Bloody Women

by Helen FitzGerald

  I didn’t say anything out loud because Mum repeated that she was here to help, as usual, and this required focus and a third party. I remained silent as the lawyer set his pencil to the blank page at the top of his thick file.

  ‘The manuscript has made us wonder . . . about your relationship with Anna.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened when you spoke to Anna Jones.’

  ‘She sat where you are.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘She came to see me yesterday, sat where you are.’

  ‘Right, okay, but I’m talking about just before your wedding day, before all of this.’

  I took a deep breath. I’d gone over this a great deal. But with the trial about to begin, and with Ms Edgley’s crazy-lesbian argument being primed for publication, I realised I would need to find the strength to go over it again, many times.

  ‘I rang her from Italy and asked her to be my best woman,’ I said. I knew the story by heart, having written copious detailed notes for the chapter in Janet’s book that was supposed to be about my love for Joe, and ended up being DOCTOR JOE ROSSI: THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY.

  I hadn’t read any of that chapter yet, just the heading. The implication that he was lucky to have escaped made me angry, as did the fact that she’d put it before the chapter on Johnny, when Johnny was first, and Joe was last, and there were three in between. I’d loved five men in my life, in the right order, in the right place, for the right amount of time – except for Joe, perhaps. They were the chapters of my life and as such should be consumed in order. Joe simply did not come before Johnny. If he’d come before Johnny, I wouldn’t be who I am and things would make even less sense.

  ‘But first, I need to tell you about Rory,’ I said, ‘because I’m reading the book and I’m up to the part about Rory.’

  Mum rolled her eyes at the lawyer, far less subtly than she should have.

  ‘Cat, we need you to concentrate. We can talk about Rory another time. Tell us what happened after you rang Anna.’

  I realised I was sounding crazy. But I was crazy. Things had started ram-raiding my head. It was happening now: I’m looking for headache pills. There’s something in my bag.

  That morning, I’d been feeling so confused I’d asked to see a social worker. She came straight away.

  ‘I’m seeing things,’ I told her. ‘And that’s not all . . . Everyone is talking about me all the time. People at breakfast, officers at the desk, prisoners in their cells. All the time. Talking about me . . . talking about me.’

  She didn’t reassure me. She asked me the same old questions.

  ‘Are you sleeping?’

  ‘Eating?’

  ‘Crying a lot?’

  ‘Had any visits?’

  ‘Telephone calls?’

  ‘Spoken to the nurse?’

  ‘The doctor?’

  ‘Do you want to come to our Anxiety Group? It’s on Wednesdays at three. For people like you.’

  People like me.

  She then walked out of my cell. It was lunchtime, so I followed her, but she didn’t realise, and I was only a few feet behind her and could hear what she was saying to the desk woman.

  ‘Jesus Christ, is that one paranoid!’ she said, ‘The worst I’ve seen. Thinks people are talking about her all the time. Everyone.’ She began mimicking me in a Cuckoo’s Nest kind of way. ‘Talking about me, talking about me.’ She laughed. The desk woman joined in.

  I think it was my intense stare that made her turn around. When she did, her face dropped because she now knew I was right. Everyone, including her, was talking about me . . . all the time.

  Stark raving mad, me. But I reckon if you’re not depressed and paranoid in prison, then there’s something even more seriously wrong with you.

  I needed to concentrate, to answer the lawyer’s questions. I shook my skull from side to side, my brain lagging behind it a little.

  ‘Sorry, that sounded nuts. It’s just in here things are in order. It’s all I have, order, and I’ve only read up to the bit about Johnny, see. And it’s thrown me. I feel like I’m what’s-his-name watching The Truman Show. Have you seen that? It’s like it’s The Truman Show and I’ve knocked through the paper sky and found the control room and I’m watching my life, only none of the people or the places are familiar, at all . . .’

  Another eye-roll from Mum.

  ‘I’ll try and answer your questions.’

  They smiled at me, then at each other.

  I began.

  ‘I’d been in Italy about three days . . .’

