Chapter 52: Without Provocation
Damon Ashford's personal statement was six hundred and forty words long, which is more than he ever said to me in three years.
It began: I have always tried to make Nadia feel welcome in our family.
I read it four times, standing up, and then sat down because my legs had gone strange.
He wrote that he had made a joke at Christmas about the table service and had reached out to her in a friendly way.
He wrote that he had no memory of the next part.
He wrote that he now flinched when people came up on his left side.
That he had cancelled a ski trip.
That his wrist ached in the cold and would ache for years.
That part I believe.
Wrists do.
He wrote that his mother had not slept properly since.
He wrote that his sister-in-law was a trained athlete and he had always been aware of it, in a joking way, and that he now understood that it was not a joke.
He wrote: I want her to say what she did.
And then, further down, the sentence that Ruth had underlined in pencil so faintly you could only see it at an angle.
I want her to say she did it for no reason, because that is the truth, and because until she says it my family will not be able to move on.
He is twenty-nine. He runs four care homes.
He had a hand on my collarbone and a fistful of green silk and he pulled down.
I put it in the drawer under the sink with the takeaway menus, because there was nowhere else to put it that was not in my sight.
That night I did something I have not told anybody about until now.
I stood in the middle of the floor with the window black and the yard lights making nine long shapes on the wall.
And I said it out loud.
“I accept that the complainant had not used or threatened force against me.”
My voice was fine.
That surprised me.
I had thought it would come out damaged and it came out like a woman reading a station announcement.
“I accept that I acted without provocation.”
The second was harder, and not for the reason you would think.
It was harder because of the word acted.
Acted is a word for a thing you begin.
In a courtroom it will sound like a decision I made and carried out with my arms.
What happened was that a hand closed on my dress at the collarbone and pulled downward and my body did the only thing it has ever known how to do with downward force.
For three years I had put my right hand back on my thigh.
Eleven times. I have the dates.
On the twenty-fifth of December it did not go back.
I said the sentence again. And again.
Eleven times, which was not deliberate at first and then was.
By the eighth my jaw had started to ache along the hinge, and my hands had gone to the fronts of my thighs, palms flat, fingers together, thumbs tucked.
Which is where Margot Ashford had required them to be.
You practise a movement enough times and it stops being a movement you choose.
That is the entire theory of the sport I gave my childhood to.
Nobody tells you it works on the other things too.
I stopped after the eleventh and drank from the tap with my left hand.
Here is what I understood at that sink at half past one in the morning.
The sentence was not a lie I had to tell.
It was a lie I had already been telling, every day, for twelve years, to myself, without a form to sign.
That I was a woman with something wrong in her hands.
That the man in the street had been an accident of my temperament rather than an event with two people in it.
That the correct life for me was one in which I did not move.
The prosecution was not asking me to say something new.
It was asking me to put my name under something I had believed since I was twenty-two.
That is why it was possible.
I want to be clear about that, because people later asked how I could have nearly taken it.
I could nearly take it because I agreed with it.
I lay down with my right arm across my chest and looked at the ceiling, which had a crack shaped like a letter Y running from the light fitting to the corner.
At four I got up and put my hands on the doorframe, both of them, and took a quarter of my weight.
The right shoulder said no, quietly and finally, like a door closing two rooms off.
I let go and stood in the dark with my palms stinging, and I decided I would sign it.