by Sean Thomas
— The Broken Spears. The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico
Rebecca is shrugging; Murphy:
— … Call me a stupid cow with skates on, but I thought you were doing the Crusades?
— Well
— Too easy was it? Thought you’d tackle a few more subjects? Brainiac
Murphy looks like she’s thinking of another insult; to stop her Rebecca picks up the paperback that Murphy was reading. Slowly Rebecca recites the title, in a similarly stilted way:
— Veiled Voices, an anthology of Arab women’s poetry
Murphy looks vaguely abashed; and a tiny bit proud. Rebecca says:
— Not exactly the lightest of reading … – Checking the title again – Any good?
Murphy shrugs and says:
— Actually, it is … it’s very good, kinda horny
— Kind of horny?
Murphy laughs:
— Well it’s … interestingly confessional – A glance between them; then Murphy shrugs again – OK so I’m easily aroused …
Before Rebecca can ask her next question, her usual question about Murphy’s love life, Murphy has barked
— Fuck, Becs, I have to go. My boss’ll be chewing her arm off. Conceptual dustbin lids don’t sell themselves y’know …
Rebecca smiles:
— No. Hold on. I’ll come with you, I’ve got to buy something from Waterstone’s
— K
Preparing to go, they look around.
— Er …
— Golly …
Hands on hips they assess the mess they have somehow made. Surrounding their lunch spot is a fairy ring of mobile phone cards, choc-bar wrappers, doodled-on diary pages, and bits of cigarette packet. And Aztec history books, scrunched-up tissues, hay-fever nasal sprays, empty mocha coffee cups, Hello! magazine, OK! magazine, Arab women’s poetry paperbacks, and splinters of smeared almond. Murphy laughs; Rebecca laughs. Laughing as one, they stoop to it: with a burst of zeal and energy they bend to collect the rubbish, bag the books, collate the other stuff, and spend a minute mutually grooming grass stalks. Then and only then do they start walking. As they leave Rebecca checks the corner of the lawn where he was; he isn’t.
Ah well …
But he is already just a memory, a memory almost forgotten as they stroll happily across the grass and down the steps that lead under Birkbeck College. This is their normal short cut: today the two old college friends’ route is blocked by crowds of weird people. By bearded blokes in bad Hawaiian shirts, by hairy-legged women with Marxism For The Twenty-First Century laminate badges. Walking past a parade of temporary bookstalls set out in the sun with an array of yellowing Workers Power titles, Murphy finally stops, wrinkles her nose, blurts:
— God, they ming
Rebecca:
— Murf, please
— But they do. They smell. Yuk
— Murphy
— But why? Why do they have to pong? Does it say that in Das Kapital?
The two college friends push through one particularly gamey cell of would-be Irish Republicans from Guildford as Rebecca explains:
— It’s a Marxist Weekend, they take over the Union every spring for a weekend and have … I don’t know … conferences … I suppose …
Evidently unsatisfied by this Murphy stops short on a pavement and starts loudly reading out the signs installed everywhere: the Luton Comrades For A United Ireland poster, the Kidderminster Spartacists Meet In The Marlborough Arms flyer. Then:
— Correct me if I’m wrong, Becs, but didn’t, like, these people lose? Weren’t they like … totally wrong?
— I’m going to Waterstone’s
— Yeah? Try that poetry collection, you might like it …
Rebecca nods. The two of them are on the corner of Malet Place. In the sun Murphy smiles and reaches over and holds Rebecca’s face and kisses her on the cheek.
— And take care, ducks
With that done Murphy twists on a heel, and walks away down the road.
Still stood still, Rebecca watches her friend depart. From this vantage, the slight overfatness of Murphy’s bottom is obvious, despite the pink cardigan tied around. The sight of this tugs at Rebecca. Flushed by something, Rebecca realises that it is actually this, the pathos of Murphy’s self-consciousness, the pathos of Murphy’s awareness of her own physical imperfections, that constitutes a large part of why Rebecca loves Murphy. Considering this, this odd fact, Rebecca gazes, half in reverie, as Murphy suddenly turns, brightly smiles, and does a sarcastically soppy wave back at Rebecca.
