Bloody Women Read online

  Okay, I thought to myself as I read, paced, and re-read. The writer was not only an arsehole bitch, she was an idiot.

  Matthew Bain! He’d kicked me in the shins for winning British Bulldog, so – yes, I admit it – I relinquished the moral high ground and bit him. But he deserved it, the weed. As for the incidents in the naughty book, I don’t remember a thing – but if it’s true, I don’t forgive myself. They were nice kids, Jack and Brett. I liked them.

  It was dinner time.

  Fish and chips with mushy peas followed by over-microwaved sticky toffee pudding that was harder to chew than Matthew Bain’s arm. I ate all of it slowly, savouring not the taste but the time it subtracted from my day. Afterwards, the Freak locked me up for the night.

  ‘Goodnight, Catriona,’ she said, looking at the book on the desk beside the television. She’d never spoken to me like this before. Softly. And she looked at the book with sadness in her eyes. I found it hard to reconcile this with the image I had of her as the hall rapist and beater-up-er, an image that was reinforced by numerous things I’d heard – that she’d put her finger inside Butcher from the hairdressers’ during a cell search one time, and smashed a drug-user’s head in with her truncheon, and tongue-kissed Burns in a seg’ cell.

  Usually, I counted to get to sleep. Not sheep, but people I’ve known.

  Mum, Dad, Aunt Becky and Joe,

  Peter, Tracy, Carol-Anne and Johnny.

  Matthew, Erin, Jane and Bill,

  Mani, Poppy, Rianna, Jill.

  It pleased me when it rhymed.

  But that night, I returned to the book – like the wobbly tooth I used to push at one way, then the other. Oh, taste the blood, feel the pain . . .

  6

  ANNA JONES: HEAVENLY CREATURES

  Anna Jones skipped all that outing angst, always happily uninterested in boys or men. When the kids played doctors and nurses in the school playground, Anna was the doctor, proudly declaring to her female patients that it was sexist to assume the doctor should be a man.

  Born and raised in Leith, Edinburgh, Anna’s older brother, Nathan, died tragically in a white-water rafting accident at the age of seventeen. Anna was thirteen at the time. The family supported each other though the terrible loss of Nathan, organising a funeral service that neighbours remember to this day.

  ‘Anna spoke,’ a resident recalls. ‘She was very composed. Mmm, very composed come to think of it.’

  Anna’s sexual orientation was neither a surprise to her parents, nor a problem.

  ‘She always told us,’ her mother says, ‘“I’m not doing any man’s washing.”’

  Anna excelled at sport and academic subjects, particularly in public speaking and creative writing. Journalism was always her ambition.

  She fell in love for the first time when she was thirteen. It was thunderbolt stuff. A red-haired netball opponent with green eyes stuck to her like glue, and stayed stuck.

  ‘She stands out,’ Anna says of her friend. ‘She zings.’

  In earlier days, the photos on Anna’s bedroom wall would have been of netball teams, discos and best friends grinning in photo booths. As young adults, these would have been joined by glossy photographs documenting Cat Marsden’s rise to fame as a television presenter and celebrity stylist. Now, in her flat in Glasgow, these happier images are overshadowed by press cuttings, headlines and paparazzi-style snaps following the arrest. The place reeks of obsession.

  Okay, so Anna had fancied me. We’d bonded immediately. I was the only friend who wasn’t frightened by the death of Nathan. I didn’t look at her like a shamed celebrity, embarrassed and fascinated by her status as the girl whose beautiful big brother had died in a rafting accident, falling out of the raft in grade-four rapids and doing all the wrong things – panicking, arms flailing, feet behind instead of forward, so the current took his head straight into the side rocks of the Tay. I didn’t pretend she wasn’t there like other kids, avoiding eye contact, hoping to God she wouldn’t say something and require a response.

  It had happened just before we met. As soon as I heard about it – ‘Apparently her mum tried to jump in after him!’ Melissa the goal keeper sneered as Anna warmed up – I went over to her and hugged her tightly while she cried. As we walked home afterwards, I told her to talk about him, if she wanted to, to tell me everything about him, to show me photos. She complied after that, and I never tired of it.

