‘Okay,’ I start to say. Do I know any solicitors? I think of all my friends. Reuben says I’ve got so many. But no solicitors, I am sure.
‘You have the right to have somebody informed of your detention,’ she says, talking over me like a robot. ‘You have the right to consult the Codes of Practice. Do you have any questions?’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘How do I get a solicitor?’
‘We can contact the duty solicitor or you can call somebody else,’ she says, ‘so long as it doesn’t interfere with our investigation.’
My mind reels. ‘I get one call?’ I say.
‘Yes.’
There’s no question who I will call: I need only him.
Right in the corner of the custody suite, still in the open, in full view of everybody, is an old-fashioned telephone. There’s no seat. Three policemen are sipping tea, right next to it, out of cardboard cups with PG Tips written on the side. The phone’s handset is weighty and black with a heavy silver coil like a snake.
I call Reuben’s mobile and listen to the tinny ring. He never usually answers unknown numbers. He wouldn’t be intrigued by them like I am. But, nevertheless, I hope he does. I want to hear his voice.
He answers almost immediately, unusually for him. He must’ve been worried.
‘It’s me,’ I say.
‘Are you okay?’ he says.
‘There’s been an – I don’t know. An incident,’ I say.
‘Are you okay?’ he says again.
‘Yes. I am.’ I look over my shoulder. The entire suite is still full of police. I can’t explain. Not here. ‘Look – I need a solicitor,’ I say.
I may as well have said I have flown to another country, or given birth. I can hear his stunned silence, heavy down the phone line. ‘A solicitor?’ he says eventually. I hear a faint rasping. He will be rubbing his stubble. ‘Where are you?’
‘In the police station,’ I say in a low voice, although it is not those around me who will be embarrassed for me.
‘Where?’ Reuben says, and in his tone is a stunned note of incomprehension. It is almost funny.
And then I hear it. Not in anything he says, exactly, but in a beat he leaves between words. A beat that sounds a lot like judgement.
‘What …’ he trails off, then lets out an exhalation.
I have blindsided him. I have shocked my calm, stable husband.
‘Jo – what’s happened?’
‘I pushed that man.’ I say it again, without thinking.
‘The one following you?’
I close my eyes. ‘Yes,’ I lie. It’s too complicated to go into now. I’ll tell him later. ‘He’s … injured.’
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll come.’
For once I love his brevity. ‘It’s Paddington Green Police Station.’
‘I know it,’ he says softly. Of course he does. His clients must be here often. ‘I don’t know a solicitor well enough. Get the duty one.’
‘Okay.’ I’m lost in our conversation, and I jump when Sergeant Morris appears right by my side. ‘I’ve really got to go,’ I say.
‘Shall we … shall we do the things?’ he says.
‘You first,’ I say with a little smile, grateful, pathetic tears budding at my eyes.
‘Your …’ He must be thinking hard. I hear him swallow.
We started this charade two months into our relationship – Reuben reluctantly, at first. And now he’s the instigator, like a child told their bedtime routine; expectant. We’re on number 2,589. Over two thousand five hundred facts we love about the other. We’ve never missed a day.
‘The piece of hair right by your temple that never, ever goes into a ponytail,’ he says.
‘The way you file your post immediately,’ I say.
‘I’m sure you’ve used that one before.’
‘Nope.’
‘Two thousand five hundred and ninety tomorrow,’ he says.
I hang up first.
‘In there,’ Sergeant Morris says to me after the call.
‘Where?’ I say.
She points to a room next to a toilet. I go inside and a Forensic Scene of Crime Officer introduces himself to me.
It’s a blur, what happens next. Fingerprints. A DNA swab, hard and dry against the inside of my cheek. A breathalyser. A photograph. Just like in the movies. A blood sample. The underneath of my fingernails are scraped, even though I tell him I was wearing gloves.
‘Take off your shoes,’ he says, when I think we’re done.
‘My shoes?’ I say dumbly.
‘Yes.’
I take off my silk-covered heels and hand them over.