  The lawyer wrote this down. I noticed he had terrible acne scars, poor soul. His adolescence must have been a nightmare. No wonder he’d studied hard and become a lawyer.

  ‘. . . with Joe. Can I tell you about Joe first?’

  ‘We know about Joe.’

  ‘Have you called him?’

  ‘What happened after you phoned Anna?’ Mum prompted sternly. I composed myself.

  ‘Okay. I was in Bar Centrale, in Lucca. A nice wee café, sells freshly made cannoli. Joe and I always had the ones with custard first thing, fresh, still warm from the tray. He liked espresso with his.’

  ‘Catriona!’ The lawyer’s teachery voice.

  ‘. . . It was around nine o’clock. I was drinking my third cappuccino which I’d asked for molto caldo, which means very hot because otherwise it’s tepid, to down in one, for energy. Joe was in his surgery across the square. Oh, you should see Lucca, Mum, I wish you’d come over when we asked! Why did you never come over?’

  ‘It was around nine . . .’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes. I dialled Anna’s work in Glasgow. The BBC newsroom . . . She was working as a reporter,’ I said, filling the lawyer in on things he probably already knew. ‘“Ciao!” I said to Anna. I was over the moon. I was happy. It was to be the start of a new life for me.’

  I stopped because an image had escaped my badly Sellotaped box.

  There are no headache pills. There’s something else, though. Something cold.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Mum asked.

  ‘I’m remembering that thing, Mum. That thing we talked about. I’m seeing in between the cracks.’

  ‘Maybe we should come back tomorrow,’ Mum suggested, looking concerned.

  ‘Can you ring Joe?’

  ‘I will. I’ll try again.’

  Reaching into my bag again, touching the cold, the cold is coming from the shiny thing.

  The image disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. I started to cry.

  ‘Oh God . . . I can’t keep it taped!’

  The crying was loud, as if another person’s. Maybe I should have asked Mum to talk to me alone for a minute, after all, just for a minute. Maybe she would have held my hand.

  ‘Time’s UP!’ said the Freak, eyeing me, the lawyer, the book and Mum, angrily. ‘I think she’s had enough.’

  I had had enough. I needed to be alone in my cell. I needed to stop thinking about how everyone was talking about me. I needed to stop the flashbacks, or perhaps not the past, just dreams, perhaps . . . just nonsense . . . burning their way into my grey matter. I needed to stop looking at things in my cell as implements that might come in handy one long, long night.

  Instead I would think about Rory, the man I’d loved second. I would read my notes about him, and then read The Truman Show version by Janet fuckwit Edgley, so I could work out which, if either, was true.

  I decided to take a peek to see which chapter was about Rory.

  He had two chapters – one for his life, one for his death. I noticed that this was also the case for the rest of them. The first, about our relationship, was called BREAD, NOT CIRCUSES! The other one, about his death, was called NO FUCK-FACES! The BREAD, NOT CIRCUSES one wasn’t too far out of sequence, I thought, just by one chapter, but that was enough to really annoy me. It made me swear out loud, ‘Fucking idiot!’

  The door clunked open.

  ‘You all right?’ It was the Fre
ak.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe you should give that to me?’ she said, looking at the pages I’d thrown at the wall.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re worrying us, you know?’

  ‘I’m not going to kill myself,’ I said, which, roughly translated, meant, ‘I’m not going back to that fucking sui’ cell.’ Mum was right. I was clever. I did know how to talk to them.

  ‘I’m glad. How about you give those to me?’ she smiled and held out her hand. ‘You can have them back tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m fine, I promise. I won’t read it any more.’ I gathered the pages and put them under the bed. ‘I’m going to sleep now.’

  ‘Okay, then. Have a rest from reading and writing tonight,’ she said, looking at the neat pile of twenty-eight cross-referenced, single-spaced, hand-written pages sitting on the desk beside the television.

  ‘Get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.’

  ‘I feel fine.’

  ‘Good. Goodnight, Catriona.’

