by Alex Lake
‘So,’ he said, ‘here’s what I think.’
Julia nodded. ‘Shoot,’ she said.
‘As you know, the court acts in the interests of the child. Brian will be trying to show that Anna’s best interests are to stay with him, but not because he offers something exceptional. He’s claiming that you cannot offer a stable and safe environment. Now, even with all of the stuff he’s accusing you of, he can’t prove it. A courtroom is not a newspaper. If he wants to say that you are an alcoholic, he will have to prove it, which he won’t be able to, because you aren’t. Likewise with the anger management issues. So you hit him, once, under extreme duress. That is not an anger management problem. It’s a human response. And we just deny the accusation of a suicide attempt. My point is that it’s pretty hard for him to prove any of the things he’s laying at your door.’
Julia felt mounting excitement. Maybe this was not as hopeless as she had thought.
It must have showed on her face, as Mike frowned. ‘Don’t get carried away,’ he said. ‘There’s more. Like I said, he can’t prove the things he’s accusing you of, but that doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t need to. Remember, the court is only concerned with Anna’s best interests. Whether you have a drink problem is only relevant as it pertains to Anna’s welfare.’ He folded one thigh over the other and took a long drink from his whisky glass. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘This is where it gets kind of grey. In my experience, family courts are very risk-averse. What I mean is that they are looking for reasons why an environment might be unsafe for a child. That’s what Brian is playing on. He’s saying, yes, I can’t prove these things, but are you going to take that risk? When there’s a risk-free alternative? It’s not a bad strategy.’
‘So,’ Julia said. ‘What do you think I should do?’ What do you think a court would do?’
‘I think,’ Mike said, ‘there is a good chance the court would award custody to the father. To Brian.’
Julia wanted to scream at him, shout no, your job is to say that we can do this, that we should fight, not that I should give up! Not that I should hand over my daughter!
‘Right,’ she said. ‘So what should I do? If I was your client, how would you advise me?’
‘I’d say that the best you are likely to get in court is what you already have – Wednesdays and every other weekend – and that there is a risk of losing that if you do go to court. So there’s no upside to contesting custody in this case, only a downside.’ He looked at her. ‘I would advise against.’
She had known it all along but it took hearing it from Mike to make it real, to make it so that she understood that she was going to see her daughter four days in ten, that Anna would grow up in Edna’s shadow, maybe calling another woman Mum, if Brian remarried. She, Julia, would be on the outside, face pressed to the glass, increasingly a distraction as Anna’s life filled up. Right now they would spend weekends together, but as Anna grew into a teenager and a young woman her weekends would revolve around friends and boyfriends. Parents saw little enough of teenagers when they shared a house full-time. Julia would be living on crumbs.
‘I can’t,’ Julia said. ‘I can’t just let it happen.’
‘I know,’ Mike said, ‘but you asked me what I would advise a client, so I told you. I gave you my professional opinion. If you want me to advise you as a friend, then that would be different.’
‘So let’s say I asked you to advise me as a friend,’ Julia said. ‘What would you say then?’
‘I’d tell you to fight the bastard with everything you’ve got,’ Mike said. ‘That’s what I’d tell you as a friend.’
v.
‘You think I should fight? Even though you would advise a client not to?’ Julia said. ‘I’m not sure I follow the logic.’
Mike smiled. ‘That’s because it’s not about logic. Let me see if I can explain.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘I remember your dad, Julia. He coached the rugby team I played in – if you can believe I ever managed to shift this lump of a body around a rugby field – when I was a teenager. He’d played some semi-professional stuff and given it up after an injury. It was probably around the time you were born, but you won’t remember.’
Julia didn’t, but she did remember playing with the trophies her dad kept in a cupboard when she was a child. She also had photos of him with his teammates. She’d always marvelled at them, at the proof that her dad had an existence that preceded her, an existence when he was a fit, muscular athlete with a full head of hair and a wicked glint in his eye.
‘He was great with us teenagers. We were a rum lot, a bunch of tearaways and thugs, but he whipped us into shape. Got us fit, taught us the game, gave us some discipline. But the thing I remember most – and others remember it too – was that he insisted we adhere to a higher standard than the one required by the laws of the game. He told us that the laws of the game were one thing, but we needed to stick to the spirit of the game.’
‘What did he mean?’ Julia asked. She loved hearing about her dad; loved learning what he had been like as a man. ‘What kind of things did he make you do?’
‘Well, he used to referee our games, and he would penalize us if, say, one of the bigger players on our team tackled a smaller player on the other team unnecessarily hard. It might have been a legal tackle, but he would penalize us for it. He called it unsporting conduct. The thing that annoyed us was that he didn’t penalize the other side for it. He couldn’t; they didn’t know that he had added a rule, so when he refereed us we were at a disadvantage. But you know something? We applied his rules even when other referees had the whistle. So it worked.’
‘Sounds like Dad,’ Julia said. ‘But how does it help with this situation?’