Observing her friend’s cheery wave, Rebecca feels overwhelmed. From nowhere, she now feels an engulfing sadness, as if something soon, something looming and near, something awful is about to happen to her dearest friend that should forever change …
Dismissing it from her thoughts Rebecca goes over to Waterstone’s the Bookshop. Pressing glass she enters. Immediately inside she pauses in the welcome cool downdraught from the doorway aircon. Where to? Travel, Cookery, or Magazines? Or Medieval History, as is proper and right? By her self-imposed schedule Rebecca is all too aware that at this moment she shouldn’t even be here: she should be back at the London Uni library reading up Frankish chronicles. Disregarding her postgraduate conscience Rebecca instead makes her way slowly round Fiction, Crime and New Titles, before climbing the black metal stairs, and the second flight of stairs, at the top of which she turns and makes that guilty but familiar, wicked but much loved right turn: into Literature, and Drama, and Poetry, and Art. Her trueloves …
Hours pass, maybe minutes. Rebecca moves from Braque to Brancusi, from Hockney to Biedermeier. Finally she finds a book about French eighteenth-century court portraiture. The engrossing book makes Rebecca wonder how she can relate the sensuality of rococo portraiture to her thesis; she knows she can’t, but hey.
Then Rebecca starts. Something has made her pull her head from the book: some subconscious foreshadowing, some creak in the floorboards. Some noise. Turning, Rebecca sees: him. It is him. The thug. The puppy drowner. The very real subject of her very recent lunchtime daydreams is standing in the doorway pretending to look at the book he is holding. The book is an anthology of love poetry, Rebecca notes: but the way he is not truly reading it makes Rebecca realise, with a surge, that quite possibly his real intention is to talk to her; it seems as if he really wants to be talking to her, to be looking at her.
So this is it; my pounding heart surcease, Rebecca thinks. For the moment he, the thug, does nothing. He appears to be about to say something, he is surely struggling for the right words, but nothing yet. Closing her eyes Rebecca starts on wondering what he will eventually enunciate when he works up the courage; with a pole vault in her heart she considers what cliché’d but lovely line of poetry he’ll choose, how he’ll opt to mark this wonderful, enchanted, never-to-be-forgotten moment in their now forever twinned and linked-together lives by saying thou unravished bride of quietness, or maybe carentan o carentan or just possibly I have desired to go, Where springs not fail, to fields where flies no sharp and sided hail, and a few lilies blow.
— Great arse!
He says.
3
Fleeing the sunshine and the sight of Rebecca, Patrick steps inside a low metal doorway into a tiny badly carpeted lobby, where he is scrutinised by three policemen standing half visible behind big panes of scratched, thickened glass. Patrick leans and explains, through the grille at the bottom of one pane of glass, that he is up for trial. The policeman looks blank, then mutters, then reads from a big book to his side; with a final, diffident glance at Patrick the policeman nods and buzzes a button which slides open the door of a cylindrical plastic airlock to Patrick’s right. Unsure, Patrick turns and steps inside the vertical clear plastic coffin. The circular door behind slides shut; Patrick wonders why the Old Bailey gets its furniture from cheap Seventies BBC space dramas; the arc of transparent plastic that is the door in front jerks open.
Clear of the door
Patrick is beckoned through a metal detector arch by the same policeman who gave him the funny look. The policeman then directs him up some steps and turns away as if he does not want to look at Patrick any more.
Patrick approaches some more steps. These are big steps, bigger steps. This is more like it, thinks Patrick. His shoes tap-dancing on the large marble steps Patrick feels a tiny frisson of aesthetic pleasure as he is guided by the dead architect’s unseen hand up and out into the cool marble spaces of the Central Criminal Court proper.
— Patrick
It is his lawyer; and his lawyer’s junior.
— Hello Mister Stefan
— About time!
— Yes er sorry
— You do remember your bail conditions?
Patrick grimaces inwardly, then outwardly. He does not feel like being ticked off, not now, not here. His lawyer seems to notice this. With a lofty chuckle Stefan places a squeezing hand on Patrick’s shoulder. At the same time, Charlie Juson, his lawyer’s junior, slaps Patrick’s other shoulder. Patrick smiles weakly at this display of slightly awkward mateyness, and stares wonderingly ahead. The last time Patrick saw his brief Robert Stefan QC, Robert Stefan QC was in an open-necked shirt leaning back in a relaxed leather chair in his panelled chambers in the blossomy, vernal, High Middle Ages loveliness of a Maytime Inner Temple, discoursing whisky-in-hand-ishly on his wide knowledge of various sex crimes. Here Stefan is in black with a white horsehair wig on his head: looking very serious.
