The Allegations

by Mark Lawson

  ‘Tobes?’ she asked. ‘Why has Seb Landrose started calling you “Ray”?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do know.’ A jolting echo of her mother’s voice from childhood. ‘When did this start?’

  ‘Mummy …’ He wasn’t looking at her. ‘It’s just, like, a joke about one of the Man City players.’

  The maternal instinct, arriving almost with a child’s first words, for a lie being told. ‘Oh, which one?’

  ‘Huh? Like you’d so know any of them, anyway.’

  Avoid being so interfering that your child is encouraged to deceive you, a Guardian article had warned.

  ‘Okay. But you will tell me if anyone gives you any grief over … ?’

  Toby nodded.

  The Bonfire of the Sanities

  ‘The title’s great.’

  ‘Well, a bit obvious, I suppose.’

  While a lunch at the Ivy had been a ritual of every previous commission – symbolic of both editorial budgets and confidence in the project – Ned currently detested restaurants. Public recognition, once validating, now led him to imagine prosecution and sentencing from those who glanced at him and then looked away. Opting for a sandwich in the office of his editor also brought the benefit, he reckoned, of not having to explain why he was off alcohol.

  But as he walked in, Jack Beane was already filling two glasses from a bottle padded with a silver freeze-sleeve.

  ‘Prof, I think you need this, what you’re going through,’ said Beane, one of those men who maintained into late middle-age their waistline and hairline, the whitening of the latter the one concession to seniority.

  ‘I’m driving,’ he said, the only explanation for sobriety that he found at least some hosts accepted. ‘But thanks.’

  The dust jackets of some of their seven books together were butterflied behind glass. Ned wondered if display was a qualitative judgement or based only on sales.

  ‘It goes without saying,’ Beane said, ‘that nobody here thinks you’re anything but a thousand per cent innocent. In fact, HR insisted that we asked around before you came in if anyone had ever had any problems with you and it was totally fine.’

  Even though this secret trial had cleared him, Ned felt despair at the revelation that such shadowy assizes were judged necessary before he could enter a building. And, if an objection had been raised, would Beane have mysteriously pressed the case of some nearby diner where the waiters were all elderly men?

  Beane lined up both wine glasses on his side of the desk and passed across a substitute tumbler of water. The publisher waved at a plastic platter of snacks from a sandwich franchise, a reduced version of the catering at book launches. Appetite still absent, and unable to digest without cascading sweat, Ned took a small slice of vegetable wrap and, with minimal actual nibbles, stage-ate.

  His host, anyway, was looking down at a print-out of the proposal for The Bonfire of the Sanities.

  ‘Wow! I like this. You’ll be arguing that Savonarola was right?’

  ‘What?’ Ned wondered if the publisher was actually reading the treatment for the first time. ‘No, of course I won’t. He was a mad fucker working out a political and psycho-sexual pathology.’

  ‘But you’re Professor Perversity – you always go against the grain.’

  Ned felt the irritation of finding that someone who seemed to have missed the point had actually seen it. ‘Oh, yeah, well, I suppose, in a way, in this case too, yes. I’ll be arguing that our academic, judicial and media institutions seem to have taken the mad monk as their inspiration.’

  ‘Wow! Sales and Marketing will love the coverage potential!’ As publishing struggled to come to terms with the twin tenets of the digital revolution – that anyone could write a book but nobody should have to pay for one – Ned had suffered the sensation, in recent meetings with Beane, that his editor was being dubbed into another language; when they first worked together, the publisher had just completed a Ph.D. on Martin Luther and considered Ned a reckless populist. ‘Prof, do you think this is something we could position for the Christmas market?’

  ‘I suppose so. Just the thing for the family member who has been witch-hunted.’

  ‘It’s great you can laugh about this. I’m sure it will help. Do have more sandwiches. Otherwise, they just go to the food bank.’

  ‘I had a late breakfast. I stayed up writing last night.’

