The Nothing Man Read online

  They were hardly appropriate viewing for a twelve-year-old, but the bored teenager manning the counter at the video shop didn’t care and my parents, I have to assume, didn’t know. The general rule in our house was that so long as you were being quiet, whatever else you were being wouldn’t be queried. These days I can easily minimise it by drawing comparisons to what children might watch now, when they can go to bed with a device small enough to hide under the covers that can effectively show them anything at all. In any case, to pontificate about what effect my true-crime habit might have had on me is very much a moot point seeing as I was, unknowingly, in line for a ticket to the live show. But the truth is I don’t think they had any effect on me at all.

  I knew the events I saw re-enacted on my little TV screen were real on some level, but they weren’t my reality. This was Ireland at the turn of the millennium. Our police force didn’t carry guns. We’d never had a confirmed serial killer, defined by the FBI as a person who commits at least three murders over the span of a month or more, allowing time for a distinct ‘cooling off’ period between them. When murder made the news here, it was nearly always terrorism or gangland related. Your risk of being the random target of a murderous stranger was exceptionally low, if not practically non-existent. (In the popular podcast West Cork, which centres around one of Ireland’s most famous unsolved murders, the death in 1996 of Frenchwoman Sophie Toscan du Plantier, hosts Jennifer Forde and Sam Bungey describe how the locals refer to it as ‘the murder’ because there hasn’t been another one in the area since.) Besides, I knew how to avoid the bad men. The same lessons were repeated in every movie. Don’t walk home alone in the dark. Don’t accept lifts from strangers. Be a good girl.

  I was a good girl and I was at home with my family. The doors were locked and the curtains were closed. I was safe.

  How do you know what you know about your parents? Lately, I’ve been putting this question to friends of mine. Their answers generally fit into one of two categories: either they found out things from other people, like relatives or their parents’ friends, or their parents shared stories with them directly. The second one happened more and more as time went on, as in, they were told more the older they got. I should also say that these friends have adult siblings, uncles and aunts and, like all good Irish Catholic families, cousins to spare. They’ve been collecting friends all their lives and so too have their parents, dotting their social orbits with figures like the girl who lived next door to their childhood home and the guy they worked with in that place that time. One friend told me that, after thinking about it, most of what she knows about her parents’ initial meeting and pre-married life comes from snide comments her maternal grandmother, who never liked her father, would make during family get-togethers when she’d had one too many G&Ts.

  But both of my parents were only children, and they and my only sibling died when I was twelve, an age when you have zero interest in who your parents are or ever were outside of their being your parents. After that I was left with just one familial link, Nannie, and in our remaining years together I didn’t dare question her about them. The sad truth is I know very little about who my parents were as people.

  My mother’s name was Deirdre. She was short and slight; physically, Anna took after her. She had worn her hair the same way since before she’d got married, in a bob that stopped just above her shoulders in her natural light brown. She worked as an illustrator, adding images to a series of French and German textbooks aimed at the Junior Cert cycle and also, during term time, as a waitress in a café in Carrigaline. She would drive us to school on her way to work and pick us up on our way back, by which time a box of something from the café – creamy cakes, demi baguettes, fruit scones – would have appeared in the passenger-side footwell. She worshipped the sun and would be out the back garden on a sunlounger, oiled up and skin bare, at the merest suggestion of light peeking out from behind the clouds. She’d been born in a town called Killorglin in Co. Kerry, hadn’t been to college and spoke little of her own parents, who had died when she was just a teen. In secondary school she had been a competitive rower and was always saying she was going to get back into it, somehow, just for exercise, but we all knew the talking about it was the start and end of her efforts.

  My mother was very easy-going, relaxed and unfussy. If Anna or I acted up, she would award us a bemused expression and then leave us to burn ourselves out – which, without a reaction to fuel our temper-tantrum or an audience to perform it to, we would quickly do. Her best friend was a woman called Joan who she’d known since secondary school. Joan owned the café where Mam worked. I don’t really remember her spending time with people without my dad. When they left us on an odd Saturday night in the care of Nannie, it was to go somewhere together, usually to another couple’s house for dinner or out to a work do.

