The Adulterants

by Joe Dunthorne

  “One man protests repression in Beijing,” I said, lifting my voice a little, “and another buys a beach house in San Diego. It’s crazy.”

  Liam had stopped taking notes. I’d managed to turn good cop, good cop into sad cop, tired cop. There was a sense they were both thinking of other careers. It was easy to imagine Dana working in events, Liam a driving instructor. Dana took me downstairs and put me in a holding cell. I spoke to her through the slat in the door.

  “You don’t think I’ll get charged, do you?”

  “Not up to me.”

  “Not up to you? Why not?” I raised my voice. “You’re the best damn cop in this whole precinct.”

  “You’re a character,” she said.

  “But if it were up to you, you wouldn’t charge me, right?”

  “Probably not,” she said. “You’d just clog up the system.”

  “I would,” I said. “Bung it right up.”

  She blinked.

  “Sorry. I just feel we have a great rapport,” I said.

  “Sleep well.” The slat slid closed.

  “Guilty people sleep well,” I said, “so I’ll sleep really badly.”

  Murderers sleep deeply after their arrest because it’s a relief to get caught. The innocent lie awake with the fear of wrongful conviction. And what about those of us in a third, unadvertised category who agree they have done wrong in the eyes of the law but believe it was something small and understandable and sleep for a dreamless six hours with full faith in the justice system?

  I woke when Dana knocked, glimpsing the gap in her teeth through the gap in the metal door. “Rise and shine. You’ve been charged with aggravated trespass and handling stolen goods.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “But at least it’ll be dealt with quickly. Riot-related offenses are being fast-tracked.”

  She wasn’t lying. The magistrates’ court was opposite the police station. It was a squat modern building made of brick the color of bread. I followed Dana as she strode across the road, her handcuffs glinting in the sunshine. We descended to a windowless basement room with plastic seats that resembled a bingo hall. I sat with a dozen or so others awaiting justice, all much younger than me, mostly boys, some with legal aid, some with mental-health workers, one Chinese-looking kid with a puffy jacket who wanted us all to know he was representing himself. “I represent myself,” he said. Above our heads hung the judicial coat of arms—a lion and a unicorn; one real, one mythical.

  My defense lawyer was a woman in her forties, Antonia, whose scalloped nostrils allowed tasteful glimpses of purplish capillaries, a nose I instantly trusted. I was to be charged with accepting the stolen beers and entering the estate agent’s. Antonia said that, under normal circumstances, I would plead not guilty and go to Snaresbrook for trial, but that these circumstances were not normal and the judges were on tilt.

  I had such fond memories of jury service, of how I and the other jurors had ganged up on the one woman who thought the guy was guilty, of how we had made her say it out loud—“He just looks like he did it”—before working on her, needling her, using all kinds of musical and condescending tones of voice, a real team effort, until she cried. We set the guy free. He fell to his knees in the courtroom thanking God, which was us.

  “So you think I should say guilty?”

  “That would be my advice. They’ve got you on camera. I doubt they’ll give you a custodial.”

  “Custodial means jail?”

  “Right.”

  “What other options do I have?”

  “Plead innocence, go to trial, roll the dice.”

  “And how long would the trial take?”

  “We won’t get a court date for a month or two.”

  “I’m having a baby in eight weeks’ time.”

  “Then go guilty,” she said. “I’ll work the baby into my statement.”

  I sat behind inch-thick glass at the side of the courtroom. Dana was sitting beside me, openly yawning. The yawn went viral: I watched the young clerk’s jawline pulse, then it spread to the usher, whose teeth popped right out, so he covered his mouth with both hands. This was good news. Chains of yawns are evidence of empathy.

  We waited while some documents were photocopied. By the time the clerk called my name, Dana’s eyes were shut, her breathing slow. It had been a tough few days, but I was still amazed she could sleep. It indicated that she valued my destiny less than I had imagined. All around me there was the oppressive boredom of the administrative staff, the mundanity of watching endless lives ruined.

  One of the magistrates was an old, pink-headed white guy with neck flesh like drawn-back curtains and the other was a middle-aged black woman in a sober shirt-dress. They both looked supremely reasonable, listening with their heads tilted as the prosecutor summarized the police report. “At 5:55 PM, Mr. Ray Morris was seen taking receipt of and proceeding to drink two cans of Carling lager, handed to him by a Mr. Colin Barry, who this court saw yesterday. The beer had been looted from the nearby off-license . . . ”

  The problem with my I-am-listening face is that it takes a lot of concentration to maintain. It’s not possible to listen and look like I am.

  “ . . . Though he was not seen to have stolen any specific items from the estate agent’s, it was clear that he was facilitating and supporting the widespread destruction of private and public property. And we see by his expression in this photo that Mr. Morris enjoyed taking part in the worst unrest in our country for two decades.”

  Unrest was a strange word. It made it all sound like nothing a nap couldn’t fix.