He delves into a basket nearby and pulls out a blue blanket stamped with HMP. I see that, bundled up with it, are a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms, a T-shirt and some black plimsolls. ‘We need your clothes, too.’
‘My clothes?’
‘For forensics.’
‘Right … okay,’ I say.
When I’m finished, and in prison-issue grey clothes, I emerge into the custody suite and am given back to Sergeant Morris.
‘Do you want to look at our Codes of Practice?’ she says.
‘No,’ I say blankly.
‘Okay, then,’ she says, in the tone of voice of a weary mother letting her child spend all their birthday money on sweets.
I look over my shoulder as we walk. Am I supposed to read the codes? Should I want to read the codes?
She leads me down a corridor. The vinyl flooring – a kind of rainy blue-grey – squeaks underneath her shoes as we walk.
I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t ask. I wonder if my mobile’s in a clear plastic bag in a locker somewhere, buzzing sadly. If I ever leave it alone for more than an hour I come back to hundreds of texts and tweets and WhatsApps and Snapchats and emails. Reuben despairs of all the noises it makes; he says that every day I am in touch with everybody I have ever known.
Our surroundings get grimmer as we walk. Along two more corridors and through heavy doors – painted blue, just like how a child might draw a police station, a nick. She holds each door open for me, not in a polite way, but more so she can watch me go through and make sure it locks behind us.
We round the corner and I see that we are into the female cells. It’s exactly how you’d imagine it. There are rows and rows of them. My eyes trail upwards like I am watching rocket fireworks. There are more above those. And more again above those. There are bars. Bars everywhere. Metal flooring with holes in so that I can see right up. I feel vertiginous. We walk up a flight of stairs, on to the first floor, and along a corridor.
We come to a stop outside a door with a ‘13’ written on it. It has a blackboard outside it. On it she writes: J Oliva.
I can hear someone retching. I turn my head to the sound. A groan, a guttural noise, and then a splash. And, like I’ve opened the door to it, I notice all of the other noises. Moaning. A woman shouting. Like we are in a closing nightclub at the end of a particularly violent happy hour. I draw my arms around myself. I pretend my arms are Reuben’s.
I breathe deeply, trying to calm myself, but it only enhances the smell of the place. Wee. Old, sweaty food. Vomit. Stale alcohol.
‘In,’ she says. ‘Time twelve-o-six.’ She makes a note in a book.
‘In?’
She pushes open the door. I haven’t thought about it. About where we are. About where I’m being put. I didn’t think … there were no handcuffs. Nobody forcing my head down as I got into the car. I didn’t think I would be here. It’s a complete shock to me.
There’s a blue plastic mattress on the floor. No – mattress is too grand a term. It’s of the type we used to lay down in PE for gymnastics and tumbling. There’s a smaller one, too, which I guess is supposed to be a pillow. There’s no window. There’s a tiny vent in the wall, top left, next to the high ceiling. There’s an arrow on the ceiling, pointing left. It’s huge and black and I must be staring at it, because she says, ‘It points to Mecca.’
/> She passes me the blanket.
It smells strongly of urine, much worse than outside.
To the left there’s a toilet. No lid. Metal, like on a train or an aeroplane. I remember when Reuben and I flew to Berlin and I used the toilet during turbulence. It stinks. That synthetic cleanness combined with all the dirty things that have gone down it, so they become interchangeable. The bleach and the dirt. They smell the same. There is no toilet roll, and no flush. I blink, looking at it, until I realize Sergeant Morris has left me. The door slams shut and I jump, and then I keep shivering as the word for it reverberates around my brain.
It’s a cell. It’s a cell.
It’s my cell.
5
Conceal
I haven’t told him. I haven’t told him, I haven’t told him, I haven’t told him.
I look at him as he stirs our porridge on the hob.
He is always cooking. He does the cooking, and I do the washing. Two years ago we divided the chores up to stop arguments. Needless to say, the dishes are stacked neatly, the dishwasher never used to store dirty plates, while the laundry basket is overflowing, belching washing like a drunkard by the side of the road.
