The One Safe Place (12 page)

"I'll go along with you guys. By eventful you don't mean anything I should brace myself for."

"No, only anecdotes to amuse you over dinner. But I'm sensing you have another kind of news."

"Well..." She glanced at Marshall, then leaned close to blow softly at his forehead. "Honey."

"Ye," Marshall said as if he hadn't time to choose a final consonant, and crouched over the book.

"Marshall."

"Marshall."

Hearing them both speak made him look up reluctantly. "What?" he said in the tone of someone wakened from a good dream.

"Nothing too terrible. I'm sure it shouldn't be," Susanne said, and dug in her canvas tote bag. "I've written it all down. It won't be for a while yet anyway. Only Marshall, don't mind if you maybe have to see that man again who broke into our house."

Once Marshall was past the security check and upstairs in the waiting area outside the courtrooms, the building reminded him more than ever of an airport terminal. Beneath the high ceiling of the white hall longer than his street the almost floor-length windows might have overlooked runways rather than people pursuing trajectories across a paved square. Next to the windows bunches of six square red armchairs, rows of three stuck back to back, faced one another all the way down the room. An electronic bell sounded two notes, and Marshall wouldn't have been altogether surprised to hear a flight announcement, but a woman's amplified voice said, "PC Pickles please attend Court 13." Nobody in sight took any notice—not the gatherings of bewigged barristers robed like some of Marshall's teachers, nor the people scattered about the armchairs, most of whom appeared in various ways to be trying not to look like criminals—except for a toddler who began to wail, adding to the echoes mating beneath the roof. A man whose head was shaved so close it seemed a metal plate was showing through the skin released the baby from its stroller and bounced it on his knee, and a man with a wig clasping his head as far down as his ears came forward like Dracula to meet the Travises. "Thank you for being so punctual. We shouldn't be kicking our heels long."

He was the barrister who'd visited their house and quizzed him about the intruder, Marshall saw, and heard him say, "Could the young man sit out while we just have a word?"

"Won't you need him as a witness after all?" Marshall's mother said.

"Mom, I want to."

"I would hope there won't be any difficulty at this stage, Mrs. Travis. If we could..." the barrister said, flattening one palm to indicate a door beside the entrance to the nearest courtroom. "You can amuse yourself for five minutes, can't you, young man?"

"Sure," Marshall said, feeling his face grow hot and his mouth twitch into a helpless smile, and wishing he'd thought to bring a book. "Sure," he repeated to let his mother hear how unconcerned he was, but she gave him one of the looks she often gave his father, which said that both of them knew the truth, before being ushered by the man into the room.

A statue of a draped woman with no pupils in her eyes was lowering her hands to indicate two armchairs whose foam was exposed by gouges in the plastic. Marshall sat on one of their neighbours, but when he felt its tripe of foam shift uneasily beneath him he stood up to read the notices posted outside each courtroom.

The Crown vs. Philip Fancy.
So that was the man's full name. It made him feel suddenly present, and Marshall had to suppress a nervous burp as he stared about at all the people who weren't surmounted by a wig. Reading that the case was being tried by Mr. Justice Melon was reapplying that smile to his mouth when he glimpsed movement to his right, beyond the glass doors which led to the stairs. He glanced that way and saw the identikit portrait coming toward him.

It wasn't a portrait, it was the real face rendered flat and colourless by the coating of sunlight on the glass. The doors were shoved aside, and the face split into three and blazed with sunlight and advanced on him.

For a moment which felt like never again being able to breathe Marshall thought they were all somehow the man who'd forced his way into the house, and then he saw none of them was. One was too fat, the others were too young. Nevertheless he wanted to emit the kind of cry which sometimes wakened him from nightmares as, having veered toward the first courtroom and away after a prolonged contemplation of the notice, they converged on him.

He dragged his head around and fixed his stare on the notice. He was surrounded by a smell of new suits and aftershave and deodorant not quite cloaking sweat. The echoes closed around him to drown him, a burp which tasted like too much breakfast rose to his lips, and a voice said almost in his ear, "Here's the fucker."

