A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  Daisy first looked down at the floor with a frown. It seemed almost as if she would not answer the question, or perhaps had not heard it. Finally she raised her head and said with a shrug, “Love.”

  There was a hush over the courtroom while we waited for her to carry on. Even the judge leaned forward. When it was clear she did not intend to elaborate, Carlford said, “Yes, I think I understand, but perhaps for the sake of clarity you would expand your answer a little.”

  Now Daisy looked across the jury with a sweep of her eyes, glanced at Carlford, and settled on the judge.

  “It’s very hard to talk about, isn’t it? I loved him. And he was a soul who lived in hell. Sooner or later you have to at least try. I mean, if you love, if you feel love, you have to believe it has the power to save someone, even if you’re not a Christian. Otherwise what’s the purpose of living?”

  Carlford waited for this answer to sink in. “I see. You felt that your love was a kind of insurance against your husband’s recidivism?”

  “If you must put it like that.” She glared at his slightly cynical choice of words. “I was determined to be a good wife. I was faithful, caring. I put a lot into it, our marriage. I put everything into it. I was sure at the time that I was strong enough to change him.”

  “But it’s right to say, isn’t it, that from the start there was a shadow over your marriage?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that shadow took what form?”

  “James Knight.”

  Thirst, it appeared, was obsessed with me. Sometimes she wondered if he had only married her as a perverse way of reaching me. He constantly demanded her reassurance that he was a better lover. But there were whole areas of aspiration in which I had ten years on him. He frequently talked about me and at each difficult turn of the road asked her what I would have done. There was a mystery in his obsession with me that she never penetrated or understood.

  “But not to put too fine a point on it, Mrs. Thirst, yours would not have been the first marriage in which one of the partners had a history unpalatable to the other. Was there anything else that, with hindsight, might have doomed the relationship from the outset?”

  “He was bent!” Her voice was unexpectedly loud and cracked. She stared at the jury, ticking them off one by one with her eyes. “Nobody knows what that word means until they’ve lived with it. Everything he did, every thought he had, every word, every relationship, was bent, twisted, perverse. Even when it was in his own interests, he couldn’t be straight. He couldn’t even fill in a form for council housing without trying to be clever, lying. I found out. When someone’s psyche is twisted, it twists everything around it. My husband couldn’t be straight to save his life.”

  Carlford nodded. “Nevertheless, your life together continued for some years?”

  I winced at the description of their life which emerged. They drank cheap cider and made love all the time. She was still broken and vulnerable from her mother’s death and her breakup from me, and sought solace in sex. Her strange, American psychology, which at first he had found exotic, was confusing and infuriating to him. As she turned to him once in postcoital gratification, she found that he was staring at her with cold curiosity.

  “Christ, you make me sick sometimes, Yankee.”

  It was an early indication of the extremes of violence which raged within him.

  Carlford wanted to dwell further on Thirst’s character and history. Through Daisy’s lips he painted a portrait of Thirst that anyone could believe. He took us through Thirst’s early aspirations, triggered by me. A career in law was obviously out of the question, but he was not prepared for the doors of other professions to be shut in his face as soon as his past began to be revealed. Whoever the liberals were, they did not seem to be running the country after all. Daisy, with genuine sorrow, described his depressing journey from courageous optimism to despair and from there to the fury that lies beyond despair—to the animal at bay. Out of more than five hundred applications for jobs (they ranged from trainee social worker to publisher’s assistant to transport coordinator for a firm of minicabs to editor of a monthly journal for ex-convicts), he was called for interview twice and on both occasions was paralyzed with nerves.

  He held fast for two years, at the end of which he began to disappear at odd hours and have more money in his pockets. The maudlin note of despair that had begun to dominate his mood was replaced by a new tension that exploded whenever he drank too much—which was often.

  “And what effect did this transformation have on you?” Carlford’s voice was tender and respectful.

  “At first I welcomed it,” Daisy said. “I thought that even if he was doing something dishonest, he was at least doing something again. And he had found his anger at least. He wasn’t just passive and bleeding anymore.”

  “And did you continue to welcome this new mood?”

  Daisy paused before answering. “Not when he started to beat me up—no, I didn’t.”

  This was a matter that Carlford went into at length. Violence and the fear of it formed an obvious motive in the eyes of the prosecution, and it was standard practice for defense counsel to steal the prosecutor’s thunder by bringing out in evidence-in-chief what might otherwise emerge in a more damaging form under cross-examination. But Carlford went much further. He seemed to be possessed by a reptilian fascination with Thirst’s sadism.

  I had noticed the judge sending increasingly irritated glances toward Monkson while he continued to scribble his cross-examination points. Then all of a sudden Monkson seemed to wake up. He threw Carlford a suspicious look, grew red in the face as he realized he needed to make another objection. He stood up slowly this time, his confusion under control. Carlford sat down.

  “My Lord, I do not pretend to understand the gravamen of this portion of my friend’s examination-in-chief. He appears to be establishing a motive for murder on the part of his own client.”

  “It is puzzling, I agree,” the judge said. The ice in his voice suggested that he was anything but puzzled.