  She locked the door, leaving me with nothing but brain-flashes, handy implements and the buzz of Catriona Marsden-related conversations floating in through my spy-hole.

  9

  I lay on my bed and tried to sleep, like the Freak suggested, but I couldn’t divert my mind from the summer of fourteen years ago, when I’d started going out with Rory MacManus. Marchmont, Edinburgh, it was. I was nineteen.

  Johnny and I had been apart for three months.

  For the first few weeks, I phoned his dad several times.

  ‘He’s in a mine in the middle of the desert, with no phone, ken what I mean?’

  I turned up at Spider’s garage while he was making a cup of sugary tea. ‘Cat, it’s over. Stop embarrassing yourself.’

  I found the addresses of some Australian mines and sent letters to seven of them. The contents of all seven letters were much the same, although reading through them after they’d been returned later I realised how much they had increased in desperation towards the middle and then diminished.

  Please get in touch Johnny!

  I just need to talk.

  What are you doing? Who are you with?

  Johnny, I feel lonely.

  I’m writing this to myself now, I think. Cat, it’s over. Stop embarrassing yourself!

  I don’t know why I behaved like this. In truth, I’d wanted it over as much as Johnny had. But it was agony, losing the only forehead that had willingly pressed itself against mine for well over five minutes.

  After a couple of weeks of depression, I moved on. I joined the hill walking, wine appreciation, pottery and Gilbert & Sullivan societies. I found a netball team that didn’t know about my lifetime ban. They were based in St Andrews, and I had to drive two hours twice a week to train and play, but it was worth it.

  I got myself together, ditching societies one by one as I slowly regained my self-respect. I’d lost touch with Anna, but knew from Mum that she was in Bristol doing a journalism traineeship with the BBC. Mum liked Anna. They talked on the phone sometimes.

  I started getting distinctions in my Fine Art degree. Then Aunt Becky died, leaving me enough for a deposit on a tenement flat in student-crammed Marchmont. It was there I found my true calling.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Rory squealed, beholding the gorgeousness of the one-bedroom flat I’d given a ‘quick fix’ to using paint and MDF, mostly.

  ‘You inherited some money eight weeks ago,’ he said, ‘and you’ve already bought and sold. How is that possible?’

  ‘Anything is possible,’ I answered.

  Rory MacManus was a student at Edinburgh too. We’d met during a Freshers’ Week pub crawl imaginatively called the Old Town Pub Crawl. In fact, the only university friends I ever made were those I’d met on that particular pub crawl. I wonder what life would have been like if I’d chosen the New Town Pub Crawl instead.

  We had been friends for over a year. I was a taken woman to start with, and then a bit depressed, then a bit manic and scary.

  Rory was gay, or so I’d thought.

  ‘You what?’ he’d screeched over an expensive dinner on the Shore in Leith. We were celebrating the ludicrous price I’d got for the flat.

  ‘If you’re straight, then I’m uncomplicated,’ I dared.

  I spent dessert testing Rory’s sexuality. He loved Kylie Minogue, remembered the date of his parents’ wedding anniversary, sat down to pee, ate passion fruit and made regular appointments for back, crack and sack waxing. He was a Scottish socialist. His mother was a Labour politician and a well-known feminist, so his views weren’t macho. I would never in a million years have believed he was straight if he hadn’t administered the most patient, creative and expertly managed cunnilingus I’d ever experienced. I’d get him to draw diagrams and spread the word, if he wasn’t dead.

  ‘Find me a gay man willing and able to do that,’ he’d said afterwards, ‘and I’ll gazump those idiots who got your flat for ten grand over the asking!’

  He could have, too, because, despite his regular attendance at angry gatherings that demanded social change, Rory’s family also happened to have a fuck-load of cash.

  I was with Rory from the age of nineteen to twenty-three. He called me his ‘breath of fresh air’. While the years with Johnny had varied in texture and quality, Rory and I were at loggerheads from very early on. To start with, I attended all the rallies he helped organise. I spent weekend mornings on buses, and afternoons in seas of placards. I stuck notices on lamp posts and yelled ‘Bread, not circuses!’ in George Square. I signed petitions and gave out free papers in the street.

