Chapter 116: The Bill
The bills arrived over about five weeks, the way they do.
Legal aid covered the trial. It does not cover everything and it is not free.
There was a contribution assessed from income for the period I was on thirty hours at the laundry.
Four hundred and eighty pounds, payable at forty a month.
There was travel.
Eleven months of buses to a solicitor's office, a court, and a regional inspectorate above a dental practice.
I kept the tickets in a jar, out of a habit my mother had.
When I counted them in December they came to three hundred and ten pounds.
There was the fee for the divorce, which is a fixed fee and which nobody waives for you.
There was a suit for court, which came from a charity shop on Bridge Street and cost eleven pounds.
There was the second-hand phone I bought in July, because the cracked one stopped taking calls.
A phone is not optional when a solicitor may ring.
There was the rent on a room I had taken in March at six hundred and twenty a month for a room worth about four hundred.
And there was the money I did not have, which is a bill you pay in a different currency.
I owed Priya four hundred and eleven pounds by the end of it and she has never once mentioned it.
The financial settlement was never revived. Hallam's firm wrote in November to confirm the withdrawn proposal remained withdrawn.
I was entitled to make a financial claim in the divorce. I did not make one.
Ruth advised me, formally and in writing, that I was probably giving up a five-figure sum.
I signed the letter saying I understood.
In her office, with the same pen I had used for the advice about refusing the offer in February.
The reason is not noble and I said I would not pretend it was.
A financial claim takes eighteen months. Disclosure, correspondence, a district judge.
It puts Margot Ashford's solicitors in my letterbox twice a month for a year and a half.
I had done eleven months of that.
I priced the next eighteen and could not afford them, and the currency was not pounds.
So: no compensation.
There is no compensation for being acquitted. The State does not pay you for the year.
No apology. I have never received one from any member of that family, in writing or otherwise.
I no longer expect one. Expecting it was the last thing I put down.
No damages from the care company.
I was not a resident, not a relative, not an employee. I had no claim and never pretended otherwise.
Nobody gave me anything at all for any of it, and I want that understood.
There is a version of this story people prefer, in which somebody hands the woman a cheque.
What I had, on the first of January, was this.
Nine hundred and forty pounds a month from Fairholme, less the forty for the contribution.
A room on Carrow Street with a sink in the corner.
Two bags of possessions, a box from a garage, and a provincial medal in a shoebox.
Thirty-four years old, then thirty-five in the February.
A right shoulder worse than it had been in March, because eleven months of moving ninety-kilo cages does not repair a labrum.
Fifteen months without a mat under me. That is the line in the inventory I would have found hardest to explain to a coach, and it is the one I minded.
And a document nine pages long that I hand to employers.
I went back on shift on the Monday after the verdict.
I had told the supervisor I would be back on the Monday, and I was back on the Monday.
That is the only reason I still had the job.
He said, “How'd it go?”
I said, “Not guilty.”
He said, “Right. Cage three's jammed.”
That is the truest thing in this chapter and I have never wanted it improved.
I worked the whole shift.
At the end of it my hands smelled of laundry chemical, which is a smell you stop noticing after a fortnight and other people notice for years.
On the way out through the car park I stopped by the bike racks under the light where Anisa Fenwick had stood in May.
I had told her I would not ask her for anything and I had kept that.
She had done it anyway, and it cost her the job.
She left in the September and took an agency post that pays less and is worse.
That is the last fact I have about her.
I have never been able to give her anything for it except this, which is her name spelled correctly.
I unlocked the bike and rode home along the towpath in the dark with one working light.