  When it was her turn, my lawyer really milked the baby thing—“looking forward to being a first-time father at thirty-three”—and the community angle—“just yesterday morning, Mr. Morris and his wife were out on the streets with a dustpan and brush”—and she occasionally glanced across, signaling toward me with her open hand, during which moments I angled my gaze meekly downward.

  The magistrates’ chairs squealed as they slid away from their desks to confer. Dana woke up and looked startled to find herself here, approaching middle age in an underfunded police force at the beginning of the third millennium.

  The magistrates rolled back to their desks.

  “Will the defendant please rise?”

  I floated up toward the ceiling.

  A small fine!

  An electronic tag on my ankle the size of a diving watch!

  A hundred hours of community service, which was something I’d been meaning to do for years anyway!

  I wafted down the halls of Thames Magistrates’ Court, admiring the pocked surface of the ceiling insulation panels, the way light from the high windows set aflame the civic handrails.

  For the next eight months, I was not allowed to leave my flat during the hours of darkness!

  No parties! No gallery openings! No theater!

  Only matinees!

  It felt like freedom, this sentence. It felt more like freedom than real freedom had ever felt.

  “Thank you so much.” I hugged Dana.

  “Don’t thank me.”

  I went straight to the administrative office to pay my fine in full. Two hundred and fifty pounds plus a hundred in court fees.

  “Can I use a credit card?” I said.

  “You can,” she said.

  “This one gets double air miles.” I was trying to mock my own entitlement but it didn’t fly. She handed me the card reader. No gratuity option or I would have tipped the judicial system.

  Walking down Bow Road, I was happy that the tag ruined the silhouette of my narrow jeans. I would have to buy different trousers now, wider trousers, and that felt absolutely right. I went to the British Heart Foundation and flicked through a rack of men’s jeans, all the heartbreakingly normal body shapes, sad and varied. I pulled out a pair of eye-blue bootcut Lees, completely undistressed. I put them on in the changing room. Normal trousers are brilliantly comfortable—that’s what th
ey don’t tell you.

  “I’d like to buy the ones I’m wearing and donate these,” I said.

  She held my old jeans up, let the legs unfurl.

  “There’s nothing wrong with them,” I said. “In fact, they were quite expensive. It’s just that they don’t fit me any more, ideologically.”

  I walked back into the street in normal trousers, coming to terms with the fact that I was still someone who could not resist adding the word ideologically.

  I went to call Garthene and saw I had three messages, all from last night. The first read: Product launch? You poor thing. Helsinki? Hellish. x The second read: Why don’t you have a foreign dial tone? The third message: The police are here. They’re looking for you. There were no more messages, just missed calls, six from Garthene and one from a withheld number. Then my phone died in my hand.

  As I climbed the stairs to our flat I began to feel the weight of the tag, how it altered my gait. By the time I got to the top, my legs felt unwieldy, out of sync with each other.

  “Sweetheart?” I said as I opened the door, and then again, “Sweetheart?” as I went into the kitchen-lounge, and so on, through the bathroom and bedroom, “Sweetheart?” There were so few rooms to explore. I plugged in my phone and called Garthene but she didn’t answer. Then I called her again and she’d switched her phone off. I sent six small messages: I’m sorry. / I can explain. / I spoke to the police. / Everything’s fine. / I’m at home. / I love you. xxx

  At ten thirty I heard a car outside and went to the window. There was a blue Vauxhall Astra idling, exhaust fumes lit red in the brake lights. Garthene was holding the passenger side door open and speaking into the car.

  I went to stand at the top of the concrete stairwell. I’d never known her ascend so slowly. Her hand gripped the metal banister, properly put weight on it, in a way that made me realize I only ever held the banister as an affectation. Carrying our child put the discomfort of my tag into context. She paused on each landing. At one point she looked up and the despondency in her expression sent me back inside.

  I put the baking dish out on a cork mat. I’d made lasagna, Garthene’s favorite meal, also her death-row meal. I’d set a fat white candle burning in a clamp jar, but now it seemed inappropriately romantic, that I’d misjudged the mood. I licked my thumb and forefinger and snuffed it out, a thread of smoke unraveling. That left a burning smell, so I opened both windows to get a through-breeze. On hot nights like this the flies come up off the communal bins and three of them immediately entered, but none of this—the smell, the wind, the flies—registered with Garthene as she came in without comment, lowered herself into a chair at the table, and waited for me to explain myself.

  “I’m not going to prison,” I said.

  “But,” she said.

  “But.” I lifted my trouser leg. “I can’t leave the flat after darkness for the next eight months.”

  She turned to the open window. She was wearing one of my baggy jumpers, though I sensed that she had chosen it purely from pragmatism.

  “And I’m sorry I said I was in Helsinki. I didn’t want to stress you. The police thought that I was involved in the unrest.”

  “They told me. They came looking for you.”

  “I’d already handed myself in.”

  “There were three of them in here. They stood around me as I phoned you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why were you in the estate agent’s?”

  “I just wanted some information. About the cash buyers.”

  “Ray.”

  “They’re buying to let. They’ve already got a place in Clerkenwell.”

