‘GBH,’ I say. ‘Right.’
‘I think you ought to plead guilty,’ she says, and she gives me a look.
I’ll never forget that look. Pity and sadness and guilt all at once. Like somebody seeing the saddest thing they can imagine. A homeless person stealing bread. A toddler in Aleppo. There’s that pity, but something else, too. Something in the slant of her eyes and the tensing of the muscles either side of her mouth; she’s relieved. Relieved this is me and not her life. That this didn’t happen to her. She is glad of it.
‘Plead guilty – now?’ I say. ‘We’re about to go in. All that – all that work,’ I say pathetically, thinking of her reams of notes on the doctrine of mistake, her arguments about how unsafe women always feel when walking alone at night, how they’re inclined to overreact. They’re not legal, she told me, but they are arguments. I think of all the experts’ statements and the bundles of papers brought here today in suitcases. All for this? It seems strange to focus on all of the hard work, and not that I might be about to be sent to prison. But I do. I can’t help it.
‘Your sentence will be reduced by one tenth for a guilty plea at the courtroom door,’ she says. ‘And I didn’t ever think they’d offer a section twenty up.’
‘What would the sentence be?’
‘The range is a suspended sentence – which is unlikely – to five years.’
‘What will it be for attempted murder?’
‘Six years is the very minimum. But in your case, ten years to life.’
I close my eyes. I wish I had asked months ago. Armed myself, not ignored it.
‘This is why they changed your charge,’ she says. ‘So you’d be more likely to take a plea. And it’s such a good one. Not just a section eighteen. A section twenty. They’ve come down a lot, Jo.’
I freeze up. She takes it as a lack of understanding, and moves her hand over the table towards me, like a mother making a conciliatory gesture to her child over dinner. Her palm squeaks against the marble. Next to me, Reuben is motionless. His neck has turned blotchy, uneven, the way it does when he’s approached in the street for directions or spoken to directly at dinner parties. The heightened colour creeps up behind his ears. He’s panicking. We all are. He thinks I am going to go to prison.
I meet her eyes. It’s time to ask the question I should have asked months ago. ‘What would you do?’ I say.
‘The thing is, Jo,’ Sarah says, and then, like a doctor breaking bad news, she reaches properly across the table for both of my hands.
Reuben shifts out of the way, probably embarrassed. Duncan appears behind us and clears his throat, a soft uh-ah. And then, in my mind, it’s just Sarah and me, looking at each other.
‘Here’s the next three years – say.’ She holds a fist out, like she might be holding a spider enclosed in it. ‘And here’s the next twenty. Pick one.’
‘I see,’ I say.
‘You’d be gambling.’
‘Do you think I can get off?’
She looks me dead in the eye. ‘I think you should take the plea.’
‘Is there any chance they’ll – suspend it?’ I say, the lingo becoming familiar to me.
‘No,’ she says.
The hopeful fire inside me goes out.
‘Unlikely. The guidelines say you’d get some time … but they might be lenient. In sentencing. You never know. They take all sorts into account. And you’d get a bit of a reduction for pleading guilty. And a section twenty is much less serious. There’s no risk of you getting a huge term.’
‘Maybe they’re not confident in their case?’ I say hopefully. ‘Maybe that’s why they’ve offered it.’
‘You don’t want to play that game. I think you should take it, Jo.’
‘What’ll I get?’ I say, my mouth and my throat and my eyes and my chest full of tears. The hollow feeling’s finally gone, but it’s been replaced by something else. Shock, maybe? I don’t know. I never thought this would happen. I’ve got all my things with me. My handbag. My iPhone. I thought I might go to prison, but not today. I thought it would happen after the trial. ‘What do you think? Really?’
‘Five years. You’d be out in two and a half. You’d do the rest on licence.’
Two Christmases.
Two summers.
Almost a thousand days.
If I’d seen my own case on the news a few months ago I might’ve raised my eyebrows. Said the woman deserved more. She seriously injured someone. His life will never be the same, I would’ve said. How on earth could I have been so sure of everything? Did I think years were something other than the earth orbiting the sun, then? Did I think years in penance went faster, that people ceased being human after they made a mistake? I don’t know. I don’t know. It turns out, when you’re facing them, years are years. Two and a half years. A huge amount of time. And yet I know logically that it is better than ten years. The stakes are too high to take the risk.
‘The hypoxia,’ Sarah says. ‘That’s a strong point. And the coup and contrecoup injuries. They will argue that you left him there for too long, in the water, and their expert will back that up. They’ll say you ought to have foreseen the sharp steps. The puddle. They’ll ask you if you know what happens if you land, face down, unconscious, in a puddle. They’ll ask you if you knew it was raining and, when you say yes, they’ll ask you whether rain causes puddles. And then they’ll have you. Even if you say you got him out immediately. They’ll say it takes one breath to drown. They’ll say you should have known – you would have been able to see him gasping for breath, because his chest would have been rising and falling violently. Or they’ll say that you’re lying, and you stood there for ages, watching him almost die. And you’ll have no answer. No matter what the experts say. They’ll say you intended to kill. And it’s a – it’s a strong argument.’
‘I never meant any of this,’ I say.
‘I know,’ Sarah says kindly.
I glance left at Reuben. Tears are coursing down his cheeks.
‘Take the plea, Jo,’ she says. Still patient, her cool hands still around mine. ‘Take it. Bite their hand off. Serve the sentence. Get on with your life.’
‘Is this …’ I look wildly around me, feeling like an orphan about to be transported; like an evacuee. A detainee. Somebody being deported. All those gruesome, human things I’d avoided. Everything Reuben tirelessly campaigned about. Always at protests. Always at the House of Commons. The refugee crisis. The legal aid reforms. The social services cuts. I ignored them. These issues that didn’t affect me. Until they did.
I think, too, of my revelation in Little Venice. It’s not just the right thing for me to accept the plea, but for Imran, and his family, too. They won’t have to face a trial. They won’t have to see me deny it. And I will serve time. Serve time for what I did.
I’m ready, I think, raising my head and looking first at Sarah’s blue eyes, and then at Reuben. It’s time. It’s time to do the right thing.
‘I’ll plead,’ I say.
Reuben’s head drops forward, his chin thudding on to his chest. I hope, one day, when I’m out, or when he’s come to terms with it, that he’ll be proud of me, somehow, in amongst this mess. That he might find something to love, something to be proud of, amongst the shite, like finding glistening raindrops inside a spider’s web. I was brave, he might think one day. I faced up to what I had done.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say to him.
He gets up, his body language defensive. He waves a hand.
‘Don’t apologize to me,’ he says, and I’m surprised to hear his voice is husky. ‘But the babies,’ he says, looking at me. ‘What about the ginger babies?’
‘We’ll have to wait,’ I say.