Читать книгу The Cheek Perforation Dance - Sean Thomas - Страница 11

— So when did you first meet Mister Skivington?

In the witness box, Rebecca coughs. Then she looks flatly across the various heads that comprise the courtroom and she says:

— two years ago

The prosecutor nods and smiles, but his smile is uncertain. The judge intervenes:

— I’m sorry Miss Jessel but you’ll have to speak up

— sorry

In the dock Patrick exhales. He wants to curse, loudly. So where did she get this voice? His articulate, educated, cultured, self-confident, sexually experienced, words-like-Weltanschauung-knowing twenty-four-year-old ex-girlfriend: where did she suddenly acquire this meek, quiet, bashful, timid, inarticulate, hushed, I-am-oh-so-innocent teenagerish voice? Cursing quietly Patrick rests his forehead on two thumbs pointing up from interlocked hands; then he looks up to hear the judge say to Rebecca:

— The jury must be able to hear every word, you see

Rebecca nods:

— Yes, I’m … very sorry

The judge smiles reassuringly at Rebecca, and then turns back to the prosecutor’s grey wig:

— Do you want to repeat the question, counsel?

The wig nods. Laying down a pen on a desk, wrapping a hand around a black gown, gazing once more at his principal witness in her gingham-checked dress and her lambswool cardigan, the suntanned prosecutor opens his mouth and says:

— So you met the defendant about two years and two months ago?

— Yes. In a bookshop

— And you began … dating, soon after that?

— Yes

Dating? Patrick twitches, feels the horrible triteness of the word. He and Rebecca never dated …

— And how long after that did your relationship begin?

— A couple of … weeks. Maybe three …

— You were at college at the time?

— Yes. King’s College. London University. I still am

— What are you are studying?

— History. The Crusades

— And you are doing – The prosecutor looks at his file for a fact already, quite obviously, in his head – A PhD, yes?

— A doctorate, yes

— And your bachelor’s degree, from Edinburgh University – His eyes lifting – What was that in?

Rebecca shrugs:

— Art History

— And you – Gregory pauses, half smiles – took first-class honours in that, am I right?

— Yes

With a slight turn of the body towards the jury the prosecutor pauses to let this important fact take root, then says:

— OK. Now, fairly soon after this, as I understand …

And so it goes on. As Patrick sits in the dock and tries not to stare, hard, at Rebecca, at the side of her blonde head, Rebecca is asked to describe the inception and genesis of their relationship: from the first meeting, the first date, the first sex. As she sees it; as she saw it.

— I was seeing someone else but you see

— We went to a restaurant and we

— He was older than me so I

And during this litany Patrick has to admit, despite himself, that his lying cow of an ex looks surprisingly sweet, trembly and believable in the witness box. Surprisingly young, fresh, and betrayed. And raped. And in turn Patrick feels cheated, intrigued, guilty, scandalised, stressed-out, odd and libidinous. Not least because of Rebecca’s get-up. Obviously she is wearing the schoolgirly dress as a deliberate move; self-evidently she chose the pale cardigan, unheeled sixth-former shoes, and the throat-exposing hairstyle this very morning – in a deliberate attempt to gain sympathy, as self-conscious props designed to assist her in her role as the wronged adolescent, the abused child-bride. Yet Patrick still has to admit to himself: the ensemble works. At least: it works for him. Looking at her looking all schoolgirly and vulnerable, gamine and young and quite-possibly-raped-a-year-ago, Patrick wants nothing so much as to take Rebecca into the Old Bailey toilets and press her pleading face against the cold Edwardian tiling, hard.

— He was in the music business. He ran nightclubs and groups …

— I’d never really fallen for someone like him before

— I found him interesting and

Stuck in the dock Patrick wonders. As he watches his ex-girlfriend do her evidence in chief, he has to ponder how well she is going down. How well is she going down? If he were in the jury box, the visitors’ gallery, what would he see here in this pale-wood-panelled Old Bailey courtroom? Would he see a farce, or a tragedy? Or would he nip to the pub instead? Would he just dawdle a while and listen to Rebecca and then turn to a mate and say – oh forget it, this bastard’s going down. Boring.

