Chapter 55: The Picture They Used
The Ledger comes out on Thursdays.
It costs ninety pence and nobody under fifty buys it, and everybody in the town reads it.
I was on page eleven.
FORMER JUDO INTERNATIONAL 'THREW' CARE HOME BOSS AT FAMILY CHRISTMAS DINNER
The word threw was in quotation marks, which I have thought about a great deal since.
They were not doubting it.
They were enjoying it.
The article was four hundred words.
It was accurate.
That is the thing nobody believes when I tell them.
It said I was thirty-four.
It said I had been a member of the national squad and had taken a silver medal at national level at eighty-one kilograms. It said the complainant was a director of a company operating four care homes.
It said a hearing had been listed for the twenty-second of April.
It did not say what happened at that table. Reporting restrictions and the shape of the hearing meant there was nothing to say yet.
So the whole story was in the photograph.
The photograph was three columns wide.
I am on the fourth step from the bottom.
My coat is open.
My left arm is out from my body about fifteen degrees because of the wind, and my right arm is not.
My mouth is open.
I was breathing.
My jaw is set, because it was four degrees and the wind was coming off the river.
And my right shoulder is lower than my left. In a still photograph, with the coat open and the collar flat, you can see it clearly.
It looks like a woman leaning into something.
I looked like exactly what they needed me to look like.
I want to be fair. The photographer took four pictures in two seconds of a woman walking down eleven wet steps. He did not choose the face. He chose the one that was in focus.
But a picture editor chose it too, and a picture editor is a person making a decision.
The website version had a comment section. It had sixty-one comments by Friday evening.
I read all of them once, at half past ten at night, sitting on the divan with the phone very close to my face, and then I did not read them again.
They came in two kinds.
The first kind said that a trained fighter is a weapon and should be treated as one. That was about a third.
The second kind said that a man who grabs a woman at a dinner table gets what he gets. That was about a fifth.
The rest were people arguing with each other about care homes, and one person asking what the parking was like at Marsh Road.
Nobody in the second group knew anything. They were guessing. They guessed right, and it did not help, because a guess is not evidence and I could not have told them anything anyway.
On the Friday morning the supervisor at Marden called me into the glass office by the roll cages.
His name is Terry. He has a burn scar across the back of his right hand from a press and he had printed the article and folded it in half.
“That you?”
“Yes.”
He looked at the folded page for a moment and then put it in the drawer.
“I don't want it on the floor. Not because of you. Because they'll talk and then the line stops.”
“All right.”
“Are you going to prison?”
“No.”
“Then be here Monday.”
That is the kindest conversation I had that month and I mean that with no irony whatsoever.
In the shop on Ackerly Road on Saturday a woman about my age moved her basket to the other arm when I came down the aisle.
She may have been changing arms. People change arms.
I have spent twelve years learning not to know what other people mean when they move, and I lost that in about four days.
The woman who runs the dry cleaner's downstairs is called Mrs. Oyelaran and she takes in parcels for the whole building.
On the Saturday she came up and knocked and handed me a parcel that was not for me, for a flat on the top floor, and asked if I would take it up because her knee was bad.
She did not mention the paper. She had it on the counter downstairs. I had seen it.
That was deliberate and it was the only deliberate kindness of the week.
The paper printed my name three times, my age once, and one other thing.
It printed what I used to be.
I had kept that off every form and out of every conversation for twelve years, and a local weekly gave it away on page eleven of a Thursday edition for ninety pence, between a planning notice and an advertisement for a garden centre.
Somebody read it.