  ‘Good, good. That you’re writing, I mean. Ned, I’ve told them you won’t want to but I’ve been asked to ask if you would totally rule out a memoir of what you’re going through? Assuming, of course, that it all turns out …’

  ‘I am making that assumption, yes. And, if it doesn’t, I can always sell The Prison Diaries to Penguin instead.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a joke.’

  ‘But, yes, you’re right: it remains my ambition to remain the only person to have been on television who hasn’t published an autobiography.’

  ‘But you might sort of be there somewhere behind Savonarola?’

  ‘In the folds of his habit. Yes, possibly.’

  ‘Ned, you’re sweating up – should I open a window?’

  The deal done, Beane, by convention, should now tell Ned that the company was thrilled to have the book and would publish the fuck out of it and then they would drink a toast (though, on this occasion, half non-alcoholic) to the project. But the publisher went off-script: ‘There’s talk here about a poppy Shakespeare biog for the death quatercentenary in 2016. Editorial are talking about the usual dames and sirs, of course, but I’d like to float you for that, all being well?’

  ‘Well, hang on, let’s get this one sorted first. You’ll talk to Emma about the contract as usual?’

  ‘Look, Ned, this stuff is decided way above my head. My advice is to get reading, even writing, but the word from Legal and HR is we can’t sign off on anything until you’re in the clear. They stress that this position is not in any way presumptive or judgemental.’

  Dialogue With A Daughter

  ‘All the evidence shows that almost no women make it up!’

  ‘Does it? Then why are so many men acquitted? Just recently, Will …’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! If you lose a trial, it doesn’t mean you’re lying …’

  ‘Oh, no? Just that the jury didn’t believe you …’

  ‘Yeah. And why’s that? Because the culture propagates the myth that women who’ve been raped are deceitful and / or money-grabbing sluts.’

  ‘No, no, no. Because jurors know that in the – look, I promise you, I wouldn’t ever have wanted to talk to you about this stuff – in the bedroom, sometimes, there are … are … misunderstandings …’

  ‘Blurred lines? Right. I hope they play Robin Thicke for you on prison radio.’

  ‘Look, sweetheart …’

  ‘Ew! Did you call her that before … ?’

  ‘Oh, come on. This isn’t fair. Whatever she thinks happened it isn’t as if I …’

  ‘Jumped out from behind a tree in a ski mask?’

  ‘You know what I … ?’

  ‘Haven’t you got it yet, guys of your age? Rape in an underpass with a knife or in a living room with a bottle of Chablis and Barry White on your iPod, it’s still all rape. There isn’t nicerape and date-rape and posh-rape. It’s all rape!’

  ‘I actually agree with that.’

  ‘Do you? How? Doesn’t sound like it …’

  ‘And – which is the point, what I am saying – is that there are also claims of, er, rape, that are false …’

  ‘Statistically, the facts …’

  ‘Look, seriously, I know you’re angry with me for dragging us into all this, though obviously I didn’t do it deliberately, but you must know that there are reasons – regret, anger, whatever – why a woman might sometimes convince herself that …’

  ‘Professor Marriott …’

  ‘Why are you calling me … ?’

  ‘There was a survey recently into so-called malicious allegations
…’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s always malice. I’m saying people have a … a …fucked-up fuck …’

  ‘Ew!’

  ‘And later one of them – to explain it to herself or to a partner …’

  ‘Her? So false accusation is just a girl thing?’

  ‘Oh, Cordelia, Cordy, please …’

  ‘Do you know – in this survey – do you know how many rape prosecutions there were in the period under survey … ?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t, not exactly …’

  ‘Five thousand six hundred and fifty-one …’

  ‘You actually know the exact … ?’

  ‘Yeah. Women and their memories. Annoying, eh?’

  ‘Oh, please don’t do this …’

  ‘And do you – in all that time – do you know how many women were prosecuted for making a false allegation of rape?’

