by Sean Thomas
Turning from the unhelpful choice Patrick paces to the door and as he does he looks at his watch and is surprised to see that half an hour has passed. Where did it go? Pushing the glass and cheap wood of the canteen door he walks to the steps and leaps the steps, trying to be youthful and careless. Then he wanders some corridors for a while. List Office. Robe Room. Press Office. Jury Members Canteen.
Done with corridors and people looking at him suspiciously, Patrick turns a left and a right and he finds himself in a huge marble round place underneath the main Old Bailey dome. Tiled in a vaguely Byzantine way to the ceiling of the dome is a series of admonitory and elevating mosaics; gold inscriptions; mottoes. Patrick swivels about as he reads the old inscription in tiny mosaic tiles: Right Lives By Law, Law Consists In Power, Praise The Cause In Justice Equal Scales.
An hour and a quarter, an hour and a half. Still feeling his heart pounding, Patrick leans his cheek to the cool of the marble wall and swallows and goes into a form of reverie.
Two hours, two and a quarter hours.
Sitting down now, Patrick rubs his face. Two and a half hours have elapsed while he’s just stared out of the window at the cloudy summer sky, at the hint of rain to come.
— All parties in Skivington to Court Eighteen!
OK … OK. Rifle, kit bag, bayonet. Standing back from the window, thrusting back, Patrick wills himself across the tiled marble floor and down the steps to the floor of his court; he sees the journalists going into the court, the lawyers, the hangers-on, the policemen; some of them notice him and they step back to let him pass, like he is the Oscar-winning star at the press conference; momentarily famous he passes between and he enters the courtroom, where, after a flurry of nods and whispers and policewoman’s coughs the jury foreman is standing in his unevolved leather jacket listening to the clerk of the court. As she intones:
— Have you reached a verdict on which you are all agreed?
The jury foreman says … Yes. Patrick’s heart is doing jazz percussion. The clerk nods and makes a note somewhere, and then she says:
— Do you find the defendant guilty or … not guilty?
A pause. Patrick stares at the momentarily silent, note-reading foreman. Patrick balls his fists, and stares, and thinks … Go on then. Get it over with, send me down then; go on. Please. Now. Just make it all go away, get it finished.
Because after all, Patrick decides, because after all they are probably right anyway, all of them: I’m just another one, just another man, just another one of them, another you-know-what-they’re-like.
Right?
Right. I’m just another racist, another Klansman, another Serb in the bedroom, the General Pinochet of foreplay, aren’t I? Aren’t I?
Yes I am. Yes. Yes I am. Yes I am yes I AM. I’m just another Loyalist psycho, another moustachio’d heavy, another secret policeman with a penchant for the cattle prod; I’m just another swamp-dwellin baccy-chewing nigger-baitin unterfuckingmenschen rapo with a clawhammer.
The foreman opens his mouth. Speaks.
Two Years Later
26
Staring at her own brown eyes, Rebecca winces, and looks away. Stuck in her old room, listening to the sounds of the house, to the summer breeze in the sycamores outside, Rebecca looks across at her cigarette balanced on the edge of her dressing table. Taking the cigarette, she smokes and exhales, and then balances the cigarette again; then she gazes back into her old dressing table-mirror.
The mirror reflects herself reflecting on herself. Leaning forward Rebecca wonders. She analyses, scrutinises: tries to make out what her face says about herself, her life. Has she got older, because? Her eyes do still seem the same, soft brown; her cheekbones are still emphasised by the rouge of youth, maybe. But her complexion is definitely paler; paler because no longer marked, not any more, no longer reddened and violeted by his love … maybe …
A slight tremor in her hand makes Rebecca drop the hand that had been touching her cheek; she lets the hand fall to her lap, and gazes around her old room: her old bedroom. She has not slept here in so long and for the second or third time this day she feels that this place is no longer where she will ever truly sleep again: it is no longer her ultimate domicile, the default option, home.
