Kay McGee

known associates

She removed the marker pen from her suit jacket pocket and held it against the door of the toilet cubicle, pausing for a brief moment to decide on the type of scrawl to adopt.

ChEstNuT iS a PeEdO

She stepped back and tilted her head to the side. Too much? She scored it out. No need to overdo the spelling bluff, she decided. Too obvious.

CHESTNUT IS A PEDO

She gave a businesslike nod and returned the pen to her pocket. She sat down on the toilet seat, satisfied with her handiwork. Her eyes darted around the space above the cubicle door for CCTV cameras. Are they allowed to put cameras in public toilets? she wondered, and weighed up the likelihood of being caught. Surely impossible. But if she were to be caught, would she be... arrested? Would she lose her job? Reaching down for the can of Red Stripe resting against the toilet brush holder, she decided that the worst case scenario, and sadly the most likely outcome, was that Chestnut would never bring a date to this pub any more, rendering it unlikely that her message would reach its target audience. There was also the possibility that he was currently deployed, or had moved out of the city. There had, for a while before the incident, been talk of him being moved down to Portsmouth. On a more positive note, his patently ridiculous nickname was a factor that would work in her favour. This was a deeply reassuring notion.

At least, she thought, I’ll never have to go to back to Portsmouth. Or go to any more of those dinners or balls where I feel like so much matter out of place.

The last Navy dinner they’d been to had been in Dunfermline. It was mainly memorable for her because Chestnut had outright forgotten her name when introducing her to a senior officer.

‘It’s Aoife,’ she’d said, shaking the officer’s hand and pretending not to notice his slightly leering expression. 

Chestnut had waited stoically until the officer had moved away. ‘Sorry, I got confused,’ he’d said, ‘it’s just because I usually call that man “Sir”.’

‘But you don’t call me “Sir”. And you live with me. Now he thinks I am some kind of escort.’

He’d smiled vaguely as if conceding that this was likely, but of no consequence to him.

The dinner table conversation that night had been as offensively banal as usual. Aoife had been largely ignored, except by two women seated nearby, a pair she’d identified almost immediately as classic flag-wavers. They interacted with her merely to get the measure of her commitment to the forces’ WAG lifestyle and to repeatedly assert the superiority of proper Navy life down in Portsmouth. One of them made a curious point of gesturing disdainfully at each course that was brought out and rolling her eyes at it for the benefit of the other women. Meanwhile, the men seemed to Aoife to communicate with one another solely via generically approving-sounding braying noises.

Aoife felt herself retreating inwards and wishing for it all to be over. She was always wishing for things to be over, she noted – events, films, conversations, walks, meals, cigarettes – even things she had been looking forward to, and wondered if her current feelings were merely reflective of her nihilistically short attention span. Just then, as if on cue, one of the WAGs gestured dramatically around the dining hall. ‘In Portsmouth, this entire room would be purely for desserts,’ she said. ‘Just tables and tables of different kinds of puddings. And’ – she paused and pointed her finger in Aoife’s direction – ‘everyone would be wearing the appropriate attire. Nothing that stops below the knee. Calf-length minimum.’

Aoife looked at her not quite knee-length skirt and suddenly felt something. It was impotent, or stillborn, whatever the thing was that she was feeling, but it was there. She smiled at the woman while she formulated an appropriate response.

‘Ah, but tell me...’ Aoife paused for a moment to drain her wine glass. ‘What would you say are your top three historical examples of inbreeding?’ Another pause. ‘Because my personal hands down favourite has to be the Hapsburg chin.’

The woman seemed to look through Aoife, like she hadn’t heard her say a word, then returned her attention to her dessert. Chestnut gave an oblivious half-smile in their general direction.

‘Chestnut, I'm just asking the ladies at the table: has anyone here ever wanted to fellate someone so hard that they called the police? What about the fire and rescue service? Has anyone, celebrity or someone real, ever induced you to want to commit a terror-level blow job?’

‘Sorry, darling, what was that? I didn't catch you,’ he said, immediately returning to face one of the men to resume the braying.

