I didn’t speak. I couldn’t give the hollow reassurances that she wanted, say that I’d come and see her for the next ten years, make a go of our empty marriage, talk about the garden and the apple tree and oh, goodness, Mr. Tottery at number thirty-seven had a foreseeable accident, what a pity. I was so tired and raw already and, dreading the slip of meaning from lip to ear, didn’t dare tell her how I felt.
Margie spotted another child across the room, a five-year-old boy, and ran over to play with him. I don’t know why small children are magnetically drawn to older kids who never want to play with them, but I couldn’t help seeing parallels in our situation.
There weren’t as many people visiting today as there were the last time. A cancer-thin man of about fifty, wearing denims and an anorak that were too big for him, was visiting an emaciated woman with yellowed-white hair. They sat silently together and smoked matchstick rollies, her arms wrapped across her stomach as though it ached. The women who had calmed Margie down were sitting at different tables on different visits. The relationships between the visitors were usually obvious: mother, daughter, big sister, wee sister, pal. Some of them chatted; most looked a bit bored. One prisoner got up to go to the toilet. She had her eyebrow pierced and homemade cross tattoos on her hands. She tipped her chin at Susie, checking me out as she walked by. Susie pressed her lips together and nodded back.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
Susie shrugged. “Someone.”
“Someone who?”
“Just someone. She cut my hair.”
I hadn’t thought of Susie having a social life in prison. I had imagined that she would be static in aspic while the world outside revolved. I asked her if she was being bullied or anything.
“Women’s prisons’re not like that. It’s more like being at school. Games, popularity contests. Margie, come here, baby.”
She spent the rest of the visit coaxing Margie back across the room. She only came back after the older boy had pushed her and she ran over, crying, wobbling on her chubby wee legs. Susie picked her up again and hugged her tight, stroking that part of her cheek that makes her sit still. It’s below her right eye, a patch of skin so sensitive that it hypnotizes her with pleasure when it’s touched in a particular way. I can never find it.
The thin woman with the rollie was looking over at us. When she caught Susie’s eye, the woman smiled down at Margie, and Susie raised her head and smiled slowly, taking the compliment on the chin. It was a codicil to a long conversation had elsewhere.
A bell rang and everyone in the room stood up. Susie let Margie down to the floor and cupped her hands over my forearm like a begging dog.
“Come back, Lachie, please?” she said, looking up at me.
I frowned. “Give me something,” I said, but we both knew that I meant anything.
She paused, thinking hard, looking for a place in her heart where I provoked a positive response. I waited for a year.
“I miss you,” she said eventually, but she was looking at Margie.
Still, I felt the electric neediness flood through my feet into the ground. I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll come back.”
“Thursday next week? One o’clock?”
“I’ll come.”
We were standing close together. She floated slowly up to meet my face and let her plump purple lips brush mine. A flash of hope shocked me. For that golden moment, things were fine. It was okay between us and I had a future.
She walked away toward the short line at the back door. A male guard pointed the women into a straighter line, asserting his power over them. They shuffled into place as the visitors gathered up their things and made for the other door. Susie twisted from the waist and looked back at me. I was standing exactly still, tipped forward at an improbable angle into the space where her lips had been.
“Stay out of the study,” she said and turned her attention to Margie. She splayed her fingers open-shut in a starburst and Margie raised her little hand and did it back. Nothing more for me. I’d had all I was getting.
“I’ll go where I like,” I said, loud enough for her to hear.
She took a step out of line and jabbed an angry finger at me. “Stay. Out.”
“Back in line,” called the guard.
Susie’s right, I shouldn’t be up here. I was lying on the couch in the dark, watching the green minutes count by on the video recorder, when I suddenly remembered the night we went to the opera. We were students and still open to new things, hadn’t yet rejected whole swaths of cultural experience, so we ended up going to see Duke Bluebeard’s Castle by Bartók. We paid a fiver each for our seats. We were so high up that we were looking down on the singers’ heads, and their bodies were dramatically foreshortened. The set was good, but the music did nothing much for me. I found it a bit dreary. Susie loved it, though, and I bought her the CD for her birthday.
I got up off the couch, put the lights on, and found the CD. I wanted to play it, but it was the middle of the night. I sat reading the libretto and was struck by this line of Judith’s: “I came here because I love you. Let me enter every doorway.”
I’m firmly on Bluebeard’s side. I said so afterward; he specifically asked her not to go into the seventh room, he gave her the run of the castle and everything she wanted, but Susie disagreed.
“Could you?” she said in the pub on the way home. “Could you know that some amazing piece of information was behind the door, have the key, and resist the urge?”
I said yes, I definitely could, but Susie didn’t believe me. She teased me, alluding to a raunchy lesbian experience she’d had in the sixth form. She said it was with Tina, a buxom girl we’d bumped into at a party once. She wore tight trousers and a fluffy bra; I couldn’t stop staring at her tits. This irritated Susie, but Tina looked like a prostitute. Did I remember her? I grinned; yeah, I remembered Tina. We sat silently smiling at each other, and she ended up laughing. I didn’t find it hard not to ask about Tina because I knew it wasn’t true.
The point is that in abstract I agree with a no-entry policy for seventh rooms, but in this raw reality I’d rip the plaster off these walls to find out what was going on. I’d face the fact that Susie was in love with him, admit she killed him and cut his tongue out, deal with every sordid detail because I suspect- and I might well be wrong- but I suspect that I wouldn’t feel just as bad if I knew the truth.
What am I looking for in here anyway? The truth? A fact? Her motive? At the moment, on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis, I think, speculate, wonder about Susie’s motives more than any other single thing. Yet motive is the most slippery of truths. After an utterly honest, undefensive, unpropagandizing three months of incessant talk, a brilliant, insightful psychiatrist couldn’t hope to uncover my true motives for taking an unsatisfactory dump this morning. They could call it tension, stress, a mother complex, and I could call it a desire for world peace. All of them could be equally true. It could be a fleeting vitamin deficiency or a dream I don’t remember having. I know this and still I’m wasting time trying to determine what someone else’s motives were for a series of out-of-character actions months ago. I’m up here for hours at a time searching for a completely unknowable quality.
In conclusion, my being here is both wrong and pointless. And still I’m here, scrabbling through the rubble.
A good, true husband would want his wife to be autonomous, could comfortably allow her to leave questions unanswered, and I used to. I loved being so sure of her. I loved having a wife who could go off to a conference and come in and grunt, “Hello” without elaborating. I was proud that she was free to make her own choices, and so was I. Now pain and insecurity make me want to control her, like the arsehole men who kill their wives and girlfriends in the prison-lovers book. I could never have anticipated this hurting and preoccupying me so much. I don’t want Susie to be free to do things that make me feel like this. I don’t want her to have free will at all. If I could, I would rip the free will from her, rip it out and keep it from her.