Deception aka Sanctum

chapter thirty-two

YENI’S BEEN OUT FOR MILK AND BROUGHT THE PAPER BACK WITH her. We sat at the table and looked at it together. They used that horrible picture of me leaving the court on the day Susie was found guilty, the one where I look like Paul Weller’s Fat Elvis years. Blinded by the low winter sun coming in through the French windows, I thought I caught Yeni looking at me strangely. I asked her if she believed all that stuff about me.

She said, “What is it?”

I couldn’t be bothered elaborating. I said, well, you’ve been in this house for a year now, you know what goes on in here. She said yes, don’t be angry, and, smiling, she stood up, leaned over, and kissed my eyelids. I pulled her onto my knee and thanked her. I said that I was so grateful for her support, I’d buy a truck made of marzipan for her. Happily such items are not readily available around here and she agreed to settle for a pizza later instead.

When the sun hits her brushed-cotton skin and she looks happy, I could wrap her up in my new Armani coat and run her to the airport and whip all three of us off to Greece or somewhere, to a place where fucking a dusky young beauty while your wife languishes in prison isn’t regarded as an appalling thing to do. France maybe.

I asked her to take Margie to nursery tomorrow, and she actually said no to me.

“Jyou ca

She’s right, of course, but I do want to hide. I said I’d get her a nice surprise if she did, and she agreed reluctantly, but said it would be better for me to go. She’s very adult about everything.

I find the way she moves enchanting. It’s like a dance. If she reaches for a thing, she sweeps her arm quickly and then catches herself, as though she needs to consciously conjure up memories of failure and caution. She raises her arm too high, halts it and slows, letting it alight on the object, then brings it back slowly. I love the confidence in that sweep, the lunge, the reaching for my cock because she wants to. I don’t know if I envy her age and underlying belief that nothing can go wrong, or if I just like her. If it’s her age and naïveté, then I’m a nasty old man. If it’s her I like, then I have a crush on her, which isn’t such a bad thing. Having a crush on someone could be my mind’s way of tricking me into feeling something positive, a psychic trick to restart the endorphins after all the misery and insomnia.

I know that ru

Yeni and Margie were fast asleep in the house, and I was trying hard not to come up here and spend the tail hours of the evening speculating about everything, typing up five-odd pages that end on a self-pitying note, and then slink off to bed for a crappy sleep. I told myself I was going out for a smoking session in the car, but really I knew it was nothing of the kind. I’m smoking properly again, getting through about ten a day, and I can feel my heart rate rising every time I inhale, my bronchioles getting itchy and irritated, my lung capacity diminishing. It feels good.

Driving through the town at midnight, through the parallel universe that is pub closing time. All the newsagents had cloyingly alliterative posters, tattered and smudged from a day of windy rain: SEXY DR. SUSIE’S SWINGING SECRETS. I fret about smoking ten cigarettes a day and being slightly overweight at twenty-nine; the town was full of drunk, fat, laughing people smoking casually as they walked down the streets, stopping at late-night shops to buy fatsnax and yet more cigarettes. Half of them didn’t even have enough clothes on for the weather. The young women especially, walking along with their tits hanging out and skirts up their arses. Susie said they are dressing to impress one another, but I don’t think any heterosexual man would ever believe that. I’m not going to let Margie out until she’s twenty-five. She can wear what she likes, but she’s staying home with me.

The colors at night are yellow and blue and gray. Uplit faces are slow, drunk. People move gracelessly, laugh loudly, fall languorously. Hot chips spill onto litter-strewn streets, crying women hail cabs, and angry men go after them (Angela, you stupid bitch, Angela, fucking come back here). The red eyes of the car in front leave crusty, bloody trails in the yellow dark.

I cruised through the town, not going anywhere really, not consciously, until I found myself far out on the south side, on the council estate. It’s built on the edge of a deep wood, with ugly concrete cottages from the fifties lining broad streets and a badly broken-up road surface. I had to snake along, veering back and forth across the road to miss axle-shattering chasms. I only saw two or three other cars there.

Beyond low brick walls were bare little gardens, overlooked by bright windows with curtains. They had ornaments arranged on the sill: a china cat, a nasty vase with dusty plastic flowers jagging out of it, a ceramic flower basket. None of the front gardens had anything growing in them. Stevie Ray’s house had two small windows knocked into a much bigger one, but the surround wasn’t finished on it and the white PVC frame sat inside chipped and crumbling brick. A pile of bricks and loose rubble sat in the middle of the front garden. The lights were off.

I drove past Stevie’s house three, maybe four times before I pulled over just beyond it and stopped. I was so angry by this point I could have kicked his door in. I wanted to ask him how he could live with himself, did he think I was a wanker? Well, did he? I sat in the car, taking deep breaths so I wouldn’t be too angry, smoking a cigarette, which made me angry again.

I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Stevie Ray coming along the road toward me, back from a night in the pub. Next to him was a small blond woman, and I thought he’d got lucky. They were walking so close, smiling but chatting very little, it was a touching scene. I’d calmed down by this point and knew I’d have to work myself up into having a fight again, so I slid down in the seat, and as I watched, I realized that the woman looked familiar.

They turned into the garden. For a moment I worried that they’d notice my car. They could have, but at that moment the woman said something, flicking her finger toward the crap piled up in the front garden. The gesture was disapproving, but she dropped her shoulders in despair at the same time, as though she’d pointed it out a hundred times. Stevie didn’t say anything, but his back tensed guiltily. From that one gesture and response, I knew immediately that they were living together and had been for a long, long time.

Then Lara Orr took out her keys and opened Stevie Ray’s front door.

I was stubbing out my fifth cigarette, about to get out and knock on his door, when a rap at the window made me jump, the seatbelt yanking me back and hurting my shoulder. Stevie Ray was at my window, looking wary but curious. He was breathing frost, wearing stripy pajamas under a heavy woolen dressing gown and outdoor shoes on bare feet. I pressed the electronic button and Stevie reeled back as the window started and lowered. He’d been expecting me to punch him.

“Listen,” he said, talking fast and hanging on to the wall behind him with both hands, “I’m sorry, but a guy’s got to make a living. You’ve got everything- you wouldn’t understand. You’re clever and good-looking and you’re a doctor. You’ve got a healthy daughter-”