Lying in Wait(41)

It is a terrible, terrible thing to live with, this knowledge of a murder – and the evidence right here – but now it is too late for us to do anything. It is five years since I discovered it. Since it can be established that I am the person who paved it and put the bird bath on top, I am implicated in the cover-up.

After I discovered Annie Doyle, I became fearful of everything. If I could not trust my own father, who could I trust? Not Helen. Helen dumped me the day after we got our Leaving Cert results. The circumstances were sordid. She had sex with the boy in my class who had bullied me the most. He made sure I knew about it. I didn’t care that much by then. I didn’t really care about anything. I was humiliated, but she was never the love of my life. I didn’t think I would ever have a love life.

I didn’t stick to Granny’s diet and exercise regime. I became obese again, revolting and disgusting. I caught my reflection in shop windows sometimes and turned away, sickened by the sight.

Going to university was no longer an option for me, but it may have been a blessing. I liked working in the dole office. Apollo House was right in the heart of the city, surrounded by shops and offices and pubs. At first I shadowed others as they showed me how to go through the various application forms with the claimants and then how those claims were processed. There was an awful lot of paperwork involved. I didn’t really get to process any actual claims for the first few months. I did a lot of carbon-copying, and delivering files from one section to the other, and fetching teas and coffees. At the end of the process, our office issued a giro, which could be cashed in the post office across the road. This was all tightly controlled and well managed. Every section of about eight staff handled about 500 claims. The section was made up of two clerical assistants and five clerical officers, one of whom was the supervisor. Our supervisor was middle-aged Brian, a widower with three grown-up children – he didn’t appear to be very clever, although he was very nice to all of us.

In the beginning I was scared of the unemployed. I’d heard about them from my father, who had referred to them as layabouts and spongers. I had the impression that they were all criminals. Although a few of the people we dealt with were just out of prison, most were ordinary people who had lost jobs or were looking for them. Unemployment rates were high and all kinds of people were turning up to sign on. Middle-class housewives abandoned by their husbands, college dropouts, winos and junkies. The father of a former classmate, and our old butcher, who had been put out of business by the new supermarket – they joined the type of people who had never been employed. Queuing up for a government cheque was the great leveller, and yet they didn’t get to go for a drink together afterwards and discuss how their day had been. Unemployment was something they experienced on their own in their long empty days at home, or mooching around the park, drinking tea in cheap cafés and trying to make it last. I understood that loneliness without ever having experienced it.

The claimants were usually nice to me – I guess because they thought I was making the decision whether to give them money or not. We did have a little power, and if someone was particularly aggressive I learned there were ways of delaying a claim, or ‘losing’ the paperwork, if you were so inclined.

In a few months, I learned far more about the world than my years of schooling had given me. And I had real friends in a way I had never had before. Mum didn’t understand that, and it was only when I was out in the world that I realized how unusual she was in that respect. She had no friends.

Work was good for me. My job was not difficult and my colleagues were very nice. I almost couldn’t believe my luck. I got to go and spend every day with a bunch of people who didn’t bully or demean me, doing work that didn’t exactly tax me, and at the end of every week I got money for it. Not a lot of money, but I didn’t have rent or a mortgage to pay, so there was almost enough to pay our household bills and have the occasional cinema trip and a few drinks after work most Friday nights before catching the last bus home. The section I worked on was made up of all kinds of people of all ages.

Dominic was a gum-chewing DJ at his soccer-club disco who couldn’t say a sentence without the words ‘know what I mean?’ tacked on the end. He didn’t want to be thirty, I think. He’d have preferred to be my age. Chinese Sally was a little older than me. She was actually half Korean, half Irish, but had grown up in Tralee. Everyone still referred to her as Chinese Sally and she had got bored with correcting them. Evelyn was the oldest of us all. She was a bitter, chain-smoking alcoholic with a line in filthy jokes and no-good ex-boyfriends. She had grown up in the inner city. Pretty Jane was my age. She was the first lesbian I had ever met. She wasn’t at all what I expected. She had long hair, and wore skirts. Arnold was a 24-year-old father of three who didn’t like children – ‘I love my boys, right? I just can’t stand them.’ He was always broke and miserable. He was a grade above me, but clearly wasn’t earning enough to keep a family of five.

We were a strange mix and yet we all got along. Not one person mentioned my weight. Everybody’s quirks were accepted, though they did call me Posh Boy because of my south County Dublin accent, but in an affectionate way. It seemed to me that none of us had had a childhood dream of working in an unemployment benefit office. We had all just landed there from our different walks of life and would probably pass the time there until retirement.

In June 1982, even though I had only been in the job seven months, I was promoted from clerical assistant to clerical officer (now I was allowed to talk to claimants on my own!). There was a small pay increase. Sally was furious. ‘Just because you’re a man!’ she said. She had been there for nearly two years without promotion, but I couldn’t help my gender. Mum and I were just about keeping our heads above water.