The Choice

by Gillian McAllister

  I called in sick to work. It was the best I could do. Ed was nice about it, as he always is, and I was grateful for that.

  Sarah is waiting in a meeting room for me. She’s wearing a black skirt suit and a white shirt. She keeps shifting within its confining fabric, while it remains stiff around her neck, uncomfortable. Her face is less made-up than it was on Saturday, and her eyes look smaller and more tired.

  She hands me a machine coffee. It tastes like burned toast.

  We haven’t told anybody yet, Reuben and I. It could be on the television or in the newspapers. I have no idea. But it’s like there’s no room for it in my head. I should have told Ed. My parents. Wilf. Laura. But I can’t. Not yet. Not when I could be imprisoned within the hour. Reuben will have to do it.

  “I’ve got all of your mitigation,” Sarah says, indicating a pad.

  She’s changed her nail color. I wonder if she removed it last night, scrubbing frustratedly at it while talking to her other half, then slicked on a new shade while he made them liqueur coffees at a stainless-steel breakfast bar.

  “And you have no aggravating features,” she adds, interrupting my chain of thought.

  “No,” I say softly.

  “No previous. Good character. No flight risk.” She is rattling off her checklist.

  I can see Reuben, through the windowed panel in the door, standing confidently, assessing everybody. He comes to court a bit, for work. He looks at home here.

  “You must be wondering at the likelihood of bail,” Sarah says.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t want to know.”

  I can’t be worrying about likelihoods of imprisonment. I don’t understand it: I am currently free to wander down the road and buy breakfast from Pret. If there is no risk now, what is the risk in a few hours’ time? But then, what is the risk at all? If I am bailed now, why put me in prison later? I raise my eyes to the marble carved ceiling and pretend for a second that I am merely in—where? Where looks like this?—the Natural History Museum, maybe, and Reuben is earnestly explaining the dinosaur exhibits to me.

  What is the point in any of it? I have learned my lesson, haven’t I? I am not going to do it again. I will never so much as touch another person again, I tell the universe.

  We walk out. I’m listed fourth in Courtroom 2.

  The foyer looks like it’s made of marble and glass, with rows of benches fixed into the ground, like in an airport. But it’s the people who sit at them; they’re the people I would like to talk to. Or maybe to write about. They are like personifications—is that the right word?—arrayed on those little benches. A man whose shoulders are back, gesticulating at his lawyer. Defiance. A man in a tracksuit, elbows resting above his head on the wall, forehead against the concrete right next to the justice crest. Grief. Or maybe Penance, or Regret.

  I have no idea what I’m doing here in my Boden blazer, my husband’s hand in mine. None at all.

  * * *

  —

  We have a three-hour wait. I watch Reuben. Looking at him calms me down. He never fiddles. Never gets his phone out. I like to stare at his slow movements, his green eyes raising as people approach; at how he slides his leg closer to mine, lays a hand in my lap just like he did on our wedding day.

  But, eventually, we’re called; my name is announced on an electronic screen above the door to Courtroom 2, as if I am in the GP’s surgery or at the dentist (if I hadn’t avoided the dentist’s for the last ten years).

  “All rise,” a clerk says.

  I immediately think of the Blue song. I am still a silly, immature thirty-year-old who would like to snigger in court; my mind hasn’t caught up with the fact that I am the defendant, and it is me in the wooden dock fronted by the bulletproof glass.

  I hardly understand a word of the proceedings. The lawyers and the magistrates refer constantly to a big black book, which they all have open on the table in front of them. The magistrate puts on her glasses to look at it. Their words are a rainstorm of legal jargon: mitigating circumstances and aggravating features and flight risks and CPS Sentencing Guidelines and referrals to the Crown Court and provocation and reasonable force and premeditation and grievous bodily harm and mens rea.

  I understand the facts, but the facts seem to be a backdrop, at best, to what is being discussed. They are not talking about how I was walking home alone. Or that he came up behind me. Or what I did. The push.

  It’s other stuff. Logic and argument and theory.

  I stare at the immaculate glass. It isn’t smeared. Why not? I wonder. There’s a security guard behind me, in a navy-blue uniform. He’s making sure I don’t move, bolt, make a run for it. Because, once again, I’m no longer free. Not for now. Not for these minutes.

  My whole body is covered in sweat. I try to calm myself, try to imagine placing my hands against the panes. Perhaps I’m just at SeaWorld, or at the zoo—the penguin enclosure cool against my palms. We’ll get an ice cream and then drive home. I close my eyes with the ferocity of my desire. If only I had walked away. If only it had never happened.

  “Joanna Oliva, please stand again,” the magistrate says.

  Her voice was clear at the beginning of my bail hearing but has become muffled and raspy sounding, as though she can no longer be bothered, by 12:40 on a Monday afternoon. There are three of them, the magistrates, but only she speaks.

  Oliva. I was so happy to have his name. To ditch my plain name and take his interesting one. “No, it’s O-lee-vah,” he’s always had to say, and now I do, too. I liked it. And the rest, his family name and all it stood for. That he was adopted, and they all loved each other, it seemed to me, without conditions. The Oliva pub, where he spent his teenage years getting a fantastic alcohol tolerance and a brilliant poker face and an education in all the classics. R. Oliva, occasionally quoted in the press on issues of social justice, London gangs. I loved all of it. Joined it readily. The Oliva clan. And now, here I am, tarnishing it.

