Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

  The next morning, the first day of our new lives together, she got up early and came up here to work on some unspecified thing. When she came down for lunch, her eyes were very red and her hair stank of smoke. I don’t think we’ve had an honest conversation since.

  * * *

  I remember when they were going to release Gow, I commented that the news programs were using nicer photos of him now, and she sat up and asked me if I thought he was attractive.

  It’s the betrayal of trust that smarts the most, makes me feel stupid and gormless. I trusted Susie so much. I was naked before her, and she was wearing an invisible trench coat. I wonder if she told Gow about me, how I called to her every night as she came through the door, asking how her day was, honey. That irritated her, I know it did, but I kept doing it because it made me laugh. I wonder if she was seeing him when I gave her that antique watch for her birthday. She didn’t like it very much and only wore it to please me. I can imagine them together: “He gave it to me. I feel so bad. I don’t know whether to wear it or not.”

  I wonder if she told him about the time I couldn’t get it up; whether they had a laugh about it. But that wouldn’t be her style at all. “I feel so bad even discussing this with someone else,” she’d say. “He’d be so hurt. I feel awful.” She’d be a better person twice: once for tolerating my private failings and again for being kind about it.

  * * *

  My world has shifted sideways suddenly and I find that I’m not even a central character. I’ve never felt less in my life. The evolutionary biologists must be wrong: if we’re not designed for monogamy, why is infidelity so excruciatingly painful? Shouldn’t I just shrug and move on?

  It’s so long since I smoked that the man in the shop said they didn’t make Piccadilly anymore, much less packs of ten. I fucking need a smoke. Over and above Tucker’s revelations last night and my getting two and a half hours’ sleep:

  1. Margie and I were rushed on the way to nursery this morning.

  2. We have a most unwelcome guest.

  Unannounced and uninvited, Susie’s Aunt Trisha has come to stay with us. I need a bit of time to take in what Tucker said, instead of which I can hardly find a quiet corner of the house to be alone in. She actually knocked on the door while I was having a long leisurely shit this evening. We have three fucking bathrooms in this house and she was standing outside the one I was in, clutching a vanity case. She couldn’t find those other bathrooms, she said. It was not without a frisson of compensatory pleasure that I stood on the landing, holding my limp newspaper, and watched her lock herself in with the rank stench of my lower intestines.

  * * *

  This morning Margie and I were walking slowly through the park. I was busy mulling over what Tucker had said last night, trying to think of alternative explanations for Susie and Gow’s long chats but drawing a blank. It had been raining and the leaves and grass glistened bright and white, trembling in the searing breeze. Margie was hitting the ground with a twig she had found and making talky noises, intonation without vocabulary, which I love because I can hear what her little voice will be like when she does start talking properly. We walked on past the trash bins, following the path we always take, when a man with a big camera leaped out at us from behind a shed door and took our picture. I grabbed Margie and shouted at him, stupid things like how dare he, stop it at once, and what a rotten thing to do. I forgot to swear or act hard at all. The photographer didn’t even reply to me, just walked away looking at his camera. It was as if I wasn’t talking to him at all, as if I wasn’t a person. My shouting upset Margie more than he had.

  She was crying when we got to nursery, but the mums at the door couldn’t have been nicer.

  A little blonde who has a son called Harry kept smiling at me. “How awful,” she said, through a big grin. “That’s awful.” She kept standing on her tiptoes. I think she was quite excited by it.

  I called Fitzgerald the moment I got back. His office has been phoning the papers all day, issuing lawyerly threats. He assures me that none of the national papers will use Margie’s picture. It brought it home to me for the first time how much of a burden this is going to be to Margie. She’ll always be The-Girl-Whose-Mum. It’ll never leave her. I mentioned the notes I’d made to Fitzgerald- about the search of the bothy- but he didn’t seem very excited. He didn’t leap to his feet, pull his coat on, shout “I’ll be right over,” and slam the phone down. He sort of sighed, burring his lips. Maybe I could make a list of all these points and drop it at the office, he said. He’d have a look at it. It’s pretty annoying. He was the one who asked me to have a look through the papers. I’m spending hours doing this for him.

