Precocious Page 17

  I didn’t mention HM. I said I still like him, yes, when she asked, but nothing else. She knows we’re friends, which we are – good friends. According to him. He hasn’t asked me to keep the other stuff secret, but I keep it to myself anyway. I haven’t even told you everything, Dear Diary! Ha ha. (Prying eyes and all that.)

  The whole thing with HM just feels so different from the rest of my life, I have absolutely no idea, if I did want to talk about it, where I would begin or what words I would use.

  Ten-ten, TTFN.

  fifteen

  I dress for court as though for a funeral. Black skirt, black tights. I want to be in shadow, today.

  My hair, disobedient as ever, won’t lie flat. Or rather, on one side of my head it is too flat; limp against my temple, resistant to the coaxing of the brush. On the other it skips out at chin level, a jaunty curl I can only tuck behind my ear. I stare at myself in the mirror. For at least fifteen minutes I’m convinced that today’s outcome somehow depends solely upon my ability to control my hair. My eyes fill with frustrated hot tears and I brush them away impatiently and slick concealer under my eyes.

  You are surprisingly upbeat. Whistling, even. Behind me in the mirror, you straighten your tie, bare your teeth to check for stray crumbs. Is your confidence completely unshakeable? What would have to happen to make you weak, make you crumble? Losing you, you would probably say, and I would smile and nestle into your shoulder, only half daring to believe you.

  ‘Shall we go?’ you smile, as though suggesting a visit to the shops. I nod and follow you numbly out to the car.

  The court building smells sterile, like a hospital. The people in its halls look lost, dazed. Most stare into space. The clicking of heels down wooden floors echoes around the vaulted ceilings of the hallways. I sit on a plastic chair, my hands clasped.

  I can’t help but wonder what Alice is doing now.

  I scan the courtroom desperate to see a friendly face, and dreading seeing a familiar one. I have an aunt who’s been known to pop up in the public areas of court cases completely unrelated to her. And what about the jury? They could be anyone.

  I suddenly remember reading somewhere that in the earliest courts the jury comprised one member of each zodiac sign. That’s why there are still twelve jurors today. The reason was to represent every facet of the human personality and therefore assure the defendant of a fair trial. As they file in I look at their faces, try to read from their clothes, the way they hold themselves, whether they are the type of people who would find you guilty. Am I? I wonder, but I don’t have time to give myself an answer because we are beginning.

  I hadn’t thought about seeing some of my former teachers here. I know you’ve aged, but some of them look ancient. Mrs Syms – my beloved History teacher – is grey-haired now, and seems smaller, her shoulders bony. I don’t like looking at her, and don’t want her to see me. I sink further down in my chair.

  One by one, a procession of witnesses trot out the same mantra. Lines repeat themselves as though from a higher source: well-respected. Unblemished record. Previous good character. Moral.

  When Sister Agnes, the head teacher, takes the stand, I glance at Alice. She looks as though she might faint. A couple of jurors, their faces inscrutable until now, lean forward perceptibly. Who wouldn’t be interested in the testimony of a nun?

  What’s more, Sister Agnes seems to want to take the opportunity not only to defend you but to attack Alice. When asked how she remembers the plaintiff, she scoffs, ‘Hardly a model pupil.’

  Sister Agnes is still a physically slight, unimposing woman, but her voice seems to boom around the courtroom and her stare and her words are like knives. Even Imogen Cartwright has to ask her to stick to the point. When she finally leaves the dock I could swear she casts Alice a triumphant glance.

  Your part is brief.

  ‘Have you ever invited a pupil, past or present, to visit you alone at home?’

  ‘No.’ An unflinching lie.

  ‘Can you explain how this young woman could have provided an accurate description of the inside of your house?’

  ‘Yes, I think I can.’ You smile disarmingly at the jury, address your answer to them, patiently, as though talking to a small child. ‘Alice had an aunt who lived just along the road. It’s a fairly new estate, all the houses have a very similar layout,’ you shrug. ‘Alice was at her aunt’s reasonably frequently as far as I can make out. She could probably give you the exact dimensions of the rooms.’ That smile again.