And what precisely would he think of Rebecca? Would he empathise? Be repulsed? Find himself moved? Would he be touched by the pale rapeable baby pink of her lambswool cardigan? Or be appalled by this lying whore of a Jewess lisping her ex-lover into court?

— So you became lovers when?

— … On the fourth or fifth time

— That’s mid-June?

— Yes … I think so … it’s … – Rebecca lifts her blonde head and gazes frankly at the counsel – Difficult to be specific

— We understand, Miss Jessel, we don’t need actual dates

— I wish I could be more accurate … – She tilts her head and looks young – It’s a bit … you know …

At this the whole court seems to nod in sympathy; even Patrick feels himself nod sympathetically, too. It is. She’s right. It’s … a bit … you know.

— And you continued going out all that autumn … and over the new year?

— Yes

— Until eventually you moved in together … the following spring?

— Yes …

— So. Let me get this right – A slight adjustment to the wig. A slightly self-conscious adjustment – By this time, Miss Jessel, would you say that … – The prosecutor stops again; stares at the wall behind Rebecca’s head; he seems to consider something written on the wall, as he starts again – Would you say that you were in love with the defendant?

Rebecca looks puzzled. The courtroom stares at her puzzlement, rapt. Only the stenographer and Patrick are not looking straight at Rebecca. Patrick is looking out the side of an eye. Stretching out an arm to steady herself against the panel of the witness box Rebecca swallows, shrugs, looks pained, looks at her hands, says:

— … I suppose. Yes

— Only suppose?

— No. Yes. Definitely. Very much so

— Why?

— Why?

— Why were you in love with him? What was it that … attracted you to him?

— He was … funny, different. I …

— He was fun?

— Yes. Cynical but amusing, I mean … sort of sexy …

In the dock Patrick tries not to puff with pride: sexy! Sexy and funny! I’m sexy and funny … and amusingly cynical! Then he remembers he is on trial for rape. Embarrassed by himself he leans forward and listens to Rebecca say:

— But it wasn’t just that about him

Alan Gregory QC:

— No? What else was it?

Rebecca shakes her head, turns her head to look at the judge; the judge smiles paternally as if to say go on; Rebecca turns back and goes on:

— I don’t know. How can you define it?

— It, Miss Jessel?

— Love. Whatever it was … it was love – Again – We were in love

The court goes more quiet, more still. From the dock Patrick can almost hear the jury’s huge enjoyment. He can sense their pleasure at this laid-on melodrama, this subsidised soap opera, its clichés withal. His life. His trial.

— So you definitely would say you loved him?

— … Yes. I would – Rebecca nods, and then swallows, apparently with difficulty. Doing his own bit, the judge asks Rebecca if she wants a glass of water; Rebecca shakes her head and says no and goes on – He was … he was … – Head high, she confesses – As a man, Patrick was easy to fall in love with …

Rebecca stops. Patrick looks at her and feels again an unwonted pang of pride, and also gratitude for what she has said; he wonders how difficult it was for his ex-girlfriend to say that. Then he watches, trying not to be sympathetic, as Rebecca steadies herself again. Rebecca looks, now, as if she is resisting the urge to turn across the courtroom and stare at Patrick, to turn her delicate well-bred doesn’t-need-make-up face on Patrick. Sat on his plastic chair in the dock Patrick studies Rebecca not looking at him: he can see a very slight painterly pinkening around Rebecca’s delicate nostrils, as if she is flushed with difficult emotions. Patrick nearly flinches, seeing this, feeling Rebecca’s unspoken suffering. He feels like blushing.

But why? Why should he blush? For-God’s-sake. Affronted by his own thoughts, Patrick sits and gazes away from her, ignoring Rebecca’s words about their love. He doesn’t want to think of their love. Doesn’t want to think of her lies. It was true they were in love; it’s lies what she says now. So how does he disentangle them? How does he unloom this skein of mendacity and veracity? And if he doesn’t know how to do it, how does the jury? How?? HOW?

