Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

We relapsed into silence again. The cabby was doing his best. Every time we got mired in the traffic he got his A — Z out and started looking for a shortcut. It wasn’t his fault that this part of north-east London was one tortuous, twisting high street after another. There were hardly any alternatives.

It was 10.30. We were stuck in a jam on Leyton High Road. I’d more or less given up. There was sixteen quid plus up in red on the meter. An artic was stranded across the intersection. A roar from behind us and a file of motorcycles came dodging through the stalled traffic, very fast. A blur of dayglo faring, leather shoulders, dirty visors, vinyl tabards and in front, already fast disappearing, the flapping flares of some familiar corduroys.

There was a jolt in the queue. The lights changed and two minutes later we were pulling up outside the court. I leapt out and shoved some bills at the cabby. Jim was being sentenced in Court 19, in the modern annexe. I ran through the car-park and into the building. I slowed to a walk going up the stairs, labouring to capture my breath. In the upper hall a tall black man with a wispy beard approached me. It was 10.40.

‘You must be …?’

‘Yes, yes …’

‘I’m Clifton.’ He extended his hand. It was Jim’s brief. Carol was in a corner with a knot of people standing around a robed barrister.

‘But the case …?’

‘We’ve had to ask for a slight postponement. Mr Stonehouse isn’t here yet.’

‘Isn’t here! Then where the bloody hell is he? The judge is going to take a pretty dim view of this.’

‘I should imagine he will.’

I went over to the corner where Carol was talking to the barrister — a rather hepatitic-looking woman.

‘Oh, hello,’ said Carol and introduced us.

‘Didn’t Jim stay at home last night?’

‘No, I was just saying. He’s more or less moved in with Carlos now. He’ll have been coming from Acton. It’s a long haul across town.’

‘I hope he’s at least managed to put a suit on for the occasion.’

At that moment, the devil we spoke of appeared at the end of the room and walked down it, erect, head swivelling mechanically from side to side. He beamed contempt at the motley bunch of defendants, lawyers, plaintiffs, witnesses and police who waited their turns.

‘Sorry I’m late. Got stuck in the lift. I had to wait for an hour before they let me out.’

Just at that moment the swing-doors from the courtroom swung open and a small throng appeared. The hepatitic barrister pressed through and I saw her lean over and talk to the clerk. I turned to Jim. ‘It looks like we’re on.’ We passed through and into the courtroom.

Jim took his place in a rather long dock to the right of the courtroom. In fact the dock stretched the whole width of the room; there was enough space in it to contain terrorist and stock market multiple defendants. Carol and I took our place at the back of the four rows of tip-up seats immediately to the right of the door we came in by. Together, the seats and the dock faced off two sides of the court. Opposite the dock was the bench; and in the main area, the pit of the court, were rows of desks for the lawyers. The whole place was well lit by flat, flickerless, strip lighting. Every surface — the front of the dock, the lawyers’ desks, the witness box, the bench — was fronted with a light varnished wood. It reminded me of the Old Lecture Theatre at Houghton Street, except that there, all was dark with obscurity. Here, everything was light: truth, the panelling seemed to say, albeit of a particular, restricted, keyline-boxed variety, is about to be pursued.

The presiding judge gave a diffident tap with his little mallet and the court was in session. The clerk of the court rose and read the charges:

‘… that you on the 21st of August did wilfully cause damage to the vehicle belonging to Mr Takis Christos of 24 Rosemount Avenue, Crouch End; that you did thereafter assault Mr Christos; that you did fail to report the accident or to stop after the accident; that you did assault a police officer who came to interview you concerning the accident on the 22nd of August at your place of work. How say you to these charges, guilty or not guilty?’

‘Guilty.’ Jim sounded like a large plastic doll, the word ‘guilty’ wheezed out of him in a breathy, strangulated voice about an octave higher than I’d expected. It was clear that all his bravado had deserted him, he was frightened. A sharp toothpick of compassion entered my heart. My friend was on trial. It was painfully ridiculous.

‘Mr Stonehouse.’ This was the judge, a dormouse figure perched up on his high chair. He was little and pink; a quivering snout quested out from under his wig, his pink eyes blinked as if they had been recently washed in tea. ‘Can you tell the court why you were late arriving here this morning?’ The judge had an incongruously weighty and judicial voice. Imposing and threatening in equal measure, he must have practised a lot when he was by himself.

‘I got stuck in the traffic, your Honour.’

‘I see. Where were you coming from?’

‘Acton, your Honour.’

‘And at what time did you set out?’

‘8.30, your Honour.’

‘I see. It took you nearly three hours?’

‘There were extremely bad road-works in Hackney, your Honour.’

‘I see, I see.’

The prosecution counsel came to Jim’s assistance.

‘There were indeed bad tail-backs through Hackney, your Honour, I was caught in them myself.’

‘All right, all right. This is a court of law not an AA incident room, let’s get on with it.’

The prosecution set out its case. Counsel, the policemen and even Mr Christos kept things brief and to the point. I sensed from the manner in which they gave their evidence that they all believed that Jim was cracked and didn’t really want to see him go down. There was little vindictiveness in the way they spoke about him, it was rather that they were all playing their part as subsidiary cogs in a well-oiled machine. At each juncture the QC asked the judge if he wanted to ask further questions — the only time he did ask one, it was addressed to Mr Christos.

‘I have a note here from the police saying that you have been unable to present your own licence and insurance documents, Mr Christos. Is that correct?’

‘It is true, yes, but I have them, but in the post like I say to them, from Swansea, like I say.’ Mr Christos was a very short individual, globular with tufts of hair protruding irregularly from a balding scalp. It was very difficult indeed to visualise him as a representative of that great, quiescent multitude which Jim believed to be awaiting the onset of the millennium in a lather of spiritual anticipation.

‘See that you present your documents as soon as they become available.’

‘Of course, of course, like I say …’ The judge cut him off with a paw gesture. The fruitier rejoined his friends who were sitting in the row in front of me. They were a couple of sharpish young men who looked like estate agents; and a plump woman in late middle age wearing elephantine slacks and a CND sticker on her raincoat.

I had no time to consider the implications of this. The hearing rolled forward. Jim’s hepatitic barrister got to her feet and looked yellowly around the courtroom, checking no doubt that all her witnesses were in place. The witnesses turned out to be me and a Dr Busner from Heath Hospital. Busner was the psychiatrist who had been charged by the Highgate magistrates with the job of assessing Jim’s state of mind. Busner took the stand.

‘You are Dr Busner, a consultant psychiatrist at Heath Hospital?’ There was a pause. Busner was an ageing hippy with grey, collar-length hair. He wore a striped poplin suit and a tie like a rag. I vaguely recognised him, but couldn’t pin down the recollection. I’d never seen him in the flesh before, of that much I was certain, but perhaps on television. He’d have to be a pretty damn good witness to justify turning up in court in that rig. If I was the judge I would have sent Jim down just on the basis of his expert witness’s apparel.