by Tim Parks
Judge Savage put his biro down. He had been writing swiftly and confidently and this aggressive purposeful motion of the mind in the silent room, had left it rapt and calm, as if cooled and assuaged by its own fierce speed. He was intensely aware, powerful and quietly waiting, like some well-tuned engine ticking over in the early hours of a silent street. The near panic of an hour before had been transformed to near pleasure. This is a hellishly complex case, he thought, and yet he was confident that what was at stake could be sorted out into a series of decisions, and that each decision could reasonably be taken on the merits of the evidence presented to the court. He could direct the jury how to do this, he could explain to them how they could arrive at a series of verdicts congruent with the laws of England.
But what if the same expertise were applied to his own life? What if a skilled judge were to direct the jury in that case? Immediately Daniel Savage felt uneasy, his mind clouded. How many witnesses would have to be called, how many decisions about the admissibility of evidence? He pulled himself up abruptly. Your life is not a crime, he said. There is no charge against you. So it is nonsense to think of a judge summing up. Why do I keep thinking of my life as a crime? The expertise of the judge summing up, he thought, has been developed over centuries in the closest symbiosis with the criminal code and the technicalities of the laws of England and Wales. It is an expertise that allows the judge to instruct the jury on how to take decisions with regard to acts that this country considers illegal. It is not a general wisdom, he reminded himself. You cannot apply this technique to a marriage or a friendship.
But far from cooling him down, this reflection now had Judge Savage on his feet again, pacing the room. If it was a crime we were considering, what crime would it be? Was there one crime that could define a life? Daniel felt something looming now. More and more over recent years he had begun to experience mental activity as a physical thing, something as sensible as wind when you turned a street corner, or the first rumble of distant thunder that raises the head from the desk, that turns the jury’s faces to the window. What crime?
It was ten to five. It is just before dawn, he thought. He pulled on trousers and sweater and let himself out of the flat. Nothing to do with fucking a girl on the jury, that’s for sure. He hurried down the stairs and stood in the street. It was quite silent in this exhausted inner suburb. He breathed deeply and felt calmer. The crime of letting a fire go out? he wondered. He was calmer now. I let the fire of my marriage go out. Weren’t there ancient religions where it was a crime to let a fire go out? Not to mention The Lord of the Flies. The last book he had read to Tom. I am just chattering to myself, Judge Savage told himself calmly, even cheerfully, striding along this yellow-lit pavement through the uneven volumes of these makeshift streets, the decayed housing and low, prefab discount stores.
He breathed deeply. Yes, he was almost enjoying himself. I’m chattering. I did the right thing to come out. The insomniac makes the night present. He had read that. But then he stopped. There was the crime against Sarah. What crime? He shook his head. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the Crown will be seeking to show that Miss Savage’s unhappy behaviour patterns over recent months are the result of crimes yet to be defined and identified but indisputably perpetrated by her legal guardians and parents. He smiled. There had always been something odd with Hilary and Sarah, oh from way back, an odd attraction and attrition. But that’s not a crime. It’s family. If there’s nothing odd, it’s not a family, Daniel thought, it’s not a life. Martin did not take pictures of your daughter pissing over him. The fact that she wept at his funeral means nothing. Everybody weeps at funerals. I myself have wept at the funerals of people I hardly knew. That is not the crime. Then at last he saw he was guilty of not having understood. You have understood nothing, Judge Savage told himself. Nothing. The jury’s verdict would be unanimous.
