The Cheek Perforation Dance

by Sean Thomas

  Get a taxi?

  — Thanks. Old Bailey please

  From the back of the cab Patrick looks at the back of the cabby’s head as it bobs up and down, monologuing. Not listening, Patrick looks out of the cab window at Holborn Tube station, at all the black cleaners and janitors and crack dealers disappearing home down the Tube at the same time as all the white office workers and bankers and white-trash homeless on crutches emerge into the sunlight. Idly Patrick wonders if one could tell the time in London by the average negritude of the streets, the amount of white people versus black people. A sort of race clock, like a sundial but …

  As the sunlight from the cab window flickers strobily on Patrick’s anxious face Patrick surveys the streetscape. Marvelling at all the glass, all the metal and glass of modern London, the boiled chrome and hi tech mirror walls. So much glass; how tempting it is; how easy it would be. Right now Patrick would like to smash it all. Right now Patrick would like to get out the cab and go a-wandering the streets hurling bricks and stones … and what a ruckus he would cause, what a lovely fiesta of destruction it would be: breaking all the windows of the condos, smashing up the Warburgs and Schroeders and Saatchis and Cazenoves and yes, oh yes, oh if only, oh if only something like that would happen, if only the Luftwaffe would come and save him, a Luftwaffe of angels strafing the City, destroying it all, laying waste to it all, erasing everything in a firestorm of forgetting.

  But when he thinks of the Luftwaffe Patrick thinks about the Germans and when he thinks about the German army he remembers an image he read about sometime, when and where he does not know: of German soldiers walking jackboot-deep through sunlit fields of Romanian corn, so as to flush out the hiding Jewesses, and rape them.

  And when he thinks this he wonders about Rebeccca’s unJewish blonde hair. Patrick wonders if Rebecca’s blonde hair could be an adaptation, protective camouflage, making it easier to hide in sunlit corn from rapists. Hm. Then Patrick wonders if, instead, the reason Rebecca has blonde hair is actually because her dark-haired Jewish grandmother was raped and made pregnant by some flaxen-locked Teutonic nobleman, in the Baltic pine forest, or on the outskirts of the Shtetl. This would help explain, Patrick thinks, among other things, why some distant female descendant might inherit, say, a genetic penchant for rough sex …

  — Just here mate?

  Clearing his head of these thoughts, these sad and belated thoughts, Patrick nods towards the cabby.

  — Yeah, thanks, just here

  Alighted on the sunny pavement Patrick turns, pays, tips, then walks down to the Old Bailey entrance, which is being picketed as ever by camera crews and photographers and curious Nordic tourists. Ten yards away from the door Patrick is engulfed by friends and family.

  — Patch where’ve you been?

  — About a minute left mate

  — They’re only letting in witnesses

  — One too many wanks this morning?

  Patrick looks at Joe’s impish grin, and says:

  — The First Lord Spiritual received something of a dressing down

  — Hunh?

  — What?

  — Your brief’s pulling his wig off

  Inside the door to the Old Bailey Patrick does the Seventies sci-fi airlock thing, the airport security thing, the nod to the policemen thing. Up the steps into the main marble lobby, full of sunlit dust and paedophiles, he paces. For a moment he pauses to check a noticeboard, then he turns and finds half a bench of people he recognises sitting on the bench staring at him. Why does he know these people? Who are these people?

  With a start Patrick steps back, shocked. It’s the jury. His jury. Sitting here. It’s his jury sitting on a bench staring at him. So? What should he do? Introduce himself? Run away? Act cool and innocent? Definitely not go over and rape any of them?

  A sudden firm hand on Patrick’s shoulder makes Patrick turn and as he turns he finds he is staring into the severe, bewigged, white-collared, black-gowned visage of his lawyer Stefan. Firm hand still on Patrick’s shoulder Stefan says:

  — Explanation?

  — I’m sorry

  — You did know when we were starting?

  — Yes sorry, Robert, I overslept and I

  Stefan’s junior Juson, standing beside and slightly behind Stefan, looks swiftly over to Patrick and shakes his head as if to say that was the wrong thing to say. With undisguised frostiness, Stefan is speaking:

  — Overslept …

  — Uh … yes

  — You overslept?

