Anything You Do Say

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Joanna – the duty solicitor, Sarah Abberley. Sarah – Joanna.’ Morris turns and leaves without another word.

  ‘So,’ Sarah says, once we’re alone.

  I like that proactive so. She explains the caution to me. She breaks down all of the words, even though I know what they mean.

  ‘You’ve been assigned to the CID, who are for serious crimes,’ she adds, when she’s finished.

  ‘I just … what’s happening? It was just a push.’

  She looks up at me sharply. Her eyes are blue, and incisive, like a hawk’s. They move quickly, darting around, taking in my clothes, my shoes, my shaking hands.

  She gets out a pen and a branded notepad from her law firm.

  She is looking down at the pad, taking down my name, the date and the time, but then she raises her eyebrows to me. They’re plucked but not overly so. Smooth, angular dark lines.

  ‘What happened?’ she says simply.

  I start from the beginning.

  Sarah writes notes occasionally, but she mostly just sits, looking at me. Nodding and mmm-ing.

  I tell her everything.

  Except one thing.

  It’s not even a lie. Not really. Simply an omission.

  I don’t tell her of my pause. My tiny pause as the man in the street lay in that puddle. I can’t tell her; don’t want her to know that I dithered. That, in another life, I might’ve fled. I tell her I got him out of the puddle immediately.

  When I’ve finished, she says, ‘Look, they won’t give me any disclosure. So you need to give a no comment interview.’

  ‘No comment? Why would I do that? I have lots of comments,’ I say. ‘I want to explain.’

  ‘I know. You have a strong defence. But they are being obstructive. They won’t tell me anything. What you said at the scene. The position the victim was in. His injuries. If they have witnesses.’

  ‘I … he was at the bottom of the stairs. I said I pushed him –’

  ‘My advice is to give a no comment interview,’ she says, her voice razor-sharp, cutting me into ribbons.

  Embarrassed, chastened, by her tone, I look around the room. There’s cladding on the walls. Grey-green, the colour of a dirty pond. It’s spongy, and makes the room look smaller. Soundproofing, maybe. There’s a gap in the cladding, like a dado rail, only it’s white plastic, with a red strip running around it. I extend my fingers towards it.

  ‘Don’t,’ Sarah says, reaching a slim arm out to stop me. ‘It’s a panic alarm. You’ll send a load of police in here. The last thing you want.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll give the no comment interview,’ I say after a moment’s thought.

  ‘Good. Now, Joanna. I think they will be talking about causing grievous bodily harm with intent.’

  ‘What’s causing grievous bodily harm with intent?’

  ‘It’s very serious.’

  She passes me a sheet of paper, an Internet printout. It has Offences Against the Person Act 1861 written across the top.

  Offences Against the Person. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m still not really understanding.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says, grabbing a blank sheet of paper and a pen. On a page she writes murder, followed by attempted murder, manslaughter, s18 (GBH with intent), s20 (GBH), common assault. ‘These are in descending order of seriousness,’ she says. ‘Killing, trying to kill, killing with reason or excuse.’ She points to the words as she runs down the list.

  ‘But I didn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘Section eighteen is causing grievous bodily harm with intent. Section twenty – causing grievous bodily harm. GBH.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Lastly – common assault.’ She taps her pen against the sheet of paper.

  I wonder dimly if she loved law school; if she always wanted to be a lawyer. If the bureaucratic justice system disappoints her. I’d never thought of being a lawyer. But perhaps I should have. I would like to do what she does. Turn up on weekends and save the day in a pinstriped suit.

  ‘Causing grievous bodily harm with intent. Just below attempted murder,’ I say, tracing a finger over the words. She’s pressed hard with the ballpoint pen, and the letters feel three-dimensional, the paper curling underneath them. ‘I didn’t have any intent,’ I say.

  ‘You pushed a man.’ She says it kindly.

  ‘But …’ I say. ‘He was … Sadiq was …’

  ‘I know. And we’re going to run that. We’ll say it was self-defence, but back it up with another legal doctrine. Called mistake. It says if you believed the mistake you made – genuinely – then the court will treat you as if it were true.’

