But For The Grace

Enclosed in the booth, his isolation emphasised his position as the focus of the room. The glass forming the walls from waist-height upwards was unnaturally clean, except for an oval-shaped smear in front of his mouth. He wore black; black suit, black tie, with a white shirt. Helen had no idea whether the outfit was a ten-a-penny Primark effort or a carefully-sourced investment – how could they tell, she’d always wondered, when someone described a suit as ‘beautifully-cut’? 

“Court rise.” 

Thirty seconds later the raised desk at the front of the courtroom was occupied. Helen’s attempts to prepare herself for this moment now felt absurd, since nowhere in the imagined scenarios that haunted her had a plump, middle-aged woman appeared. The judge’s eyes swept her audience. 

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is a criminal case.” Her voice was gentle, with a trace of a Manchester accent.

 "You will be asked to decide if the defendant is guilty or not guilty of the offence with which he is charged. You have been instructed how to proceed should you require clarification or if for any reason you find yourself in difficulty. Please raise your hand if you have not received or understood these instructions.”

The jury’s collective attempt to mirror the behaviour of the professionals was laudable, if a little ridiculous, as they straightened their backs and nodded raised chins, whilst maintaining their solemn expressions.

She softened her voice further.

“You will hear accounts that contain some distressing details.”

Helen’s breath left her lungs as her heart raced.

“You must listen carefully to all the information presented to you, in order to reach a fair conclusion. A young man has lost his life. You must decide whether that life was taken from him unlawfully, and whether the defendant was responsible.” 

Did she have a child? 

Helen had a child.

Helen stood in a small, cluttered kitchen, the lives of neighbours above and below an ever-present sound track. She liked knowing that the two of them were sandwiched between secure families with the right balance of people. The weak February sun was already low in the sky, striking the perfect angle to highlight the sticky handprints that marked ownership of everything below waist level. Plastic farm animals consorted with dinosaurs on the linoleum floor behind Helen, as she spooned sweetcorn and cauliflower from a saucepan onto a scratched melamine plate. Mickey and Minnie disappeared as the vegetables, then a spoon of pasta covered them.

“Feeding time,” she said, placing the plate on a table, then scooping up the nineteen-month-old farmer, who squealed and clutched a triceratops closer to him.

“It’s OK, he can have some too.” She expertly squashed the resistance by standing the three-inch dinosaur next to the plate. The child replied with the cherished babble that demanded her full attention every meal time. She breathed it in, along with his light blue eyes that concentrated on hers as he struggled to explain why his triceratops couldn’t eat sweetcorn. Everything about him was pale, her white-blond, ivory-skinned little doll of a baby. Precious, people called him, and he did have the air of a fragile ornament, a delicate work of art that would shatter if it were knocked. Appearances were deceptive though, and Helen was proud of her son’s self-assurance. He would happily babble to anyone, child or adult, and Helen liked to think that his confidence was somehow her doing. 

“At least no one else can take credit for how he turns out,” she’d reminded herself wryly on the days when she would have readily accepted a helping hand, whatever form it came in. No offers were forthcoming though, unless a mercifully brief liaison with a financial advisor sixteen years her senior counted.

“All down to me.”

“I invite the counsel for the Prosecution to present their opening statement.”

One of the black-gowned barristers in the middle of the courtroom rose and bowed briefly to the coat of arms behind the judge. She was an imposing figure, tall and broad-shouldered, her sharp features made all the more striking by unapologetic make up. In contrast to the judge, she made no attempt to soften her manner for the comfort of the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant is charged with murder. Should you find him guilty, you will have concluded that he, whilst of sound mind, unlawfully killed his victim.

A twitchy elderly man in the front row of the jury was nodding vigorously. 

“His victim. A twenty-one-year-old man. An ordinary, law-abiding Business student in the second year of his degree. He a boyfriend, a friend. A son. A promising footballer and a popular, valued member of the university. I don’t paint the victim as exceptional – quite the opposite. I suggest that he was unremarkable; your neighbour, your daughter’s boyfriend, the son you chastised for trampling mud on your floor. His murder has left a tragic hole in the lives of those who loved him, which will never be filled.” The banality of her words did not diminish their truth.

Helen’s other senses had faded in order for her hearing to intensify; the words were all she was conscious of, a torch-lit text in a pitch-dark room. She absorbed every word, as the judge had instructed, and her eyes closed, an unconscious attempt at a deeper concentration on the description of this beloved, perfect, imperfect boy.

