a rational man

by J S Hollis

  he was trying but other than the fact his penis was solid, nothing seemed to be happening. maxi was gorgeous, of course. but when S eventually came it was drawn from the front rather than propelled from the back.

  NECESSITY

  entry 12

  S looked at cecil, who was sitting in a wooden box at the front of the old bailey, isolated from the teeming benches. his father in turn looked straight at the judge and the judge faced the whole courtroom, his gaze hovering in the air, breaking the triangle of vision.

  S had communicated his support to cecil earlier with a nod. cecil deserved support irrespective of what he went on to tell the court. S had heard what a wonderful man his father was a thousand times. how for months he had refused to ask clara out in case she would take it as an insult to her vanity. how he was a great boss, who gave his employees a real chance to make something of themselves. how he could have been a billionaire but settled for millions. how he moved his factories to mali, when no one else would manufacture there. how he turned to politics when every politician was being dissected by the media for the smallest indiscretions. how he tried to tackle poverty when there were no votes in it.

  S had never wanted for anything. he remembered cecil defending him in front of unimpressed schoolteachers, the hours they had spent together in the garden practising batting techniques, meandering walks through london during which cecil would recall the histories of each street with increasing wonder at how they interlaced. what did history mean if it rotted in the light of one moment?

  and yet S was nervous. maybe the meaning of the past was always premised on the future. perhaps he had been lying to himself by ticking all the boxes, finishing exams, socialising and doing the routine. all the time waiting for cecil to somehow summon the past, so that it rose up and washed away the Event, bringing back clara or, at least, bringing back sense. perhaps dr kyriakos was right, but what difference did the causes make? clara was dead. cecil was guilty.

  * * *

  Judiciary of England

  In the Central Criminal Court

  5 September 2061

  R

  -v-

  Cecil Stanhope

  Sentencing remarks of the Hon Mr Justice Cooper

  1.Cecil STANHOPE, you have pleaded guilty to the murder of your wife, Clara Stanhope. I have heard your pleadings on sentencing and I have heard those of the prosecution.

  2.Parliament has decided that those guilty of murder must be sentenced to life imprisonment. All I am therefore required to decide upon is the minimum period of time you will have to serve before you can be considered for release.

  3.The nature of the murder in this case is not unusual. While we have fortunately seen very few murders pass through these Courts in recent years, they normally involve the murder of a spouse or a lover. The murder itself was uncomplicated. You approached your wife, Clara Stanhope, with a knife and cut her throat. It was a nasty and cowardly act: abusing the trust between you and her and disregarding the deepest moral conventions of this land. Moral conventions, which I add, you had sought to develop as a Member of Parliament.

  4.Your guilt was never in doubt and you readily admitted to killing your wife at the hearing that took place in February this year.

  5.There is however something unusual about this case, which you no doubt anticipated. There has been a trend in recent years for crimes to be committed with no indication of premeditation. The nature of security provided by the International Democratic Surveillance System, the IDSS, means that premeditation must remain in the mind. In fact, our society has become rather skilled at planning and thinking without external aids. The Court will undoubtedly be familiar with the various mental mapping classes that now exist. Clara Stanhope, the victim of this sad crime, was a fan of these classes. They seek to teach people how to think clearly and to organise their minds. Many of the teachers were former Drawers in the military, where they were tasked with formulating our nation’s military strategies in their heads. We have seen the resurrection of chess to aid with these skills. Our media regularly report fears that Mind Games, those games that can be played purely in the mind of one individual like a dream that the individual controls, can be used to plan criminal ventures.

  6.Limited evidence of planning does not therefore mean that there has been no planning. Yet this case is unusual because the evidence is not merely limited, it is entirely nonexistent. Prior to the act itself, I doubt anybody could have predicted its occurrence. Immediately before the attack, you and Clara were engaged in the drab conversation typical of married couples. There were no incendiary flickers indicating that something was about to change.

  7.Neither does there appear to have been a fuse lit some hours, weeks or months before the attack that we can track making its way along the taper of time until exploding in the moment of violence. The prosecution has presented no evidence indicating any arguments or disputes between you and your wife. Your relationship appears to have had no more issues than the standard marriage. There is no doubt that you and Clara were both under significant pressure at work – in particular, you had just resigned from the Cabinet – but again there was little to suggest so much tension and stress that it would lead to the act.

  8.This lack of evidence leaves me in a difficult situation. Each murder is different. This much is revealed by the fact I am given discretion with regard to your minimum term and, I should add, by the relentless public debate about why this crime occurred. A murder can be evil, grotesque, a moment of passion and even perhaps comprehensible, if always contemptible. If a murder has been premeditated, I would be required to see that as an aggravating factor. I have therefore been keen to determine the nature of this murder. But I am left with little except the paltry evidence presented by the prosecution and your ambitious testimony. I must decide whether this was a crime of passion, a crime of compassion or neither.