  I look up, my eyes trailing past the bench, past the justice crests, past the high, barred windows and beyond, up to the strip lights. They’re the same as in the police cell, and the panic washes over me again, less like a wave and more as if I have jumped off a boat and sunk fifty fathoms deep.

  I haven’t even been thinking about it. Haven’t been working it out. But my brain has, ticking over in the background like a radioactivity monitor nobody knows is working, totting up numbers all on its own.

  There are five and a half thousand nights in fifteen years, a life sentence, I think suddenly to myself. And I did just one. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I want to break free of my enclosure, rip out the glass.

  The magistrate is speaking. I don’t understand—can’t understand—the words she’s saying, but I like the tone. It reminds me of when Wilf and I would watch the football scores coming in, on our tummies in front of the television, and we would try to predict the results from the tone of the announcer’s voice. I can hear it. While this is serious . . . she’s saying. The rest is currently unsaid, but I understand what it’ll be. The State: nil; Joanna: one.

  She is listing the things I haven’t done. I didn’t flee the scene. I have not attempted to conceal evidence. I have not ever committed an offense before. And then she says: The defendant sought immediate help. I ignore this, not letting my mind look at it, like trying to hold still a mechanical toy.

  “And so I am minded to think that, although this carries with it the risk of a very long prison sentence, I am not of the view that the defendant needs imprisoning pending trial.”

  I look across at Sarah, wondering if what I’m hearing is correct. Her back is to me, her head bent, intently listening to the magistrate. I look at Reuben instead. He’s looking directly at me. He’s wearing a shirt and tie; he hates ties, always pulls them off at the earliest opportunity, usually looks slightly scruffy, even when he’s trying hard not to.


  The magistrate moves on to bail conditions. I don’t listen to them. I am daydreaming about how I am to be—temporarily—free. I don’t want to think about the tomorrows: the trial, the aftermath. I will think only of right now, I tell myself. The sky beyond those windows. The weather. Our tiny basement flat. Reuben. All mine for a few more months of borrowed time.

  My case is committed to the Old Bailey, and then I am led out.

  The guard’s hand is gently resting against mine, and then, as we reach the foyer, he slowly releases it, and I am alone. I shrug, out of his gaze, of his touching distance, of the shackles of custody.

  Bailed. I am free. For now.

  But it is not true freedom, of course. It is temporary. A purgatory. Until later, when it will surely end. Now it’s like a little taster, a teaser. A cease-fire. A friendly football match, on Christmas Day, in the middle of a war.

  13

  CONCEAL

  The GP thinks my hand and wrist need strapping. I enjoy her tender touch on my arm and hand, her concerned expression when I tell her I have had a lot on, that I fell when hurrying.

  “Be kind to yourself,” she says, in the tone of an exasperated schoolteacher.

  When I get home, Reuben stares at the strapping, and I tell him the truth: that I fell over.

  I only omit to tell him when, and why.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t check the work rota much more than a day in advance—a fact that irritates Reuben—so I don’t know until the Monday, ten days After, that I have the Tuesday off.

  I kiss Reuben good-bye as he leaves. I haven’t kissed him since it happened, and a faint frown crosses his face as his lips meet mine, which I try to ignore. But I can’t unsee the way he draws me to him, wanting to extend the kiss like someone on rations might bulk up a meal.

  “You’ve lost a bit of weight,” he says.

  “Oh, really,” I say, self-consciously patting down my slim hips. “Good.” I want to disappear.

  When he’s left, I go out and walk, crunching around in the winter frost. Walking’s the only thing that seems to work for me. The only time I feel okay. The rhythm of it. The lack of thought. The cold, harsh air. Who knows what I’ll do when it’s warm again?

  Of course, I find myself walking toward Little Venice, but I steer myself south.

  It’s no longer snowing but it’s still bone cold—the worst winter on record, the newspaper headlines scream—and I wrap my thin trench coat around myself, walking alone along an A-road in Paddington. A bizarre, sixties building with an extra bit on the top of it sits to my right, and I turn instinctively toward it, crossing the road, turning down a side street toward central London. I will go and look at the landmarks, I think. Look at my London: one of my favorite things to do.

  I wander for hours. And then, before I know it, without realizing how far I have drifted, it is there in front of me, a white, square building, a golden dome: the Paddington Mosque. I stand in front of it, blinking, and I know why I have arrived here, almost unconsciously, without quite knowing myself. To pay my respects. To say sorry. To express my regret. I’ll do it alone, and quickly. I think back to the news article. He was buried yesterday. I won’t be disturbing anybody. I’ll nip in. Find his grave. Leave. Nobody will know. It is necessary, I realize, for me to do this.

  I let myself in through the door—my left hand hangs by my side, strapped and useless—knowing just enough to remove my shoes and hold them in my hands as I cross the carpet of the women’s section. I cover my hair with my scarf.