Back then, two months previously, when Patrick had gone to discuss his hopes, his fears, his case, his evidence, his chances of getting jail, cricket, rugby, the precise meaning of the word ‘consent’ as regards rape trials, Stefan had seemed to Patrick rather young to be a top lawyer, a silk, a Queen’s Counsel: which was both worrying and reassuring. Now, here, in the Old Bailey, Stefan seems older and infinitely more serious; which both reassures and frightens Patrick. So Patrick stands here feeling confused; Stefan talks quickly:
— Don’t worry, we haven’t been called yet
— Right
— Ten thirty I think
— Yes
— But I rather think we’re going to be in Court Eighteen are you feeling alright?
— Patch!
Patrick turns.
— I just saw her mother she was staring at me like
— Anderson!
— Chin up you old twat
— Was that her outside? In the school dress?
— First there’ll be jury selection
— Then evidence in chief
— Talk about hooters!
— Joe
Surrounded by gaggles of over-sarcastic friends and an anxious-looking sister Patrick wonders, slowly. For a moment he feels comforted by this mob-handedness: after all, how can anything go wrong, with all his friends and his sister and probably his mother here and … and …
And then he remembers that if this were his funeral they would still be here, all of them, his friends and family, behaving precisely the same way, being chatty yet sad, feeling guilty but laughing, greeting each other merrily and youthfully and then stopping as soon as they remember where they are. And so now Patrick swoons at the thought that this is indeed his funeral, here, stood in the middle of the marble lobby of the Central Criminal Court of Old Newgate Jail he will be gone and never seen again; will be despatched with due ceremony; and with this thought Patrick feels himself transcend, go out-of-body, feels himself levitate above the vortex of buzzing besuited friends and black-cassocked priests-cum-lawyers … he is ascending … ascending to somewhere, to somewhere where his experience is so beyond what they shall ever experience he is beyond the reach of mutual understanding and they shall none of them ever be friends again.
— Patch you nutter I told you not to rape her
— As I’ve said, with previous convictions, the recommended sentence can …
— Tapir!
Crackling through the noise of his friends and lawyers like someone shouting his name at a party Patrick hears a voice come over the court loudspeakers
—All parties in Skivington please go to Court Number Eighteen
— That’s us
Says Stefan.
Patrick breathes in, breathes out. He sweeps a gaze across the faces in front of him: his lawyer, his friends, his sister. His sister Emily. Emily looks back at him. Her Skivington-blue eyes are slightly moist, her hair slightly dishevelled; her caring for him is evidenced in the lack of care for herself. Holding her brother by his besuited shoulder Emily says:
— Good luck, Patrick
— Yeah mate
Says Joe. Someone else says:
— Give ’em hell, y’wanker
A couple of Joe’s friends have slapped Patrick on the back; Joe has done the same. With his shoulder still smarting, Patrick is then man-handled by his lawyers, by Robert Stefan and Charlie Juson, up some more expensively shallow, lavishly marble steps, unto a marble cool corridor. Escorted by his legal bouncers, Patrick walks past other lawyers in wigs and kit, past his solicitor Gareth Jenkins who gives Patrick a thumbs-up, past a girl who seems to be crying, past three nasty-looking blokes with tattoos who are staring at the crying girl. Then they stop before a padded door which is all velvet and wood and dignified weight.
The door opens, they step through; the door closes quietly and slowly behind. Patrick lets himself be led into a wooden-railed dock. The dock. Patrick sits down on a crap plastic chair and gazes around Court Number Eighteen. It is a long high soft-lit soft-white light-brown-wood-panelled courtroom. A clock ticks on one wall. The other wall is taken up by a jutting gallery; the public gallery? Patrick presumes it is. Patrick leans to try and see who is seeing him from the gallery; he can’t quite see. So instead Patrick looks at the royal crest, the Lion and Unicorn above the judge’s big wooden throne at the end.
