Chapter 58: What I Did Not Say
She let me sit there a long time and did not fill it.
That was not kindness exactly.
She had come with something to deliver and she was not going to make it easier by talking over the top of it.
She reached into the plastic bag and put three things on the table, one at a time, squared up, the way Ruth does.
The first was a photocopy of an ambulance service patient report form.
Eleven years and ten months old when she got it.
There is a box on it headed NARRATIVE.
It has four lines of handwriting in it.
Assault. Pt found supine on carriageway. Bystander female approx 30 states pt had hold of her and was attempting to place her in vehicle, third party intervened, third party left scene.
Third party.
That is me.
The second was an email from a police disclosure unit dated four years ago, saying they were unable to provide the information requested and that she might wish to make a subject access request.
The third was a page torn out of a notebook with dates on it in three different pens.
“That's every time I tried,” she said. “It's not complete. I lost a notebook in a house move.”
I looked at it and did not touch it.
“I'm not asking you for anything tonight,” she said.
I got a sound out. It was not a word.
She put her coat on and did it up, and wrote a mobile number in the white margin at the top of page eleven, and tore the strip off and put it under the mug.
“I'm not going to disappear,” she said. “I've had twelve years of being the one who disappeared.”
At the door she stopped with a hand on the frame.
“You said something to me on that street. 'Do you know him.' Three words.”
“Nobody else asked me anything for six days.”
She went down the stairs holding the rail with her right hand, and the side door banged, because it always does.
I stood in the middle of the room.
I have been hit hard perhaps a dozen times, in the way you get hit in training when somebody's elbow arrives before their apology.
There is a period afterwards, four or five seconds, where you are standing and functioning and can hear the room, and nothing has arrived yet.
I stood in the middle of that room a long time in the four or five seconds.
Then I went into the bathroom, which is a hundred and ten centimetres wide, and I was sick, twice.
Afterwards I sat on the floor with my back against the side of the bath.
The floor was vinyl over concrete.
Cold through the trousers within about a minute.
I know how long I sat there, because the boiler fires on the hour and I heard it three times.
At some point I said out loud, to nobody: “I thought they were a couple.”
That was the whole of my defence for twelve years.
I thought they were a couple.
Nobody had ever asked me.
That is the thing I keep coming back to.
Not the police, who had a man with a head injury and a young woman who admitted throwing him.
Not the duty solicitor, who had a client saying she had done it.
Not the man in the wig, who had a guilty plea in front of him and eleven minutes of court time.
Not my mother, who asked me one question at the kitchen table and never asked another for the rest of her life.
Not Julian, in three years.
Not me.
That is the part that will not go anywhere. Not me either.
I had the facts.
I was there.
I had a memory of a hand on a wrist and a car door standing open and I had filed the whole thing under my own bad character because it was the only folder I had.
At three in the morning I read the basis of plea again, all four paragraphs, sitting on the bathroom floor.
The fourth paragraph did not change.
Paper does not do that.
But I read it as a sentence somebody had written about me rather than a fact about the world.
At ten past six I went to work, because I could not think of anything else to do with my body.
I fed sheets into a machine for eleven hours and did not speak to anybody except to say yes when Terry asked if I was all right.
Four hundred an hour when the line runs. Eleven hours. My right shoulder was a wire from the front of the joint down into the elbow by hour six.
At the end of the shift I went out to the tarmac behind the loading bay where the fans blow.
I took the strip of newspaper out of my coat.
And I rang the number.