(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (9 page)

Although they were separated immediately after the touching service, Donna insists that she does feel married. “We weren’t able to consummate the marriage, but we were allowed an hour together, under guard of course, and that was great. We just held each other and kissed and laughed. Andrew doesn’t want to see me sad. He said if he ever sees my tears, he’ll hang himself.”

What a nice man. The article continues and gets more and more anodyne and hard to read. It finishes: “As soon as Andrew gets out, we will go up to the north of Scotland and start a new life together.”

God help the Highlands. They are cluttered up with incomers from all over the country, running from whatever. Mr. and Mrs. Petty-Fury from Shropshire who can’t maintain a harmonious relationship with any neighbor anywhere. John Q. Bankruptcy, living on a yacht with a suitcase full of cash. Ms. Adulteress and her suspiciously young friend. It’s almost impossible to stay in the Highlands for any length of time without seeing all the subtexts float to the surface, bloated and obscene, like rotting day-old corpses. And Donna and Gow were going to add to that.

The article finishes with a picture Gow has drawn of Donna with her hands behind her head. I don’t think he meant it to be a sexy drawing, I think it’s just because he can’t draw hands. It’s not a bad drawing, actually, although she looks as if she’s squinting and the tip of her nose is dirty.

I understand what Susie means in the Dictaphone interview now: when she’s talking about projection, she means love like this. All this stuff about Gow’s being gentle and kind and everything, it’s so obviously not true. They found the blood of the women in his car and his spunk on them. They proved he was in the area during the crimes. Reading these interviews, it’s as if Donna were trying to turn a really fervent hope into a fact by being adamant about it.

chapter nine

I WAS A BALL-HAIR AWAY FROM WRIGGLING OUT OF TAKING Margie to nursery, but I gave myself a talking-to. I felt a bit cocky anyway because I had a dream last night, about myself and Susie. We were swimming through the living room in Otago Street. The water was amniotic and comfortable. We slid past each other in the warm currents, touching fingertips, smiling in the blue light. It felt prophetic somehow, as if everything were going to be okay. I woke up feeling sure again, thinking that she’ll be back, certain I can cope. This lasted until I got to the doors of the nursery.

I need to get Margie back to some sort of normality. She needs routine, I need to sort these papers out, and Yeni needs to go to English classes. She’s been fantastic and has done the bulk of the child care while I mope about and come up here. She’s not required to do so much, and would have been within her rights to leave us when Susie was first arrested. She’s a kind girl. I think back on myself at eighteen and I know I’d have run away at the first sign of trouble, but she’s mature for her age, emotionally. She told me she has four younger brothers, so maybe that explains it. I thought of buying some thrush suppositories and leaving them in her bathroom, but that’s probably a bit presumptuous.

I’m avoiding writing about the nursery. As I walked through the park, I could see up the hill. Beyond the park gate parents, mums mostly, were parking their big cars and pulling the little kids out of the backseats, lingering in the street before they took them in, chatting to each other. The trendy brigade, what Susie calls the MILTers (Mums in Leather Trousers), were gathered around the doors of one of the urban jeeps, looking in at something on the floor. I began to wish I’d sent Yeni, but I want to be with Margie during any potential unpleasantness. If anything happens, I want her to remember me being there, not simply handing her over to Yeni all the time.

Margie was messing about, picking up leaves and showing me them. I picked her up, put my head down, and walked up the final hill to the park gate. My heart was thumping like a gallows drum. Margie realized where we were going and got excited, squealing and stiffening her body to be put down. I held on to her tightly. Luckily, a small boy had caught his coat on the cast-iron railing at the head of the stairs, and some parents were engaged in trying to untangle him. I slipped down the stairs to the basement without catching anyone’s eye.

Usually I just let Margie run in, but Mrs. McLaughlin waved me over and asked how I was: syrupy concern, head tilting and hand rubbing. They keep the playroom incredibly hot, so by now I was sweating heavily and could feel my blood pressure going through the roof.