  “My Lord,” Monkson continued, “I hesitate to criticize any of Her Majesty’s counsel with the experience and reputation of my learned friend, but…”

  I heard the gallery hold their breath in anticipation of another blunder. I felt a professional compassion for him. Carlford was scrupulously obeying the rules, but with the ethics of a fox. It was not an easy objection to formulate, and poor Monkson was not the man to carry it off.

  “…but…”

  “Yes?” the judge said.

  “I mean, why is he doing this?”

  The judge shook his head at Monkson as if at a disappointing child. He shot a cold glance at Carlford, who was standing up again.

  “Well, Sir Simon Carlford, why are you doing this?”

  Carlford looked up at the judge with undisguised contempt. “The categories of permissible objections are well known to Your Lordship. Nothing my friend has said can be made to fit, even with the best will in the world, into any of them. As to Your Lordship’s question, why, I am using the best of my professional endeavors to present my client’s case. I take it Your Lordship has no objection to that? This is a jury trial after all, and the jury will be required to judge the facts for themselves without any interference from the bench.”

  This time there was a sharp gasp from the gallery. The judge, though, an old pro, knew that Carlford had won. He could not be seen to favor the prosecution case, even if it was presented by an incompetent.

  “Very well, Sir Simon Carlford, pray continue.” The judge slouched in his high-back chair, his fingers steepled, his mouth pinched.

  Carlford nodded once as if acknowledging an inevitable concession from an inferior player, and turned back to Daisy.

  Feinberg had drilled her well; her performance was immaculate. With dignity and a minimum of adjectives, she described the last year of their life together. Her narrative style had been rather different the first time Feinberg forced her to remember those horr
ors.

  It had been soon after she had been charged with the murder. Feinberg made it clear that she would have to describe Thirst’s cruelties in detail, but with restraint—above all she must not crack at the trial and look like a crazed killer, something that could easily happen if she was reliving those experiences for the first time in the witness box.

  “So let’s have it,” Feinberg had said.

  We were sitting across from him on the clients’ side of his desk. I looked at Daisy. She seemed confused. After a short silence Feinberg, with a curl of his lips, said, “Looks like I’ll have to help you. Let’s start with the buggery—most heavy criminals are compulsive sodomites. Hurt, did it? Make you bleed?”

  Daisy whitened, stared at him for a few seconds, then jumped up. She ran out of his office.

  “You cunt, Feinberg,” I said, before running after her. I grabbed her arm as she was opening the glass door to the street. She stared at me.

  “We’ll get you a drink,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said after she’d finished the brandy I’d bought her. “I just wasn’t ready for that this morning.”

  “Of course you weren’t. He’s a very crude man, and a twisted one. But he does have his methods. He’s basically right.”

  “I know. But I can’t just sit there looking at all those sadistic twitches and tell him things—things I haven’t even told you.”

  “Then why not start by telling me?”

  She looked at me for a moment.

  “It’ll be easier to show you. Somehow I just can’t face trying to describe it with you looking at me. We’ll get a taxi. If we take your car they’ll just smash it up.”

  “Take a taxi where?”

  38

  The address she gave to the driver was in Hackney. “Chaucer House in the Sunningdale Estate.”

  A vast vertical dormitory, an instant slum where a dehumanized workforce could sleep and copulate, the Sunningdale development was one of many such, built in a hurry in the sixties. Most of the buildings were empty now. The construction had been so cheap, the quality of the concrete so poor, that even by Hackney’s standards the place had become largely uninhabitable. In a lift smelling of urine, she took me to the twenty-fifth floor of Chaucer House.

  “How d’you know we’ll be able to get in?”

  “Someone will have broken in, the lock will be smashed,” she said. Then, when we had walked the few paces down the corridor: “Told you.” The front door of 25-D was hanging off its hinges. I followed her into the main hall of the empty flat.

  “Welcome to my bed of nails.”

  “I suppose it was not quite so bad with furniture,” I said.

  “What furniture? We couldn’t afford any, except a mattress on the floor I had to turn every day because it rotted and stank. He never did a thing. Nor did I in the end—just watched the mushrooms grow. We were desperately poor. He was too jealous and possessive to let me work, and he’d only just started to deal drugs. Look.” She pointed to a large purple fungus emerging from a crack in the wall. “You see, you have entered a different country. Everything has a different meaning in this place. Take doors, for example—”

  “Daisy, I don’t think this is good for you—”

  “Don’t interrupt. Take doors. To someone like you, I expect doors are for entering and leaving a room. You let women go first, make sure small children don’t get their little fingers trapped. But you’re wrong. Suppose, like now, you are following someone you love, someone you’re trying to get close to, a few paces behind—yes, like that. Well, this is what doors are for.”

  She kicked the door behind her with her heel. I just had time to raise my hands to stop it hitting me in the face.

  “More of doors later. Let’s go to the kitchen, so I can show you what hot plates are for. You’ve guessed. Not necessarily to burn a person’s flesh, you understand, more to exploit the possibilities of menace they offer. It’s done like this. You’ll have to pretend I’m ten times stronger than you.”

