It was not a difficult statement to draft because Catherine had already done a very neat and succinct job on it. Jennifer also worked late in chambers after the conference that evening so we both got on with what we had to do.
‘How did the con go?’ Jennifer asked during one of our frequent breaks for tea. Con is barrister language for conference. I told her what had happened.
‘I feel so sorry for her. Poor bloody woman.’
‘Simon, be very careful. She’s just another client. Remember?’
‘I know. But I still feel sorry for her. She seems so…I don’t know… overwhelmed, I suppose.’
‘All the more reason to be careful.’
CHAPTER FIVE
I did not meet Catherine again for another two months and did not give her case a second thought. Then there was a consultation, which is a conference held with a QC, to prepare for a preliminary hearing that was listed before the trial judge in Birmingham.
The QC had been chosen by the solicitor, not me, although we were from the same set of chambers. She wore bright red lipstick, strong perfume and expensive clothes, which were too young for her. She was clever, good at her job and thought herself to be part of the elite – one of the beautiful people. Jennifer described her as looking like an upper class tart.
‘Right,’ the QC began the consultation with a clipped tongue ‘have you read Dr Springton’s report?’ Dr Springton was the jointly instructed expert paediatrician whose report concluded that, although Catherine’s statement gave a possible explanation for what had happened to Martha, it seemed ‘implausible’ on his interpretation of the facts.
‘Of course,’ I could already tell that Catherine didn’t like the silk’s manner and I got ready for a fight between the two of them.
‘He describes your account as implausible. Can I check please, are you quite sure that you have told us everything we need to know?’ In other words, the silk was asking whether Catherine wanted to fess up. It was not a wise approach with this particular client.
‘Of course I have.’
‘We did go over this very carefully when preparing Ms Warrenberg’s statement,’ I chipped in.
‘Thanks Simon.’ Catherine made eye contact with me and smiled.
The silk just grunted but eventually backed off as she realised that Catherine was not going to be terrorised and the rest of the consultation was spent going over the paperwork and discussing how we were going to argue our case. At the end it was agreed that I would go with Catherine to the preliminary hearing that was listed in Birmingham during July and ask the judge to order a number of things to be done so as to get ready for the main hearing that was already arranged for September.
As we left the silk’s room Catherine spoke to me quietly: ‘Jesus - how many razor blades does she eat for breakfast?’
‘One a day, but only after she’s finished shaving with them.’ I put my hand on her shoulder to usher her in front of me.
‘Are you going up to Birmingham by train?’ she asked.
‘Sure.’
‘So, am I, travel together?’
Travelling with a client? That was awkward. ‘OK, but I may need to work on the train.’ It was just a snap decision.
‘I promise I won’t disturb you.’
Jennifer said I was a bloody idiot when I told her. ‘You shouldn’t be travelling with a client. What if she starts talking about the case?’
‘I’ll tell her to shut up. Simple. Anyway, she’s a barrister. She knows the score.’
‘That’s not the point. You’ve got to be so careful, Simon. Is the solicitor coming with you?’
‘No.’
‘Make an excuse and say you have to go up on a different train.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘Well I think you’re being an idiot…wide-eyed and fucking spineless.’ Jennifer always shot to kill.
We did travel together. We couldn’t talk about the case on the train as it was full, so I spent most of the time working while Catherine sat opposite me and read a book. However, I can remember now the warmth which seemed to develop between us for no obvious reason other than that we were able to be quiet in each other’s company. I remember looking across at Catherine at one stage as she read; she caught my eye and smiled. After everything that has happened here in Sri Lanka, it feels very strange to think of myself as I was then.
The directions hearing went reasonably well and we were even allowed by the judge to instruct our own shadow expert, to check the work of Dr Springton, so that was a bit of a triumph. It also helped that our opponent was a barrister for the local authority called Nagan, who got right up the judge’s nose. There was also a solicitor there who reminded me of the taste of blotting paper by droning on that she was ‘acting for the child’ and who turned the instructions she received from Martha’s legal guardian into pointless and sanctimonious mulch.
Somewhat buoyed, Catherine and I came out of the hearing, lost the articled clerk and decided to go to the big bookshop in the Bull Ring centre, I’ve forgotten its name, before catching a later train from New Street station. I can picture Catherine now as she picked up books and studied them as if shut off from the rest of the world in the oasis of calm that the shop offered. Thinking about it now she and Josh had the same sort of ability to study – to close down on everything around them and read in a way that was totally absorbed.
The train journey back started with both of us reading the books that we had bought but, within a very short time, we put our books down and started to talk.
‘What sort of music do you like?’ she asked, at one point.
‘Pretty mixed bag, really. I listen to trance music when I’m running and, usually, opera when I work. Mostly Verdi. And you?’
‘Classical, mostly. I sing. I’m singing in a concert in the Middle Temple in a couple of weeks, actually. Fancy coming?’
‘What are you singing?’
‘Song to the Moon. It’s by…’
‘Dvorak. From the opera Rusalka. I know it very well indeed.’
