Apple Tree Yard

by Louise Doughty

  But there must have come a point – and my dear, I wonder how long it took – when the two sheared halves of your brain rejoined to face the new reality. You were once a cop, after all, so you are a man who has had professional training in how to think on his feet. I wonder if you did it consciously or subconsciously – I’m not sure it matters. Either way, perhaps after some minutes of walking in slow circles, you must have chosen your route out of there, out of the circles. Your preparations for all eventualities, the clothing, the shoes, all that meant that you could not call 999 and report an accidental death. You were experienced enough, calm and rational enough, to know that. If it had not been for the preparations you so carefully made for a fantasy murder, you might have stood a much better chance of getting away with the real one. You could have told them what really happened, confessed to a fight in which a man had been accidentally killed, be distraught about the whole thing. Anyone with any sense knows that, long term, that would be the best way to avoid a murder charge. But everything you had done up until then to feed your fantasies was exactly what made reality look suspicious. So you gambled, with your freedom, and mine. You were not thinking of me sitting outside in the car – you were not thinking of me at all. You were thinking that if you called an ambulance now, that would be it – but if you took the high-risk strategy of fleeing, there was a chance, a very slender one, but a chance – if the body was not discovered for a while, if the CCTV cameras between that flat and the station were not working, as they often aren’t…

  At some point, maybe there was some satisfaction in your head. It had finally happened. Your paranoid fantasies had come true. You were not just a man bored with his job who had invented a more exciting narrative – the narrative was a reality now. You had made it so. I imagine you would have swung into action quite efficiently. You would have addressed the issue of forensic evidence, retracing your steps from the moment you entered the flat, wiped any surfaces that needed wiping with a cloth you found in the kitchen, the one that smeared George Craddock’s dilute blood in a circle on the floor. You would have checked carefully that nothing was left behind. You would have gone to the hallway mirror and wiped any traces of blood from your face or hair. Only when these tasks were performed would you have stood behind the entrance door to the flat and taken the spare trousers out of your Nike hold-all and put them on, changed your trainers. At this point, I imagine you to be in the grip of something close to euphoria.

  The sight of me, sitting in the car, patiently waiting for you, was that not enough? Was that not enough for the sobering reality of what you had done, what you were risking on my behalf as well as your own but without my permission – was there no point at which you looked at my face, as you approached the car and felt some small twinge of compunction? You forgot me, by which I mean, you forgot me as a real person, with her own needs and desires, her own narrative. By then, I was no more than a bit part in your story. Drive.

  *

  Courtroom Number Eight, Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, EC1, so clean and modern and efficient – but even in this sterile, wooden room, with the square fluorescent lights in the ceiling and the blanket of weariness cast over its habitués, even here, there is an unmistakable frisson as the jury returns to the room. I know, just as you know, how much is at stake for you and me, but it is only as we are all bid to rise that I am reminded by looking around at everyone else in the courtroom just how much is at stake for them too. Each victory or defeat counts for or against a counsel. Ms Bonnard is compulsively clearing her throat. The judge has made his feelings known in the summing up, so his reputation within the business is at stake too – this is the only time in the whole trial, after all, that he is not the undisputed autocrat. The police officers know what result they want, of course, and DI Cleveland is adjusting his tie, flipping it beneath his jacket and shrugging his shoulders in a small movement, as if making himself neat will produce the right result. Even the jury who are now entering from the same door as the judge – they have been held in a special room while they deliberate – even the all-powerful jury don’t get to leave this court unscathed. In a few moments, at their say-so, a man and a woman will either walk free from the Old Bailey, to return to their families, their homes, their ordinary lives – or they will be taken away, to the underworld, another world, for many years to come. The members of the jury will have to live with that decision for the rest of their lives.

