In Your Defence

by Sarah Langford

  Later that morning, as wind whipped grey sea spray on to the windows of the ferry, I looked at what I had written on the page of my notebook:

  R v George Clarke

  10:10 a.m. No evidence offered. Case dismissed.

  I did not know what to say to George afterwards. Unlike Derek, neither he nor I had grown up in the shadow of a law that made a man who loved another man a criminal. I knew only a little of chemical castration, of undergoing the cure, of undercover pretty police officers tasked with luring men behind bars. Even long after private homosexuality was decriminalized, a public gesture of affection – a hand held in the street, a kiss – could still mean an arrest for gross indecency. Derek had been almost thirty when the law had changed, by which time his fear of it was embedded. He had therefore lived a double life, keeping his nature a secret from all who knew him, terrified by the prospect of being uncovered. I was ashamed that this offence still existed. I was ashamed that the decision to drop the case had come too late. I was ashamed that the humiliation of exposure was, even now, worth more than someone’s life. But I was also ashamed of something deeper: of my hubris, my delight in the details of the case, my thrill at the prospect of winning and my failure to remember the deeply felt pain that lay behind every life I rifled through. Behind the pages of the law and the court stamps lay secrets and histories, ruptured dreams and biting shame. The consequences of every case ripped far further than the courtroom. That, I thought as I pulled my wheelie case off the ferry, was something I would never forget again.

  3

  Saba

  Reading Magistrates’ Court

  Children Act 1989

  Section 8 – Child arrangements orders and other orders with respect to children1

  (1) In this Act ‘child arrangements order’ means an order regulating arrangements relating to any of the following—

  (a) with whom a child is to live, spend time or otherwise have contact, and,

  (b) when a child is to live, spend time or otherwise have contact with any person.

  A MONTH BEFORE I first met Saba, I found myself at Southampton Crown Court sitting opposite two men who were speaking at length to one another while successfully ignoring me. It did not matter how intently I watched them – followed the jabs of their hand gestures, the furrows of their brows, the rise and fall of their voices – I was unable to understand anything they said. Eventually I held up my hand to stop them.

  ‘Please, Mr Khan, as I said before, your job is not to advise my client, nor discuss the evidence with him. Just tell me exactly what Mr Begum’s answer is; no more, no less.’

  The interpreter, Mr Khan, turned to me. He looked indignant. ‘I trying, Madam, but he wants talk with me about its case,’ he said, gesturing to my client, whose eyes flicked from him to me. I had been trying to extract the details of a fight outside a pub in which my Pakistani client – due to begin his trial for grievous bodily harm at any moment – had fractured a man’s eye socket. The complainant’s drunkenness and resulting concussion meant that he could barely remember a thing about it. The only witness willing to give a statement was a security guard who had been standing outside the pub, although he had been dealing with another fracas and had not seen the blow. My client’s description of what had happened would, therefore, be largely unchallenged. He had every chance of being acquitted and walking free if only he were able to explain himself. If he could not do that and was convicted, then his life would be changed for ever. He would almost certainly be sent to prison, but he also then risked deportation back to the country of his birth after his sentence was over. I leaned across the table, urging him to look at me.

  ‘Mr Begum. When the other man was shouting at you, how did you feel?’

  Come on, I thought, willing him on. Give me the words I need to save you: I was terrified. I didn’t understand him. The man was much bigger than me and very aggressive, waving his arms around and shouting loudly. He came towards me. I thought he was going to hit me. I was trapped, there was nowhere for me to go. So to get him away from me, I hit him before he could hit me.

  If the jury decided that the cracking of Mr Begum’s knuckles upon another man’s face was a reasonable and proportionate defence against an oncoming attack then he was entirely within the law, no matter that his was the first fist to swing. But my client had to say the words himself – I could not give them to him, no matter how much I wanted to coax them out.

  I watched helplessly as Mr Khan turned to my client, drew a breath, and spoke urgently and unintelligibly to him. The translation lasted a long time and required much gesticulation. Mr Begum began to speak, directing his answers at Mr Khan, who made grunting noises in response, nodding and shaking his head in turn. I cut in. I could hear the frustration in my voice but I no longer cared.

  ‘Mr Khan, have you asked Mr Begum my question?’

  Mr Khan turned and, imperiously, replied, ‘I am just doing so, Madam—’

  ‘It’s just that your interpretation seems a great deal longer than my question. Can you please just tell me what he said – it is very important that I have his instructions.’

  Mr Khan’s face twitched. He swept his hand towards Mr Begum.

  ‘He said, he hit the man.’

  It was only the beginning of the week but already I wanted to close my eyes and rest my forehead on the cool tabletop. Before I could reply, Mr Begum’s name blasted out of the tannoy, summoning us into court. I started to my feet, grabbed my wig and flipped it on to my head. This trial was going to start whether we were ready for it, or not.