He walked the streets. The town sprawls and changes and you cannot keep track of it. But the houses that come down, he reflected, are not the oldest. Some fixed points do remain. Most of the world, then, is in flux around a few fixed points, the undisputed evidence that remains. But not in this part of town. There was rubble to his left now and three billboards carrying artists’ impressions of utopian shopping centres. In this part of town everything is up for grabs. There was corrugated iron and the domestic solemnity of curtained windows. This is an Indian area, Daniel thought. The iron gates closing a building site were plastered with posters in Indian languages. How could you understand them? The corridors of the courthouse likewise had posters in Indian languages. Judge Savage could only presume that they meant the same as the posters in English beside them. The evidence was circumstantial, but convincing. It does fit, Frank said. So Martin was a paedophile. Or had that tendency, Daniel thought. As his closest friend, I never knew this. For years, decades, I was his closest friend, yet I never understood that Martin had dangerous tendencies. Martin had often defended paedophiles. But then as often as not he prosecuted them too. We all did. And equally effectively. My children were often visitors at his house, Daniel thought. That means nothing. Childless, his wife Christine was a willing babysitter in the days when Hilary and I went out of an evening. The last times Hilary and I went out together, he thought, we always had Tom with us, but never Sarah. We went to concerts with Tom. Oddly for an Indian area there was a Madonna with baby Jesus in a niche beside a front door. They’re thick as thieves, Tom said of mother and Sarah. And a dwarf on a bicycle in the garden. She’s punishing you for betraying her mother, Martin told him. They’re very close, Martin insisted. If he had known something of Martin’s difficulties, would Daniel have been able to help him? Six months ago we bought and furnished a large house, Judge Savage told himself, to be happy in. You had decided to be happy, Daniel remembered. You wrote something about it in your diary. It was a clear day. A day when you imagined you were seeing things with immense clarity. But in fact you had understood nothing. The jury would return their decision in a matter of minutes. You must find a place to live now, he decided in the cold streets as the air turned grey among a tangle of traffic lights and hoardings. Shops were opening this side of the park and someone was walking a fat dog. Judge Savage picked up a newspaper, sat in a café and learned from the headlines that once again the police had arrested upward of a hundred illegal immigrants. There will never be any shortage of work for a judge, he thought.
THIRTY
YOUR EFFING MOBILE, squire. Frank was furious. At six-thirty. Six bloody thirty! Daniel apologised. Arthur, as always, smiled quietly, leaned on a doorframe. Don’t say sorry! Just take the fucking thing with you when you go a-shagging. That’s what mobiles are for, aren’t they! You can leave it in the chariot if you’re afraid they’ll nick it. Frank, I’m sorry. Twice, he insisted. Twice! At six-thirty. Then I got up and turned it off. When I’d managed to find it. It was inside your bloody bag! Idiot! Frank repeated. He was in his bath-towel, portly and pink, cigarette in one hand, ashtray in the other. Judge Savage didn’t bother to say he hadn’t been shagging. Was Frank jealous? Arthur raised his blond eyebrows. There is something immensely reassuring about Arthur, Daniel thought. The man seemed to wait in the background for all negative energy to exhaust itself He has rescued Frank. I’m moving out today, he announced. Good, Frank said. Found a place? Arthur asked. No, Daniel said.
The mobile told him the caller’s number had been withheld. Where are my papers? he asked then. I made some notes. The table’s for eating on, Frank snapped. He blew out smoke with a mocking smile. Arthur intervened. I recovered them, he said. He produced five sheets of paper that had evidently been crumpled, then smoothed. There were traces of something brown and sticky. Yeah, sorry about that squire, Frank said. He was fiercely sarcastic. Some of the words were illegible. All the same, far more than this mishap with the kitchen bin it was the evidence, the following Monday morning, of the last defendant, Janet Crawley’s sister Gillian, that would oblige Judge Savage to rewrite even these few notes for his summing up.
The tone had been quite wrong in any event. Meantime, there was Sunday to be got through.
While the others ate their breakfast, Daniel found a phone directory and called the Cambridge Hotel. At least a week, he said. Dressed, Frank seemed more amenable. Want to give us a hand, Dan, moving a couple of sideboards? After Arthur’s visit yesterday, Christine had agreed to let them have some items for their stall in return for moving the big old sideboard into Carlton Street. You never know, kid, we might find a few shrunken heads, pickled toddlers’ testicles, what have you. Pint at the boozer afterwards. There’s an excellent set of Victorian fire-irons, Arthur enthused. Poke her with a poker said the poker-faced poker partner, Frank laughed. And don’t imagine, he turned to Daniel, that I’m feeling guilty about your bloody notes, because I’m not. I hate being woken up. And I hate the smell of burnt photographs. You are one nutcase. God knows how the wife put up with you so long.
