Bloody Women

by Helen FitzGerald

‘Are you coming?’ Rory asked when he rang in the morning.

  ‘Do you want me to?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  It was a Sunday lunch for his parents’ anniversary, which Rory had remembered in plenty of time to organise the do and purchase several specially wrapped gifts from Jenners.

  ‘But what can one actually do with an art degree?’ his postpost-post-feminist mother said to me after the starter.

  She had said the same thing at a function once before. For years, I’d been constantly justifying myself to this lot at dinner tables, playing along to please them. Once, I’d even agreed to recite a poem.

  ‘One could always shove it up one’s anus, fuck-face,’ I said.

  The entire table of Sheriffs, QCs, oncologists and Rory look-a-likes froze.

  ‘Rory MacManus the second,’ I declared, standing tall and raising a £105 champagne glass to my imminent ex. ‘To the cunting revolution! May they chop off all your heads.’

  I put the glass down delicately and left, without tripping or forgetting to take my bag and coat. It was my finest hour. I’m still proud of it.

  But this bad behaviour does not prove that ten years later I drugged Rory with Rohypnol in his New Town office, severed his not-so-girthy manhood, drove him to the busiest, darkest section of the M8, and tossed him out to stagger amongst speeding lorries with the words ‘NO FUCK-FACE’S!’ scrawled in black pen on his chest.

  I’d never have got the apostrophe wrong, for a start.

  10

  I didn’t sleep. The television incident was one I wanted to forget, but couldn’t. It weighed on me for years. I wish I hadn’t kicked it.

  After breaking up with Rory, I phoned Anna. She bought me a ticket to Bristol and I stayed in her flat for a few weeks.

  ‘He was a condescending bastard,’ she said. ‘He always looked down on you.’

  It was a different break-up from the last. I used different tactics to cope. No club-joining and desperate letter-writing. Rory was right after all. I had really needed to sit down. It was while sitting down at Anna’s that I began to write a diary.

  The remand hall was almost quiet, except for the odd scream, key-jingle, and door-bang. I got out of bed and read over my notes about Rory, and then I read the Janet version about a man who resembled Rory MacManus as much as a turnip.

  Some called him weak, some too kind, some felt he lost his soundness of mind, trailing behind Cat Marsden, tongue out, panting. Rory MacManus was privileged, popular, successful and committed. He fought for causes, one of which was the tall girl with all the drive of his mother – the student, the stylist, the developer, the athlete, the protestor.

  The relationship was always stormy. Rory’s mother continues to berate herself for not trying to separate them earlier. ‘They were the worst years of his life,’ she says. ‘She was feral, a hostile force, always critical, all over the place. Once,’ she recalls, ‘she threw a television across the room.’

  Kicked. It was a twenty-inch Sony. I had to buy another one.

  ‘Once,’ Rory’s father recalls, ‘she made him eat an avocado, knowing full well it would make him ill.’

  It was our one-month anniversary. He hadn’t told me he was allergic to them.

  ‘Once,’ according to Rory’s best friend, Piers, ‘she asked him to have anal sex. He told me about it in the pub.’

  Telling everyone was his idea.

  ‘She called his family fuck-faces.’

  They were.

  ‘She ignored his calls.’

  I ignored his calls.

  ‘She didn’t speak to him for twelve years.’

  I didn’t speak to him for twelve years.

  ‘Once,’ Rory’s wife, Susan, says, ‘she rang him out of the blue and asked him to have sex with her.’

  I asked how he felt about a goodbye shag. He said he felt hard already.

  ‘We were happily married.’

  There’s the shiny thing again.

  ‘She tossed him, bleeding from his crotch, onto the motorway.’

  What? I’m so . . .

  ‘The girls have lost their daddy.’

  . . . so, sorry.

  11

  ‘So you waved at Joe then dialled Anna at the BBC newsroom?’ It was the pizza-faced lawyer again. Mum was holding my hand. I’d had it in my mind that she never did and that she was bad to Dad and bad to me, but maybe she wasn’t, and maybe she did hold my hand and I’d just been confused. She was holding my hand across the table.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. My face was blank. The manuscript was wiping me out. The manuscript and the prison and the waiting and waiting and the suicide meetings and the stodge. Mostly the manuscript though.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I asked her to be my best woman.’