  — Uh yeah I uh

  — You overslept for your own rape trial. I suppose you think that’s frightfully cool … or something?

  — I

  — You moron

  Patrick, mouth agape

  — Uh sorry?

  Stefan barks:

  — You do realise that if your trial hadn’t been delayed this morning they would have noticed you weren’t here and the police would have slung you inside for the rest of the trial?

  — Ah

  — Don’t make a fool of me, Patch

  Stefan looks at Patrick and shakes his head; Patrick makes an honestly I’m just crap face, and says:

  — So … er … anyway

  — Yes?

  — What is happening then?

  Stefan goes silent, and brooding. The junior takes pity and interjects:

  — As it happens they’re missing a witness or something, that Murphy girl …

  Patrick comes back, eyes wider now:

  — Murphy Reardon?

  — Yeah

  — She’s up this morning?

  — Yep

  Ignoring his junior’s conversation with his client Stefan looks at the gold on his wrist and then with a flick of the wrist he snaps:

  — Court Eighteen, ten forty-five. Be there

  — Of course

  — And keep away from the jury

  — Of course – Patrick repeats, glancing over to where the jury is sitting, phoning, chatting, smoking, gossiping. Some of the jurors are looking whisperingly and oo-er-ishly in Patrick’s direction, like kids looking at a Disney monster in a theme park.

  Turned, Patrick sees that Stefan has disappeared. As has Juson. Patrick stifles a sudden desire to bolt. To run for it. He has twenty minutes to deal with, and so he wanders down to the entrance but there he looks through an open door and sees … Rebecca’s mother sitting in a side room. Rebecca’s mother. Her mother. Her mother? She is sitting there in a yellow side room staring at him; he is staring at her. Rebecca’s mother. The mother of the girl who is claiming he raped her. Now Patrick panics; his reserve of English upbringing makes him feel like going over and saying:

  — Hello Mrs Jessel … Awfully sorry about raping your daughter

  Why does he want to say that? After all, he didn’t, and hasn’t. Arguably. But still: the natural English urge to apologise first. Even when you didn’t do anything …

  Patrick stares at Rebecca’s mother’s pale, paling face as it stares back at him. Narrowing his own eyes, Patrick tries to intuit Mrs Jessel’s mood from her face: from the face he remembers with great clarity. How many briochey, bagel-ish, smoked-salmon-esque brunches and breakfasts did he share with that face? As Patrick stares at Mrs Jessel he gets a flashback to that vague, evanescent, overwhelming sense of being disapproved of that he always received from Rebecca’s impeccably polite, prosperous, Mozart-quintet-liking family. And as Patrick gets this big old unhappy angry feeling again he recalls how he was never able to quite work out whether – in all the times he stayed in or ate at or just picked up Rebecca from Rebecca’s house – whether he was being disapproved of because he was Gentile, or lower middle class; or both. The bile of this sour memory in his mouth Patrick remembers how it used to enrage him so much precisely because it, this same disapproval, was so subtle and nebulous and Hampstead and refined and hardly there. And so now Patrick stares at Rebecca’s mother in a defiant, fuck you, I’m glad I raped your daughter way, before coming to some sanit
y again. Hard-knotting his tie Patrick turns and steps back up the steps.

  But as he reaches the top of the steps where the marble changes colour, from anchovy to tartan, Patrick wonders what Rebecca’s mother is doing in court this morning. His friends: what did they say? They were only letting witnesses in this morning? But Rebecca’s mother isn’t a witness? Is she? Could she be a witness? To what? What did she see? What did she hear? What? What would her evidence be about? His ignorance of how to correctly eat artichokes? His dissing of the Jewish Chronicle? His insalubrious way of deliberately shagging the daughter so loud it caused the mother in the room next door to take an extra Temazepam?

  — All those in Skivington please go to Court Eighteen

  Spit swallowed, tie smoothed, suit jacket buttoned, Patrick stiffens and girds and paces down the hall and up some steps and round the marble stairwell and up some more steps and along another hall to the door he knows is the door to his court because outside it is standing the prosecution junior in her sexy stilettos just visible under her long black gown. Black stockings?

