On Loving Josiah

by Olivia Fane

The prosecution threw down the gauntlet: there were two charges against Thomas, the kidnap and sexual abuse of a minor. The buggery charges were dropped for lack of evidence. A policeman read out a statement from the Scroppos about how it didn’t seem to bother the pair that there was only one single bed, about the quantity of dried semen on the sheets, about their suspicions right from the start about the exact nature of their relationship. The policeman then went on to produce his own evidence, which seemed to amount to no more than the exact measurements of the bed in question.

  ‘Would it have been possible not to have touched in such a bed?’ asked the barrister for the prosecution.

  The policeman laughed. ‘Not likely, sir.’

  But the defence barrister asked him, ‘Do we know whose semen it was?’

  ‘No,’ the policeman admitted. ‘Mrs Scroppo had already washed the sheets by the time we got there.’

  ‘The boy in question is only fifteen. Isn’t it possible that he was prone to what we call “wet dreams”, that he had ejaculated in his sleep?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said the policeman.

  ‘And one further question. Is it not possible to lie very closely to another human being and not touch them sexually? Because touching per se does not imply sexual touching, does it?’

  ‘It doesn’t sir, but in this case…’

  ‘What are you implying?’

  ‘I think it’s likely there was sexual touching, sir.’

  ‘If there had been two beds, do you think it likely they would have still chosen to share one bed?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know.’

  ‘In other words, you’re guessing. In fact everyone here is guessing what went on in that bed. I’m suggesting that there being only one bed in that chapel was a surprise to the defendant; in fact, they would both have preferred two, but they made the best of what there was. There was no other bedding. There was no alternative. Is that possible?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Things seemed to be going so well. Even the lodger Greg, with his sly insinuations, his anxieties at finding Josiah sitting at the kitchen table at a quarter to eight in the morning, was unable to meet the barrister’s question, ‘If you had been so certain that sexual abuse was going on, why didn’t you go to the police?’

  When June Briggs victoriously declared to a stunned court that Josiah had told her that Dr Marius loved him, the barrister asked her, ‘When was love against the law? We’re dealing with sexual abuse, aren’t we? Sexual abuse is a crime, and rightly so, but if you begin to legislate against love, then God help us.’

  To Dr Hollis, who gave an account of Josiah’s ‘bizarre behaviour’ when confronted with an anal examination and his ‘violent and unprovoked attack, indicating trauma,’ the barrister suggested that to a young boy an anal examination was indeed traumatic, and would have amounted to rape.

  And then the defence barrister summoned the Child Protection Officer of the Cambridgeshire Police Force, and Margie Wynter was a brick, now dressed to the nines in her police regalia. She spoke with authority and conviction of her two interviews with Josiah. She said that instinctively she did not feel that Josiah had been the victim of sexual abuse; and she spoke, with great feeling, about the second interview, when Josiah had broken down in tears, declaring that it was ‘all his fault that Thomas was in prison’. He also confessed to forging the letter purportedly from Angela Day, which Dr Marius believed had given him permission to take him to Italy. Both defence and prosecution barristers cross-examined her, and she acquitted herself with exemplary professionalism.

  But even while the defence team were quietly congratulating themselves on the front bench, even while the chaplain, Justin Phipps, was telling the court how in his thirty years at Corpus he had never met a man of purer principles, Thomas stood up as though he were about to speak, and then sat down again, his eyes darting to left and right and upwards at the ceiling. People had by now stopped listening to an account of his virtues, and were staring at him. Then suddenly Thomas leapt up and shouted, ‘It’s not true! I am guilty!’

  The judge remained judge-like. Barely two seconds’ silence had elapsed before he asked the defence team if they would like the opportunity of speaking to their client, and he was happy to adjourn the court for half an hour to that end. But half an hour was too short a time to knock sense into a man who could only plead to be cut in two so that the Court could see for itself how stained he was, how there was no purity in him. In his heart, he told them, he had always realised that the letter was a forgery; but so keen was he to take the child to Italy that he overlooked it. He wanted the Court to know that he loved the boy with his mind, body and soul: and if, therefore, good people considered him to be a pederast, then a pederast was what he was. Thomas did not allow that there was any difference between thought, word and deed in the question of guilt; he said that the divisions were arbitrary and had no bearing on what was true.

