Our Little Cruelties Read online

  Liz Nugent

  * * *

  OUR LITTLE CRUELTIES

  Contents

  Preface to William

  Part One: Brothers William Chapter 1: 1994

  Chapter 2: 1985

  Chapter 3: 1992

  Chapter 4: 1978

  Chapter 5: 1999

  Chapter 6: 1983

  Chapter 7: 1998

  Chapter 8: 1981

  Chapter 9: 2006

  Chapter 10: 1984

  Chapter 11: 2001

  Chapter 12: 2004

  Chapter 13: 2016

  Preface to Luke

  Luke Chapter 14: 1977

  Chapter 15: 1989

  Chapter 16: 1984

  Chapter 17: 1995

  Chapter 18: 1988

  Chapter 19: 1983

  Chapter 20: 1997

  Chapter 21: 1978

  Chapter 22: 1994

  Chapter 23: 1979

  Chapter 24: 2010

  Chapter 25: 2003

  Chapter 26: 2000

  Chapter 27: 2016

  Preface to Brian

  Brian Chapter 28: 1978

  Chapter 29: 1993

  Chapter 30: 1979

  Chapter 31: 1976

  Chapter 32: 1989

  Chapter 33: 1995

  Chapter 34: 2005

  Chapter 35: 2011

  Chapter 36: 2008

  Chapter 37: 2015

  Part Two: Strangers Chapter 38: 2017

  Chapter 39: 2017

  Chapter 40: January 2018

  Chapter 41: March 2018

  April 2019

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Liz Nugent’s critically acclaimed novels – Unravelling Oliver, Lying in Wait and and Skin Deep – have all been Number One bestsellers. Skin Deep won two Irish Book Awards in 2018, as well as a 2019 Dead Good Reader Award at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. Unravelling Oliver and Lying in Wait have also each won an Irish Book Award and Lying in Wait was a Richard and Judy Book Club choice in 2017. Liz was named Irish Woman of the Year in Literature in 2018. Her novels are published in fifteen languages. Before becoming a full-time writer, Liz Nugent worked in Irish film, theatre and television. She lives in Dublin.

  Our Little Cruelties

  ‘For sheer nerve, no other crime novelist of the past decade has rivalled Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell or Gillian Flynn. In her every book, Nugent explores the shadowlands of the human mind: its wild regions too untamed for most authors. Her particular genius is to describe these forbidden grounds so coolly, and to map their terrain with such elegance, fitting narratives and timelines into a seamless whole, that we think we know where we’re headed … until, with a shudder, we find we’re lost in the woods, and night has fallen’ A. J. Finn

  ‘She’s quite a unique writer – ostensibly writing psychological thrillers … but she’s writing them in the way Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw. They’re beautifully made books. She’s my favourite sort of writer which is entirely instinctive, a writer born’ Sebastian Barry

  ‘The complex storytelling seems effortless and the ending manages to feel both shocking and inevitable. She’s known for her killer first lines, but this novel proves Liz Nugent’s real talent is for devastating endings’ Catherine Ryan Howard

  ‘Oh my god, what a book – a deeply dark tale of family dysfunction, insidious sibling rivalry and disturbing consequence. THAT ENDING BROKE ME. Incredible’ Liz Barnsley, Liz Loves Books blog (on Twitter)

  ‘A cautionary tale on how love can sometimes destroy more than nurture. It is dark, compulsive and powerful – couldn’t put it down’ Kate Moloney, Bibliophile Book Club blog

  ‘Deliciously dark. She knows how to write the most endearingly awful characters. You hate them, yet they have these moments of extreme likability. Very, very cleverly written’ Margaret Madden, Bleach House Library blog (on Twitter)

  ‘A page-turner filled with devious and broken characters that we hate to love – but love anyway! A compelling read with all the clever twists that we have come to expect from this very accomplished storyteller’ Caroline E. Farrell

  ‘She’s done it again. A deliciously dark tale’ Philip Nolan

  ‘Brilliant, intense … her best book yet!’ Laura King, Laura Eats Books blog (on Twitter)

  To Davy and Jennifer McCullough, for letting me marry your first-born son. You did a great job.

