(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (19 page)

All the numbers in the world are sloshing about in my head, forming themselves into answers to questions that I don’t fully understand. I’m lying down, knowing that it is imperative that I fall asleep right now because Trisha will be up at seven, smashing about the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, and all the time I’m trying to sleep, I’m thinking about Susie and the Vale and Margie and Gow, and when I switch off, I think of numbers and hard sums. So I gave in to the noise in my head, made a cup of tea, and came up here. My head is bursting.

While at university, hanging out on the eighth floor of the library trying to get the attention of some girls, I was flicking coolly through a journal and read a study about the effects of sleep deprivation. The US Army found that it can induce temporary psychosis, hallucinations, both auditory and visual, and mood swings. I know this. I haven’t been awake for sixty hours, being chased around a square mile of tarmac by a sadistic CIA experimenter, so the effects are more subtle, but they’re there, especially the mood swings.

For the first few miles of the drive out to the prison, I was sad and anxious. When we stopped at a Little Chef for Mum to go to the toilet, I became angry. Then Dad got back into the car and started feeding Margie sweets made of sugar and ADD-inducing additives. I asked him to stop it and he pooh-poohed my objections. I became more and more furious as Margie became more and more hyper. She began to wriggle, shrieking intermittently when she didn’t get the paper/keys/attention/chance to run the sugar off. She was going berserk by the time we got to the prison. I swore in front of her, a thing I hate to do. I told them to fucking stay in the car; the antiques fair turned out to be four miles away, and I wasn’t prepared to wander around for hours and hours after the visit looking for them. Now that I’m so tired and the fight has gone out of me, I can see perfectly clearly that I was nervous and looking for someone to blame. It wasn’t their fault at all. So now I feel angry and guilty.

The guard at reception saw me holding a screaming, wriggling Margie around the waist like a paper parcel and didn’t comment, but I could sense her disapproval. A couple of scary women with bad dye jobs sat up as I came into the glass waiting room. Margie was turning red and close to vomiting. The gnarled women came over, gathered around her in a solid wall, and cooed over her beetroot face, stroking her and making clucking noises. Somehow, they managed to mollify her so that she sat up on my knees, breathing heavily and holding tightly on to my arm as she looked around. I thanked them as they dispersed, and they said things in indignant Edinburgh accents. I didn’t understand the words but guessed that they were meeting my thanks with dismissal and statements of solidarity. I had dressed Margie in the faded red corduroy pinafore dress, which doesn’t look too expensive. I didn’t want to make Susie stand out, and I was glad of it now: I don’t know if they would have helped me if she had been head to foot in Burberry check, but maybe that’s just me being a middle-class prick. I’m stalling because I don’t want to go through the details of the visit again.

They didn’t search me this time. They just let me through with everyone else, and I saw Susie sitting at a different table at the back of the room. I expected Margie to run across the room to her darling mama, but the first thing she did when we got in there was to start coughing. It was incredibly smoky. Susie stood up when she saw her girl. She kept her eyes on Margie as we walked over; she didn’t look at me once, didn’t even offer me her cheek to kiss this time. Her hair has been cut straight across just below her shoulder blades and she looks even thinner than she did last week. Her lips are dry and have turned slightly purple. Her skin is luminescent and waxy, and her blue eyes are sad and hollow and more expressive of every nuance of thought than I have ever seen them.

She took Margie from my arms and sat down, hugging her tight and straightening her little red skirt as if she were dressing a dolly.

“I picked the red dress so she didn’t look too middle-class,” I said and gave a kind of wet snort as if to say “we’re better than everyone else here, fnar fnar.”

She frowned briefly at my feet. Margie seemed completely unaffected by her mother’s presence, and for a fleeting moment I wondered whether we could just never come back here. Maybe we could run away, Margie and I, take all of Mr. Wilkens’s money and go and live somewhere warm, like Greece; perhaps take Yeni for the first year or so. I was thinking that Yeni wouldn’t come because she’s supposed to be over here to learn English, when I heard Susie whispering into Margie’s hair. She was repeating “I love you,” telling every strand, letting the words spill across her lips and soak her hair.

