Lying in Wait(88)

Malcolm hung around for months, trying to console me, but thankfully, although he dealt with mental instability on a daily basis, he found mental disability more difficult to cope with, and eventually he drifted out of our lives, except when I needed him about the house for some manly task.

Legally, as Laurence was no longer capable, I managed to get the cottage registered in my name. I sold it immediately. We would have to live on the proceeds for some considerable time. We would have to make the money last. The government provided a disability payment for Laurence, and with my widow’s pension it meant that we would not starve. After a certain period, Helen was our only visitor, apart from an occasional social worker. But mostly, it is just Laurence and I. I don’t think he understands anything much, but often, very often, I find him standing in the kitchen, looking out of the window. I ask him what he is looking at, but he doesn’t respond and stares vacantly.





Part 3




* * *





2016





27


Karen


At the time, I was so distraught that I couldn’t trust my own judgement. I had been wrong about everything. Dessie was incredibly kind to me. He offered a solid shoulder and assured me that everything would be OK. Ma and Da were shocked. Laurence had fooled them too, especially Da. Ma thinks that Laurence probably intended to kill me too, but we’ll never know now.

When I think of the nights I shared with him, I want to pull clumps of hair from my head. Sometimes, I do. The guards warned us to stay away from Avalon after Laurence got out of hospital. I didn’t want to go near the place, but Da badly wanted to beat the living daylights out of him. I am still so angry that he got off scot-free. Laurence murdered my sister and I never got to know how or why, and even if he is brain-damaged, I don’t think that is enough punishment because he doesn’t have to live with himself in the way I do.

Because I had some kind of public profile then, Yvonne could do nothing about protecting me from the media. Ma and Da’s house was besieged, and somehow they found my flat. They couldn’t name Laurence, but they could name me and Annie, and reprint photographs of me alongside lurid headlines. Dessie offered me a place to stay and I went home with him. I drank myself into oblivion in those first few weeks. I was a mess. The police interrogations seemed endless. Detective Mooney had been wrong about the murderer being dead, though they couldn’t rule out the possibility that Laurence’s father had helped him, despite Lydia apparently insisting that he would never have done such a thing. Poor Lydia. This time, the guards were taking it seriously, now that there was a middle-class Cabinteely man involved.

It was three days after I had called the guards from the phone box that I realized the significance of the garden monument that Laurence had built. My suspicions proved to be true. The guards had sealed off the house and were searching through everything. They found some essays in Laurence’s handwriting about dating Annie and having sex with her. I still feel sick at the thought of it.

I never intended to get back with Dessie, not then, but he was so rock steady and so ready to forgive. I thought if we got back together, I could make things right and turn back the clock to when we’d been happy. Yvonne thought that the notoriety would die down after a while, and that I could resume my career, as I was still in demand in Europe, but the whole modelling scene seemed so stupid and trivial to me. Dessie said the money would be handy, but he let me make my own decision. Eventually, I got a job in Arnotts’ shoe department. Dessie was as protective as ever, but that was what I needed back then. He tried not to comment on my drinking in the beginning.

We have a house in Lucan and two children, Debbie and Stevie. I should be happy. I should be able to let go of the past. And I should never have gone back to Dessie. After a while his protective ways turned into full-scale intimidation and bullying. He has never raised a hand to me again, but he doesn’t have to because he knows that I am afraid to ever leave him. Our daughter drives him up the wall. She was wild like Annie when she was a teenager, and he blamed me. I drank more wine and blocked it all out. Stevie is a good boy. He’s a lorry driver, getting married this year. I don’t have much of a relationship with him. Dessie and Stevie stick together. Debbie and Stevie stick together. Nobody sticks to me.

When the news scandals broke in the 1990s about the Mother and Baby homes, I thought about looking for Marnie, but Dessie went ballistic when I mentioned it.

‘Jesus Christ, Karen. Remember how your last search went? Are you stupid or what?’

I am stupid. A fool.

The only person I see on an occasional basis is Helen. I’m not sure why we still meet up, but we do. Every six months or year or so, we’ll go to a pub and rehash the whole story, as if we were old soldiers reliving our days at the front together. Helen is now a pharmaceutical sales rep on her second husband, a lab technician. She never had children. We still don’t like each other very much, but we are somehow bonded by our experiences of Laurence Fitzsimons.

She still visits Avalon. I didn’t understand why she bothered, but she said that in the beginning Lydia paid her to do shopping and cleaning and to help with caring for Laurence. Helen says it’s hard to see Laurence as a murderer when she is giving him a bath and spoon-feeding him his dinner. I can’t see him as anything else. In the last few years, Laurence and his mother have lived in just three rooms downstairs. Lydia has run out of money, anything left of any value has been sold off, and she can no longer pay Helen.