Chapter 7: Permanent Record
The sentence was two years of probation and a hundred and twenty hours of unpaid work.
I did the hours in a furniture warehouse that took donations, sanding and re-gluing chairs, and I was good at it, and the man who ran it offered me a job at the end.
I did not take it.
I could not be in a room where people were kind to me about it.
The probation finished when I was twenty-four. Completed. Not breached, not extended, not once late.
There is a form of words people use about this. Spent.
They say a conviction becomes spent, as though it goes quiet and then goes away.
It does not go away. It goes quiet, which is a different service.
There are jobs where you have to declare it forever.
There are countries I cannot enter without applying first.
There is a category of check, the thorough kind, where everything comes up regardless of age, and it comes up in the order the computer likes, which is offence first.
Assault. Then the date.
Then, much further down, if anybody reads that far, the words no previous and no subsequent.
Nobody reads that far.
I have watched people not read that far in three different rooms.
What it actually means, day to day, is very simple, and I worked it out in my twenties and never had to revise it.
If I am ever again in a room where a person ends up on the floor, it does not matter how they got there.
It does not matter who reached first. It does not matter what was said.
It does not matter that I am one metre seventy-four and he is one metre ninety.
The first sentence of the report will be that I have a conviction for assault, and the second sentence will be that I was on a national squad.
And those two sentences, side by side, do all the work. No jury needs anything else.
I have seen what those two sentences do to a room.
So the rule I made at twenty-two was not really about violence. It was about geometry.
Never be the only person in the room with a history.
Keep your hands where a witness can see them.
Keep a table between yourself and anybody who has been drinking.
Do not stand in doorways.
If a man puts his face near yours, put your hands behind your back.
It looks like insolence.
It is the safest position there is, because a hand behind the back cannot be described.
Twelve years of that. It becomes posture.
I told Julian eight weeks before the wedding, in a car, parked outside a garden centre, because I wanted somewhere neither of us would want to stay.
I told him the whole of it.
The street, the throw, the kerb, the eleven days, the hours in the warehouse.
He listened with both hands on the wheel and when I finished he said, Thank you for telling me.
Then he said, That's not who you are.
I have wondered since whether he meant it as absolution or as an instruction.
He asked me if I would mind him telling his mother.
He said she would rather hear it from him.
I said of course.
That is the part I have gone over.
That is the part where, if you are watching from outside, you want to shout.
I said of course, and I have never once, in three years in that house, heard Margot Ashford refer to it.
Not a hint, not a joke, not a look. She was flawless about it.
I took that as delicacy.
I want to write down, plainly, that I took it as delicacy, because I did, and because a person who has taken something for delicacy for three years does not get to pretend afterwards that she suspected.
There is one more piece of paperwork and then I will leave it.
To go into Willow Bank as a volunteer you need the thorough kind of check, because of who lives there.
I filled the form in at the kitchen table two and a half years ago and I sat looking at the declaration box for a long time, and then I ticked it and wrote the date and the offence in block capitals in the space provided.
Damon took the form off me. He said he would deal with it.
He countersigned it himself, in the hall, standing up, using the top of the radiator cover.
Four days later a badge came with my name on it and a photograph I had not been asked for.
I never saw the check.
I never saw a decision, or a risk assessment, or a conversation about supervision, and there should have been all three.
I assumed I had been let through because of the family name.
That was the second thing I took for kindness.