Chapter 31: The Photographs
On the second of January, Ruth came to Kestrel House, because there was no phone she could call me on.
They gave us the family room, which has a low table, two armchairs with wipeable arms, and a box of toys in the corner.
I sat in the armchair on the left, because it faced the door.
The dress was gone by then. I had jeans from a thrift shop on Ferry Street, four dollars, an inch too short.
Ruth was going through the discovery schedule and I crossed my legs, and the denim rode up over the right knee.
She stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.
That is the whole of it. She stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.
“What is that,” she said.
I put my hand over it, which was the stupidest thing I could have done, and she watched me do it.
“It's nothing. It's old.”
“Nadia.”
I took my hand away.
The next day she sent me to a clinic on Ferry Street, two floors above a dental practice, to a nurse practitioner named Elin Marsh.
A forensic examination happens in a room like any other room. Vinyl floor, a couch with paper over it, a sink, a blind that does not quite close.
The equipment is a camera on a tripod, a lamp on a jointed arm, a grey card, and an L-shaped plastic ruler marked in centimetres.
Marsh was about fifty, with reading glasses on a cord, and she narrated everything before she did it.
“I'm going to ask you to sit on the couch with your legs straight out in front of you. I won't touch you without telling you first.”
She said it as routine. I do not think she had any idea what it did.
The gown is paper and opens at the back, and I did not need it, because it was only the knees, but they give it to you regardless.
She laid the ruler on the couch beside my right knee and moved the lamp down.
Then she began to describe what she was looking at, out loud, for the record.
“Right knee. Anterior aspect, over the patella. An area of discolouration, four point two by three point one centimetres.”
“The centre is deep purple. The periphery is green and yellow.”
“Immediately inferior and partly overlapping it, a second area, brown, approximately three by two. Older.”
“Below that, over the tibial tuberosity, a firm raised thickening. Not tender on palpation. Consistent with repeated pressure over an extended period.”
She did the left knee. That took longer, because on the left there were three.
The camera made a small sound each time. She took eleven photographs.
I know it was eleven because I counted, and because eleven is a number that follows me around.
Then she sat down on a stool with the clipboard on her lap and asked the question.
“Can you tell me what causes a bruise like that?”
Here is what I want to say about that moment.
I had been arrested, fingerprinted, counted four times a day, and described in open court as a woman who used a technique.
None of it cost me anything remotely like what the next sentence cost.
“I kneel,” I said.
She wrote it down. Then she said, “On what surface?”
“Oak. Four-inch boards.”
“For how long?”
“The shortest was ten minutes. The longest was forty.”
“How often does this happen?”
And there it was, the list, which I had carried in my head for three years without once letting it out of my mouth.
“Twelve times in three years.”
“You're certain of the number?”
“I have the dates.”
She looked up for the first time. “All of them?”
“All of them.”
She turned the page and wrote for a while, and I looked at the blind that did not quite close.
“Who asks you to do it?”
“My mother-in-law.”
“And what happens if you don't?”
That one stopped me, because in three years I had never tested it, and so I genuinely did not know.
“I don't know,” I said. “I never found out.”
Marsh nodded and wrote that down too, and she did not react, and I want to be clear that her not reacting was a kindness.
Then she asked the last one, in exactly the same tone she had used for all the others.
“And where is your husband when this is happening?”
“At the table.”
She wrote at the table.
The examination took fifty-five minutes. At the end she gave me a photocopy of a body diagram with the marks drawn onto it and told me to keep it somewhere safe.
I had not cried at any point in the nine days since Christmas, and I did not cry then either.
But I sat on the edge of that couch for four minutes afterwards, and I could not do the buckle on the boots, because my hands would not close.