Sean Thomas - The Cheek Perforation Dance

The door opens, they step through; the door closes quietly and slowly behind. Patrick lets himself be led into a wooden-railed dock. The dock. Patrick sits down on a crap plastic chair and gazes around Court Number Eighteen. It is a long high soft-lit soft-white light-brown-wood-panelled courtroom. A clock ticks on one wall. The other wall is taken up by a jutting gallery; the public gallery? Patrick presumes it is. Patrick leans to try and see who is seeing him from the gallery; he can’t quite see. So instead Patrick looks at the royal crest, the Lion and Unicorn above the judge’s big wooden throne at the end.

The judge isn’t on his throne, isn’t in the courtroom, but lots of other people are: a clerk of the court; what Patrick assumes is a stenographer, though he isn’t sure what a stenographer is; his own lawyer, now opening his briefcase; another lawyer-type, but older, (older? wiser?? the prosecution???) opening his own briefcase; his solicitor, doing nothing ( nothing ?); some security musclemen who are standing ominously nearby; a yawning policewoman; another policewoman chewing gum; another clerk of the court; and a couple of seedy-looking guys in cheapish suits who are staring him out from some of the side galleries ranked beside the dock. Journalists? Patrick shakes his head and stares at the royal crest above the judge’s seat. Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense.

Something about this agitates him. In his dock, in his seat, Patrick swallows. Although Patrick knows it is a trick, a stunt, a sleight of the psychosocial hand, he feels his pulse race, his heart go fast: the Majesty of the Law. He might have been in courts before, but they were nothing like this.

Patrick is, now, suddenly, again, scared. He feels like a small boy sent to the headmaster’s study. Like a schoolkid walking down the corridor, heading for detention … Except this time his detention will result in his spending fourteen years in a cold northern jail before having three broken lightbulbs shoved up his arse by his gay psychotic car-jacking Kurdish cellm …

— All Rise

Everybody in the court who wasn’t standing now stands; at the back of the court beside the judge’s throne a clerk opens a door and a small oldish man walks in wearing a larger wig. The man ascends to the throne and sits down and gazes around and says:

— Good morning, everybody

A good morning is mumbled back by everybody. Everybody sits down who seems to be allowed to sit down; Patrick does the same. At once people start chatting, opening folders, relaxing, moving about the courtroom confusingly but confidently: just people doing what they normally do, on a normal day. Normal day! Patrick sits there, marvelling. Then Patrick’s lawyer leans across to chat to the man whom Patrick presumes is the prosecution lawyer, Alan Gregory QC. The prosecutor nods, nods again, and then laughs.

!

The spittle of outrage fills Patrick’s mouth as he sees this open collaboration, this evidence of conspiracy. How can they be chatting? Laughing? Chatting? Jesusfuck! Patrick is outraged, helpless, stuck in his blue plastic chair in the wooden dock, palsied by impotent anger. Colluding! Conspiring! Chatting! Patrick wants to shout out at them: Wankers! Jobsworths! Toffeewombles!

But Patrick does not shout this; shouting out swearwords isn’t going to do anything. He realises this. The judge might be a pantsucking fuckbat but …

The judge!?!

Patrick eyes up the judge. A good man, surely, hopefully, pleaseGod, yes. Yesyes, a good man. Yes. And so Patrick calms down, and so Patrick calms down. And so he calms down … until he has another spasm of panic when he realises that he can’t see his friends. Where? Where! Scandal! Before it has fully dawned on Patrick that they are in the public gallery and the public gallery is virtually directly above him, overhanging him, and therefore invisible to him, some official stands up and says:

— Stand up!

Patrick looks around the court to see which idiot is being bossed in this way. Then he realises it is him: Patrick Skivington. Obediently Patrick stands, and steadies his knees. The clerk, or whoever it is, says:

— You are Patrick Skivington of flat two, number thirty-five, Leominster Place, London WC1, correct?

Patrick nods and croaks a quiet yes. The clerk says:

— You are charged that on the night of August twenty-eight, two thousand and – Patrick jibes; was it that long ago? The clerk completes the date; then pauses, slightly, before saying – raped Rebecca Jessel, contrary to section one of the Sexual Offences Act of nineteen fifty-six – Another significant pause; another glance up – How do you plead?

OK, OK, OK. Patrick takes a grip of his thigh. OK. Ready. Ready-ready. Firm voice. Big voice. This is your chance. For months Patrick has waited for this moment, this moment when he shall express all his outraged innocence, all his innocent hurt, all his unjustly tormented truly-suffering-selfness, in two words. He has only two words, two words to say it all, all he’s felt over these last months, this last year, all he felt in prison, all he felt in his cell, all he felt on remand: and so Patrick stands, and lifts his chin and looks directly at the judge, at the Queen, at God, and asseverates, with all the self-righteous self-justification he can adduce in a tone of voice:

— NOT GUILTY

Half a second passes while this sinks in. Then, nothing. Contrary to Patrick’s quondam daydreams of the last year, the tone of outraged innocence in his voice fails to instantly convince. The proceedings are not summarily dismissed. The court is not in uproar. The public gallery is not full of hat-waving citizens demanding his immediate release. Nor does the judge glance sharply across at the clerk and say what is this obviously innocent young man doing here, let him go at once.

Instead the judge clears his throat and says:

— OK I think we’ll have the jury in

— Call the jury!

— The jury …

Patrick sits down. Around him notepapers have been unfoldered, pens clicked on, wigs taken up. Then the main door opens, and a procession of people are led in, Indian file, one by one. Two of them are indeed Indian: a youngish fanciable girl, and a middle-aged woman in a horrible, oversized jumper. Urgent, Patrick scans these two, and the rest of the jury. Patrick tries to remember Stefan’s advice not to eyeball the jurors for fear of frightening them, but he can’t help himself. These people are going to be holding his bollocks in their hands, and he wants to assess their bollock-holding fitness-for-purpose.

Eight of the jury are women; only one (a man in a battered brown-leather jacket, with a wry intelligent smile) is the sort of person Patrick would consider even sharing a couple of beers with. Apart from the cute Indian girl. One of the men, a darkish, shortish, possibly foreign man, has an eggshell-blue nylon shirt on. With a glossy green leather tie.

Patrick shudders.

He is doomed.

One by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one the jury is sworn in, each taking a bible in hand:

— I swear by Almighty God to do my best to try the defendant according to the evidence presented …

As the jury is sworn in, Patrick weighs up the irony of the fact that he is about to be tried by a man wearing a green leather tie. His fate is about to be decided by a man who buys his clothes second hand in … Azerbaijan. This pleasurably snobbish line of thought exhausted, Patrick finds that after this he is actually growing very very very slightly … bored. Bored? Patrick’s sense of doom, of pointlessness, of almost-being-extraneous-to-proceedings has metamorphosed into a kind of numb dull indifference which is barely a whit away from … boredom. From his dock seat Patrick idly gazes at the female stenographer, wondering what her nipples are like; until he is shaken out of his maudlin torpor by the annoyingly pompous voice of the prosecutor, Mister Alan Gregory QC.