Deception aka Sanctum

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 go

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.