The Choice

by Gillian McAllister

  Ed is still in his own world, looking back up at the skylight, and so I answer her.

  “He’ll be okay,” I say. “I hope.” I give a worried, hopeful shrug, playing the role of my life: the sympathetic sister. Sympathetic over a fabricated death.

  “I hope so, too,” she says, bobbing on her toes. And then she takes Bilal’s hand, shifting the books to her other arm, and leaves again. “We’ll be back next week,” she says.

  My body is flooded with cold, cruel fear. I never realized it before, but fear is the worst of all emotions. With sadness, you cry. With grief, you miss somebody. But fear. Fear gets under your skin. And you can do nothing but feel it. Worry about it.

  She will be back. There’s no getting out of it. I have to keep the lie going. Package it up, as though it’s the truth. Absorb it into the regular rotation of lies I have told.

  I look back at Ed. He’s still looking up at the light, but his eyes are on me. The effect is strange. Almost animalistic. Very slowly, he raises his eyebrows, his expression opening, becoming expectant.

  “Wilf’s girlfriend died,” I say.

  “What?” Ed says. His head drops, his mouth opens.

  “A while ago,” I say, wondering how I will explain it away. My colleague, my friend. There’s no way I wouldn’t have told Ed. “He hardly knew her, actually. It was all very early days.”

  “Jesus,” Ed says. “How?”

  “Car crash,” I say, recalling some statistic about the most likely way to die.

  “God,” Ed says.

  He turns away from me, sorting out the children’s shelf, which is messy and disordered from where Bilal has pulled books out randomly. There are gaps, like missing teeth, making the bookcase grin weirdly. “How serious were they?”

  “Just a few dates,” I say.

  Minimize it. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? To dampen the effect of the lie, like slowly, slowly putting out a fire. Next week I’ll tell him it was just one date, actually, and soon he will have forgotten it, like a tattoo gradually getting lasered each week and fading, fading, fading . . .

  “When?”

  “Just a few weeks ago. I didn’t want to—I didn’t want to make it into a huge deal.”

  “What a shame for Wilf, though,” Ed says musingly as he neatens up the books.

  Ed knows Wilf’s completely blank relationship history as well as I do; he’s forever listening to me moan about how my brother is a workaholic, doesn’t value relationships, only things. Mostly money.

  “And for you, Jojo,” he says softly. “I’m so sorry. You should’ve said.”

  I shrug awkwardly. I can’t deal with his intense compassion.

  “I’m so sorry, Jo,” he says again, glancing at me and holding my gaze.

  “I know. Bad luck,” I say, bringing a finger up to my mouth and biting the nail.

  * * *

  —

  I tell Ed to drop me back at the office, that my car’s there, waiting for me. I tell him I’ll lock up. He glances at me, surprised; he almost always drops me home.

  When we arrive, he says, “I’ve got loads to do here.”

  I realize, then, that my working day usually ends long before his. I never knew before.

  “I can help,” I say, following him inside, even though I will have to come back out to get the clothes.

  As he gathers up books, I tug gently on the cupboard where the lost property sits. I can picture all the items behind it. Jumpers and tops and children’s coats. There’s always loads of it. It will be so easy to hide mine there; they’ll be taken to the tip one day, but not by me.

  But the cupboard is locked. Ed’s keys are always attached to his belt; he wears them like a janitor. There’s not enough time to get to my car and put the stuff into the cupboard without him seeing, anyway. He’s busy tidying up, but close by. Always close by.

  There’s no opportunity. He doesn’t leave the office until he’s done, and waits for me, expectantly, then leads me out to my car with him.

  I glance behind me as he locks up, wistful, looking at the cupboard through the window, at the opportunity.

  Missed.

  16

  REVEAL

  It is five weeks After when Sarah telephones me. It was the strangest Christmas, full of foreboding instead of cheer. Where would I be next Christmas?

