It’s already after two in the afternoon, and I am rifling in our kitchen drawer for four charity bags that I will distribute evenly along our road, each containing a contaminated, criminal piece of clothing. I should be at work, of course. No doctor’s appointment takes this long. Much longer, and they’ll request a note, but it’s hard to care.
The gloves in one. Cancer Research. The scarf in another. Barnardo’s. Laundering my possessions through a charitable system. I disgust myself.
I pause over the shoes and the coat.
The shoes. Ordered Before. An emblem of my life as it once was. An ASOS order I knew would irritate my husband. Frivolous shoes before a much-anticipated night out. My only problems the credit card bills and the pinching sensation the shoes produced in my toes.
The coat. Filled with duck feathers. A present from Reuben, for my thirtieth. I have no idea how much it cost. I expect hundreds. But I was always shivering, on the way to work, in a stupid trench coat, the skin on my arms cold to the touch when I arrived. I didn’t think he’d noticed. And then, in August, the day I turned thirty, he placed a squishy, large package on the bed. It was the coat. ‘Ready for the winter,’ Reuben said. I have worn it every day. It’s like a duvet. Wrapping me up, reminding me of him as I walk to work.
I ball it up, bringing it to myself like it’s a baby, squeezing it tight. The feathers inside it crinkle underneath my arms. I bury my head in it as though it is his and he is long gone. Just like the man in Sainsbury’s did. Only, I am saying goodbye to myself. To the Joanna whose husband bought her thoughtful birthday presents.
I shove it in the last bag. Macmillan.
I put the bags in my car. I’ll deposit them along another road, next to bins and by doorsteps.
But first: the shoes. They are too distinctive. I can’t risk it with those.
I drive to the tip on a whim, the shoes sitting on the passenger seat next to me. I look at them as we sit at traffic lights and at junctions. Right outside the recycling centre, I see the sign.
This waste disposal centre is monitored with 24/7 CCTV: Smile – you’re on camera.
I loop back around, driving past the sign, pretending I was never going in. My lower back is sweating against the seat. My legs tremble so much my feet slide off the pedals. There are cameras everywhere. It would only take one, to see me acting suspiciously, disposing of evidence, for them to know. I can’t go to the tip, and I can’t put the bags out, either.
I return home with the bags and the shoes and shove them in the back of my wardrobe.
12
Reveal
Westminster Magistrates’ Court is not how I imagined. We are here for my bail hearing. This happens at the Magistrates’ Court. The trial happens at the Crown Court. Mine will be at the Old Bailey, Sarah tells me.
The Magistrates’ Court looks like a sixties office block, the grandeur only apparent if you get closer and can see the crest with the lions on it. Otherwise, it’s an unassuming building in central London where, inside, people’s lives are changed forever. If it wasn’t me, if it wasn’t my bail hearing, it would be so interesting. These people at the heart of the justice system, at the juncture between freedom and imprisonment. The lawyers in robes sweeping by. The divide: between the suits and the lay people who have wronged, or are unfortunate enough to know somebody who has.
I called in sick to work. It was the best I could do. Ed was nice about it, as he always is, and I was grateful for that.
Sarah is waiting in a meeting room for me. She’s wearing a black skirt suit and a white shirt. She keeps shifting within its confining fabric, while it remains stiff around her neck, uncomfortable. Her face is less made up than it was on Saturday, and her eyes look smaller and more tired.
She hands me a machine coffee. It tastes like burnt toast.
We haven’t told anybody yet, Reuben and I. It could be on the television or in the newspapers. I have no idea. But it’s like there’s no room for it in my head. I should have told Ed. My parents. Wilf. Laura. But I can’t. Not yet. Not when I could be imprisoned within the hour. Reuben will have to do it.
‘I’ve got all of your mitigation,’ Sarah says, indicating a pad.
She’s changed her nail colour. I wonder if she removed it last night, scrubbing frustratedly at it while talking to her other half, then slicked on a new shade while he made them liqueur coffees at a stainless-steel breakfast bar.
‘And you have no aggravating features,’ she adds, interrupting my chain of thought.
‘No,’ I say softly.
‘No previous. Good character. No flight risk.’ She is rattling off her checklist.
I can see Reuben, through the windowed panel in the door, standing confidently, assessing everybody. He comes to court a bit, for work. He looks at home here.
‘You must be wondering at the likelihood of bail,’ Sarah says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to know.’
I can’t be worrying about likelihoods of imprisonment. I don’t understand it: I am currently free to wander down the road and buy breakfast from Pret. If there is no risk now, what is the risk in a few hours’ time? But then, what is the risk at all? If I am bailed now, why put me in prison later? I raise my eyes to the marble carved ceiling and pretend for a second that I am merely in – where? Where looks like this? – the Natural History Museum, maybe, and Reuben is earnestly explaining the dinosaur exhibits to me.
What is the point in any of it? I have learnt my lesson, haven’t I? I am not going to do it again. I will never so much as touch another person again, I tell the universe.
We walk out. I’m listed fourth in Courtroom Two.
The foyer looks like it’s made of marble and glass, with rows of benches fixed into the ground, like in an airport. But it’s the people who sit at them; they’re the people I would like to talk to. Or maybe to write about. They are like personifications – is that the right word? – arrayed on those little benches. A man whose shoulders are back, gesticulating at his lawyer. Defiance. A man in a tracksuit, elbows resting above his head on the wall, forehead against the cement right next to the justice crest. Grief. Or maybe Penance, or Regret.
I have no idea what I’m doing here in my Boden blazer, my husband’s hand in mine. None at all.
We have a three-hour wait. I watch Reuben. Looking at him calms me down. He never fiddles. Never gets his phone out. I like to stare at his slow movements, his green eyes raising upwards as people approach; at how he slides his leg closer to mine, lays a hand in my lap just like he did on our wedding day.
But, eventually, we’re called; my name is announced on an electronic screen above the door to Courtroom Two, as if I am in the GP’s surgery or at the dentist (if I hadn’t avoided the dentist’s for the last ten years).
‘All rise,’ a clerk says.
I immediately think of the Blue song. I am still a silly, immature thirty-year-old who would like to snigger in court; my mind hasn’t caught up with the fact that I am the defendant, and it is me in the wooden dock fronted by the bullet-proof glass.
I hardly understand a word of the proceedings. The lawyers and the magistrates refer constantly to a big black book, which they all have open on the table in front of them. The magistrate puts her glasses on to look at it. Their words are a rainstorm of legal jargon: mitigating circumstances and aggravating features and flight risks and CPS sentencing guidelines and referrals to the Crown Court and provocation and reasonable force and premeditation and grievous bodily harm and mens rea.
I understand the facts, but the facts seem to be a backdrop, at best, to what is being discussed. They are not talking about how I was walking home alone. Or that he came up behind me. Or what I did. The push.
It’s other stuff. Logic and argument and theory.