Lying in Wait(9)

The guard’s tone was nervous, subservient. Too many ‘sir’s. It was clear he had drawn the short straw when sent to question my dad. Or Judge Fitzsimons, as he was more recently known.

‘And may I have your name?’ my father asked, and although I couldn’t see him, I could hear the air of superiority in his voice, coupled with a strange tremor that was new. The kitchen door behind me was only slightly ajar, and I strained to hear what followed on the doorstep.

‘Mooney, sir. I’m sorry to be having to ask, like –’

‘And what exactly is your rank, Mooney?’ He lingered on the ‘oo’ in Mooney.

‘I’m a detective, sir.’

‘I see. Not a detective sergeant or a detective inspector, then?’

I knew that tone. Dad could be rude or dismissive with strangers and he could fly off the handle. He intimidated me sometimes. I’m not sure that he meant to. He just did.

At the other end of the table, my mother was looking at me quizzically.

‘Is that your fifth potato, Laurence? Go on, quick, while your father isn’t looking.’

I hadn’t been counting.

My mother got up, muttering about the draught. She closed the door behind me and turned on the radio and began to hum along tunelessly to the song playing. I said nothing, but now I couldn’t hear what was being discussed at the front door.

My father had just deliberately lied to the guards. I admit I was taken aback by his lie. He was being asked about his movements almost two weeks earlier. I remembered that Friday night very clearly indeed because I was having my own adventure. I had also lied about my whereabouts. I had told my parents that I was going to the cinema with school friends, when actually I was losing my virginity to Helen d’Arcy, who lived in Foxrock Park, just twenty minutes away.

I had not intended to have sex with Helen on our first real date. I did not find her physically attractive. She had very nice silky blonde hair, but her frame was both wide and too thin. Her face, which was unnaturally big, sat on top of a scrawny neck. My own skin was flawless in comparison, perhaps because it was stretched.

I went to Helen’s house simply because she invited me. I did not get many invitations.

She had caught up with me as I was returning from school a few weeks earlier. It was raining, as usual. School was awful. I had only started in St Martin’s Institute for Boys the previous January because of Bloody Paddy Carey. I tried very hard not to let my parents know how much I was bullied in my new school. There was a particular group of four or five boys, all brawn and no brain. They did not often attack me physically after the first month, but my books were stolen or defaced with disgusting slogans, and my lunch was taken and replaced with items too revolting to mention.

Helen’s school was one of the fee-paying ones a little closer to town, but she lived near our school. I had overheard stories about her from other boys in my class. I felt a kinship because the bullies in my class seemed to have as much contempt for her as they did for me.

I heard her before I saw her. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked. I turned. Her green uniform skirt, made of some hairy fabric, was worn to baldness in places and the hem had come down on one side. I could see the inside of her collar was threadbare at the neck.

‘Laurence. Fitzsimons.’

‘Ah yeah, I’ve heard of you. Why do they call you the Hippo? You look normal to me.’

I warmed to her immediately. ‘I am normal. They just don’t like me.’

‘Well, who gives a fuck what they like? Do you live on Brennanstown Road? I’ve seen you around.’

I lived in Avalon, a large detached house with a well-kept garden at the end of the road, but I wasn’t sure if I should tell her. She didn’t seem to mind whether I responded to her questions or not. We ambled companionably onwards. When we passed Trisha’s Café, she suggested that I buy her a Coke. I hesitated.

‘OK then, I’ll buy you one,’ she said as she pushed the glass door open. It would have been rude not to follow her. Unfortunately, the bullies were already there, sitting near the counter.

‘Oink, oink!’ one of them shouted in our direction.

‘Fucking eejits,’ said Helen, ‘ignore them.’

We very rarely had bad language in Avalon, but now, in the same five minutes, I’d heard fuck and fucking. From a girl. I used bad language too sometimes, but never out loud.

Helen strolled coolly to the counter and returned with two Cokes.

I shoved two 10p pieces towards her to pay for them.

‘You don’t have to. Just because I paid, it doesn’t mean you have to ask me out.’

Ask her out?

‘I want to pay. It’s fair.’

‘Fine,’ she said. There was a lull in conversation as we sucked our Cokes through thin straws. And then she said, ‘You’d be quite good-looking if you weren’t fat.’

It was not news to me that I was fat. My mother said it was puppy fat and that I’d shed it soon enough, but I was seventeen. My father said I ate too much. My scales said fifteen stone. I hadn’t always been big, but over the last year, since I’d moved schools, my eating habits had gone completely out of control. The more nervous and miserable I was, the hungrier I felt. I love food, and mostly the fattening stuff. But this was the first time that a non-parent had said I was fat without a look of disgust.