11. Guest v. Finbow Day One
GUEST V. FINBOW: DAY ONE
Outside the law courts, the sky is white, the sun half obscured by a fumy haze of smog.
I collapse on a bench at a bus stop and rest my head in my hands, replaying the hopeless spectacle of Anna’s evidence.
A drumming anxiety descends. It has started to seem very possible that the Finbows will lose.
I check my phone. My meeting starts in twenty minutes, and I am about to board the next bus, which will take me north, when I become aware of somebody waiting at the pedestrian crossing. At the sight of her, my stomach lurches. Lucy Ayres, the woman who has sat next to me all day. Oriel’s mother.
Her head moves side to side as she waits for a sensible moment to cross.
I raise a hand in greeting, but she doesn’t see me, and crosses over the road.
I step away from the shelter, just to check which way she is headed.
South, toward Waterloo station. Did she miss me waving?
Or was she ignoring me on purpose? There isn’t much time, yet I find myself following her, darting suddenly into the road so that a cyclist almost clips me.
The man turns and curses, but I’m walking fast along the pavement now, craning my neck to keep sight of Lucy as she reaches the part where the Strand forks in two.
I go after her, entranced. My fast walk becomes a run.
She inches slowly up the right-hand side of the street and, for a while, I am only ten meters behind her.
What is it that compels me to follow? After our shared experience in the courtroom today, I have decided we cannot pass each other like strangers.
We must discuss what has happened. I wonder what she thinks of Anna’s questioning.
Perhaps if we go for a walk she will tell me how Oriel is doing.
Perhaps if I buy her a coffee, I can correct the lies I told her this morning.
I can tell her who I am, how I am really doing.
We pass office workers and tourists on Waterloo Bridge.
I am about to call out her name, when a bus empties its passengers onto the pavement.
Caught up in the swarm of people, somehow, I also lose my view of Lucy’s coarse dark hair.
I cross the river but Lucy is nowhere to be found, and I don’t know why I am pursuing her.
My footsteps slow. I start to feel embarrassed, but why?
I have been ghosted countless times before.
This is always the pattern of things for me: I crave the company of people who vanish.
I don’t know why it still makes me feel so foolish.
As I turn back, an evening newspaper is thrust into my hands.
I tuck it under my arm, making a neat fold between Anna’s and Bonamy’s front-page faces, and walk toward my meeting.
The café where I’m meeting my support worker is north from the courthouse in Clerkenwell.
It’s the kind of place that has framed photographs of the owner on the wall; the owner’s brother and mother, too.
The tea comes stewed from a silver urn, and a bottle of vinegar is set out on the surface of every Formica table.
When I greet Bernard, he gives my arm a quick squeeze. Settling opposite, he tells me how troubled I look.
“This is just my face,” I say, tossing the newspaper to the side.
“Well, in court, you’ll need to cheer up a bit,” he says gently. “Their single aim will be to discredit your character. They barely need to prove or disprove what you say, only to make you sound disgruntled, misguided, angry.”
“What if I’m all of those things?”
He raises his eyebrows. “You’d have every right to be.
But we need you to be calm and objective.
Above all, unswervingly truthful. They’re going to try to make you look obsessive.
Perhaps even a stalker.” Bernard sighs. “For what it’s worth, Augusta, I think what you’re going to do is very brave.
It’s not easy standing up for the truth.
Admitting what happened to you, everything you’ve done. ”
A lump appears in my throat. I concentrate on aligning the salt and pepper shakers to repress it. It’s his kindness that undoes me.
“It’s fine. Honestly,” I say, but my voice cracks. I can barely say the words.
“Not long until all this is over, so just lay low over the next few days. Don’t talk to anyone. We have concerns that she may try to approach you. If that happens, remember everything we told you to do: Don’t engage,” he urges. “And—”
“I know, I know. Don’t engage. Ignore her and walk away .”
Bernard reaches into his pocket, then slips a pamphlet to me: a guide to giving evidence from the Courts and Tribunals Service.
“This is bullshit, fundamentally,” says Bernard. “It sugarcoats the whole thing. But I’m professionally compelled to give it to you.”
There is a guide to the different oaths I can choose to take.
As I read it over and consider the full magnitude of what stands before me, the text grows pixelated.
I can hear Bernard’s phone ringing, as if I’m emerging from a dark tunnel.
Then it’s his soft voice excusing himself as he gets up to answer it.
He slips out of the café, leaving his file—a blue paper wallet stuffed with documents—on the table beside me.
I toss the pamphlet aside and look through the window.
Bernard is still talking on the phone. I bring the file toward me and study what’s inside.
At the top are the notes of what he is supposed to cover in today’s conversation.
Beneath that, my evidence: screenshots of emails and text messages, labeled numerically, with other marks alongside them in blue Biro.
A photo I had taken of Quill and me together, months before.
Then, just under those, is a scan of the most recent photograph I’d sent him.
It had been the most painful evidence of all to provide.
But here it is, scanned and numbered: my favorite photograph.
It’s a Polaroid, showing a group of girls standing in front of a Renaissance church in the corner of a piazza.
The facade of the building is ornately carved in light stone, its surface like gelato, gorgeously whipped and curved.
At the top, there is a mosaic in gold and shimmering blue: the Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome.
Looming above it is the square clock tower, the time showing six, so the light is falling, but you can still clearly see the group of girls—five in total—posing outside it, with arms and wrists intertwined.
Their skin and hair vary in color, but it is all as luminous and creamy as the stonework behind them.
Mary Finbow sits at the front, on the floor, wearing the little red shorts I always liked, her long legs stretched across the cobblestones ahead of her, a Birkinesque wicker handbag on her lap.
And I am there, too, alongside her, my hair sun-bleached and longer.
I am crouching there, smiling dreamily, my hand gripping hold of her knee, barely balancing.