Deception aka Sanctum

chapter seven

I CAN’T BRING MYSELF TO REPLY TO SUSIE’S LETTER. I COULDN’T say all the bland things she wants me to say: things are fine, I am well, much love, well done, get well soon.

What the fuck was she doing in Cape Wrath? I wonder about the details that don’t fit. If she did go up there to save Do

She was slightly nervous when Gow was released, I remember that, but she’d been sacked only two months or so previously, and I thought his appeal was a reminder.

She went straight into the kitchen the night she was sacked; she didn’t come into the front room with me and Margie. She didn’t even reply when I called her. I found her at the table, drinking our second-best brandy and smoking a cigarette indoors. I knew something big had happened.

I was pleased when Susie told me she’d been sacked. Finally, I thought, we’ll get to spend days and days together. I can show her what I do all day, introduce her to my small enjoyments; she’ll slow down. We’d be all right for money; we could live on the interest and I could work again if we ran short. Let’s travel together, I said. Let’s get another na

“There are things”- Susie squeezed my fingers together, pressing the knuckles so tight it hurt-“things you don’t know about, Lachie.” Her eyes overflowed and she climbed onto my knee, pressing her face into my neck to hide the tears. I held her, felt her rib cage deflate, stroked her bony little back as she struggled to breathe in. I held her until she caught her breath again and she called me her Lachie. I remember that strong, possessive feeling, that she was my girl, that no one could give her this sort of comfort but me. At the time, I thought to myself, I’m not a completely useless bastard after all.

She had told me that, despite all the public pressure, Gow would never get out because her risk assessment of him was so bad. She was shaken when they sacked her, because she knew they’d get her replacement to do another RA. Gow’s lawyer could easily argue that her report was biased because she’d been accused of stealing his files. But she wasn’t scared when Gow did get out. She didn’t introduce any new security measures to the house and said, “Nah,” when I asked whether we should get rid of the decoy box and buy an actual alarm. Did she think he’d hurt Do

I think she was more afraid when Do

I mustn’t give in to this insistent self-pity. Yesterday evening was the zenith. After tea I went into an apoplexy of miserable self-loathing: I ate a whole box of Celebrations in front of the television and almost choked on the irony. Yeni had put Margie to bed by the time I finished the chocolates, and I suddenly felt that I was missing her growing up. I went upstairs and stood by her bedroom door, looking in at her sleeping. I stood there, wishing I was less ineffectual, until I realized that nothing could be more ineffectual than standing about in dim halls, wishing I was otherwise. If I were a friend of mine, I’d give me a slap.

At the start of all this, when Susie was first arrested, I promised myself that I’d be a good man. I promised I’d put my own feelings aside and attend to those of my family, but time and time again I find it’s beyond me. The whole thing has been so emasculating: having the mother of my child taken from me, then sitting in the court like a spare prick, listening to the prosecution suggest that she was in love with Gow. It makes me so angry. I have an urge to go about smashing people in the face just to prove I’m still here, still making my stamp on the world, still a man.

I phoned Susie’s colleague Harvey Tucker again, but he wasn’t in. I need to talk to him. Tucker didn’t pick up this time, but he must have the message by now. He obviously doesn’t want to talk to me. I left a message saying I wasn’t angry or anything. Just wanted to ask him a couple of things to set my mind at rest. He still hasn’t called back. Maybe I could use Gow’s prison files as an inducement to Tucker to get in touch; I could promise him a swap.

The disk that’s with the prison files has a list of people who had contacted Gow in the past two years, like Stevie Ray and Do

I’ve got to hang on to Susie, my own Susie. The images from her arrest and the court are so overpowering that I have to strain to remember her from before, when we were just two private people, before we became a byword for privileged suburban professionals lusting after a bit of rough.

I’ve been looking at photos all day, thinking about when we met. I was the only guy in our crowd in med school who married another doctor. All my pals, Rosso and Bangor and Morris, they all said it was a bad move, marrying someone like Susie. They didn’t mention Susie, of course; they just said someone who wasn’t a nurse.

Susie Wilkens was in the year above us, and her grades were legendary. She was determined to do psychiatry from the begi

I’ve brought up some photos from our student days to stick on the walls here, to remind me of my Susie. I should put them into an album and leave it around the house so that Margie can see her mummy in normal situations.

Three of the pictures seem especially significant to me:

Photo One

Susie in our crowd from the student union. She is small, five feet four in heels. Her dark, thick hair is long and pulled over one shoulder.

It was one night among many in the beer bar, special only because I’d bought a disposable camera to take pictures of my room in the medical residence to send Mum and Dad so they could see where I was living and agree to the high rent. The rent wasn’t high at all, but they’d been in Spain for a year and were used to nothing costing more than a te

There is a lot of movement in the picture. Everyone is mugging furiously, shoving each other around and drinking pints of lager, the amber and froth sloshing up the sides of the glasses. Susie is in the middle of it all. She’s making a silly face, sticking out her tongue slightly and crossing her eyes, as if making ugly faces is something she finds terribly hard. She is holding a bag of crisps: cheesy puff balls.

Photo Two

Susie and I in the sunshine, outside a church. It was a student wedding; one of the guys from the union got married suddenly because his girlfriend was pregnant. The marriage was over before we graduated.

Neither Susie nor I could afford good clothes at the time of this picture. She is dressed with studied abandon in a shocking-pink pencil skirt and black di