Am I mad?
Apparently, a mad woman would not ask this, but Mary didn’t rate ‘apparently’.
‘Apparently’ was Thomas McInnes telling Gregor Thom that Mary Shields sucked off Johnny Simpson three times by the loch, and anyway, Mary had firm evidence that she was – self-awareness notwithstanding – a card-carrying, attic-worthy, lunatic.
The first piece of evidence was the email she sent to the Procurator Fiscal. Rather than applying the twenty-four-hour calm-yourself rule, she had pressed ‘send’ as angrily as each of the letters preceding it, and now realised this could jeopardise Roddie’s defence.
I should have sent this to you first – oops, Mary messaged Adeela, a mutual pal from uni and a hot-shot defence lawyer.
OMG Mary, Adeela replied. Write to no-one, speak to no-one. Stay home till after court on Monday – two more sleeps. Don’t even talk to Jack. Talk to NO-ONE.
The second piece of evidence of mental incapacity was that Mary was having auditory hallucinations. Since arriving home from the police station she’d been hearing an orchestra that simply could not be real. She could hear it very clearly with the shutters closed, with all the appliances off, sitting cross-legged, in the hallway. The shutters didn’t block out all the never-ending evening sun, and pincers danced on the floor around Mary to the orchestra that was definitely playing.
Madness, of course, that an orchestra was playing, but Mary could hear bagpipes, and drums, as well as track-laughter that seemed to ridicule the ruined pieces of her, one of which she held in her hand.
Roddie might be writing her a letter in B hall now, in which she’s the abuser. For example: Dear Mary, Derek suggested I record a memory. This is my memory of the most recent time. You are standing in the kitchen smashing glasses. Your eyes are dim. I can’t find you in them. ‘Fuck you all!’ You smash another, and a piece of glass hits my shin.
The pipe band passed by – it was a pipe band! Not madness. The 12th July was approaching, and the Orange Order was already flexing its muscles in this largely Asian neighbourhood. Mary wondered if racist Simon Gallacher would be drumming along.
She wasn’t hallucinating. It was a pipe band.
And the laughter was coming from downstairs. Nora in 1/1 must be having a dinner party. Mary didn’t get invited after the fourth time, because she hated cooking and didn’t reciprocate. She suggested paying for a takeaway, but this was offensive to Nora. There were all sorts of rules. Shame, Nora made great lamb.
Mary dragged herself to the bathroom. Adeela was right, she should stay inside until court on Monday – two sleeps. She shouldn’t talk to Jack, should not leave the flat. She opened her mouth for the first time since being questioned at the station and beheld the one big problem with this plan.
Her tooth.
On her palm was one jagged half of her left front tooth, smashed by the elbow of her beloved. She’d found it, thankfully, with the help of the feminists, who suddenly liked her again cos she was bleeding. She couldn’t turn up at court looking like this – and this did not look good. The toothlessness aged her by thirty years and would add a further thirty months to Roddie’s sentence if found guilty.
Mary superglued her tooth in front of the bathroom mirror. She held her mouth wide open and fanned her teeth for sixty cat-dog seconds, then checked her dental work. Her left tooth was very clearly in two pieces, which very clearly did not quite match. She yanked at her Picasso tooth-work, but the glued piece wouldn’t come out. Fuck.
She phoned Bella Brava and ordered seven bottles of wine and ten portions of cold lasagne.
Wine – yep.
‘Rescue’ playlist – tick.
House cleaned – tick.
Bath – done.
Clean sheets, candles, and a sad sneeze of a wank – tick.
1.00 p.m., and Mary had done everything she could to stop the itching. Sex and The City: The Movie didn’t help, even the wedding dress shoot. Bella Brava red wasn’t working either, but she decided to try harder.
The moisturiser burned her scratched calves, and she used it as an excuse to scratch again. She had to clear her head, make an action plan and fix this. Fuck it, everything can be fixed, even thoughts, allegedly, if you have a flipchart.
Mary had three under Jack’s bed. She’d thought about stealing them from work but had in fact ordered them online, because she loved them and had naively always hoped for a moment like this. She assembled the flipchart with a lot of heavy breathing then couldn’t remember why she’d done it, jumping wholeheartedly into an alternative and excellent reason for the flipchart being there:
REASONS TO LIVE
Mary wished she hadn’t worded it exactly that way, it’s not what she meant, and she shouldn’t have used red felt-tip and capitals and underlined it. It looked suicidal and she wasn’t. Granted, she’d been thinking about death a great deal: of the different ways it might happen. And she’d accidentally tunnelled into a Netflix sub-genre about creative people, such as poets and painters, who have lots of fun then kill themselves. Once, after re-watching The Hours, she got in the car and drove to Troon beach. She removed her shoes and socks and walked on the wet sand until her toes reached the water. It was bloody freezing.
She was not suicidal, unless she could scratch herself to death, which, right enough, Liam Macdowall practically did in the end, but Mary wasn’t wanting to do that. She ripped the page from the flipchart and burned it in the log fire she must have lit a while back. The flame ignited the reason for the flipchart. She was going to fix everything, which meant making an action plan. Mary loved action plans so much. The examining of a life in crisis, the defining and dividing of a problem, the promises you make to try and improve things. Mary chose the blue pen. She didn’t underline or use capitals. Her question was unintimidating:
What is the problem?
