Apple Tree Yard (12 page)

‘Shall I get you a coffee?’ I say, in a voice I mean to be kindly and understanding but to my ears sounds patronising.

You don’t seem to notice that you’re being patronised, or if you do, you’re too distracted to care. ‘White americano,’ you reply, no thanks or acknowledgement, and you get one of the phones out of your pocket again and immediately start checking emails. It’s hard to know what to do at such moments. It is human nature, faced with such behaviour to become annoyed and demanding but of the many roles I would like in your life, petulant mistress is the last, so I rise and go to the counter. When I have ordered, I look back at you – you are tapping something into the phone. I pay for the coffee and glance back again, still standing waiting at the counter. You are tucking the phone into an inside pocket – and, then, that done, all at once, you look at me and see me watching you from where I stand, and there it is: that coruscating smile. And I know that whatever was bothering you has been resolved and that for the next few minutes or however long we have, you are mine.

I turn back to the counter as the barista places the coffee in front of me, pick it up, and then make my way back to you, weaving between the crowded tables. I do not look at you, but know that you are looking at me. Now, I have your attention. I ease my way through the tight spaces between chairs with a sideways sway of my hips. I know that the dress I am wearing flatters me, the fine black material gathered and ruched in the right places. I know it makes me seem voluptuous rather than plump, and that this is something you are observing. It is an odd and arbitrary business, getting you to notice me. I was wearing exactly the same dress when you entered the café but your mind was elsewhere. Now, suddenly, I am receiving the full beam of your attention, and the more you stare the more I sway and the more I sway the more you stare and by the time I reach our table, I am wet already, just from being observed by you, and your lips are parted slightly as I place the coffee down in front of you.

‘You know it’s really quite demure…’ you say, nodding toward the dress. Still no
thank you
.

‘Think so?’ I smile.

‘Well, your text said
party
frock. It’s longer than I expected, long sleeves, but that bit…’ Your gaze lingers on the wide space above my cleavage. This part of me has not aged, for some reason. I have yet to grow the brown spots and lizard lines that some women do, although I am sure it won’t be long.

I raise my own coffee to my lips and take a sip, looking at you over the cup as I do. You watch me carefully. I put down my cup and wait for you to speak.

You lean forward in your chair. ‘Go to the Ladies and take your knickers off.’

I stare at you. You move your head in a small gesture:
go on
.

I rise from the chair again with the same disbelieving mixture of irritation and compliance I felt when I got you your coffee while you checked your emails. What am I? What do you think I am?

In the Ladies toilet, I pee, then do as I am bid.

What am I? I look in the mirror as I wash my hands afterwards. My knickers are balled up in my handbag.

As I emerge from the Ladies, you are watching me, and you continue to watch me as I make my way through the tables. You glance at the length of my body and raise your eyebrows. I sit and open my handbag. You peer in, then without even looking round to see if we are being observed, reach in for the balled-up pair of knickers and enclose them in your fist. You lift your hand and look at the knickers briefly before tucking them into your coat pocket. ‘A thong. Easy access eh? Demure dress but a thong underneath. Nice.’

I affect outrage, although I knew that was what you would do. ‘Give them back,’ I hiss, looking around. The other tables are close to ours but we are slightly lower because we are sitting on the easy chairs and the murmur of conversation is loud enough for us not to be overheard.

‘No,’ you say, staring into my eyes.

‘Give them back,’ I repeat, achieving an easy mix of laughter and insistence.

‘You’re wearing hold-ups, aren’t you?’

‘It’s warm tonight…’ I laugh, but awkwardly because the truth is, I wore hold-ups for you in anticipation of exactly this scenario.

‘Go to the party with no knickers on. Wander around and only you and I will know. But the men will all be like dogs. They will be able to tell even though they don’t know what it is about you.’

‘You won’t even be there.’

‘I’ll still know.’

‘Give them back.’

‘OK, in a bit. I’m just keeping them hostage for a while… OK?’