  “We have witness statements,” Sarah says. She asks me to go to her office later that day, or the next day, but I want to go now. I can’t wait. She says—reluctantly, it seems to me—that she’s free.

  “Will you come?” I say to Reuben, standing in my trench coat, which isn’t quite warm enough for the January chill. “I don’t know what they’ll say.”

  “Of course,” he says immediately. “Of course I will.” He isn’t looking at me, fiddling instead with his keys, sorting the flat key out from the others, ready to lock up.

  I hear him make a call while I am getting my shoes. He is canceling a meeting. He emerges, his face impassive, and then I see that he is wearing a suit. I don’t ask what the appointment was. Court, maybe. With a client.

  * * *

  —

  We arrive and sit down in Sarah’s foyer. It’s run-down, with a shabby red-carpeted corridor lined with boxes. There is no receptionist.

  “It’s good,” Reuben whispers as we sit. “It means they’re not making too much bloody money.”

  It’s called Powell’s. I’ve seen it on signs, I remember now. In less than salubrious areas, above high-rise flats and in back-end car parks. It advertises itself on teal-colored billboards, posters, business cards left on the Tube. As though anyone committing a crime might require their help to deal with the aftermath. And isn’t that true? Look at me.

  Sarah comes to collect us, and we go to sit in a meeting room. I like her lack of small talk. No discussion of the journey here, the weather, how I’m feeling. She’s wearing a T-shirt, tucked into a skirt suit. It’s styled up, with a large necklace, so it’s just about office appropriate. Her handbag—a leather one from River Island, according to the logo on the zip—and her keys sit nearby. She has a Sea Life key ring, and I wonder why. Perhaps it was her first Mother’s Day present from her child, if she has one. Or an in-joke with her husband, if she has one.

  The view from the window is out onto central London. I can see the Gherkin and the Nokia building. I close my eyes and try to imagine that I’m just a highflier. That I’m here because I’m smart, not because I am incredibly, incredibly dumb.

  The room has a large table in the center of it, but it’s pine, and rickety, not a mahogany boardroom table. There’s a display of straggly lilies, which Sarah positions to her right. Cheap tea and coffee machines are off to one side.

  “I’ve traced Sadiq, from the business card you gave me,” she says. “I’m hoping he will confirm what you have said about that night.”

  I breathe out through my nose. “Good,” I say. “Good. He will. It was obvious. Laura will, too.”

  “It will be excellent if Sadiq confirms it himself,” she says. “I’m seeing him in a couple of weeks. Anyway. The victim has woken up. He can’t give a statement. This is from his sister. And then a second one from his treating doctor about his current condition, which is evidently slightly worse than we thought. We will get another expert statement about his health, but at the moment they both create a picture of it for us.”

  She rattles all this off as though she is talking us through a complicated but tedious paperwork procedure, like how to get a mortgage or challenge a parking fine.

  “He’s worse?” I say.

  It hits me then. It happens all the time. In the shower when I’m opening a new bottle of strawberry shower smoothie. Taking a first sip of coffee in the morning. Gazing out of a window. Feeling the cold winter air against my face. If we lose, as Sarah puts it, I will be in for a very long
time. I haven’t googled it. I haven’t asked her. But I know, from that one-word sentence I saw in her notes.

  Life.

  It’s ironic, really, when it means practically the opposite of living.

  She’s not looking at me, concentrates instead on pouring the water from the jug into three glasses. A segment of lemon plops in, splashing the pine table. A drop of water sits there, distended, on the tabletop, and I reach out to squash it with my index finger. Reuben’s eyes follow my movements.

  I leaf through the statements. None of the words leap out at me. They all blur together. I glean what I can from them: Imran is brain damaged. To what extent, nobody knows.

  I don’t want to read on, but I do. The words keep on attacking me, like hundreds of needles across my skin.