‘Who was your favourite Nazi?’ She raised her voice and gave a conspiratorial nod in his direction.  ‘... Discounting Goering.’

Everyone at the table then abruptly turned to face the DJ, who had until this point evaded any particularly direct attention. He’d begun to blast out ‘In the Navy’. A ripple of ostentatiously false laughter spread through the room. Several couples immediately got up to dance, exaggeratedly mouthing THEY WANT YOU! THEY WANT YOU! THEY WANT YOU THEY WANT YOU AS A NEW RECRUIT! at each other. Many others made a display of expressing faux-disgust or embarrassment, pointedly folding their arms in cartoonish disapproval, as if this was the first time this had ever happened at one of these events. Aoife grimaced and a waiter topped up her glass.

She didn’t really remember the rest of the night, thankfully. She realised she didn’t actually remember much about the weeks that followed – the rest of their relationship before the incident. Was it possible that Chestnut knew that night how everything would pan out? She discounted the notion. He had too many key bits of him missing, she thought, for him to be capable of any kind of forethought like that. Just like he had too many bits missing to be capable of genuine emotion, or to ever commit to an opinion on anything, or to do anything except follow orders, or to recognise when someone was in need.

She heard a buzzing sound from within the toilet cubicle and realised her mobile was on the floor by her feet. She picked it up. A text from her aunt. HAVE YOU BEEN TO DR ABOUT BLOATING YET. PS COLEEN NOLAN OFF LOOSE WOMEN IS A FUCKING REPTILE. She returned her phone to the floor.

Since she’d very recently committed at least two criminal offences in this pub toilet, she decided that lighting up a cigarette and smoking it there and then would not be an especially inappropriate course of action, and it would probably be satisfying in a nebulously post-coital kind of way. She retrieved the packet of Chesterfield Blue from her pocket and fumbled for her lighter. Her relief upon finding it disappeared when she tried to ignite it and discovered it was out of gas. Click, click, click, click. Nothing. ‘Ah, fuck it,’ she said, dropping the cigarette between her thighs into the toilet bowl.

Gaslighting. Now, there was a very recent but very prominent new word in her vocabulary. She tried not to say it herself in her appointments with her therapist, Colin, as she had started to notice an increasingly widespread tendency to overuse emotively charged labels, such as ‘gaslighting’, ‘abusive’, ‘toxic’ and ‘narcissist’ to make a subjective narrative sound more objective, which made her cringe and struck her as disingenuous. There was no way of knowing for sure, but she felt pretty sure Colin approved of her in this, and she found that idea incredibly satisfying. It gave it more gravity and validation when he used words like that – never to define Chestnut, or her mother, or even her father, as characters – but he would sometimes describe their individual actions in these sorts of terms, and it prompted a curious feeling in her: a sudden and profound state of relaxation that radiated from the core of her. She considered joking to Colin that he could have a lucrative sideline making very, very niche ASMR YouTube videos, but she knew he wouldn't laugh. He never did.

She had found she could achieve a similar zen state by compiling a mental list, which she affectionately titled CHESNEY ‘CHESTNUT’ MCANDREW’S GREATEST HITS. It made the narrative feel linear and easier to follow and it stopped her from questioning if she had got it all wrong, and if it was her fault. It stopped her thinking about the version of events that he would tell his friends and future partners to elicit sympathy.

•       Telling her that the reason he never contacted her during a nine-month deployment was because he was simply too anxious to use a phone, and this was something, as someone with serious anxiety herself, she should understand.

•       Insisting that he was especially anxious when on relief at port, so when he was in a hotel room in some exotic location for four days – during which he was repeatedly tagged on Facebook as ‘checking in’ to establishments with names like ‘FANTASY PALACE’  and ‘FOR YOUR EYES ONLY: GENTLEMEN’S CLUB’ – there was even less chance of him finding the strength and resilience to contact her. Again, something that should be painfully obvious to someone like Aoife.

•       Retracting his previous statement that he was addicted to pornography when she enquired about an Instagram account in his name that was full of lewd images of young women that she personally found degrading and upsetting. The fact that said account was also attached to his email address was coincidence, somehow, as was the fact it was followed by a few of his friends. And, oddly, his dad. Of course the account was not his, and he was viscerally offended that she even had to ask.

