Chapter 53: Yes
I telephoned Ruth from the yard at Marden Linen at twenty to twelve on a Thursday, standing between two roll cages full of pillowcases.
There is a strip of tarmac behind the loading bay where the extractor fans blow out.
It is the warmest place on the estate and it smells of wet cotton.
I said: “I'll take it.”
Ruth did not say good.
She did not say anything for two seconds, which from her is a great deal.
Then she said: “I'll draft the confirmation this afternoon. Come in Monday and read it before you sign.”
“I've read it.”
“You've read it angry. Read it flat.”
I went back in and did another five hours on the line, and my hands did not shake once, which I noticed at the time.
On the Monday she had it ready on the desk, turned the right way up for me, squared.
She offered me a proper pen, a heavy one, black.
I used the biro from my coat pocket that I had taken from the laundry office, because it seemed important not to make it a ceremony.
My signature has not changed since I was fifteen.
It has a hard downstroke on the V and then it collapses.
I watched my own hand do it.
That is the part I want to put down accurately, because everything afterwards depends on it.
My hand went across the paper at a steady speed, the way a hand does when nobody is fighting it.
There was no resistance in me at all.
Ruth witnessed it, dated it, and put it in a folder the colour of a manila envelope.
“They'll list it for a plea. Probably three weeks.”
“And then?”
“Then you stand up and you say guilty, and a judge asks whether you accept the basis, and you say yes, and it's finished except for the hours.”
“Say yes,” I said.
“Say yes.”
I walked back down the sixty-three stairs and out into a wet street with a bus stop opposite and a man loading crates into a van.
I noticed that I could smell the rain.
I had not been able to smell anything much since Christmas.
I do not know if that is a real thing that happens or something I did to myself.
That night I ate a proper meal for the first time in eleven weeks.
Rice, two eggs, half a tin of tomatoes.
I slept eight hours. No waking at four.
In the morning I lay in the dark and understood that I felt light, and that the lightness was the problem.
Because the lightness was not the relief of surviving something.
It was the relief of stopping.
For twelve years there had been a small, exhausting argument going on somewhere behind my sternum, and signing that page had ended it by conceding.
I have felt this before, once.
At twenty-one, in a corridor outside a consultant's room, when a man in a blue shirt told me that the repair had held but the joint would never be reliable under load, and I walked out into the car park and felt wonderful.
Wonderful.
For about four days.
Because I had spent nineteen months getting up at five to do rehabilitation on a nineteen per cent chance, and now nobody was going to make me get up at five again.
The relief of a door being shut is real. It is not the same as being free.
I told nobody.
There was nobody to tell.
Julian sent a message on the Wednesday. It said: Ruth has told my mother's solicitor. I think it is the right decision. I hope you can put it behind you.
Behind you.
He has never in his life put anything behind him. He simply stands in a room where a thing happened and describes the room.
I did not answer that one either.
On the Friday I went into the bathroom, which is a hundred and ten centimetres wide, and looked at myself in a mirror above a sink with a crack in it.
I am a hundred and seventy-eight centimetres. I was eighty-one kilos for six years and I am seventy-four now.
The right shoulder sits about a centimetre and a half lower than the left. It has done since I was twenty-one. Nobody has ever mentioned it to me except a coach and a surgeon.
I stood square to the glass and put my hands flat on the fronts of my thighs and watched my own face do nothing at all.
Then I made myself say it, to see if it was easier now that it was signed.
“I acted without provocation.”
It was easier. That is the truth and I am not going to dress it up.
The hearing was fixed for the twenty-second of April.
Twenty-nine days of being a woman who had agreed.