  ‘Good,’ I say.

  Causing grievous bodily harm with intent. What intent? Am I a monster? I wish there was a mirror in the interview room that I could look into and inspect myself. To see if I have changed. I haven’t seen myself since Friday evening.

  She pushes her hair back. It’s flyaway, fine, like mine, and it falls forward again, like grass swaying in a spring breeze.

  ‘Okay, Joanna,’ she says, leaning forward. Her foot squeaks against the linoleum underneath us. ‘Let’s talk worst-case scenarios.’

  She’s levelling with me. Making the mistake that – because I am well spoken and intelligent looking – I am not a mess: a fuck-up. That I deserve to be levelled with.

  ‘No, I …’ I say. ‘I don’t want to know. I don’t like worst-case scenarios.’

  I don’t add that I prefer to bury my head in the sand, that I have lost jobs and failed exams and simply not turned up to things when it mattered. That I have quit things that just seemed to be – somehow – too hard to continue with.

  She sits back now, looking at me with those bird-like eyes. ‘No?’ she says. ‘I would want to know.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I work in a library,’ I say. ‘A mobile library.’

  Already, that life – my job – feels like another universe. The regulars who I would nickname. Quiet, calm Buddhist Ed, the librarian and my manager. The children I help to discover reading; a world of complete magic. I love lots of things about the job. I love sitting in the sun under the skylight on quiet days. I love recommending my recent favourite thriller to people. I love meeting everybody: babies, elderly people. Lonely people.

  Sarah nods. ‘There are some things in your favour, anyway,’ she says to me. ‘Some good news.’

  ‘Yes?’ I say.

  ‘You stayed and called 999. You did CPR. The court like all this stuff.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, not telling her how close I came to walking away entirely. How easy it would have been. How much I regret it. ‘Is it very serious?’ I say after a pause, wanting her reassurance.

  But, just like her steel-grey bag and her stern red lipstick, she doesn’t hold back. ‘Yes,’ she murmurs. ‘I’m afraid so.’

  I look down at her papers, avoiding her eyes. She keeps staring at me. Not intensely. Just thoughtfully. Impassively. My eyes run over her notes, and I avert them after a second, in shock.

  I look at the wall, at the door, down at my hands. Anything to stop my brain from processing what I’ve seen, like a partner in denial about a text spotted on their other half’s mobile phone.

  But I can’t forget it.

  I can’t un-see it.

  A printout from the Internet. The CPS Sentencing Guidelines. Three years was written at one end of an arrow.

  And at the other, there was simply one word.

  Life.

  9

  Conceal

  Reuben’s made a fry-up. The smell turns my stomach. I am now nine stone.

  ‘Alright,’ he says as I walk, ghost-like, into the kitchen. My pyjamas are damp from sweating all night. I have made lists in my mind, lists that I am too afraid to commit to paper for fear of creating evidence.

  Tread marks. Hairs. Glove fibres. CCTV.

  Reuben kisses me on the top of my head. Unconsciously, I duck away from him, jerking my head away a
s though I am infectious, poisonous, and he might catch it from me. And isn’t that true? I can’t believe we were on the verge of making a baby together.

  He looks at me in surprise. I have never done anything like that – have always been the needy one, the clingy one; childlike in my need for cuddles.

  ‘Made you eggs,’ he says, instead of asking me what’s wrong.

  I don’t reply for a second. He hates eggs. He never cooks them. ‘Tuesday morning cheer-up eggs.’

  I can feel tears waiting in the wings, but they won’t come. I am too frightened to cry. I can’t bring myself to say anything, either. I have become almost mute with guilt.

  ‘Really,’ I say eventually. My voice is hoarse.

  He knows I need cheering up. What else has he noticed?

  ‘Look,’ he says, flopping a fried egg out of the pan. I nod, once. He’s still staring at me, but I ignore him and silently take the plate to the breakfast bar.