My hand is getting worse. It is damaged and dysfunctional. It doesn’t do what I want it to. It was stiff this morning.
Reuben is serving the porridge. The kitchen and living room of our flat are open plan. It is basically a studio, even though it has two bedrooms. But we love it; we don’t care that we can hear the upstairs neighbour come home in her high-heeled shoes at three o’clock in the morning. We like the unapologetic griminess of it, of London. The artificially warm air; the hot dust smell of the tube that tells me, after a holiday, that I’m home again. That my feet in flip-flops go black in summer from the smog. The way everybody looks like utter rubbish on the underground at the end of a night out, all pale skin and smudged eye make-up in the bright, harsh lights. That, once, we saw a man with a snake on the night bus, and nobody even stared. All of it. All worth the price tag and the lack of space. Our parents don’t understand it. Reuben’s wonder why we don’t sell up and get out of there. There are other economies, his dad will say to us.
A picture of our wedding day is hung on the wall opposite the cooker. It isn’t staged. ‘I don’t want a massive, pretentious canvas of us grinning,’ he said to me soon after he proposed. And, after all, we didn’t even end up having a big wedding. It wasn’t the best day of our lives. We were pretty nonplussed by it all, after his non-proposal (‘I don’t want to patronize you …’ it began). It was a small affair. I wore a knee-length dress. We went out for a boozy lunch afterwards, at Ask. He drank too much red wine and didn’t remove his hand from my lap even once, ate his pizza one-handed. And then, out in the courtyard – he used to smoke – we had a moment I’ll remember forever.
‘We did it,’ I said.
He nodded, vigorously, his cheeks hollowing as he sucked on the cigarette. ‘We did the thing we wanted to do,’ he said plainly, summing up my happiness exactly.
That simple joy of living our lives for us. Sod everyone else.
We held hands, then, under the umbrella, as he smoked in the rain. I wore red shoes, and felt luckier than I thought it was possible to feel.
I stare at the photograph now. It’s candid, both of us facing each other. I’m laughing gleefully. Reuben’s eyes are raised heavenwards, but there’s a tiny smile on his face.
How could I tell him? He would stop looking at me in that way. That tiny, knowing smile of his. I’m one of the only people he likes. And so how can I tell him, before anyone else?
It gets too much at four o’clock in the afternoon. I’ve escaped into the bathroom twice and dialled 999, then stopped myself at the last moment. My hand is still throbbing. It looks just the same – no bruising – but my wrist still feels weak and useless. I will see if it gets better. And then I will go to the doctor, once all of this is sorted.
I tell Reuben I’m going to go for a walk. I’m light-headed – I have hardly eaten – but I put my jacket on anyway to leave. Reuben looks out at the twilight but says nothing. I look both ways before ascending the stairs out on to the street, as though the police might simply be waiting there for me, too worried to knock.
The cool night air is chilled inside my lungs. I thought I would feel calmer, after a few minutes, than I did in our hot flat, but I don’t. Nothing helps. My stomach churns and I can feel a weight across my shoulders. Everything seems scary, on the walk – out, by myself. The distant sound of sirens. The street lights that seem too bright. It is the beginning, I suppose. The beginning of living in fear. I’m not happy out. I’m not happy in – holed up, inside.
When I let myself back into the flat, Reuben is playing the piano in the box room at the back. He only ever does it when I am out. I stand for a second, then shut the door behind me. As expected, the playing stops. He sits uneasily with that talent, does Reuben. It is too extravagant for him.
He appears in the doorway. I have always loved the proximity our flat affords. I like being able to call Reuben from anywhere, to make casual conversation with him when I am in the bath, when he is cooking.
‘Number two thousand five hundred and eighty-nine,’ he says, still standing in the doorway, ‘how cute your cheeks look when they’re red. When you’ve just come home from a crazy walk.’
I never even have to think about the list of things I love about him. It is endless. I love how shy he is about his brilliant, artistic, instinctive piano-playing. How he is forever crossing boundaries with his clients, bringing them home, taking them on trips, when he shouldn’t: how much he loves those messed-up kids. How he once told my brother, Wilf, that he was being condescending to me.
