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?)
Trisha asked what all the pictures on the walls were. What were the photos stuck to the skylight for? You’ll make the room dark, you’ll strain your eyes. I lied and said I only came up here at night anyway, and what was she doing up? Go and have a cup of tea if you can’t sleep. Fuck off downstairs, in other words.
She got embarrassed and looked at the floor, tottering on the step, staying far enough away from me to remain decent. “I do worry about you, Lachie,” she said, and for an awful moment I thought she was going to come on to me, rub her ghastly old body on me, touch me. “I’ve never liked you, I’ve made that plain in the past, but I can see that you are a very good father and I greatly appreciate you standing by Susan Louise.”
“Her name’s Susan,” I said, finding, to my surprise, that I was speaking quite loud. “Susan. Or Susie. That’s her name.” It was alarm, I think, at the mental image of Auntie Trisha pole-dancing in a thong and brogues.
“Well, she’ll always be Susan Louise to me,” she said, stepping away and nodding, pleased that she had said what she came to say. “I’ll leave you alone.” She shut the door and threw it open again immediately. “Unless you’d like a cup of tea?”
“No.”
Now I’m bristling with guilt and shame. I feel as if Trisha’s just peered into my brain. What I’m writing is private but it’s not shockingly private. I’m not looking at porno on the Internet or anything, though I might if I knew how. Had I been jerking off when she came in, I’d probably have felt less embarrassed. The bit of the page I was most worried she might see was the bit about Susie maybe having an affair with Gow. Is that what I’m most worried about? Being superfluous?
I feel odd writing now. I need more privacy if I’m to write in here. Susie had a padlock on the outside of the door, but I unscrewed the attachment from the wall because I didn’t have a key. I’ll put a Yale on the door, one that’ll lock automatically when I come in and go out. In the meantime I feel this room is very compromised. I don’t want Trisha coming in here, but I can’t watch her all the time. I’ll leave a bit of paper behind the door so I’ll know if someone’s been in during the day.
There was a line when I got to the prison door. I and the people off the Glasgow bus had to wait outside in the freezing gale, all shivering with sideways hair, stamping to keep warm while they processed the group already in the reception area. In front of me was a gang of three, obviously related, female troglodytes. They were wearing identical purple anoraks with the hoods up and smoking wee rollies, held between gnawed and nailless fingers, sucking the smoke through atavistic, stubby teeth.
Their chiefess looked up at me. “Ye right?”
I nodded and looked away.
“Yur gonnae freeze out there; mon intae the doorway.”
I would have looked like the world’s snootiest asshole if I’d turned down her offer of shelter. I had to squeeze in between the three of them and smile cheerfully while they made a series of almost incomprehensible, largely dirty jokes about me not telling their man about this or us being engaged now. At full height, not one of them reached my nipples.
Eventually our group was called into the reception area, and we had to tell them our names and who we were there to see. I was stumped for an answer when they asked me why I was there. The guard had to prompt me. “To see your wife…?” she suggested.
I had to hand over my mobile phone and sign for it (everyone was very impressed that I had one) and let them check any gifts I had brought in (took ages). Then I had to go and sit in a waiting room behind a glass wall. The heavy door shut behind the last person and locked with a definite “click.” There were gray plastic chairs clamped to the wall and ladies’ and gents’ toilets at one end of the room. The three women sat near me, as if we were there together. Around the room sat sad, damp visitors in ones and twos, some with small children, some barely adult themselves. Antidrug posters adorned the walls, along with bus timetables for Glasgow and Edinburgh and notices advertising support groups for the families of prisoners. A teenage boy with the most tenuous mustache I’ve ever seen kept getting up and going to the toilet. Every time he came out he was smiling sneakily. He was either wanking in there or drawing on the walls.
I allowed myself a bribe toffee. Eventually, twenty minutes before the visit was due to begin, an unsmiling guard came through and stood outside the glass wall. The locked door buzzed open, we were ushered into the corridor, and then a second door, leading into the prison proper, buzzed open. We all walked through, the guard made sure the door was shut behind us, and we followed her to the second waiting room. I had another toffee. I don’t know why they had to keep us there for so long, but it was another gray room with the same haranguing posters. The troglodyte family started laughing at something, hee-hawing through smoker’s phlegm, rocking back and forth in their chairs, elbowing each other. A guard came through the door and flicked a finger at me, motioning me to follow him. He took me into a side room off the main corridor. There was a narrow table, a white curtain, and a burly male guard standing next to a sharps bin, pulling on latex gloves. I stalled at the door.