  Afterward I made a cup of tea and was sitting in the garden, thinking about raking and bonfires, when the front doorbell rang. I peered around the curtain in the front room and almost passed out with dismay. It was Trisha. Bad enough in itself, but she had a big suitcase with her.

  The mums were lovely back at nursery. I think they’d phoned each other during the day because they all knew about the photographer. A tiny fat mother, with a hat jammed so low on her head that she had to tip her head back to talk to anyone above five feet tall, said she’d had a lot of trouble with the press during her husband’s bankruptcy but it all blows over. They’ll forget you soon enough, she said cheerfully.

  As she left with her eight-month-old baby, I noticed a drip of vitrified baby puke on the back of her black coat. I asked McLaughlin about her. Her husband was a corrupt councillor who had an affair with a lady pilot. She, the hatted-vomit-woman, walked away with everything plus a new boyfriend in the lawyer who had represented her. It was all in the paper, apparently. I don’t remember any of it.

  Harry’s little blond mum was there again this afternoon. She seemed to have been waiting about until I came in, and made sure she caught my attention by sticking her chest out as she put her coat on. Harry is a sad-eyed child, the eldest of three, who knows his time in the maternal spotlight is over but has not the words to say it. Even smiling, he looks as if he wants to cry. When he waves good-bye, he twists his little hand from the wrist, slowly, as if he’s being taken off to be killed and wants us to remember him.

  * * *

  Margie doesn’t know Trisha or she wouldn’t have been so friendly to her. She sat on the old shit’s knee and tried to pull her cheeks off. Trisha gave her a bath and put her to bed without a story.

  “I am the child’s great-aunt and Susan Louise has no one else,” she explained later when I asked her why she was here. “As the only surviving member of her family, I should be here.”

  “If you’re so keen to lend her support, why didn’t you turn up at court during the trial?” I said, knowing full well she couldn’t have stood the humiliation. Susie would have recognized her and waved, and Trisha couldn’t cope with being publicly associated with an accused person. “Maybe she could have done with a bit more support then, did you think about that?”

  “I had commitments”- Trisha was scratching the back of her hand slowly, raising welts on the thin dry skin-“that I simply couldn’t walk away from. I came as soon as I could.”

  “Does Susie know you’re here?”

  She looked straight at me. “She asked me to come and visit Margery.”

  She then deflected attention from herself by demanding a cup of tea, a bath, the use of the guest bedroom (too small), and by quizzing Yeni as to where she’s from. Yeni didn’t really understand, but she was uncomfortable at the accusatory tone, I could see that.

  When Yeni went upstairs to her room, I told Trisha that Yeni had been a rock during the whole bloody episode. She stayed with us throughout the trial, I said pointedly. Trisha pursed her lips. She said that was fine then, as if Yeni were an unsuitable friend who would lead me into smoking and the use of slack grammar and tube tops and other modern evils.

  I gather that Susie didn’t really send Trisha here. They’ve been writing to each other, and Susie agreed that it would be nice for M
argery to see other members of the family. It was Trisha who decided she was needed; whether she was wanted here or not is of no concern to her. She knows I hate her and doesn’t seem to care. I wonder how she now feels about taking Susie aside before our wedding and telling her she thought I was a drinker. I was a student then and it was a friend’s graduation. I wasn’t even that drunk, I’d only had about four pints. How unforgiving can you get?