It wasn't until the trio moved away that Marshall realised the man hadn't been referring to him. A taste of cereal and eggs and English sausage filled his throat, and he floundered between the glass doors and fled down the stairs to the men's room.

The twin of the outer door admitted him with some reluctance to a white room where two cubicles presented Engaged signs to him. In one of them a man was discovering how many different speeds and inflections he could use to moan "Oh God." Marshall stumbled to a washbowl and splashed cold water on his face, and felt his face drip, at which point the pressure within him relocated itself to his bladder. He lifted his head to the mirror and grimaced at the hair peeking over the back of his head, he ran his comb under the faucet and plastered his hair down with water so nearly hot it came as a shock, and then he raced to the nearest urinal and unzipped himself.

He closed his eyes and tried to sense which muscles needed to be used, but the whole of his groin had been overtaken by an ache. He took hold of his penis and wagged it, appreciating how much bigger it was since West Palm Beach, but what good was size if it didn't work? As he shook it hard enough to make it twinge he heard the inner door judder, and saw its tiny misshapen reflection opening on the pipe above the urinal, and a figure bulging through it. "I thought you must be in here," his father said. "They're nearly ready for you."

"I won't be—I'm just—"

"I know the feeling." His father stood at the adjacent urinal and unzipped himself amid the silence which had fallen. "Just let it come, I used to tell myself. Just relax. Try thinking of a stream running down a mountain. Try waving it about a bit," he said as someone else came in.

Marshall's giggle at the thought of that being overheard shifted the dam. He was jetting pleasurably when a second newcomer said close behind him, "Isn't that fucking—"

"Fucking right it is, Ken."

They were both the younger men. Marshall felt as though he was tethered to the bowl by his urine, and sensed that his father couldn't turn either. When a bell went off overhead he jerked so much that his stream almost swayed out of the bowl. "PC Harry please attend Court Four," said the voice which the bell had announced, and the bolt on the door of the non-groaning cubicle slid back to release a policeman in uniform. "Come on, dad," Marshall whispered, and zipped himself up. "You said they were waiting."

"Give a man a chance to micturate." Marshall's father produced a last trickle and shook himself off and packed himself away, and as he turned from the urinal Marshall saw he hadn't realised who was in the room. The policeman was keeping an eye on the room in the mirror while he washed his hands, and seemed more interested in the Travises than in the two men swaggering to the urinals. As his father pushed him out of the men's room Marshall gave a hiccup that tasted stale. "Don't worry," his father said once the twin doors had thumped shut, "they can't touch us."

Until his father had said that Marshall had believed it, and why should it become untrue because it had been said? They were making so much noise in hurrying upstairs he couldn't hear if they were being followed. He felt safer in the long hall planted with barristers, where echoes and his mother came to meet him. "Won't be long now. The lawyer says just tell the truth the way you told it to him and you'll be fine."

It wasn't until Marshall sat down outside the courtroom that he saw he'd walked past the third man with the face, who was watching him from the row of chairs less than ten feet away and breathing so hard Marshall was almost sure he could see the nostrils widen and narrow with each breath. The younger men barged through the glass doors and caught sight of the Travises, and said something to each other which showed their teeth. They stalked forward to sprawl on either side of their relative and stare at Marshall.

He could stare back. He could stare at each of them in turn, except that he felt as though they were paralysing his eyes in the sockets, around which the skin was beginning to jerk. The men could only stare, and he was with his parents in a place devoted to the law. He swallowed the taste of altogether too much breakfast, and his mother sat forward. "Excuse me, would you mind not staring?"

The six eyes fastened on her, and a virtually identical grin appeared on all three faces. "Fuck off, you silly slag," said the younger man whose name wasn't Ken.

Marshall's father slapped his knees preparatory to standing up, and the speaker and Ken shoved themselves to their feet. "What you going to do about it?" Ken snarled.

Marshall's father sat back and displayed his upturned palms. "I'm open to suggestions."