  Mr Findlay had to tell the judge that he could no longer represent his client, and Thomas Marius took his fate into his own hands. The judge showed leniency, however. He was sent down for three years, with the possibility of parole.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ON 1ST NOVEMBER 2000, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Elspeth Hardy was watching the sunset from her office window. She was on the top floor of a large, Victorian building, now converted to the premises of the Cambridgeshire Probation Service. The view was good, and her attention was held by the roof of King’s College Chapel glistening in the last, low light of the day. There was a two-minute interval between reception ringing through to announce the arrival of a client, and the knock on her door. Elspeth always used that time well: she would gather her thoughts, or, as she was doing now, she would ungather them, thereby creating an empty and welcoming space that a new client (or possible friend, as she liked to think) might occupy.

  On this particular afternoon she was about to meet Josiah Nelson for the first time. She vaguely remembered the details from the referral meeting three weeks previously. He was sixteen years old and an arsonist. He was a first time offender and had lived in residential care since he was seven. He’d been involved with a paedophile. She seemed to remember it was a barn he’d set fire to, but Elspeth hadn’t read the Social Enquiry Report – not because she was lazy, far from it, but because she always liked to come to her clients with an open mind. She took pride in the fact that she never pre-judged people; she let them explain, in their own time, who they were and what they wanted from this life. Then she did everything in her power to help them get it.

  There is one other fact about Elspeth Hardy which set her apart from her fellow probation officers: she was beautiful, and wore her beauty lightly. She had coal-black hair, which she plaited, giving her the air of a seventies American folk singer. Her natural pallor only exaggerated her flawless skin, and her eyes were dark and expressive. She never wore make-up, she didn’t need to. The curves of her lips were so perfectly drawn, that they belonged more to an artist’s notebook than to a living face. She was tall and slim, and on that particular afternoon, she was wearing a tight-fitting shirt with the top buttons undone, a short skirt and nubuck boots up to her knees. None of this was lost on the young Josiah, who, despite his continued refusal to go to school or apply for a job, had at least succeeded in growing four inches since we last met him, and now used a razor every other day.

  Elspeth was still standing by the window when she said, ‘Come in.’ She was pleased with Josiah. She liked his long blond fringe, and the habit he had of jerking it away from his face. She liked the way he wore an old man’s shirt without a collar and with the sleeves rolled up, though it was deeply autumn by now and cold. She liked his trousers, made of grey wool and held up by a belt, also, she decided, bought from a charity shop and part of a suit which might have been cut in 1965. But above all, she liked the way he looked at her. In fact, she enjoyed his appraisal of her quite as much as her own of him.

  She said to him, ‘Would you like a ci
garette?’

  Josiah shook his head. There was a ‘No Smoking’ sign on the wall and Josiah briefly glanced at it.

  ‘Rules are for breaking, aren’t they?’ said Elspeth, and she sat down briefly at her desk to seek out her ten-pack of French Gitanes. She found it, lit one, and resumed her place at the window to smoke it.

  ‘Do you like Cambridge?’ she asked him. ‘There’s a good view from this window. Would you like to see it?’

  Josiah walked towards her, and with a flick of his fringe looked out. They stood next to each other, almost touching, while Elspeth continued to inhale deeply on her cigarette.

  ‘Here, go on,’ she said, handing it to him.

  Josiah smiled, and put the cigarette in his mouth. Suddenly he began coughing.

  Elspeth snatched it back. ‘Where, for God’s sake, have you been all your life?’

