Deception aka Sanctum

chapter forty-one

THE DRIVE TO THE VALE OF LEVEN SEEMED TO TAKE HOURS AND hours. They are doing roadwork on the narrowest stretch of road outside Coatbridge, and half a mile of the motorway is reduced to a single-lane obstacle course. Margie started whimpering softly in the back. For three miles I didn’t get above twenty, and each time we came to a break in the divider, I imagined myself pulling a U-ey, turning us around, and heading home. I saw myself at home in the bedroom, throwing clothes into bags, packing Yeni and Margie into the car, and driving us all to Dover. We were having lunch in France, sitting outside on a pavement café somewhere charming and tranquil, when Margie’s shouting from the backseat turned into a full-blast screaming panic attack. I found it hard to care. I turned the radio up for a while, but she was losing her breath. I pulled over and found her diaper was full; she was sitting in cold shit. She had been crying for ten minutes. I almost drove all the way there with her in that state.

Worse than that, I smoked in the car with Margie in the back. That’s probably the real reason she was crying. I opened the window to make myself feel better, but that just streamed the smoke right into her precious little face.

When Yeni was bathing her later she said, “Baby hair smell of smoke,” and I shrugged.

“Susie,” I explained.

Yeni frowned. “Ver’ bad.”

“I know, Yeni, I know.”

I stopped at the village and left Margie in her seat for a minute while I nipped into the shop and bought a bag of toffees like the first time I went there. They didn’t taste as nice, and they didn’t have the same pacifying effect, either. They tasted dull after all the rich sickly gourmet chocolates I’d eaten.

I see Cape Wrath quite differently today. I see Susie getting the call and her heart leaping at Donna’s voice. I see her turning away from me, looking down the hall, and her cheeks turning quite pink, her clit stiffening. Of course I’ll come. I see myself sitting in the kitchen, asking where she’s going, and Susie smirking at me, huneee, won’t be long, huneee. I see her driving, happy at last because she has made her choice, arriving at dusk and sitting in the little wobbling boat across the beautiful kyle, worried by the letter but determined, going to save Donna for herself. I see Brenda Rumney standing in the filthy bothy, immaculate in her white shirt and black skirt, holding the supine Gow’s tongue between little silver tongs, pulling it out as far as it will go and slicing it off slowly. Will that be all, sir? I see Brenda, panting as she walks across the wet sands with the heavy weighted sling, climbing to the foot of a cliff and letting out Donna McGovern, her solid eyes still open, frozen blood all around her mouth. I see her placing the golden ring under her playmate’s body. Later she stands in the dark and sees Susie run back across the wet sands. She sees Susie run into the hotel. Through a small window she watches her order a drink of whiskey, and Brenda smirks at her, huneee. See Susie run. Run, Susie, run.

Susie was a gift for Brenda. She must have thought that modest, lonely Donna was a good cover for her, but what luck to stumble upon Susie, another love-hungry lady, willing to be duped and used, driving for eight hours on the promise of a kiss after being passed over for a prick like Gow.

The sky before me was dull as I approached the flat plain of the prison. The guard on reception asked for my mobile phone, to see my bag, and for me to lift the raincoat Margie was wearing so she could see her legs and tummy. It makes me despair of the world when there are people in it who’d smuggle contraband into prison strapped to their children’s legs.

There were other visitors waiting in the glass-walled room, but I didn’t really notice them. Margie had worn herself out crying in the car and sat quietly on my knee, sucking her fingers, burying her face in my chest when anyone tried to talk to her and no doubt thanking her lucky stars that she was no longer sitting in cold shit while being suffocated by her selfish father.

For the past two days I feel as if I’ve been walking through thick custard, trying to think through cotton wool. All I can see clearly is Susie’s betrayal, Susie tossing aside the empty husk of my dignity. She must despise me.

I saw a laminated photocopy of the official rules on the wall of the waiting room: They can’t ask you to take your clothes off. It turns out they can only ask you to take your coat off, pat you down, and check your mouth and feet. They weren’t being nice when they let me keep my clothes on. They’re not allowed to ask me to do more. I didn’t care, I didn’t care. I don’t care. None of it matters now.

We tripped through the door, across the cold, wet, grassy verge, and through the far door to the visiting room. Margie, perched on my hip, saw Susie sitting nearby and pointed her wet little finger at her. I held her out to her mother, and Susie stood up to take her. She offered me her cheek again, but I pretended not to notice and sat down.