It has been emptied: of her. On the walls are square, lighter-coloured spaces where her art posters used to be, on the shelves are dusty rectangles that mark the slots where her feminist textbooks used to slide. She has been moved out, thrown out, under the pretext of redecoration. And so Rebecca turns, and thinks, her lips slightly ashine in the setting sun slanting through the window; and so she remembers: this is the bed where she used to be in love, where they used to make love, her and Patch, when his chin stubble was abrasive on her inner thighs, when their hands used to interlock like the branches of trees in a wind, when he used to stuff her Paddington Bear between her lips to muffle her orgasm, making them both laugh so much afterwards she woke up her parents, anyway.
Rebecca picks up the Paddington Bear. Puts it down. She remembers when she came: with him. When she came she used to talk, to babble, she used to make those weird noises. Rebecca recalls this. He would always claim she came in German, long long incomprehensible compound words with lots of Ks and Ichs. This, she would assert, was due to her Yiddish heritage. And when she said this he used to say yum and lick the rise of her stomach and call her cunt his little ghetto, his adorable Shtetl, the squalid slums of beautiful Krakow …
Remembering this now Rebecca remembers how much she used to love Patrick for this: how he was always exciting and wrong, at the same time: like sex, indeed. His charming tongue. Sometimes he used to positively schmooze her cunt …
Feeling tired, gloomy, Rebecca picks up the cigarette from its nearly-burning-the-dressing-table situation and sticks it between her thick red lips: where she lets it dangle from her mouth, Ute Lemperishly. Again she stares into the mirror at her unbruised, bitemarkless face. The face he loved, bit, slapped, kissed: a million times.
Whatever. It’s hot: too hot. Standing, moving, creaking the window fully open to the cooler air Rebecca leans in her summer dress, and gazes out over the perfect hush of the evening Suburb. Suntanned elbow on a wooden windowsill she surveys the fake arcadia of her childhood: the red-slate mansard roofs, the artfully lichened walls, the redbrick Arts and Crafts cottages, the neo-Queen-Anne chimney stacks, the butterflies fluttering through the lime-tree-scented air to Little Wood.
The sun is going down; the kids are coming out. Leaning further into the still-hot humid summer night air Rebecca sees and hears a shiny new racing green BMW roadster throttling down Meadway. The car is being driven by a laughing Jewish principessa with too many bracelets waving to a boy in a Fiat. Brushing a coil of blonde from her eyes Rebecca squints to espy and recognise the girl’s face but as the car revs to the distance Rebecca is distracted by the numberplate of the car: 8EEN.
8EEN?
Eight-een. Of course. Eighteen Years Old and driving her eighteenth birthday present. Of course.
And only here Rebecca thinks. Only in the Suburb; this Beverly Hills with crow’s step gables. Only in this cradle of the cul de sac; this place where nothing bad could ever happen. Except what happened.
Rebecca muses. She has always found this place, the Suburb of her youth and upbringing, reassuringly prosperous, luxuriantly safe, somehow uterine. Today, staring across the roofs and gardens and bay windows to the cod-medieval town walls of Hampstead Heath boundary, she finds it claustrophobic and unbearable. A prison by Ruskin and Morris. Rebecca wishes fervently there were a great big motorway running through it, a great big tube station right in the middle of Central Square. If only.
Through the window Rebecca sees 8EEN again, reversing backwards and taking a different route. Then she sees a Jewish guy with skullcap and two corgis resting against a wall. Fuzzy white stuff is riding the air. Clover drifts from the Heath; scents of grass cuttings.
This scent breathed in, Rebecca is brought back, perforce, to
a memory. This is the smell of her A levels. Of being 8EEN. This lovely cut-grass cologne perfuming the streets is the smell of hot afternoons with no more exams, those wonderful nothing-to-do days at the end of her upper sixth when she and her friends would spill out of school. When they’d skip laughing through the grey-and-redbrick portals of Henrietta Barnett’s and run to where Murphy had parked; where they’d lean their bare arms on the hot metal of Murphy’s driverside door and gossip, and chat, and wonder whether to walk down the road to Rebecca’s to raid the fridge for juice and white peaches, or jump in the car and shoot off to the Freemason’s Arms.