Daniel phoned Hilary. Somebody called my mobile, at 6.30. Well, not me, she said. Oy! Tom, Sarah, did either of you call Dad? He could hear their voices sing out no. Then he experienced, most intensely, as if he were physically present, the routine intimacy of family breakfast, the smell of the milk and coffee and children in the early morning. So why didn’t you answer the phone yourself, Hilary was asking. Where were you? I’d left it in the car, he lied. Does one of the kids want me to take them out? This time she must have put her hand over the receiver. There was the remains of mirth in her voice when she said: No, they’ve both got full days. They’re not five-year-olds, she added. He was struck by something in her voice and suddenly found himself saying: Hilary, I keep thinking you’re seeing somebody else. Oh God! But she seemed indulgent. That’s because you keep imagining everybody’s like you! She didn’t seem angry. I thought maybe you were seeing Max, that you’d stopped doing lessons so you could see him away from home. Now the shrillness of her laughter forced him to move the receiver from his ear. Poor Max, she confessed. She added. Oh when the dust’s settled, Dan, we must do some sums. She seems perfectly in control, Daniel realised. As he put the phone down, he heard a dog barking.
The idea was, Gillian Crawley said, that we could always, like whenever we wanted, call each other, you know, so we wouldn’t ever feel alone.
Perhaps people had expected the trial to wind down fairly rapidly after Janet Crawley’s evidence, but no sooner, on Monday morning, had her sister Gillian settled in the box for her examination in chief, than Daniel knew that something was up. Her counsel had an apologetic look on his face. Never sum up before the end, Daniel told himself. Never work in the middle of the night. Waste of time. At this point it was two nights since he had slept. The dust never settles, he thought, or never all of it. In the end, Frank laughed, after he had returned to the kitchen Sunday morning, when a woman’s got the house and she’s got the kids, she doesn’t need a bloke any more, does she? He was chewing toast. They’re very materialist, don’t you think, Art? Art has an interesting line on women, Dan. I mean either they’re fucking everyone so they can take just a little cash from each, like your Brazilian babe on the ring road, or they’re pleading monogamy so they can take all the cash from one. Isn’t that right? I always loathed Hilary, Frank added. It was quite mutual, Daniel assured him.
The idea was, Gillian Crawley claimed – her defence counsel had asked her why they went to the bridge – that when we went to the bridge, but only then like, and only if enough of us went, well then we could all kiss and cuddle whoever we wanted like, among ourselves, in the cars there where there’s a parking spot in the wood by the bridge. What I mean is, it was a sort of agreed thing that you had to kiss anyone who wanted to kiss you, but only when we were at the bridge. And no more than kissing and cuddling. You know? I don’t know when it started exactly, it was a thing that had built up in the group. A tradition really. There had been people before us that left and sometimes there was someone new who came along for the first time and then they had to kiss everybody and that was Janet, my sister just a few months ago. Do you get me? The bridge was a kissing place. So that’s why we went there really, and that’s why the others stopped going, like when they wanted to be steady, or somebody didn’t want you to kiss everybody else, and that’s why we all agreed we wouldn’t tell. It was something you were sworn to.
Miss Crawley, her counsel said gravely, the man had barely said a word throughout the trial, could you explain to the court what happened on the evening of March 22nd.
Jamie, Mr Grier, had some stones in his car, she said quickly. She was taller than her sister, and plainer. The hair she brushed from her face was mousy.
Why?
I don’t know.
But you must have had an idea.
No, really.
Had he thrown stones from the bridge before?
Small stones, she said.
Why?