  “What were you planning to do?”

  “Nothing bad. Just write them a passive-aggressive letter, like a normal human being.”

  She didn’t find me funny. She kicked off her shoes. My ankle was tagged and hers was lost to swelling.

  “Where have you been?” I said.

  “The hospital,” she said.

  “I thought you weren’t working—”

  “I wasn’t.”

  She looked at me. I was being asked to jump to a conclusion. I didn’t want to jump.

  “Is anything wrong?” I said.

  “I had pain,” she said.

  “What kind?”

  “Abdominal.”

  I looked at her bump. Her hands were not touching it.

  “Oh Christ,” I said.

  “The doctor said I was having Braxton Hicks.”

  She scanned my face for recognition. Braxton Hicks were, as far as I could remember, practice contractions and nothing to worry about, but the risk of guessing wrong, of underselling her condition, kept me quiet.

  “They’re practice contractions,” she said.

  “I was going to say that.”

  “They’re normal.”

  “That’s what I thought. So the baby’s—”

  “Fine,” she said.

  I nodded. “And who took you to the hospital?”

  “A colleague.”

  I was not allowed to use this moment for accusations. “That was nice of him or maybe her,” I said.

  More flies had come in and were making weirdly orderly laps of the room. They were restless, high on bin juice. The best way to get them was with the device we kept beneath the sink, a battery-powered tennis racket with electrified strings that we bought on the internet. While Garthene ate lasagna—her fork clattering against the plate, almost no visible signs of chewing—I swung the racket. It killed the smaller flies in a fizz of blue sparks but only burned the wings off the bigger ones. They dropped down and walked around the room on foot. It somehow didn’t seem right to stomp on them, so I trapped each one under a glass, slid a postcard underneath, then took them to the window and let them, wingless, fall four stories, live out their short lives on the street.

  Garthene went straight to bed and I got in beside her. It seemed to me that the structure of pillows she used to support her stomach’s weight and allow her knees and ankles to rest at a comfortable elevation now also functioned as a partition. When I woke in the middle of the night, I found her sitting upright, staring, working through a packet of water biscuits, the motion of her jaw shifting the mattress.

  The next morning, the door buzzer rang. A large, bald man from Serco came upstairs carrying a tool bag and a black, buttonless box the size of a modem. Garthene and I followed him as he measured the flat’s dimensions with a laser pen. Our minuscule flat. It was cruel to be under house arrest when I could not afford an actual house, jailed inside the very reason for my jailing.

  “If you leave the flat after dark, Mr. Morris, then this box will notify us.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And if you tamper with anything it will tell us about that too.”

  “I won’t do that.”

  “Though if you go outside and come back within five minutes, you’re okay. There’s a grace period. If you need to take the bins out or sign for a package or—”

  “Commit a really quick crime,” I said.

  Tough crowd.

  My wife and the man from Serco shared a look.

  My community service began on Monday. I knelt beside the towpath with my fellow convicts, sweating, wearing a high-visibility waistcoat over a council-branded T-shirt. We clipped the brambles to stubs, tore out handfuls of nettles, scratched by the former, stung by the latter, but all pain was good. In my head, I repeated the names of my fellow convicts as an improving mantra: Aaron, Connor, Dave, Dave, Rich, Vishak, Vasile. We uncovered a rotting wooden ladder, a tricycle, sheets of metal, cans of a prehistoric fizzy drink called Enjoy. We talked as we worked. Vasile was an ex-professional cyclist from Romania. His torso was miraculously round, so spherical that it came close to aesthetic perfection, only spoiled by his head and limbs. He brought out a hip flask of vodka and we passed it around until it was empty.

  At lunch, we sat side by side on benches by the river amid the sound of swans barking and the soft clack of our
teeth. We hung our high-visibility waistcoats from the branches of a tree to breathe, the words Community Payback turning in the breeze.

  During the afternoon, we cleared more of the towpath, slower now, eventually passing the horrible maisonette, which was on the far side of the water. In the residents’ car park was a skip half full of rubble: the walls they’d already knocked through. Our work was raising the value of their portfolio.

  Afterward, I volunteered to wash our T-shirts and vests, enjoying the sour stench of them in my arms as I walked home.

  While the clothes were on a hot cycle, I plugged in my tag to charge. I was just one of the appliances now. White goods.

  Garthene texted to say: Out with work. Back after curfew.

  All kisses withheld.

  I hung the clothes on the drying horse in the lounge. I wanted to wait for her to return and see the flayed, fluorescent skins of guilty, repentant men. But it had been the first real day’s work of my pitiful life and I fell asleep on the sofa and woke alone, my lower back throbbing, the vests glowing in the dark of the lounge, the words repeating around me, Community Payback, Community Payback, Community Payback.

  I saw Garthene the next morning. I was up early, charging myself again. I’d chosen a plug socket by the kettle, bread bin, and toaster, just to give me some breakfast options. She stood in the bedroom door in a stretched white T-shirt and boxer briefs.