When I reached the pavement I had already decided to have another shot of whisky. I made my way to a milk bar and walked through into the men’s toilet. There, sitting on the lavatory seat, I allowed the whisky to trickle down my throat. I replaced the cap on the flask, pocketed it, and on second thoughts urinated. There was an excitement at my belly which made itself known at the surface in a slight sweat. I read the various invitations to sexual abnormality which covered the walls about me. A moment later, I arranged my clothes and walked directly out through the milk bar on to the street.
An old man with a grey beard and whitely congealed, sightless eyes was selling shoelaces and pencils. The shoelaces were draped over the arm which manipulated a white stick as a probe The pencils in a bunch were clutched in the other hand. The head nodded wisely. It occurred to me that he was probably a fool even before he was blind. A shilling for St. Francis. I skirted him, unwilling to be touched. I pulled on a pair of gloves and went into a post office.
I bought a letter-card. Over at the window, with one of the post office pens, I wrote the following message in block capitals:
I HAVE NO INTENTION OF SURRENDERING TO YOU NOR OF PROVIDING YOU WITH FURTHER INFORMATION. IF YOU CONDEMN GOON YOU WILL CONDEMN A MAN WHO KNOWS NOTHING OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF CATHERINE DIMLY’S DEATH. I ALONE WAS WITH HER AT THE TIME SHE DIED. THE DROWNING WAS ACCIDENTAL. I CANNOT PROVE THIS WITHOUT IDENTIFYING MYSELF AND WERE I TO DO SO I SUSPECT I WOULD STEP STRAIGHT INTO HIS CONDEMNED BOOTS. I CAN’T TAKE THE RISK. BUT GOON IS INNOCENT.
I waited for the ink to dry, not wishing to have the message appear on the post office blotter, and then, sealing the letter-card, I addressed it to the judge who was trying the case and dropped it in the box.
Of course I was under no illusion that my melodramatic message would in any way affect the proceedings (Goon’s wife might have written it, or any practical joker), but however slight the possibility of its being taken seriously it was worth the effort. To sow a seed of doubt in the mind of the judge... I supposed it wouldn’t even have that effect. Whether or not they are conscious of it, all judges must look upon themselves as God. To judge is to presume one is God. That is why wise men put words forbidding us to judge one another in the mouth of God.
A policeman directed me to the particular courtroom. It was already quite crowded. Mostly middle-aged women. I had the impression that I was watching a parliament of birds.
As soon as I was seated I began for some reason or another to think of my shaving mirror. I remembered that on more than one occasion I had dropped it and I was being continually surprised by the fact that it didn’t break. No matter how often I repeated to myself that it was made of metal I could not rid myself of the response of expectation that it would break. Why did I think of that then?
I tried to make myself comfortable on the seat, looked closely at the polished wood; my legs were tired, and that made me look at the scarred black leather of my boots. In a way, I was bored, I hadn’t realized how utterly dependent on things I had become, even if only to catalogue them, saying over and over again, the door, the seat, the boots, the mirror, the thing to wash in; if I had had a big ledger I could have drawn up an inventory of things, neatly arranging the columns of the names of the microscopic objects, which, with the courtroom about me, formed so large a part of my experience. Then I might have progressed to microscopic objects. With a ledger and a pencil I could have kept going indefinitely. The seats, for example, were grouped rows, and they were really benches with backs and multiple legs. The mirror – for some reason I had it in my inside pocket – had four corners, the scarf of the woman next to me was seen, when examined closely, to be composed of weaves of wool ranging from a distinct red, through all the various shades of purple, to one strand which was almost white. I would not have been at a loss for things to catalogue.
It suddenly occurred to me that Goon was still alive. It struck me as obscene that they should put him on trial for his life. He would be eating, drinking, sleeping, and attending to his wants much as a house-trained cat might do under the same circumstances. He would be forced constantly to focus his attention on his bodily functions. That would cause him to be more aware of himself as a living thing than he had been before when, in his actions, he would lose sight of himself. Gradually his mind must have escaped less and less from the limit of his perceptions. He must have spent hours and days in measuring distances within his cell.
I remembered one time, after a fight in a bar, I came to consciousness in a hospital. There were screens where the walls should have been and I smelled iodoform instead of the air that hangs around a bed where two people have slept. I was living with Cathie at the time. On returning home things were different. As I wakened and began to take in my surroundings I realized that the constable was not there on a chair close by the bed and holding his helmet by the rim as he had been when suddenly at the hospital, out of nothing, I came back to my senses, thinking the peak of his helmet was a star. I remember he was a young man with worried grey eyes and a white, pouchy face. I cannot remember whether he had a black moustache or no moustache at all. I watched him for a time under the rims of my eyelids and then I must have fallen asleep again because when I looked back he was an older man with veined cheeks and with eyebrows as fierce as shrimps and I can remember the buttons on his uniform were very bright, so bright that beyond the pervasive consciousness of my limbs between the clean sheets I counted them, twice at least to be sure I hadn’t made a mistake. I forget how many there were.
I was thinking of that, I suppose, because that was my only direct contact with the police when, beyond me, someone said: “Nonsense!” and I was suddenly aware that the trial had begun. There was Goon, a pale-faced man of middle age, in the dock, two policemen behind him, and then the remark – by whom it was spoken I do not know – was followed by silence in the courtroom which gave way gradually to talking in hushed tones, terminated abruptly by the insistent rapping of the judge’s hammer. Looking up at him, I had the impression that I was being stared at by a venomous old turtle.
The court became quiet.
A man in a wig was speaking. He seemed pleased with himself. Even in his gown it was obvious that he had an abnormally large bottom. His voice derived something from his adenoids.
The people in court looked more like birds than ever, tilted, an eye glinting, about to peck. I became absorbed in watching them. As the trial proceeded, they were sometimes bored, sometimes tense and feverish, and all the time ridiculous, blobs of expression huddled together, marvelling at the sanctimonious odour of their paid prosecutors.
Throughout the trial, it was quite clear that they were not talking about Goon at all. The victim created in the speeches of the procurator to fit the sea of evidence had nothing to do with any self Goon was conscious of. I was disturbed by the placid way in which they all took it for granted that it was he whom they were talking about. If they condemned him they would condemn Goon, and if they hanged him it would be Goon’s body they would cut down.
“When you went,” they said.
“When you did this or that.”
Questions. Off-key. Counterfeit. Loaded.
I had the impression that they wanted things to fit as a man wants to believe in God.
Goon sat looking sullen and afraid. From time to time he was called upon to testify. He did so with a kind of helpless rage, almost tearfully. A woman’s voice beside me said that it was easy to cry when you were caught. She was unable to explain what she meant because an usher warned her to be silent.
The courtroom smelled musty, vaguely perfumed, and very little light penetrated from the street through the high-level window. The. lawyers stood up and sat down, sat down and stood up, and a small man in spectacles was explaining that Goon’s fingerprints had been on the shoes of the deceased.
“There could be no mistake.”
“What?”
“None whatever.” From a handkerchief, tilting his little voice out through his pince-ne
z.
That item of information obsessed me. No doubt the witness went back to his laboratory afterwards. He did not appear again.
Leslie appeared towards the end of the morning. He had recovered the body from the river. “With Joe,” he said.
“Joe?”
It is strange to think that I am mentioned in the papers on the proceeding of this trial.
“My mate,” Leslie said self-consciously, and there was a titter in court. Leslie wore a high white collar above which his sugar-loaf head with its cropped grey hair maintained a startled tilt during his questioning.
He was not asked for his opinion. The Crown ascertained that the woman was dead when she was pulled from the water.
The court was adjourned at the end of the first day. It was quite obvious that the procurator was going to get his conviction. He was a small man, rather self-satisfied, and he seemed to take a personal pleasure in murdering Goon.
I did not feel like returning to the house immediately. Instead, I took a tram to Kelvingrove and walked through the park. I sat on a seat for a long while thinking about nothing in particular. Ella had not been present at the trial. Leslie had come and gone without seeing me. I wondered vaguely whether he had returned to the barge or whether he was a night watchman somewhere or other in the city. I missed Leslie more than I missed Ella. I was glad to be rid of Ella. There were many things I liked about Leslie.
After a while I got up.
I was walking near the tennis courts when two young men and a girl passed me on the footpath. I supposed they were students because they were carrying books under their arms. When they saw me they stopped laughing. It was as though what they were laughing about was too private to be shared with strangers. And then they were past me and laughing again, and the voice of one of the men came back to me, high, artificial, excited, as though he were mimicking someone, and then the girl’s laughter again. I turned to watch them.
She was walking between them, swinging a pot-shaped handbag on a long leather strap, in flat shoes and a summer dress, strikingly blonde, her hair rising gracefully from her neck in a ribboned horsetail. She was slim-hipped and desired obviously by both of them.
They walked out of sight.
I found myself thinking that she could not have been more than twenty-two or so and wondering whether I looked old to her, and then I found myself envying the two young men who escorted her. A feeling almost of despair came over me. I felt a devastating sense of loss for something which I had never had, and it didn’t occur to me that that something was a thing which no one ever possesses for the simple reason that it is something which is created in being seen and which exists only for the spectator without whom it could never become an object to tantalize. I was tired and distraught and it did not strike me then that her escorts were even farther than I from the thing for which I felt such an acute sense of loss, infinitely farther from it, because it did not exist for them – their laughter, the swing of her hips, the ribbon, their familiarity, all that. And even if she were the mistress of one of them, I had created the thing for which I felt the sense of loss and it was not anyone else’s to be enjoyed. Afterwards I saw that, that it is ludicrous to envy someone a situation which does not exist for him because he is part of it and because it can only be seen, and thus exist, from the outside and then always as a lack.
I did not think that then, but during the night. At that time I was tired and profoundly outraged.
I needed a drink, badly. The social syllogism in which Goon had been unfortunate enough to get himself involved upset me deeply. If any act of mine could have destroyed that syllogism, I should have acted gladly. Go to the police? Confess? In practice I knew it would prove fatal to me. In principle it would have been in an indirect but very fundamental way to affirm the validity of the particular social structure I wished to deny.
A double whisky was more relevant, more fit under the circumstances. I drank two in the nearest bar. As I hadn’t eaten since early morning the alcohol had an exaggerated effect upon me. When I left the pub I was feeling slightly tipsy.
I found myself in a large public library with an old number of the British Medical Journal open in front of me. I read:
When the first pair were hanged it was my duty to determine the fact of death. As a general rule, on auscultation the heart may be heard beating for about ten minutes after the drop, and on this occasion, when the sounds had ceased, there was nothing to suggest a vital spark. The bodies were cut down after fifteen minutes and placed in an ante-chamber, when I was horrified to hear one of the supposed corpses give a gasp and find him making spasmodic respiratory efforts, evidently a prelude to revival. The two bodies were quickly suspended again for a quarter of an hour longer. The executioner, who was thoroughly experienced, had done his part without a hitch, and the drop given was the regulation one according to individual physique. Dislocation of the neck is the ideal to be aimed at, but, out of all my postmortem findings, that has proved rather an exception, while in the majority of instances the cause of death was strangulation and asphyxia.
I don’t know how long I stared at it before I thrust it away from me across the table. I left it there, not bothering to return it to the desk, and walked blindly out of the library.
When I returned to the flat in Lucien Street, Connie’s husband was preparing to go to work. Connie was wrapping his sandwiches in a sheet of newspaper. “Goon Arraigned...” the print said.
“How did it go, Joe?” he said.
“They’ll find him guilty,” I said.