“Mr. Harriot,” said the first man, “under the Prisoners and Young Offenders’ Institutions Scotland Rules 1994, we are authorized to search you prior to your visit with your wife.”
I looked back at the open door. They were going to search me, strip me and stick a finger up my arse in a room with an open door. I managed a strangled “No,” but it was so small I don’t think they heard it.
“We are authorized to ask you to take your jacket off.”
“My jacket?”
“Yes, sir, your jacket. Please, take it off. Do you have any sharp instruments on you? Any syringes or knives that we should know about?”
The guard took my jacket, stroking it carefully, while the other man patted me everywhere, my underarms, between my legs, the soles of my shoes. His fingers brushed the underside of my balls and made me wince. I know he noticed. He paused momentarily, cringing, I hope, and then looked in my mouth and got me to waggle my tongue around. They looked through the stuff Susie’d asked me to bring. The waiting room was chock full of suspicious and desperate characters. Why search me?
“Because, sir, you are a doctor and we have reason to believe that your wife is suicidal.”
So that was how I found out Susie was on suicide watch. I don’t know if they felt sorry for me or what, but they decided to leave it at that and let me go back to the waiting room.
I’ve just been downstairs to make a cup of tea and found Trisha watching television and drinking cocoa. She’d changed her tune and said, rather accusingly, that she’d have brought up a cup of tea if I’d said I wanted one. I will not be chased around my own house. I said I didn’t want one then, but I do now. I almost resent her insomnia more than I resent her presence. Night is my time to be alone in the house, my time when I don’t need to be self-conscious. I don’t like her creeping about.
We lined up by the prison door and traipsed single file across the ten-foot stretch of windy grass, guarded on either side by prison officers. The door behind us locked before the door in front opened. Inside the door the troglodytes dispersed: they were there to see two different people. The convicted visiting room is disgusting, furnished with knee-high brown tables and spongy yellow chairs with no arms and melted fag burns all over them. Everyone was smoking; it looked like a Philip Morris laboratory. A vending machine selling Coke and crisps in the corner had a thick metal belt around it, strapping it to the wall, presumably to prevent anyone from ripping it off its foundations and throwing it.
I tried to remember who Susie and I were in Otago Street, a lucky pair of scamps, not a man who could be patted on the balls with impunity and his murderess wife. Then I saw Susie across the room. She looked like shit. Her black hair was frizzy at the top and her eyes were swollen from crying. She had lost weight in the week and a half since I last saw her. She was dressed in a shapeless blue sweatshirt and jogging pants that were too short for her. The elastic cuff clung to her calf above the ankle, showing off her white socks and the black slip-ons I’d bought her for court.
She scowled at me and waved grimly. Eager visitors swept past me, and I stood there, not wanting to go to her. I wanted to turn around and run away and keep my Susie safe, but I clutched the final toffee in my pocket, walked over, and bent to kiss her.
She gave me her cheek, which annoyed me. She sniffed the side of my head and asked me why I smelled strange.
“Oh, I, um, flattened my hair,” I said, self-consciously.
“With toffee hair spray?” She looked annoyed. “You didn’t bring Margie, then?”
When I said she told me not to, she got tearful and stared at the table. I said I’d brought the radio and the battery and the other things she asked for, but she didn’t speak then either. I put my arm around her shoulder and told her that we’d get her out of there, that we were doing everything we could for the appeal, that things would be fine, she’d see, things would be okay and not to worry. She started to cry. She just shook and shook. All around us groups of people talked quietly while the women in blue uniforms hugged the kids on their laps. I stroked Susie’s hand and said Fitzgerald wouldn’t let a single thing go. I felt awful for finding her vulnerability so frightening. I used to love it, but then, I suppose she was only ever a little bit vulnerable. Even when she was in labor she just seemed very, very angry, not broken like this.
“Susie, they said you’re suicidal.”
She rubbed her red eyes hard. “Well, I’m not. They use suicide watch proactively sometimes. I’m a high-profile case, and if I killed myself it would cause an uproar. They’re being cautious.”
“What does ‘suicide watch’ mean?”
“You’re put in a special cell and they look in on you every fifteen minutes. The cell has all the corners taken out so you can’t hide.”
She tried to chat. The sentencing reports were coming on well, she said, and should be ready in a couple of weeks’ time, but then she ran out of things to say and sat, miserably still.
