the back of his hat, but I suspect he was bald ontop and that was why he wore the tam-o’-shanter. Lot of blubber on him.’
And yes, Yvonne, that’s him, they agree in a shared murmur, their heads touching and the electricity flying between them as they gaze at the full-plate photograph she has slipped under their noses. Yes, that’s Vanya from Perm, second from left of four merry, overweight white men sitting in a nightclub surrounded by hookers and paper streamers and bottles of champagne on New Year’s Eve 2008 in God-knows-where.
*
Gail needs the loo. Yvonne leads her up the narrow basement stairs to the mysteriously plush ground floor. Genial Ollie without his beret is stretched out in a winged armchair, deep in a newspaper. It’s not your ordinary sort of paper, being printed in Cyrillic. Gail thinks she deciphers Novaya Gazeta but can’t be certain and doesn’t want to do him the favour of asking. Yvonne waits while Gail pees. The loo is fancy, with pretty hand towels, scented soap and hunting prints of Jorrocks on expensive wallpaper. They return downstairs. Perry remains stooped over his hands, but this time the palms are upward so he looks as though he’s reading two fortunes at once.
‘So, Gail,’ says little Luke smartly. ‘Your shout again, I think.’
Not a shout, actually, Luke. A fucking scream, one that’s been banking up in me for some while now, as I think you may have noticed in the course of resting your eyes on me a little more frequently than the spies’ Handbook of Inter-Gender Etiquette considers strictly necessary.
*
‘I simply had no idea,’ she begins, talking straight ahead of her, but favouring Yvonne over Luke. ‘I just blundered in. I should have realized. I didn’t.’
‘You’ve absolutely nothing to reproach yourself with,’ Perry retorts hotly from her side. ‘Nobody told you, nobody gave you the slightest warning. If anyone was to blame, Dima’s lot were.’
Gail is not to be consoled. She is a lawyer in a brick-lined wine cellar at dead of night, assembling the case against the accused, and the accused is herself. She is lying face down on a beach in Antigua under a sunshade in mid-afternoon with her top undone and two small girls squatting beside her and Perry is stretched out on her other side wearing his schoolboy shorts and a pair of his late father’s National Health spectacles fitted with his own prescription sunglass lenses.
The girls have eaten their free ice creams and drunk their free fruit juice. Uncle Vanya from Perm is up his ladder with the family-sized pistol in his belt and Natasha – whose name is a challenge to Gail every time she approaches it; she has to gather herself together and make a clean jump of it like horse-riding at school – Natasha is lying the other end of the beach in splendid isolation. Elspeth meanwhile has withdrawn to a safe distance. Perhaps she knows what’s about to happen. With the hindsight she is not allowed to indulge, Gail thinks so.
The shadows are back in the girls’ faces, she notices. The professional in her fears they may share a bad secret. With the stuff she has to listen to in court most days of the week, that’s what bothers her, that’s what drives her curiosity: children who don’t chatter and aren’t naughty. Children who don’t realize they’re victims. Children who can’t look you in the eye. Children who blame themselves for the things adults do to them.
‘I ask questions for a living ,’ she protests. She is saying everything to Yvonne now. Luke is a blur and Perry is outside her frame, relegated there deliberately. ‘I’ve done family courts, I’ve had children in the witness box. What we do in our work, we do out of our work. We’re not two people. We’re just us.’
In a gesture intended to ease her stress rather than his own, Perry cranes his body upwards and gives a swimmer’s stretch of his long arms, but Gail’s stress isn’t eased.
‘So the first thing I said to
And yes, Yvonne, that’s him, they agree in a shared murmur, their heads touching and the electricity flying between them as they gaze at the full-plate photograph she has slipped under their noses. Yes, that’s Vanya from Perm, second from left of four merry, overweight white men sitting in a nightclub surrounded by hookers and paper streamers and bottles of champagne on New Year’s Eve 2008 in God-knows-where.
*
Gail needs the loo. Yvonne leads her up the narrow basement stairs to the mysteriously plush ground floor. Genial Ollie without his beret is stretched out in a winged armchair, deep in a newspaper. It’s not your ordinary sort of paper, being printed in Cyrillic. Gail thinks she deciphers Novaya Gazeta but can’t be certain and doesn’t want to do him the favour of asking. Yvonne waits while Gail pees. The loo is fancy, with pretty hand towels, scented soap and hunting prints of Jorrocks on expensive wallpaper. They return downstairs. Perry remains stooped over his hands, but this time the palms are upward so he looks as though he’s reading two fortunes at once.
‘So, Gail,’ says little Luke smartly. ‘Your shout again, I think.’
Not a shout, actually, Luke. A fucking scream, one that’s been banking up in me for some while now, as I think you may have noticed in the course of resting your eyes on me a little more frequently than the spies’ Handbook of Inter-Gender Etiquette considers strictly necessary.
*
‘I simply had no idea,’ she begins, talking straight ahead of her, but favouring Yvonne over Luke. ‘I just blundered in. I should have realized. I didn’t.’
‘You’ve absolutely nothing to reproach yourself with,’ Perry retorts hotly from her side. ‘Nobody told you, nobody gave you the slightest warning. If anyone was to blame, Dima’s lot were.’
Gail is not to be consoled. She is a lawyer in a brick-lined wine cellar at dead of night, assembling the case against the accused, and the accused is herself. She is lying face down on a beach in Antigua under a sunshade in mid-afternoon with her top undone and two small girls squatting beside her and Perry is stretched out on her other side wearing his schoolboy shorts and a pair of his late father’s National Health spectacles fitted with his own prescription sunglass lenses.
The girls have eaten their free ice creams and drunk their free fruit juice. Uncle Vanya from Perm is up his ladder with the family-sized pistol in his belt and Natasha – whose name is a challenge to Gail every time she approaches it; she has to gather herself together and make a clean jump of it like horse-riding at school – Natasha is lying the other end of the beach in splendid isolation. Elspeth meanwhile has withdrawn to a safe distance. Perhaps she knows what’s about to happen. With the hindsight she is not allowed to indulge, Gail thinks so.
The shadows are back in the girls’ faces, she notices. The professional in her fears they may share a bad secret. With the stuff she has to listen to in court most days of the week, that’s what bothers her, that’s what drives her curiosity: children who don’t chatter and aren’t naughty. Children who don’t realize they’re victims. Children who can’t look you in the eye. Children who blame themselves for the things adults do to them.
‘I ask questions for a living ,’ she protests. She is saying everything to Yvonne now. Luke is a blur and Perry is outside her frame, relegated there deliberately. ‘I’ve done family courts, I’ve had children in the witness box. What we do in our work, we do out of our work. We’re not two people. We’re just us.’
In a gesture intended to ease her stress rather than his own, Perry cranes his body upwards and gives a swimmer’s stretch of his long arms, but Gail’s stress isn’t eased.
‘So the first thing I said to
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