  ‘Edgely writes that you hadn’t spoken to her for a while.’ ‘You believe her?’

  ‘Well, of course not, but . . .’ The lawyer was annoying me. He had a no-eye-contact facial expression that he never deviated from.

  ‘Have you spoken to Joe, Mum? Did you call him?’ ‘Love, I’ve tried.’

  Had she fuck.

  ‘He’s not coming, Cat, pet. We don’t want him to come, remember?’

  My bag is open. There’s something shiny and sharp inside.

  Tears started streaming down my face. I put my head down on the table faster than I meant to. The Freak intervened.

  ‘She’s had enough.’

  Mum wasn’t happy. The lawyer wasn’t either. Two precious interviews had been cut short by my screwed-up brain and an over-protective Freak with a truncheon.

  That night in my cell I woke needing a pee and pressed the buzzer to be let out. As I waited I thought of Joe. I’d written every day to start with. Security wouldn’t let me any more. He, his mother and the police must have intervened. I wasn’t to phone either, so Mum had tried for me. But I didn’t trust her. I didn’t trust anyone any more. I closed my eyes and imagined Joe polishing his Nonna’s gravestone up in Vagli di Sotto, Joe telling me spooky stories about Lucia Bellini at Lago di Vagli. Joe, dancing with me at the chestnut festival in Cascio. Joe, making me a cup of coffee with hot milk and presenting it to me in his garden overlooking the red, higgledy-piggledy rooftops of the old town that was a mile or so down the hill. It was getting harder to sustain the image. Were the roofs red? Were they higgledy-piggledy? What did Joe used to say when he presented me with the coffee? Eccoci? What did I love about him? When we got engaged, I’d only known him for three months, and during that time we were living in different countries. What was it about him? Was it the way he cooked for me? The way he said he would always look after me, that he was all I needed, that, with him, I would always be okay? Somehow, it was easier to conjure images of the other men.

  Their clothes.

  When Johnny wasn’t wearing jeans and a mustard jumper he was wearing jeans and another coloured jumper. Underneath the jumpers, which he rarely took off, and which he rarely covered with a coat or anorak – resulting in a fusty wet-wool smell – he wore plain T-shirts that showed off his muscular arms and the tattoos I disapproved of. He wore trainers, boxer shorts and very clean-looking socks.

  Rory wore chinos, brown leather brogues and open-necked, well-ironed shirts. Even as a radical student he’d looked like a lawyer. His Y-fronts were crisp and white, his socks multi-brown Argyll.

  Mani wore suits, all the time, even to the movies.

  Stewart wore tracksuits or shorts, and sleeveless tops that showed off his huge biceps.

  I won’t tell you what Joe wore.

  But I will tell you more about Mani, because he was the one who came, and went, after Rory.

  I was twenty-three when I disappeared from the world of the MacManuses. Despite my spectacularly rude departure from the family house, Rory kept trying to get in touch with me at Anna’s in Bristol.

  ‘I forgive you,’ he said for a while.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said for a while after that.

  ‘You’re my bre
ath of fresh air,’ he said on my doorstep when I finally gathered enough strength to leave the comfort and love of Bristol. ‘You’re right. They are hypocrites. I am a hypocrite.’

  He stopped, in the end. Got another promotion, I believe. Exchanged the fresh air of me for the stale money of a girl called Susan.

  Not long after, the BBC television idea I’d pitched when my energy levels were astronomical – A Change Is As Good – finally exited development hell and entered reality hell. I’d long lost the drive to live on building sites, had taken to watching the television shows I had previously despised, writing diaries and feeling, well, stable. Bored, actually. But at least I wasn’t kicking in televisions.

  ‘You do still have talent,’ Anna reassured me. ‘You should channel it. This job will be perfect for you.’

