Denise Mina - Deception aka Sanctum

The next morning, the first day of our new lives together, she got up early and came up here to work on some unspecified thing. When she came down for lunch, her eyes were very red and her hair stank of smoke. I don’t think we’ve had an honest conversation since.

I remember when they were going to release Gow, I commented that the news programs were using nicer photos of him now, and she sat up and asked me if I thought he was attractive.

It’s the betrayal of trust that smarts the most, makes me feel stupid and gormless. I trusted Susie so much. I was naked before her, and she was wearing an invisible trench coat. I wonder if she told Gow about me, how I called to her every night as she came through the door, asking how her day was, honey. That irritated her, I know it did, but I kept doing it because it made me laugh. I wonder if she was seeing him when I gave her that antique watch for her birthday. She didn’t like it very much and only wore it to please me. I can imagine them together: “He gave it to me. I feel so bad. I don’t know whether to wear it or not.”

I wonder if she told him about the time I couldn’t get it up; whether they had a laugh about it. But that wouldn’t be her style at all. “I feel so bad even discussing this with someone else,” she’d say. “He’d be so hurt. I feel awful.” She’d be a better person twice: once for tolerating my private failings and again for being kind about it.

My world has shifted sideways suddenly and I find that I’m not even a central character. I’ve never felt less in my life. The evolutionary biologists must be wrong: if we’re not designed for monogamy, why is infidelity so excruciatingly painful? Shouldn’t I just shrug and move on?

It’s so long since I smoked that the man in the shop said they didn’t make Piccadilly anymore, much less packs of ten. I fucking need a smoke. Over and above Tucker’s revelations last night and my getting two and a half hours’ sleep:

1. Margie and I were rushed on the way to nursery this morning.

2. We have a most unwelcome guest.

Unannounced and uninvited, Susie’s Aunt Trisha has come to stay with us. I need a bit of time to take in what Tucker said, instead of which I can hardly find a quiet corner of the house to be alone in. She actually knocked on the door while I was having a long leisurely shit this evening. We have three fucking bathrooms in this house and she was standing outside the one I was in, clutching a vanity case. She couldn’t find those other bathrooms, she said. It was not without a frisson of compensatory pleasure that I stood on the landing, holding my limp newspaper, and watched her lock herself in with the rank stench of my lower intestines.

This morning Margie and I were walking slowly through the park. I was busy mulling over what Tucker had said last night, trying to think of alternative explanations for Susie and Gow’s long chats but drawing a blank. It had been raining and the leaves and grass glistened bright and white, trembling in the searing breeze. Margie was hitting the ground with a twig she had found and making talky noises, intonation without vocabulary, which I love because I can hear what her little voice will be like when she does start talking properly. We walked on past the trash bins, following the path we always take, when a man with a big camera leaped out at us from behind a shed door and took our picture. I grabbed Margie and shouted at him, stupid things like how dare he, stop it at once, and what a rotten thing to do. I forgot to swear or act hard at all. The photographer didn’t even reply to me, just walked away looking at his camera. It was as if I wasn’t talking to him at all, as if I wasn’t a person. My shouting upset Margie more than he had.

She was crying when we got to nursery, but the mums at the door couldn’t have been nicer.

A little blonde who has a son called Harry kept smiling at me. “How awful,” she said, through a big grin. “That’s awful.” She kept standing on her tiptoes. I think she was quite excited by it.

I called Fitzgerald the moment I got back. His office has been phoning the papers all day, issuing lawyerly threats. He assures me that none of the national papers will use Margie’s picture. It brought it home to me for the first time how much of a burden this is going to be to Margie. She’ll always be The-Girl-Whose-Mum. It’ll never leave her. I mentioned the notes I’d made to Fitzgerald- about the search of the bothy- but he didn’t seem very excited. He didn’t leap to his feet, pull his coat on, shout “I’ll be right over,” and slam the phone down. He sort of sighed, burring his lips. Maybe I could make a list of all these points and drop it at the office, he said. He’d have a look at it. It’s pretty annoying. He was the one who asked me to have a look through the papers. I’m spending hours doing this for him.

Afterward I made a cup of tea and was sitting in the garden, thinking about raking and bonfires, when the front doorbell rang. I peered around the curtain in the front room and almost passed out with dismay. It was Trisha. Bad enough in itself, but she had a big suitcase with her.

The mums were lovely back at nursery. I think they’d phoned each other during the day because they all knew about the photographer. A tiny fat mother, with a hat jammed so low on her head that she had to tip her head back to talk to anyone above five feet tall, said she’d had a lot of trouble with the press during her husband’s bankruptcy but it all blows over. They’ll forget you soon enough, she said cheerfully.

As she left with her eight-month-old baby, I noticed a drip of vitrified baby puke on the back of her black coat. I asked McLaughlin about her. Her husband was a corrupt councillor who had an affair with a lady pilot. She, the hatted-vomit-woman, walked away with everything plus a new boyfriend in the lawyer who had represented her. It was all in the paper, apparently. I don’t remember any of it.

Harry’s little blond mum was there again this afternoon. She seemed to have been waiting about until I came in, and made sure she caught my attention by sticking her chest out as she put her coat on. Harry is a sad-eyed child, the eldest of three, who knows his time in the maternal spotlight is over but has not the words to say it. Even smiling, he looks as if he wants to cry. When he waves good-bye, he twists his little hand from the wrist, slowly, as if he’s being taken off to be killed and wants us to remember him.

Margie doesn’t know Trisha or she wouldn’t have been so friendly to her. She sat on the old shit’s knee and tried to pull her cheeks off. Trisha gave her a bath and put her to bed without a story.

“I am the child’s great-aunt and Susan Louise has no one else,” she explained later when I asked her why she was here. “As the only surviving member of her family, I should be here.”

“If you’re so keen to lend her support, why didn’t you turn up at court during the trial?” I said, knowing full well she couldn’t have stood the humiliation. Susie would have recognized her and waved, and Trisha couldn’t cope with being publicly associated with an accused person. “Maybe she could have done with a bit more support then, did you think about that?”

“I had commitments”- Trisha was scratching the back of her hand slowly, raising welts on the thin dry skin-“that I simply couldn’t walk away from. I came as soon as I could.”

“Does Susie know you’re here?”

She looked straight at me. “She asked me to come and visit Margery.”

She then deflected attention from herself by demanding a cup of tea, a bath, the use of the guest bedroom (too small), and by quizzing Yeni as to where she’s from. Yeni didn’t really understand, but she was uncomfortable at the accusatory tone, I could see that.