They were her best friends; Murphy was her best friend; Murphy was the very best of friends. Sitting back at her dressing table Rebecca picks up the cigarette and gauntly inhales a last Rebecca-full of her Marlboro and then stubs the cigarette in the empty cigarette packet and chucks the packet in a bin.
Stretching out a long soft arm, tanned apart from a white band where her watch should be, Rebecca plucks a photo of her and Murphy from where it was stuck in the frame of the mirror. Other photos of her on holiday, of her parents, she ignores; Rebecca takes instead the photo of her and Murphy and holds it up to view. With a pang Rebecca wishes most of all she could talk to her best friend. But she can’t; she feels too guilty. So she can’t. Not yet, at least …
— Re ye si gu
— Ca ye su gi
Her parents are arguing downstairs. Rebecca can tell they are arguing because they are trying to keep their voices unnaturally quiet. And not succeeding. From two floors up Rebecca can hear her father’s weak and languid vowels, can sense her mother’s shrill aggressive silences. Then Rebecca hears a pause, of true silence, then perhaps a footfall, on the stairs. Holding still, Rebecca listens hard, wondering if her mother or father are going to climb the stairs, to come and see her, to come and ask her the troublesome things: why she hasn’t had a job for two years. Why she hasn’t moved out the flat. Why she’s done this, that, and … The Other Thing.
But no. Her parents are not coming, it seems. All there is is the breeze, riffling the photo. It is an evening breeze: true evening must be falling. Breathing in the base notes from the open airy window, the barbecue smells and monoxidey pollen, Rebecca looks around; then she sighs and falls back onto her bed, where she lies and surveys the ceiling. Silent and thoughtful Rebecca watches a shaft of car light slide across the darkness, as a car goes by with voices laughing. Rebecca watches, and hears, in quiet. She wants a cigarette, she wants to forget. The sense of summer-night London en fête around her, just outside the window, only compounds her isolated sadness, her melancholy apprehension, only makes her remember the nights. The nights like these. When he would throw her white body onto the bed, her body a stripe of white car light across the bed.
Patrick?
Patrick.
Laid on the bed, Rebecca opens her lips, so as to silently pronounce his name to the ceiling, to the window, to the wall of her bedroom, to the last Klee print thereon, next to where her MOMA poster was. Laid here, laid out, Rebecca thinks of him, what made him, the taste of him, the taste of her on him. She thinks of the garlic and oil that they were: the sweet mayonnaise: the aioli of her cunt on his fingers that he force-fed her to stop her crying his name to the ceiling: aioli, aioli, eloi, elohim. Patch.
Patch?
Rebecca picks up her ringing mobile phone; it says MURPHY.
Murphy? Please not. Rebecca doesn’t want to talk to Murphy; she hasn’t spoken to Murphy in weeks; the last person she wants to speak to now is Murphy. Thinning her lips, Rebecca presses a button on the phone, deadens the ringing noise, then flops back on the bed and thinks about Patrick.
Where is he now? She wonders where. What is he doing now? Is he suffering, tense, sad, thinking of her with grief? With regret and anger? Is he thinking of her as she thinks of him now?
Reaching for her favourite old hairbrush from her bedside table Rebecca sits up, and brushes her hair, brushing the sadness of Patrick from her still-long hair, brushing and brushing, as she gazes out of the leaded window half open to the air. Then Rebecca checks the watch her father gave her; replaces the brush on the wood. On a new whim she gets up, crosses her room, goes to the place where her old textbooks are boxed in cardboard boxes ranked alongside the wall: ready for some familial move she does not quite understand, appreciate, care to consider.
Crouching nearer the boxes Rebecca reaches in the first box and takes out a history of the Renaissance. Then a monograph on Bosch; a book of Victorian photographs. Then Rembrandt, Hockney, the Venetian Renaissance. One book gains closer attention: holding the book in her hand Rebecca gazes at the cover: it is a reprint of one of Hockney’s swimming pool paintings. What does this remind her of? It reminds her of …
The pool party! Gazing into the blue of the picture Rebecca closes her eyes and sways on her crouching thighs as she holds the book and pictures: yes, of course, what else: she can see Patrick’s eyes of chlorinated blue: blue behind his laughing fringe, his unshaved chin, his sweet dark hair roughly but lovably tousled. At the pool party.