“Fine, fine, fine,” I said, over and over, panting, trying to cool down and calm down at the same time. I looked far more distressed than I felt. All around the room parents tried hard not to look at me.

Margie ran off and tugged at a fire engine a small boy was holding. The boy’s hand slipped and he let go. Completely unnecessarily, Margie smacked him over the head with it before crouching down to run the wheels on the floor. A horrible quiet descended in the room as the little boy tipped his head back and let out a rolling air-raid-siren wail. We all thought the same thing at exactly the same time. But Susie’s innocent, so how could it be genetic?

The boy stopped crying and crouched down, watching Margie play and putting his hand on top of the engine so that he was doing it too. Everyone looked ashamed because of what they had been thinking. A very young assistant ran forward and stroked Margie’s hair with ostentatious affection, smiling back at me and at Mrs. McLaughlin. God, it was awful. I muttered something ridiculous about loving my daughter very much and McLaughlin nodded wildly and I left. I don’t want to go back this afternoon.

I forgot about the press and came in the back way. There was only one camera crew this time. They scrabbled out of the van, but I sped up and managed to get through the gate before they got their stuff out. I could hear them over the wall, swearing in French. It’s frightening. Even when I’m sitting in the house, I sometimes break into a sweat, imagining I’m being watched.

* * *

I’ve just found a book about the psychology of love hidden under this desk. Susie hid the book but not the files she stole from Sunnyfields. What does this mean? What does all the stuff in this room mean? I feel like an Egyptian grave robber in here sometimes, as if I’m crashing around in a room full of signifiers and symbols, unknowingly smashing through a hundred subtle strata of meaning.

* * *

Otago Street: the cramped, new-built flat. We were the first people to live there and it was our first home together. They had knocked down the tenement block that had stood there previously. The whole area was subsiding, sliding slowly down the hill to the river. During our first week there, the lintel above the bathroom door began to skew. The windowsill in the living room shifted, and the front door got jammed open. The workmen said it was normal settlement for a new-build. We were just grateful that we were renting.

It was tiny. The bedroom was so small that the double bed touched three walls. We had to climb over it to open the window. We used to lie in the dark and listen to the river and talk about our day. Sometimes Susie would get up and make a plate of buttery toast and two mugs of tea and we’d sit up and watch late-night clubbers walk home across the Gibson Street bridge far below. I was her world then. She adored me. She did things, like the toast, gave gifts, thought of me all the time. She phoned me during the day to say she missed me. Sometimes we’d be watching television and I’d turn and find her just staring at me, doting. She wrote notes and stuck them around the house for me to find, saying she loved me, sending kisses.

She loved me more than I loved her then. It was a bit scary, how much she loved me. When I daydreamed about ending it— just for a distraction, not because I was going to— when I thought about it, I worried that she’d stalk me. She had never been in love before. I’d been in love twice before I met her and knew how to hold back and defend myself. I made a decision to be kind to Susie when I could have been otherwise; I deigned not to hurt her. I was only ever tempted once, when I saw Sandra again and we went back to her house. It felt wrong and cheap and stupid, and I was angry with her before she even made a move. I couldn’t touch her. I went back to Susie’s room in the med residence and had to resist the urge to make a huge fuss of her, because that’s a dead giveaway that you’ve been thinking about doing something wrong.

How did it happen, then, that her benevolent tin god ends up getting the tail end of her phonecard? How come I’m hanging about at the back of the court, acting calm as I hear that she loved a serial killer over me? When did the dynamic change to the point where she doesn’t even feel the need to explain to me that it isn’t the case?

I was still in charge before the wedding. I knew it and so did she. She even said it sometimes, that I didn’t love her as much as she loved me. We laughed about it and I reassured her. I said that I would never leave her; that I was set with her for life. I’d stroke her hair and roll the flesh on the top of her ears gently between my lips: tiny hairs, skin that had never rubbed against anything, never been sunburned.