  We bonded even more when Dad died, gravitating to the grief in each other’s eyes, mine more recent than hers, but no less raw.

  I knew she fancied me. But then I’d had schoolgirl crushes too. Once I followed Sam Morrison home from school and hid behind a bush to watch those perfect legs ascend the first flight-and-a-half of her stairs.

  The team Anna and I joined made it to the grand final a few months after we met. I was nervous, and she took me aside at warm-up and said, ‘It’s all about mental attitude and focus. Don’t over-analyse things. Just decide you’re going to win, then do it.’

  My mental attitude must have sucked, as I missed several passes and let my opponent get nearly every goal. We lost, by sixteen.

  Afterwards, in the Portobello Community Hall, a DJ played chart music for our end of season gig. I walked in late to find everyone standing around the edge of the dance floor like stunned mullets. I immediately grabbed Anna’s hand, jumped into the centre of the parquet floor, and boogied like there was no tomorrow. There were stares and whispers, but in the end everyone gave in and joined us.

  During the sausage roll and lemonade section of the evening, Anna and I went out for a cigarette. We both smoked as often as possible, which is probably why our netball skills had gone downhill somewhat. Sharing a Benson’s in the dark, I rested my hand on a wheelie bin and bemoaned the useless numb-nuts in our team. Anna put her hand gently on my cheek and told me I was enthralling and gorgeous. It didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t scared of it. I let her hand stay there for a while, put the cigarette out, and then kissed her. It would have been very nice if our wing attack hadn’t walked by and gasped. Anna and I separated. The wing attack ran. We followed. She became they, and they whispered, then laughed, then pointed, then talked, then yelled ‘Fuckin’ lezzies!’ Then I punched the wing attack in the nose and gave the goal shooter a Chinese burn.

  I was banned from netball.

  The next day I went to Anna’s house in Leith. Sitting on her bed I told her it was surprisingly enjoyable, that I didn’t regret it, but that it was never going to happen again. I was curious, everyone’s curious, but I liked her too much to hurt her. Did she mind? Could we still be friends?

  She minded, she said, because she never lied. ‘But of course we’re still friends. How could we not be?’

  I hugged her, and when we pulled back from each other, I found my arms still holding onto her shoulders and my eyes still looking into her eyes, and my lips propelling themselves towards hers. The experience scared the shit out of me, and made me cry at the end.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, wiping my eyes. ‘I didn’t mean for that to happen. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Okay,’ Anna said, a little teary too.

  For a year, we spent every spare second together, meeting after school for tennis, walking along Portobello beach, eating chips and brown sauce, listening to music in our rooms, going to the pictures, going running. We were inseparable: if not joined at the hip, then by the phone. And while I knew Anna wanted more, I loved her discipline, her ability never to try again – because if she had, it would have ended our friendship. In the end, it was Johnny Marshall who did that.

  7

  JOHNNY MARSHALL: THE BOY WITH THE MUSTARD JUMPER

  When Catriona was fifteen, her father kissed her goodnight, and drove to Loch Ness. In the darkness of the night, he emptied a bottle of pills into his mouth, removed his clothing, tied a bag of stones to each leg, and walked into the water.

  ‘I don’t talk about that,’ Catriona says when asked about her father.

  The f
uneral was on the Black Isle, north of Inverness, where James Marsden’s family lived.

  ‘She didn’t cry,’ a second cousin recalls. ‘She had hate in her eyes.’

  Catriona and her mother drove back to Edinburgh after the funeral and never returned to the graveside.

  It was at this point that Catriona developed a fear of water. She’d learned to swim as a youngster, but would never swim again. Her friend, Anna, recalls taking her to the outdoor swimming pool in Greenock years later and coaxing her into the water.

  ‘She panicked as soon as she jumped in,’ Anna says. ‘She didn’t know what to do with her arms or legs. I had to drag her out. It took me a long time to calm her down afterwards.’

  After her father’s death, Catriona also embarked on a series of destructive relationships with men.