  Currently, he can’t care for himself. He will probably struggle to work. At the very least, he will not be the same again. He is struggling to regulate his emotions. He is forgetful, reintroducing himself to nurses, over and over. He is not Imran anymore, his sister’s statement reads sadly. He drinks tea, mechanically, with a straw, the cup held by a nurse; he has forgotten, his sister says, that he hates tea. My eyes fill with tears.

  In all that—the injury, the life-changing stuff—it’s the tea that does it.

  Sarah is watching me reading it. “It’s all just conjecture. We won’t know his condition for a while now. Until he’s stable,” she says. “So ignore that. They’re getting proper expert evidence. About his prognosis. His injuries. We need to concentrate on what his sister says about what he was doing that night, and link it to your mistake. To make people see how easily you made it.”

  She briefly shows me a couple of photographs, taken at the hospital. A head wound, deep and red. A close-up of his face, in hospital, the eyes closed. He looks nothing, I realize with a start, like Sadiq. He has distinctive, high cheekbones, a wide, sensual mouth that turns down at its edges.

  “Can I see him?” I croak.

  “Who?” Sarah says.

  “Imran. What did he look like—before?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah says.

  Reuben plucks the papers out of my fingertips and lays them, text down, on the table. I look at him gratefully, but really I’m processing the last sentence I read in the witness statement.

  Previously, he loved running and dancing and was undergoing a cheffing course in central London. He suffered from social anxiety but was learning to manage it with exercise and CBT. He was out running that night when . . .

  He was running.

  He was just running.

  I almost laugh. It makes sense in a funny kind of way. I can plot it, like a narrative, my whole life leading up to this point.

  When I was five, I thought I saw a jester outside our car in a petrol station while Mum, Dad, and Wilf were inside in the services. I swore on it. And that’s where it began. The teasing. Imaginative Joanna, they would say. She confuses fantasy and reality.

  I spent my degree making up stories for the strange people dwelling in my tutorials. Everybody at school had looked the same, in hindsight, and suddenly, at Oxford, everybody was . . . different. A man with waist-length dark hair. I used to imagine him combing it every morning. One hundred brush strokes, I was thinking, instead of discussing Ulysses. The girl with the bowl cut of curls, the ends of which she dyed red. The boy who had already made so many notes his folder was rammed full of immaculate, tiny writing.

  I still do it now with every customer who comes into the library. Or I did, anyway. The man with the little regular scars on his forearms. The woman with the bald patch on the top of her head. The guy with the beard and the wild hair but the wise, kind dark eyes whom I privately call Gandalf. Who were they all? I wanted to know. I made things up for them. To get inside them.

  And now, here we are. The perfect, unfolding narrative from an imaginative woman. I was lifted by the fingers of God and planted in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and I imagined that somebody who was merely out running was trying to attack me.

  His life is changed, and more than mine. I deserve all this. Anybody would say so. The State would say so. The law. And that’s worse than any of it. His injuries. His life.

  Reuben clears his throat. “What’s the point of all of this? She’s not dangerous. She doesn’t need to be inside. He probably doesn’t even want her inside.”

  “No . . .” Sarah says, nodding seriously like my socialist husband hasn’t just taken down the justice system in four sentences. “You don’t need to tell me that.” She says it kindly, not dismissively, in a departure from her usual authoritative tone.

  “To punish and discourage,” Reuben says, talking over her, using the voice he uses when he’s talking to Tories.

  I see Sarah shift away from him. What Reuben doesn’t realize is that he is never going to change anybody’s mind.

  “Those are the reasons—for prison—aren’t they?” he says.

  “Yes, but—”

  “She doesn’t need punishing. She’s not going to do it again. What’s next? Reforming her? Get her a probation officer? As if. It was wrong place, wrong time. Removing offenders from society—that’s another reason, isn’t it? Because they’re dangerous. Well, she’s not. I just can’t see why . . . it’s a hefty prison term, isn’t it?”

