Both showed far less interest in my teaching relationship with Wish. The fact that a gorilla had been taught to communicate with her hands was accepted without argument; it aroused no more curiosity than might the begging of a dog, or the speech of a parrot. This was due more to a low opinion of Sign, than to a high opinion of the intelligence of Wish. And due also to the fact that they were only half-listening to what I said; more amused with themselves, finally, than with me. There was a lot of light-hearted flipping through of the statute book—a huge, green door-stop—trying to find the precise wording of an offence which was clearly a first for both.
‘Crimes Act, Section 69,’ Vogel announced. ‘“A person must not commit an act of bestiality. Penalty: imprisonment for five years.”’
I murmured, unheard: ‘She’s not a beast, she’s a person.’
‘“An act of bestiality is any of the following: penetration of the vagina of an animal by the penis of a man; or penetration of the vagina of a woman by the penis of an animal; or buggery committed…”’
‘Whoa,’ Crilly said, ‘run that last one past me again.’
‘Buggery?’
‘No, the woman bit.’
‘Penetration of the vagina of a woman by the penis of an animal?’
He nodded. ‘Funny wording. Who gets arrested—the woman, or Rin Tin Tin?’
For the first time he laughed out loud; Vogel managed a short, sharp smile.
I repeated, more loudly: ‘She’s not a beast. She’s a person.’
I was serious; I also saw immediately that I would not be taken seriously. My lines were clown lines, whether I played them straight or bent. My role was cast: less pervert than buffoon.
Crilly said: ‘This is not some kind of publicity stunt is it, big feller?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This professor—the Animal Rights bloke. He used the same words. You in it together?’
‘What exactly did he say?’
Vogel flipped through a notebook on the table. ‘That we should charge you with unlawful carnal knowledge. Of a minor. That he would refuse to testify to a charge of bestiality.’
She glanced at her colleague, rolled her eyes upwards; he wearily shook his head from side to side, a connoisseur of human types. She flipped another page and read on. ‘He says the law of bestiality is demeaning to animals. Animals should have the same protections—and rights—as humans.’
‘He has a very logical mind,’ I said.
‘Tell me about it.’
Crilly added: ‘He’ll need it.’
‘What do you mean?’
They glanced at each other; Vogel finally said: ‘The Federal Police are throwing the book at him. And his wife. Vertebrate Pest Control Act. Quarantine Act. They’re in more trouble than you are.’
‘They’ve been arrested?’
‘They’re being questioned. Charges may follow. Illegal Animal Keeping.’
The news filled me with panic. If Clive and Stella had been arrested, where was Wish?
‘Where’s who?’
‘The gorilla. That’s her name. Wish. Where is she?’
‘Can’t help you there, big feller. But the Federal Police will want to take a statement from you. You can ask them.’ He stretched his arms, leant back in his chair. ‘My guess—the RSPCA have her in safekeeping.’
Vogel said: ‘The Act clearly states, Tom—she would have to be kept in an A-class zoo.’
I rose at this, unable to keep still. ‘I really need to know where she is.’
‘Sit down please, sir,’ Vogel said, her tone more serious.
My hands were signing as I spoke, breaking imaginary shackles. ‘I have to get out of here.’
Her own hand went to the handle of her torch, a heavy blunt instrument. ‘I won’t ask you again, sir.’
I forced myself to sit, restless and fidgety. ‘When can I get out?’
‘When’: the Spread Hand wriggling its fingers against the cheek, an obscure sign I couldn’t help repeating as I spoke, spastically. I must have looked as if I were having some sort of seizure.
Vogel watched me carefully. ‘First you sign your statement.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Then we charge you. Then we consider granting police bail.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you became visibly agitated during questioning. I don’t want the responsibility if we release you tonight. A night in the watchhouse might cool you down.’
I was on my feet again. ‘You don’t understand! I can’t stay!’
Vogel’s hand went to the torch on the table again. ‘For the last time, sir—sit down!’