“Well,” said Susie to Margie, with a lightness in her voice I hadn’t expected. “Daddy’s annoyed with me for some reason.” Margie wriggled and squealed until Susie put her down. We both watched her stagger over to the table and grab the plastic ashtray, banging it off the tabletop. “Which is odd, because he’s been having affairs with half of Glasgow, apparently.”

“You saw the paper, then?”

Susie didn’t answer.

A slim prisoner with bleached white hair and a pierced nose walked past and smiled at Margie. “She’s beautiful, Susie,” she muttered and walked on.

Susie waited until she had gone. “Yeah, a helpful screw saved it for me. What have you been doing?”

I looked up at her. “What?”

“I said, Lachlan, ‘What have you been doing?’ ”

Distracted, she turned away from me and waved over at a prisoner with a five-year-old boy standing sulkily next to her. “Hello, Patrick,” she called to the boy. She looked at me again and saw that I was perplexed. “What have you been doing since I last saw you? Have you been swimming, or for tea with the queen?” I shook my head a little. “Tell me all your news, Lachlan. We have to talk about something during these visits. It can’t all be high emotion, you know.”

And there she was. Back in control. Mr. and Mrs. Wilkens’s little Princess Susie. In ten years’ time she would get out and come home and take my life over again. She would make all the decisions and oust me from whatever small encroachments I had made. She’d come home and get her own way every day and in every way, jollying me along into my grave.

I lit a cigarette. “I need to talk to you,” I said quietly.

She gave me a sharp smile and opened her mouth, ready to ridicule me, but her expression dissolved when she saw how serious I was. “What about?”

“I know, Susie,” I said, “I know what you’ve been doing.”

She narrowed her eyes, impatient because I was calling the shots. “And what have I been doing?”

I took a deep breath. “Moving money.” I took a deep draw on my cigarette. “Away from me.”

She was surprised I knew, I could tell that. She picked up Margie as a distraction. She smiled again, trying to act calm, but I could tell she wasn’t. “You should get a job, Lachlan. You’re a fit young man. You can’t sit about at home living off my dad’s money forever. There won’t be anything left for Margie if you do.”

This made me really angry. “I gave up my job to… Someone has to bring up Margie, and you obviously weren’t going to do it.”

“We had to let Saskia go because you gave up your job without even asking me-”

“No, Susan, we didn’t do anything. You let Saskia go. I didn’t want her to go. I gave up my career so that Margie could be cared for by her own family.”

She gave me a sidelong smirk. “Career?” she said. “Exactly which dazzling career is that, Lachlan? Your medical career? Your brilliant career as an insurance salesman? Or is it your literary career? Are you still waiting for your big idea? How long has it been? A year and a half full-time and twenty-seven part-time?”

She had raised her voice. Other people in the visiting room were aware of us and spoke quietly, looking everywhere but in our direction. The guard who makes the women stand in tidy lines by the door was watching us from the other side of the room, waiting for trouble to erupt.

I took out a packet of cigarettes from my pocket and looked up at her. “A gift,” I said, putting them on the table, standing them on end.

She didn’t want to take them, but she wasn’t in a position to knock the kindness. She snatched them away, afraid I’d change my mind. She took one out and lit it cautiously.

I could have said to her: You know, Susie, I might have fucked up my career, but at least I’m going home tonight. I’m a good dad. No lesbiotic con artist got me to hand over my life. I could have told her that I do have things to say, I will write something one day, you’ll see. I could have said at least I stayed faithful to you, and you were off fucking a woman whose name you didn’t even know. She made you love her, and let you watch as she chose Gow over you. I could have said she tricked you, you stupid cow. You ridiculous, bourgeois faux-sophisticate. You daft faithless fucking whoring bitch. You’ve laughed at me for the last fucking time, you witless, cheap cunt.

Instead I cleared my throat. “I’ve saved all the documentation about the money, so don’t even try to lie about it. I want a divorce, Susie. Trisha can bring Margie to visit you in the future, because I’m not coming back here.”

I stood up and looked down at her, shrinking into her chair, shriveling smaller and smaller until she was a sobbing, wet-faced speck in her ripped yellow nylon chair. I picked Margie up by the waist and left her mother crying in the stinking visiting room.

I’m not going back there. I’m never going back there.