by Denise Mina
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 Bartó
k. 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.
What am I looking for in here anyway? The truth? A fact? Her motive? At the moment, on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis, I think, speculate, wonder about Susie’s motives more than any other single thing. Yet motive is the most slippery of truths. After an utterly honest, undefensive, unpropagandizing three months of incessant talk, a brilliant, insightful psychiatrist couldn’t hope to uncover my true motives for taking an unsatisfactory dump this morning. They could call it tension, stress, a mother complex, and I could call it a desire for world peace. All of them could be equally true. It could be a fleeting vitamin deficiency or a dream I don’t remember having. I know this and still I’m wasting time trying to determine what someone else’s motives were for a series of out-of-character actions months ago. I’m up here for hours at a time searching for a completely unknowable quality.
In conclusion, my being here is both wrong and pointless. And still I’m here, scrabbling through the rubble.
A good, true husband would want his wife to be autonomous, could comfortably allow her to leave questions unanswered, and I used to. I loved being so sure of her. I loved having a wife who could go off to a conference and come in and grunt, “Hello” without elaborating. I was proud that she was free to make her own choices, and so was I. Now pain and insecurity make me want to control her, like the arsehole men who kill their wives and girlfriends in the prison-lovers book. I could never have anticipated this hurting and preoccupying me so much. I don’t want Susie to be free to do things that make me feel like this. I don’t want her to have free will at all. If I could, I would rip the free will from her, rip it out and keep it from her.
No one who knew what this feels like could assent to it. In a way it’s proof that God doesn’t exist. If there were a God, and he did love the world, he wouldn’t have given us free will. He would have anticipated this feeling, deemed free will a flaw, and taken it out. Maybe there is a God but he simply doesn’t care what we feel or how much it hurts, in which case any and all pleas for succor or help from him are just about as useful as a nun’s cunt.
God forgive me. That’s the worst curse I’ve ever read or said or heard of.
chapter nineteen
MUM AND DAD CAME DOWN TO THE KITCHEN AS I WAS FINISHING my porridge this morning. They tumbled bleary-eyed into the room as though afraid to have left me alone during the hours of darkness. By my watch it was six-forty-five. It’s an insult to insomniacs, voluntarily getting up at that time. I went upstairs and found Margie standing in her cot, good as gold, chewing Lizzie Limber Legs and watching her mobile. When I got back down, Trisha had appeared. They were all sitting around the table together, chatting politely. They look a bit scary in the mornings because nighttime dehydration and pillow-creasage exaggerate their wrinkled smiles into horribly sarcastic sneers.
I gave Margie a piece of toast and let her run off into the living room, and then I took a deep breath and turned to the assembled crowd. I told them that I had something to say to all of them: I greatly appreciated their coming to support me, but I wanted them to go home now and let me get Margie back into a routine. Susie will be home soon, I said, and everything will be back to normal. They stared at me, dumbfounded at my gall. Mum was annoyed that I was speaking to her in front of Trisha; I know she wants me to choose her to be on my team first, but I’m too tired to play those games. Dad, sensing what was going through her head, twitched nervously and glanced at her. Mum asked me if I was quite finished, and when I said I was, she stood up, pressing her fingers on the table as if she were addressing a public meeting.
“I think Trisha should go,” she said. “She has been here for a whole week-”
Determined to be evenhanded, I interrupted her. “No, I want you all to go. I didn’t invite you. This is the worst imaginable time for me to have visitors.”
“ Lachlan,” she said patronizingly, “you’re not well enough for us to go home.”
“Mum,” I said, closing my eyes. “I am perfectly well.”
She huffed disbelievingly, and her voice rose to a familiar brain-gouging pitch. “LACH-LAN,” she said angrily, “your eyes are bright red. It is clear that you are under a lot of strain. To be quite honest, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, I’m actually afraid to leave you alone with the child. There, I’ve said it. You’re not sleeping, you’re being very moody-”
“I CANNOT SLEEP BECAUSE YOU’RE IN MY BED,” I shouted, dropping a plate to the floor. It broke and spiky shards shot across the kitchen floor. “When I can get to sleep, you wake me at six a.m. Having you here is driving me crazy. Just get out, will you? Will you all just get out and leave me alone?”
Trisha deliberately misunderstood and said, “Cheer up,” weakly. Speechless with impotent rage, I picked up her cup and threw it at the wall. The toffee-brown tea splattered across the white emulsion, flecking at the outer edges. They all looked suddenly very old and brittle. In the living room Margie put the television on. An interviewer was questioning someone about a bombing in the Middle East.
“Young man,” said Mum, “it’s about flipping well time blah blah blah.” I can’t remember her exact words, but I was supposed to shape up, ship out, and something something. I wasn’t listening, I was sitting at the table, sagging and bent, wishing I were asleep or at least winning the fight. The more emphatic I was, the more they thought they should stay with me and deprive me of a bed. “And furthermore-”
Trisha stood up suddenly. It’s easy to forget how tall she is. She stands about five eight, which isn’t eugenically freakish or anything, but in Scotland, where all the women are tiny (smallest in Europe), and especially among older women, she seems supernaturally long. I was only half listening, so this is a paraphrase. “I think Lachlan has done incredibly well. I think he deserves a little peace and quiet now. The very least we can do is go and stay at a hotel.”
I don’t even think it was just to piss Mum off, either. I think she believed it.
“I don’t need you to tell me what to do, you sneaky prig,” Mum shouted, and I covered my face. Name-calling. Always death to rational argument. “I think I know what’s best for my own son.”
“I’m not telling you what to do,” said long tall Trisha. “I’m telling you
my opinion as to what we should do. I think we should leave him in peace and be supportive from a distance.”
“From a distance?” Mum was really fired up now. Dad and I have both seen this scenario a hundred times. When Mum gets past a certain degree of annoyed, she starts crying and blaming and lashing out with accusations of all sorts until only physical exhaustion can calm her down again. I see the same pattern in myself sometimes. Knowing that an emotional tsunami was imminent, Dad stared anxiously at the table. Mum turned on me, wagging her finger. “If you don’t get some sleep and sort out your marriage PDQ, young man, there’ll be hell to pay, you mark my words.” She was shouting and trembling and just about to blow when Trisha interrupted her.
“Any idiot can give advice,” said Trisha calmly. “It’s taking it that’s hard.”
It was such a sensible observation that we were all stunned into silence. Then Trisha picked up the newspaper and sauntered off.
Mum’s head was twitching, side to side. She blinked hard, and her anger just sort of subsided as she sank down into her chair again. Dad, as surprised as I was, caught my eye and pressed his lips together. Margie came running in and climbed onto Mum’s lap. I went next door and turned off the television, came back into the kitchen, and we all continued our breakfast as if I hadn’t smashed two bits of crockery and shouted at a crowd of benignly inspired pensioners.
Ten minutes later we heard Trisha lugging a suitcase downstairs. I ran up to help her with it, whispering, “Thank you,” under my breath. I was so pleased I felt like asking her back to visit again.