Our Kind of Cruelty(62)

There is so much empty time in court, so many hours pass in which nothing is really said or established. I find myself looking at the dust which collects between the glass and the wood of the enclosure they have put V and me into. I try not to look over at her too much and she never looks towards me. But there are moments when something is said and I feel the pull between us like a wire, feel us reaching and straining for each other.

People stand, people sit, the judge nods and the barristers speak to the jury. The jury frequently looks over to V and me; I can feel their eyes on us and I know they have no idea what to think because they are such ordinary people, puffed out by life. The charges seem so large: murder for me and accessory to murder for V. And I know the jury is so far from being able to make these sorts of decisions about us. They seem like nothing more than children being told bedtime stories when Xander and Petra speak to them and I am not sure they even listen to the details. I see them yawn and rub their eyes sometimes; one of the young men looked hungover a few days ago.

And sometimes I hardly blame them because so many stories have been told in here it is hard to grab hold of what they mean. Sometimes even the witnesses change their minds halfway through as the questions switch between Xander and Petra. Angus’s brother, Frederick, told us that they had all liked Verity and had never seen Angus so happy. But he also said that sometimes it had seemed too much, that maybe you could say he was almost under her spell, that it was a lot of money to leave to someone you had known for such a short time.

I hate the thought of V having Angus’s money. I think we should burn it. I think we should fill his stupid show-off house with notes and set fire to it, watch it dissolve into the air like the nothing it is.

We had to listen to the man all the papers have been quoting; he was called Gordon Sage and he was paraded in front of us to speak about the things he and V had done together when they were eighteen.

‘I must confess I found her scarily sexual,’ he said, his piggy eyes staring out of his fat, rugged face as though they could still see her naked body. ‘She had this thing for doing it outside.’ He licked his lips and I felt something rise through me so I was worried I was going to be sick on my shoes and fill the court with the acrid stench of bile.

I looked over at V but she had shut her eyes and was leaning her forehead against her hand. I turned my attention back to Gordon Sage and saw his fat fingers curving round the wood of the witness box. I imagined them inside V. ‘But then one day she got a friend to ring and say it was over, no explanation or anything. In fact we never spoke again.’

I imagined V screaming underneath his corpulent body and I knew then why she needed me to always save her from men like that. All the Gordon Sages I had peeled off her in nightclubs, all the times I had stopped them pawing her body and breathing on her neck, little droplets of spittle landing on her skin, so she would be tainted by their DNA. I would prise his fat fingers off one by one, bending them so far back each one would break and he would end up snivelling on the floor, snot dribbling from his nose.

Xander liked Gordon, or at least what he brought, as he put it. ‘They tried to call some American woman you worked with over there,’ he said when we met beneath the court after that day. ‘I’m presuming it was that girl you slept with. But she’s refused to come and the judge said he didn’t think it was relevant anyway. He actually said that he wasn’t interested in your sexual adventures.’ He laughed. ‘I thought Petra was going to burst when he said that. Good old Smithson, never disappoints.’ I couldn’t really understand what he meant, but I didn’t care, because the thought of V having to sit in the same room as Carly made my skin itch.

On other days my brain has felt overused, as if words are turning in my head and banging against the side of my brain, chipping my skull so that fragments of bone are imbedding themselves in places they shouldn’t be. I wonder now if the woman who called herself Mrs Lascelles really was my old headmistress, because nothing about her felt familiar. She could have gleaned a lot of what she told the court from any newspaper: like how my clothes were often dirty and I was small and thin for my age. But she also spoke about things I find hard to place, like my ‘violent temper’, as she put it. She said I was always starting fights and that lots of the parents complained about me. She said the other children were frightened of me, even some of the staff. Sometimes I had to be restrained, one teacher carrying my legs and one my arms, to remove me from classrooms.

Her words scratch at my head and at times I have thought I am going to remember something, but it always remains tantalisingly just beyond my reach. She didn’t blame me, she said, trying to catch my eye as she spoke. They knew there was trouble at home, but however many times they questioned me I never admitted to anything, always saying everything was fine, even when it so obviously wasn’t. They were in contact with social services, but they hadn’t known how bad it was. Naughty children are never anything more than bad parents, she said, her understanding radiating off her like a bloody halo.

But then there are others, like Sarah Cross, who felt like being reunited with an old friend. She smiled at me when she stepped into the stand and I remembered how warm she had always been, how she’d give you a hug even when she wasn’t meant to or sneak you an extra biscuit. She was rounder than she’d been when I’d known her and she had heavy bags under her eyes and a nasty cough which attacked her sometimes as she spoke.