I almost roll my eyes. Of course. Not a true love life disaster. Something else.
Wilf bought well in the London market and it’s changed his life. His flat made him ￡150,000 in just over a year. He now owns four London properties. Buy to lets. He whinges about his tenants.
‘But more another time,’ he says.
I close the door softly behind him. Reuben walks straight past the car.
‘What …?’ I say.
He doesn’t answer me, just keeps walking, reaching behind him for my hand. We walk together, to the end of my parents’ winding road, and he turns to face me and gestures towards me. I step into his embrace. His hands encircle my shoulders and I can feel the length of his body against mine. It’s a proper hug. The kind we couldn’t have in the car.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he murmurs. ‘I’m so sorry they’re such utter shits.’
‘Me, too,’ I say.
Later, on the way home, I turn to him. The heating’s on high and he drives so carefully, so slowly, that I feel utterly safe. Almost asleep.
‘I was unlucky, wasn’t I?’ I say. I can’t help myself.
‘No doubt,’ he says immediately.
‘Would you prosecute me?’ I say. ‘If you were the police?’ I can’t avoid asking that, either. Usually, I would prefer to never ask, to choose never to know, but something’s changing.
‘How could I?’ he says. ‘You’re my wife.’
Even after two years, the word sends a frisson up and down my spine. His wife. The only one he chose. For life.
‘But if I wasn’t?’ I say.
We’re approaching a roundabout. Reuben hates this junction. He hates driving in London. He doesn’t hear me, is navigating around the traffic island, checking his mirrors methodically. He looks over his shoulder as he changes lane, his gaze alighting on me. Just for an instant.
I tell Laura, too. Before she hears it somewhere else. It might be on the news, Reuben says. Depending on what happens to Imran in hospital. I press ‘call’ with shaking fingertips on my phone.
‘About Friday,’ I say as she answers. My tone is brusque, trying to cover the embarrassment of not having told her sooner, of having an incident involving her lead to one that’s just about me. Laura wouldn’t have done what I did. It is better I tell her now, anyway, before Sarah requests a statement from her.
‘What about Friday?’ she says.
‘I thought I was followed – after we left. By that bloke. Sadiq.’ I try to do it how Reuben did, but I fail. The edges of my vision darken as though somebody has dimmed the lights in our living room.
‘Yeah?’
‘And – I mean, it wasn’t. But I thought it was …’ I swallow. How am I going to be cross-examined on the witness stand if I can’t even cope with explaining it to my best friend?
Laura, as ever, says nothing, waiting. I can imagine her hand raking through her cropped hair, her eyes squinting as she tries to understand what I’m saying.
I tell her the rest. What I’ve told Reuben. What I told the police. Omitting my lie.
‘They can’t do that,’ Laura says. ‘Surely it’s just – surely it’s just an innocent mistake.’
‘It’s the law.’
‘Well, the law’s wrong. What should you have done? Wait to be killed?’
‘Apparently.’
‘God. I can’t believe it,’ she says.
‘It wasn’t the best night ever,’ I say with a weak laugh.
Laura doesn’t speak for a while. And then she says, ‘Well – I just went home and had a pizza.’
We both laugh, and I love her for that.
Reuben told my work, and they requested a meeting for the day I return. Today.
I’m only half aware of all of these things. They happen on the periphery of my vision, like planets orbiting the sun. Reuben asked if he should tell them, and I remember saying yes, but what I remember more vividly is eking the tea out of the teabag as I squeezed it against the white cup, and being struck with the notion that I might only have a finite number of cups of tea left in the outside world. In freedom. That, after a few hundred more, or maybe fewer, my next tea might be a prison cup of tea. I poured it down the sink, suddenly terrified.
News travels fast, and a colleague texted me. I’m outraged on your behalf, she had written. She went on to say she couldn’t believe I would ever be charged for that. I didn’t know what to say back.
We’re both silent as we approach the Hammersmith Library and the offices behind it. We both know. Of course the government library service isn’t going to let me work for them. The government is charging me with wounding with intent, after all.
Reuben stops, a hand on the door handle, his eyebrows raised. I nod. I want him with me.
It is quick and painful. I am suspended. I am not innocent until proven guilty. It is quite the opposite. Ed looks at me with what I first think is embarrassment, but later – in bed, at 4 p.m. – I realize was actually fear.
He is afraid of me. And of what I might do.
The next day, I report to the police station at noon. I have to go at noon every day.
It’s snowing again.
There is already somebody at the desk, wearing an ankle tag, and I sit down on a bank of grey chairs affixed to the wall. The tag is a wide, sturdy band, like a Fitbit. It has a grey face with an eye on it, like a webcam. His skinny jeans ruck up around it. Evidently it is new to him, because he asks how he’ll shower, gesturing down with his right hand, cocking his leg like a dancer. The woman at the desk tells him in a bored tone that it’s waterproof. He swears at her, and she threatens to report him.
He makes a loud phone call on the way out. ‘Finally done. Some bitch all up in me,’ he says.
I blink, trying to ignore him. I wonder if they prefer me, here, at the reception desk, sitting primly with my handbag.
I have no tag. No conditions except this reporting. This endless reporting. Every day. Even weekends. Just to prove that I am … here. It is tautological. Pointless.
Two women come in as I’m at the desk. They’re both skinny, ill looking.
‘This, then methadone, then to the shops,’ one says to the other.
I start, my body jolting, then stare at them. And then I feel the strangest dart of emotion: envy. I am envious. That this is not shocking to them. That they don’t think their lives are ruined. That maybe court appearances and bail conditions are routine – a nuisance, an annoyance, like flies in the summer heat.
‘I heard about you,’ the woman behind the desk says to me. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m on your side. He deserved a lamping.’
I don’t correct her. I don’t remind her of my mistake. I simply nod, and say thank you.
‘Mum called,’ I say.
I am sitting by the breakfast bar while Reuben chops an onion. How many thousands of onions have I watched him chop, sauté, serve? I usually love it. The warmth of it. The distraction of the cooking. The smells and the creativity and his flair; that piano-playing flair he sometimes demonstrates. It’s one of the many reasons we won’t move: we love the closeness, the proximity our tiny flat affords.
He doesn’t answer. This is his way. He lets me talk, if I want to. Or not, if I don’t.
‘The landline,’ I say.
Reuben glances up, catches my eye, smiles briefly. ‘Of course.’
She always telephones the landline. I wish she would get the hang of emails, of texts, so that I could politely ignore them, or that she would call my mobile so that I could screen it, but she never does. I answered unthinkingly, hoping it was good news – from the police, from my lawyer, from the victim, saying he wanted to drop the charges – but it was her.
‘She didn’t apologize. But she invited us again, this weekend.’
He looks up at me at this. ‘Why would we go back to their house when they were rude to us?’
‘Because they’re my family. I might need them,’ I say uselessly, my mind spiralling over past news stories I have ignored, but whose details have entered my psyche somehow. Alienated prisoners, released with nowhere to go. Not just because the probation system has failed them, I bet, but because their families have, too. I can’t let it happen.
‘You don’t need them,’ he says. ‘Bunch of twats.’