The Girlfriend

by Sarah Naughton

  I hold up my hand. “It’s not as simple as that, Daniel.”

  He leans toward me, head bent, waiting for me to continue.

  I sip my coffee and put it down on the table. It’s too milky, half-cold. My hand is trembling, and the liquid sloshes over the untouched brownie. Sweat is breaking out around my hairline.

  “I want you to say we didn’t sleep together.”

  He frowns. “But I asked the concierge for condoms.”

  “Say we changed our mind, decided to wait. You’re the only potential weakness in the case.”

  He swallows. “What did he do to you? The rapist.”

  Around us, the noise of the café becomes muffled, as if we are enclosed in a bubble, a quivering wall of tension surrounding us.

  “He killed my brother.”

  I tell him everything. When I’ve finished, there is a horribly long silence during which I want to stab myself with the brownie knife. What a stupid thing to do. I came here to patch up a potential weakness in my case, and now I’ve blown a hole in it so big, it might not even get to court. Daniel might march straight to the police and tell them everything. They’ll assume I’ve been taken in by Jody’s lies and may be lenient with me, given my recent bereavement, or they may just charge me with wasting police time. Otherwise, it’s perverting the course of justice. If Jody’s called in, it might very well be prison for her this time—for both of us.

  I blunder to my feet, knocking over the cardboard cup, spilling beige milk all over the table.

  “I shouldn’t have come. Please, please forget everything I told you. Please don’t go to the police.”

  “Mags—”

  “He’s a bad person, Dan. Don’t feel the need to protect him. He did rape her, the first time. Her social worker is a hundred percent sure. She had injuries and—”

  “Mags! Calm down.”

  My heart is pounding, and I can barely catch my breath. I sink back into the chair. He reaches across the table, his sleeve dragging through the puddle of coffee.

  I grip his hand like a terrified child, but after a moment, he lets go, slipping his fingers from mine and getting up.

  “Let me think, OK?”

  And then he’s gone. A dark shape in the huge mirror on the wall opposite me as he passes the window and is lost in the crowd.

  What have I done?

  March

  41.

  Mags

  The Crown Prosecution Service team’s junior lawyer, Rauf Chaudhry, is a young Pakistani who took his degree at some crappy college in the Midlands, but I suspect he’s going to be seriously good one day. He’s clearly rabidly ambitious, and when he finds out I’m a lawyer myself, he pumps me for information about the U.S. legal system.

  His official role is to keep me informed about how the trial’s progressing, but I tell him that after I’ve given my witness statement, I intend to sit in on proceedings. He does his best to persuade me to present my evidence via video link, as is the right of all rape victims, but I tell him that I want to face my attacker. I add, with a meaningful smile, that I also want to make sure the CPS doesn’t fuck up the case.

  I wear a navy suit to court, no makeup, tie back my hair, put on my reading glasses. My rapist will struggle even to recognize me. No one in the court will remember me after the trial ends.

  I’m the first witness, and the court falls silent as the heels of my low pumps tap up to the stand. I can feel eyes upon me, trying to penetrate my drab disguise, to see the trembling victim—or the drunken slut beneath.

  The jury’s an even split, male and female, many of them under forty, which is good. Old prejudices about women who ask for it—with their clothes or their alcohol consumption—die hard.

  That’s why I stuck to Coke on the night of the rape. He said he’d tell you I was drunk, I told the police, that you wouldn’t believe a word I said. The blood and urine test proved I was stone-cold sober, giving credence to my assertion that I’d just gone outside for a pee because the toilet was blocked. You’re not allowed CCTV in a bathroom, so there was no evidence of me stuffing the bowl with hand towels until the water rose to the rim. It wouldn’t even occur to them to suspect.

  I face the court, unsmiling, and when the judge tells me to begin, I give my version of the events of New Year’s Eve with quiet determination, studiously avoiding the accused’s eye—no tears. I’ll let the photographs and the DNA do the work for me.

  His girlfriend sits, stony-faced, listening intently. Sophie, I think. A standard-issue blond with orange makeup and heavy eyeliner. After a few minutes, she gets up and walks out of the court without a backward glance. It wasn’t hard to convince her that her boyfriend was a rapist. This makes me feel better.

  I talk for half an hour or so, and by the end, the jury are sipping their water and fanning their faces.

  It’s all gone very well, I think, and it’s hard to stop myself smiling as the judge calls for a break in proceedings before my cross-examination by the defense lawyer.

  Rauf is waiting for me outside and escorts me to a witness room with a coffee machine and a sagging sofa pocked with cigarette burns.

  “I think that went pretty well, don’t you?” I say, flopping onto the sofa and kicking off the frumpy shoes. But my smugness falters when he turns back from the coffee machine and hands me my drink.

  “What?”

  He shrugs. “It sounded like you were reading a script. The jury didn’t warm to you.”

  “Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether they warmed to me or not. It’s an open-and-shut case. Wait till they see the photos.”

  He gives me a penetrating glance then, which makes me wonder if he’s guessed I’m hiding something. I can’t tell him the truth, or he’d have to drop the case, but I want him to understand.