  ‘And the decor? Your furniture?’

  ‘Not sure.’ You stroke your chin as if puzzled, as if unrehearsed. ‘I suppose it’s possible she may have seen photographs. I have a few family photos on my desk at school. Nieces, nephews, that sort of thing.’

  Imogen opens her mouth to speak but you chip in, ‘Of course, I suppose she may have looked through my window one time on a visit to her aunt’s.’ At this you look directly at Alice, a lingering look. A gentle look. With a soft laugh you finish, ‘But I’m not suggesting she was that obsessed.’

  ‘But you do think Alice Webb was obsessed with you?’

  A sigh, the hands through the hair. ‘I’m afraid so, yes.’

  She had a crush. She’d become something of a teacher’s pet, hanging behind after class, signing up for extra lessons. You didn’t worry too much about it at first – you were pleased because it marked a turnaround in her behaviour, which previously could at best be described as ‘rebellious’.

  Down in what increasingly are looking to me like stalls in a theatre, I catch sight of Sister Agnes nodding furiously.

  The allegations; this is the first time I’ve heard what they actually are, in detail.

  Three counts of sexual activity with a child.

  Once in your car. Twice in your house.

  Described in detail, not by Alice in person, but by a statement written by her and read out. I hear her voice in it. I listen carefully for your voice, for any piece of you in the descriptions, but to my relief I don’t hear you.

  Letters are produced but they’re quickly discounted as nothing can be proven from them. You admit when questioned that it was ‘ill advised’ to write letters to a pupil. You were trying to support her, you say. To ‘reach’ her.

  You were concerned; Alice had stopped turning up for her extra tuition. She was troubled, but she was bright. You wanted to help her. That’s why the letters said things like: ‘talk to me’ and ‘we can sort it out’.

  One of them was signed with a kiss; all with your initial or initials, but never your first name. That, you say, would have been inappropriate.

  Drinking champagne seems wrong, somehow. We’re an odd collection: me, you, Imogen Cartwright, Mr Addison. Mr Addison: star witness! Mr Addison, I mean Bill, Bill Addison, I should call him by his first name, of course, as I silently top up his glass like a waitress. Instead I still see him as my Geography teacher; see chalk in his hand, remember exercise books tossed disdainfully across desks, bored scathing comments from his weasel lips hanging in the air.

  I don’t think he recognises me. Why would he? I don’t suppose he would be expecting to see two former pupils in one day and, besides, he’s engrossed in his own self-importance. I’m just the girl holding the bottle, the girl in black, in the background. Bill Addison, greedy champagne slurper, is too busy swallowing praise: yours, and Imogen’s.

  ‘Now, now,’ he blusters, ‘it was nothing, really.’

  His testimony was key. He was the colleague you had confided in – shared your concerns with about this poor, troubled pupil whom you feared was getting ‘too close’. His words, careful and clear as though rehearsed, were: ‘If there was something going on with the girl, why would Henry have told me his concerns about her?’

  It had annoyed me that he kept referring to her not by name, but as The Girl. Alice, I kept thinking. AliceAliceAlice.

  What an odd foursome we make, laughing and supping our bubbles; looking out over the freedom of the garden.r />
  The dry taste of champagne in my mouth, the smell of freesias, transport me to a summer day only two years ago. I look down at my severe black outfit, feel uncomfortable in the thick tights. Is it so long since I was wearing white?

  Our wedding, over the course of its planning, had become a thing that got out of control, grew legs (‘and hair and teeth,’ Dave used to laugh). Well-meaning aunts and friends had done their ‘bit’ with table decorations, flowers, candles, favours. It had all seemed odd to me; beautiful, but odd, like wearing jewellery that doesn’t belong to you.

  The wedding was a little idyll. It exceeded my expectations in every way. Everyone says it’s the best day of your life and this is the whole problem with marriage, surely? Everything that comes after the wedding, this day of hyperbole, of almost overwhelming pleasantness, is bound to disappoint.

