Disreputable People

by Penelope Rowe

  ‘There, that’s better,’ said Phyllis emerging and peeling off a pair of rubber gloves.

  ‘Hurry along now. The court is waiting,’ said Mario shooing us through the door. I took the cleaning as a bad sign. Germs are only a minor obsession with Phyllis, but worrying enough all the same.

  The morning session was endless and the John I was sitting next to was a leg jiggler. The case itself was practically unintelligible, focusing on investment fraud or somesuch. The judge kindly told us not to be alarmed and feel free to ask for clarification of anything we were worried about. Immediately Phyllis stood up and started to speak.

  ‘No, no,’ said the judge hastily. ‘In writing if you will.’ Phyllis sniffed and sat down.

  At lunch Anne handed Phyllis a note.

  ‘I want it sent to the judge,’ she said. ‘It’s about the flooding. I’m worried sick. I can’t concentrate.’ Given we were in the middle of the longest drought recorded since the arrival of the white man in this country it seemed like insanity.

  ‘But what can he do about it?’ asked Phyllis.

  ‘I think he should know that it’s affecting my judgement,’ said Anne and started to sniffle again.

  ‘All right,’ said Phyllis. She got up and rang the bell for Mario.

  ‘We would like this sent to the judge and that,’ she said formally when he appeared.

  When we arrived back in the court after the lunch break the judge turned to us all.

  ‘I have here a note from the jury,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I did not make myself clear. I have influence upon interpretation of law, not upon the weather. I can only suggest that you put all concern about flooding out of your mind. Now, Madam Crown, if you are ready, please.’

  At tea-time Phyllis handed round nicely printed name tags for us all. She had wiled away the afternoon session producing them in splendid calligraphic style.

  ‘I’m not wearing mine,’ said Tracey. ‘I don’t want him to find out my name.’

  ‘No, dear,’ said Phyllis. ‘We don’t wear them, we put them in front of our places at the table here. Like the United Nations.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ said Stanley. ‘United bloody Nations in here. What’s your name again?’ He was addressing Anna, who did not reply because she was giving herself a manicure. ‘Hey! You!’ said Stanley, aggro appearing. Anna looked up. ‘Name?’ demanded Stanley.

  ‘Anna,’ she said. ‘I not speak very good English.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Anne. ‘We have to let the judge know.’

  ‘Don’t worry, dear,’ said our foreman. ‘None of us in here understand what’s going on.’

  ‘I do, thanks very much,’ said Fether.

  ‘Righteo,’ said Phyllis serenely. ‘You and the judge can explain to us what to do at the end and that.’

  We filed back into court and were immediately sent back to our room while points of law were debated. Anne disappeared into the toilet. One of the Johns stood in a corner with his back to us and made an illegal phone call. Suddenly loud cries came from the toilet.

  ‘Is she having a baby in here?’ said Stanley. Tracey and I went to investigate.

  ‘I told you, I told you,’ cried poor Anne. ‘The flooding. I knew this would happen.’ There was blood everywhere. Phyllis and Anna joined us in the toilet.

  ‘It’s the change and that there,’ said Phyllis. ‘I had this trouble myself. I’ve done midwifery.’ Total lie. ‘Don’t panic.’

  ‘I’m not panicking,’ screamed Anne. ‘I’m telling you I can’t cope. Tell the judge again. I have to go home.’

  The judge was told. We remained locked in. A doctor was called and arrived towards the end of the day. The male jury members were stunned into silence by this powerful display of femaleness. We cleaned up the toilet and Phyllis went haywire with the Dettol. Mario rang Anne’s husband and told him to collect his wife. She was escorted away like some defiled creature and we were unlocked and sent into the streets where drink was taken by all. We were to continue with eleven members only.

  That night I was feeling so demoralised, what with Stanley, a jury member who didn’t speak English, the flooding and Phyllis, that I just had to ring Squeak. I needed reassurance.

  ‘Squeakie? That you?’

  ‘With whom did you wish to speak?’ she said primly. Silence. Offended, exasperated silence. I accepted the inevitable. I asked for my daughter by her ‘birth name’ as she so quaintly and pompously refers to it, nostalgic for my naughty little Squeak who didn’t put me in my place quite so rigorously.