  I push the egg and beans around my plate. They leave orange smears that start to congeal.

  Reuben’s silent, too. He’s hurt, I can tell. He would never say so, would never be so petty as to pick an argument over eggs, but I can tell.

  ‘I can’t eat this,’ I say. I can’t force it down my dry throat.

  I stand and scrape my egg into the bin. Right there, on top of the other rubbish in the bin, is another floppy white disc. Another egg, already in the bin, slightly blackened underneath. He must have burnt the first one. Made me a second.

  Sky News is on a silent loop in the background as I dress. I try to use both hands, but my left is still useless; stiff, now, more than painful. We have a TV in our bedroom. Reuben resisted it, at first, said it was dysfunctional, but I like to watch Don’t Tell the Bride and scroll through Instagram on my iPhone before bed. I loved that time.

  My top hangs off me. I can see my ribs, just below my collarbones.

  I avert my eyes from my changing body and reach for my mascara. I have to leave in half an hour, and all I am thinking is that I shouldn’t be putting make-up on. Maybe if I hadn’t worn mascara, hadn’t worn those shoes … maybe Sadiq would have left me alone. Maybe he’d have approached Laura instead. Or somebody else entirely. Maybe I looked up for it.

  And then he wouldn’t have followed me.

  And then it wouldn’t have happened.

  And now I wouldn’t be hiding.

  Just as I apply the last stroke of mascara, the news bulletin changes again.

  ‘The body of a man left for dead by the side of the canal has been identified by his sister. It is that of Imran Quarashi.’

  I am staring at the television. Waiting.

  A photo pops up. Imran in a field in the summer. They zoom in, cropping out a woman. He’s smiling. Happy.

  I can no longer ignore it. No longer deny it. I killed the wrong man.

  ‘He was found, face down, in a shallow puddle in the early hours of Saturday morning. It has now been confirmed that he died from a lack of oxygen reaching his brain during this time and catastrophic head injuries sustained from a fall. He had been out jogging.’

  It feels as though my body’s not mine any more. My hand holding the mascara wand. My feet nestled in the carpet. They do not belong to me.

  It could have been prevented. That’s the worst thing. I keep thinking that something is the worst, and then finding something else, like a layered onion with a rotting core.

  They cut to a video of a woman standing nervously outside a white building. I can’t make out where it is.

  ‘Now we’re speaking to Imran’s sister, Ayesha,’ the news presenter says.

  ‘We’re so sorry about Imran,’ another presenter says.

  There they are. The people I have tried to avoid.

  ‘I am – was – his sister,’ the woman says carefully. She’s beautiful; petite, with huge eyes, a turned-down, full mouth. She has a mole, right in the middle of her cheek. A beauty mark. ‘Our parents are back in Pakistan. It was – it was just us.’

  I can’t stop looking. At this woman whose life I have ruined. If only … if only I could reach out into the television and touch her. Tell her how it was. My cataclysmic mistake.

  Imagine if I had handed myself in. Dragged him out of the puddle. Explained myself. They might’ve let me go. Surely they would have, once they’d seen that I was good. But I am not good and he is dead and I have no choices left: I have run out of them.

  I finish applying the mascara, mechanically, like a robot.

  Outside, sleet flurries swirl around an illuminated halo of a street lamp. It’s still dark. Edith has put fairy lights up. She does it every year. Reuben says it’s tacky, but I like it. She puts them around the Hammersmith and Fulham Council parking meters and along the steps leading to the front doors. I can hardly believe the world is continuing.

  I wonder how many other near misses I have had. How many times have we laughingly crossed the street and not seen a car speed past moments later?

  Reuben comes into the bedroom, his keys in his hand. ‘Be back late,’ he says. ‘Got a thing.’

  He is always mysterious about his work; will hardly ever tell me exactly what he’s doing.

  ‘Okay,’ I say woodenly, but my voice catches.

