I sounded like a backward child reading aloud in class. ‘ “She didn’t say anything, it was more of a whimpering sound.” ’
‘ “She didn’t say anything, it was more of a whimpering sound”? That’s what you told the police immediately after it happened?’
‘Yes.’ The lump in my throat must have been visible from the public gallery.
‘Now, there’s a world of difference between a whimper and a word, you’d agree?’ said Fiona Price.
‘Yes.’ It came out in a whisper. My eyes swam; tears, if I wasn’t strong, would come with the next blink.
‘You misinterpreted a moan of pleasure, didn’t you?’
‘No.’
‘And if she’d said a word, you would have told the police, because words are not so easily mistaken, or forgotten, are they?’
I didn’t shake my head as firmly as I wanted to, in case I dislodged a tear.
‘And yet you have just told this court that you clearly heard her say, please no. You agree that only one of these statements can be true, Miss Langrishe?’
My chance to put things right was slight – it was like hoping that a single thread could bear my bodyweight – but it was all I had to grasp.
‘I mean, I heard her whimper, please, no,’ I said, in something of a whimper myself.
Fiona Price’s eyebrows all but vanished under her wig. ‘A clever girl like you must be aware how important those words would be in a case like this, yet you overlooked this at the time of giving your statement, mere hours after the alleged assault?’
I could only shrug. Staring at my feet, I understood why people talked about wanting the ground to swallow them whole. Come on, I thought, looking at the fuzzy blue carpet. Part. Show me the abyss. Put me out of my misery.
‘And you didn’t remember this mere minutes ago, in this very witness box? And yet it suddenly all comes flooding back to you under cross-examination?’
‘She did, she did say please, no.’ She might as well have, I told myself. She might as well have. I wish she had.
Price let my words hang in the air for a few seconds, then changed tack.
‘How would you describe the atmosphere leading up to the alleged assault?’
I cooled a little, glad that the spotlight had swung away, even knowing that the respite would only be temporary. I swallowed the lump in my throat.
‘Licentious?’ asked Price. ‘Hedonistic?’
‘No. It was quite quiet for a festival,’ I said. ‘But it was happy. Peaceful.’ She can’t get me on that, I thought.
‘Anything goes? You’d just seen an eclipse, the music was on, everything was heightened, wasn’t it?’
‘That doesn’t excuse what he did.’ I bit back a smile of triumph. At last I’d got one over on her. Or so I thought, until she went on and revealed that it was my state of mind she was burrowing towards, not Jamie’s.
‘In fact, the eclipse was, I believe the phrase is, clouded out? You didn’t see it?’
‘Yes.’ I didn’t realise, but I was laying a path towards my own further humiliation.
‘Visibility was poor that day. Was there a sense of anti-climax, after all the anticipation of the eclipse?’
‘Yes.’ Confidently, unwittingly, I set another stone.
Fiona Price stroked her chin. ‘Are you prone to getting caught up in drama, Laura?’
‘What?’
‘Making things up? Struggling to tell the difference between reality and your imagination?’
I dug my fingernails into my palm, furious at myself.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m just telling you what I heard.’
‘What you heard seems to vary from one minute to the next.’ She smiled, almost in sorrow; as though she deeply regretted my unreliability. ‘What you saw was two adults making love, wasn’t it?’
I shook my head hard. ‘If you’d seen what I saw, you’d be ashamed to use that phrase in this context. This was not “making love”. I saw a rape. I saw it in their faces.’
Price regarded me with what looked like pity. ‘Do you know what confabulation means, Miss Langrishe?’
The droplet of perspiration that had been inching its way down my face splashed on to the ledge in front of me. ‘Of course I do.’
‘Forgive me. You’re a highly educated young woman; an upper second-class honours degree in Sociology and Women’s Studies, lest we forget.’ She tilted her body towards the jury. ‘Jurors, for those of you not familiar with the term, and to remind those of you who are, confabulation is merely a long word for jumping to conclusions; when someone genuinely comes to believe in something that fits a pet theory of theirs. Are you a feminist?’
I hit back with the hardest argument to rebut. ‘I believe women and men are equal.’
‘In your studies, you’ve read the theories that all men are rapists?’
‘With respect, that’s a bit of a cliché.’ The jury all but crackled with hostility; don’t be a smart-arse, Laura, I told myself. Price herself was unruffled.
‘But you’ve read them?’
‘Of course.’ I tried to crowbar some politeness into my voice.
‘And you assumed this was the case here, didn’t you?’
‘No. I saw that man rape the complainant.’ The mental picture of what I’d seen burned vividly in my mind’s eye. The urge to cry was back, stronger than ever, as Price turned on me.
‘It is your confabulation that you saw a rape, isn’t it? The work of an overactive imagination so uncontrolled that you can’t even tell the same story twice?’
‘I saw their faces,’ I said, but it was a choice between talking and tears, and it came out as a whisper. In any case, my words would have been drowned out by the clear and strident tones of Fiona Price saying that she had no further questions for me.