  She drives me insane with her endless pronouncements. She seems never to have mastered the art of interaction, and her conversation, which cannot be discouraged or stopped (not even dammed to a trickle by food), consists entirely of her imparting information. Social acceptance is still important, apparently. Having a daughter is a great responsibility, especially for a man alone. Nutrition is the starting point for intelligent growth. I asked, intelligent growth, Trisha, what is that? Is it growing intelligently, i.e. upward, and not diagonally like all these malnourished young ones with their fancy ideas today? Or is it growing in intelligence during the course of normal physical development? She doesn’t have a sense of humor and knew I was conversing obliquely but couldn’t quite put her finger on the meaning. But she didn’t give up. The government will have to improve the education system or lose the next election. These and many other sparkling gems were cast before Yeni and me, swine that we are, over the macaroni on toast. Yeni smiled and nodded, trying to be friends with everyone, as usual. I sighed and tutted just enough to make Yeni finish eating quickly and stare uncomfortably at the table until pudding came.

  Mum phoned later and was horrified to hear that Trisha had arrived. She demanded to know what she was doing, had I asked her to come? I said of course not. Mum gave the phone to Dad, he asked all the same questions over again, and then she snatched the receiver back from him and asked them again herself. There’s a serious danger of their coming over, even though I told them that there are no spare beds now.

  I want to teach Margie to say “Great-aunt Trisha is a bastard,” but she’d be taken off me by the social workers.

  So I’m up here after everyone has gone to their respective beds, smoking in a sulk, making this nice room smell horrible. I’ve opened the skylight, and the November air’s fresh outside. It floats down the chimney-shaped room and nibbles at my fingers and forehead and bare ankles, keeping me awake.

  In the past twenty-four hours I’ve been emasculated, violated, snubbed, and invaded. To cap it all off, I’ve got to go and visit Susie tomorrow. I don’t want to go. I want to be back at the nursery surrounded by sympathetic, pitying mums. I want to press my face into their big warm tits and stay there forever.

  chapter thirteen

  WORSE. AN EVEN WORSE FUCKING DAY THAN YESTER-FUCKING-DAY was. I’m up here, hiding in my own home, so I don’t have to talk to Trisha or tell her about Susie and the visit.

  Today started out okay. I got a letter from Susie that didn’t say much but did make me think it would be quite nice to see her. I went to the shops to buy the batteries she asked for and found my picture in one of the papers. Margie has been cut out of the photo, which is good, though you can just see her little hand. I actually look quite attractive. It was windy (you can see the wind-ruffled trees behind me), and my hair was brushed back off my ears. Also I had an overcoat on, which covered my belly. Instead of fat and afraid, I seem angry, defiant- even, at a stretch, a little handsome.

  (I’m wondering if we could make anything of the press coverage for the appeal. It feels as though we’ve never been out of the papers. Surely one of them must have broken the rules?)

  I put three copies of the paper in my cart, right side down, and walked around the shop in a flush of excitement. I thought the cashier would recognize me, but she didn’t. I’d drawn myself up, ready to explain that I was gathering material for a case I would be presenting to the Press Complaints Commission, but she didn’t even notice my buying three copies because they scan them in upside down. I was a bit disappointed.

  The story itself is horrible, all about me struggling on with my pathetic devil-spawn child. There’s no mention of me as an independent person, just Susie’s unemployed husband this and that. They’d never say that about a woman. She’d be a housewife, an attractive housewife maybe, or a stay-at-home mum, but not unemployed.

  I half wanted to cut the picture out and take it to Susie, to show her I’m not a complete loser dog, but the story would upset her, and I thought she might have other things on her mind. When I came home from the shops, I took the picture up to the bathroom and used Susie’s hair spray to flatten the hair at the sides of my head. I look cool, whatever Susie says. I know I do.

  I keep going back to the picture and looking at it. I may feel like a neurotic fool, but when I look at that picture, I’m a tragic hero. I can see the story from the far distance for the first time, and I come off rather well. I’m tall, not at all bald (a major boon at twenty-nine), and I’ve stuck loyally by her. If I were slightly thinner, I think I’d cut quite a dashing figure.

  Trisha’s being here was good for one reason only: she agreed to take Margie out for the day. I’d rather do that than leave her with Yeni. That wouldn’t be fair to either of them.