I must have paused or looked flustered because Catherine said ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s nothing. Just a thing from the past.’
‘I’ll leave you an invitation in chambers if you like.’
‘Thanks. My wife and I may be away in France at my family’s farm but if I’m around I would love to come.’ What was I doing? I could hear Jennifer’s voice in my head baulking at even the hint that I might go to watch a client perform at a concert but I had given myself an exit strategy by mentioning my wife and the holiday.
When we got to Euston it was time to go our separate ways.
‘Keep in touch’ I told her and then headed off home to Chelsea.
CHAPTER SIX
So, what about that song? It matters so much to our story. It is a song that I have lived with since I was aged eight and it has carried the symbols of my feelings since then. I know you came to love it, too - we would listen to it together often. You knew that it served as a doorway into how I was feeling, that I could not run away from things when I listened to it. I have played it again and again since you died since now, once again, it sings out how I feel in a way that only music can. I know every note and have followed its journey so many times but still yearn to be drawn once again along the familiar course of the song that has always understood how I feel, to allow myself to be swept along by the call of its sadness. It has always forced me to face how I feel. To stop thinking. Feel don’t think; that’s what you told me, too.
It was one of two pieces of music that my mother listened to repeatedly after my father died when I was a child. After his death she never spoke to me directly of her grief and she never even spoke of his death or tried to explain it to me. She told me how much my father had loved me and I would hear her crying when she was on her own at night time, sitting downstairs at the kitchen table, locked away in Devon with me, her only child. She was separated from her family, her home country and the way of
life of her own childhood on the farm near Nuits Saint Georges.
It was through music, though, that she communicated her grief and it rested over our home like a mist hanging over a mountain top - always present and always dampening and darkening the atmosphere within our home. Together we shared an unspoken sadness and expressed it in ways other than through words. I learnt to put the record of this song on the gramophone at times of sorrow and to send a message of understanding to my mother, in harmony with her feelings. My mother would look at me and say ‘thank you, Simon.’ But nobody spoke to me about how I felt, probably because it was too embarrassing and difficult, so I just carried my own grief as part of my personality and retreated to its comfort and security when I felt sad. My one true companion at home was the Border collie that my mother took in after my father died.
Written of course in Czech the song is one of beauty and of the deepest sorrow. My mother explained its meaning to me in French after I asked her one day, ‘Mum, what do the words mean?’ She wrote her interpretation of the words on a piece of paper for me and I kept the note in a box, my treasures box, in my bedroom. I even learnt the words that she wrote for me by heart in both French and then in English, after translating the note so I could switch between languages in my mind as I recited the words to myself. They are engrained within me.
Petite lune, si loin dans le ciel...
arrête-toi un moment
Dis-moi, où est mon amour?
Dis-lui, lune d’argent,
que pour moi tu l’entoures de tes bras,
que tu brilles pour qu’au moins un moment
il se souvienne de moi en rêve.
Et dis-lui que je l’attends.
Éclaire-le, là-bas, très loin.
Et si j’apparais en rêve à cette âme humaine,
Peut-elle s’éveille avec ce souvenir.
O Lune, ne me quitte pas, ne quitte pas.’
And that is how the personal connection between me and Catherine began. Because of a song. And because of a setting and another context. As I write this I have the piece playing on my laptop but whenever I stop writing it buzzes in my head drawing me to a cliff edge of comfort and yet madness. Like you Josh, I feel it stretch out towards me and I am scared. I just feel really scared because I sense its pull, its draw and I don’t know what to do. I wish you were here.
I play it to you, over and over and over again. I force myself to look at the chair and see you there and I smile. As you turn the page of your book you look up and you smile back before returning to what you are reading. If I could have buried you, I would have played it for you. Om Sahana Vavatu – may God protect us both. That’s what I wrote for you and that’s what I wanted to say for you, but maybe that’s just selfish. I don’t know. You have no idea how difficult this is. No idea - at least I have protected you from that.
Moon, so far away in the sky…
Stop for a moment,
Tell me, where is my love?
Tell him, silver moon,
that you are holding him in your arms for me,
that you shine so that, for at least one moment,
he might remember me in his dreams.
And tell him that I wait for him.
Shine on him down there, so very far away.
And, if I should appear in a dream to that human soul,
may it awake with this memory.
Oh moon, do not leave me, do not leave.’
I’m going for a walk.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I see your face. I see your eyes all the time. I can smell you on your clothes. I hear your voice which speaks to me in my head, softly, kindly, talking to me, comforting me into madness. Always talking to me, talking and talking, wrapping round me; everything else is just noise. I feel you lying next to me at night and I wake screaming because of the dreams I have of seeing you with your neck broken and your eyes empty. How could anything have hurt something so beautiful?
We were together for only three years, I know that and I can hear you say it as you try to get me to move on. Who knows what the future would have held, you ask me? But you didn’t say that when you were alive. And you know that those three years made me the person I am and you know that I cannot go back or forget how we became. I can’t run away from myself again and this time I just don’t want to. If I run away from myself then I run away from you and I cannot do that. That’s not just choice, it’s who I am now.