  ‘Not very many, I’d guess. But …’

  ‘Thirty-five. Thirty-five! And, like all our family, our first family, I’m crap at maths but isn’t that, like, less than one per cent of prosecutions? So, if this woman has invented it all, she’s in pretty select company …’

  ‘No, no, no. That’s a false statistic …’

  ‘What? False claims, false statistics. Never trust a fucking girlie, eh?’

  ‘Please, Dee. Listen to me. You’re confusing two things …’

  ‘Really? Blurring the lines, am I?’

  ‘Yes. LISTEN!’ Almost a decade away from the normal father–daughter wars of adolescence, it was a long time since she had heard him shout and she resisted a vestigial trigger to storm out, slamming the door. ‘The fact that only a few women have ever actually been hauled to court for lying is meaningless …’

  ‘Oh, right, really?’

  ‘Yes. Because the standard of proof for perjury is very high. It doesn’t mean that every single one of the others is automatically one hundred per cent right about what happened.’

  ‘It means the police didn’t think they were lying.’

  ‘Mmm. Yeah. Ish.’

  ‘Oh, is that what you are? A rap-ish.’

  ‘Oh, please, this isn’t really you …’

  ‘Right. And who are you, really?’

  ‘Darling …’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’

  ‘It’s not as simple as lying or not lying. Look, every single day, doctors see loads of people who are absolutely convinced they’re fatally ill, although, in fact, they’re not. But those patients aren’t lying about dying.’ The rhyme and rhythm made it sound even more like his TV voice. ‘They’ve misread the signals or they’re working out some other problem or someone else has convinced them it’s a terminal condition. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘All! It’s quite a lot to say.’

  ‘It isn’t. It’s saying that when there are two people in bed – and, yes, I am going to say that’s different from running up behind a woman with a knife – there are often two stories. Especially now there’s this thing that young people seem to do now of letting people sleep in their bed who they aren’t actually sleeping with – or, at least, in their mind they aren’t – or who are just – that awful term – fuck-buddies – and so the potential for crossed wires becomes higher. And so the decision has to be in which cases a jury should get to decide between those versions. Look, in America, there are degrees of sexual offence …’

  ‘Well, maybe you should go and try your luck there, then …’

  ‘Oh, please! But the point is that you actually get more convictions that way.’

  ‘Okay. Well, to what degree are you guilty?’

  ‘What? Well, not at all, obviously.’

  ‘Right. So there we have the problem.’

  ‘Dee, you’re obviously very very upset about this. So I have to ask. Is it that you’ve been – please tell me – that you’ve been yourself …’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, brilliant, now we’ve got the full Monty. Daddy’ – it was the first time she had brought herself to say the word but spun it like an insult – ‘I’m not saying this stuff because I’ve been raped. You don’t need to have been killed to be against murder!’

  A Theory of Domestic Economics

  When the girls were something like seven, Ned, driving them back from some treat, stopped on a double yellow to use a cashpoint. Alert to the threat from traffic wardens and kidnappers, he remained half-turned at all times, watching the car.

  When he returned, there was no ticket or ransom note attached to the windscreen But, safely back in traffic, Phee, always the worrier, piped from behind him: ‘Daddy, why do the banks give you money?’

  ‘Well, muffin, they don’t really give it to me. I have money in the bank and that machine – what people call a “hole in the wall” – is one of the ways of getting it …’

  ‘But where do you get the money from?’

  ‘Well, Daddy is a teacher, like Miss Sharp, but to much older girls and boys. And the university – which is a sort of very big school – pays him for that. And Daddy also talks on television and radio and other people give him money for doing it.’

  But, put like that, the economic system sounded ridiculous and flimsy and clearly unsustainable. Ned suddenly felt like a banker watching a frenzy of selling on the screen.

  ‘So,’ said Dee with her soft solemn voice. ‘When you say you don’t have enough money to buy us a horse, you could just talk more?’