I sat across from her (resisting a cigarette for Margie’s good), feeling sick and angry and exhausted. Ten words from her would let me sleep and bring me peace of mind. A mere ten words would keep me on her side for the next thousand years.

I’m so sorry.

I’ve been faithful.

I love you still.

Instead she looked over the top of Margie’s head and said, “You look knackered, Lachlan.” Using the formal name, pulling back from me.

And instead of ten words that would soothe her soul, I said, “I am, Susan. I am.”

We sat across from each other, unhappily watching Margie so we wouldn’t need to look at each other. I told her Trisha had come to stay. She didn’t make a joke about it or say any of the usual things. She sighed as though I’d reproached her unfairly and apologized. I said my parents had come to stay as well and they were all competitively caring for me. She didn’t smile. Well, she said, that must be nice. It seems as if all we learned to do during our marriage is not talk. We stared at Margie some more. She’d wriggled off Susie’s lap and was holding on to the low table, trying to grab the far edge.

“Did you get my letter?” she asked.

I said I did, yeah, and asked when the next visit was.

She smirked miserably. “We’re hardly ten minutes into this one yet.”

I stopped to breathe and gather my courage. “Look, Trisha wants to come and see you, and, well, you’re obviously not bothered about seeing me, so I’ll send her next time.”

She melted. It’s the only way to describe her face: her jaw dropped, her eyes drooped, and she keened quietly, “Oh, Lachie, no, please.”

I know that prisoners will do anything, promise anything to keep their families coming to visit them— we’d talked about it when she was still working— and I knew that she was begging as a friend, asking me not to abandon her.

“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “But I can’t do this. . . . I can’t come here and be treated like this . . . like I don’t matter.”

She covered her face and wept. Margie turned and tugged at her hands, muttering “Mummmumm” noises, poking the tears off her face and yanking her hair to distract her.

Susie sniffed hard. “Please, Lachie, please.” Electric blue eyes half closed in dire warning of the consequences, she shook her head at me; a perfect strand of midnight black hair fell over one eye, ending in a kiss curl on her dusky cheekbone. She pushed the hair behind her ear and pulled Margie onto her lap, enveloping her. “Please?”

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t give the hollow reassurances that she wanted, say that I’d come and see her for the next ten years, make a go of our empty marriage, talk about the garden and the apple tree and oh, goodness, Mr. Tottery at number thirty-seven had a foreseeable accident, what a pity. I was so tired and raw already and, dreading the slip of meaning from lip to ear, didn’t dare tell her how I felt.

Margie spotted another child across the room, a five-year-old boy, and ran over to play with him. I don’t know why small children are magnetically drawn to older kids who never want to play with them, but I couldn’t help seeing parallels in our situation.

There weren’t as many people visiting today as there were the last time. A cancer-thin man of about fifty, wearing denims and an anorak that were too big for him, was visiting an emaciated woman with yellowed-white hair. They sat silently together and smoked matchstick rollies, her arms wrapped across her stomach as though it ached. The women who had calmed Margie down were sitting at different tables on different visits. The relationships between the visitors were usually obvious: mother, daughter, big sister, wee sister, pal. Some of them chatted; most looked a bit bored. One prisoner got up to go to the toilet. She had her eyebrow pierced and homemade cross tattoos on her hands. She tipped her chin at Susie, checking me out as she walked by. Susie pressed her lips together and nodded back.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

Susie shrugged. “Someone.”

“Someone who?”

“Just someone. She cut my hair.”

I hadn’t thought of Susie having a social life in prison. I had imagined that she would be static in aspic while the world outside revolved. I asked her if she was being bullied or anything.

“Women’s prisons’re not like that. It’s more like being at school. Games, popularity contests. Margie, come here, baby.”