  As I rise, I glance up at the public gallery, and it is only then that I see, sitting next to Susannah – my husband, Guy. He is staring at me, waiting for me to look up and see him. He is dressed in a pale blue shirt and a blazer, his thick straight hair clean and his face broad and open, looking at me as if drinking in the sight of me, trying to work out everything about how I am. It is too much. My knees begin to shake; my life, my real life, up there, a few feet away – I know he wants to support me but it is a torment. I try a smile, and he tries one back, but even he cannot prevent the fear from showing in his face. Susannah gives me a hopeful grin and Guy lifts a hand in a tiny wave of acknowledgement, a little apologetically I think, because he must know that his unexpected appearance will be making my head reel. ‘Sorry,’ he mouths. Later, he will tell me that he kept his promise to stay away from the trial, but he had made no such promise about staying away for the verdict. He came back from Morocco after a weekend with Carrie and Sath and Adam. He has been at our home the whole time. Susannah has been calling him with daily updates. He knows everything, as he stands there in the gallery and I stand in the dock, and we look at each other for a moment or two before we turn our heads to watch the jury file in.

  I am standing. Miraculously, I am on my feet. It is miraculous because I cannot breathe. My chest is like a sack of rocks pressing against the rest of my body and I even have time to consider, briefly, if this might be what having a heart attack is like. I know it isn’t, though. The onset of a heart attack is often accompanied – I was once told by a friend in cardiology – by an overwhelming sense of doom, a black descent into a world that feels unfamiliar but inevitable. My breathlessness isn’t producing that result, on the contrary, it is sending me soaring – I am as light as air, for it has suddenly come to me: it is nearly over, thank God thank God… I am already imagining stumbling from the dock, walking through the court and out into the corridor. I am imagining running down the stairs to the exit, Susannah – and now Guy, yes, Guy – waiting for me in the street outside. I permit myself the images I have been avoiding for the whole of my trial: my kitchen, the shabby leather armchair by the double doors that lead out into the garden, where I often sit with a coffee – at this time of year it will be bathed in sun; Guy upstairs working, distracted and absent, my son sitting on the back step smoking on one of his rare visits home; my daughter cooking with her boyfriend in the kitchen – they like to cook for us when they visit. These are the separate but interlinked pictures that appear in my head, snapshots of my previous life, my domestic life, it is all so near to me now. When will the kids be back from Morocco? This weekend, they said, come what may.

  But first, the verdict.

  *

  Relationships are about stories, not truth. Alone, as individuals, we each have our own personal mythologies, the stories we tell in order to make sense of ourselves to ourselves. That generally works fine as long as we stay sane and single but the minute you enter an intimate relationship with another person there is an automatic dissonance between your story about yourself, and their story about you.

  I remember this from the trial. I remember how, when the matronly Mrs Price rose to her feet to give her opening statement, she was so calm, so well prepared. She had her story, complete. She did not need even to clear her throat. She glanced at her feet briefly before she began, to indicate, I guessed, her humility before the truth she was about to outline for the court. It wasn’t her story, her downward glance seemed to say, oh no, it was what really happened. Whatever my feelings towards that woman and the processes she rep
resented, I had sufficient detachment to observe and admire this: she had a hypothesis, just as I have hypotheses. Hers was tested by assertion, by trickery if you like, by the misplacement of evidence from context to create that smoke and mirrors effect, so I’m not sure that the scientific analogy really holds water, but it did make me think this much: as a scientist, I have told more stories than I ever realised, or admitted to. You, Mark Costley, were a fantasist, a person who could only manage his normal life as long as it was propped up by a series of self-flattering tales in which you were a spy or master seducer or avenging hero and who knows what else. Your stories had become so necessary they had claimed you, detached you from any sense of objective reality. And the end of all our stories was this: you and I went to prison.

  24

  The day after my mother died, I followed my father from room to room. I did not approach him, or try to touch him. I was not seeking physical comfort, merely his presence. My mother had discharged herself from the Community Residential Adult Mental Health Unit in Redhill – she had been doing well in the weeks running up to her death, but later there was an enquiry about why she had been allowed to leave when she was known to be at risk. She had walked until she found the railway line – the same line my father used to commute to work in London and the same line I myself would use in years to come. She found a place where the line was accessible by easing through a wire fence – she must have ducked her head to get between the wires – and a scramble down a steep bank. A witness saw her descend the bank by sitting on her backside with her knees raised and her feet flat against the soil, placing her hands either side of her body, letting herself down the bank slowly, as if she was afraid of falling. The driver of the train said at the inquest that although she was standing in the middle of the tracks, between the rails, she was facing away from the oncoming train, and he wondered if she did that because she didn’t want her face to haunt him. I wasn’t allowed to attend the inquest but I heard my father and aunt talking about it later, what the driver said, and how warm it had been in the coroner’s court, when it was so cold outside.