  She grabbed some hair at the back of my head. I allowed her to force my head down so that my face was close to the hot plate.

  “Imagine it’s red hot and you can smell your hair starting to burn.”

  She let go. She was pale again and starting to shake.

  “Daisy, this—”

  “No. We have to go through it all, just as the wise Mr. Feinberg says. Bathrooms are next. You think that bathrooms are for washing and relaxing? Perhaps to have fun in with lovers from time to time? Wrong, my friend. This is what baths are for. You fill the bath, d’you see, then you make your wife kneel on the floor and you force her head down into the water. There’s a peculiar gratification, apparently, in fucking your wife from behind while she’s half drowning. And buggering her, of course—as Mr. Feinberg so astutely points out.”

  “Daisy, you’re shaking so badly. I think—”

  “We can’t stop now; suppose I get like this at trial? Where was I? Ah yes, back to doors. Such useful things. First you open it, like so, then you force a person’s fingers into the gap like this, then you close it again, quite slowly—am I hurting you yet? Quite slowly, till all the fingers break, one by one if possible, unless two or three snap at the same time. At the more advanced stage you trap your wife’s fingers in the door and you put your foot behind it like this so it can’t open, then you grab her by the hair and with your spare hand you do what you’ve been looking forward to doing for years. You hit her in the face with your big hard fist over and over again because her face is delicate and beautiful and beautiful things must be mutilated….”

  —

  In the taxi home, Daisy had finally allowed herself to burst into tears. She held me close.

  “It was when I’d been crying. I said, ‘D’you know why I cry, Oliver? I cry because James hit me once and that little slap hurt him so much I was the one who apologized, and now I’m married to a man who can torture me and actually enjoy it.’ That’s when he smashed my face in….Of course, by then I already knew I could never let myself have his child. It would have been a monster, like him. So you see, I didn’t get what I wanted at all. Not at all.”

  39

  “And now, Mrs. Thirst,” Carlford was saying, “happily, thanks to the surgeon’s skill, nothing remains of those horrific injuries but some well-healed scars?”

  In a masterstroke of theater, Carlford made her waddle past the jury with her chin up to show them the hairline scars under the jawbone. I would guess that there was not a member of the jury who did not see those old scars inflicted by a man now dead as a threat to the unborn child.

  “Finally, Mrs. Thirst, please tell the court what his last words to you were, on the day that you left him for good.”

  “He said that he would find me, and when he found me he would kill me.”

  After that her alibi was hardly more than an afterthought. He took her through it with perfunctory speed, as if it were a kind of wink at the jury—this is the vehicle we have provided for you to set her free. The lady foreman nodded conscientiously as Daisy trotted out the Feinberg fabrication. It was, even for Carlford, a masterpiece. There was probably not a member of the jury who believed her to be innocent of the charge of murder. Nor was there anyone in court who did not feel in his heart that the homicide was justified. With a craft that was almost seamless, Carlford had created in the minds of the jury exactly the claustrophobic, sadistic, and insufferable domestic situation in which so many ordinary people, especially women, can imagine themselves committing murder. Behind Monkson’s back, and before the helpless glare of the judge, Carlford had played the English vice of fairness for all it was worth.

  He ended with the small matter of the gun. It had been carefully taped, and therefore no fingerprints had been found on it. But to be frank, it did look very much like the gun she was holding in that photograph.

  “It probably is the same gun,” Daisy said, a little wearily. “It was his gun that I used to take to the firing range. He kept it
locked in a drawer. I used to steal the key, use the gun, then put it back. I don’t think he ever knew.”

  “And what was your purpose in developing the martial arts and shooting small arms?”

  “I wasn’t going to let him beat me up again. Never.”

  Carlford sat down. Monkson rose to his feet in order to walk into our final trap.

  “Even if that meant killing him, Mrs. Thirst?”

  “I believe I have a right to live in peace, Mr. Monkson.”

  —

  Carlford and Monkson made their final speeches to the jury, the judge summed up. For all his chivalry, I knew he had seen through us, and his last words to the jury sent a shiver down my spine.

  “In just a very few moments you will retire from this court to the jury room, where you will remain until you have reached your verdict. In so doing, it is your duty to cast ruthlessly out of your minds all thought of sympathy, all natural tenderness normal people feel for a woman in the defendant’s condition.” Here he leaned forward toward the jury. “Still more importantly, you must cast out of your minds any compassion for the defendant arising from the history of domestic violence she apparently endured at the hands of the deceased. You must, instead, weigh the facts in your mind and decide, quite simply: did she kill her husband or not?”

  40

  Daisy’s bail had been renewed daily, so that she had been able to come home with me every night, not that this had made intimacy possible between us. All our energies, all our thoughts, were sucked into the terrible psychic vortex of the trial. Not only had we stopped making love; Daisy avoided eye contact. But there is not a judge in the world, of course, who will grant bail to a defendant while the jury is considering its verdict in a murder trial. And so two women officers of the Prison Service took her away. She gave me one long look before she went.