She spent the rest of the visit coaxing Margie back across the room. She only came back after the older boy had pushed her and she ran over, crying, wobbling on her chubby wee legs. Susie picked her up again and hugged her tight, stroking that part of her cheek that makes her sit still. It’s below her right eye, a patch of skin so sensitive that it hypnotizes her with pleasure when it’s touched in a particular way. I can never find it.

The thin woman with the rollie was looking over at us. When she caught Susie’s eye, the woman smiled down at Margie, and Susie raised her head and smiled slowly, taking the compliment on the chin. It was a codicil to a long conversation had elsewhere.

A bell rang and everyone in the room stood up. Susie let Margie down to the floor and cupped her hands over my forearm like a begging dog.

“Come back, Lachie, please?” she said, looking up at me.

I frowned. “Give me something,” I said, but we both knew that I meant anything.

She paused, thinking hard, looking for a place in her heart where I provoked a positive response. I waited for a year.

“I miss you,” she said eventually, but she was looking at Margie.

Still, I felt the electric neediness flood through my feet into the ground. I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll come back.”

“Thursday next week? One o’clock?”

“I’ll come.”

We were standing close together. She floated slowly up to meet my face and let her plump purple lips brush mine. A flash of hope shocked me. For that golden moment, things were fine. It was okay between us and I had a future.

She walked away toward the short line at the back door. A male guard pointed the women into a straighter line, asserting his power over them. They shuffled into place as the visitors gathered up their things and made for the other door. Susie twisted from the waist and looked back at me. I was standing exactly still, tipped forward at an improbable angle into the space where her lips had been.

“Stay out of the study,” she said and turned her attention to Margie. She splayed her fingers open-shut in a starburst and Margie raised her little hand and did it back. Nothing more for me. I’d had all I was getting.

“I’ll go where I like,” I said, loud enough for her to hear.

She took a step out of line and jabbed an angry finger at me. “Stay. Out.”

“Back in line,” called the guard.

* * *

Susie’s right, I shouldn’t be up here. I was lying on the couch in the dark, watching the green minutes count by on the video recorder, when I suddenly remembered the night we went to the opera. We were students and still open to new things, hadn’t yet rejected whole swaths of cultural experience, so we ended up going to see Duke Bluebeard’s Castle by Bartók. We paid a fiver each for our seats. We were so high up that we were looking down on the singers’ heads, and their bodies were dramatically foreshortened. The set was good, but the music did nothing much for me. I found it a bit dreary. Susie loved it, though, and I bought her the CD for her birthday.

I got up off the couch, put the lights on, and found the CD. I wanted to play it, but it was the middle of the night. I sat reading the libretto and was struck by this line of Judith’s: “I came here because I love you. Let me enter every doorway.”

I’m firmly on Bluebeard’s side. I said so afterward; he specifically asked her not to go into the seventh room, he gave her the run of the castle and everything she wanted, but Susie disagreed.

“Could you?” she said in the pub on the way home. “Could you know that some amazing piece of information was behind the door, have the key, and resist the urge?”

I said yes, I definitely could, but Susie didn’t believe me. She teased me, alluding to a raunchy lesbian experience she’d had in the sixth form. She said it was with Tina, a buxom girl we’d bumped into at a party once. She wore tight trousers and a fluffy bra; I couldn’t stop staring at her tits. This irritated Susie, but Tina looked like a prostitute. Did I remember her? I grinned; yeah, I remembered Tina. We sat silently smiling at each other, and she ended up laughing. I didn’t find it hard not to ask about Tina because I knew it wasn’t true.

The point is that in abstract I agree with a no-entry policy for seventh rooms, but in this raw reality I’d rip the plaster off these walls to find out what was going on. I’d face the fact that Susie was in love with him, admit she killed him and cut his tongue out, deal with every sordid detail because I suspect— and I might well be wrong— but I suspect that I wouldn’t feel just as bad if I knew the truth.