  Dialogue with a Daughter (2)

  ‘Look, Cupcake, you may not want to talk about it at all – which is fine, these aren’t conversations anyone really wants to have – but if there is anything you need to …’

  ‘What is there to say? I don’t believe them. I do believe you.’

  ‘Well, that’s really … oh, fuck, can you, there’s a box of tissues under the … thanks … I promised I wouldn’t …’

  ‘I think I’ve probably done enough blubbing over the years in front of you, Daddy.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s the normal … oh, Jesus, I’m sorry … I … the only thing I really hold against my mother is that for some reason I never learned to blow my nose properly …’

  ‘Should I get you some water?’

  ‘No. I’m fine … I … I think I’ve got some kind of summer cold which makes it worse … all I’m saying is: don’t listen to your sister … I don’t mean it like that – everyone has to get through this in their own way … but it was like being accused of … of … infidelity … which I suppose, in a way, is how she sees it …’

  ‘I know what you mean. But she took the … the divorce worse as well …’

  ‘Oh, don’t remind me … I haven’t exactly been a good advertisement for masculinity … it’s a wonder that you’re not both … oh, God, all this stuff, I suppose it would be too weird if I asked you to teach me to blow my nose … ?’

  ‘Lesbians?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A wonder that we’re not both lesbians?’

  ‘Oh, God, no, don’t tweet I said that. Look, I don’t care what your sister … that came out wrong … of course I care … what I’m saying is that I’d understand it if you’re angry with me but talk to me instead of letting Dee …’

  ‘Look, I don’t need much encouragement to disagree with her. Although that isn’t why I’m doing it.’

  ‘I can’t really complain. She’s got the argumentative gene.’

  ‘Oh, right. And I got the pushover one?’

  ‘No, of course you didn’t. The peacemaker one. Like your mother. Who, incidentally, has been great over …’

  ‘We talked about it. As Mummy says, if every man’s sex life was put on trial, there’d be a Wormwood Scrubs on every street corner …’

  ‘Yes, well, I know that Jen, that Mum means well but my lawyer and I, we’re sort of going for the line that I’m innocent rather than that all men are guilty. But I want to be clear that, though these women are mistaken, I’m not blaming …’

  ‘Well, I am. I think they’re silly self-in
dulgent canutes.’

  ‘Can … ? Oh, Phee, I forget you even have your own swearing … Oh, God, I’m going to need you to pass me that box again …’

  ‘It’s fine, Daddy. As Granny always says, better out than in.’

  ‘Take this as a warning. This is what it will be like when I get Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘Well, if it is, it is. That’s fine.’

  ‘Take this as a warning. This is what it will be like when I get Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘What? You just … oh, stop it, Daddy! If they try to lock you up for your jokes, don’t come to me.’

  The Literature of False Accusation (4)

  Summary: In 1996, Professor Coleman Silk, a Jewish-American sixty-nine-year-old (or possibly sixty-eight-year-old, fiction generally being more precise on years of birth than days) teacher of Greek and Latin classics at Athena College, a humanities institution in New England, is urgently summoned by Professor Delphine Roux, ambitious Dean of the new Language and Literature department that has recently absorbed Classics. He is told that two students, who are African American, have brought an allegation of racism against him.

  The complaint relates to the sixth week of the semester when Professor Silk, noting that two students in the register have not turned up all term, asked the class aloud: ‘Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?’ Though now most associated with ghosts and spies, the word is also an antiquated racial insult against black people. Silk points out that the phrase makes no grammatical sense as bigotry – ‘Do they exist or are they African American?’ – but he is placed under formal investigation.

  This academic crisis, though, is a flashback from the main narrative, which takes place in 1998, during the summer when President Bill Clinton is facing disgrace and dismissal over his sexual relationship (fellatio and mutual masturbation but no penile penetration, according to the Starr Report) with White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.