  “He’s a violent rapist, Rauf. He deserves to go down. And he will.”

  Rauf runs toffee-colored fingers through his hair and leans against the door. “You’ve been living in the United States too long. The white British male is an endangered species. Look at him, standing there in his too-tight suit, big hands hanging by his side because he doesn’t know where else to put them. It’s pathetic. The older women will want to mother him, and the white men will see themselves. It only takes one or two prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt—that he’s too thick or too unreconstructed to know when a woman means no.”

  Before I can say anything, the PA system announces that the court is about to go back into session. Rauf opens the door for me, and as I move past him, he murmurs, “I want us to win this case as much as you do, so just try to be a bit more…victim-y, OK?”

  I smile indulgently, but as I follow him out into the corridor, I’m feeling rattled. And now I must face cross-examination. I know how brutal that can be. I’ve done it myself.

  This time, I study the jury more carefully. A young overweight woman squeezed into a wrap dress casts fluttering glances at the defense bench as the accused whispers with his lawyer. Is she one of those insecure, desperate types who writes to serial killers in prison and occasionally marries them? Perhaps she will resent me for being slim and successful. Beside her is an elderly Asian man. He’s beardless and in Western dress but may still frown upon women who go out to parties without a chaperone.

  Then there’s the token middle-aged white guy: bald, overweight, tattoos peeping from his shirt cuffs, he looks like an older, poorer version of the man at the defense table. Shit. Maybe Rauf was right. I need to get them onside. Show some vulnerability.

  Except that’s the one thing I’m no good at. I can shut down, but I can’t open up.

  I should take some tips from Jody, who trembled so much when I said goodbye to her this morning that she resembled an out-of-focus photograph. I told her she didn’t have to attend if she didn’t want to, but as I take the stand again, I spot her, shrinking behind a pillar on th
e back bench. She keeps her head down and worries at the buttons of her cardigan as the judge speaks. By contrast, Mira, beside her, is straight-backed, her eyes alive with intelligence as she follows the proceedings as best she can. She came back from Albania ostensibly to give Jody and me some moral support. But I think it’s more than that. I think she knows what’s going on, though neither of us has told her. I think she’s here for Loran. To bear witness as the murderer of the man he loved is brought to justice.

  Or not.

  Not if I can’t play my part.

  Come on, Mags, I tell myself as the defense lawyer gets up. Make it up. Put on a show. Pretend you’re trying to convince your dad how sorry you are for smoking at the bus stop so that he’ll stop cutting up your little tart’s clothes.

  She’s tall and rangy, with thin dark hair that looks painted to her head and a hooked nose like a bird of prey. As our eyes meet, I think I see a flash of recognition, one lawyer to another, both of us determined to play the trial like a game of chess. I look away quickly, dipping my head, the picture of demure trepidation.

  But she’s not stupid.

  “It takes guts to face your supposed rapist in court, Miss Mackenzie, especially since you could have given your evidence behind a screen.”

  I straighten my back and swallow hard. Here we go.

  “And only a very self-assured young woman would walk alone into a party full of strangers. Just as it takes a certain devil-may-care confidence to urinate outside when other women are waiting patiently for the toilet to be unblocked. And yet”—she glances at the jury—“we are being asked to believe that you are a shrinking violet, unable to defend yourself against my client, too frozen with terror to be able to utter an audible peep to alert the partygoers to your plight.”

  “The countdown to midnight was happening,” I say. “It was too noisy.”

  She ignores this. “You are a lawyer, Miss Mackenzie. Last year, you defended a man charged with evading forty million dollars’ worth of U.S. tax, a man who, in his twenties, was convicted of the murder of three business rivals.”

  I scowl at the CPS lawyer. Come on: object.

  “I put it to you, Miss Mackenzie,” she says, “that you are a strong, clever, calculating young woman who is, for reasons best known to yourself, trying to manipulate the court.”

  “What possible reason would I have to put myself through this?” I ask, but I know at once I have made a mistake. She has caught the flash of anger in my voice, even if the jury hasn’t. She knows this line is worth pursuing.

  “You left home at sixteen, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why was this?”

  “My relationship with my parents broke down.”

  “Your parents? Or just your father?”

  “My parents.”

  “Is it the case that you reported your father to the police for false imprisonment?”

  I hesitate. “Yes.”

  “And that you claimed he had beaten you, but no charges were pursued because he said you had attacked him and fallen when he pushed you away?”

  I nod. She has spoken to my teachers.

  “So there has been a history of making false claims in your past?”

  “They weren’t false claims.”

  “Your father was retired from his role in the Mountain Rescue for health reasons. What were these?”

  “He had a nervous breakdown.”

  “And your brother recently committed suicide.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe mental health problems run in your family?”

  My lip curls. “No.”

  She gives a small smile, flagging up to the jury my reluctance to cooperate. The glances they shoot in my direction are closed and hostile. Rauf was right. They don’t like me.