‘The lesson I learned from your dad,’ Mike said. ‘Is that sometimes you just have to do what’s right. You can walk away from this, sign the agreement, hand over custody, and if you were a violent, suicidal alcoholic who had a history of negligent parenting, then I would suggest you did. But you aren’t, and the fact that Brian and his mother will paint you that way – successfully, maybe – is not enough reason to accept their terms. Plus, if you do, then you will be admitting that you are what they say you are. I just feel that if you – we –walk away from this, then it will rankle forever.’
‘But what can I do?’ Julia said. ‘If I fight them I might lose Wednesdays and every other weekend. They might push for supervised custody only. I couldn’t live with that.’
‘That’s a risk. The question is, whether it’s a risk worth taking.’
‘Not if I can’t win.’
‘There’s no can’t,’ Mike said. ‘It’s not obvious how, I’ll grant you that, but there’s no can’t.’ He paused. ‘The thing is, their case rests, at least partly, on lies. You aren’t violent, you don’t drink to excess. We need to find a way to pick it apart. Find the thread that will unravel it.’
‘How?’ Julia said. ‘How do I fight back?’
‘A couple of ways. I have a couple of ideas.’ He stood up. ‘So why don’t you let Brian know you don’t want his deal, and we can get to work?’
‘That depends on what your ideas are,’ Julia said.
‘Then let me fill you in.’
The next morning, Julia sat at her kitchen table, opened her laptop, and started to type.
Brian, I find what you are doing – exploiting the abduction of our daughter to get custody, although we both know it is your mother behind it – to be appalling, and I hope you feel the shame of it. I do not accept your proposal for custody, and my lawyer will be in touch in due course to formalize matters.
Yours, Julia
Then she hit send. She hoped that she was doing the right thing.
His reply came a few minutes later.
Fine. Send your lawyer’s details. My lawyer will be in touch.
She didn’t deserve a reply to her letter. A defence against her accusations. She didn’t even deserve a signature.
But that was fine. She smiled. From now on Brian
– and Edna – were not going to have it all their own way.
vi.
Julia scanned the tweets hashtagged #notfittobeamum. It seemed as good a place to start as any other; there was no shortage of vitriol being spilled onto keyboards. What was it that drove these people to comment so viciously on someone they didn’t know and would never meet? Did they think they were somehow making the world a better place? That they were showing other people how to live, warning them of what awaited them if they messed up? Or did they just enjoy it? Were they simply angry, bitter people who could not resist the impulse to lash out; an impulse they would never have dared to indulge publicly, but which they could revel in to their heart’s content under the anonymous protection of the internet?
Julia thought it was the latter, and if it was they had miscalculated. The internet was rarely as anonymous as people thought it was.
She read @vernaldraft tweets; @vernaldraft had quite a lot to say about her, from the merely insulting:
#JuliaCrowne is the reason why some people should not be allowed kids#notfittobeamum
To the off-topic:
Why’s slut #JuliaCrowne like a washing machine? Because they both drip when they’re fucked #notfittobeamum
To the frankly chilling:
#JuliaCrowne should not breed again. #notfittobeamum #forcedsterilization
Well, Julia thought, let’s see what we can find out about @vernaldraft. She read through the rest of @vernaldraft’s tweets:
Been at the beer festival in Cromer. Best real ale in the country – and the world!
So, a lover of real ale. And, it seemed, amphibians:
Evening listening to frogs at local vernal pond. #Norfolkboy #BestcountyinEngland
So, a real ale lover from Norfolk. She carried on reading. Here was something from a year ago:
Love being an engineer. New job in pumps. Awesome.
And a tweet in reply, from @RobParker:
Congrats mate looking forward to seeing you in the office and celebrating with a few jars. Nice one.
Almost certainly a man, then, and a man who worked as a pump engineer in Norfolk, with someone called Rob Parker.
From then on it was easy. On LinkedIn there was a Rob Parker working at a small sewage pump company in Norfolk. He only had seventeen connections, one of whom was a man called Clive Gaskell, who had joined around a year ago, and who was chairman of his local real ale society.
A search on Clive Gaskell revealed a Facebook profile of a man in his late forties, married, two kids. His profile picture was a pond in the evening.
Bingo.
A few more clicks and she had the name of the owner of the pump company: Jenny Jones. She had a Twitter profile too. Julia typed out a tweet in reply to @vernaldraft’s most offensive effort:
@vernaldraft Not sure about #forcedsterilization. Seems a bit eugenics to me. Sure you want him working for you @jjpumps?
Then, just for good measure, she replied to the others:
What about this one @vernaldraft @jjpumps?
Or this one @vernaldraft @jjpumps?
That should make Clive Gaskell think twice before abusing someone again.
She closed her laptop. Fun as it was, spiking the guns of her Twitter enemies was nothing more than a way of taking some kind of control of her situation, a way of breaking the habit of seeing herself as powerless in the face of her husband and the press and the courts and Edna.
Which was going to be important, as the real work was just about to get started.
‘You know,’ Mike said. ‘I think it might be better if I go to see Derek alone.’
Julia stiffened. She glanced out of the passenger-side window of Mike’s Audi. A woman pushing a pram looked back at her, her face drawn and harried. They were on their way to see Derek Jacobs, the retired magistrate who had witnessed Julia scratching Brian.