  ‘We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers and sisters.’

  – Martin Luther King, Jr

  All three of the Drumm brothers were at the funeral, although one of us was in a coffin.

  Three is an odd number so there had always been two against one, although we all switched sides regularly. Nobody would ever have described us as close.

  As the service began, I became tearful. Without ever realizing it, I had inherited my mother’s acting abilities. My living brother and I stood, side by side, at the top of the crematorium while people lied to us about what a brilliant man our brother had been, all the usual meaningless clichés.

  His death was sudden. Horrific. The investigation was quick and conclusive. I was not a suspect. I had a sense of freedom and relief I hadn’t felt in quite a while. I didn’t expect that this air of serenity would last. But I thought I would enjoy it while I could.

  My surviving brother was unreadable to me. Maybe he was thinking of our brother’s smashed and broken body. Still, even he must have known this outcome was for the best.

  Daisy sat in the pew behind us. She seemed not to be aware of her surroundings, fidgeting and whispering to herself. I caught my brother’s eye as her babbling became audible and people began to notice. He reached out and quietly asked her to join us. That reaching out of his hand made me shudder momentarily. She seemed to return to reality and moved to stand between us without any argument. We both attempted to put a proprietorial arm around her, but she shrugged us off. We brothers looked at each other. The old rivalry resurfaced.

  Part One

  * * *

  BROTHERS

  William

  1

  1994

  My daughter, Daisy, had just been born and Susan was feeling the strain of new motherhood. I was twenty-five and trying to get a film production company off the ground to make short films with my college buddy Gerald, who wanted to direct, but there were money problems and I sensed that Filmbase would take some persuasion to fund a new company. Mum had lent me some seed money and Gerald had a generous uncle who helped out financially too. I had rented an office in a city attic and ordered some letterhead notepaper on which I was making desperate pleas to the Arts Council, Dublin Corporation, the National Lottery and any organizations I could think of with money. I was working hard, and then up at night with the baby a lot of the time, and maybe I was more irritable than I should have been, but when I came home in the evenings after a long slog in the office, the last thing I wanted to see was my rock-star little brother, sprawled across my sofa while my still-sore wife perched uncomfortably on the dining chair, baby-sick stains on each shoulder, unkempt and exhausted.

  In the beginning, I joked with him and pretended to be pleased to see him because if I couldn’t get finance from anywhere else, I was going to have to ask him, though that would be my last resort.

  ‘Luke! Shouldn’t you be out somewhere snorting cocaine off a super-model’s arse?’

  Luke was twenty-three. His second album was a massive success. He had toured constantly for three years but was now on a hiatus of sorts. He lived in a big Georgian terrace house on Waterloo Road, bought for cash two years after he dropped out of college to sing
in a band. We, on the other hand, were renting a one-bedroom mews nearby with no central heating and unreliable plumbing.

  We were mystified by Luke’s stardom. Luke looked waifish with his big eyes and long hair, and a thin, reedy voice which would have travelled nowhere without amplification. Brian and I were jealous. We were older and we had worked to pay our way through college, earning respectable enough 2:1 arts degrees. Luke had surprised us all by getting the results to study engineering but then spent his two years smoking hash by the pond, reading poetry and rehearsing with The Wombstones. At one stage, he attached a collar to a hen and walked it through the campus. All for affectation. We never knew where he got the hen or where it ended up afterwards.

  For some unquantifiable reason, he could attract women. I don’t understand how. Women are weird. He could take or leave them and never seemed to be particularly attached to any of them. It got to the stage where I didn’t bother trying to remember their names any more because there’d be a new one along any minute.