The judge isn’t on his throne, isn’t in the courtroom, but lots of other people are: a clerk of the court; what Patrick assumes is a stenographer, though he isn’t sure what a stenographer is; his own lawyer, now opening his briefcase; another lawyer-type, but older, (older? wiser?? the prosecution???) opening his own briefcase; his solicitor, doing nothing (nothing?); some security musclemen who are standing ominously nearby; a yawning policewoman; another policewoman chewing gum; another clerk of the court; and a couple of seedy-looking guys in cheapish suits who are staring him out from some of the side galleries ranked beside the dock. Journalists? Patrick shakes his head and stares at the royal crest above the judge’s seat. Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense.
Something about this agitates him. In his dock, in his seat, Patrick swallows. Although Patrick knows it is a trick, a stunt, a sleight of the psychosocial hand, he feels his pulse race, his heart go fast: the Majesty of the Law. He might have been in courts before, but they were nothing like this.
Patrick is, now, suddenly, again, scared. He feels like a small boy sent to the headmaster’s study. Like a schoolkid walking down the corridor, heading for detention … Except this time his detention will result in his spending fourteen years in a cold northern jail before having three broken lightbulbs shoved up his arse by his gay psychotic car-jacking Kurdish cellm …
— All Rise
Everybody in the court who wasn’t standing now stands; at the back of the court beside the judge’s throne a clerk opens a door and a small oldish man walks in wearing a larger wig. The man ascends to the throne and sits down and gazes around and says:
— Good morning, everybody
A good morning is mumbled back by everybody. Everybody sits down who seems to be allowed to sit down; Patrick does the same. At once people start chatting, opening folders, relaxing, moving about the courtroom confusingly but confidently: just people doing what they normally do, on a normal day. Normal day! Patrick sits there, marvelling. Then Patrick’s lawyer leans across to chat to the man whom Patrick presumes is the prosecution lawyer, Alan Gregory QC. The prosecutor nods, nods again, and then laughs.
!
The spittle of outrage fills Patrick’s mouth as he sees this open collaboration, this evidence of conspiracy. How can they be chatting? Laughing? Chatting? Jesusfuck! Patrick is outraged, helpless, stuck in his blue plastic chair in the wooden dock, palsied by impotent anger. Colluding! Conspiring! Chatting! Patrick wants to shout out at them: Wankers! Jobsworths! Toffeewombles!
But Patrick does not shout this; shouting out swearwords isn’t going to do anything. He realises this. The judge might be a pantsucking fuckbat but …
The judge!?!
Patrick eyes up the judge. A good man, surely, hopefully, pleaseGod, yes. Yesyes, a good man. Yes. And so Patrick calms down, and so Patrick calms down. And so he calms down … until he has another spasm of panic when he realises that he can’t see his friends. Where? Where! Scandal! Before it has fully dawned on Patrick that they are in the public gallery and the public gallery is virtually directly above him, overhanging him, and therefore invisible to him, some official stands up and says:
— Stand up!
Patrick looks around the court to see which idiot is being bossed in this way. Then he realises it is him: Patrick Skivington. Obediently Patrick stands, and steadies his knees. The clerk, or whoever it is, says:
— You are Patrick Skivington of flat two, number thirty-five, Leominster Place, London WC1, correct?
Patrick nods and croaks a quiet yes. The clerk says:
— You are charged that on the night of August twenty-eight, two thousand and – Patrick jibes; was it that long ago? The clerk completes the date; then pauses, slightly, before saying – raped Rebecca Jessel, contrary to section one of the Sexual Offences Act of nineteen fifty-six – Another significant pause; another glance up – How do you plead?
OK, OK, OK. Patrick takes a grip of his thigh. OK. Ready. Ready-ready. Firm voice. Big voice. This is your chance. For months Patrick has waited for this moment, this moment when he shall express all his outraged innocence, all his innocent hurt, all his unjustly tormented truly-suffering-selfness, in two words. He has only two words, two words to say it all, all he’s felt over these last months, this last year, all he felt in prison, all he felt in his cell, all he felt on remand: and so Patrick stands, and lifts his chin and looks directly at the judge, at the Queen, at God, and asseverates, with all the self-righteous self-justification he can adduce in a tone of voice:
