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Zara, you talk about Sebastian all the time. I know more about him than anyone else in Bristol, even though you’ve only known him for five minutes and I’ve lived here for years. He doesn’t drive a car because of its effects on the environment. His chest size is forty-four. He votes for the Green Party. He supports Chelsea FC. He isn’t religious. He isn’t superstitious. An Aidan Turner lookalike. A dark-eyed cavalier of a man, whose hairy arms turn you on. His favourite film is Love Actually, which always makes him cry. Thirty-two years old.
He knows how to find the G-spot and tells you you are the first person he has ever been in love with. He told you he loves you, two days after he met you. A real romantic – big time. You love him back. You know I will appreciate him when I meet him. What’s not to like, about a man like that?
THE PRESENT (#ulink_d8eac2af-b61d-5f5d-8703-8f6583f5e9d6)
5 (#ulink_d8eac2af-b61d-5f5d-8703-8f6583f5e9d6)
Her mother is visiting her at the custody suite, allowed to see her in the visit area. Waiting, surrounded by grey sterility. Shell-shocked by what has happened. By what she has done. Exhausted by her long drive from the Lancashire coast.
She is being escorted to the visiting area, along the corridor, not knowing at first that her mother is here. She hasn’t been told. She assumes she’s being interviewed again. When the door is opened and she is brought in, the sight of her diminished mother greets her. She inhales sharply and struggles for breath.
Mother and surviving daughter are standing opposite one another, eyes locked. Her mother sees a bedraggled young woman standing in front of her, panda-eyed from lack of sleep, hair tangled, hands trembling. She smells her other daughter’s blood. Her daughter sees the earthy fragility of her mother’s grief. The damage it has done. Grief more virulent than disease.
Her mother steps towards her. They clamp together. At first, touch replaces words. For a while neither can speak. The more her mother holds her, the more the screaming in her head begins to decrease. Then, slowly, slowly, pushing back the tears, she tells her mother what happened. What her sister did.
The day of the bail application arrives. She is escorted from her cell by a police officer with friendly eyes and a sympathetic smile. The sympathy cuts into her. She shrugs it away, too emotionally closed down to cope with it. She pulls her eyes away from the officer as they step out into the yard and he hands her to the guard.
For the first time in days, fresh air assaults her face. She inhales greedily, drinking it like champagne, but before she is satiated, she is shunted into the van – a cattle van. Or at least that is what it looks like. The sort that takes sheep and bullocks to be slaughtered. The sort she has seen so many times rattling up and down the motorway, making her think how awful it must be to be inside.
Inside such a thing now, in her own pen, which has a seat and a high window. All she can see through the window is sky. She looks up intently. A mackerel sky. Pale blue. White feathers. Beautiful white feathers. She would like to be up there with them, flying and floating, inhaling fresh air. The van sets off, jostling her from side to side. Making her feel sick. Look at the horizon, look at the distance, she tells herself. Her mind rotates towards the feathers in the sky, but still she feels sick. She feels sick as she remembers.
The van finally judders to a halt in a car park at the back of the crown court. Now her experience becomes surreal. She cannot believe it is happening to her. She feels as if it is happening to someone else and she is looking down upon it from above. Someone else being cuffed to a middle-aged guard with grey hair and dandruff. Being taken in a small lift to a holding cell beneath the court. Sitting on a wooden slatted bench, head in her hands, waiting to be called into court. Someone else turning her mind in on itself to close it down and allow time to pass in a mist.
After a while, the grey middle-aged guard is standing in front of her again. ‘You’ve got a legal visit. Your brief.’
She is ushered along a winding corridor, through two metal gates, and escorted into a legal visit room. A man is sitting waiting for her. A man who looks about her age. He stands up when she enters the room. He has golden amber eyes and auburn hair with a wave in it that caresses the top of his shoulders. The shoulders of a rugby player. Smiling at her with a wide dimpled smile. He moves around the plastic table he was sitting at to stand in front of her.
‘Hi, I’m Theo Gregson, your brief.’ His voice is strong and deep.
He takes her hand in his and squeezes it lightly. Her eyes are caught in his. He doesn’t look like a barrister. He looks like the front man in a sexually pumped-up rock band. Springy and virile. About to go on stage to play a riff.
He removes his hand from hers.‘Let’s sit down and talk about the bail application.’
He sits back down at the other side of the table; she sits opposite him. He pushes his hair back from his eyes.
‘I’ve read the papers so far. Bail isn’t normally granted for the defendant in a murder trial, but you have made it quite clear from the moment the police arrived that you acted in self-defence so I am going to give it a go.’
She looks into his amber eyes.
‘Thanks.’
Time has melted away. She is sitting in the dock, behind a wall of glass, next to a rotund guard with a red face. She looks across at her mother in the front row of the public gallery, head turned anxiously towards her. She smiles at her across the courtroom. A whisper of a smile, tangled by grief. Her mother is wearing her best black trouser suit and a baggy frilly blouse, which disguises her love handles. Her heart shreds as she looks at her, eyes stinging with tears.
She searches the courtroom for Sebastian. He is not here.
The lawyers are sitting at the rows of wooden workbenches in the middle of the court. Richard Mimms and the rock star brief, heads together in deep discussion. Her heart leaps for a second. Are they really going to get her out? Then the heavy leaden feeling in her stomach expands and takes over. Wherever she goes from now on her sister won’t be there. Will going home help? Will her memories of her sister assuage the guilt or make it worse?
In the distance of her mind, she sees lawyers on the other side of the court. A tall thin brief, talking to a small pretty Asian woman with a neat face. Lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service. Must be. She can’t bear to look at them. She looks at the floor. At her feet, clad in the sensible flat pumps her mother brought into the custody suite for her to wear. Then she raises her head to check for Sebastian again. He still isn’t there.
The guard nudges her. The court is rising for the judge’s entrance. A judge with a leonine face, wearing blood-red robes. He enters slowly, gracefully, like a swan or a king. He bows to the court and they sit. He asks her barrister to present his case.
Theo Gregson stands. Bull-like shoulders. Strong hair escaping beneath his wig, making his wig balance awkwardly on his head, like a small hat. He coughs a little before he speaks. The judge is watching him like a hawk.
‘I request bail for my client, the defendant, a responsible citizen. No previous brush with the law of any kind. She has stabbed and killed her sister in self-defence. She made that point quite clear from the initial point of contact with the emergency services. She presents no flight risk or danger to the public.’ He pauses. ‘I request bail in these circumstances as my client’s emotional vulnerability after losing her sister means she should be at home, not in prison.’
‘Thank you, Mr Gregson,’ the judge says. His voice is long-vowelled. Almost ecclesiastical.
Mr Gregson sits down.
‘Have the Crown Prosecution Service any comments on this?’ the judge asks.
A barrister from the other side of the benches stands up. The one she noticed earlier with a long thin back.
‘We oppose bail. She is so emotionally vulnerable that she has stabbed and killed her sister. We believe it is safer for all concerned, including the defendant herself, if she remains in custody.’
The judge frowns for a second.
‘Bail denied.’
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