The interviewer has stopped laughing. He sounds disappointed and offended, as if she has insulted his favorite comedian or something. He asks a question, and I realize that he’s goading her. This interview took place two months before Cape Wrath. It’s his first-ever interview, and he’s already guessed what eluded me for a year: that Susie has strong feelings about Andrew Gow. Now she’s talking quickly and defensively.
“Not my skin. No, he didn’t… That’s my job, giving nothing away. The purpose of what I do is objective assessment… Well, it’s important for Donna’s safety. I’ve told her, but she won’t listen to me. He’ll hurt her, of course he will, that’s what he does. I don’t know if any appeals court could possibly refuse him now, after that poor student’s murder. That’s exactly why I’m giving this interview: I want people to know Donna isn’t safe. I want people to watch out for her when he gets out.”
Even I know that this last bit is a piss-poor excuse for committing professional suicide. Donna wouldn’t read GLT, and I don’t suppose her friends would either. They didn’t print that comment. I expect the mag’s lawyers combed it out. It must have been sub judice at the time.
“If Donna was a friend of yours, you’d be afraid for her, wouldn’t you? It’s not surprising she was attracted to him. Psychopaths are often compelling, as are celebrities, and Gow was both… No, I’m not saying all celebrities are psychopaths. There are parallels, but I’m not saying it’s the same thing. Celebrities give us an instant connection because we have prior information about them, while psychopaths can anticipate things familiar to you and mimic them back so that they seem familiar… They have little conception of other people as fully sentient beings, have a limited capacity to empathize. They think of other people as objects to be used and moved about.”
Susie takes a drink while the interviewer asks something. I can hear him saying “Gow.”
“No, look, I can’t talk about the murders or Gow’s history. You can get that information yourself, anyway. I have to be careful what I say, especially now that the appeal is coming up.
“You shouldn’t make him out to be a hero, you know. Serial killers’re not heroes to the police or the families of their victims. They’re inadequates worshiped by inadequates. D’you know what he did to those women? I read once that the people who buy the records by American gangster rappers are generally middle-class white teenagers. Same thing. That luxury of distance.”
The interviewer’s talking, coaxing Susie, and her voice gets closer. I think she’s looking at the Dictaphone. “No. No, I’m not afraid of Gow. He won’t come for me.” They made a lot of this phrase in the court case: whether Susie meant he won’t come for me, in other words, I’ll come for him, or whether she just meant he wouldn’t come. I’m glad they only had the printed interview to go on. From the intonation on the tape it definitely sounds like she’s hinting that she’ll get him.
There are books on her shelves up here, professional and sociology books and a couple specifically about women falling in love with prisoners and killers. The spines are broken and the top corners of the pages are dirty where Susie’s been doing that disgusting thing she does when she reads: cleaning gunk out of her nails on the top corner of the page.
She’s sought these books out and taken her time reading them. She hasn’t opened them on the table and run her finger down the margins, paring out the relevant information for a work-related article or argument. She has luxuriated over the contents, which means that she probably read them in here, in this room. I’ve seen her reading in here, she sits sideways at her desk and opens the bottom desk drawer to rest her feet on, her mouth sitting slightly open, inner lips moist, drawing her nails slowly, one by one, over the corner of the page. I asked her once, huffily and pointlessly, because the answer’s obvious, why couldn’t she read downstairs? She said the light up here was perfect, and she’s right. The window is just overhead and the branches of the overhanging tree diffuse the directional light, even now that most of the leaves are gone.
She read a lot up here, and yet we never talked about books. I never asked her what she was reading, but she didn’t bring it up either. I have a vague memory of asking her about a book by someone we both knew at university. She said it was good, not a comprehensive look at treatments, but it had a thorough literature search at the beginning. It’s no wonder I didn’t ask again.
It makes me speculate, though: what else did she think about a lot and never mention? I wish her here. Suddenly I want ten clear, clean minutes to talk without the baggage of the past few months, few years actually, from before Margie was born. I want to ask her what she thinks about all sorts of things, as if we were first going out together and I was still listening to her.
I spent so much time with Susie ignoring her. What must she have seen when she looked at me? A fat guy with a weird haircut who doesn’t want to do anything but read obscure novels and pester the garden.
We should have done things together instead of pissing the time away. We should have talked more, done stuff, sat with the television and the radio off and taken the time to look at each other. After we moved in together, so much of our time was spent simply stumbling along, thinking forward or sideways or about cars and clothes and furniture and pensions and Margie. We haven’t even been on a proper holiday together, and I can’t blame anyone but myself. We kept going to my parents’ in Marbella and having a fraught time, whispering in hot rooms about annoying incidents and having quiet sex, never really being off duty.
Susie resented using her holidays to visit them. How would I like it, she used to ask, if she made me spend all my time off at her parents’? My excuse was we needed to see them as a family, but I could have gone there on my own. The truth is I wanted her there as a buffer. She said often, right from the very beginning, that she wouldn’t be one of those wives, that she refused to be the point of emotional contact between me and my parents. “It’s not my job,” she said. “Do it yourself.”
She was right of course, but I still found myself putting her on the phone, asking her to speak to them about specifics or comfort Mum about flat-roof leakage. I shouldn’t have used our holidays like that. I should have taken her to Mexico and the Maldives, like she wanted.
She should be here with me. My yearning for her is so strong that it feels as if all the panels of our fractured picture will inevitably slide back to true and we’ll be as we were before.
In my head I run through the last ten minutes of a cheesy film about a couple chasing each other on the beach, barbecuing fish, horseback riding, etc., and then I remember it’s Susie. I snort, thinking about it; imagine her, slathered in sunscreen, turning to me and saying, “This beach is chemically unsafe.”
chapter six
IT’S COLDER TODAY. I MIGHT NEED TO BRING A HEATER UP HERE. My feet are quite warm, but the top of my head gets cold. I think all the heat rises from the house and gets sucked sideways, out through the attic space next door. I’d like to insulate this room for Susie coming home, paint it maybe, and buy her a new computer and not say anything so she comes up here and gets a nice surprise. I could convert the whole loft area and give her a really big office. We don’t keep that much stuff in there, just Margie’s baby clothes and the LPs and some suitcases that were here when we moved in. I’d like a building project, something big, as a sign of good faith that she will come home. I think it would cheer me up. But, then, she probably doesn’t want a big office. The claustrophobic feel of this little room, squashed in next to the chimney stack, has an intense privacy about it. If anyone else were in here, they’d be standing indecently close to me. It’s like a physical incarnation of personal space. The nights are coming earlier and earlier, and as the skylight deadens, the slow black oak waves softly in silhouette, reminding me that there is an outside to this small, tall room. In case I forget.