Patrick is choked by confusion. He feels like swearing. Or shouting out. Or crying. But why? He never cries anyway, or hardly ever, so why here? Because the girl he loved more than himself is now twenty yards away trying to put him in prison? Why should he cry at that?

— Miss Jessel?

Rebecca has gone quiet, she has lowered her head, and stopped talking about their love; now she is gazing across the court: gazing out. To Patrick she looks as if she is gazing out the window onto some sunlit pastoral scene, gazing at elm-shaded watermeadows, some fields where the fritillaries dance …

Rebecca is saying, slowly:

— I loved him more than I’ve ever loved anybody else in my life

Pause, gown, lapel, Alan Gregory:

— And you think he felt the same way?

— I’m not sure … You’d have to ask him. I think maybe …

A pause; then, she says again:

— … maybe

For the first time, so far, Rebecca stops. Totally. Just for a moment Rebecca looks like she is really truly struggling to compose herself, to think of something to say. As she struggles, and succeeds, in maintaining her composure Patrick blatantly stares. For all Patrick’s lawyer’s stern advice never to stare at Rebecca Patrick is looking directly at Rebecca thinking how much he loved her, too: because she made him so desperately happy when he was with her, so desperately unhappy when not. So: what does that mean? That he obviously doesn’t love her any more? Patrick is even more confused, startlingly angry: with everyone, with her, with himself. He doesn’t know what he should do, he doesn’t know what he’s meant to think, he knows what he wants to do. Right now Patrick wants to cross the dreamy dissolving non-reality of the courtroom and take Rebecca in his arms; he wants to gather the harvest of her narrow waist to his waist, and cuddle her, and comfort her, and kiss the place where her blonde hair thins to her warm and living temple.

And then he wants to grab a fistful of hair and nonchalantly spin her round and hoist her over the sill of the dock and reach under her dress for the elastic of her panties.

— So you moved in together in February of that year?

— Yes

— And this was his idea as much as yours?

— Yes, we both wanted it

— Who was paying the rent, Miss Jessel?

— I was, mostly

— I’m sorry? You were paying? – The prosecutor is standing back, pretending to be shocked.

Patrick feels like laughing aloud at this. Patrick feels like openly laughing at the actorliness of this cameo; at the prosecutor’s overdramatised reaction. Looking left Patrick checks out the lined-up twelve faces of the jury to make sure they saw this, too, to make sure they are fully aware of the prosecutor’s phoniness.

But the jury, the Asian girl, the man in the green tie, the older Asian woman, all of them: they’re just gazing back at the prosecutor, soaking it all up, taking it all in, unflinching, suspending disbelief. In the dock Patrick sighs, bitterly.

Three yards from the dock the prosecutor is making a frown – I don’t understand, Miss Jessel. Didn’t he have a job?

— Yes, but … – Rebecca sounds as if she is embarrassed; embarrassed for Patrick – You see, his business started going under …

— The nightclub?

— The club, yes. And the label

— Was he losing a lot of money?

— Yes. They were going bankrupt

Now Patrick wants to squirm. So what? So what’s this got to do with anything? Chin on paired thumbs Patrick listens depressedly and involuntarily to the lawyer vowelling away in his pompous English way.

— Miss Jessel

The prosecutor is beginning to assert himself. Using Rebecca’s mumbled monosyllables, exploiting to the full each tiny yes and he did Gregory is beginning to take over the court, casually laying out the truths as he sees it: the truths about Patrick’s sex life, and Patrick’s social life, about Patrick’s violence, about Patrick’s drinking. On top of the revelations about Patrick’s career this comes hard. It makes Patrick queasy. Patrick feels like this is some medieval ordeal, some game with the pilliwinks and gyves. A devious and cruel sport designed to make him squeal in mental pain, and thus reveal his evilness. Patrick flinches in the dock, waiting for the next barbed question, the next prosecutorial thrust. He watches Gregory like a kid in the dentist’s chair, fearfully eyeing the dentist to see what hideous tool he will choose next. Then Patrick once more curses Rebecca for bringing him to this: this profound embarrassment.