•       His assertion that if she ever witnessed him do something that concerned her, she should just assume that she had got it wrong because asking him about it would upset him and diminish the trust in their relationship.

•       After the first break up, he had insisted he had to be friends with her. He just wanted to be there for her, for always, as she’d been there for him throughout his deployment. He wanted her to know that even though things hadn’t worked out between them romantically, he still loved her in a platonic way, and she could always come and stay at his flat if she needed to get away from her parents. Then when she took him up on this, and had turned up at his door, incoherently wailing and sporting a black eye, he had said that she was either his girlfriend now or she was using him.

•       Telling the man in the pub who’d prevented her from taking all the pills, and cleared all the packets out of her bag, that he’d come and get her right away, and then going to collect a takeaway of a kebab instead.

•       Call-back again to the kebab. It is surely deserving of its own space on this list, a tellingly pedestrian culinary choice for such an occasion.

Colin had been praising her recently for her ‘excellent progress’. She considered that she had perhaps concealed from him the extent to which she continued to be consumed by desire for revenge, and what Colin would say about her progress over the last few months if he saw her right in this moment. Even if he sympathised and told her the bit again about how all feelings, including obsessive, petty destructiveness, were valuable and worth exploring, he’d probably still be somewhat concerned that after almost a year of continuous plotting, toilet door-based defamation was the best she could come up with. She had to admit it perhaps wasn’t indicative of someone back at peak performance, mentally.

Another buzzing sound from the ground, this time continuous. It was Hazel phoning her. She answered and cleared her throat in conscious preparation for the impersonation of someone normal.

‘Hello?’

‘Where the hell are you, man? You’ve been gone ages.’

‘Still in the bathroom, sorry. I’ll just be a minute.’

‘Hurry up, will you? Creepy Simon is here, for God’s sake. He’s brought the sisterwives with him.’

‘OK, OK. Let me just, like, flush and wash my hands and stuff.’

‘OK. You shouldn’t be using your phone on the toilet, by the way. You’ll give yourself pinkeye.’

‘Right, well. I better hang up then. See you in a second.’

‘Bye.’

Aoife felt the familiar invigorating thrill that came from getting a ticking off from Hazel. Hazel’s profound disgust of insincerity of any kind had, she realised, saved her many times over. Aoife had finally taught herself to cook because of repeated private shaming by Hazel. Not long after that, Hazel’s impassive, patient expression had silently taught her that talking endlessly about minor problems to someone who has survived more than their fair share themselves comes across as self-absorbed, and there are types of friendships where some things are just implicitly understood.

It had been Hazel who had turned up at the pub to get her on The Night of the Kebab. Aoife had slept in Hazel’s kids’ room after that until she’d found a flat. During that time she had learned very quickly not to leave cigarette butts in someone’s garden. She had learned that you can sob and wail incoherently in someone’s face, get snot on them and be shaking all over and they will still be there when you’ve finished. She had learned that you can do a sudden, impromptu version of Helene Weigel’s silent scream with The Tellytubbies playing in the background and someone will see you do it and they won’t laugh at you.

She pictured her friend just now, chatting to the sisterwives and looking through Creepy Simon as if he wasn’t there. She had a sudden image of Hazel squeezing her hand in the ambulance. It was exactly the same squeeze as she’d given her before, in Zaragoza, on a swing at 4am.

Aoife stood up and removed the sharpie from her pocket. She scored out what she’d written on the door. She flushed the toilet for no real reason and left the cubicle. Seconds later she returned to retrieve the Red Stripe can, toying for a few moments with either shoving it in the toilet bowl or putting it in the sanitary bin. But in the end she picked up her own rubbish, disposed of it, and went to show up.

Kay McGee is a writer and critic from Edinburgh. Her stories, essays and reviews have featured in various publications in the UK and the USA. Her work often focuses on personal or collective trauma, and individual routes to healing and recovery. Twitter: @KayMcGeeWriter