Chapter 50: The Arithmetic
The flat was one room above a dry cleaner's on Ackerly Road. Three metres by four, if you did not count the part behind the door where the boiler was.
The whole building smelled faintly of solvent. By the second week I had stopped noticing, which is its own small loss.
I slept on a divan against the long wall. From it I could reach the kettle without standing up.
There was a doorframe between the room and the landing.
Oak, painted over eleven times. I had checked it on the first night, with two fingers, the way you check ice.
I had not hung from it once.
Bail said no contact with any member of the Ashford family, direct or indirect.
No attendance at the house. No attendance at any premises operated by the family company.
That last line took Wednesdays away from me.
Three years of Wednesdays.
Two hours. A corridor, a wheelchair, a woman called Iris Penhale who liked her nails cut square and could not bear them rounded.
Nobody had told her where I had gone.
I knew that because there was nobody who would think to.
The work I found was at Marden Linen Services, on the industrial estate past the bypass, eleven-hour shifts feeding hotel sheets into a machine the size of a bus.
They took me because they took anybody. The supervisor read my name off the agency slip and did not read anything else.
Sheets come out of the dryer at sixty degrees and you catch two corners and shake and the machine takes them.
Four hundred an hour if the line is running.
By hour seven my right shoulder had a hot wire running from the front of the joint down into the bicep, and I had learned to catch the corners with my left hand high and my right hand low.
Twelve years of learning to catch things low.
Ruth cost money. Legal aid covered part of it and not the part that mattered, which was her time.
I had four thousand two hundred pounds.
I had earned it before I married and had never spent it, which tells you something I did not want to look at directly.
At the laundry I earned two hundred and eighty a week after the agency took its cut. The room was ninety.
The trial date, if there was a trial, was the fourteenth of October. Seven months.
Seven months of the same three metres by four. Seven months of catching corners.
Ruth had put it plainly and it was the plainest thing anybody had said to me all year.
“People think the choice is guilty or not guilty. It isn't. The choice is a known small thing now, or an unknown large thing in October.”
Julian sent a message on the ninth of March. It said: I hope you are managing. Let me know if you need anything practical.
Practical.
He is not a stupid man. He chose that word with care, the way he chooses all of them, and the care is the thing I cannot forgive.
I did not answer.
At two in the morning I sat on the edge of the divan and did the arithmetic on the back of the agency slip.
Column one: take it.
Two hundred hours. Say eight hours a Saturday.
Twenty-five Saturdays. Half a year of Saturdays picking litter off a verge.
Then supervision. Then nothing. Then a form, every year, forever, with a box on it.
Column two: fight.
Seven months of waiting. Ruth's fees, which I could not pay past June. A jury hearing about a man who slept for eleven days.
And if it went wrong, eighteen months.
I have been in a lot of rooms where somebody explained the odds to me.
Coaches are honest about odds.
It is the one place where nobody lies.
At twenty I had been told my shoulder had a nineteen per cent chance of coming back to national standard, and I had trained for nineteen months on nineteen per cent.
That is not courage.
That is what you do when you cannot yet imagine the other life.
I could imagine this one.
That was the difference and I want to be honest about it.
I put the pen down.
The window looked out over the yard behind the dry cleaner's, where there were nine grey bins and a fire escape with a broken second step.
I had measured the drop from the window on the first night.
Four metres to the flat roof.
Nothing I could not have taken at twenty-two.
I would break my ankle now and I knew it, and knowing it was not sad.
It was just information.
I lay down with my right arm across my chest, which is the only way it does not ache.
Column one was in ink.
Column two was in ink too, but I had gone over the numbers twice, and pressed harder the second time.