  When he got famous as a solo act, Luko, he was generous, bringing us all out to join him on tour in London and Lisbon, splashing cash around like it was nothing to him. His name had opened doors for me in the arts scene, but that spring, there had been no tour invites, no lavish awards ceremonies, no rock ’n’ roll parties. He’d just turn up at our house in time for dinner, at least twice a week.

  That was always the thing about Luke. He couldn’t take a hint. He’d sit on our sofa staring at the television, though not appearing to take in whatever programme was on. He’d eat the dinner that Susan or I prepared, ignore our baby, and as soon as he was fed, he’d leave without much of a thank you. Eventually, I brought up the subject of finance and my funding difficulties and he nodded and grunted. No offer was forthcoming. I was forced to ask.

  It wouldn’t be a lend as such, I said, it would be an investment, and we’d be asking him to compose the music for our film (even though Luke still couldn’t read music and we didn’t actually have a film yet, because we had no funding). ‘It’s not really my thing,’ he said. ‘Did you ask Brian?’

  Brian at this stage was living in Paris. Mum would get an occasional letter from him written on a page torn out of a copybook. If Brian couldn’t afford writing paper, he certainly couldn’t afford to lend me money.

  ‘Brian? What are you talking about? You know what he’s like with money, and I don’t think he’s even earning that much.’ I tried to contain my frustration. It was so typical of Luke to be completely unaware and unconcerned. He shrugged and picked up the remote control and changed the TV channel without making eye contact. Susan got up and left the table in disgust.

  It took a few weeks after that for me to tell him he was no longer welcome. If I’d done it straight away, he’d have thought it was about the money, and it was about the money, but it was everything else too. He didn’t appear to be washing too often. He brought, literally, nothing to our table and he sucked the energy out of our home as soon as he entered it.

  I didn’t see him for the rest of that year, though I read in the papers that he was back in the studio recording another album and was then going on tour. I saw this in the Sunday gossip column. I wasn’t about to pick up the phone.

  Susan wanted that Christmas to be special, but she felt guiltier about Luke than I did. She suggested I invite everyone over for Christmas dinner and then it would look like he was naturally included. Besides, we wanted to avoid going to Mum’s house in Glenageary because she was always much louder and overbearing in her own home than in ours. Brian was home from Paris for a few days and was going to stay with Mum. It was Daisy’s first Christmas. We had finally won a small Filmbase grant, and things were looking good for us. We were going into production in January for our first short film, Fear of Life, and I was planning to announce it over our festive lunch. I rang Luke and left a message on his answering machine. When he hadn’t rung back after a few days, Susan dropped a note in his letter box.

  He never showed up. We didn’t think much of it. It had happened before, that he would drop off the radar for a month or two. We knew from Brian that the tour was on a break and that Luke was home in Dublin. Mum was put out that he hadn’t called her. She sulked about it, but it was obvious that she hadn’t tried to contact him either.

  The family were impressed by my news, at first. Mum raised her glass and toasted me. ‘My son, the next Steven Spielberg!’ But then when Brian heard it was a short film, and that it wasn’t going to get a cinema release, he was dismissive. ‘What’s the point in making a film that nobody is going to see?’ he asked me. He ridiculed the whole project because the actors were friends from my college drama society. Mum argued in my defence that everyone had to start somewhere, and pointedly asked Brian what his career plan was. He responded defensively that he was working in an exclusive school, but Mum dismissed his boasting. ‘Yes, as a teacher, Brian. It’s a little different from being a film producer. Show business is in our blood. You must take after your father.’

  Brian bristled. ‘Being a teacher is a very important job.’

  Still, I felt the need to explain myself, that I had to start small and work my way up, that nobody was going to give a bunch of unknowns ten million pounds to make a feature film. Mum said, ‘Well, not yet, darling. I’m so proud of you.’

  Brian said, ‘Why don’t you put Luke in the film?’

  Mum laughed. ‘Sure, if you want to make a film for teenage girls.’

