So that was how I found out Susie was on suicide watch. I don’t know if they felt sorry for me or what, but they decided to leave it at that and let me go back to the waiting room.
I’ve just been downstairs to make a cup of tea and found Trisha watching television and drinking cocoa. She’d changed her tune and said, rather accusingly, that she’d have brought up a cup of tea if I’d said I wanted one. I will not be chased around my own house. I said I didn’t want one then, but I do now. I almost resent her insomnia more than I resent her presence. Night is my time to be alone in the house, my time when I don’t need to be self-conscious. I don’t like her creeping about.
We lined up by the prison door and traipsed single file across the ten-foot stretch of windy grass, guarded on either side by prison officers. The door behind us locked before the door in front opened. Inside the door the troglodytes dispersed: they were there to see two different people. The convicted visiting room is disgusting, furnished with knee-high brown tables and spongy yellow chairs with no arms and melted fag burns all over them. Everyone was smoking; it looked like a Philip Morris laboratory. A vending machine selling Coke and crisps in the corner had a thick metal belt around it, strapping it to the wall, presumably to prevent anyone from ripping it off its foundations and throwing it.
I tried to remember who Susie and I were in Otago Street, a lucky pair of scamps, not a man who could be patted on the balls with impunity and his murderess wife. Then I saw Susie across the room. She looked like shit. Her black hair was frizzy at the top and her eyes were swollen from crying. She had lost weight in the week and a half since I last saw her. She was dressed in a shapeless blue sweatshirt and jogging pants that were too short for her. The elastic cuff clung to her calf above the ankle, showing off her white socks and the black slip-ons I’d bought her for court.
She scowled at me and waved grimly. Eager visitors swept past me, and I stood there, not wanting to go to her. I wanted to turn around and run away and keep my Susie safe, but I clutched the final toffee in my pocket, walked over, and bent to kiss her.
She gave me her cheek, which annoyed me. She sniffed the side of my head and asked me why I smelled strange.
“Oh, I, um, flattened my hair,” I said, self-consciously.
“With toffee hair spray?” She looked annoyed. “You didn’t bring Margie, then?”
When I said she told me not to, she got tearful and stared at the table. I said I’d brought the radio and the battery and the other things she asked for, but she didn’t speak then either. I put my arm around her shoulder and told her that we’d get her out of there, that we were doing everything we could for the appeal, that things would be fine, she’d see, things would be okay and not to worry. She started to cry. She just shook and shook. All around us groups of people talked quietly while the women in blue uniforms hugged the kids on their laps. I stroked Susie’s hand and said Fitzgerald wouldn’t let a single thing go. I felt awful for finding her vulnerability so frightening. I used to love it, but then, I suppose she was only ever a little bit vulnerable. Even when she was in labor she just seemed very, very angry, not broken like this.
“Susie, they said you’re suicidal.”
She rubbed her red eyes hard. “Well, I’m not. They use suicide watch proactively sometimes. I’m a high-profile case, and if I killed myself it would cause an uproar. They’re being cautious.”
“What does ‘suicide watch’ mean?”
“You’re put in a special cell and they look in on you every fifteen minutes. The cell has all the corners taken out so you can’t hide.”
She tried to chat. The sentencing reports were coming on well, she said, and should be ready in a couple of weeks’ time, but then she ran out of things to say and sat, miserably still.
I took out a pack of cigarettes, and she fell on them. We smoked together. We haven’t smoked together since we lived in Otago Street. She caught her breath, managed a shaky smile, and thanked me. She told me to leave the pack for her. I said it had been my full intention to pursue that course of action from the outset, and that made her smile. I asked her what she was reading, whether she wanted me to send in some books. She drew on her cigarette, inhaling heavily, and said she couldn’t read, couldn’t concentrate. The atmosphere was nicer between us then. She took my hand, gave it a little squeeze, and we smoked in silence for a while. I thought suddenly of her with Gow, and I felt myself dying inside, atrophying through moral compromise, like a Nazi general’s fat wife. I wanted to whip my hand away and tell her I knew what she’d been doing with Gow in her office, dirty bitch, that Harvey Tucker had told me. I had to breathe in deeply, over and over again.
After a while I started talking quietly, and just to have something to say, I told her not to worry. I was going through all the papers at home and would find any tiny detail we could use for an appeal.
She sat up stiffly and looked at me. “What papers? What are you talking about?”
“The stuff in the study,” I said. “Around the computer and on the disks.”
“But that’s my stuff. Those papers aren’t about this, they’ve got nothing to do with this.” She was speaking very quietly, angrily, spitting words at me, and then she stopped and looked suspicious. “How did you get into my study? I put a lock on the door.”
I reached over for her hand but she whipped it away from me.
“Come on, Susie, it was just a teenie wee padlock. I wanted to use the computer.”
“You ripped the padlock off my fucking office door?”
“It was only a small one,” I said, chasing her hand around her lap.
“You took the lock off…?” She stopped still again. “How… You’ve been using my computer? How can you use my computer? How can you know the password?”
I said, come on, Margie H wasn’t exactly hard to guess, the joint account code is Margie’s birthday, our movie channel request code is margiel, every secret code we have is Margie.
But Susie wouldn’t allow me to make light of it. She had turned a strange lemony shade. “Just leave it alone,” she said. “There are confidential files in there. They’re nothing to do with any of this.”
I thought she was talking about the Gow files from Sunnyfields, and I dropped my voice and said, “Look, don’t worry about Gow’s prison files, I’ve already found them. I’ll burn them when I’m finished.”
Susie slapped my hand away and shut her eyes, taking deep breaths, trying not to lose it. If we had been at home, she’d have left the room to cool down, but we were in an open-plan visiting room surrounded by nosy bastards with nothing better to do than listen in. “Forget the study,” she said through gritted teeth. “Just stay out of there.”
“Susie,” I said softly, “come on…”
She stood up, pocketed the pack of cigarettes, turned on her heels, and left. A guard opened the back door to let her through and glanced at me, curious and faintly accusing. I’d driven forty reluctant fucking miles to be blown off for trying to help.
I pulled over onto the hard shoulder on the way home, pretending to the passing drivers that I was afraid to go on in the high winds. I put my elbow up to the window and hid my face with my hand. It was the search, and fighting with Susie, and the strain of not asking her about Gow. She was in love with him, I know that now. I don’t think she hates me, but I can see in her eyes that I’m irrelevant. I knew it when we sat and smoked together. She was thinking about him, wishing I were him.
I was glad Margie hadn’t been with me. I don’t want her left alone with a prison guard while someone pokes her dad in the balls. I went for a walk around Kelvingrove Park so that I didn’t have to go home early. I sat on a bench and watched people walking their dogs. It was cold, I could see my breath, and I remembered the Christmastime when we were expecting Margie, how hopeful everything seemed and how pretty the frosted grass was in the garden, like a moat of jagged glass all around the house.