I should respond. I should offer up something I love about him. Or cross the room and say thank you. A full hug. The length of our bodies pressed together. I should tell him how happy the sound of his piano-playing makes me feel when I get in.
But I can’t.
Because if I do that, then I’ll tell him. I know I will. Or, worse: he’ll know. He’ll see the blackness at my centre. He’ll guess. And he’ll hand me over.
He’s still looking at me, almost expectantly. I avoid his eyes, looking down.
What he’s not expecting is my rejection. And so it makes it worse when it comes. When he realizes I’m not going to answer, I sense his gaze shifting. He’s embarrassed for me to see how hurt he is, and so he turns away from me, messes uselessly with the plants on the windowsill. He starts watering them, not looking at me.
The water trickles, the only sound in all of London, it seems to me.
We take it in turns to make coffee in the evenings. It was his turn this evening, but I followed him, not wanting to be alone, my body fizzing with acid.
I promised myself a day, but now’s the time. We are alone in the kitchen. This is the moment.
‘I didn’t even tell you about my Brixton boy,’ Reuben says, looking up at me as he packs ground coffee carefully into our stove-top espresso maker.
‘No?’
‘You know the one – the boy who got out of the gang stuff, last Christmas? Behaved himself?’
‘Yes,’ I say woodenly.
‘Well, he’s been out with other lads … torching cars.’ He leans against the counter. ‘I can’t work him out – it was all fine.’
Reuben is often bewildered by things like this. I suppose it is a symptom of having a steady mind. If you remove the boy’s problems, the boy will behave. Very logical, but untrue.
‘But don’t you remember being a teenager?’ I say, with a tiny laugh, turning to look at him, grateful for the distraction, for the chance to emerge out of my own head, even if I have to fight while doing it, like climbing a rope with no support, burns on my hands.
‘I was just … I was very boring,’ he says, flashing me a small smile.
I wish for a moment that other people could see this Reuben. That he would let them.
‘But you of all people
had reason to be – to be angry,’ I say.
‘My adoption was hardly personal.’
I can’t hide a smile. ‘You are very blessed to have a sound mind,’ I say, reaching to touch his hand.
He pulls me to him, immediately, and I step back. He leans his weight against the kitchen counter, looking thoughtful. The coffee maker is on the hob and the second it starts to bubble he turns the gas off. ‘Don’t want burnt coffee,’ he says, looking pointedly at me.
‘He’s not happy, then,’ I say. ‘Even if he’s out of the gang and with functional people … he’s not happy.’
‘Why not?’
I shrug. ‘Some of us are screwed up. We sabotage our lives. We don’t know why.’
He gets the milk out of the fridge. ‘You’re my people person,’ he says, reaching a hand out to me tentatively. It brushes my stomach and I move away from him.
He’s always called me that. His ‘people person’. One of his many nicknames for me.
He turns his eyes to mine. There’s a question in them. ‘You alright?’ he says. ‘You sound sad. You’re not a screw-up.’
‘I am,’ I say hoarsely.
He looks at me. ‘You’re holding your arm weirdly,’ he says.
This is surely the moment. I have put it off and put it off. But now I have run out of excuses. My deadline is upon me and I have yet to begin. It is the story of my life.
He sits down at the kitchen counter, at the breakfast bar that divides our kitchen from the living room, but turns towards the television, sipping his coffee. He has the BBC News Channel on. He always does, even though it irritates him.
I open my mouth. In some ways, it would be so easy. They’re just words.
My mouth stays open, like I am waiting for something. Waiting to feel ready. Waiting to be sure. I am never sure about anything. It is easier to do nothing. I glance at the window, out on to Edith’s yard, and then back at Reuben. My gaze slides away from his and towards the television. Focusing in on it like a camera lens, I see the news bulletins. They flash up, narrated, and interspersed with music:
Surrey MP in expenses scandal
Anything You Do Say Page 5