  This business with the cigarettes was a ruse Elspeth regularly employed with her young male clients. She’d even put the ‘No Smoking’ sign up herself. For anyone, she would argue, could put on an act for an hour a week: anyone could appear sensible, hard-done-by, apologetic, and say and do all the right things and then go out, get drunk and slap his girlfriend that same evening. This was Elspeth’s first year of her first proper job as a Probation Officer: she was a radical and an idealist. If a youth was unemployed, she would meet them in the Job Centre; if a lad was in custody, she would take his family out for a picnic on the way to visit him. On a Tuesday evening, she would teach ‘social skills’ to a dozen young people (yes, a couple of girls too) and she used the occasion to give a supper party, designating ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’, teaching the hosts how to cook vegetarian meals, for that was another of Elspeth’s passions, she was a vegetarian. Of course, her clients loved her: this was par for the course, for why bother to change one’s outlook and character for someone one didn’t love? And because Elspeth had an affectionate nature, she loved them back, or at least, she said she did.

  The fact that Josiah had never smoked a cigarette in his life in some curious way gave him the upper hand. For Elspeth was ever so slightly embarrassed, and it took quite a lot to embarrass this girl. She wanted to rewind, and start the interview again, and in a way, that’s what she did.

  Elspeth put out her cigarette and laughed. She made a bad joke about not inflicting her smoke on Josiah if he didn’t indulge himself; then sat down at her desk and tried to look serious.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said.

  Josiah obeyed, amused.

  Elspeth saw that amusement; and it made her want to confess to him that that whole first scene had been a little trick of hers, which had worked countless times before… and look how much she knew about this boy before he’d even said a word! But wisely she realised that she wouldn’t have been able to get her words in the right order, and she was determined to get the interview onto the right track.

  ‘As you can see, Josiah, I know nothing about you. Not even whether you have an occasional cigarette. I know nothing of your character nor your crimes. What are you going to tell me about today?’

  Josiah smiled and paused, ‘Ask me something easier.’

  ‘Okay, Josiah, how are we going to play this?’

  Josiah didn’t say anything for a while. He looked first at Elspeth, and then around at her office, the smallness of it, the bareness of it, the floorboards, the cheap desk and bookcase, and the books – Young Offenders, Criminal Law, The Paradoxical Injunction, The Sociology of Marriage. And he noticed the mug on Elspeth’s desk, on which was written ‘Rights For Cows’ in large red capital letters. Elspeth was quite relaxed about the silence: there was a trick she’d learnt from the BBC, the longer the pause, the greater the revelation at the end of it.

  But then suddenly Josiah said, ‘Have you got a car?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I could take you to the scene of the crime, if you like.’

  ‘That would be a start, I suppose,’ said Elspeth, wishing at that moment that she hadn’t extinguished her cigarette. ‘How far away did you commit this crime of yours? I hope conveniently close.’

  Josiah considered. ‘Twelve, fourteen miles,’ he said.

  ‘All right. You’re on. Let’s go,’ announced Elspeth, hell-bent on seizing the initiative.

  Elspeth took Josiah down into the basement garage for employees. The garage was very dark: it was hard even to find her keys in her handbag, with the figure of Josiah looming over her. She drove a much-loved Citroen CV, ten years old, and on the panel above the gearbox was stuck a red love-heart with the words underneath, ‘I love Gertie.’ A client’s grateful mother had given her the sticker when she was still a student, because Elspeth had once taken some mothers of young offenders on a day trip to the country (because Elspeth believed in self-help groups, and thought that might be a useful one), and Elspeth had confessed that she sometimes called her car ‘Gertie’, as in ‘My dear Gertie, please start for me this morning! Please ignore the frost, Gertie!’ So when the Mum had sent the sticker in the post along with a ‘thank you’ note, Elspeth had stuck it on her car with pride. Even as she watched Josiah reading it, she would have paid good money for it to self-incinerate.

  ‘Who’s Gertie?’ asked Josiah, looking at Elspeth and watching her reply.

  ‘Gertie’s my car. A friend gave me that sticker. It’s a bit silly, I admit.’

  ‘You call your car, “Gertie”?’ Josiah was genuinely curious, but Elspeth only saw mockery.