  Even my parents – usually surly and uncommunicative, often with people generally and almost always with each other – were merry and sociable. I actually saw them hold hands. We were both products of so-called ‘happy marriages’, Dave and I, or at any rate, we both had parents who stayed together. Mine seething with barely concealed resentment, mother raging and occasionally leaving, father saying nothing; his so calm and level-headed and fair about everything, you could easily believe they were self-medicating.

  But everyone was at their best that day; the whole event was suffused with a kind of warmth I’d never experienced before.

  Wedding days are always remembered, like childhoods, as warmer and sunnier than they really were. The photographs are always flattering, and deceiving; they don’t capture the moments of stress; everyone is smiling; there’s no way of knowing from the pictures that the bride can barely breathe, laced into her corset, unable to sit down, much less eat a meal.

  But there is a moment I remember with total clarity, exactly as it was. Just after the meal that I couldn’t eat, Dave and I slipped away from the party for half an hour, walked in the gardens behind the hotel.

  There was the overwhelming smell of freesia (meanwhile, in today’s new world, I hover in the conservatory, stare through glass at your garden). And there were sweet peas, and lily of the valley. Sweet, old-fashioned flowers.

  As we walked, fingers interlinked like shy young sweethearts, I suddenly wished everyone else would go home. Everything had changed for us now; we were public property. I felt as though we had made our vows not just to each other but to all of these people. They were our witness; they owned pieces of us. It terrified me, made me want to run away.

  Of course, the evening would roll on and be wonderful, twinkling with candles and stars, and I would forget my fears. But for that half an hour, while it was just us, it was just Us. Us in beautiful clothes, showing our best side to each other, but still Us. And we were Ours, away from the camera flashes and the kisses, we were ours, and each other’s. And I knew that moment was perfect, and would never ever come back.

  And now I find myself staring out of a window, clutching a half-empty bottle of champagne, wondering how the hell I got from there to here.

  ‘Anyway,’ Addison’s blustering voice snaps me away from my memories like a command, ‘it wasn’t me who was the star witness. It was the girl’s mother. Where did you get her from, Imogen? What a coup!’

  Imogen Cartwright smirks. She hadn’t had to do too much. She’d questioned Alice about the problems she’d shared with you. A picture emerged of a vulnerable girl with a troubled home life. A violent father and a mother too weak, or too drunk, to leave.

  ‘And why did you tell Mr Morgan all of these things?’

  Alice was silent for a moment, looked down. In her navy skirt suit she looked like a child who’d raided her mother’s wardrobe.

  ‘Alice. Why did you confide in Mr Morgan about the things that were going on at home?’

  ‘I felt he was … my friend.’

  ‘Anything else? Something you might have mentioned in an earlier statement, for example?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Let me see if I can help you out.’ Imogen lifted a piece of paper and looked at it as though for the first time. In the mechanical voice that signifies quotation marks she said, ‘“I told him stuff, coz I knew he had a weakness for girls with problems.”’

  There was a strange, barely perceptible shuffle from the jury, and the air in the courtroom moved. It was as though you could hear their minds beginning to change.

  From this point Imogen Cartwright was relentless in depicting Alice as a conniving, sexually aggressive, devious girl who had set out single-mindedly to seduce Henry Morgan and in the process wreck his career. The picture didn’t sit well with the pale young woman in the dock, who occasionally shook her head and whispered ‘no’, but otherwise looked beaten. I stared at her bitten-down fingernails. I stared at my own.

  As Mr Addison rightly pointed out, it was Alice’s own mother, however, who would prove to provide the turning point.

  Alice had looked horrified when the woman with bleached blonde hair and a haggard expression took the stand.

  ‘Lies,’ she said simply. She had a lisp that meant she spat at the microphone with every ‘s’. ‘It’s all lies. All that about her dad hitting me? A load of rubbish. It never happened.’ Her bold, unblinking eyes were the only resemblance she bore to her daughter. ‘You won’t find a single person, apart from Alice, who’ll say that it did.’