  By the time I left uni I’d made £150,000. I’d bought and sold two flats in central Edinburgh and had started a side-line styling show homes for estate agents. Two days after graduation, I appeared on a show for the BBC as a guest stylist, and it wasn’t long before I started getting regular gigs.

  Rory stopped the creative cunnilingus after a couple of years.

  ‘I want to be with someone who’s dedicated to social change,’ he said after I’d failed to march for asylum seekers one Saturday afternoon, choosing instead to go shopping for pillowcases. I’d spent years trying to convince myself and Rory of my burning desire for Justice, but I was beginning to realise that I was more dedicated to décor change than social change, and when Rory started at me after a very busy day, I didn’t have the motivation to defend myself.

  ‘Shut up!’ I hissed.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What do you really mean? “Someone who’s dedicated to social change”?’

  He was stunned, didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You don’t even know, you posh prick.’ I said, marching down the hallway towards the very distant door of his family’s four-storey Georgian townhouse.

  ‘Well, someone whose job has meaning, for a start,’ I caught as I tried to slam the ten-ton door behind me.

  I can’t believe I stayed with him for nearly four years. I regret each and every one of them. I’ll never get them back. He was such a self-righteous, phoney arsehole.

  He’d gone to Gordonstoun. He had a first-class degree in law. Halfway through our so-called romance, he was offered a post in the biggest firm in Scotland (starting salary £70k). I remember I used to take muffins to his posh office if he was working late sometimes and we’d shag on his desk. By the time we split two years later, his salary had doubled. The whole time, he lived with Mummy and Daddy. Oh, and he confessed to fox hunting occasionally with friends in the Borders.

  We had some good times, don’t get me wrong. There were a lot of things I liked about Rory, it’s just that his company wasn’t one of them. I liked the idea of a well-educated, radical, driven man. But when it came down to it – to the things we did at the weekend and the people we saw – his world was an obnoxious, stuffy one that did not sit well with me. He was a snob. The kind who scoffed loudly if someone admitted to earning a lot, while secretly gloating at earning a hell of a lot more.

  The en
d was signalled by an enormous row. I’d had a really productive day – painting several abstract and floral canvases to match the décor of my third flat, pitching an idea to a BBC producer for a television series called A Change Is As Good, doing a ten-kilometre run, making a three-course meal, cleaning the floors, ironing the bed linen and creating a foolproof filing system for my CDs – and I really needed to clean the crumbs from under the cushion-seats of the sofas.

  ‘Can’t you do it later?’ Rory asked, his increasingly fat arse firmly planted on the cushions that were grinding crisp crumbs and God knows what else into the fabric of my new sofa. ‘I’m watching something!’

  I cleaned the other sofa first, huffing a bit as I did, then stood over him with my hand-held hoover humming.

  ‘It’ll only take a minute.’

  ‘You know this is my favourite programme,’ he dared.

  It was Have I Got News for You? At that stage of my life, all television-watching seemed a complete waste of time. Televisionmaking, now I could understand that, but not watching. Especially watching other people doing things you should be doing, like talking to each other, or exercising. Lard-arsed football fans annoyed me no end: too lazy to get out there themselves, and yet somehow qualified to yell abuse from their crumby living-room seats at those who weren’t too lazy. I despised lazy people. Rory was one of them. He was still on the sofa, watching people talk shite to each other.

  I moved his legs off the sofa, and removed one of the two cushions.

  ‘Fucking hell, Catriona! You’re crazy! Sit down!’

  ‘Just stand up!’ I said, taking the remote control from his chubby hands and switching off the television.

  There was a scuffle over the remote, which Rory won, and before I knew it I had kicked the television and sent it flying against the wall. The screen smashed when it fell. There was smoke.

  Staring, then silence.

  The door of my flat slammed shut. Home to Mummy.

  A crumb-free sofa. At last.

  I thought we’d already split up, but in fact it happened the following day.