Chapter 61: She Is Angry
She was in the laundry car park on the Thursday at six, parked across two spaces without meaning to.
A grey Corsa. Cracked wing mirror held with black tape. A booster seat in the back for a niece. I got in because it was raining.
The car smelled of vanilla from a cardboard tree on the mirror and underneath that of a wet dog she did not have. She did not start the engine.
“I've been angry with you for nine days,” she said, “and I don't want to be, and I'm going to be anyway.”
“All right.”
“Why did you run?”
That is the question. Everything else is decoration. I gave her the whole answer because she had earned the whole answer.
I was twenty-two. I had been out of the national squad for nineteen months. There is a paragraph in the code of conduct you sign at fourteen.
It says that a licensed player who uses technique outside a controlled environment brings the sport into disrepute and may be permanently excluded.
My coach made me learn it. Not to frighten me. Because that is how you keep a room of teenagers safe.
For ten years, every adult in my life had told me that my hands were a loan.
Then the shoulder went, and the loan was called in, and I had no job and no qualification and no idea what a Tuesday was for.
And on the eighth of November a man on Farrow Street had hold of somebody, and my body did what it does.
“And then?”
“Then he was on his back and he was not moving.”
“And then?”
“I got to the end of the street.”
“And?”
Here is the part I would give a great deal to change.
“I looked back.”
She went very still.
“I looked back and there was a woman sitting on the kerb next to him.”
“Sitting next to him.”
“Yes.”
“And you thought I was with him.”
“Yes.”
The rain came on harder and the roof of that car is thin and it was very loud for about fifteen seconds, and neither of us tried to talk over it.
“I have thought about that woman on the kerb every week for twelve years,” I said. “I had her completely the wrong way round.”
Priya put both hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, which is what she does instead of shouting. I have watched her do it four times now, and each time the knuckles go first.
“Do you want to know what six days is?”
“Yes.”
“Six days is how long I waited before I understood that nobody was coming.”
“On day one you're a witness. On day three you're a woman who keeps ringing. By day six you have started saying it faster, because you can hear yourself taking too long.”
“And then in March a girl at work tells me it's done.”
“And I sat in a staff toilet at St Cuthbert's and I thought, she's admitted it, so it must have been what they said it was.”
She stopped.
“For about four years I thought I'd made it bigger than it was.”
I turned in the seat, which is not easy in a Corsa, and looked at her.
“You thought you'd overreacted.”
“I thought I'd been walking with a man and got frightened and a girl had ruined her life over nothing.”
“That's what a guilty plea does. It tells everybody what happened. Including the people who were there.”
We sat with that, in a car park, with a roll cage against the fence and the light going out of the sky.
“You think you overreacted,” she said. “I think I underreacted. We have had the same twelve years from opposite ends.”
Then she said the thing she had come to say, and she said it looking through the windscreen at a roll cage.
“I am not here to save you. I want that clear.”
“I'm not a witness who's going to walk into a courtroom and make everything all right. I've read enough now to know I'm not. I'm here because I want it written down somewhere, by somebody official, that I did not imagine it.”
“That's all. That's the whole of what I want.”
“That's fair,” I said.
“It isn't, particularly. But it's what I've got.”
She turned the key and then turned it back off again.
“There's one more thing and then I'll take you home.”
“Go on.”
“On the twenty-second of April you are going to stand up in a court and say you did it for no reason.”
“That is what the paper said. I looked it up.”
“And I'll be sitting somewhere with a photocopy in a plastic bag.”
I did not answer her.
The wipers had left two clean arcs on a dirty windscreen and everything outside them was grey, and I sat in it until she asked whether I wanted the heater on.