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.