‘He’s worse?’ I say.
It hits me then. It happens all the time. In the shower when I’m opening a new bottle of strawberry shower smoothie. Taking a first sip of coffee in the morning. Gazing out of a window. Feeling the cold winter air against my face. If we lose, as Sarah puts it, I will be in for a very long time. I haven’t googled it. I haven’t asked her. But I know, from that one-word sentence I saw in her notes.
Life.
It’s ironic, really, when it means practically the opposite of living.
She’s not looking at me, concentrates instead on pouring the water from the jug into three glasses. A segment of lemon plops in, splashing the pine table. A drop of water sits there, distended, on the tabletop, and I reach out to squash it with my index finger. Reuben’s eyes follow my movements.
I leaf through the statements. None of the words leap out at me. They all blur together. I glean what I can from them: Imran is brain damaged; to what extent, nobody knows.
I don’t want to read on, but I do. The words keep on attacking me, like hundreds of needles across my skin.
Currently, he can’t care for himself. He will probably struggle to work. At the very least, he will not be the same again. He is struggling to regulate his emotions. He is forgetful, reintroducing himself to nurses, over and over. He is not Imran any more, his sister’s statement reads sadly. He drinks tea, mechanically, with a straw, the cup held by a nurse; he has forgotten, his sister says, that he hates tea. My eyes fill with tears.
In all of that – the injury, the life-changing stuff – it’s the tea that does it.
Sarah is watching me reading it. ‘It’s all just conjecture. We won’t know his condition for a while now. Until he’s stable,’ she says. ‘So ignore that. They’re getting proper expert evidence. About his prognosis. His injuries. We need to concentrate on what his sister says about what he was doing that night, and link it to your mistake. To make people see how easily you made it.’
She briefly shows me a couple of photographs, taken from the hospital. A head wound, deep and red. A close-up of his face, in hospital, the eyes closed. He looks nothing, I realize with a start, like Sadiq. He has distinctive, high cheekbones, a wide, sensual mouth that turns down at its edges.
‘Can I see him?’ I croak.
‘Who?’ Sarah says.
‘Imran. What did he look like – before?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sarah says.
Reuben plucks the papers out of my fingertips and lays them, text down, on the table. I look at him gratefully, but really I’m processing the last sentence I read in the witness statement.
Previously, he loved running, dancing, and was undergoing a cheffing course in central London. He suffered from social anxiety but was learning to manage it with exercise and CBT. He was out running that night when …
He was running.
He was just running.
I almost laugh. It makes sense in a funny kind of way. I can plot it, like a narrative; my whole life leading up to this point.
When I was five, I thought I saw a jester outside our car in a petrol station while Mum, Dad and Wilf were inside in the services. I swore on it. And that’s where it began. The teasing. Imaginative Joanna, they would say. She confuses fantasy and reality.
I spent my degree making up stories for the strange people dwelling in my tutorials. Everybody at school had looked the same, in hindsight, and suddenly, at Oxford, everybody was … different. A man with waist-length dark hair. I used to imagine him combing it every morning. One hundred brush strokes, I was thinking, instead of discussing Ulysses. The girl with the bowl cut of curls, the ends of which she dyed red. The boy who had already made so many notes his folder was rammed full of immaculate, tiny writing.
I still do it now with every customer who comes into the library. Or I did, anyway. The man with the little regular scars on his forearms. The woman with the bald patch on the top of her head. The guy with the beard and the wild hair but the wise, kind dark eyes who I privately call Gandalf. Who were they all? I wanted to know. I made things up for them. To get inside them.
And now, here we are. The perfect, unfolding narrative from an imaginative woman. I was lifted up by the fingers of God and planted in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and I imagined that somebody who was merely out running was trying to attack me.
His life is changed, and more than mine. I deserve all of this. Anybody would say so. The State would say so. The law. And that’s worse than any of it. His injuries. His life.
Reuben clears his throat. ‘What’s the point of all of this? She’s not dangerous. She doesn’t need to be inside. He probably doesn’t even want her inside.’
‘No …’ Sarah says, nodding seriously like my socialist husband hasn’t just taken down the justice system in four sentences. ‘You don’t need to tell me that.’ She says it kindly, not dismissively, in a departure from her usual authoritative tone.
‘To punish and discourage,’ Reuben says, talking over her, using the voice he uses when he’s talking to Tories.
I see Sarah shift away from him. What Reuben doesn’t realize is that he is never going to change anybody’s mind.
‘Those are the reasons – for prison – aren’t they?’ he says.
‘Yes, but –’
‘She doesn’t need punishing. She’s not going to do it again. What’s next? Reforming her? Get her a probation officer? As if. It was wrong place, wrong time. Removing offenders from society – that’s another reason, isn’t it? Because they’re dangerous. Well, she’s not. I just can’t see why … it’s a hefty prison term, isn’t it?’
Sarah doesn’t say anything in response to that, only darts a quick look at me. She knows I don’t want to know, and so she won’t hint either way. She’s a good lawyer. Her legs are crossed only at the ankles, primly, and she sits forward in a wave of perfume and looks at us. ‘You missed one,’ she says.
‘What?’ Reuben says.
‘Justice.’
‘Justice?’ he thunders.
‘This is the law,’ she says, spreading her hands wide. ‘The prosecution have to prove that Joanna broke the law. Forget about the rest. Just look at the offence. She did not commit it. That’s what we’re arguing. Self-defence. Mistake. If we prove the mistake was made in good faith, and not negligently, then the law will treat your case as though it was Sadiq. Then, we need only to establish that you acted in self-defence.’
Just look at the offence. I repeat it to myself, thinking about Imran and his tea. But quietly, a small voice in the back of my mind agrees with Reuben: what use is it all? What will change for Imran if I go to prison? Who is any of this for? The thought is like a rain cloud, flitting over my consciousness. What’s the point of any of it?
‘If something’s a crime and you do that thing – you deserve the punishment. That’s what the UK law is. Whether or not … whether or not you’re – you know – good. The idea is that the law puts in place all possible excuses and defences. If you don’t have one, then you get the punishment.’
I don’t say anything. I am not good.
‘But it was a mistake,’ Sarah continues. ‘And there’s good, supportive law around this. There’s a whole doctrine … I think that’s your best shot. Though it’s not used very often. Sadiq will help. I will impress upon him that it’s best just to be honest. To prove your innocent mistake.’ Her features soften, and I can see sympathy there behind the facts of the law. Has she ever walked home alone, on an ill-advised jaunt? Perhaps she had dodged the bullet that hit me.
‘Mistake,’ I say. The whole thing was a mistake.
‘So, we’ll use mistake to make the point that you thought the victim was somebody other than who he was, and then self-defence after we’ve got over the mistake hurdle.’
‘Right.’
I reach over and finger one of the lily petals in the middle of the flower arrangement. It’s plastic. The pollen’s plastic, too. They looked so real, until I saw the fine layer of dust.
‘We can do this,’ she says.