  ‘Well, when you have a car, you never know, you might call it “Fred.”’

  ‘I don’t suppose I will,’ said Josiah. His tone was deadpan.

  Negotiating a route out of Cambridge when she wasn’t even sure where she was going was hard enough: she couldn’t even give Josiah the occasional sideways glance. She suddenly realised quite how idiotic this venture was: in half an hour’s time, they’d barely be able to see the scene of the blasted crime.

  ‘Where exactly are you taking me?’ asked Elspeth, though what she’d wanted to ask, was ‘Where am I taking you?’

  ‘West of here. Beyond Caldicott.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Elspeth.

  At the traffic lights on Grange Road, Elspeth was finally able to look at her young charge. There was an intensity about him which she felt strangely attracted to. She liked his voice, too: a pure, strong voice, as if he knew something that no one else did, and which set him apart. He seemed more like twenty than sixteen.

  Then they were off again. ‘You live in residential care. Is that right?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Josiah.

  ‘Is that in any way… difficult?’

  ‘I’m probably institutionalised by now.’

  ‘You don’t seem institutionalised.’ Josiah shrugged.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘There’s nothing much to tell.’

  ‘What do you do in your free time, then?’

  ‘I don’t have… what is the opposite of free?’

  ‘Don’t you go to school?’

  Josiah shook his head.

  ‘Why not?’

  Josiah said nothing.

  ‘Education is a good thing, though you might not think it now.’

  ‘Education is everything,’ said Josiah.

  ‘So why aren’t you at school, then?’

  Josiah simply ignored the question, and looked out of the window. ‘I like your car,’ he said. ‘I see why you’ve named her.’

  ‘So, if you don’t go to school, and if you don’t hang out smoking on street corners, what do you do with your life?’

  ‘Three miles beyond Caldicott,’ said Josiah.

  ‘How did you find this place you’re taking me to?’

  ‘I biked here.’

  ‘You have a bike?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘You mean, you nicked the bike, or you borrowed the bike?’

  ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ Josiah asked her.

  ‘Do you?’ Elspeth’s question was impulsive; well, h
e deserved it for being so impertinent.

  ‘No, nor girlfriend. You might say, I’m quite friendless.’

  ‘Ah, that can’t be true!’ said Elspeth warmly.

  ‘I couldn’t even count my friends on one finger,’ expanded Josiah.

  ‘Don’t you ever get chatted up? You’re not bad looking,’ said Elspeth, and she thought, ‘In fact you’re the most good-looking teenager I’ve ever set eyes on.’

  ‘No one would know how to chat me up.’

  ‘Tell me the secret.’

  ‘There’s none to tell.’

  ‘One day you’ll fall in love. You shouldn’t be so cynical, Josiah.’

  ‘I’m the least cynical person I know,’ said Josiah.

  ‘I don’t know if I believe you.’

  ‘I’m innocent.’

  ‘I’m not sure I believe that either,’ said Elspeth, giving him a sideways glance.

  ‘Why do you think it’s good to be innocent and bad to be ignorant?’

  ‘A child is innocent,’ suggested Elspeth.

  ‘A child is also ignorant. And both ignorance and innocence need correcting, don’t you think?’

  ‘Do you think an innocent child needs to be made less innocent? That seems a sad thing to say.’

  ‘It’s not sad at all. There is something true about the world which innocent people don’t know about. It’s important to get access to that truth.’

  ‘What sort of truth is that, Josiah?’

  ‘I don’t know because I’m innocent. But I want that truth. It’s worth having.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘It’s not about facts. School knowledge is about facts. Ignorance is about not knowing any facts.’

  ‘So if you’re not wanting facts, what is it that you’re wanting?’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll only recognize it when I have it.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘I’m talking about the knowledge of the heart.’

  ‘Meaning, exactly?’

  ‘Cors non explicanda est,’ said Josiah mysteriously.

  ‘Is that – Latin?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Josiah, unapologetically.