‘Why? I thought we were going to talk to him together.’
‘I don’t want him to feel pressured,’ Mike said. ‘He might clam up.’
‘I do want him to feel pressured!’ Julia said. ‘He has to know what’s at stake here! I want him to have to look me in the eye.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Mike said. ‘But he was a magistrate. If he thinks there’s going to be a custody case then he may simply refuse to talk. If it’s just me then he might be more relaxed. And I’ve known him for a long time. I can keep it off the record.’
‘You know him?’
‘I’ve been a lawyer in this town for three decades, Julia. He was a magistrate. Our paths crossed from time to time.’
‘I don’t know, Mike. I want to see him.’
The car slowed to a stop at a red light. Mike turned to face her. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘It’s better this way. Really. I know Derek. He’ll talk to me. If you’re there … I don’t know.’
‘Ok, we’ll do it your way.’
‘Thanks. Now, talk me through what happened at Edna’s house again.’
‘There’s not much to say,’ she said. ‘Brian and Edna pushed me and I lost my temper – wrong, I know, but I was tired and they had my daughter – and I scratched his face. And this guy was there to see it all.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s typical Edna. In the middle of all this and she had a lunch guest. She said it was a long-standing appointment. It’s exactly the kind of thing she would do: carry on with some social engagement so that she didn’t lose face.’
‘You have to admire her,’ Mike said. ‘She’s got balls, if you know what I mean.’
‘I’m not sure “admire” is the word I’d use.’
They pulled into the car park of a white-walled pub. Mike switched off the engine.
‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’
Julia watched Mike shuffle across the damp tarmac of the pub car park. His suede shoes were stained and his trousers were baggy and shapeless. She felt a tug of sympathy for him: he was going to grow old alone. The highlights of his life: boozy lunches with former colleagues and visits from his daughters; highlights that would only serve to show how desperate the rest of his life was. The problem for Mike wasn’t that he would be alone – plenty of people put up with, or even enjoyed, that – but that he didn’t want to be. She could picture him as a young dad, warm, goofy, fond of telling bad jokes and reading good books to his girls. And as a husband: loyal, considerate, generous, and prepared to play his role; work hard to provide for his family. It was a shame it wasn’t enough for his wife: a woman she couldn’t help but dislike because of what she had done to Mike.
Of course, people could say that she was no better. Julia wasn’t happy with Brian – a fundamentally decent man – so she was walking away. If Mike’s wife should have stayed with him, why was it different for Julia? She wasn’t sure it was.
Anyway, now was not the time to think like this. She took out her phone and scrolled through her emails. She had a request from LinkedIn. It was an old friend – well, an acquaintance, really – from university. She was working in Leeds as Managing Director of a haulage firm, which was not where Julia would have imagined her ending up. They’d met when Julia had acted in her one and only student play. Charlotte was blonde and petite and girly.
She accepted the request, then flicked through her contacts. A guy she had dated during high school was now VP of Marketing for some big corporate. She should have stuck with him, except for the fact that he could only get aroused if she pretended to be a cat. The first time it was almost enjoyable, but after that it became downright weird. She’d been recommended for strategic thinking by a former colleague. Nice to know. And Brian was celebrating a work anniversary. Five years in his current job. She clicked on his name. He didn’t have many contacts. One of them, she was surprised to see, was Edna.
Edna had a mere nine contacts. Of course she did: very few people, Julia included, would merit inclusion in her inner circle. Julia glanced over them.
And then she sat up in the car seat, her stomach tight.
Edna was con
nected to the News Editor at the Daily World.
Julia read it again, then typed the man’s name into Google. He had a bio on Wikipedia: Oxford alumnus, at the same time as Edna.
Why hadn’t Edna mentioned it? She could have leaned on the guy and stopped them from publishing all the rubbish about Julia. It was amazing she had a contact like that and hadn’t used it.
Unless, of course, she had.
‘No,’ Julia said, out loud in the empty car. ‘No, she wouldn’t.’
Was it possible that Edna had leaked the information to the Daily World? Surely she wouldn’t have done something like that. But it made sense: it was either the police or someone else who knew what was going on, and there were very few of them. After confronting Brian, Julia had assumed it was someone close to the police, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was Edna?
Her head was spinning. It was a struggle to concentrate. But one thing was clear: if Edna had done it, it would blow the custody case wide apart.
Forty minutes later, Mike was back.
He opened the door and sat in the car, the smell of beer settling in with him. The glassy look in his eye suggested he’d had at least a couple of pints in the hour he’d been in there.
Julia didn’t care. She was flush with her discovery.
‘Mike,’ she said. ‘I think I found something out. Something important.’
‘That’s a coincidence,’ he said, ‘because so did I.’
vii.
‘You go first,’ Mike said.
Julia handed him her phone. He read it and looked up at her.
‘So?’ he said. ‘It’s Edna’s LinkedIn profile.’
‘Look who she’s linked to.’
Mike glanced back at the screen. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see.’
‘Yeah,’ Julia said. ‘So here’s what I think, Mike: I think she leaked the details of my so-called suicide attempt and negligent parenting and rumours of an affair to the press.’