  The first was with Johnny Marshall, an eighteen-year-old boy of six foot one-and-a-half. They’d met at the amusement arcade in Portobello, smoking beside the dodgems. At first, he fancied the brunette, till someone informed him that she preferred girls. The possibilities raised by this revelation spurred him to chat up both ‘posh birds’.

  Johnny had tattoos. His father was a dirty cop. His friends were bad boys, two in Polmont Young Offenders’ Institution, another dead already.

  ‘What’d he die of?’ Cat asked him, sharing his dodgem.

  ‘H,’ Johnny said, smashing hard into Anna’s car.

  ‘You go to the funeral?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Cry?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Do you want to have sex?’

  A few minutes later Anna Jones found herself guarding the ticket man’s tiny grey caravan, dragging hard on the Embassy Regal she’d managed to scavenge from one of Johnny’s ‘revolting’ friends. The caravan bounced. Afterwards, Cat exited the van with unruly hair and declared herself no longer a virgin and in love.

  Jesus, who had she talked to, to put this shit together?

  It wasn’t like that.

  Johnny had a tight, bright, mustard jumper. His grand-mother had knitted it for him, and he loved it. He wore flares, when flares were no longer okay. He had curly brown hair, played golf, and was best mates with a guy called Spider. He got his first tattoo at the age of sixteen. He sang well and often. His brothers stole cars. His father was a traffic warden. He lost his virginity to someone other than me at the age of fourteen. He did not hold back a laugh. He cried, especially when he thought of his dead friend, and was not afraid to own up to it.

  I didn’t have sex with Johnny in a Portobello caravan. We hardly even spoke in the Portobello days. But we liked each other and met there for several weeks – at the same time, with the same friends – increasing the number of words we spoke to each other to a total of about four including ‘really’ and ‘fancy’ and ‘you’.

  It was almost a year before we had sex. In those months, we moved from Portobello to a greasy spoon in Leith Walk, from Leith Walk to the Meadows, from the Meadows to my house, then from my house to his. We wrote to each other. I remember one of his letters, word for word.

  C,

  Last night it hit me. I’m eighteen. That means I’m a man.

  If I die, they’ll say a man died. A man was killed.

  This man loves you.

  Johnny

  I also remember the first time he said it out loud. I’d woken in my bedroom at about three in the morning. Mum was fast asleep and our suburban street was completely dark and dead. Johnny was standing at the end of my bed in his jeans and mustard jumper. I managed to stop myself from screaming as he proclaimed, ‘Catriona Marsden, I am in love with you!’

  That was the night we had sex. The night I lost my virginity. We’d had so much touching over the preceding months that it wasn’t sore, but there was no need for me to cry afterwards.

  Come to think of it, my closeness to Johnny increased with Anna’s irritability. She hated Spider because he spat, Johnny because he swore, Johnny’s father because he gave people parking tickets, me because I stopped answering her nightly calls.

  ‘He came onto me!’ she said. ‘He comes onto everyone. Can you not see that?’

  ‘You’re pathetic,’ I replied.

  Our walks along the beach became harder to fit in. Or was it winter setting in? I began to find Anna’s questions suffocating. Why did she make up lies about him snogging girls and making passes? What did it matter if I hadn’t climaxed or if we didn’t use condoms? Before I knew it, a month had gone by and Anna and I had not spoken. Soon after, I discovered that she’d thrown a big sixteenth birthday party in Leith Links Bowling Club where she’d snogged a netballer from Stirling called Miranda in full view of everyone, including her folks.

  I’ve never experienced anything as intense as my first love. Since Johnny, I haven’t closed my eyes and pressed my forehead against another forehead for more than five minutes. I haven’t twisted my tongue around and around, and then around some more, unworried about something as unimportant as air. I haven’t waited by the phone and prayed for it to ring. I haven’t sat on the toilet every hour, on the hour, to check my pants for blood.

  Anna was right – we should have used condoms. I was sixteen, studying for my Highers, and ten days late. I’d told Johnny on day five, and he’d disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Eventually, I rang Anna. It was awkward. She had to be persuaded to come over and when she did, she had an ‘I told you so’ look on her face. When I asked her about her party and about Miranda, she said it was private, actually.

  I said, ‘What do you think being ten days overdue is?’