  “I put it to you, Miss Mackenzie, that as a young girl with a bullying father, you developed a hatred for men that has continued to this day and has rendered you unable or unwilling to form meaningful relationships. This fact, and your strongly religious upbringing, has resulted in a very conflicted sexual identity. After sexual relations, you are so disgusted with yourself, you have to lay the blame on someone else—in this case, my client. I suggest that the mental health problems that dogged your father and brother also affect you, that they drove you to make false accusations in the past, and that the cry of rape against my client is just another of these.”

  She gives a sad smile, and I want to claw out her eyes with my fingernails.

  “You are a traumatized young woman who deserves our sympathy, but whatever your problems, you must not be allowed to bring down an innocent man.”

  The jury’s faces turn to the accused, slumped in his chair, the patch of fluff between the two glossy stretches of his receding hairline stirring in the breeze from the air-conditioning. He looks up at them with wide, bewildered eyes. What did I do?

  “No further questions.”

  Rauf is honorable enough not to say I told you so.

  “Surely,” I rant, “the jury isn’t gullible enough to believe such convoluted nonsense?” But it’s a rhetorical question. Of course they are. Juries will believe any old shit—look at O.J.—and I’ve made my living out of this fact.

  I should have swallowed my pride and squeezed out some tears. I’ll make sure I put on a better performance in the public gallery, in case the jury looks over at me to gauge my reaction to any other evidence or witnesses, but Rauf doesn’t need to tell me I’ve missed my chance.

  And there’s worse. Before we say goodbye, I ask him why the defense lawyer didn’t grill me about my sex life. Rauf says they’ve made it much tougher to go down that route. I should have known this. I should have found it out before I went shooting my mouth off to Daniel. They wouldn’t have been able to call him as a witness to my loose ways, so there was no need to tell him anything.

  Let alone everything.

  Back at Abe’s flat that evening, I experience my first unpleasant stirrings of doubt. I sluice them away with a bottle of wine.

  The next morning, I tell Jody and Mira I’m having breakfast with Rauf so as not to have to travel to the court with them, trying to keep the mask of unshakable confidence in place. I’ve lost track of the days, but a free paper I pick up on the bus tells me it’s a Thursday. Always my favorite day in Vegas. The weekend just starting to get going and the air throbbing with anticipation. Jackson has given me a six-month sabbatical. Others have taken over my cases and are, according to him, doing awesomely. That’ll teach me to think so much of myself. A little humility might have saved me yesterday’s car crash.

  Over a lonely coffee in a greasy spoon around the back of the courthouse, I resolve to try to let go a little, let the CPS do its job. I’ve done all I can, for better or worse: it’s up to them now to make the case. When I spot Rauf as we file back into court, I don’t even ask for the sheet of the day’s proceedings.

  There are the sounds of people settling, the clunks of knee against pew backs, coughs and rustles, the slosh of the jury’s water bottles. Mira and Jody are already here, two pews behind me. I give them a quick smile, then sit down with my back to them.

  The next prosecution witness is called, the policewoman who found me sobbing in the rugby club bathroom, being comforted by a couple of the older wives.

  After her, it’s Elaine, one of the wives, who makes perfectly plain her distaste for Rob. Then the medical examiner and his sheaf of photographs.

  I hope Jody doesn’t catch a glimpse of them as they are passed around the jury.

  There are more photographs of the scene of the crime, my clothing, and Rob’s clothing, complete with ragged tears, lost buttons, and stains, a few more witnesses, and then the prosecution case is closed.

  It’s a strong one, and as we break for lunch, my confidence has bounced back enough to face Jody and Mira. We
eat sandwiches in the little rose garden by the court, and I pretend to fall asleep in the sun so as not to have to answer any of Mira’s questions.

  When we get back, it’s the accused’s turn to give evidence. As he stumps up to the witness box, the material of his suit pulling into wrinkles across his slab of a back, I remember the tackiness of his skin, the taste of salt when I bit him.

  He gives his own account of the events of New Year’s Eve. It’s all pretty unbelievable stuff. The most unbelievable thing about it, of course, is that it’s the truth.

  His lawyer cross-examines him, and then it’s the CPS’s turn.

  Is the court supposed to believe that I approached him out of the blue and asked him to have sex with me? And that I insisted we have intercourse outside even though the temperature was around freezing?

  Is it correct that his girlfriend was present at the party?

  How would he explain the fact that I was covered in mud and patches of my hair had been pulled out?

  His answer, that I fell over crossing the field and that my hair must have got pulled out because I’d asked him to be rough with me, draws gasps of disgust from the public gallery.

  “What, this rough?” asks the lawyer, holding up the photo that made most of the jurors wince.

  During the cross-examination, the jury is increasingly restive, and by the end, some of the women are glaring at him with barely disguised loathing.

  But all is not lost for him.

  Next, they bring in character witnesses who, to a man, insist upon what a great bloke he is. Salt of the earth. Heart of gold. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Etc. We hear about his trek across the Andes for Sport Relief, his commitment to the rugby team, how every Sunday he visits his granny in her nursing home.

  And then we’re done. It’s all over apart from the summing up by each side. The prosecution evidence was strong, but there’s no denying we are left with the impression of a confused drunken fool who made a terrible mistake.

  As we file out of the court, I put on a brave face for Jody and Mira, but all my doubts have crept back in.