  She could be very funny, always there with a witty remark or devastating comeback, which made her an odd match for my serious dad. She took a lot of photographs and got them developed but stopped there, her grand plans to organise them into volumes of albums remaining just that. She left me with boxes and boxes of bulging envelopes thick with glossy 4x6 prints, none of which have names or dates or places to go along with them, and now my plans to do something with them are so far failing to materialise too. Nearly all the photos are of Anna or me or the two of us together.

  My father’s name was Ross. He was from a place called Sunday’s Well on the north side of Cork City, where large houses backed on to the river and the families who owned them were well-to-do. After he’d moved out and got married, Nannie had sold up and moved to Blackrock. His father had died of heart failure before I was born and had been, as Nannie muttered occasionally, ‘fond of the drink’. My father had met my mother in a pub in the city and within eighteen months they were married. They’d only ever lived together in the house in Passage West.

  My father was tall, over six foot, and, according to my mam’s photos, had been balding since his twenties. I understood little about his job, which involved chemicals and a big factory in Ringaskiddy. He worked long hours and was missing from most of our home life. The one rule both Anna and I knew to observe was to never go into his office on the ground floor of our house. When I think of my dad I think of the cards Hallmark make and the unimaginative gift guides department stores put out at Christmas. He could’ve been their model for A Typical Dad. He took a briefcase to work. He carried handkerchiefs with his initials on them. He liked whiskey and watched golf and kept classical music CDs in the car, and everything he wore came from the same palette of dull brown tweeds and knit navy blues.

  A few weeks after my article came out, I received an email from a woman I’ll call Michelle, who said she had worked with my father for many years and that they had been great friends. She spent nearly a thousand words sharing her memories of a man I had never met, a version of my father who was funny and spontaneous and good at giving advice, who gave Michelle carefully chosen books as gifts and left journal articles on her desk that he thought she’d find interesting. Michelle still missed him terribly and wanted to meet me. Starved of information on my parents, I should’ve jumped at the chance. But there was something lingering between the lines of her email, something delicate and treacherous, that I didn’t dare unpack. I had never heard her name. I ignored the message and she didn’t contact me again, but she left my father standing in a light I’d never seen him in before, and I didn’t know what to make of it.

  From what I witnessed, my parents’ marriage was a solid partnership. They bickered but never fought, although this might have been because my mother just couldn’t get herself worked up enough over anything to have an argument. Before it could get heated, she’d shrug her shoulders and back down. They didn’t act like the couples you saw on TV, the ones who were always kissing and hugging and flirting like teenagers, but when I grew up I would discover that hardly anyone did. My father did hold my mother’s hand when they’d walk together in public, and I often
heard them talking softly to each other late into the night through the wall our bedrooms shared.

  When you’re twelve years old, adult life seems like an endless adventure – or rather, your adult life feels like it will be. In those last few months I had a thick hardback notebook in which I recorded my private thoughts, observations, secrets, hopes and dreams. I had covered it in a leftover scrap of the wallpaper my mother had hung in the living room, a dense toile pattern in duck-egg blue and white, and kept it covered in a series of multicoloured rubber bands arranged in an order only I knew, so I would know if anyone had interfered with it in my absence. I think I got that idea from a Judy Blume book. Flicking through its pages now, I find a girl who is planning on living several lives.

  I wanted a great love affair like in (Baz Luhrmann’s) Romeo + Juliet. I wanted to live in New York and London and Paris. I wanted my teenage years to be like the American shows I watched on TV, full of proms and cheerleading and wearing your own cool clothes to school. I wanted to be a professional dancer, and also a scientist who got to work in the Antarctic, and also a hairdresser on a cruise ship because my friend’s mum had done that when she was younger and was always talking about how much fun it was. So when I looked at my parents – living in the city they grew up in, doing normal jobs, being normal people – I couldn’t help but feel unimpressed. Why had they done nothing with this, their one wild and precious life? Why didn’t they desperately want anything? Why didn’t they have dreams and adventures and wishes and goals?