  ‘I have to talk to you, Squeak. Sorry! Sorry! About the jury.’

  ‘Mum!’ She was scandalised. ‘You know you can’t do that and don’t dare involve me. I’m a lawyer.’ As if I don’t know!

  ‘But I have to. Phyllis Musk is foreman!’

  ‘Who? You’re joking!’ protested Squeak, then crossly, ‘How could you let her?’

  ‘How could I stop her?’ I snapped. ‘Don’t be so cruel to me.’

  ‘Mum, I’m not being cruel but honestly you can’t talk to me about it.’

  ‘Phyllis Musk was very kind to you, when you were a little thing,’ I said. Oh, why do I do it? Go off at a tangent when flustered by her? Other mothers do it with their daughters, too, I’ve noticed.

  ‘Mum.’ Warning. That really set me off.

  ‘Listen here, my girl. How much longer are those cartons of university notes going to clog up my hall and if those disgusting old Virginia Andrews books are not …’

  ‘MUM. What has that got to do with it?’

  ‘Plenty. I …’

  ‘Mum.’ Weary. ‘I have to go. I don’t want a fight. Okay? Bye.’ She hung up. I hung up. She can make me feel so guilty sometimes.

  Next morning was, as I think the expression is, a doozy. Stanley arrived under the influence.

  ‘I won’t have this with my jury,’ said Phyllis grandly. ‘I am notifying the judge.’ The judge was not impressed.

  ‘We shall bat on,’ he said sternly, frowning at us. As if we were all drunks. ‘Please do not come into my court when you have been drinking again.’ We more or less sent Stanley into Coventry but some of the life had definitely drained from the jury room. He tried to explain that he was allergic to being locked up in windowless places. That he was a gardener at heart. He pined for the open air and was missing Duckie. Phyllis relented and gave him a packet of Arctic Mints to suck upon.

  ‘They’ll sober you up and that there then,’ she said.

  It was an endless day. Fiscal shenanigans occupied Madam Crown and left us deeply bored. Every three minutes or so the judge would lift his eyes wearily to the clock at the back of the courtroom. Both the Johns dozed. Phyllis was humming very quietly. I knew that to be a very bad sign.

  Which indeed it was. Disaster struck our jury the very next morning. We were all assembled except Phyllis, which was ominous. She’s a stickler for punctuality. I feared the worst though didn’t know from what direction she would come. Mario marched agitatedly up and down outside our door, telling us the judge was waiting, telling us this would not do at all.

  Then she came, striding indignantly into the room.

  ‘Who are you people?’ she demanded, pushing Mario aside. ‘Don’t think you can pull the wool over Phyllis Musk’s eyes.’ We stared at her in silence. ‘Come on,’ she hectored. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Where are who?’ whispered Tracey, agog.

  ‘My jurors,’ said Phyllis. ‘I shall notify the judge of this at once.’

  ‘Of what?’ I asked.

  ‘You re-plicas,’ she said, thumping the table angrily. ‘Hoo hoo, you think you’re so clever but you can’t trick me. What have you done with my jurors? I’m notifying the judge.’

  ‘He’s a re-plica too,’ said Stanley laconically, getting into the spirit of things.

  ‘Too right he is,’ said Phyllis. ‘He won’t be any good to me. Let me think.’

  ‘Are you all ready, please?’ interrupted Mario from the door. ‘We
must proceed at once.’

  ‘I’m not proceeding anywhere until you put them all back,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘I think we should send another note to the judge,’ I said. ‘I know Phyllis and sometimes she is not a well person.’

  The judge was very cross. He demanded to know if we thought this was some sort of joke and were we not aware of the seriousness of our undertaking et cetera. Notes flew back and forth. There was no convincing him. ‘What do you mean, the jury has been replaced by re-plicas? What are re-plicas?’ he finally asked our foreman face to face after we had persuaded her to come into the courtroom.

  ‘I am not prepared to discuss it with you,’ she defied him. ‘Return our judge at once!’