  He stops, his hand on the door, and looks at me. ‘You alright?’ he says softly. ‘You seem kind of … down.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, thinking, Don’t come near me. Don’t reach out to me. I’ll tell you if you do. I nod quickly, looking off to the left, not meeting his eyes.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, dropping his keys on the bed and coming close to me. In a single movement, one we have practised again and again, he wraps me up in his arms. My head slots neatly into the place between his shoulder and his neck. His hands come around my shoulders. ‘Jojo,’ he says.

  It wasn’t Sadiq. That is all I can think about while the man I love holds me close to him.

  I have killed without reason. It was bad enough before, but it is worse now. Somebody innocent has died at my hands.

  ‘What’s up?’ Reuben says.

  Perhaps I could … perhaps he would help me. Stand by me. Make it better. My confession looms tantalizingly in front of me.

  I lean back and look into his eyes for what feels like the first time since Before. ‘Nothing,’ I say glumly.

  ‘Tell me your worries,’ he says; a sentence he’s uttered many times before.

  I keep staring at him, and he raises his eyebrows, just a fraction, like somebody encouraging a frightened, unsure toddler to take its first steps. He raises them further, then gives me a tiny smile, a smile just for me, and it is as though my chest is expanding and letting all the good feelings in again: hope and optimism and forgiveness and love.

  ‘Something happened on Friday,’ I say slowly, wondering what I’m going to say, unable to stop thinking about the intoxicating relief of telling him.

  He steps back, but runs his hands down my arms, as if warming me up, then takes my hands in his. ‘What?’ he says. ‘With the man?’

  I nod. I’ll start at the beginning. I’ll tell him – properly – about the bar. And then … and then I’ll see.

  ‘Yes. Sort of,’ I say, taking a deep breath. It wouldn’t be just mine any more. It would be our secret. Shared. He would help me. ‘I did something bad.’

  There. It is out there. My confession. My half-confession.

  ‘What?’ Reuben says gently. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘He had … he’d grabbed me. In the bar. I felt his …’ I’m surprised when the tears come. This isn’t about that. And yet – isn’t it, all the same? ‘He grabbed my bum,’ I say. ‘It was really full on. Worse than I made it out to be. I was very scared.’

  ‘Shit,’ Reuben says. ‘I’m so sorry, Jo. You should’ve said.’

  ‘I know, but – but after that –’

  ‘Yes?’ he says. And then, because he works with youths, and always knows the right things to say, he looks me directly in the eyes and says, ‘It wasn’t your f
ault. You did nothing wrong. It’s never okay to do what he did. To grab you and to follow you.’

  I nod again, but now the moment is over. I can’t tell him.

  It was my fault.

  It was all my fault.

  We break apart soon after that.

  10

  Reveal

  ‘Interview tape is running,’ Detective Inspector Lawson says. ‘Video on.’ He cautions me again.

  I can see myself reflected in the lens of the video camera.

  ‘Can you please state your name for the record?’ Lawson says.

  I lean forward. ‘No comment,’ I say.

  It’s what Sarah told me to do; it’s what we decided I would do. To buy us time to build a defence. So that I wouldn’t incriminate myself. It was for the best, she said, until we knew what we were up against.

  ‘And please can you state your date of birth for the record?’ the other detective, Detective Sergeant Davies, asks.

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘And can you give us your address, please – otherwise we won’t be able to process this interview at all.’

  I dart a look at Sarah. She’s looking intently at me, and then the police officers, and then me again. She nods her head, just once.

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘What happened that night, Joanna?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘If you explain, we might be able to end things here. We’ll release you. You can get some sleep. If you cooperate, Joanna, things will be much easier for you.’

  ‘I …’

  The CID both sit back, together – they are like one unit, with the same body language and expressions, one a paler, taller version of the other.

  ‘No comment,’ I say, feeling like a clown in the middle of a serious meeting.

  ‘Let’s just cooperate, Joanna. I take it your silence means you’re thinking about it? Pleading guilty?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘The victim’s name is Imran Quarashi.’

  ‘Imran,’ I say. Who is he? What does he like? Where is he now? Will he get better? I can’t ask these questions, of course.