  I turned the car radio on to keep myself from thinking and drove onto the motorway. It’s a long time since I’ve been out of the city. It was windy, and all the high-sided vehicles were leaving the road or stopping on the shoulder. I could feel the car being blown sideways on exposed stretches. When I got all the way out into the flat Leven Valley, the traffic was backed up to a complete standstill, and I was afraid I’d miss visiting time. I was cursing whatever feckless bastard was causing the obstruction when I saw an ambulance weaving against the traffic. It passed, and the cars began to move again. Two hundred yards farther on a large truck lay on its side in a field like a big dead beetle, down a sharp slope from the motorway. It was at such a crazy angle from the road it must have tumbled over several times before coming to rest. The ambulance had been attending here, and I realized that the driver might actually be dead.

  I was making good time, so I stopped in the local village and bought a big bag of toffees. I sat eating them in the car, one after another, chomping and slurping the toffee juice, unwrapping another before I’d even finished the last. I tried to remember all the lovely times we’ve had together. My Susie. My Susie-suse. But all I could see was the back of her head in court and the death-trap truck on its side, and all I could hear was my jaw grinding the hard toffees, my saliva sloshing glucose onto those hard-to-reach surfaces of my teeth.

  I could have claimed that the conditions were too bad for me to drive out. It was the perfect excuse. There were bad accidents everywhere; it would be confirmed on the news. But I couldn’t do it to her. Whatever she had done, I couldn’t leave Susie Wilkens sitting in a women’s prison waiting for a visitor who wouldn’t come. I thought about the real reason I didn’t want to go. If she admitted she was having an affair with Gow, I’d sob. In front of everyone.

  I sat looking out the window and chewed through three more toffees before I made up my mind. I decided (cowardly, I know) not to ask her about Gow today. I put the rest of the toffees behind my seat in disgust, so that I couldn’t reach for the bag while I was driving the final mile to the prison. I promised myself that when I got there I could take three toffees in with me, one for the reception area, one for the waiting room, and one for the way out.

  The Vale of Leven doesn’t look like a prison from outside; there are no high brick walls or spotlights or watchtowers. The bars on the windows are 1960s-style curvy iron, painted beige. The prison complex consists of a series of two-story buildings, like an army training camp, set deep inside a wide perimeter fence made from what looks like chicken wire. I guess the fence is stronger than it looks. The high wind whistled through it like a “blasted heath” sound-effects record.

  The Vale has a suicide problem. They have seasonal rashes of women, usually drug addicts on remand, who kill themselves. At its absolute worst, they had
four deaths in three months. It was a national scandal. I heard once, during the last suicide craze in the Vale, that a woman had hanged herself from a radiator. A radiator? How much determination must it take to hang yourself from something three feet off the ground? Until the very last second of her conscious life there must have been not a shadow of doubt in that woman’s mind that she’d be better off dead. The conviction must have been so complete that even the instinctive urge to put her foot on the floor and lift the weight off her neck was overridden by the certainty that she didn’t want to live. She had four daughters, ranging from twelve years old to six.

  * * *

  Trisha just came in there. She burst through the door and whispered that she’d heard me creeping about up here. This room’s too small for two people. It’s a closet really, and with the chair behind the door, there’s barely room for two sets of feet. She stood in the room, realized that her belly was inches away from my face, and stepped back out onto the shallow landing. Then she found that she was too far away to whisper properly. She moved forward, standing on the raised threshold, keeping her balance by holding on to the wall as I, lowering my voice so as not to waken Margie, asked her to get out, this was a private study, and anyway, what was she doing up at quarter to two in the morning? She said she might well ask me the same question. What was I doing and what was that on the computer screen? I kept my finger on the enter button so the text disappeared up and away. I said it was just some work, and listen, you, this is my house. I can do what I flipping well like. (Why can’t I remember to swear at people when I’m trying to be angry?)