Deception aka Sanctum

chapter thirty-seven

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON WHEN I GOT BACK FROM LEICESTER. I sent Yeni over to the deli to buy us a late lunch, and she spent the entire twenty-quid note I had given her. She came back with twenty-three pence change and a bag of perishable groceries that needed to be eaten more or less right this very minute: dolmas and taramosalata, which she claimed came from Spain.

“No, Yeni,” I said. “That’s from Greece.”

“Sí,” she said nodding. “In Spain. Is very good.”

She had also bought a half-bottle of wine, a packet of Nabisco Grahams for four pounds fifty (!), some fresh smoked haddock soup, a very heavy loaf of brown bread, and two slices of chocolate tart.

We heated up the soup in the microwave, and she broke crackers into it and served it with bread and taramosalata. It’s the most expensive bowl of soup I’ve ever had, but it was nice. Not a tenner nice, but still nice. She poured us both a glass of wine, and we sat down opposite each other at the kitchen table and ate. It all felt very civilized. We didn’t talk. Her English is so bad that we’ve kind of given up. I think she must have a tin ear for language. She should be fluent by now, given the amount of television she watches.

The tarts had broken in the bag, so she put the bits on a communal plate in the center of the table. It was lovely bitter chocolate, smooth and rich and yet not filling. As we each broke off sweet nibbles, our fingertips touched, and then our hands. Yeni held on to my fingers and tugged at me, smirking languidly, trying to pull me across the table to her. I was angry and sickened by Susie. I like Yeni, I don’t want to use her to spite Susie; I really do like her, so I resisted, but then she stood up and came around the table, sitting next to me in a chair and bringing her soft big mouth to my tingling ear.

“ Lachlan,” she said, brushing the lobe with her lips. I heard the warm saliva slack under her tongue as she whispered to me, “Baby asleep. You come with me?”

She didn’t give me a chance to answer. She slid a hand between my legs, easing her fingers down my inner thigh and pulling me toward her. I was still a bit reticent, but when I looked at her, her lips stained with the wine and smelling of haddock, I knew it wasn’t about Susie.

I grinned at her. “Yeni,” I said, “you’re very bad.”

She smiled back. “ Lachlan, I’m want you to fuck with me.”

It’s the closest thing to a grammatically correct sentence I’ve ever heard from her, so I had to.

We were lying in bed afterward, watching the circus clock on her sideboard creep toward five, knowing that Margie would wake up soon. Yeni was snuggled into the pit of my arm when I asked her what she wants from this. She shook her head and shrugged, but I made her sit up.

“Come on, Yeni,” I said, trying to be kind. “You’re a bright girl. This has happened twice now. Are you hoping for a relationship?”

She looked a bit insulted. I had expected her to say yes and then I’d have mollycoddled her a little, softened the blow, but let her know that it wasn’t really on, because I was married. She pulled the duvet around herself, suddenly ashamed of her fantastic tits. As she flattened the bedspread over her chest, the generous fat on her upper arms splayed unattractively. She lost her beauty in the act of hiding, like Eve discovering shame.

“I know you understand English better than you speak it,” I said.

She sighed and chewed her lip. “I like,” she said, after a few faltering starts at the statement, “that we cannot speak.”

“You like that?”

“Sí.”

When she saw how much I brightened, she grinned back at me and put up a hand, covering my face, and pushed me back on the pillow. She let go of the duvet and slid down the bed. She had never had any intention of learning English. She’s the eldest in the family of five. She came to Glasgow for a rest.

As we lay next to each other, our heads dovetailed on the pillow, I think I fell a little bit in love with her. I felt I had descended to somewhere warm, like a presleep drop in blood pressure that shocks you awake. I might be wrong, but I felt that I could write if I stayed with her. I would not spill my seed in conversation and existence; I’d save it all for the page.

Through the open door at the end of the bed, we heard the ching-ching of Margie’s crib clown, and we grinned in unison up at the ceiling. Any second now she’d start screaming.

“Yeni, if I went to France, would you come with me?”

She looked wary. “No south?”

“No, not anywhere near Spain. Perhaps not even France, perhaps Greece?”

“Sí,” she said simply, “I like. We can hchave satellite?”

“Satellite TV?”

“Sí.”

“In Greece?”

“Sí. For Friends.”

“Yeah.” I took her small, cool hand, touching the sensitive tip of each of her tapered fingers. “We could just about afford that.”

Yeni was in her dressing gown, chasing Margie back and forth in front of the telly, when I left them and came up here. I’ve been taking shots of Margie with the instant camera so that I can enclose them with the daily letters to Susie. When I think about Donna and the money and how sneaky and rude it is for her to move it, I wonder why the fuck I’m bothering.

This evening Yeni said to me, “Jyou very serious.”

I shrugged, and she waited for me to explain. Eventually she walked out of the room and came back with her coat on. She said she was going to see her friends from the English class. I nodded and gave her a hundred quid and said have a nice time. She tried to give me the money back, but I insisted.

“For baby-sitting.” I pressed the money into her hand. “For baby-sitting for a whole night. Take it. You have a good time, honey.”

She brushed my cheek with the back of her hand and made a precious little “o” with her mouth when I called her that. She didn’t cringe or grimace or get pissed off. I heard the front door slam behind her. I hope she genuinely doesn’t want to talk and didn’t just say that so that I would like her more. I hope she never wants to talk.

Susie is a cunt. She’s a duplicitous, faithless, disloyal cunt, and she’ll leave me broken if I don’t do something soon. If this ever gets out, I will be the world’s biggest, most widely recognized, dickless idiot. She’s been laughing at me from the very beginning, from before Otago Street.

The gloves are off, as far as I’m concerned.