Corfu was the first time she had ever been abroad, and she had that perfectly translucent skin little Scottish girls have. It was the softest skin I’d ever felt until Margie was born.

Before we were married. I remember that time so well: it’s the most vivid memory I have. Two days before the wedding, we sat in the car outside here, in Orchard Lane, looking at the SOLD sign looming over the high garden wall. I didn’t know this house existed until we came to view it. It’s hidden away, and the lane looks like a delivery slip because it cuts down the side of two large houses. Beyond the wall, in this overdeveloped, trendy square mile of a busy city, sits our fat little white house with our apple tree and fruit bushes and our three small hills of private green heaven. I love it here.

Susie pulled the car around and parked. We couldn’t see past the wall, but we sat together and imagined our way through the gate, across the garden, opening the French windows and walking into the kitchen. We imagined eating with the doors open in summer and gathering in the front room for Christmases with family. Not our own families, who are quite tricky and grim, but cheerful families who are nice to each other and enjoy a good time. I said I’d cook with our own fruit and plant carrots and cabbage. This house cost a fortune because of where it is. Susie’s father gave us a big chunk of the deposit. Said he’d been saving up. It should have made us suspicious but it didn’t.

As we sat in the car, Susie said that the storeroom next to the attic could be a small study for her, if I didn’t mind. I didn’t even remember it from the viewing. I’d been looking for a comfy television room, enough bedrooms so we didn’t ever have to move, and a nice bit of garden. I wasn’t looking for a study when we first saw it. We both knew she was the one with ambition. I said of course she should have it, and she started to cry because she was so happy. I held her hand across the gear stick, kissed her fingers, and called her sweet names while I thought of Sandra and all the other women; well, all six of them. It didn’t seem like that many. I mean, statistically, it isn’t that many. Compared with most people. I still had the upper hand at that point, I’m sure of it.

After the wedding, after our honeymoon, when we came back and began the task of doing the house up, we were probably still equal.

It’s strange to know a house as well as I know this one, to know its guts and drainage system, to have seen inside each and every wall and under every floor. Everything needed doing: rewiring, replastering, replumbing, central heating, painting, and furnishing. I got the estimates, chose the workmen, and timetabled everything. She liked it that I did that: took control. She chose the colors and furnishings, but she was working hard at the time, so I did everything else.

Maybe the change happened after her mother died. It must change you, becoming an orphan with no parent to chastise or please, no one at the back of your mind to keep you in check.

* * *

I was downstairs just now, listening to the Mirror journalist offering the answering machine untold wealth (Alistair Garvie, from god-almighty London, where barter economies are a thing of the past and they have schools). I went off and made a cup of tea, and it occurred to me that Susie grieved differently for her mother than for her father. She was bewildered by her father’s death, stunned and saddened, but her mum dying made her angry, as if the old woman had committed the ultimate submissive act when she pegged it.

Maybe the change came when Susie inherited all that money. That would make you feel powerful. She must have felt that she didn’t need to be subservient to anyone. Even I felt powerful when she got it and paid off our mortgage. Just knowing that all that cash was sloshing around in the bank with my name attached to it in some tangential way made me feel strong. She got pregnant a month after her mother died, just when the money came through. Three years of trying and she gets pregnant then. She never worried about money until she inherited. We never even talked about money before, but afterward we did. We talked about little else for the duration of her pregnancy.

I still don’t know exactly when our relationship shifted in her favor, but it did, and I didn’t even notice until we were in court and I was drying my damp palms on the knees of my trousers, staring at the back of Susie’s head, wishing with all my might that she’d turn around and smile at me.

The clues were all there: her hassles at Sunnyfields as she struggled to win back lost ground after her maternity leave. I thought she was just going back to herself after giving birth, but actually she was hardening way beyond what she had been before.