I sat. She said, more reasonably: ‘Your lawyer can apply for bail tomorrow. Magistrate’s Court.’
‘Then you cross your fingers,’ Crilly said, and winked, reassuringly. I had provided an hour or two of entertainment, something out of the ordinary. I had helped him get through another morning—he was feeling more mellow.
‘So what am I being charged with?’
He turned to his companion. ‘Good question. What say you, Girl Wonder? Gross indecency?’
She reached again for the heavy statute book, riffled through a few pages, read for a moment, shook her small sharp head, and pushed the book across the table to Crilly, her finger pressed to some key passage.
‘Has to be bestiality, Tom.’
‘Five years jail?’ I said.
Crilly shook his head. ‘First offence—a slap over the wrist with a wet noodle.’
Vogel added, more primly: ‘With the proviso, of course, that you get some form of counselling.’
‘You mean see a psychiatrist?’
‘Rabbit on about how your father abused you and you’ll be in the clear in no time. Your friends are in much deeper shit. Federal offences.’
My statement, a ‘record of interview’, was handed to me: I signed with agitated fingers. The detachment of those words—‘statement’, ‘record of interview’—seemed proper; in no sense did I feel I was signing a confession. To confess was to accept some burden of guilt. I hadn’t asked for a lawyer to be present at the interview, or during the signing of the statement; I felt I had nothing to hide. Now, desperate to reach Wish, I needed a lawyer urgently.
‘You can ring from the watchhouse,’ Vogel said. ‘Stand up, sir. Hands behind your back.’
She deftly handcuffed me, increasing my agitation.
‘Are these necessary?’
‘Regulations.’
No one in that small bare room understood Sign, but I felt as if I had been gagged. Those cold cuffs seemed to somehow restrict my thinking. Even speech was difficult.
‘Please—I need my hands to think with.’
Crilly shrugged, smiling—regulations were regulations, the gesture seemed to be saying. He opened the door and ushered us through. ‘See you in court, big feller.’
Vogel marched me down the same three flights of stairs, then down a further flight into a brightly lit underground tunnel. At the far end another flight led up into what I took to be the watchhouse. A uniformed desk sergeant greeted her, paperwork was exchanged, the cuffs were removed, my belt and shoelaces were confiscated. After the taking of fingerprints, I was allowed access to a phone. I rang the only lawyer I knew: Linda Kelly, the Family Court solicitor who had handled, or mis-handled, my divorce. Her answering machine advised that she wasn’t available; I left a message after the beep.
‘Can I send a fax?’
The desk-sergeant, a tubby grey-beard, friendly to that point, assumed I was joking.
‘It’s hardly a laughing matter, sir,’ he said, gravely, a phrase straight from the police manual of stern clichés. He topped it with another. ‘I would have thought you were in enough trouble already.’
‘My mother is deaf. I have no way of reaching her.’
His expression softened a little, but remained sceptical. ‘I’m sorry, sir. That’s not my problem.’
He took me by the elbow and
‘helped’ me to my holding cell, a small clean room with a bed, washbasin, toilet-bowl. A video camera was secured, out of reach, in a high corner. The cell was comfortable apart from the smell: some sickly sweet deodorant-cum-disinfectant. I lay sleepless under a single blanket, with that hygienic chemical stink filling my nostrils. It was the smell of motel rooms and hire-cars, but I was travelling nowhere. At first I could think of nothing but Wish; other, lesser worries then began to seep into my head: my parents’ reaction, Jill’s reaction, how to contact Rosie who was expecting an access visit in the morning. In the smallest hours I entered a state of delirium where I could no longer even choose what to think, the twilight zone of insomnia where thoughts choose themselves.
I rose with a thick headache and a numbed, exhausted mind, badly in need of my wetsuit and the water cure.
Breakfast arrived on a tin tray at six: a can of Coke and a stale meat pie which obscured, at least temporarily, the motel-stink.
I asked the guard, a thickset tough with a rugby neck, for a morning paper. He laughed. ‘You wouldn’t want to see it.’