  Pushing the door Patrick goes into the courtroom and sits in the dock without having to be asked. Then the door opens some more and the clerk and the stenographer come in, then the jury, one by one, then other people, then the lawyers, all chattering, smiling, carrying sweets, pens, books, mini Evian bottles, and switched-off cellphones. A few desultory minutes pass and then they ALL RISE in honour of His Honour. As he watches the court do its practised thing, Patrick gets a strange feeling of camaraderie. He is sensing a kind of bonding with the other members of the court, a kind of esprit de corps; inasmuch as they have all heard a lot of weird stuff together in these rooms and are therefore like some kind of close yet dysfunctional family, privy to the same nasty secrets. Or perhaps they are like some busload of tourists, captured and held hostage for days: by wig-wearing terrorists …

  But this almost nice feeling of bondedness and cosiness disappears as the door opens to a shouted name, and in walks Murphy.

  Murphy Reardon …

  Sweet, tall, talkative, sarcastic, pretty, awkward, clumsy, likeable, cuttlefish-tattooed Murphy.

  Smurf.

  Seeing Rebecca’s best friend walking slowly around the courtroom to the witness box makes Patrick wince. He always liked Murphy, fancied her, even. Now seeing her as a shy but brave defence witness in a trial that might send him to prison for a suicide-inducing stretch of sex criminal’s solitary confinement, for LIFE, makes Patrick gulp, feel an even higher degree of fright, feel even more angry, panicked, terrifically melancholy. Yes he always liked Murphy; this same Murphy, this same sweet tall gauche funny Murphy who is climbing the little wooden ladder to the witness box of his rape trial.

  From the dock Patrick feels like calling across the courtroom Yo Murf, coming in on some gear?

  As he would have done; as he did so many times.

  Murphy is in a neat black suit. Smarter than Patrick has ever seen her. Sat in his blue plastic seat Patrick finds himself staring at Murphy, thinking about Murphy’s cuttlefish tattoo under that white blouse under that black suit. As Patrick stares he notices that Murphy does not stare back. She is avoiding his gaze, in fact she is avoiding his whole side of the courtroom: as she picks up the bible and does the riff, as she quietly but firmly answers a few introductory questions gently lobbed by the prosecution junior, the woman in black stockings.

  Smurf …

  As the junior and Murphy play evidential patball Patrick thinks some more about Murphy’s tatt. The times he would see it when they were drunk in a pub, him, Joe, Smurf and Rebecca, when it was summer and she would stretch back and laugh her broken-lav laugh, stretching butchly but sexily in her croptop so as to show the discreet little purple-and-red tattoo and he would wonder whether a threesome, or a kumquat …

  And now the sadness of it all comes again, the tides of sadness. Patrick feels like crying for these broken friendships, that lost innocence, the losingness of life. It is all starting to hurt a bit too much, as Murphy says all these things, all these things, these things.

  — Yes …

  — Yes, he …

  — Yes, he used to hit her, I think …

  — Sometimes I dunno … bruises … I never knew whether …

  — Perhaps she was lying but …

  — Oh yeah he used to drink quite a lot and …

  — That night I was meant to be going round and I got

  pretty anxious you know when she didn’t show … Is all … is all … is all …

  Is all.

  Patrick slumps. He is not looking at Murphy’s side of the courtroom. He is slumping in despair and abjection, a feeling he is becoming increasingly used to during these days of prosecution evidence. Then he lifts his head from his hands to see his lawyer stand up and ask:

  — Miss Reardon … What was the first thing the complainant, Miss Jessel, said to you when she came to you that night?

  —

  — That night she was allegedly raped?

  — Um …?

  — It’s here in the transcripts of your interview

  Murphy looks like she is stalling:

  — Mm … I …

  — Shall I remind you?

  — No … uh – Murphy swallows – No

  — You do remember then?

  — Yes. I …

  — Miss Reardon?

  Holding on to the box Murphy lifts her head and takes a deep breath and slowly recounts:

  — She said, ‘I don’t know what constitutes rape, but I think Patrick raped me’

  14

  — trellis

  — dik-dik

  — … ointment

  — veggie

  — whooping cough

  — … ff – Patrick thinks, muses, takes his hand off the wheel – fffff … fffffff … Gabon

  — Gabon?

