Chapter 30: Conditions
Pretrial services was a room on the ground floor with a counter, four chairs, and a poster about jury duty.
The officer's name was Yolanda Meeks. She had a stack of forms half an inch thick and a yellow highlighter.
She read the conditions out loud. She was required to. I was to stop her if anything was unclear.
There were eleven of them, numbered.
Eleven. I noticed. I notice numbers now the way other people notice weather.
One. Appear at all scheduled court dates.
Two. No contact, direct or indirect, with Damon Robert Ashford.
Three. No contact, direct or indirect, with Margot Ellis Ashford.
Four. Indirect contact includes messages passed through any third party, including family members.
Five. Remain at least five hundred feet from the property known as Fenwold, including all structures upon it.
Six. Do not enter any premises owned or operated by Ashford Care Group.
She read that one and looked up. It is an unusual condition and she had read it twice before I came in.
“Do you work for them?”
“I volunteer at one of the homes. Wednesdays. Two hours.”
She wrote the word volunteer on her pad and then drew a line through it.
Seven. Do not leave the state without written permission.
Eight. Surrender any passport within seventy-two hours.
Nine. Report in person to this office every Tuesday at nine in the morning.
Ten. Notify this office within twenty-four hours of any change of address.
Eleven. Do not possess a firearm or any other dangerous weapon.
She stopped at eleven and asked me if I understood the conditions as read.
I said I understood the conditions as read.
“Sign at the bottom of each page. Initial anywhere there's highlighter.”
There were nine pages.
Then she asked for the address at which I would be residing.
“I don't have one,” I said.
She did not look surprised, which told me something about her Tuesdays.
She gave me a card with three names on it and said the second one had beds for women in January.
Kestrel House. She wrote the intake number on the back of the card with a biro that skipped twice.
Then they gave me my property back.
One dress, dark green, three-quarter sleeve, seam open at the shoulder.
One wedding ring, which I signed for and put on, because I could not think what else to do with it.
One earring.
One pair of shoes, dark green suede, two-inch heel, returned to me in a paper bag.
The phone was retained. There was a separate form for the phone.
I changed in a cubicle with a curtain. The dress smelled of a plastic bag and of the twenty-fifth of December.
At ten to five in the afternoon on the thirtieth, a door opened onto a car park and I walked through it.
It was two degrees. The wind came off the flat ground behind the building with nothing at all to stop it.
A woman at the desk had seen the dress and pointed at a plastic bin beside the exit.
Lost property that nobody claims goes into that bin, and after ninety days it goes to a charity.
I took a fleece jacket. Men's extra large, navy, a company logo on the chest, and a broken zip.
It was the first thing anybody had given me in six days, and I stood there holding it a while before I put it on.
Then I put it on and rolled the sleeves twice.
There is a bus stop three hundred metres from that building. I walked it in two-inch heels, on grit.
On the way I did the only thing I had left to do, which was think about my husband.
The order named two people. Damon and Margot.
It did not name Julian.
I had asked Meeks before I left, because I wanted to hear it out loud from somebody official.
“Am I allowed to contact my husband?”
She checked the page. “He isn't a protected party. There's no restriction on that.”
There was a payphone in the shelter of the bus stop, which surprised me, and it worked, which surprised me a great deal more.
I have had his mobile number in my head for four years.
It rang.
A payphone gives you a display counting the credit down, so I watched the number fall while it rang.
It rang eleven times before the recorded voice, and I would like to tell you that I did not count them.
I hung up before the tone.
I put more coins in and rang again. Eleven again. That was when I understood the phone was in his hand.
A phone that is switched off goes to voicemail immediately. A phone that rings out is a phone that somebody is looking at.
The bus came at twenty past five, and I got on it with three dollars and a broken zip, and I did not ring a third time.