Chapter 63: What I Told Ruth
I was at Ruth's door at eight forty on the Monday, before her first appointment, which she does not like.
She made me wait until nine in the corridor by the dental practice, and then let me in carrying two coffees she had bought for herself.
“Say it.”
“I'm not signing the fourth paragraph.”
She sat down. She did not sigh. She has never once sighed at me.
“Right. Then we do this properly, and you are going to let me put the cost in front of you before you feel good about it.”
She took the yellow pad.
“One. The basis has been served and accepted. Withdrawing it makes you a defendant who changed her account after taking advice.”
“Two. The Crown's agreement not to press for custody was tied to that document. It is not a promise. It evaporates.”
“Three. If the judge has to hold a hearing on the facts and does not accept your version, you lose most of your credit for pleading.”
“That is the difference between a community order and eight months. I have seen it go that way.”
“Four. Twenty-two witnesses. Three of whom say playfully.”
“Five. You are not paying me after June.”
I said I knew all of it.
“You don't, but you know enough. Say the sentence out loud.”
“I want the basis to say that he took hold of my dress at the collarbone and pulled downward.”
“And if the Crown will not have it?”
“Then a judge can decide.”
Ruth looked at me for about four seconds.
“All right,” she said, and she turned the pad over to a clean page. “Then I need something from you that I should have taken in January.”
“What?”
“Your account. All of it. Slowly. And I am going to write it down and you are going to sign it.”
It took two hours and ten minutes.
She started at half past nine on the twenty-fifth of December and made me go through the evening at a walking pace.
Where the table was. Where I was standing. What was in my hands.
Two plates. The lamb had gone out at nine and this was the second vegetable dish, green beans.
Which shoulder was towards the room. My left.
Where Damon was standing when he spoke. A metre and a half, off my right side, half behind.
What he said. I told her. She wrote it exactly and did not soften a word of it.
What his hand did.
I said: he took the front of my dress at the collarbone, in a fist, and pulled down and towards himself.
“Show me on yourself. Slowly.”
I put my own left hand on my own collarbone and closed it and pulled down four inches, and Ruth watched the whole of it and wrote for a long time afterwards.
“What did that do to you?”
“It broke my balance forward and to my right.”
“So what happened.”
“I turned.”
“Which way.”
“Left.”
She wrote it. She did not know yet what that was worth. Neither did I.
Then she took me through the eight seconds twice more, out of order, and backwards the second time, which is what they do to check whether you have a story or a memory.
At ten to twelve she printed it and I read four pages and signed the bottom of each one.
Four pages. Two thousand one hundred words.
That is more words than anybody had ever let me say about either of those two nights, put together, in my life.
Twelve years ago a duty solicitor had asked me two questions in a corridor. Did you throw him. Do you understand the charge.
I had answered yes and yes and that had been my account.
Ruth squared the pages and put them in the file and looked at the wall for a moment.
“Nobody has ever taken this from you before, have they.”
“No.”
“That is a failure of my profession and I am not going to make a speech about it.”
She wrote to the prosecution that afternoon and copied me in, and the letter she sent was four sentences long.
The twenty-second of April became a mention rather than a plea, and then it moved to the sixth of May, and then somebody's diary moved it again.
The charge is still there. I want to be clear about that, because for a while I let myself feel as if something had been won.
Nothing had been won. A document had been un-signed.
I was still a woman on bail with a trial date and a rented room.
On the way out Ruth said one more thing, at the top of the sixty-three stairs, with the door half shut.
“Get your shoulder looked at.”
“Why?”
“Because if this goes to a hearing, somebody is going to ask you to explain what your body did, and at the moment you cannot even describe it to me.”