  I know it’s a disgrace, a terrible waste of the tax payers’ money but the whole trial was aborted. Squeak has held me personally responsible. It does not reflect well on her corporate image to have such disreputable people as myself and Phyllis Musk in her past so I’ve made a deal with her that I won’t breathe a word to anyone about what went on in that jury room if she comes over this weekend and removes the university notes, throws out the rats’ cage, sorts through her old wardrobe and burns all the Virginia Andrews novels that clog my house. One hand washes the other and that, as Phyllis is fond of saying.

  one more, for the road

  ‘I think we are as happy as any two people could be,’ said Cathy as they stood together on the belvedere overlooking the city of Lisbon on the final night of their holiday. ‘No-one could be as good to me as you are.’

  ‘I don’t intend to change,’ said Robin.

  ‘Maybe one day you won’t be able to take any more.’

  ‘No matter how much I wish it wasn’t like this, I accept it. It’s part of the package. I knew before I married you. You hid nothing. We’ve survived this ten years and I love you even more. I didn’t think that could be possible. To love you more.’ She saw that his eyes were shining with tears. ‘You are the best thing that has ever happened to me.’

  He drew her towards him and held her so tight that her nose was crushed against the hard button of his jacket but she remained still, enfolded in his love, moved beyond words by his devotion, distressed beyond expression by the pain and anxiety she caused him.

  ‘If I could do anything, anything, to change things, I would,’ she said finally, drawing away, looking at his careworn, heavily-lined face, his tired eyes.

  ‘I know that,’ he said simply. ‘Just never stop loving me. Promise?’

  ‘I promise,’ she said, kissing him, thinking, I will remember this promise every day of my life and it will be the one thing that stops me ending that life. It would be a betrayal of his perfect love.

  The holiday had been to recuperate after another episode: six months of hallucinations, delusions, starvation, speechlessness, drugs, shock therapy, sleeplessness, total exhaustion, the overwhelming urge to end it forever. She had doubted her capacity to undertake the trip but Robin had encouraged her.

  ‘April in Portugal. We’ll do as little or as much as you want. We’ll stay out of big cities, wander the north and the centre, drink wine, enjoy each other, love each other.’ She would not have agreed, except she realised he needed a total change even more than she did at this time, and the resolution of the illness had left an overwhelming sense of guilt that she could not dismiss. He had done so much. She had to repay it. She didn’t know if she was up to the task.

  On arrival they had spent only the first night in Lisbon, Robin knowing how quickly she still reacted to noise and crowds, how sudden disturbances could set her shaking uncontrollably, how anything more than a short walk could leave her exhausted and unable to sleep. He had chosen their hotel carefully: the old and beautiful Hotel Borges, in the old quarter, with a splendid airy room and two balconies that looked down onto the street and the panelled coffee houses spilling into the air the delicious aroma of roasting coffee beans.

  They drank Portuguese wine and ate bread on the balcony that night and went to bed early, which was a mistake. Around midnight the streets came alive with the sound of chatter, laughter, argument, and from a coffee house opposite, the wail of fado. Robin slept through it all. He always could. Cathy lay in the light spring air willing herself to enjoy the noise, relax through it, drink it in, get used to ‘the feel of the place’, as Robin always said. She was always quoting to herself what Robin said.

  In the early hours the noise subsided and only one sound could be heard, a man alone, singing? wailing? drunk? mad? crying over and over what sounded to Cathy like, ‘Gotta have a whipping, gotta have a whipping, gotta have a whipping.’ He stopped as dawn came up but his refrain played crazily and continuously in her head as they drove out of Lisbon towards Sintra.

  ‘Tell me about Sintra, Cathy,’ said Robin, because he thought she knew everything about literature. This exasperated but flattered her, too.

  ‘It’s where Byron wrote “Childe Harold”:

  ‘The horrid crags, by toppling convent

  crown’d,

  The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy

  steep,

  The mountain-moss by scorching skies

  inbrown’d,

  The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must

  weep.’

  ‘Did you learn that at uni?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘School.’

  ‘Imagine remembering! I don’t remember anything I was taught at school.’

  ‘I always remember poetry and really obscure things when I’ve been sick,’ she said. ‘And then forget them—until the next time.’ There was a stillness between them. She knew he wanted to say, ‘there’s not going to be a next time’, and she knew he knew that it would be fatuous and pointless.