2
THE FOLLOWING MORNING I woke up late. I hadn’t slept much during the night. When I went through to the kitchen Connie was kindling the fire and Bill, the night watchman, was asleep in the cavity bed.
“I didn’t wake you,” Connie said, as though to explain.
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“You not going to the trial today?”
“Yeah, I’ll go. In an hour or so.” I yawned. “Is there a cup of tea?”
She slapped one in front of me. An eternal teapot on the hob. “What’s it like, that trial?”
“It’s insane,” I said. “It’s like a football match. Two teams of lawyers preening themselves like turkey cocks and Goon is the ball.”
“It’s a bliddy shame,” she said. “I’m sorry for him. I was readin’ the papers. He says he wasn’t even there.”
“What the bliddy hell d’ye expect him to say?” Bill’s voice came from the bed.
“Shut yer gob and go to sleep!” Connie said.
I shaved carefully, watching the smooth line of my chin appear from under the soap in the mirror. It was after eleven when I left the house.
Once again I found myself in Argyle Street. I almost decided not to go. The verdict was a foregone conclusion. They had created a crime and now they had created a man to fit it. The only disquieting part about the whole freak show was that they would condemn a living creature in deference to the system. There was no doubt about it. The man who was created in the speeches of the procurator was fitted admirably to the crime which the police had invented – a very gratifying thing indeed to see two branches of the public service, the judiciary and the police, work together in such imaginative harmony.
I found myself playing pinball in a dive in Jamaica Street. There were a few people hanging around there at that time in the morning. After lunch I made my way to the courtroom and found the jury had already retired. The newspapermen were there with their cameras. I sat down not far from where I had sat on the previous day and waited for the twelve jurymen (three ladies and nine gentlemen) to return. Their pomposity made them ridiculous. It occurred to me that there might be one amongst them who felt like a murderer. The rest would be protected by their sanctimoniousness.
I can remember no quiet so quiet as that which followed when Mr Justice Parkington had finished saying that never before in his long experience of crime had he felt so justified in awarding the maximum penalty. He said it alm
ost lecherously, and only then was I struck by the fact that the man was quite mad.
Goon was called to attention. Mr Justice Parkington asked him if he had anything to say before sentence was passed on him.
“Just that I am innocent, sir. I swear to God!” he mumbled, without daring to look at the owl who leant forward angrily towards him.
The remark was received in silence. Its meaning appeared to escape everyone. Having said it, Goon seemed to sway from the court’s presence. He had to be supported by policemen. I take it that this would have happened even if he had been guilty.
Suddenly a woman’s voice cried out: “Now you’ve done it!” All eyes turned on her, a woman in black, rather stout, weeping into a handkerchief – Mrs Goon. The judge’s hammer rapped for order. People close to her were helping her to her seat, and she was whimpering: “He’d be better dead... he’d be better dead!...”
“Silence in court!”
In the silence which followed, Mr Justice Parkington fitted the black cap neatly to his balding crown and delivered his barbaric sentence in nasal tones. The law, it seemed, required that Goon be hanged by the neck until dead. A day was prescribed. The time, early in the morning. Mr Justice Parkington’s denture-shored mouth then uttered the formula that God should have mercy on Goon’s soul.
For a moment I wondered whether I was going to stand up and give him the lie. I felt my body tense as a gambler’s, a gambler who, just before the last call for bets, is poised in indecision whether or not to throw his whole stake on the red or the black, and who breathes with relief as the croupier says: “No more bets.” The stake remained in my hand, my life, and I knew that it would never be in the balance again, that Goon had lost and stood now entirely at the mercy of those who had condemned him. My body was in a cold sweat.
The courtroom was silent and grey and heavy with its high ceiling, and the brass lamp brackets on the walls were high up and austere. I tried to hear the noise of the traffic outside on the streets. I wanted badly to hear that, but the walls must have been too thick. And the people were silent except for a slight cough, a rustling of paper, the small scraping of a boot.
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