Think how you would have felt if you were here on your own, if I had been the one to die. What would you have said about me? I think about that, what you would have written, a lot because it allows me to escape, to imagine myself reaching across the divide and holding you, wiping away your tears, stroking your hair, holding your face in my hands and kissing your forehead. Guiding your face into my shoulder for it to rest there. Trying to protect you as you do now to me.
But you would have been lost, I know that. You would have been all over the place and I am glad that I am the one here now because you would never have coped. You put everything you had into our lives together and the knowledge of that is the one thing now that I possess. And the future? What does it matter? Who would have guessed this would be the future? One thing I do know. I would never have stopped loving you, wanting to be the outlet for your beautiful mind and your beautiful body. You don’t stop loving beauty.
I know you would understand.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Well, I have returned to my computer after taking a complete nosedive over the past few days. In the end, Dharan the hotel owner, followed me down the beach at a distance and found me sobbing under a palm tree. I was sitting watching the sea in the rain, pissed out of my mind again.
‘What are you doing sir?’ Why sir?
‘Just watching the sea, Dharan.’
‘But you are soaking wet. It’s not safe to be here on your own.’
He put his coat around my shoulder and led me back to the hotel. By the time we arrived he was drenched – he was only wearing a T-shirt and a sarong. He and Karunya have now taken me under their wings and are treating me as if I were their guest, as if they were running the hotel properly. They’ve even started to lay out meals for me on the veranda of what used to be their restaurant and to knock at my door when they are ready - I suspect that they like to have someone to look after and have even tried to organise for me to go to see the ancient Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee and the coral nature reserves of the two Pigeon Islands that are about a kilometre from the beach. Me, a tourist?? Where’s the street cred in that? Yeah, there’s a song about that. We sang it together one night. I was drunk. You were stoned. Remember?
In any event, there is still too much military activity to roam around tourist sites and there are security checks everywhere - without a valid visa, I don’t want to go to them. I can’t start all that again. Dharan and Karunya are very kind, as many people here are and they look after me well but I can’t settle down. They have next to nothing, no money and no opportunity. So, the little bit of money I pay them makes a big difference but I won’t know them for long.
How can I put how I feel into an image, for what that is worth, luxuriating as I am in my own self-pity? I think the nearest I can get is from one of the few photographs that I have from my year of travel before I came to Sri Lanka. I have just been staring at it. It was taken by an Australian guy called Will that I had met in Nepal who persuaded me to go skydiving with an outfit that was run from beside the Phewa Lake in Pokhara. Because my former wife and I had everything money could buy, when we were together, she used to buy me extreme sport holidays as presents and one of them had been a skydiving course on the Devon/Somerset border. So that’s where I got the bug for it.
The photograph, which Will took, shows me with one foot on the strut of a microlight as I am about to jump. The Annapurna mountains and the beautiful fishtail mountain, Machapuchare, can be seen in the distance. And yes, the Phewa Lake can be seen many feet below through a crystal clear November sky. Bu
t at the moment he took the photograph I was shit scared, completely alone, had no idea where I was going in life and wondering whether I would open the chute. I felt sick and couldn’t stop shaking. I remember thinking my head would explode.
‘Jesus, Simon, you left that late. I was buttering the toast.’ That was Will after I landed.
‘Stick to Vegemite, Will. Jam’s off the menu today.’
Well, Greenwood, it’s time to sober up again. You weren’t going to do that, remember? OK, green door. Lavatory or shower? Toalett eller dusch? You taught me well, I think. I wonder how you say shit-hole in Swedish. So, it will have to be lavatory. Definitely.
CHAPTER NINE
Hangovers are shit and that last chapter is not what this is about. I’m sorry. I thought I had stopped doing that.
I have explained to Dharan and Karunya that I am writing about painful things that have happened in the past in an attempt to get my head together. They understand that and have even gone on to tell me their own appalling stories of suffering after the government announced in December 2006 that it intended to expel the LTTE from the Eastern Province and there were raging battles and atrocities on and off for the next seven months as the government army swept north from Batticaloa. They tell many tales of the mass exodus of civilians from the southern part of the province during a lull in the initial offensive until it began again in earnest in mid-January 2007. Thousands of people with nowhere to go except to the government refugee camps or the area to the north which they knew was not safe because that is where the fighting will go next, inevitably.
After hearing their dreadful tale, though, how can I tell them mine in any true detail despite their kindness - it would be alien to them, in any event, and I can’t talk about Josh to them or anyone – how could I? Homosexuality is illegal and culturally unacceptable here and so we only ever told one Sri Lankan person, a Buddhist priest whom we called Mahendra, about the truth of our relationship – Raja and Sunil both knew of our love for each other but didn’t ask for details and others just thought we were two westerners who had shacked up together out of convenience. We did also open up to a Swedish couple that we met at Arugam Bay and some Australian tourists with whom we got drunk at the opening of the hotel, but that is about it.
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