  My memories of my mother are still sharp, although there are only a few of them. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her, doing cat’s cradle – I must have been four or five at the time. We were doing it with rough green wool. She was holding her fingers up for me to weave the wool and I was singing some vague chant I had learned at school. We weren’t very good at it, not as good as I was with my friends anyway – it was more a holey cobweb than a cradle. Her legs were bare, tucked neatly under the chair in which she was sitting. Her ankles were chunks of bone above her slippers.

  The day after my mother died, I followed my father from room to room. When he got up from the kitchen table to go and sit in the sitting room, I trailed after him, and sat down on the arm of the chair he was in. When he went upstairs, I followed him up there too, and when he went into the bathroom and locked the door, unable to face me I think, I sat down outside and leaned my back against the door, hugging my knees and waiting for him to come out.

  *

  It is spring, the year after our trial. I am at home. My son has put up a hammock in the garden, a long one made of tough blue plastic rope. He has hung it between the two apple trees. I spend a lot of time in the hammock, wrapped in a grey blanket that Guy found in the spare room. It is unseasonably warm for April. I lie wrapped in the blanket, swinging gently between the apple trees, looking at the post-winter sky.

  I was released from Holloway two days ago. Adam has been living at home the whole time I have been in prison. He says he has had enough of the scene in Manchester but I’m not sure I believe him. I think he may have moved back home to be with Guy. I was worried that my release might drive him away again, but when they brought me home he took me out into the garden and showed me the hammock, and said, ‘It’s so warm, we thought that, after everything – we thought you might like to be outside.’

  That night, the night of my release, there was no alcohol or celebration. Carrie arrived from Leeds and, as she had driven down, she came with a car boot full of fresh food. Everything she made for me that evening was fresh: four different salads, an arrangement of exotic fruit on a platter. We all sat round the kitchen table, more or less in silence, and they all watched me pick at the fruit with a fork.

  Carrie could only stay one night, then she had to get back up north. She and Sathnam are getting married in the summer. She has a lot to arrange.

  Guy and Adam are looking after me. I see them exchange looks across me from time to time.

  Sometimes, as I lie in the hammock, I can hear the phone ring inside the house. The back door to the kitchen has been left open, so I can hear the murmur of Guy’s voice as he answers. ‘Yes, she’s fine,’ I imagine him saying. ‘She’s very thin, but she’s fine.’

  Adam has been helping his father clear out the garage. He looks well, and wiry, in baggy combat trousers and a cut-off T-shirt, still with the stubble that suits him. I know that when I am well again, there is a danger I will drive him away but I am not well. I lie in the hammock and stare at the sky.

  *

  It is just over two years since you and I first met. I was released from prison two days ago, after serving three months of a six-month sentence for perjury – I pleaded guilty at the first available opportunity and so received a relatively light sentence at my January trial. I am out on licence. I am free, but not free. If I breach the terms of my licence, I could be recalled at any time. You were found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. You were sentenced to fourteen years in prison. With the time you spent on remand and a reduction for good behaviour, you could be out five or six years from now. I was found not guilty of murder or manslaughter and released from the dock but was arrested for perjury immediately afterwards, in the corridor outside. There were three officers waiting for me as soon as I left Courtroom Number Eight. DI Cleveland followed me out and watched with his pale eyes.

  *

  It worked, partially, your betrayal of me. The scales tipped. My lying to the court made you seem less guilty; the bad things I had done made you seem less bad. You were found guilty of manslaughter but not guilty of murder, on the grounds of loss of control.

  *

  I lie in my hammock and I stare at the sky and I think about you, my lover, Mark Costley, an ex-policeman who worked in an administrative capacity in security at the Houses of Parliament, who liked outdoor sex and spinning dramatic stories because it made him feel less ordinary. The spies didn’t want you, my love. If they had taken you, none of this would have happened.