  I glanced up at the courtroom clock. It was already 4.30 p.m. and the prosecuting barrister was only now beginning his cross-examination of Mr Begum. There was every chance the trial would spill over into a third day. Mentally, I ran through my diary for the week. I would have to call the clerks on my way home and ask them to return the case I had on Wednesday to another barrister. There was still a chance we might finish Mr Begum’s trial by tomorrow. If I returned Wednesday’s matter now it would leave me out of work and pocket. But I couldn’t risk it – the clerks needed to know now so they could find another barrister and get the papers to them in time. I tried to remember what Wednesday’s case was. A hearing in a family matter – the father had applied for residence of his infant daughter. I was representing the mother. I remembered that the solicitor’s letter had explained she was from Bangladesh and spoke little English. I looked up at the witness box as Mr Khan and Mr Begum were reminded by an irritated judge not to confer before the defendant answered questions, and felt weary at the prospect of taking on another case where I could not understand anything my client said.

  Mr Begum’s case did run into Wednesday, but only just. Word by painful word his evidence came out. I was therefore able to say, in my closing speech to the jury, that Mr Begum was the man under attack. The words were the ones Mr Khan had given us on Mr Begum’s behalf, but in my order, with my emphasis and in my voice. By midday the jury had returned a sharp, short not guilty verdict. I left court relieved, and waited in the corridor. Mr Begum appeared, grinning.

  ‘Thank you, Madam,’ he said, grasping my hand. ‘I am very thankful for everything you did.’ It was the first time I had heard him speak English and, although his accent was pronounced, his grammar was perfect. Mr Khan appeared silently alongside him, proffering me his timesheet to sign, then the two men set off down the courthouse stairs together, chatting in their shared language. I watched as Mr Khan clapped my client on the back and laughed, and wondered, for a moment, if I had just been duped. And, maybe, whether the jury – who had been told they were bound by law to give Mr Begum the benefit of any doubts – had too. I walked back to the robing room, feeling uneasy. Had Mr Khan helped my client win by telling him to give evidence which he knew would help his case? Or had he simply tried to explain the nuances of each question, knowing that few direct translations could catch the secret meanings so often hidden within a word? I would never know, but I thought of all the ot
hers I had represented who had given evidence without a translator. Those clients who spoke in their native tongue and were assumed therefore to know the right words but, so often, did not. Was I, in some form or another, their interpreter? It was my job to find ways to draw from my clients what they needed to tell the jury, what they had thought, how they had felt. And then, at the end of the case, to wrap my client’s words up in my own so that their story was told with a fluidity that theirs did not have. So maybe, I thought as I tapped the code into the robing room’s keypad, that really made me no different from Mr Khan after all.

  When Asif Choudhury led a procession of his relatives into Saba’s house, the first thing she thought was that he looked like a pop star. He was older, tall, heavily built and exotic in his worldliness. His dark hair was thick and combed back. He smiled at her and she looked away, flushed with shyness. This man is going to be my husband. She said the mantra silently to herself, in case repetition could reinforce its truth. A few days later, when the marriage ceremony was over and their relatives had drifted away, Asif boarded an aeroplane back to England. Left alone with her family, Saba feared the whole thing might have been a dream.

  Eight months later, Saba’s uncle met her from the airport on the outskirts of London. The next day he drove her north to her new home, and her new husband. Saba’s uncle was married to her mother’s cousin and Saba did not know him well, but he and his wife were the only relatives she had here and she was grateful to them. Her belongings were to follow, so Saba arrived with only one bag of her most precious possessions. It was February, and a foreign grey chill seemed to penetrate through her as she and her uncle walked up the path of the modest terraced house. The front door opened to a pulse of artificial warmth, and Saba could smell cooking that seemed at once familiar and strange. Before her in the gloom of the hallway stood her new mother-in-law. Saba had met her before, of course, at their first introduction and then at the wedding, but away from the heat and light of Bangladesh and the encouragement of her parents, she seemed unrecognizable. Mrs Choudhury was slightly shorter than Saba, but her wide frame and authoritative air made her seem indomitable. After her uncle had left, Saba identified the sensation tugging at her since she arrived in the small house that was now her home. It was fear.

  Asif’s first act of unpredictable violence seemed to Saba afterwards so insignificant that, later, when her lawyers asked her to tell them everything, she almost left it out.

  It was a few days after she had arrived in England. She and Asif were sitting beside one another on their bed, and Saba was absorbed in competing sensations of excitement and strangeness as she tried to grasp that this man was actually her husband. He was scrolling through music videos and Facebook profiles on his mobile phone as they tried to navigate and blend their different worlds. Saba, excited that they might share a love of music, darted across the room to her bag and came back with a book: an album of sorts, into which she had stuck pictures of Bollywood singers and actors she admired. Glued into the middle was a ticket. Saba and some friends had travelled to see their favourite singer in concert and, afterwards, they had waited until he appeared from backstage. With professional ease he had taken the ticket from the pretty, diminutive girls giggling in front of him and, turning it over, had written a note to them. He had signed it with a flourish of kisses underneath his name. As Asif flicked through her book, Saba felt glad that it might make him think her more worldly than she feared she was.

  ‘What’s this? Who wrote this?’ he asked, tapping his large finger on the page with the ticket.