  ‘But Mrs Webb, why would anyone invent such terrible stories?’

  ‘That’s just it. That’s our Alice,’ she sighed, ‘always been a storyteller.’

  I started as though hearing someone call my name.

  From that point on, it was like watching a building be demolished in slow motion. A psychotherapist’s report citing Alice’s anorexia, self-harm, some delusional tendencies; the minor criminal convictions and failed money-making schemes of Alice’s partner Dennis. What had seemed a huge boulder in your path settled to crumbs and dust; just the word of a girl, a troubled girl, her head in her hands.

  ‘Unreliable witness …’

  ‘Attention seeking, dangerous and plausible liar …’

  ‘Any conviction would be unsafe …’

  ‘In view of Mr Morgan’s previously unblemished character …’

  ‘No case to answer.’

  sixteen

  You’re an avid reader of newspapers, most days. You’re the only person I know who reads every section. Sport, Gardening, Travel. News, Reviews, Business. You even look over the classifieds, although to my knowledge you’ve never bought anything from them. Picking up a Sunday paper after you’ve had it is like sifting through rubble. As neat as you are in every other way around the house, when you read you leave a mess. Pages lie open, folded backwards and over themselves, in the wrong sequence. Articles you’ve paused on are partly obscured by coffee-coloured rings and your doodles, your scribbles.

  But today you turn the pages slowly, meticulously; today you are scouring them only for your story.

  ‘No case to answer,’ you murmur, flicking through the pages, ‘that’s what will be written.’

  ‘Therefore it’s true’, is the unsaid postscript to your comment; ‘what’s written is true’.

  I look at the entertainment section, scan the reviews. Maybe we should go to the theatre this weekend.

  My mobile rings; Mari’s name flashes up. I pause, then pick up with a breezy ‘Hello!’

  ‘Hello …’ she says hesitantly, as though not sure she’s got the right number. ‘Are you okay? Where are you?’

  ‘What do you mean, where am I?’ My voice is too high, too happy, too sing-song. But I don’t know how to stop it. ‘I’m … here.’ I can’t bring myself to say ‘at home’, it still doesn’t sound right. I get up from the table, smiling at you, and wander out of the room. You aren’t looking at me, you’re still studying the papers.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asks again. ‘I saw the news.’

  ‘I know, it’s great, isn’t it?’

  �
��Is it?’

  ‘Of course.’ I try to keep the frown from my voice. ‘No case to answer. The whole ridiculous thing thrown out.’

  ‘Fee,’ she says slowly, ‘he wasn’t found innocent … she was found unreliable. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Is this why you called?’

  ‘I don’t want to hear this’, I want to say. I want to eat breakfast and make plans for the weekend. I’m done with all the analysis.

  ‘No, not really,’ she sighs, ‘I miss you, babe. Wanna get together and throw back some wine? Sit up all night talking about nothing?’

  A strange feeling, like fear, comes over me. As a general rule I love nothing more than an all-nighter with Mari. We’ve always tended to stay in rather than go out; maybe it comes of beginning a friendship in the days when we were too young and too skint to go to the pub; maybe we’ve been trying to keep the spirit of the old parties going all these years. Most likely we just find being ‘out’ too noisy, too distracting; we’ve always had far too much to say to each other to risk it being drowned out by other people’s chat, by the clink of other people’s glasses.

  The thing is, general rules don’t seem to apply anymore. I glance back down the hallway into the kitchen. You’re drinking coffee, looking out of the window now, the papers abandoned on the table. The thought of leaving you, even for a night, fills me with panic. Other people, people outside of these walls, represent danger now. Even Mari, my surrogate older sister.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say; met with silence from the other end, I have to keep talking. I’ve always found it hard to say no to Mari. ‘I mean, I’d like to, but I’m kind of busy, I’ve … I’m …’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she sighs, ‘I get it.’

  ‘It’s just …’ Hopeless; I have no excuses.

  ‘Just let me say one thing, babe. It’s lonely, you know? It’s lonely when no one knows what’s going on in your life.’