  The mosque, on the inside, is nothing like a church. More like a living room. The carpet is red and swirling, and the edge of the room is lined with pillars. Otherwise, it’s almost entirely empty. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling, and it seems to sway slightly in a breeze that must be coming from outside. A few men are praying around the edges of the room, and I cross it silently, putting my shoes back on when I reach the door. But, after a second, I realize there’s no graveyard here. I ask someone, and she directs me to the cemetery over the road.

  It’s frosty, and the grass crunches underfoot. My breath steams out in front of me, eddying like bathwater in the frigid air.

  The cemetery is completely empty. I take a deep, chilly breath. I am alone with him. He’s here somewhere. Imran. I’ll stop a grave or two away—I can’t risk going right up to him—and pay my respects to him from a few feet. I’ll pretend to be visiting someone else.

  They are different to Christian graves, to secular graves. The headstones are mostly smaller, but some of them have entire tombs, crypts, shining white in the sun. They are all pointing in the same direction, I notice immediately. It gives a strangely uniform effect. Rows and rows and rows of them, evenly spaced, like somebody has neatly laid out piles of paper.

  I find his grave—marked with a wooden stake. I don’t know how long I stay there for. Just looking, three along from his grave. This is close enough. If he could see me now, he would know. He would know that I’m sorry. He would want you to hand yourself in, a voice inside my head says, but I gulp back tears and ignore it.

  Instead, I just stand there, my feet cold in the frost, breathing deeply, apologizing with each breath.

  “Rubbish, isn’t it?” a voice beside me says.

  I turn and see a woman standing next to me. I didn’t hear her arrive. And, then, with a panicked lurch, I realize that it is obviously, unmistakably her. Ayesha. His sister. Her face is more drawn than it was on the television, but I recognize the turned-down lips, the mole. I can see hollows underneath her cheekbones. Like she is biting her cheeks.

  I want to back away, to turn and run, but I can’t. I can’t do that to her—scare her in this peaceful graveyard, where her brother rests. So recently buried.

  “I’m not supposed to be here again so soon,” she says. “But I can’t stay away.”

  She raises her face to the sun. It kisses her features—lighting her forehead and shadowing underneath her bone structure—and I look away, embarrassed.

  It wasn’t right to come. It wasn’t right at all, I think, wanting to run far away. I am a monster, a killer, following the same murderous instincts that have preceded me for hundreds of years. Returning to the scene of the crime. Coming to the grave. Stupid. Selfish. Predictable.

  “I—I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m here to . . .”

  She’s looking at me expectantly, and I wonder why I spoke at all. I can feel my eyes darting around the graveyard. I can’t pretend to have known him: That is a step too far. I will just . . . my gaze lands on a gravestone bearing the inscription HANNA AHMED: LOST TOO SOON. It has this year’s date on it. She was born in 1983.

  “My brother’s girlfriend died,” I say, the lie escaping my lips before I can really stop it, thankful for my fast brain, always good with numbers right from when I was young. “I’m just—I’m so sorry to have . . . disturbed you.”

  Her expression is soft, and I realize she wasn’t asking me. Her expression looks questioning, but it is only grief. Hollow grief that I have caused. Her eyes meet mine. They’re a dark brown, almost black, the pupils lost inside.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, gesturing to the grave, almost as new as Imran’s, the earth piled on it, covered in plants and flowers. “About your brother . . . about his girlfriend.”

  I wave a hand, like it doesn’t matter, which she must think is strange.

  “They’re at rest now,” she says, looking out over the graves. “Mecca’s somewhere that way,” she says. “You know?” She looks at me. “I never believed all that, but he did. I think.” She speaks with a cockney accent.

  She doesn’t care that I’m not answering. That I’m thinking about Imran and every grave in here. She leans down, looking closer at Hanna’s grave. “She was young, too. Did they bury her fast? As soon as the postmortem was over, we got the body. It’s hardly been any time a
t all.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, a blush creeping across my cheeks.

  I take a step back, the panic descending again. What am I doing here? I have to get away. I can’t be doing things like this. Risky things. Cruel things. Things that don’t make any sense.

  I take two steps back, but, as I leave, I can’t help but wish her well. She nods gratefully, her eyes still on me.

  * * *

  —

  I dream of Imran again and wake up sweaty.

  I shower, my arm feeling wasted without its splint on, ashamed at the strange concoction of emotions inside me. Sadness—it’s almost all sadness. But there are other things, too. Sadness is the main course, but there is a starter of guilt. No, make that a sharing platter.

  But then also, right at the end, after pudding—a biscotti on the side of the coffee, maybe—is something else. I see it for what it is, and wince as I realize.

  It’s relief. A chink of relief, because, as each day passes, it’s looking like I might have got away with murder.

  I am despicable.

  14

  REVEAL

  Reuben finishes playing for me. His head is bent low, the fingers finishing the piece with the softest, quietest, most understated ending. A musical sentence, trailed off.

  “Calmer?” he says, turning to me with a smile. He hardly ever plays for me.

  I nod, but I’m not really. “Yes. No,” I say. We are about to leave to go to my parents’. Wilf has said he will be there, too. We’re telling people. We can’t avoid it any longer.