  I didn’t know anything about their desires, that was the problem. Without that missing piece, it was hard for my parents to live as fully formed people in my mind. But recently I’ve started to wonder if they wanted nothing because they already had it, if our family life was their dream. I like to think so. I’ve decided that from now on, I will.

  What really strikes me about that diary is what is missing from it. I only mention my parents to complain about them and I barely mention Anna at all.

  I have very few distinct memories of my sister that I can play back in my mind. There are flashes and my mother’s photographs, but few moving images. When you’re a child, and especially when you’re a child on the cusp of adolescence, a gap of five years is a chasm. Anna was an annoyance to me, mostly, buzzing around on the periphery of my days, demanding things: help, a loan of something, my attention. When she’d ask for these things she’d come to me quietly, hands clasped behind her back, head bowed, knowing the odds weren’t on her side but wishing that this time would be different, that I would be different.

  I can see her now, blonde hair held back by a pink band, a spill of freckles across her nose, wearing those Velcro-strap trainers with lights in the soles. One leg is bent behind the other and she’s looking up at me with naked hope. I am desperate to go back and tell her she can have anything she wants, that she can have all of me, that I’ll forgo all others and spend every moment of the rest of her life with her doing whatever she wants, that I love her and love being her sister.

  Actually, no, scratch that. If we’re getting to go back, I’d scoop her up and run away with her, and we’d stay safe and grow up and reach that place where, as adults, we can be friends. But I was just a child, we both were, and neither of us knew what was coming.

  Here’s what I do remember: when Anna played, it was at being a grown-up. While I was into Barbie dolls, casting them in elaborate soap opera-worthy storylines involving adulterous Kens and kidnapped Skippers, Anna liked the life-size baby kind that came with prams and pushchairs and, one memorable Christmas, the ability to make a little brown smudge in a nappy. We had a waist-high shelving unit in the living room that Anna would drag away from the wall and stand in behind, and then we’d all be forced to queue up to visit whatever business she was conducting that day, be it the bank, post office or coffee shop. One summer we got a barbeque and Anna hired my dad to be the chef in her restaurant, which only seated three around a somewhat battered patio table but had printed menus and a very attentive waitress, from what I recall. (The chef, meanwhile, burnt all our burgers and clearly needed retraining.) Her lands of make-believe never seemed to involve princesses or mermaids or superheroes, but air stewards and office workers and librarians. She was so eager to play in the adult world she couldn’t wait to stop being a child. Her pretending, as it turned out, was all she would ever get to experience of it.

  That last summer, two things happened that I can recall quite clearly. The first was that, in June, Anna had an accident. She was riding a friend’s bike down a steep hill near our house when the front wheel caught in the lip of a pothole and vaulted Anna up and over the handlebars. She was wearing a helmet but ended up covered in bloody grazes, and with her awkward landing managed to dislocate the ring finger on her right hand. Resetting it had to be done under general anaesthetic, which meant that Anna had to stay in hospital for two nights. She was a small child anyway, but seeing her lying on a hospital bed, barely troubling it, looking tiny and lost, shocked me. I spent hours with her over those two or three days, reading to her, playing card games, painting glitter on the little nails that peeked out from her cast. When she came home, I granted her control over my TV – temporarily, I warned her several times – so she could watch her favourite Disney movie, The Emperor’s New Groove, and then Toy Story 2, which Dad had just bought her as a get-well-soon treat. She asked me to stay and watch them with her and, with that image of her in the hospital bed still fresh in my mind, I agreed, although with some eye-rolling and sighing just to save face. Mam delivered us popcorn and cans of fizzing Coke on a tray, entering the room carefully and stealthily, as if we were wild animals in our natural habitat whose equilibrium was at great risk of being disturbed.