  They wound their way tentatively through the forests, dark and bleeding moisture from gnarled and ancient oaks and cedars, strangling vines, mosses thick as carpets, towering ferns; everything gradually becoming hazy in a heavy drizzling mist. Huge stone walls, twisted through with tortured roots; huge wild roses with thorns the size of fingers, crushing, tangling, surged out at them as they crept through the winding laneways to Sintra.

  ‘Stop,’ said Cathy, breathless, after a particularly narrow and perilous curve. ‘Let’s have a breather.’ Robin pulled the car up against a seeping stone wall. Cathy opened the window and stretched out her hand.

  ‘Oh, I want to see properly,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out.’ She pushed open the door, grazing it heedlessly against the stones and ran forward, seeking a gap in the wall.

  ‘Here. I can climb up.’

  ‘You won’t see over. It’s too high.’

  ‘There’s a gap up there.’ She scrambled up the slippery wall, a toe hold here and there until she came to a hole big enough to put her head through. A thicket, a jungle of hostile thorny roses. Impenetrable. She peered into the gloom. Her mind jangled with fantasy.

  Once upon a time, a young prince, with tremendous strength, tore aside the stone with his bare hands and forced his slender body through this very hole and with his enormous sword started hacking and slashing at these roses, to reach the castle of the Sleeping Beauty, up there somewhere in the forest. A prince in satin jerkin and golden hose, with a tasselled cap on his head; and in the castle, on a white bed under muslin curtains, a golden princess lay waiting in a white velvet dress with a cincture of gold and a long cone of a hat with a flowing veil on the end, surrounded by a miasma of rose perfume, thousands and thousands of drooping pink roses, all waiting for the magic moment. Or were they brown and slimy, and the princess they surrounded a lump of heaving maggots, or was she already eaten clean, or …?

  ‘Cathy, come on down, it’s dangerous to leave the car here. We’ll get hit, no-one can see in this mist.’

  Maybe rats darted …

  ‘Cathy, come down.’

  She dragged herself back, slipped, slicing her palm on a thorn, and made her way back to the car.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ said Robin, ‘show me.’ He to
ok her hand. ‘Here. Silly thing.’ He handed her his hanky. She looked at the blood and paled.

  ‘I pricked it on a spindle. The wicked fairy’s revenge,’ she muttered. Robin pressed the hanky harder on the blood. ‘For trying to be happy.’

  ‘You don’t have to be afraid of being happy, you know. You’re allowed to be,’ he said lightly, watching, recognising the tension in her face, the appeal in her eyes. He prayed it was not what it seemed.

  As they drove towards Sintra a thunderstorm broke over them and lightning cracked around the car. Robin slowed to a crawl, his hazard lights flashing, his fog lights soupy yellow-grey in front of them.

  ‘I made a mistake. It isn’t Sleeping Beauty’s castle,’ said Cathy. ‘It’s Bluebeard’s. No beautiful princess. In there are seven bloodied corpses dangling on thin chains, slowly twisting in the wind from the casement windows. Frantic with terror in the bleak prison there’s a demented woman, waiting for a monster to return, a monster who is out here somewhere, watching us even, biding his time.’

  ‘Stop that now. You’ve got too much imagination,’ said Robin trying to be light-hearted. How he loved this troubled woman, this woman who had spun into his settled widower ways, turning his humdrum, orderly, quiet life into a peak of possibility and renewal, bringing excitement and laughter and passion to his life. And madness too.

  When they finally pulled into the square, Robin was ashen with tiredness from the unfamiliar car, the poor visibility, concern about his wife.

  ‘Let’s get a drink first and a strong coffee,’ he said. They crossed to a café and relaxed together sipping port. Cathy watched a man at the next table sipping his coffee and eating jam from the jam jar with a spoon. When it was scraped clean he leaned over to their table, muttered a permission and took their jam as well. Cathy pressed Robin’s foot, to draw his attention to it. They exchanged a smile. He relaxed his guard slightly.

  ‘Time we find a pensao, darling,’ he said. ‘Then we can decide on dinner.’

  They returned to the car and drove out along the Sintra road. There was a high carved iron gate outside the pensao that Cathy had selected from the Frommer’s. No amount of tugging at the old bell evinced a reply so they pushed open the creaky gate and went inside. An overgrown path edged with camellias and rhododendrons, under whose weight the bushes sagged and dripped, led them to a small cottage. A woman watched them from the doorway.