  Sarah doesn’t say anything in response to that, only darts a quick look at me. She knows I don’t want to know, and so she won’t hint either way. She’s a good lawyer. Her legs are crossed only at the ankles, primly, and she sits forward in a wave of perfume and looks at us. “You missed one,” she says.

  “What?” Reuben says.

  “Justice.”

  “Justice?” he thunders.

  “This is the law,” she says, spreading her hands wide. “The prosecution have to prove that Joanna broke the law. Forget about the rest. Just look at the offense. She did not commit it. That’s what we’re arguing. Self-defense. Mistake. If we prove the mistake was made in good faith, and not negligently, then the law will treat your case as though it was Sadiq. Then we need only to establish that you acted in self-defense.”

  Just look at the offense. I repeat it to myself, thinking about Imran and his tea. But quietly, a small voice in the back of my mind agrees with Reuben: What use is it all? What will change for Imran if I go to prison? Who is any of this for? The thought is like a rain cloud, flitting over my consciousness. What’s the point of any of it?

  “If something’s a crime and you do that thing—you deserve the punishment. That’s what the UK law is. Whether or not . . . whether or not you’re—you know—good. The idea is that the law puts in place all possible excuses and defenses. If you don’t have one, then you get the punishment.”

  I don’t say anything. I am not good.

  “But it was a mistake,” Sarah continues. “And there’s good, supportive law around this. There’s a whole doctrine . . . I think that’s your best shot. Though it’s not used very often. Sadiq will help. I will impress upon him that it’s best just to be honest. To prove your innocent mistake.” Her features soften, and I can see sympathy there behind the facts of the law. Has she ever walked home alone, on an ill-advised jaunt? Perhaps she has dodged the bullet that hit me.

  “Mistake,” I say. The whole thing was a mistake.

  “So, we’ll use mistake to make the point that you thought the victim was somebody other than who he was, and then self-defense after we’ve got over the mistake hurdle.”

  “Right.”

  I reach over and finger one of the lily petals in the middle of the flower arrangement. It’s plastic. The pollen’s plastic, too. They looked so real, until I saw the fine layer of dust.

  “We can do this,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “We can.”

  “Okay,” I say again.

  “Let’s get to it, then. We n
eed to put your defense statement together. It’s your evidence.” She turns to Reuben. “So, according to the phone records, Joanna called you at eleven thirty-three.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “And how did she sound?”

  “Well—frightened,” Reuben says, looking at me. “Of course.”

  She looks at me. “So you lost signal, and then you must’ve walked for . . .”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your 999 call was at eleven thirty-nine.”

  I think quickly, am forced to think quickly. “It happened at eleven thirty-nine.”

  But the reality, of course, is that it will have been eleven thirty-four. Right after the call cut out. The rest was . . . the rest was the dithering, while Imran drowned.

  “So you were pursued while on the phone to Reuben, and then pursued for a further five minutes.”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “Right,” she says. “And where were you when you called Reuben?”

  My mind spins. Did I ever tell him I was right by the bridge? I don’t think so. “Outside the bar,” I say, hoping there will be no accurate telephone call records. I thank the stars that Reuben turned off my GPS that one time, said Facebook was tracking my every move.

  She writes it down. “Okay, then.” She looks up at Reuben. “And you agree with this—you corroborate?”

  “Whatever Jo says. That’s the truth,” Reuben says, his face open, trusting.

  * * *

  —

  Reuben and I are in the car behind Sarah’s office. Neither of us is saying anything. He’s not put the keys in the ignition yet. It’s one of those January days where it seems as though it’s not ever going to get light, the rain beating down like God is drumming his fingers on the roof of the car. I made Reuben come to V Festival with me, years ago, to see the Killers, and it rained like this as we left. You hated that, didn’t you? I’d said to Reuben in the car. He’d nodded, smiling that half smile. Never make me attend a festival again, he’d said, the car’s wheels spinning in the mud. We failed to move, had to call the AA out, left after dark in the end. I was unable to stop laughing on the way home and, eventually, Reuben joined in.