Lying in Wait(6)

My sister had a reputation. Ma said she kicked her way out of the womb feet first and she hadn’t stopped kicking since. In secondary school, Annie was in trouble all the time for giving cheek to the teachers, stealing, vandalism, mitching, and beating up other girls. She was smart for sure, but couldn’t settle to learning. She was slow to read and slower to write. I am three years younger, but by the time I was seven my reading and writing were better than hers. I tried really hard to help her, but she said the letters didn’t always make sense to her. Even if I wrote down a sentence and asked her to copy it, the words would come out as a jumble. She’d been moved to two different schools by the time she left at fourteen. She could just about write, but her main hobbies by then were smoking and drinking. Ma tried reason, talking to her, bargaining with her, but when that didn’t work, Da tried violence. He beat her and locked her in our room, and I know it killed him to do it. ‘Jesus, Annie, look what you have me doing!’ and he’d go quiet and not speak for a few days. But that didn’t work either, and eventually the worst thing that could happen in a family back then happened. We didn’t know until she was four months gone.

All hell broke loose. She was only sixteen. The father was a boy her own age who, of course, denied all responsibility and said the baby could be anyone’s. He and his family moved away shortly after that. Da called the parish priest, and he and a guard took Annie away to St Joseph’s in a black car. I didn’t see her again for nearly two years.

When she returned, she was completely altered. That was where all her tics and cleaning obsessions started. She had never been like that before. Her appearance was a shock. Her fiery red hair was gone because her head had been shaved. She was painfully thin. On her first night back, in the room we shared, I asked her to tell me what it was like to be locked up in a mother and baby home, and she said it was a living hell that she wanted to forget. She told me about the day the baby was born. It was the 1st of August. She called her Marnie. ‘She was perfect,’ she said, ‘even her mouth was perfect.’ When I asked what happened to the baby, she turned her face to the wall and cried. For the first two months after her return, she used to hide food under her bed. She jumped at the slightest noise. Neither Annie nor my parents ever mentioned the baby. We tried to be normal and Annie tried to settle. Da got her a job cleaning in the bakery he worked in. Her hair grew back, but she dyed it black. A really harsh blue-black. It was her rebel statement.

A few months later, on the 1st of August, I bought Annie a gift in the Dandelion Market, an identity bracelet. I had the bracelet engraved with the name ‘Marnie’. I’d been saving up for a while, but it wasn’t real silver so it tarnished quickly. She never took it off after that, though. Da commented on it one day.

‘What’s that thing you have on?’

She stuck her wrist in his face, but he couldn’t make out the word on the bracelet.

‘It says “Marnie”,’ she said, ‘your granddaughter’s name if you must know.’

Gradually, Annie went back to her old ways. She was fired from the bakery by Da’s boss because her work was shoddy. After that, the frostiness between her and Da was unbearable and she moved out of the house. I admit that I was glad when she moved out.

Though she was always a rebel, when it came to my schooling, Annie leaned hard on me to do my homework and stay out of trouble.

‘You’ve got brains and beauty, Karen,’ she said. ‘You need to use both of them.’

I am clever enough, I suppose, and I liked school, but I worked hard to remove the stigma she had tainted me with. My teachers recognized this. ‘You and your sister, chalk and cheese!’ said Miss Donnelly one day, scoring me a B in an English test. When I meant to leave school at fifteen and try for work in the Lemons factory, Miss Donnelly spoke to Ma and Da and told them that I could stay on to do the Leaving Certificate. Nobody in our family had ever done the Leaving Certificate. My parents were thrilled and Annie was over the moon. ‘You’ll take the bad look off me!’ she said.

I wasn’t a natural genius, but I studied hard to justify Ma and Da’s pride. Then, when I got reasonably good results, there was talk about going to university. I knew that keeping me in school had been a strain on my parents when I should have been out earning, and I could probably work my way through college, but I couldn’t decide what I would study. English and Art were my best subjects, but if I studied English in college, I would have to do a three-year arts degree and then a year’s HDip just to be a teacher, and if I did Art I’d have to go to an art college and Ma said there were no jobs for artists. Anyway, I had the wrong accent for university.

Ma thought I should do a secretarial course. There were still some jobs for typists, though they were few and far between. I liked the idea of that a lot better, and AnCO were running six-week courses for girls who had got good Leaving Certificate results. Annie was disappointed in me. ‘You could have gone to college, you could have got a grant.’ She didn’t understand my reluctance. I was not curious like she was. She loved that I had stayed in school, but when she was drunk, she mocked me when I used big words that she didn’t understand.

Annie got bits and pieces of cleaning work here and there, but most of the time she was on the dole, living in a bedsit not too far away. Ma gave her money sometimes on the sly. On her Sunday visits, Da would try and pretend he was glad to see her, but I think he was ashamed of her, though he denied it later. He couldn’t understand why she was so different to the rest of us. Ma and Da and me all worked hard for what we got. We were quiet and tried to avoid trouble. Annie went looking for it.