You reach into a pocket for your phone and for a minute I think you are going to check your emails again but you press a few buttons then hold it out to me. ‘This is what I did in my lunch hour this morning, thinking of you.’

My sweet, I never owned up to you then because I didn’t want to deflate you but the videos never did it for me. They say men are turned on by images, women by words. I don’t know if that’s true. I liked some of the visuals. I liked the photo of you that you sent me once where you rested your phone on the dashboard of your car and took a picture of yourself, cross-looking, stuck in a traffic jam. I don’t know why I liked that one so much, but I did. It was the combination of you looking cross and sexy with the fact that you wanted to share this with me, that you were annoyed about being stuck in a traffic jam. Extraordinary what can be arousing. Your simpleness, that was what turned me on that evening in the café. It wasn’t the video – it was your plain belief that what did it for you did it for me and that that was all we needed. Your straightforward and profound arousal: your bossiness combined with your need; you were like a toddler sometimes. You wanted it when you wanted it, right there and then. Did I desire you so much that day because I was enjoying being wanton or enjoying indulging your desires? Truly, there are some things that scientific research has yet to explain.

About half an hour later, I say to you, ‘I should go. I should be there for the speeches.’

‘Are you going to have a good time?’ you ask, suddenly sulky.

‘You bet,’ I say. I’m in an upbeat mood and it shows, drunk on your desire for me even before I get to the party and have any alcohol. I haven’t quite worked out how to get my knickers back.

‘Come on,’ you say, and rise from your chair. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

We leave the café and I turn towards Piccadilly but you turn in the opposite direction, heading south, and begin to walk down Duke of York Street. I catch up with you and look at you but you seem distracted again. Halfway down, you stop, quite close to the café where we had our first coffee and I wonder if you are about to remark on it. Then you start walking again, striding off without even looking to see if I am behind. I catch up with you, a little out of breath. You glance around, then stand on the kerb for a moment, leaning forward, about to cross the road. A taxi comes swinging round the corner and you put out a hand to bar my way. As it sweeps past, you step out and I follow.

On the other side of the street, you walk down a small street that forms a dead end. Although this is a busy area, with early evening drinkers carousing behind the leaded windows of a pub on the corner, there is nothing down this side street – no pedestrians and no cars as it is restricted parking. There are no entrances to the buildings either – both sets of buildings show us their backs, their blank double-doors for loading and unloading. There are no handles to the doors. People open them from the inside to receive goods, that’s all.

I know what you want – it was obvious as soon as we turned into this small dead end. There is a doorway, halfway down on the left. You hustle me into it, with my back against the door, tucking yourself in against me so that we are sheltered us from sight of anyone walking down the main road. We are overlooked only by the back of the building behind you, which you assess for a moment and decide is safe, before turning to press your mouth down on mine. As you do, you raise the skirt of my dress and your hand is hard and warm and, well, how can I put this? You always did know which button to press.

And then you are inside me, and I don’t believe we are doing it, in Piccadilly, in the rush hour, with a thousand people hurrying by a few metres away.

Afterwards, you press your mouth against mine again, briefly, and return my knickers to me, then step back, scanning from left to right as you do, as I pull them on over my hold-ups and boots. No one has walked down the street during that time but we have been only a matter of minutes. Before we step out of the doorway, you look at me, smile, then lift your forefinger and stroke it down the length of my nose. ‘OK?’ you ask softly. I nod.

We walk back down the street together, toward the bright lights and the bustle of commuters, me a little unsteady in my heeled boots. As we reach the end of the alley, I glance up and see its name on a high plaque:
Apple Tree Yard
. 

Part Two

A, T, G and C

7

Being in the dock at the Old Bailey is like being a member of the royal family – or a president or pope, perhaps. Sitting there, surrounded by guards and bullet-proof glass, is probably the closest an ordinary mortal can get to replicating the state of constant protection that such people live under. People are not horrible to you when you are a defendant in a criminal trial: people are kind, in an infantilising kind of way. You are the centre of everyone’s concern. It is all about you.