  She was sneery about Luke’s success and his teenage fan base. We all were. Mum had always belittled our youngest brother and we usually joined in. It was a joke to us, that little Luke could be a teenage idol. I was all about making my own name and I wasn’t going to use my sap of a brother, particularly when he wouldn’t put up any money for it.

  Brian helped Susan with the washing-up and played with Daisy. Mum got drunk early, singing aloud to The Sound of Music on television. The giant teddy bear that Mum bought Daisy sat out on the stairs as there was no space for it in the living room. But Daisy was fascinated by it and sat at the bottom of the stairs gazing up at it. After my brother and mother left, Susan and I drained the end of the wine and went to bed.

  We were woken at three in the morning by thunderous knocking on the door. Susan sat bolt upright in bed, but Daisy, thankfully, didn’t stir. I threw on my dressing gown, initially worried that it might be bad news but prepared to be furious and to berate whoever had knocked on the door so aggressively.

  Luke was standing at the door almost hidden behind a huge doll’s house. ‘Sorry, I only just finished it, the paint is dry but it’s still a little sticky. It’s for … your little girl.’ He placed it in the hallway behind me and then left. It was obvious that he couldn’t remember Daisy’s name. I let him wander off into the dark, because at that hour of the morning I was not prepared to entertain Luke’s drunkenness.

  Daisy’s eyes shone when she saw it the next day. Susan opened the hinged front of the house, but it came loose in her hand. The roof listed badly on one side and the windows had rough edges. Daisy picked up a tiny bed and put it in her mouth. There were splinters in the wood and it reeked of paint fumes. That night, with little effort, we broke it up into kindling and fed it into the fireplace.

  A week later, Luke turned up at dinnertime as if the previous six months had never happened. He never enquired about the doll’s house and we chose not to mention it. I asked how the new album was coming along, but he shrugged and changed the TV channel. We were too old then for me to punch him, but my fists itched.

  2

  1985

  Mum was the star of the family, a showband singer and actress, and Dad was always happy to let her shine. He was no pushover – he stood up to her when he needed to – but he was the quietest member of our family. Dad had established his private quarters at the end of the garden. He referred to the shed as his palace. He had a Persian carpet on the floor, an old car seat rescued from his first car, an ancient Hillman Hunter, a shel
f of war history books from Ancient Rome to Vietnam, a battery-operated radio, a toolbox and, most importantly for him, isolation. Dad was Dad. Not exciting or important or famous and far from being the life and soul of the party, but just someone who was always there. Because Mum’s concerts mostly took place in the evenings, it was Dad who had always cooked our dinners and made our packed lunches for the morning. I was embarrassed by this. As far as I knew, nobody else’s dad cooked dinners. It was even worse that he seemed to enjoy it. He would often say fondly to my mother, ‘What would you do without me at all, at all?’ and she might respond sarcastically that she’d get a husband her own age. I only ever invited friends over when I knew Mum was there because the humiliation of them seeing my dad in an apron was too much to bear.

  I knew she had cheated on him, but I kept that to myself. Maybe he knew and didn’t mind or decided to ignore it. Maybe he had cheated on her. Their marriage always seemed solid, regardless. Dad often referred to Mum as his ‘orphan girl’ though she was no longer a girl. I think my dad liked to think of himself as her knight in shining armour and he was disappointed that she wasn’t more grateful. Nevertheless, they cared for one another, even though they could be mean and spiteful to each other sometimes. He did not trust her around other men.

  Dad died when I was seventeen. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer and was dead fourteen months later, a week after my birthday. He spent the last month of his life in a hospice. He never mentioned death or dying to us in those end days, and when we went to visit him, he seemed embarrassed, as if this disease was a source of shame. Luke told Brian and me that Dad’s diagnosis was terminal and I resented that Mum had told him first and not me. I was the oldest. Luke was the kid, but she insisted on telling him every detail about where the tumours were, how they had spread and how virulent they were. Luke secretly relayed the information to us. I confronted her about this. ‘But, darling,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want to upset you.’ And I could see her point. I had my final school exams coming up.