Linda arrived shortly afterwards. She sat on the edge of my bed, a plump woman with a disproportionately small head, clearly ill at ease in those surrounds, but trying to fake confidence.
‘I have to get out of here.’
‘Patience, J.J.’
She glanced around the small cell, nervously. ‘Not exactly five-star accommodation.’
‘You haven’t been here before?’
‘I’m not a criminal lawyer, J.J. My clients don’t usually end up in places like these.’ She smiled uncomfortably. A folded newspaper peeped from her valise. I asked to see it, but she refused to hand it over until after we had talked.
‘I haven’t read it myself yet. I saw the headlines—but wanted to hear your side first.’
More involuntary hand movements as I spoke. ‘The headlines?’
‘Not front page headlines. Not yet. And we can apply for a suppression order to prevent the publication of your name, or any details which might identify you.’
Despite her evident discomfort, her tone of voice slowly soothed me, a cooing dove-like voice. Her small smooth head nodded back and forth as she spoke, a habit, also strangely dove-like, that I found calming as well. Was I clutching at straws? Too self-effacing to succeed in court, her best performances always came afterwards, I suspected, calming her disappointed clients.
‘I’ll get you out of here, J.J. But first things first. There is a problem with the charge. It may change before the committal hearing. My sources tells me that the Crown’s star witness might refuse to testify if bestiality is the charge.’
‘No might about it.’
‘I understand you’ve already signed a confession.’
My hands flared again, adjuncts to speech. ‘Not to bestiality. I confessed to making love to Wish—which is not the same thing at all.’
Same-not! The adjacent forefingers of ‘near’ or ‘close’ disrupting, flying apart.
‘You intend to plead not guilty?’
I nodded. ‘Of course.’
She screwed up her face, as if my words were unpalatable, bitter-tasting.
‘I want to make a point,’ I said, standing firm. ‘Wish isn’t an animal. And even if I’m convicted the police say I’ll only get a suspended sentence.’
‘If you plead guilty. If you make it hard for them they’ll raise the stakes.’ She fossicked in her valise and withdrew a single sheet of paper. ‘Tell me about the statement from the alleged eyewitness.’
‘She saw me on the bed. It’s as simple as that.’
Puzzlement spread across her face. ‘Who saw you?’
My hands signed an angry twinkling star as I spoke. ‘Stella.’
Linda referred again to her notes. ‘Stella Todd? The wife of Professor Kinnear?’
‘Of course. She made the statement. She was jealous.’
Jealousy: an emphatic J shaped with the baddest of Bad Hands.
‘I think you’re under a misapprehension, J.J. I’m not talking about whether Stella is jealous, I’m talking about the statement itself. Kinnear dobbed you in—not his wife.’
I sat, silenced, bewildered.
‘I also understand that his wife has left him as a result of his action.’
More news that was difficult to decipher; she took my stunned silence as a cue to continue.
‘Professor Kinnear is demanding that the charge be changed to unlawful carnal knowledge. He held a press conference last night.’
She finally tossed over the morning paper, and its comic-book heading: TEACHER CHARGED OVER SEX WITH APE. I wasn’t named and the details were scanty. Clive’s face stared out from beneath another, smaller headline. GORILLA ENTITLED TO FULL PROTECTION OF HUMAN LAW: PROFESSOR.
‘Did he also see you, J.J.? I need to know.’
I lifted my eyes from the paper, and returned her stare, unashamed. ‘Yes, he did.’
‘In flagrante?’
‘Not actually in the act. But we were naked.’
She seemed to think this important; she cross-hatched a large asterisk on her paper.
‘What about Stella?’ I asked. ‘She, ah, walked in on us too. She saw it all.’
‘My sources tell me that she is refusing to testify. She claims that she saw nothing.’
As I tried to digest this, Linda pressed on. ‘The police have two alternatives. Either they persist with a charge of bestiality—and they could subpoena Kinnear as a hostile witness—or they change the charge, perhaps to gross indecency. I can’t see them accepting a charge of carnal knowledge in a million years.’