I took out a pack of cigarettes, and she fell on them. We smoked together. We haven’t smoked together since we lived in Otago Street. She caught her breath, managed a shaky smile, and thanked me. She told me to leave the pack for her. I said it had been my full intention to pursue that course of action from the outset, and that made her smile. I asked her what she was reading, whether she wanted me to send in some books. She drew on her cigarette, inhaling heavily, and said she couldn’t read, couldn’t concentrate. The atmosphere was nicer between us then. She took my hand, gave it a little squeeze, and we smoked in silence for a while. I thought suddenly of her with Gow, and I felt myself dying inside, atrophying through moral compromise, like a Nazi general’s fat wife. I wanted to whip my hand away and tell her I knew what she’d been doing with Gow in her office, dirty bitch, that Harvey Tucker had told me. I had to breathe in deeply, over and over again.
After a while I started talking quietly, and just to have something to say, I told her not to worry. I was going through all the papers at home and would find any tiny detail we could use for an appeal.
She sat up stiffly and looked at me. “What papers? What are you talking about?”
“The stuff in the study,” I said. “Around the computer and on the disks.”
“But that’s my stuff. Those papers aren’t about this, they’ve got nothing to do with this.” She was speaking very quietly, angrily, spitting words at me, and then she stopped and looked suspicious. “How did you get into my study? I put a lock on the door.”
I reached over for her hand but she whipped it away from me.
“Come on, Susie, it was just a teenie wee padlock. I wanted to use the computer.”
“You ripped the padlock off my fucking office door?”
“It was only a small one,” I said, chasing her hand around her lap.
“You took the lock off…?” She stopped still again. “How… You’ve been using my computer? How can you use my computer? How can you know the password?”
I said, come on, Margie H wasn’t exactly hard to guess, the joint account code is Margie’s birthday, our movie channel request code is margiel, every secret code we have is Margie.
But Susie wouldn’t allow me to make light of it. She had turned a strange lemony shade. “Just leave it alone,” she said. “There are confidential files in there. They’re nothing to do with any of this.”
I thought she was talking about the Gow files from Sunnyfields, and I dropped my voice and said, “Look, don’t worry about Gow’s prison files, I’ve already found them. I’ll burn them when I’m finished.”
Susie slapped my hand away and shut her eyes, taking deep breaths, trying not to lose it. If we had been at home, she’d have left the room to cool down, but we were in an open-plan visiting room surrounded by nosy bastards with nothing better to do than listen in. “Forget the study,” she said through gritted teeth. “Just stay out of there.”
“Susie,” I said softly, “come on…”
She stood up, pocketed the pack of cigarettes, turned on her heels, and left. A guard opened the back door to let her through and glanced at me, curious and faintly accusing. I’d driven forty reluctant fucking miles to be blown off for trying to help.
I pulled over onto the hard shoulder on the way home, pretending to the passing drivers that I was afraid to go on in the high winds. I put my elbow up to the window and hid my face with my hand. It was the search, and fighting with Susie, and the strain of not asking her about Gow. She was in love with him, I know that now. I don’t think she hates me, but I can see in her eyes that I’m irrelevant. I knew it when we sat and smoked together. She was thinking about him, wishing I were him.
I was glad Margie hadn’t been with me. I don’t want her left alone with a prison guard while someone pokes her dad in the balls. I went for a walk around Kelvingrove Park so that I didn’t have to go home early. I sat on a bench and watched people walking their dogs. It was cold, I could see my breath, and I remembered the Christmastime when we were expecting Margie, how hopeful everything seemed and how pretty the frosted grass was in the garden, like a moat of jagged glass all around the house.
The journalists were gone from the back lane when I got back. I still feel that they’re watching me. Trisha was watching television with Margie in the front room. She asked me how the visit went. I shrugged. She didn’t tell me off or make any statements about what had happened, which I was grateful for. Yeni was hiding in the kitchen, looking uncomfortable. I think Trisha has been hounding her all day. It’s obvious that Yeni doesn’t like Trisha at all, and I feel I can trust her because of it.
I was suddenly struck by the terrifying thought that Yeni might leave and I’d have to find another au pair and explain the situation to her and the agency and her parents. No one in their right mind would let their teenage daughter come to the house of a lone man whose wife’s a murderer. I realized that I must be much nicer to Yeni, so I asked her if she’d like pizza for dinner and ordered it in for us all to share. I got a big one with artichoke and olives because that’s what she likes. I know she appreciated it because she went out to the deli later and bought me a bar of marzipan (“Fur jyou, Lachie”) and left it in the fridge.
I wonder about Susie. I wonder how I could live with her and know her so little. I keep looking at the picture of us in Corfu and realizing that we’ve hardly seen each other since Margie was born. I thought that was normal when couples have a baby. I thought you had to take each other for granted and concentrate on the child. I was looking forward to it, actually. It’s a normal part of the rhythm of life. It doesn’t mean one of you can go off and fall in love with a psychopathic convict.