  9.Before I proceed onto your testimony, I would like to take a minute to deal with the main argument raised by the prosecution. The prosecution argues that the murder was a premeditated crime of passion. It says that you believed the claims in the media in the year prior to the murder that Clara was in love with her mindchitect instructor, Tom Hutchings. That you became jealous of Clara’s unrequited love for Tom. For months, you struggled with how to deal with this jealousy and wondered how you might kill her. You realised that you could not plan it and could not escape the consequences. You decided that you would rather be in prison than live with a dishonest wife. On the night of 25 January, you finally took the step. You were driven to take action on that night because your career had disintegrated. You had nothing else to strive for. You knew then that you had lost your wife anyway.

  10.The prosecution’s evidence, and I use that word loosely, for the romantic desires between Clara and Tom includes Clara’s attendance at Tom’s classes on a routine basis, her admiration for his work and their friendship. Tom Hutchings has told this Court that he did not believe his relationship with Clara was anything other than platonic.

  11.The prosecution has rightly pointed out that it does not in fact matter whether or not Clara and Tom were in love. The critical question is whether you suspected they were. There is some slight evidence that you were suspicious. The prosecution provided recordings of you watching Clara at her mindchitect classes. You also asked her whether she was in love with Tom and told her that if she was, she should be honest with you because you only wanted her to be happy. Nevertheless, she pleaded that it was nothing more than the media’s imagination. From the recording, you seemed to be satisfied by this explanation and you have said as much during cross examination. It is also worth noting that on the night of the murder, Clara told you that she no longer intended to attend Tom’s classes.

  12.The prosecution has done its best with limited material but I am not satisfied by their explanation. Now I come to your explanation and I think it would be helpful to repeat the ke
y aspects of what you said.

  13.You began by describing the effect W had on Clara. You said:

  Many of you were not alive in a world before W. You have no concept of a place with privacy and I envy you that ignorance. You have always known that all of your acts are being recorded or watched. Perhaps your ignorance has made you tolerant or perhaps you read the history of the pre W world and find it unappealing. Whatever W’s effects on the majority, it destroyed Clara. Little by little it chipped away at her.

  14.I was unclear about the relevance of this information but you soon moved onto Clara’s personality and her depression. In particular, you said:

  When we first met, she was daring, unusual, colourful. I think she was only interested in me because no one expected her to be. She didn’t seem to care what anybody thought of her. But her personality was – I see now – in flux. Her mood swings and decisions were determined by a lack of certainty about who she was. She was desperate to get things right. She agonised for minutes over how a cup of tea should be made. Should the milk go in first or last? She lived in fear of others. She had no way of testing her ideas without exposing them to the whole world. She couldn’t say what she wanted to say. She couldn’t challenge what she disagreed with. And by the end she didn’t even know what her thoughts were. She was only happy designing other worlds.

  15.You soon returned to the issue of W though.

  W brought her many benefits. She voted for it. Although she was only sixteen, so what did she know? She loved how she could walk the streets without fear. She was delighted that Sebastian, our son, could play outside without constant adult supervision. She believed it made life fair. She was scarred by an early memory of her father, Leo, being almost convicted of a robbery he didn’t commit. W made such lies impossible. It made everyone equal. At least at the level of surveillance. Maybe for the majority, these gains were worth the price. They lost their privacy but they never feared for their safety again. But the cost for Clara was too high. As society’s memory stretched, she was enveloped by it. She found it too tiring to challenge it and worried about how any unusual behaviour would affect Sebastian and myself. So she stumbled around like a robot.

  16.At that point I intervened to ask you what these views had to do with you murdering your wife. You replied as follows:

  What I am trying to say, your honour, is that Clara was deeply depressed and had been for many years. You may doubt me. You have seen the montage of her smiles presented by the prosecution. Few wouldn’t be convinced by the alacrity of her face. In particular, she could never leave her lips alone. She bit them, pursed them, licked them. She applied balm to them twenty-five times a day. And she seemed to live life to the full. In the year before her death she had taken to skydiving. But I knew it was a front. Sebastian and I used to joke about how she would say everything was “amazing”. You can’t see it on the screens but I could feel it when we lay in bed at night together. Her body hunched and shivering. She never admitted it. I wonder whether she kept the depression secret because it was the one private thing she had. On the day I killed her, she was looking for another way out. I had hoped the mindchitecture would work for her. I even hoped she was in love with Tom so that she could find some happiness. And when she quit, I knew that she was searching for something that didn’t exist. Complete clarity. Perfection. She looked for it everywhere in dance, yoga and meditation. But it only exists in death and she knew it. And you may not believe me, because how can a person read something that has never been said? But I knew it. There are few things that I have been more certain of. You can read the people you love. She wanted the perfection of nothing. She couldn’t have done it herself. When I approached her with the knife, she was fully aware of what was happening. When I took her head, she touched me confidently to reassure me that I was making the right decision. You will ask: how do I know what that touch meant? All I can say is that every other touch Clara gave me in recent years was hesitant and brief, as if she were checking an unknown substance. This one was different. It was the old Clara reaching out from the past to tell me to do it. Did that make killing her the right thing to do?