  She said, ‘Well, I told you to use contraception, Catriona!’ That evening, the phone rang.

  ‘Sorry,’ Johnny said. ‘I freaked out.’

  An hour later, I met him and Spider at Waverley Station.

  ‘We’ll sort it,’ said Spider, winking at Johnny as we walked through Princes Street Gardens. Johnny grabbed my arms from behind and held them at my back. Spider poised himself to punch me in the stomach.

  He didn’t hit me, of course. They laughed.

  I didn’t.

  But that night, I got my period.

  It was inevitable that we’d break up. We were together for four years – from the age of fifteen to nineteen. The first year was the best and the worst. Our relationship was agonising, a long series of wonderful moments to dwell on and fret over. We seemed to be the only people in the world. Touching each other seemed to be the only thing of any significance. And we did. Anywhere we could. In the Botanic Gardens, by the Water of Leith in Stockbridge, on trains, in cars, in cinemas, up lanes.

  The second year was our full-on sex year. Once we’d done it, we couldn’t stop. We promised we would do it every single day. We didn’t, but almost.

  The tingles had gone by our third year. Conflicting elements re-entered our lives: study for me, disappearing acts and partying for Johnny.

  By year four we realised that not breaking up would mean getting married, having kids, never having sex with anyone else and turning thirty feeling like we’d missed out. Johnny would end up buying a motorbike or a speedboat, and I’d lose weight and get an asymmetrical haircut.

  You don’t stay together at nineteen. You stay together at thirty-three.

  We both knew it. I’d started the second year of my Fine Art degree at the University of Edinburgh. Johnny had just lost his fifth crap job as a barman. I’d started wanting to dress him and had in fact hidden his mustard jumper in his dad’s tool shed. I’d long stopped wanting sex and had begun to wonder what Anna meant about him coming onto girls and me not having a climax. Spider’s spitting had started to irritate me. And then, one day, I heard myself say, ‘If you get one more tattoo, it’s over, Johnny, and I mean it!’

  That night, he got two more tattoos – big blue birds they were, flying from his shoulder blades. He showed me them in the Hammer Bar in Glasgow, then told me he was leaving Scotland to work in an opal mine in South Australia.

 
; At the age of thirty-six, he was murdered – by me, apparently. The headline in the Scotsman said: ‘Man (36) Murdered.’

  8

  ‘We’re suing!’ Mum said, plonking a wad of A4 pages on the table. Anna had obviously printed out the manuscript for her too.

  ‘I’m so sorry this has happened, Cat, my love. This is Matthew Rowden, from Harper, Rowden, Mitchell & McDaid. He’s taking over during Peter Harper’s paternity leave. As far as we know, the Edgley woman is in Italy. Matthew’s already contacted the publishers, and is doing everything he can to track her down. There’s no way the book will be published.’

  My feelings for my mother fluctuated. Sometimes I believed her to be my best friend, someone I could say anything to and trust with my life, like Anna. Other times I felt as if she was conspiring against me, not telling me things, perhaps even using me, meaning me harm. As I sat opposite her in the visits area, it was the latter set of feelings that dominated. I felt as if it had been forever since I’d talked to her alone. I felt as if our most intimate discussions had always been in front of an audience. As a child it was teachers and friends. As an adult, it was a never-ending stream of acquaintances who’d seen me on the television and wanted decorating advice. Lately, it was writers, lawyers and journalists. I started to wonder what it might be like to have a solo conversation with my mother. Would she ask me a question? Would she wait for me to answer it? Would she hold my hand? Tell me about her garden? Let silence be the other presence at our table?

  I paused. ‘Can I talk to you alone for a moment?’ I hadn’t said this out loud. It remained a persistent nagging noise in my head throughout the visit. If I had, and if she’d agreed, would I have been able to ask her what I wanted to ask her?

  ‘I’m awful, amn’t I, Mum? Am I? Is that me, Mum, in the book? Is any of that really me?’ I didn’t know, honestly. I didn’t know who I was, who Mum was, who anyone was any more. I started to think about what my dad had said to his friends, that Mum wasn’t so nice, not so good.