  Saba dipped her head, coyly pleased. She began to tell the story, but before she could finish she realized that Asif was on his feet, shouting words in English that she did not understand. As she watched, he held her book up and began to rip pages from it. He tore out the ticket and shredded it; then he did the same to other pages, yelling, hurling the scraps of paper towards her. Saba watched him, frozen and confused, as the pieces floated impotently to the floor. She became aware of someone else in the room – Asif’s mother – who rounded on her son and ushered him away down the stairs. As he left the room, Asif turned and ripped the spine of the book in two, flicking the pieces at Saba. She flinched away, and when she turned back he had gone. Scattered over the carpet were glossy scraps of colour and dancing limbs, and fragments of kisses on the back of a torn-up ticket.

  Just over six months after arriving in England, Saba discovered that she was pregnant. Her daughter, Nazia, was born the following March as rain sluiced down the hospital window. In November the same year, Asif’s mother took Saba to the doctor. The appointment had been booked to confirm that the pain and bleeding that had crippled Saba over the past two days had, as she suspected, been the end of a second pregnancy. It was a pregnancy she had not wanted, but she tried not to acknowledge her guilty relief that it was now over. The doctor handed Saba a plastic pot and waved her down the corridor to the lavatory.

  Saba sat in the cubicle and looked at the back of the door. On it was a sign, laminated and in many languages, one of which was her own. It was not the first time she had seen it. Every time she had come for her antenatal appointments and afterwards with Nazia, the doctor had given her a plastic pot and sent her to this bathroom.

  If you are the victim of domestic violence but cannot

  talk to us, tear off the strip on the label of your

  urine sample pot and we will get you help.

  From the beginning of their marriage Asif had been violent, but once he saw his child growing inside her his physical abuse of Saba stopped. Instead he found other ways to wear her down. He found fault with her cooking, her cleaning, the way she did the family’s chores. Her very presence seemed to irritate him. Once Nazia was born the physical aggression returned, but because each individual act of his seemed to Saba to be somehow her fault, she tried to discount it. He pushed her off her prayer mat because she had not been listening to him. When she blocked his view of a football match on the television, he kicked her hard on her shins. He grabbed hold of her long, glossy black hair and pulled her back towards him if she turned away while he was shouting at her. After a time, pushes turned to punches, hair-pulling to dragging, a grip on the wrist to an arm pushed up behind her back. And at night she had to lie with him and allow her body to be used for his pleasure and her duty because, as he told her, she had not yet borne him a son and this was what a wife – his wife – needed to do.

  Then, one shocking, shuddering day, while Nazia played on their living-room floor Asif held a kitchen knife to Saba’s throat and she thought she was going to die. She knew then that if she didn’t leave, he might kill her.

  Whenever Saba left the house her husband, mother-in-law or another relative would go with her, explaining that she needed their interpretation. The front door was generally kept locked. She was able to speak to her parents and relatives only on a telephone kept in the downstairs hall next to the living room, to ensure minimal privacy. Asif refused to buy her a mobile phone, saying he could not see her need of it. His mother ruled over the family’s finances. The trip that Saba was supposed to be making back to Bangladesh to introduce her infant daughter to her parents – fearing her elderly and unwell father might die without ever seeing Nazia – was continually postponed until, eventually, Saba stopped asking. In any event, even if she somehow found the money herself she would be unable to go – Asif had handed over her passport to his mother when she first arrived and she had not seen it since.

  A few weeks after Asif threatened her with a knife, the postman rang for a signature on a parcel and Saba saw her chance. She answered the door with Nazia in her arms. As the postman climbed into his van and drove away, she walked swiftly down the path. Then, as she reached for the gate, she felt a burning pain in her scalp – it was someone grabbing her hair, pulling her back. She cried out and raised her hand, letting go of the gate, as her mother-in-law dragged her back towards the house and inside. Saba wept as she watched Mrs Choudhury lock the fro
nt door and take out the key. It was later that night that Saba began to bleed.

  Now she stared at the perforated strip on the label of the sample pot in her hand. She caught the edge of the strip and pulled it free, folding it up and flushing it away with the contents of the bowl. She did not know that the urine sample was not needed, nor that the doctor who had watched her over the months – always flanked by her husband’s family, who spoke on her behalf – had noticed the grip marks on her forearms and the shadows under her eyes, so had asked Saba to give a sample every time she came in the hope that she would read the sign on the back of the door. When Saba returned to the doctor’s room, neither looked at the other as she handed over the pot, wrapped in a paper towel.

  Things then seemed to happen so quickly that, afterwards, Saba’s memories became confused. She remembered the doctor asking her mother-in-law to leave the room with Nazia, claiming that Saba needed to undress and be examined. Alone, in broken English, Saba told her: yes, she wanted the police to come and get her. She remembered the knock on the door of the house; being taken with Nazia to the police station in the back of their car. Somehow her uncle and aunt arrived and took her back to their house in the suburbs of Reading. Asif, she realized, must have called them. She found out afterwards that they had told the police that Saba did not want to press charges; she just wanted her husband to leave her alone.