  I believe so.

  17.Your testimony was passionate and perhaps I should believe it. You have, after all, been a good and honest man for the past fifty years. You have worked exceptionally hard in the service of public good through industry and then in politics. But you were also incoherent. At times you appeared more concerned with talking about the social implications of W than the murder of your wife.

  18.In any case, killing an innocent woman on the basis of a touch, out of a belief in an unspoken depression, seems, at best, a grossly reckless disregard for the conventions of society. You could, at least, have asked Clara whether she was depressed. If I was to believe your mercy killing motivation, I fear that every other murderer who enters this courtroom will say the same thing. It is an ambitious attempt to turn a horrific act into something noble but for that it is all the more malevolent.

  19.Whether or not Clara was depressed, as you have alleged, is debated. Since your testimony, both sides have employed psychologists to comment on your views and, as tends to be the way in these cases, the psychologists disagree with each other. Dr Fouree for the prosecution argued that Clara’s irrepressible contentment and constant activity indicated a happy mind. Dr Jacobs for the defence argued that such aggressively positive behaviour had all the hallmarks of an intense depression. I doubt it matters who is right. Even if Clara was depressed, this does not sufficiently account for your action.

  20.I am troubled by one thought, which Counsel raised. If this was a premeditated murder, why didn’t you try to make it look like an accident? We have seen a few innocent walks along treacherously high coastal paths where a slip has led to the death of a loved one. But the same could be said if this was a crime of compassion. I am left with the feeling that this was either completely unthinking or that it mattered to you that we all saw it for what it was. Then again, this could be a double bluff, a murder so out of the blue, it can only make sense if we believe you.

  21.I am left in a difficult place. The motives suggested by you and by the prosecution are both lacking credibility. An alternative possibility is that you were simply overcome by life. Stresses at work and at home became so overbearing that you snapped and took it out on one of your annoyances, Clara. Admittedly, your snapping seems to be of a rather controlled kind. You killed her with the artfulness of a surgeon. But that is your nature. You are a very controlled man. While your mind may have been temporarily out of control, the rest of you remained obedient.

  22.I have discussed your motive at length and the truth is there is no resolution. The Court has to accept that it does not know. In terms of setting the tariff then, there are no irrefutable factors, which indicate that the tariff should be set above the norm of 15 years. There are no specific aggravating factors regarding this murder other than the discomforting lack of motive and your lack of contrition. You have argued that this was an act of mercy for a seriously depressed woman and that this is a mitigating factor. But, on balance, I am not convinced by that argument.

  23.Cecil Stanhope, your actions have frayed the fabric of trust that keeps our society together. You were entrusted with the duties of protecting our nation but have proved unable to understand the most basic rules of morality. Your sentence for the murder of Clara Stanhope is, as it must be, imprisonment for life and, for the reasons I have given, you must serve at least 15 years of that sentence.

  * * *

  S visited cecil a week after the sentence. he had found words difficult to come by in that time, or rather he worried that speaking one word would make him vomit. he followed the beginning of thoughts but they led into another irresolvable thought, like a house with a million rooms but no front door. the only way S could sleep was by immersing himself so fully in someone elses day that he was able to forget who he was for a moment.

  c
ecil was waiting for him in the visitors room. he was leaning forward on the table, biting a nail.

  S approached and cecil rushed the hand into his pocket.

  “hello, seb,” he said.

  S sat down, closed his eyes, inhaled as if he were about to blow out his birthday candles and then sighed. he turned to the bag he was holding and took out a tattered copy of dostoyevskys the idiot. he placed it on the desk. cecil took a look at the cover and half smiled.

  “ive tried to read it before.”

  “try again.”

  S made himself look into his fathers eyes for a moment. cecil broke the gaze to look at the grain of the table.

  S got up to leave.

  “i would really like it if you believed me,” cecil said. “doubt anyone else will.”

  S said something as he left but it is hard to make out what. probably “goodbye” but it has been suggested he said “go die”.

  entry 13

  S arrived at university determined not to let the Event dictate any more of his life. he had already made the decision to go to university rather than study from home, despite dr kyriakos concerns. he was intent on being himself. the version of himself that existed nine months before. he defined the personality of this S as reserved but friendly, with a desire to make the world a better place and a passion for watching anything that moved. he wasnt even sure if he liked this version of himself but at least it was familiar.