  My lover, Mark: who or what was he? A man for whom the normal story of life was just too normal, a man who sought thrills, mostly through sex but also through stories, only to find that each successive thrill was not enough? Just as George Craddock’s pornography habit became more and more hardcore until it left him unable to make the distinction between the thoughts in his head and the real thing, so your need for an exciting story about yourself led to sexual adventures, to full-blown affairs and then to violence. The trouble with stories is, they are addictive.

  *

  Guy comes and stands on the back step. He sees me looking at him and smiles. He has a cup of tea in his hand. He raises it to his mouth, takes a sip, then lifts the cup in a gesture that means, do you want one? I shake my head, close my eyes so that he will go away. When I open them, he is still watching me, but then Adam appears at his elbow, holding up a sanding machine that we must have had for over twenty years. Guy and Adam exchange some joke about the sanding machine, and go back into the house.

  About an hour later, Adam emerges onto the back step, sits down without looking at me and begins to roll a roll-up. I look up at the house to see that Guy is standing in an upstairs window, staring out into the garden. He is on his mobile phone. He is talking while gazing out at the middle distance but after a moment or so, his gaze drops, and he sees me looking up at him. Immediately, instinctively, he turns away,
turns his back and walks away from the window so I can’t watch him while he talks. I wonder who he is talking to. I wonder if it’s Rosa.

  *

  Later that day, Susannah comes round. She comes out into the garden. She is holding a disposable cardboard tray with four styrofoam cups of coffee wedged into it, and a paper bag full of pastries. She stands for a minute, framed in our back doorway, her tall slim figure motionless, and looks at me in the hammock as if she is trying to make a brief assessment before she approaches. Then she smiles, walks over, picking her way carefully across the grass in pale wedge sandals. She sits on the edge of the rockery a couple of feet away, puts down the tray, carefully extracts two of the cups, brings one over to me. ‘Hey you,’ she says, and bends to kiss me, holding the hot coffee out of harm’s way, ‘I thought you’d maybe like a proper coffee.’ She puts the bag of pastries down on my stomach, where it remains untouched.

  I wiggle my way up, awkwardly, in the hammock, so I can sip the coffee without pouring it over myself. Susannah returns to the rockery with her cup, where she can tip her face to the sun. We sit sipping our coffee in silence for a while. Then we talk for a bit, in a desultory fashion, about how I am and how she is, about what I might do in the coming weeks, about how I will have to take it easy for a while. At one point, she looks towards the house and says, ‘I thought Guy and Adam were coming out to join us.’ I don’t reply.

  Susannah, the friend I dared not hope for when I was growing up; I see her hesitate. She is struggling with something, pausing, wanting to say it with care. I wait, and eventually she starts quietly, ‘Every day, you know, every day at the end of court. It was always so terrible, leaving the public gallery and looking down at you, knowing you were going to be led away by those people, that you had no choice, that you were going back to prison. Every day I would go down the steps into the outside and it didn’t matter if it was pouring with rain, I would breathe in deeply and I couldn’t believe that I could just walk away and you couldn’t. It was so strange. And I’d see that old couple sometimes, talking, the old bloke was the worst, going on about how, in his opinion, you were worse than he was. I nearly pushed the old bastard down the stairs…’ Then she gives me an infinitely gentle look. ‘First thing I had to do, before I even got on the train, was ring Guy, every day, I had to ring him. He made me promise. Every day, I’d go and collect my phone from that café and then I would stand outside, even if it was raining, and turn it on immediately, and I wouldn’t even check my messages or emails because I knew Guy would be waiting for my call. And every day I’d have to tell him everything. What did you look like? Were you holding up? Who had been in court that day and how had they done? Was our barrister doing a good job? How did I think it was going? I’d be walking down to the station, and I’d go past the bar where the cops were all drinking pints and I’d cross the road keeping one eye on the buses and taxis because that bit of the road was always really busy and the whole time I’d be talking to Guy. Even if my train was due, I couldn’t go into the station in case I lost the signal before I told him everything.’