Deception aka Sanctum

I said I’d heard that a lot of women wrote to Gow in prison.

Stevie nodded. “Yeah,” he said, licking his fingertips lasciviously. “ Lot of women sent in nude pics of themselves. A lot of them were done in, baggy tits and faces like buckets, but Andy used to say this about them: he’d say, ‘It’s just a hole, isn’t it?’ ”

It’s just a hole. I didn’t know what to say. I nodded in shock and offered to get him another éclair. He said no but he’d take a strawberry tart instead. He ate it with gusto, getting jam on the corner of his lips. I couldn’t stop looking at the wreckage of his mouth and chin and thinking menses/cum, cum/menses.

I asked about Susie again, and he paused.

“I’ll tell you what he told me. Right?”

I nodded.

“This isn’t me saying this, he told me this, right?”

I knew it had to be pretty bad, but when I heard what he had to say, I wanted to laugh. It got more and more difficult not to laugh as the conversation wore on. I knew then that she had never touched him, that she might have been in love with him, but my wife, my darling Susie, never ever had sex with Andrew Gow.

Gow told Stevie that Susie sucked him off in the office once. It was when she first came to Su

It was rubbish, a series of schoolboy lies about a woman Gow’d never even touched, and I knew it. Gow saying that Susie had sucked him off once was probably intended to make it believable, but if she’d done it once, he’d have said she did it six times. And she’d never do it in the office. She might have sucked off a stranger, maybe even a dangerous stranger, but she wouldn’t have done it in her office in ’94. She was far too ambitious. Then Stevie handed me the big prize.

He said that Susie’d taken it up the arse for Gow because she didn’t want to get pregnant. She knew about these things, being a doctor. I almost clapped my hands with glee. Susie wouldn’t have worried about getting pregnant because she would have used a condom, she wasn’t into anal, and she’d never have anal sex with a man who was arrested cruising a red-light district. The HIV risk factors in that scenario are worse than throwing yourself into the stick bin at a needle exchange. Stevie was in full flow now. It was as if he was so pleased I hadn’t punched him that he couldn’t stop himself. I sat back and let him pad the story out, where they did it and how often, once in this closet, once in that room. Susie asked Gow to take off her “panties,” another jazz-mag term. I actually got bored listening to him. I got some money out and held up the bill for the waitress, and the reader’s-letter recitation tailed off.

“Is that all you want to know, then?” he asked.

I said yeah, thanks for coming, hope you enjoyed the pastries. He did, he did, did I have my car with me? He wanted a lift. I said yeah, but I was in a hurry, sorry. Did he see a lot of Gow and Do

I said I wanted to ask him one more thing: Where was Lara Orr, and how could I get hold of her? He wiped his face as if he’d just realized he was covered in food.

“I’ve not seen her for ages,” he said. “No one has. She’s probably gone back to Liverpool.”

Never mind, I said, and, once we were outside, thanks for coming to see me. Stevie flattened his hand over his bald head again, looked as if he was about to ask for money, but stopped. He nodded to himself and walked away, pulling his collar up, even though it wasn’t windy anymore and it wasn’t raining.

I felt great as I drove back to nursery. Susie hadn’t slept with Gow. She might have been madly in love with him, the twisted little prick may even have been the love of her life, but they didn’t have sex in prison, I was certain of it. And she’d been sacked before his appeal and was at home the whole time after he got out, so it didn’t happen then.

I’m going to visit Susie in a few days and I’m actually quite excited. I’m going to ask about the hotel letter and about Gow. I hope she appreciates the trouble I’m going to. I’ve spent hours up here working on this.

But I was going to write about nursery. I had taken Margie there this morning with a light heart and slight tingle in my loins. I wondered if Harry’s mum would be there, and, sure enough, she was wearing a gravitationally impossible low-cut top. I think it was actually a low back and she’d put it on the wrong way around by mistake. She must have gotten dressed in the dark. It is dark until about eight-thirty, give or take, and she has got three boys to get dressed and fed. The straps of her white bra were showing, and she kept having to yank the top down, showing the tops of the cups.

She didn’t come over but gave me the eye, which I liked because she’d been so full on before, and not coming over suggested a little reticence. I went over and said something inoffensive like, “Hi, how are you today?” She laughed loudly, covering her mouth and pulling her top down at the hem.

What was she laughing at? Was she laughing at me? She seemed quite nervous, so I tried to diffuse the situation by saying, “Calm down,” and she laughed again and said she didn’t know what I meant. I just backed away and left, waving good-bye to Margie on the way out. She was rubbing the blackboard with a dolly’s legs and ignored me.

I felt ridiculous when I got outside. What was the woman laughing about? Have I managed, in among all my other failures, to be bad at flirting, too? Maybe she was just nervous? She seems desperate. There’s something of the bu

If Susie doesn’t get out or for some other reason our marriage splits up, I’ll be back on the dating scene. I don’t know if I could stand all that guessing what people mean and getting knocked back and putting your emotional equilibrium in the hands of another person. In marriage at least there’s an understanding that you can’t just get dumped out of hand, that they definitely did like you once. It might have been long, long ago in a galaxy far away, but they definitely found you attractive and interesting at some point in the interaction.

I’m sure not all women are like Harry’s mum; it must just be some of them. But what if all the ones who aren’t like that are still married and only the ones like Harry’s mum are back out on the range? What a depressing thought. I think I’d rather stay single than try to negotiate all that crap again. I don’t want an intense face-to-face relationship. I want someone I can take for granted; someone I can not reply to when they call me from the other room. The older I get, the less often I meet new people that I can stand the sight of.

Anyway, after my encounter with Stevie Ray and his jazz-mag visage, I drove back to nursery to get Margie. One of the babies had been sick, and the heat was turned up high, so the whole room stank to high heaven of hot sour milk. Harry’s mum was there again, hanging about near the toy cupboard, wearing a different T-shirt. She came toward me through the sour fog. As she approached, I could see her getting angry, and she said, “Don’t look at me like that.” I explained that I was wrinkling my nose at the milk smell, not at her, but she stayed a