  I would present the show with a large smile, the right amount of cleavage, and a script with witty yet clean links, sardonic exchanges between me and a Lady Chatterley’s Lover-style joiner, and sequences that ensured guests were overcome with tears of joy at the end of each programme. This job lasted ten years. During that time, I commuted from my flat in Edinburgh to the BBC building in Glasgow, and spent many, many weeks on location around Scotland.

  The programme would make me famous in Scotland. Home-ownership, development, decorating and styling had taken over the world, and A Change Is As Good was soon more popular than the news. It was terrible. Each week I ruined someone’s living room or bedroom or kitchen with a squad of gormless workers who painted badly without sanding first and reconfigured perfectly good furniture into something useless that matched the terrible paintwork. Guests squealed, then howled, on cue, as I unveiled rooms filled with scatter cushions that must never be moved. They’re probably still crying, poor bastards.

  It was soon after I started the job that Anna finished her BBC traineeship down south and landed a job on the Scottish news. We were so excited to be working in the same building. We had lunch whenever we coincided. During one of these lunches, Anna introduced me to her colleague, a production journalist called Mani Sharma.

  ‘I’ve seen you on the telly,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve seen you too,’ Mani replied, tie in soup.

  We slurped five soups in a row, then each other on Friday after work. It started well – a kiss at my front door – but then I found myself under the bedclothes with a gaping black eye staring at me, daring me to ‘Lick it, lick it, go on.’

  An oral-sexless relationship isn’t a winner. Because I refused, there was no favour to return, which meant those precious foreplay-filled early months lasted a week, at most, and were okay, at best. I could do without the whole penetration bit to be honest, but that was really all we did in bed, bang, bang. The other problem we had was his family. Mani was twenty-five when we met, a rebel son who chose journalism over the family business and a red-haired Celt over Harjinder-someone. His family were Brahman, top caste back in India, and had transferred their wealth and status to Scotland with oodles of shops, a ridiculously large house and a lot of cars. They didn’t approve of lower-middle-class-at-best me scuppering their plans for first-born Mani. They wouldn’t accept me, and after one failed attempt to win them over – I spilt a cup of coffee on my shirt and said fuck – we decided to pretend they didn’t exist either.

  ‘I can’t stand them anyway,’ Mani said as I washed coffee out of my shirt afterwards.

  Mani moved into my flat. I couldn’t be persuaded to move to Glasgow, believing Edinburgh to be the most perfect city in the world. The travel, his shifts and my location work meant we saw each other on television more often than in the flesh, and when we did see each other we were yawning then falling asleep on the sofa.

  It felt nice, at first, loving each other without the consent of his parents. And my mum loved Mani. Called him Mr Reporter Man and made him cakes. She never made me cakes. For nearly seven years, we worked hard, ate well . . . Oh, and I got pregnant.

  It wasn’t one of those breathless-over-the-pee-stick, champagne-ready moments. It was me in the loos at work at lunchtime, praying as I waited for two endless minutes. Me crying as the stick turned blue. Mani sitting opposite me that night, grey and speechless. Me reading his grey speech-lessness and saying, ‘It’s okay, Mani. If you want, I’ll have an abortion. Is that what you want?’ It was getting cramps for days afterwards, looking at babies and children and thinking, It could have been her – him – that I killed.

  It was the right thing to do. It moved our relationship on, in that we knew we couldn’t stay together. After the abortion, we stopped having non-oral sex, met for lunch only by accident, and found fewer reasons to phone or text each other during the day. We had nothing to say to each other.

  Our break-up was as gentle as our relationship had been. Over a TV meal of M&S curry I asked him what was new. He told me his cousin was getting married. He said he might go, try to build some bridges. He went, built some, came back, and asked me how I would feel if he moved out. I said I’d feel sad, but would understand. We cried that night. The next morning he packed up and left. Two months later, he married Harjinder-someone in a beautiful ceremony in Udaipur and they settled into the family home in Pollokshields, Glasgow.

  ‘You knew he’d do this,’ Anna said. ‘It’s the same thing, over and over. You go for a guy who’ll hurt you before you can hurt him.’