There were too many problems. Mary had filled three pages with them and was now howling to a song she should not be playing on repeat. ‘This too shall pass’, the lyric promised, ‘This too shall pass’. It usually helped, but the pipe band would not be beaten by acoustic therapy, and her situation was more serious than late-night shame or early-morning hopelessness, and was not passing.
She ripped the pages from the flipchart and changed the question to:
Who is the problem?
Her first answer deserved to be in red and in capitals and underlined:
ME
If Mary was being interviewed for a court report, she’d be talking about her childhood now, relaying that she was sexually abused twice before the age of five – two one-off occasions thankfully, but damaging nonetheless. She’d be speaking about her parents’ response, which was fantastic. They did everything right, which is probably why it never happened again, and why Mary had a very happy life and marriage, till today. She’d be confessing that her mother smashed bottles against the wall one Christmas, but that she only did this once and cleaned it up immediately. Mary was twenty-one at the time. Come to think of it, her mum was around Mary’s age when the smashing happened and would later refer to this period as her ‘difficult time’. She became moody and tired. She left her job. And she moved to Spain with Mary’s dad, leaving Mary to graduate, start her terrifying career, get married and have a child completely alone. Being abandoned at twenty-one isn’t a thing, though, so Mary had never dared complain about it; but she and Roddie made a pact never to abandon Jack.
Mary yearned to ring her mum, to hear her say: ‘Harry, it’s Mair!’
She longed to hear her dad clapping in the background: ‘My baby girl!’
She and her boys had wonderful summers in Spain. Hopefully they’d get back in the habit again. Her parents were in their eighties now, and Mary didn’t want to infect them with her worries. She dialled but hung up before it was connected.
Even with good parents, you’re fucked, Mary thought. Imagine how screwed up Jack could still turn out to be. She was sobbing the way Jack used to when he was little – no holding back. He stopped the howling over a decade ago, but he was always up for a hug. She was proud she knew a man who hugged and cooked and danced, and that she got him to adulthood without being forced into a white van.
She turned off the song, threw her latest flipchart attempt in the fire, and reconsidered the question.
Who is the problem?
Beckoning the power of Lil, she decided not to take the blame and wrote another option. After she’d written the name, she imagined the ghost of her inner social worker levitating above her, all black and smoky, and with pleading eyes – Please let me come back.
‘Fuck off,’ Mary said to the apparition before underlining the correct answer to Who is the problem?
DEREK McLAVERTY
Mary’s nest seemed to be trembling. She wandered from room to room in search of a stable piece of ground. She’d have to move from here because of Derek McLaverty. He’d managed to destroy her life in less than a week, and there was no sign of him stopping. DEREK McLAVERTY, he was the problem, and Mary would fix him.
How? She knew better than to fight back online. She didn’t even know what Whatsup was. And she didn’t want to kill him, as this would mean losing the moral high ground. What matters to him? she wrote on the chart. His kids? (obv not). His ex-wife? (nah). How do you bring a man like him down?
It was getting dark at last. The Orange men had disbanded, and Mary felt safe enough to open the kitchen window for some air.
A bin clanged. Someone was standing out the back. Mary grabbed her keys, headed downstairs and unlocked the door to the garden. ‘John Paul?’ She could see the shape of him standing there, the cheeky bugger. ‘John Paul, I told you it’s not in there.’
He didn’t move or say anything.
Mary lit the ground with her phone as she walked across the green. ‘Are you hungry? I’ve got lasagne.’ She could do with some company, and John Paul was the only person in the universe who didn’t hate her guts. ‘Come on, I’ll feed you.’ Her phone-light reached his feet. She lifted it to illuminate his face.
Jimmy McKinley’s face.
‘Jesus Christ. What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Where is it?’ said her elderly sex offender.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ At first Mary meant what she said, then it slowly began to dawn on her.
‘Do you know how many years I worked on that?’
‘Worked on what, Jimmy? I’m calling 999.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Police thanks … this is Mary Shields of 20 Mansion House Square.’ Mary hadn’t really dialled, she was speaking to herself. But it did the job. Jimmy backed off and hobbled out of the gate.
When she opened the back door to enter the close, Nora from 1/1 was waiting, steely faced. ‘This is out of order, Mary. We’re having a meeting tomorrow. It can’t go on.’
‘What time?’ She was running up the stairs; didn’t have time for this crap.
‘You’re not invited,’ said Nora. ‘It’s ABOUT YOU.’
She was out of breath as she grabbed her River Island boot from the drawer under the bed. How could she have forgotten? She had to ring Minnie at the OMU, tell her what she’d found. Where was her work-issue Blackberry? Not in her bag, not on the kitchen table, not in her coat pocket. It was in the living room, on the chair, and if she hadn’t been standing in front of the flipchart when she dialled Minnie’s number, she may not have had an epiphany.
What is important to a man like Derek McLaverty?
She stared at the flipchart as Detective Sergeant Minnie Johnstone’s phone rang out.
How do you bring a man like him down?
One of his blog comments was echoing in her brain: ‘Even her cuck husband and beta son hate her guts #getthebitch #getthebitch, #getthebitch, #getthebitch.’
Mary hung up and shook her River Island boot. She knew how.
The pen drive.