She drew a breath. About, I don’t know, a bit before, a couple of months maybe, I mean before the night everything happened, about a month before, three other girls in the group, well they had stopped coming to the bridge. We called it playing bridge.
I’m sorry, but are you saying that that constituted a reason for Mr Grier’s throwing stones?
Her counsel was a stout, elderly, moustached man, at once avuncular but solemn. Unlike her belligerent younger sister, Gillian looked scared and fragile. A nervous shrewdness twisted her mouth and tensed her voice. Watching her bitten fingers as they flexed then clutched the rail of the witness box, Judge Savage wondered if she was making them so visible on purpose.
Well what I was trying to say was, there were more boys, like, now than girls.
And so?
So Jamie got bored when he wasn’t, like, with someone. So sometimes he picked up stones, they were pebble size things really, even smaller, and threw them on the road. Because he was pissed off. I mean, he made sure everybody saw him do it. Especially Dave, Mr Sayle. He wanted to sort of show he wasn’t having a good time.
Ah, to show he wasn’t having a good time.
Yes. She hesitated. And to frighten Dave.
Miss Crawley, I’m sure some members of the jury will find this difficult to understand. In what way would Mr Grier’s throwing stones have frightened Mr Sayle?
David, Mr Sayle, he always felt sort of responsible, you know, for all of us. He liked this sort of secret society thing. He wanted us to be happy. He was always asking if everybody was having a good time. It was, like, his community. You know. Anyway, he shouted at Jamie. He was afraid of what would happen if he hit a car. He was upset. He didn’t want people to know we went to the bridge to kiss.
Miss Crawley, please tell us what happened on the night of March 22nd.
The girl sighed. They had arrived at the bridge. They had all parked in the clearing beside the road and the woods. They got out of the cars and chatted. They had the car radios on. Both on the same station loud. They leaned on the parapet and watched cars stopping for the prostitutes in the lay-by. There were two black girls, she explained. It’s about fifty yards away. There’s a path down the bank through the wood. We sort of stood around chatting and smoking and listening to music. That was the usual thing. Anybody who wanted just had to sort of pull the sleeve of someone else and kiss them. But if the other person didn’t want that much you sort of understood and stopped after a bit.
Counsel kept his voice perfectly neutral: Could you explain to the court who was with whom and where that evening.
Well. Gillian Crawley swallowed. Again she brushed hair from her mouth. Her face was pale and plain, but not unpleasant. Okay, so, nobody ever kissed Ryan Riley. Except maybe sort of at the end. Dave said it was only fair. Dave and Ryan were sort of special friends. You know? They did a lot of things together. Ryan followed Dave around. He’s his little dog.
Miss Crawley, please, just describe the sequence of events as carefully as possible.
Her sister Janet had gone with Simmons, she said. As per usual. She told me a couple of days before she wanted to stop
going to the bridge and be his regular girlfriend but he didn’t want. He kissed everybody as much as he could.
Miss Crawley . . .
Right, so Janet with Simmie, me with Stu, Mr Bateson. At least at first me and Stu used to go out, like, when we were little, anyway, and we only recently started talking again. But anyway when we were in the car, that was Mr Grier’s car, the bigger one, because the seats come down, at the front, there was a big argument on the road with Sasha and Dave and Jamie.
That is the defendants Miss Singleton, Mr Sayle, Mr Grier.
Right.
And what was the cause of that argument?
Well, we had the radio on loud in the car and there was the noise from the ring road, which is very noisy, so even if all the windows were open, because it was mild like and it was better not to let the car steam over we didn’t hear. Anyway we weren’t listening.
So you saw rather than heard the argument?
That’s right. You could see them shouting at each other, I could like see from the corner of my eye over Mr Bateson’s shoulder. Jamie had had a lot to drink.
And what happened next?
Mr Sayle went down the path by the road to where the prostitutes were. I saw him go.
Ah. Is this something he did regularly?
Yes.
Please continue.