  Mani was the only ex I stayed friends with. He sent me postcards from India, and when he returned he found reasons to meet me for lunch in the canteen again. The dead foetus fog that had weighed on us dissipated and we found things to talk about.

  I talked about single life. It was the first time I’d been single since I was fifteen. It lasted two years, and it was scary, but good. I worked hard and spent my weekends with Anna – going to the pictures, flying off for a few days of sunshine, going out for dinner, running, whatever.

  One day, we went to the outdoor swimming pool at Greenock. Anna was determined that I should swim again. I’d been a good swimmer as a kid. But since I was fifteen I couldn’t stomach the thought of water. Even a bath was out of bounds. Showers only. No need for therapy about this one. Quite clearly my father’s death had instilled in me a crippling fear of water.

  ‘Hold my hand,’ she said, after taking me through some breathing exercises. ‘And jump!’

  We jumped into the pool and as soon as I felt the wet coldness of the water my body turned to lead. A heavy, dead weight dragging me down, down, through the salty water. I wasn’t afraid at the time, just blank, resigned. Kicking my legs and thrashing at water with my hands was simply something I could not do.

  Anna saved me.

  I shivered and cried all the way home. And resolved never to try to swim again.

  ‘You should confront your fears,’ Anna said.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Well until you do, you’ll stay stuck, stuck in time, at that moment when the police phoned.’

  ‘Shut up! Shut up, Anna. Enough.’

  That night, Anna and I watched some French movie about death, and our hands accidentally touched on the shared arm rest. ‘Oops,’ she said, taking her hand away.

  ‘That’s okay,’ I said, but it wasn’t. It filled me with excitement and terror, and for a moment I was glad she’d taken her hand away but then the moment ended because I put my hand on her knee and waited to see what she would do. She put her hand on my hand. I put my mouth on her mouth, and my body on her body.

  ‘That never happened,’ I said afterwards, my face red with tears.

  She shook her head, got out of bed, got dressed, and never spoke of it again.

  A few days afterwards, I met Stewart Gillies.

  ‘He treats me like a queen.’ I told Anna.

  ‘He’s got you on a pedestal.’

  ‘What’s wrong with being on a pedestal?’

  ‘You’ll fall off.’

  Anna was starting to piss me off. I was glad to have the less critical friendship of Mani, and we talked regularly over so
up of the day.

  ‘He thinks I’m perfect. It’s flattering,’ I said to Mani, after my first official date with Stewart.

  A few months later, Mani told me his marriage was going from strength to strength.

  I told him I was teetering on the edge of my pedestal.

  A few months after that, he told me he was going to be a daddy.

  I told him I had fallen off.

  Mani’s wife was giving birth to their son when he died.

  His name’s Kumar.

  I was lying in my cell staring at the dark ceiling, imagining what Mani’s son might look like, when it happened again.

  Stewart’s flight was cancelled. I’m glad but I’m drunk now. I need to sit down. I have a headache. I reach into my bag.

  Clunk. The Freak had finally answered the call button and unlocked the cell to let me out for a never-ending urination. After she’d escorted me back she said, ‘I read it, that pile of shite, before I gave it to you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s shite.’

  ‘It is shite.’

  ‘Just thought I’d mention it.’

  She locked the cell, and I sat on the edge of my bed wondering exactly what she thought was bullshit. That I was crazy? That Dad had made me a man-hater? That I was in love with Anna but too scared and too lacking in self-awareness to do anything about it? That I’d done it at all? I wasn’t sure, but her words verged on supportive.

  I tried the name thing to get to sleep, but Stacey had arrived earlier in the day from Paisley Sheriff and was now in the cell next door. Over dinner I heard the others saying Stacey was the loudest masturbator in Scotland and, Jesus, did she deserve a badge. She oohed and yessed and screamed and yelled and banged for an hour at least, then rested for no more than fifteen minutes before starting the inevitable thrush-fest all over again. Reading the bullshit book of my life seemed a necessary and almost pleasant distraction. I put bits of wet scrunched loo roll in my ears and read about Mani.