Although the dock is at the back of the court, the court is shallow and wide, so you can see everything before you. The only person whose view is as good as yours is the judge, directly opposite. You and the judge are the North and South pole of the judicial process. You are escorted to and from the court, so is he. You are fed, catered for – so is he. You and he both have the power to stop proceedings, object to jurors, challenge witnesses – although you must do it via your advocate. There is only one difference between you. He is North and you are South – you are each other’s inverse but there is no doubt who sits on high. He might send you to prison for the rest of your life. You have to try not to think about that bit, though, because if you do, you will go insane.

The best way of not thinking about that bit is to think about your rights. Your rights matter here, and part of the judge’s job is to have due regard for your rights. Robert, my barrister, told me the only thing a crown court judge fears is a successful appeal. They don’t even like unsuccessful ones. It is the only time their judgement is called into question. For that reason alone, the judge, however powerful, must be vigilant. Your rights and needs must not be traduced or ignored in any way. This gives you a sense of power – fragile, illusory perhaps, but power nonetheless. And so, for the duration of the trial, you and the judge feel not so much opposites as partners locked in a kind of arranged marriage. You spend a lot of time staring at him, wondering who the hell you have been landed with. He spends a lot of time staring back, no doubt wondering the same.

*

During the opening days of the trial I followed the evidence closely, of course; every remark from the prosecution barrister, the demeanour of each witness. There was a sharp difference between the professional witnesses – the forensic experts, the police officers, Witness G – and the amateurs, the bystanders: the young man from the grocer’s shop who saw you getting into my car, the landlady, the taxi driver. The professionals often remained on their feet in the witness box, addressing the judge with sharp deference, reading the oath clearly and loudly. The amateurs gave a little bow of gratitude when the judge said to them, ‘Behind you, you will see a drop-down seat, please feel free to use it…’ and then sat with alacrity, eager not so much to get off their feet as to do anything the judge suggested might be a good idea. They looked frightened but brave, determined to do their duty.

At first, as each witness was speaking, I stared at them, as if I could read in their faces my eventual fate, as if each statement, no matter how insignificant or banal, might be the turning point in my ordeal. If anyone said anything I disagreed with, I made a note of it and raised it with Robert at the end of the day.

Later on, I came to realise that none of these witnesses would prove crucial to the way our trial would go – there was only one witness who would do that: me. But I did not have to take the stand during the prosecution case – the prosecution had no right to oblige me to do so. No defendant can be compelled to speak as part of the case against them.

Even during the prosecution case, when I expected to be concentrating carefully, knowing I would later take the stand, there were so many longueurs and legal arguments when the jury was not allowed to be present that my attention would sometimes shift momentarily from the professionals and my gaze would flick up to the public gallery. It remained empty for some of the trial – there were parts of my evidence when the public gallery was emptied, and it was closed for Witness G, of course. Sometimes the security guard was slow about admitting people in the morning or after the lunch break and the door only opened well after proceedings were under way. Susannah told me later that there was a lot of waiting around on a concrete stairwell. The first day she arrived she was caught out, as many are, by the ruling that mobile phones are not allowed in the gallery and there is no locker or cubbyhole in which to leave them. A security guard told her that if she went over the road to the café, the owner there would look after her phone if she paid him a pound.

Susannah was in the gallery nearly every day – she used up half her annual leave in order to support me. She, too, had a notebook. The jury must have noticed her and probably assumed she was my sister, or a cousin, and as she is the nearest I have ever had to one, that was fine by me. My mother died many years ago and I’ve hardly seen my father since he moved to Scotland with his new wife, just once every few years. He and I spoke on the phone a grand total of three times while I was on bail. My brother lives in New Zealand. So it was just Susannah up there, amongst the students and retired people and the occasional gawper whose role I couldn’t identify.