  — It’s a country

  Across the gearwell Rebecca looks out the car window at the chariot race of the motorway, and the hissy March rain, and the dreary South London littoral whizzing past the car window and she says:

  — Doesn’t count, you’re not allowed proper nouns

  — Since when were there rules?

  — If you can have Gabon I can have … – She tilts her chin – Mold

  Patrick pauses, says:

  — Mold?

  — OK, Denbigh

  — OK, Flint

  — OK … wimple!

  — As if

  — Wimple! – She leans across the car and taps his leg; she chuckles and whoops – Beat that – Punching the air with a small suntanned fist – Wimple!!

  — Right … – Decelerating, Patrick laughs – Right, OK, if it’s going to be like that – Checking the mirror, checking the rain on the rear window in the rear mirror, the cars beyond, Patrick goes quiet; then says, quietly – Snood

  Rebecca:

  — shit

  — Ha! – Patrick slaps the car wheel and yaws the car into the slow lane and says – Unbeatable. Snood – Laughing – How could I forget?

  Silence, then:

  — She does know we’re thinking of moving in together? Your mum?

  Slow lane, middle lane, fast lane.

  — Course

  — Mm …

  Rebecca falls quiet, Patrick says:

  — So. Are you worried about meeting her?

  — Mm … no … no …

  At this, Rebecca turns away evidently to think and to worry and to fret about meeting Patrick’s mother for the first time; as she turns, thinks, Patrick turns to her and looks. At the swanly curve of her neck. The biteable grace of her neck. Her saying:

  — This … must be … Croydon?

  — You have been out of London before, Becs?

  — Yes of course

  — I mean you know Knightsbridge and Hampstead, and Venice, but could you actually put Bristol on the map?

  — Somewhere near Ireland?

  — Impressive

  — Spinnaker
…?

  I mean. Patrick thinks, looking again at her neck as she continues playing the game they have just invented. I mean, look at her neck. As Patrick looks at Rebecca’s neck he sees just above the hem of her cashmere top, the petals of his morning’s teethmarks, pink and pale violet against the white. And seeing this only makes him want to do it to her again. To plant more Alpine flowers, to add more tiny petals to the snow. Hm. Patrick swallows. Why does he want her to want him to hurt her? Why does he want what he least wants to do? Why does he want to destroy, to torch, to Zippo? Why does he want to burn the Warsaw of her body? Raze the slums of Krakow?

  — Can we have some music?

  — Sure …

  Obedient, nodding, Patrick blindly takes a tape out of the stereo and nearly drops the tape; chucking this tape over his shoulder onto the back seat, he then fondles the glove compartment for another tape and nearly kills them by almost driving into the back of a Spanish seafood truck as he takes this new tape out. Taking up this tape, bringing the tape to his face to check it’s the right tape, Patrick then takes the tape and mails it; punches buttons; starts the tape. Hissing seconds pass, a lorry overtakes, effervescent bebop fills the car. Followed by a burst of skiffle.

  Patrick laughs at the eccentricity of his own taste in recorded and compiled tapes. Then he waits for Rebecca to respond to this strange segue in taste; duly she responds. She says, shaking her head at the car stereo:

  — Your taste in music …

  — Fascinatingly eclectic, refreshingly catholic?

  — Wanky

  — Naturally your thing about boy bands is different

  She looks at him. He laughs. She smiles as she tilts her head and listens to the tape: a boy band is next; then some big band weirdness. Patrick says:

  — I’ve thought about calling this tape ‘Songs for Sylvia to Listen To’

  — What?

  — Well – Patrick taps his forefingers on the wheel, in time – Sylvia Plath died in 1963, between the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, right?

  — Yes

  — So she just missed out on the pop music revolution

  — And …

  — Well I reckon – Patrick is grinning, turning the wheel, changing gear, saying – I can’t believe she’d have been depressed enough to top herself if she’d been around to hear the Sultans of Ping F C. Would have cheered her up too much, right?