I actually found myself praying. Please, God, let me know the truth. Let all the wondering stop. Let my thoughts rest. But I don’t believe in God. I don’t even believe in the cognitive value of prayer.
chapter eighteen
IT’S FOUR-THIRTY IN THE MORNING, AND I’D GIVE ANYTHING TO BE able to sleep. I wish these old bastards would piss off home and leave me be. I want to go for three hours without talking. I want to get back into my own bed. I worked it out: In the past forty-eight hours I’ve had four and three-quarter hours’ sleep. In the past seventy-two hours I’ve had nine and a half hours’ sleep, as opposed to the generally recognized requisite twenty-four. That is a deficit ratio of 1:2.5. I should be sleeping two and half times more than I am.
All the numbers in the world are sloshing about in my head, forming themselves into answers to questions that I don’t fully understand. I’m lying down, knowing that it is imperative that I fall asleep right now because Trisha will be up at seven, smashing about the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, and all the time I’m trying to sleep, I’m thinking about Susie and the Vale and Margie and Gow, and when I switch off, I think of numbers and hard sums. So I gave in to the noise in my head, made a cup of tea, and came up here. My head is bursting.
While at university, hanging out on the eighth floor of the library trying to get the attention of some girls, I was flicking coolly through a journal and read a study about the effects of sleep deprivation. The US Army found that it can induce temporary psychosis, hallucinations, both auditory and visual, and mood swings. I know this. I haven’t been awake for sixty hours, being chased around a square mile of tarmac by a sadistic CIA experimenter, so the effects are more subtle, but they’re there, especially the mood swings.
For the first few miles of the drive out to the prison, I was sad and anxious. When we stopped at a Little Chef for Mum to go to the toilet, I became angry. Then Dad got back into the car and started feeding Margie sweets made of sugar and ADD-inducing additives. I asked him to stop it and he pooh-poohed my objections. I became more and more furious as Margie became more and more hyper. She began to wriggle, shrieking intermittently when she didn’t get the paper/keys/attention/chance to run the sugar off. She was going berserk by the time we got to the prison. I swore in front of her, a thing I hate to do. I told them to fucking stay in the car; the antiques fair turned out to be four miles away, and I wasn’t prepared to wander around for hours and hours after the visit looking for them. Now that I’m so tired and the fight has gone out of me, I can see perfectly clearly that I was nervous and looking for someone to blame. It wasn’t their fault at all. So now I feel angry and guilty.
The guard at reception saw me holding a screaming, wriggling Margie around the waist like a paper parcel and didn’t comment, but I could sense her disapproval. A couple of scary women with bad dye jobs sat up as I came into the glass waiting room. Margie was turning red and close to vomiting. The gnarled women came over, gathered around her in a solid wall, and cooed over her beetroot face, stroking her and making clucking noises. Somehow, they managed to mollify her so that she sat up on my knees, breathing heavily and holding tightly on to my arm as she looked around. I thanked them as they dispersed, and they said things in indignant Edinburgh accents. I didn’t understand the words but guessed that they were meeting my thanks with dismissal and statements of solidarity. I had dressed Margie in the faded red corduroy pinafore dress, which doesn’t look too expensive. I didn’t want to make Susie stand out, and I was glad of it now: I don’t know if they would have helped me if she had been head to foot in Burberry check, but maybe that’s just me being a middle-class prick. I’m stalling because I don’t want to go through the details of the visit again.
They didn’t search me this time. They just let me through with everyone else, and I saw Susie sitting at a different table at the back of the room. I expected Margie to run across the room to her darling mama, but the first thing she did when we got in there was to start coughing. It was incredibly smoky. Susie stood up when she saw her girl. She kept her eyes on Margie as we walked over; she didn’t look at me once, didn’t even offer me her cheek to kiss this time. Her hair has been cut straight across just below her shoulder blades and she looks even thinner than she did last week. Her lips are dry and have turned slightly purple. Her skin is luminescent and waxy, and her blue eyes are sad and hollow and more expressive of every nuance of thought than I have ever seen them.
She took Margie from my arms and sat down, hugging her tight and straightening her little red skirt as if she were dressing a dolly.
“I picked the red dress so she didn’t look too middle-class,” I said and gave a kind of wet snort as if to say “we’re better than everyone else here, fnar fnar.”
She frowned briefly at my feet. Margie seemed completely unaffected by her mother’s presence, and for a fleeting moment I wondered whether we could just never come back here. Maybe we could run away, Margie and I, take all of Mr. Wilkens’s money and go and live somewhere warm, like Greece; perhaps take Yeni for the first year or so. I was thinking that Yeni wouldn’t come because she’s supposed to be over here to learn English, when I heard Susie whispering into Margie’s hair. She was repeating “I love you,” telling every strand, letting the words spill across her lips and soak her hair.
I sat across from her (resisting a cigarette for Margie’s good), feeling sick and angry and exhausted. Ten words from her would let me sleep and bring me peace of mind. A mere ten words would keep me on her side for the next thousand years.
I’m so sorry.
I’ve been faithful.
I love you still.
Instead she looked over the top of Margie’s head and said, “You look knackered, Lachlan.” Using the formal name, pulling back from me.
And instead of ten words that would soothe her soul, I said, “I am, Susan. I am.”
We sat across from each other, unhappily watching Margie so we wouldn’t need to look at each other. I told her Trisha had come to stay. She didn’t make a joke about it or say any of the usual things. She sighed as though I’d reproached her unfairly and apologized. I said my parents had come to stay as well and they were all competitively caring for me. She didn’t smile. Well, she said, that must be nice. It seems as if all we learned to do during our marriage is not talk. We stared at Margie some more. She’d wriggled off Susie’s lap and was holding on to the low table, trying to grab the far edge.
“Did you get my letter?” she asked.
I said I did, yeah, and asked when the next visit was.
She smirked miserably. “We’re hardly ten minutes into this one yet.”
I stopped to breathe and gather my courage. “Look, Trisha wants to come and see you, and, well, you’re obviously not bothered about seeing me, so I’ll send her next time.”
She melted. It’s the only way to describe her face: her jaw dropped, her eyes drooped, and she keened quietly, “Oh, Lachie, no, please.”
I know that prisoners will do anything, promise anything to keep their families coming to visit them- we’d talked about it when she was still working- and I knew that she was begging as a friend, asking me not to abandon her.
“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “But I can’t do this… I can’t come here and be treated like this… like I don’t matter.”
She covered her face and wept. Margie turned and tugged at her hands, muttering “Mummmumm” noises, poking the tears off her face and yanking her hair to distract her.
Susie sniffed hard. “Please, Lachie, please.” Electric blue eyes half closed in dire warning of the consequences, she shook her head at me; a perfect strand of midnight black hair fell over one eye, ending in a kiss curl on her dusky cheekbone. She pushed the hair behind her ear and pulled Margie onto her lap, enveloping her. “Please?”