The details didn’t interest me; all I cared about was the fate of Wish. ‘I’m sure this is all very riveting, Linda, but I need to get out.’
‘You’re stuck here till tomorrow. The hearing is set for ten. After that I don’t foresee any problem.’ She paused, looked up at me: ‘No problem in the court, that is.’ She tapped the open newspaper. ‘I should warn you, this is only the beginning. There is bound to be a lot of interest from the media. Television.’
‘Just what I need.’
‘I can possibly arrange for you to leave through the back exit.’
‘You don’t sound too certain.’
‘I’ve never done this before. I’ve only seen it on TV.’
‘No. I’ll go out the front. I’m not ashamed. As I said—I want to make a point.’
Although not yet, perhaps, to my parents. Or to Jill and Rosie.
Linda took a deep breath, as if making a reluctant decision, and added: ‘I should also advise you—I’m a bit out of my depth. It’s not exactly your everyday common or garden Family Court brief. If you insist on pleading not guilty—against my advice—then I would urge you to retain a top criminal barrister. Preferably a silk. Can you afford it?’
‘Jill got all my money, remember?’
She zipped her valise, avoiding my eyes, chastened. The sign for lawyer: right forefinger striking left palm, firmly laying down the law. When I think of Linda I see the shape of something far more hesitant, a finger never quite reaching its destination, or arriving by roundabout route, without force or conviction.
‘I’m sure we can come to some arrangement, J.J. I know a few media junkies who would pay you to let them take the case. I’ll see you in court at ten.’
‘Meanwhile, can you find out about Wish?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Please. It’s crucial.’
She gave me a look that was half-bemusement, half-pity, and rose and walked out of the room.
4
The committal hearing, Crown versus John James, was fifth on the morning list. Half a dozen clean-cut boys and well-groomed girls sat in the body of the court, clutching notepads. Their pens remained still during the first four cases: two breakings and enterings, a receiving charge, a common assault. When the clerk called my name, the notepads flipped open as one, the pens clicked on like safety catches. There wasn’t much
to write home about. No discussion of the case took place. The charge remained bestiality, Linda reserved my plea, I was remanded on bail. The trial date was set; I followed Linda out of the courtroom.
‘Where’s Wish?’
‘Later,’ she murmured. ‘We’ve got our own problems.’
She nodded to the glass doors of the building. The cub reporters had reassembled on the steps outside, a single television camera looming behind and above, like a periscope.
‘I could still bring the car round the back.’
Her tone was hopeful; I sensed that she was beginning to enjoy the drama.
‘I’m not ashamed.’
‘Your decision. But I have to warn you—if you open your mouth they’ll eat you alive.’
‘I want to state my case. Wish’s case.’
She laughed, dismissively. ‘No one out there is interested in your opinions about the case. They’ve already decided what you will say. Look at them, J.J.—sharks in a feeding frenzy.’
I looked: half a dozen fresh-faced innocents, not a tooth or dorsal fin in sight. Linda had watched too much television, surely, a first-time celebrity lawyer, keen to amplify her fifteen minutes of fame into sixteen.
‘Even if you think you’re saying something else, J.J., you’ll turn on the TV and find you didn’t. My advice is to say nothing—yet. When we talk to the press it must be on our terms. To the sources we choose. Besides, anything more could be construed as contempt of court.’
She sounded almost competent. I mutely followed her through the pens and notebooks. A microphone was offered to my mouth like a single-cone, close enough to lick; I ignored it. The smallish mob parted without offering resistance; perhaps it was merely a journalism class, on a random field trip. A pocketful of Stella’s sugar cubes would have come in handy, if only to make a point to Linda. Once we were safely sealed inside the car I asked the question again: ‘So where is she?’
Linda opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. I could almost hear the swallowed answer—‘where is who?’—but speaking with a long-tongue, or even a disingenuous tongue, was beyond her.
‘She’s at the zoo.’
‘Take me there.’
‘You’re joking, surely.’
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