Susie’s written notes about Gow and Donna on some of the newspaper articles, single words mostly, like “grandiose,” “vicarious fame,” and “stupid”- that word recurs a lot on Donna’s clippings. Sometimes, especially from around the time of Gow and Donna’s wedding, she has articles from different newspapers on the same day. Where was she getting all these papers? I don’t remember the News of the Screws being delivered here, and she certainly didn’t get them at her work. She must have bought them in secret, on the way to work or at the shops, and cut the stories out so that she could keep them. They date back for almost a year. This has been going on for fucking ages without my knowing a thing about it.
I phoned Susie’s colleague Harvey Tucker again and a man answered. He hesitated, then said Harvey wasn’t in. I’ve never spoken to Harvey on the phone before, but it definitely sounded like him.
“Will you tell him I’ll phone back?” I asked.
“I will, of course, yes. Certainly,” he replied.
We both sounded very stiff and suspicious. I hung up. It might not have been him. Maybe the guy had seen my name in the papers and felt awkward because of it. Or he’d heard Harvey talk about the trial; that’s more likely. I think it was Harvey, though.
I miss her. I even miss the irascibility, the slights. I miss her coming up here to work alone rather than sit with me in front of the telly after Margie’s gone to bed. I miss knowing she’s up here, doing whatever. It should be easy to comfort myself. She was absent a lot of the time anyway, but it seems especially hard just now. Perhaps it’s because she’s been sitting at home for the past two and a half months. It’s just sinking in, I think.
Last night I sat in front of the television and tried to pretend Susie was upstairs, ignoring me. Yeni wanted to watch Friends on a satellite channel and sat down on the other settee. I could hardly say piss off, I’m assuaging my grief by pretending to be ignored by my absent wife. I watched Yeni out of the corner of my eye. She’s very young, and I don’t think she understands what the characters are saying, but she smiles along with the jokes and nods sometimes. I suppose for most men this would be a creamer: left alone in a big house with a lonely Spanish teenage au pair. But Yeni is fat and has a prominent mustache, and her breath smells perpetually of yogurt. I think she’s self-medicating for thrush. Susie chose her.
chapter four
I GOT A LETTER FROM SUSIE THIS MORNING. IT DIDN’T SAY ANY OF the things I want to hear, like I love you and didn’t kill those people. It said she was there and safe, and feeling a “little under the weather”… blah blah, missing you and Margie blah blah, much hope for the appeal blah blah. She tells me what the weather’s been like the past few days. She’s in a facility forty miles away, for Chrissake, we’re in the same weather system. She could have been writing to anyone from anywhere, except that just before the end there’s an unguarded moment when, apropos of nothing, she writes “It’s awful here.”
I caved in and phoned the prison to check if she was safe. I recognized the voice of the squat-faced receptionist who was there when I visited Susie before she got bail. She’s a sullen little gremlin with a flat nose covered in blackheads. Her uniform was too tight and her white bra strained against the blue blouse, her name badge tottering on a peak like an erect nipple. There was a proud, well-spoken old woman in front of me in line last time, there to visit her drug-addict daughter, she told me later, and the squat-faced guard rudely asked her to repeat her name four times, making her say it louder and louder so that everyone could hear it. The old woman was so upset by the time she sat down that I had to give her a hankie and the promise of a lift to the bus stop to stop her weeping. It’s important not to cry when you go in to visit prisoners. They’ve got enough on their plate.
Anyway, I recognized the receptionist’s voice. She wouldn’t put me through to anyone but left me on hold for ten minutes while she asked around. Susie’s fine. I asked when she might get the chance to phone me and the guard sounded surprised that she hadn’t already. I said I thought maybe she wouldn’t have a phonecard and could she put me through to her? The receptionist said it wasn’t a hotel, sir, and she couldn’t page her. I thanked her and hung up.
I wonder if the induction is going okay and what sort of things they do with them. Maybe they show them uplifting films about life, and how nice it is to still have one. I hope it’s working, I hope she isn’t thinking about suicide. I couldn’t stand the world without her in it. I wrote back in longhand because I can’t get the printer to work up here. I asked her lots of sanitized questions, told her I was thinking of her constantly, and described the garden. I enclosed a nice photo of Margie breaking a cup.
Box 2 Document 1 Dictaphone Tape
I was messing with the machine and turned it on, not realizing that the volume was up full. Her voice, calm and untroubled, filled the room like a sudden warm wave, washing through me, an embrace of noise reverberating off the walls. I felt faint suddenly. I wasn’t listening to the words on the tape; I was just sitting there, flooded by her, wishing her home. I had to turn the tape off and rewind. It’s Susie’s voice from the beginning. She must have put the Dictaphone down pointing at herself because the interviewer’s voice is distant and unintelligible. Susie sounds perfectly in control, as if she knows what she’s doing.
“Well, ask and we’ll see. [Mumbled questions.] I’ll tell you if I’m not prepared to answer. [Long mumbling.] Okay, yeah, that’d be nice. Yeah. ’Kay. It’s got it on it, yeah? [Mumbling.] I’m not completely naive about the press. I’d like to keep my own record of what we say here. It’s not a problem, is it?”
She thinks she’s being really clever. I wonder if the journalist knows how utterly out of her depth she is. Even telling him she’s not naive sounds like she’s accusing him of being a bastard, like she’s challenging him to fuck her over. But that’s Susie employing her junior doctor’s credo: protest competence regardless of the evidence. She hadn’t the first idea. This is the interview the prosecution used to damn her, the one where she said she hated Donna.
An obsequious voice, a mumbling waiter, I suppose, asks a question and Susie lets the man opposite her order.
“Yeah,” she sas flirtatiously, “I’ll have one of those too.”
“I hated Donna from the first moment I saw her. She looks ridiculous- you must have seen her picture? She gave an exclusive to almost every national paper and charged them a fortune. All that cleavage and lipstick. She looks like a female impersonator.”
Susie either coughs or laughs. All I can hear is her voice, as if she’s talking into my ear, with the uncracked timbre she had before her confidence was shattered and her creamy voice curdled. I hear her sip a drink and sit back. She’s sitting on leather, good leather judging by the sound, and it shrieks and sighs as she shifts her weight.
She shouldn’t have given an interview, not to anyone, but she’d been sacked and was bitter and probably a bit panicky. She didn’t tell me until the magazine came out in September. She went off early in the morning, saying she was going to get the papers or stamps, I forget which. She didn’t come back for three hours, and when she did she had red eyes and was shaking.
I asked what was up. She put the magazine on the kitchen table and looked out the window. “It’s a disaster,” she said, quietly. “I’ll never get work again.”
I thought she was being overdramatic until I read the interview. It definitely contributed to the end. If she’d felt she had anything to lose, I don’t think she would have gone to Cape Wrath. Which means, of course, that her career mattered more in the final instance than me or Margie or the house or our way of life or her freedom.