The worst of it is that Patrick can see all too easily what Gregory is doing, why he is doing this stuff, asking these questions about Patrick and Rebecca’s financial relationship, their resultant arguments, the death of the nightclub. The prosecution is leading them all by the hand, along the tortuous coastal path of the evidence, to a place where the gorse of doubt will finally part, allowing the prosecutor to stand and point to where the sea of certainty serenely twinkles in the sunlight: the sea of certainty that tells them that Patrick Skivington is a juvenile fool, who, because his job went arseover, and he couldn’t cope with adversity, and he felt like and indeed was an inadequate wretch cuckolded by life, came back one sad and sordid evening to rape the living Jesus out of his innocent young girlfriend Miss Rebecca Jessel, now of fifteen Goldsworthy Drive, Hampstead Garden Suburb, NW3, then of flat two, number seven Linden Street, Marylebone West One.

— Did he ever hit you?

— Yes

— When?

Rebecca looks downcast; Alan Gregory shuffles some paper importantly and confidently on his desk; grips the lapel of his gown; repeats the question. In turn Rebecca nods, pained, self-evidently pained by having the truth winkled out of her, the terrible truth:

— He hit me once … I …

— Take your time

— It was just before … you know …

— Go on

— We’d had a party. Patch

This is the first time she has used Patrick’s nickname; the sound of it in her mouth feels to Patrick so painful and sweet, touching and hypocritical at once.

— Patch came home, he came home from the office with a friend. He came back drunk and he and Joe they fooled around and he was

In the dock Patrick closes his eyes like he is about to do a macho swoon, like it isn’t just his nickname in her mouth but him in Rebecca’s mouth. Patrick feels like she has him in her mouth just one more time and she is sucking him slowly, looking up at him, ominously submissive.

— He was drunk. He started hitting me … He was angry

Half sucking, half biting.

— Why? Why was he angry?

— I think … because … I was …

—Yes?

— As I said his nightclub wasn’t working out … so …

Just biting.

— You mean he … – The prosecutor looks like he is pained by his own upcoming dip into the vernacular – ‘Took it out on you’?

— Yes – Rebecca’s voice goes even quieter. The judge asks her to speak up again; Rebecca apologises, meekly. She takes in one big breath and visibly grips the banister of the witness box as she says to the far corner of the cream-painted courtroom – He hit me quite badly

— You were bruised?

— Yes

— Did anybody else know about this?

— Well …

Crossing his legs, crossing his arms, Patrick switches desperately off. He just doesn’t want to hear this bit. The bits that aren’t complete lies are the total truth: both hurt. He crosses his arm and looks at his watch, watches it tick towards lunch, as Rebecca goes on about their arguments, their fights, about the last fight before he left, before she kicked him out. Rebecca is rambling, believably; the prosecutor is gently nudging her rambles along, and Patrick is looking at his wristwatch and thinking, seriously, with passion:

Is this it? Rebecca? Where is the other truth? The real truth? Where is the love, the sex, the death, the Aztecs? Suddenly he feels like standing up and asking her, shouting: nothing about me and Joe? Nothing about why I was angry? Nothing about my dad and your needs and my love? Your cunt? NO?

The prosecutor is in full flow now:

— So you decided to finish it?

— yes

— How long was it before you saw him again?

— yes

— And that was when you changed the locks?

— yes

— And he took how much money out of your account?

— yes yes YES

Patrick tries not to look or listen: Rebecca is unmistakably shaken. Under this barrage of friendly but piercing questions she has stopped, to control herself. Her voice is quieter than ever, her face shakes behind the lattice of one draped hand; her lips are smeared with pink; her delicate nostrils are pinked. And her hair is young, gold, meek and sweet.

Then the court’s awed and worried silence is shattered as the judge leans nearer Rebecca and says I think we better take a break for lunch here but Patrick doesn’t really listen to this. Patrick just stares at his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, the girl, the bitch, the liar, the bogus emoter, and thinks:

Jesus, Bex. You loved me that much?