Patrick. Patrick. Patrick. Patrick. Too much. Too much. Too much.
Half slumped, Rebecca tries to distract, not to think about it, tomorrow, about the law, the police, it all. Flicking through and down the piles of books Rebecca knows, however, it is inevitable. Everything here, everything now, everything she sees will remind her of him; of what she’s done; of what they did; of whether she’s done the right thing.
Rebecca cocks her head, and listens, listens to the oh-so-slow-to-wind-down clock of sadness still ticking in her head.
Pat-rick, Pat-rick, Pat-rick.
Fresh cigarette between her lips, Rebecca lights, draws, inhales gauntly. Marlboro-ing her cheekbones as she inhales, she nostrils two plumes of blue Virginia sadness down into the second cardboard box.
She has found and stopped at another book. Against Our Will. By Susan Brownmiller. It is a book on rape. It is her book of rape. It is the book on rape.
But of course.
Sighing, wryly smoking, Rebecca takes up and opens the once-famous book on rape. Riffling the pages Rebecca remembers how she read and reread this book when she was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. This after all was the book she liked above all other feminist texts, this was the ancient feminist primer she pressed closest to her heart, this book on rape was the old book on rape she thought she had most understood and knew and truly learned from.
Until Patrick.
The old Penguin paperback flattened under one hand, on one crouching knee, Rebecca flicks through the pages as she smokes with the other hand.
The pages send her. The writing spins her. Reading once more the well-wrought text, the serious but sensuous tenor, the exhilarating scholasticism, the intense but feminine intelligence of this book that Rebecca now remembers so well makes Rebecca wince: at the book’s determined naiveté, its wilful innocence, its brilliant simplisticness. Rebecca feels outrage at herself: how could she have bought this so totally? Rebecca winces again. This book was the reason for a lot: was the reason Rebecca became studious and feminist, not least. And now? Rebecca flicks, reads and exhales smoke over the paperback pages: yes the book is well written; yes it was necessary; yes it made her, Rebecca, a better more self-aware young woman. But was the book ever right? Ever as right as it thought?
Stopping, checking, Rebecca moves from a crouch to a kneel to sitting flat on the carpet as she loses herself in her old self that loved this old book, her little red book. Rebecca is remembering, realising. Reading the annotations in the margins of this book makes Rebecca sadly conjecture how long it has been since she cared so much she used to write in book margins.
Then one phrase catches Rebecca’s eye. On page twenty-seven, she reads
No zoologist, as far as I know, has ever observed that animals ever rape in their natural habitat, the wild.
Vff, Rebecca thinks. Mpfff. Tapping a tarry chunk of left-to-burn cigarette ash into a bin, Rebecca
takes and inhales and smokes and holds smoke, and then exhales, and sits back, and thinks about this. Yes, she understands why a Seventies feminist might say this. Might allege that
No zoologist, as far as I know, has ever observed that animals ever rape in their natural habitat, the wild
because she understands the thinking behind it. Even if she didn’t have A levels in Philosophy and Law, an MA in Feminism and Art, and a PhD in Aspects of Aztec Mythology, Rebecca thinks she would know and understand the necessity of thinking this particular thought. She sees. She sees it is necessary for Brownmiller to believe that rape is not found in nature, that
No zoologist has ever observed that animals ever rape in their natural habitat, the wild
because Brownmiller could not otherwise support her central thesis: that rape is uniquely human, uniquely horrid, uniquely organised and wilful, that men are uniquely rape-intent, singularly sexist, are biologically unique in their oppressive and predatory sexuality, and that rape is … is what? …
Rebecca checks the blurb for the famous phrase; finds it. On the back of the paperback she reads that
Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear
Cogitating on this, more-than-thinking, Rebecca smokes, taps, smokes, and half listens: listening to the minicabs in the street outside, listening to the minicabs offloading giggling summer-night partygoers. Then she is struck with a thought.
But is it true? No rape in the wild?