The man looked as though he might spit on the floor with rage. He took a step forward, clenching his raw fists, and wrenched his arm free as the older man tried to detain him. Surely if he spat someone would intervene—surely they would before he reached Marshall's father, or was everyone too confused by the echoes to notice what was happening? Then the door to the courtroom swished open, and a woman in robes but no wig strode out. "Marshall Travis, please," she called.

A hiccup Marshall had been holding down exploded inside his lips, and he swallowed and stumbled to his feet, raising one hand rather than speak. The young men sniggered, and Marshall's parents turned their backs on them. "Go ahead, Marshall," his father said. "We're behind you."

"That's the boy. This way," the woman urged with an ushering gesture that flapped her robe, and held open the door just long enough for his father to take over the hold before she bustled Marshall through a second door into the courtroom.

The air was full of microphones. More than a dozen of them dangled from a wide sheet of translucent material backed by fluorescent lighting and held up by a lattice set in the high ceiling of the white room. One hung in front of Mr. Justice Melon, a papery-faced old man seated on a dais, who wore robes as red as a streetwalker's dress in a movie and a bib as well as a wig. He watched while Marshall was led to the witness stand, inside which were steps to climb. "Master Travis," he said then, "do you understand the meaning of an oath?"

"Yes, it's swearing." Marshall put his hand over his mouth to straighten his face and keep in a hiccup. "Swearing you'll tell the truth."

"Speak up a little if you would."

Marshall pulled his hand away and leaned closer to his microphone. "Swearing."

"As you say," the judge said after a momentary frown like folds in a sheet of tissue paper, and nodded to the robed woman. "Proceed."

She looked up at Marshall, restricting a smile to her eyes. "Take the book in your right hand and repeat after me..."

Marshall groped for the Bible and almost knocked it to the floor of the stand. His parents had sat on the foremost of several benches on the far side of the courtroom from the judge, and the three men had moved directly behind and above them. The men were staring at Marshall as though to tell him they had only to lean forward and—Then the policeman who'd been in the men's room sat behind them, and Marshall almost hiccupped with relief as he echoed the oath.

As the woman returned to her bench he glanced around the courtroom. The jury of two more men than women seated on a pair of benches opposite him looked sympathetic, and the lawyer who'd been to Marshall's house did, while the other lawyer was murmuring to his assistant and not even looking at Marshall. Only where was the gunman, the intruder? Nowhere in sight, which seemed to mean he could be anywhere, especially behind Marshall, who had to swallow as the lawyer who'd already talked to him stood up. "Just tell the court your name," the lawyer said.

The answer was threatening to be a hiccup. Marshall imagined the three men starting to grin beyond the edge of his vision, and his anger cleared his head and his voice. "Marshall Travis."

"And you live..."

Marshall told him where, and much else in the way of preamble before they came to the events of the twenty-first of June. He supposed the pace was meant to be helpful, but it gave him more time than he liked to wonder if the gunman would be produced for him to identify. Instead he was shown a photograph which he identified loudly, doing his best to ignore the impression that the face was multiplying at the corner of his right eye, and once he'd done that he didn't mind how much longer they talked; he was quite sorry when they finished. He was stepping back, not to walk down the steps but to shift his position, when the other lawyer said, "Just a few minutes, now."

His hair was almost as white as his wig, Marshall saw as the lawyer strolled toward him, an expression of faint puzzlement on his round plump face. He touched his forehead just below the wig with two fingers pressed together, then raised them as though flicking away whatever question he'd thought of. "So, ah, Marshall. Am I allowed to call you that?"

"It's my name."

"We'll use it then, shall we? We're here for the same reason, to get at the truth. Of course you know that, being under oath. Will you do your best to help me understand a few points?"

"I'll try."

"Good fellow." He glanced at the stenographer, who was typing the transcript onto a prolonged sheet of paper with so little apparent effort that Marshall wondered what each key represented. "So here we have you coming home from school on the day in question. A good day as school days go?"

"It was all right."

"I remember being similarly enthusiastic at your age," said the lawyer in the direction of the jury, most of whom more or less smiled. "So about what time do you arrive home?"