  I was less well behaved at Anna’s party, my other clear memory from that time. For some reason my mother had agreed to take Anna and five or six of her friends to our local McDonald’s as an endof-school-year treat, which Anna promptly took to calling a party. There was a special designated area in the restaurant for children’s parties, with toadstool chairs and sunflower tables, and although I had been enlisted by our mother to attend in a sort of chaperone-slashchild-wrangler capacity, there was no way in hell I was going to be caught sitting in that section and I made that quite clear. Repeatedly. This made Anna anxious. I can see it now, when I look back: the way her mouth would get small and tight and her eyes wide whenever I brought it up, each time I complained that I had better things to do on a Saturday afternoon in the summer than go to a child’s so-called party. She desperately wanted me there and was clearly worried I wouldn’t come. I did, in the end, but I sat a few tables away, picking at fries, repeatedly checking my watch and doing my very best to look pathologically bored.

  Anna, from what I could tell, had a great time. She was just starting to knit together her own circle of friends outside of school, and when I see her in my mind’s eye at that party I see her in the centre of it, smiling and laughing and reaching to dip a chicken nugget in one of those little ketchup containers. I know she was pleased with how it went; I overheard her proudly telling my mother that the reports from the girls who’d attended were good. But I wish I had just sat with her, sat right next to her, been her big sister.

  What I really want to tell you about Anna is the teenage girl she turned into and the woman she became after that. I want to know what she looks like and how she is, who she is, and where she went and what she did. I want to know what she studied in college and where it led her. I want to meet her partner and her children, to see how she dresses and decorates her house, to visit at Christmastime with a bottle of wine for us and presents for her kids, for all of us to go on holidays together. I want to sit with her late into the night and reminisce about playing bank, bike accidents and birthday parties. I want to hear her say that she’s okay, that she’s happy, that she’s had a good life. I want to hear her adult voice.

  But because of him, I can’t.

  – 2 –

  Let’s Play a
Game

  In the final minutes of 31 December 1999, in a nation abuzz with a mix of uncharacteristic optimism about the dawn of a new millennium and a Y2K-induced fear that planes were about to fall out of the sky, I was sitting on the couch in our living room with a sleeping Anna on one side of me and a softly snoring Nannie on the other. My parents had gone out to a party in the Carrigaline Court Hotel; I wouldn’t see them until I woke up the following morning. On the TV, a concert was broadcasting live from Dublin City. Fireworks were imminent. My eyelids were heavy but I was determined to stay awake long enough to see them. I may have reached for a sip of Coke, or maybe even got up and made myself a cup of tea.

  At about the same time, in another living room about twelve minutes’ drive away and only a couple of minutes’ drive from the Carrigaline Court Hotel, sixteen-year-old Tommy O’Sullivan was looking at the same thing on his family’s television screen.

  Then the phone in the kitchen started ringing.

  At first Tommy thought he wasn’t hearing anything on the line because the speaker was being drowned out by the noise of the television, or perhaps that of his charges: his siblings David, aged twelve, Nancy, ten, and Emer, seven. They were hopping around the floor in front of the TV screen, dancing and clapping and occasionally play-fighting, hyper on the last of the Christmas sweets and fizzy drinks. The O’Sullivans’ landline was fixed to the wall next to the fridge in the kitchen. Tommy shushed the children, pulled the door connecting the two rooms shut and said, ‘Hello?’ into the phone for the second time.

  He heard what he would later describe as a crackling sound, followed by a long, slow sigh. Someone was blowing hard into the mouthpiece on the other end, generating a strange, creepy sound. The voice Tommy was about to hear was male and raspy, somewhere between a hoarse whisper and the damaged vocal cords of a chronic chain-smoker. It said, ‘Let’s play a game ...’