But the solicitor kept banging on about how it was my only chance of avoiding a murder conviction and an automatic life sentence, so in the end I went with it. I think, or maybe I just want to think, that I did it mainly for my parents’ sake. I couldn’t shake the image of my mother stepping into the Ivy House, Toby? Toby are you all right?, the cold draft through the open garden door; the thing lying on the earth, the moment of horror, the dizzying confusion when she saw Rafferty’s face; rushing through dusty rooms and up dark staircases, Toby! voice rising and cracking, Toby!; and, at last, me, doing my best to die right there in front of her, just not quite able to cross that final borderline.
So I got up there on the stand, stripped and splayed and did my little dance in front of the world. I shook and hyperventilated, right on cue, as my barrister took me through the burglary step by step. I stumbled through in-depth descriptions of every single humiliating aftereffect (And what happened when you tried to go outside alone? And when the credit-card company asked for your middle name you couldn’t remember it, is that right? And we can see that your eyelid droops, is that a result of . . . ?). I lost my train of thought and had to ask for questions to be repeated. When someone dropped a notebook I jumped practically out of my seat. I stammered and slurred my way through Hugo’s death, jammed up so badly that my barrister had to ask for a break when it came to the fight with Rafferty. I tried not to look at the jury’s faces as they carefully assessed just how much of a wreck I was, at the pretty blonde in the front row and her big pitying eyes. On cross-examination the prosecutor went after me hard, trying to push the line that I was faking it, but he backed off fast when it became clear that I wasn’t at all, that I was in fact on the verge of breaking down utterly.
The prosecution’s version was that I had held a grudge against Rafferty over Hugo’s death, and when he had shown up looking for info to cement Hugo’s reputation as a murderer, I had lost my temper and gone for him. I suppose there was an element of truth in that version, too, but the jury—after almost three days of deliberation—preferred my barrister’s. There was, after all, no arguing with the fact that I was comprehensively fucked up. I was the only one who got the irony: all the things that Rafferty had explained would work against me, the slurring and the jumpiness and the glazed look and the inability to focus, those were the things that saved me. The verdict (eleven to one: there was one big, shaven-headed guy whose jaded stare said he wasn’t buying any of it) was manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility.
The verdict meant, as my solicitor explained to me, that the judge could sentence me to anything he chose, from probation to life. I was lucky. The judge could hardly let me walk away from a dead detective, but he took into account my unblemished record, my immense potential to contribute to society, my supportive family (he knew my father and Phil professionally, although distantly enough that he hadn’t felt the need to recuse himself), the fact that my mental state and social background were likely to make prison an unduly harsh environment for me. He sentenced me to twelve years, ten of them suspended, and sent me to the Central Mental Hospital, where I could receive the appropriate treatment to make sure I fulfilled all that potential someday. I didn’t need Susanna to point out to me that, if I had been some tracksuited skanger from a family of dole rats, the whole thing would have played out very differently.
* * *
?Susanna came to visit me a few times, actually, while I was in the hospital. The first time I assumed she was there to suss out whether I was planning to rat out her and Leon to the shrinks. I wasn’t. Not out of love or nobility or anything, and not out of the cheerful nonchalance with which I’d covered for Tiernan, Hey why not? who’s getting hurt?; just because it felt like enough damage had already been done all around. If anything could be salvaged, I liked the idea of helping to salvage it.
Susanna looked good. She had come straight from college; she was wearing a pale-blue T-shirt and skinny jeans and old runners, and she looked young and energetic and studenty. In the visiting room—ratty armchairs splotched with tea stains and gum, bolted-down coffee table, vaguely unsettling art-therapy paintings of distorted flowerpots—she seemed like an alien beamed in from another world; but then, all the visitors did.
She didn’t try to hug me. “You look better,” she said. “Like you’re getting some sleep.”
“Thanks,” I said. “They have pills for that.” Susanna still wasn’t my favorite person. I’m sure she would argue that she had done her level best to keep all of us out of trouble and it was hardly her fault that I had decided to beat up a cop, but I had a hard time seeing it that way.
“How’s this place?”
“It’s OK,” I said. It sort of was, actually. The first few weeks had been bad. Suicide watch, which in itself was enough to make the most stable person suicidal: mattress on a bare floor, tiny hatch in a metal door, stifling heat, lights never off. Unreadable stares everywhere, all of them pulsing with danger, doctors who might decide to shoot me full of some mindfuck drug if I made the wrong move, patients who might decide I was the devil and needed my face ripped off. Constant noise, always someone shouting or singing or banging something, all of it amplified by the bare institutional acoustics. And the dawning realization that this sentence had no end date; the judge’s two years were an illusion, I was there until the doctors thought I was cured, which might be years away or might be never.
After the first shock wore off, though, I had settled in without too much trouble. No one tried to eat my face or drug me into catatonia. I had a room of my own (tiny, overheated, paint peeling) and I was considered low enough risk that I got to do stuff like go for walks in the grounds and do exercise classes. Even the indefinite stay had lost a lot of its horror once I realized that there was, really, nowhere else I particularly wanted to be.
“Tom says hi,” Susanna said. “And the kids. Sallie and I made you cookies, but the nurse or guard or whatever took them away.”
“Yeah. It’s in case you put drugs in them. Or a razor blade, or something.”
“Right. I should’ve thought of that.” She glanced up at the camera hanging, very obviously, in one corner of the ceiling. “Mum and Dad send love, too. And Miriam and Oliver. Miriam says to hurry up and get better. She looked it up online and found out you can apply for a discharge after six months, so she’s expecting you home by Christmas.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“I told her it doesn’t work that way, but she says I’m underestimating the power of positive thinking. She’s already made an appointment for you with some guru guy who’s going to reiki the bad vibes out of your aura, or something.”
“Oh God,” I said. “Tell her I’m getting worse.” In fact, I had no intention of applying for a discharge until those two years were up. Before that, even if I was approved, it would only get me transferred to prison. The hospital was no five-star hotel and some of the company left a lot to be desired, but the place was blessedly free from gang wars and shower-room rapes and all the feral nightmare that I (from my smug middle-class perspective, Susanna said in my head) associated with prison. All of us in the hospital had done various major shit, but with a few exceptions none of us were looking for trouble, and the seriously scary types were kept separate. A lot of people were schizophrenic, and they mainly hung out together, but there were a couple of depressives and a guy on the autism spectrum who were surprisingly good company. The autistic guy in particular was very restful to be around. All he wanted to do was talk for hours about Lord of the Rings, and he didn’t require any input or even any attention from me; I would sit by the dayroom window and look out at the gardens, wide lawns and decorous topiary and spreading oak trees, while his flat rhythmic monotone went on and on like running water.
“Are we allowed to go outside?” Susanna asked suddenly. “In the garden?”
“I guess,” I said. We were, actually, but there were a few of the guys I would have preferred her not to run into, for my pride’s sake more than for hers.