Sean Thomas - The Cheek Perforation Dance

Hours pass, maybe minutes. Rebecca moves from Braque to Brancusi, from Hockney to Biedermeier. Finally she finds a book about French eighteenth-century court portraiture. The engrossing book makes Rebecca wonder how she can relate the sensuality of rococo portraiture to her thesis; she knows she can’t, but hey.

Then Rebecca starts. Something has made her pull her head from the book: some subconscious foreshadowing, some creak in the floorboards. Some noise. Turning, Rebecca sees: him. It is him. The thug. The puppy drowner. The very real subject of her very recent lunchtime daydreams is standing in the doorway pretending to look at the book he is holding. The book is an anthology of love poetry, Rebecca notes: but the way he is not truly reading it makes Rebecca realise, with a surge, that quite possibly his real intention is to talk to her; it seems as if he really wants to be talking to her, to be looking at her.

So this is it; my pounding heart surcease , Rebecca thinks. For the moment he, the thug, does nothing. He appears to be about to say something, he is surely struggling for the right words, but nothing yet. Closing her eyes Rebecca starts on wondering what he will eventually enunciate when he works up the courage; with a pole vault in her heart she considers what cliché’d but lovely line of poetry he’ll choose, how he’ll opt to mark this wonderful, enchanted, never-to-be-forgotten moment in their now forever twinned and linked-together lives by saying thou unravished bride of quietness, or maybe carentan o carentan or just possibly I have desired to go, Where springs not fail, to fields where flies no sharp and sided hail, and a few lilies blow.

— Great arse!

He says.

Fleeing the sunshine and the sight of Rebecca, Patrick steps inside a low metal doorway into a tiny badly carpeted lobby, where he is scrutinised by three policemen standing half visible behind big panes of scratched, thickened glass. Patrick leans and explains, through the grille at the bottom of one pane of glass, that he is up for trial. The policeman looks blank, then mutters, then reads from a big book to his side; with a final, diffident glance at Patrick the policeman nods and buzzes a button which slides open the door of a cylindrical plastic airlock to Patrick’s right. Unsure, Patrick turns and steps inside the vertical clear plastic coffin. The circular door behind slides shut; Patrick wonders why the Old Bailey gets its furniture from cheap Seventies BBC space dramas; the arc of transparent plastic that is the door in front jerks open.

Clear of the door Patrick is beckoned through a metal detector arch by the same policeman who gave him the funny look. The policeman then directs him up some steps and turns away as if he does not want to look at Patrick any more.

Patrick approaches some more steps. These are big steps, bigger steps. This is more like it, thinks Patrick. His shoes tap-dancing on the large marble steps Patrick feels a tiny frisson of aesthetic pleasure as he is guided by the dead architect’s unseen hand up and out into the cool marble spaces of the Central Criminal Court proper.

— Patrick

It is his lawyer; and his lawyer’s junior.

— Hello Mister Stefan

— About time!

— Yes er sorry

— You do remember your bail conditions?

Patrick grimaces inwardly, then outwardly. He does not feel like being ticked off, not now, not here. His lawyer seems to notice this. With a lofty chuckle Stefan places a squeezing hand on Patrick’s shoulder. At the same time, Charlie Juson, his lawyer’s junior, slaps Patrick’s other shoulder. Patrick smiles weakly at this display of slightly awkward mateyness, and stares wonderingly ahead. The last time Patrick saw his brief Robert Stefan QC, Robert Stefan QC was in an open-necked shirt leaning back in a relaxed leather chair in his panelled chambers in the blossomy, vernal, High Middle Ages loveliness of a Maytime Inner Temple, discoursing whisky-in-hand-ishly on his wide knowledge of various sex crimes. Here Stefan is in black with a white horsehair wig on his head: looking very serious.

Back then, two months previously, when Patrick had gone to discuss his hopes, his fears, his case, his evidence, his chances of getting jail, cricket, rugby, the precise meaning of the word ‘consent’ as regards rape trials, Stefan had seemed to Patrick rather young to be a top lawyer, a silk, a Queen’s Counsel: which was both worrying and reassuring. Now, here, in the Old Bailey, Stefan seems older and infinitely more serious; which both reassures and frightens Patrick. So Patrick stands here feeling confused; Stefan talks quickly:

— Don’t worry, we haven’t been called yet

— Right

— Ten thirty I think

— Yes

— But I rather think we’re going to be in Court Eighteen are you feeling alright?

— Patch!

Patrick turns.

— I just saw her mother she was staring at me like

— Anderson!

— Chin up you old twat

— Was that her outside? In the school dress?

— First there’ll be jury selection

— Then evidence in chief

— Talk about hooters!

— Joe

Surrounded by gaggles of over-sarcastic friends and an anxious-looking sister Patrick wonders, slowly. For a moment he feels comforted by this mob-handedness: after all, how can anything go wrong, with all his friends and his sister and probably his mother here and … and …

And then he remembers that if this were his funeral they would still be here, all of them, his friends and family, behaving precisely the same way, being chatty yet sad, feeling guilty but laughing, greeting each other merrily and youthfully and then stopping as soon as they remember where they are. And so now Patrick swoons at the thought that this is indeed his funeral, here, stood in the middle of the marble lobby of the Central Criminal Court of Old Newgate Jail he will be gone and never seen again; will be despatched with due ceremony; and with this thought Patrick feels himself transcend, go out-of-body, feels himself levitate above the vortex of buzzing besuited friends and black-cassocked priests-cum-lawyers … he is ascending … ascending to somewhere, to somewhere where his experience is so beyond what they shall ever experience he is beyond the reach of mutual understanding and they shall none of them ever be friends again.

— Patch you nutter I told you not to rape her

— As I’ve said, with previous convictions, the recommended sentence can …

— Tapir!

Crackling through the noise of his friends and lawyers like someone shouting his name at a party Patrick hears a voice come over the court loudspeakers

— All parties in Skivington please go to Court Number Eighteen

— That’s us

Says Stefan.

Patrick breathes in, breathes out. He sweeps a gaze across the faces in front of him: his lawyer, his friends, his sister. His sister Emily. Emily looks back at him. Her Skivington-blue eyes are slightly moist, her hair slightly dishevelled; her caring for him is evidenced in the lack of care for herself. Holding her brother by his besuited shoulder Emily says:

— Good luck, Patrick

— Yeah mate

Says Joe. Someone else says:

— Give ’em hell, y’wanker

A couple of Joe’s friends have slapped Patrick on the back; Joe has done the same. With his shoulder still smarting, Patrick is then man-handled by his lawyers, by Robert Stefan and Charlie Juson, up some more expensively shallow, lavishly marble steps, unto a marble cool corridor. Escorted by his legal bouncers, Patrick walks past other lawyers in wigs and kit, past his solicitor Gareth Jenkins who gives Patrick a thumbs-up, past a girl who seems to be crying, past three nasty-looking blokes with tattoos who are staring at the crying girl. Then they stop before a padded door which is all velvet and wood and dignified weight.