“He’s been!” The tiny blond whirlwind flung open Helen’s bedroom door. “Look, look what he brought me!” He pushed a small blue box, bits of its gaudy wrapping paper still attached, under her nose. Helen pushed herself up to sit against the pillows and reached for the bedside lamp. 4.47am, shouted the red digits on her alarm. Three hours sleep was really absolutely fine, though. Better than fine.

“Merry Christmas, baby!” 

She pulled him up onto her bed as he tore open the box.

“Can we make it now?” he begged, already pulling at the clear plastic.

“Hang on, we need to see if he’s brought anything else first. And have you been for a wee yet?” 

She carried him to the bathroom, brushing off his protests that six was too big to be picked up, then together they burst into the living room. The little room didn’t have much of a fireplace - just a dated tiled effort from the 80s - but it did at least have a mantlepiece, boasting one bulging, red stocking. Their bare feet already held more of the gold glitter they had glued, or clearly not glued onto it yesterday, than the stocking did.  

“Thank God for that,” Helen thought. Her struggles to fix the brimming stocking to the mantlepiece at 1.15 that morning hadn’t been wasted. She handed it down to him and took her chance to make a quick coffee, watching through the open door. Breakfast could wait – his “Wow! That is so cool!” with the same surprise every time, was priceless. Helen sat close to him on the thin grey carpet as her coffee went cold.

The stocking empty, she gathered the pile of red paper and almost scooped up the paper plate underneath too. A silver foil mince pie case sat next to a few crumbs of carrot. He picked up the plate in silence and stared at it with reverence. Without looking at Helen, he leaned as close as he could get to the back of the gas fire and called upwards,

“Thank you, I love everything. Thank you!”

Helen dropped her pile, hugged him and covered his squirming face with kisses. She felt something - guilt? - at how lucky she was. Her one wish was for that feeling to return every year, forever, a ritual that never came to an end.

She opened her eyes and looked at the young man in the dock just for a second, keeping her head bowed. Christmas. She dropped her gaze and studied her fingers. She’d noted the open shoulders and strong posture so practised to him that he couldn’t drop it, even in that exposed glass cage. Or maybe especially in that exposed glass cage. He was listening intently to the Prosecution’s outline of the case. Working hard to maintain an image he’d been advised to portray? He was doing a good job. Taken out of the current setting, he’d have been described as calm, measured. Pleasant, perhaps. He nodded slightly at some of the lawyer’s words, confident his approval was relevant. The composure showed no sign of wavering as the prosecutor arrived at the details of the murder.

“At 1.35am on Saturday 17th of May this year, the victim suffered a violent attack outside the Firefly nightclub in Templeton Street. He played no part in initiating the attack. nor did he provoke his attacker. The victim sustained two broken ribs, a fractured skull and injuries to his face in the initial attack. I would ask you to turn to page six of the file you each have in front of you.”

The jury members reached for their white lever-arch files, glancing sideways to check the page matched their neighbour’s. A colour photograph of a man’s face. They winced. The same photograph appeared on the screen behind the judge but Helen’s her eyes remained on her hands. She’d seen it before and had no need to refresh the image already in her head.

“The injuries you see left the victim unconscious. At this point his attacker used a kitchen knife with a three-inch blade to stab him repeatedly in his abdomen, causing his abdominal aorta to burst and resulting in massive internal and external bleeding. Paramedics who attended the incident confirmed that he was dead on their arrival. Medical professionals whose testimonies you will hear this afternoon, describe the force required to cause such injuries as ‘brutal’.”

She paused and turned away from the jury a fraction, towards the judge.

“It is the Crown’s case that his attacker was the defendant.”

Helen watched the judge. She wasn’t surprised to see the serene expression maintained throughout, and had registered the barely perceptible nods as she made the odd note on her pad. 

“They could at least have given her a decent pen,” sprang to Helen’s mind as she fixed on the lidless black biro. She resisted her brain’s attempt to lead her towards the safety of a mundane frame of reference and forced her attention back to the judge’s eyes. 

Did she have a son?

Helen had a son. 

The night before, she had ironed her clothes again. The choice had been made long before, after endless sessions of trying on everything she owned, as though it mattered. She would struggle to sleep, like every night since. Between 2 and 3am was when her body usually gave in and last night had been no different. The radio still playing, she had slipped away to a past that should have brought comfort. 

The same dream. Celebrations of a new millennium. In the bedroom of her flat with his father, reliving the only night they had ever spent together. The party next door was still in full swing and Helen was flying high on tequila-fuelled, new-millennial hope. Could this be it? Could he be her future, this man who had noticed her, flattered her and now kissed her? The dream amplified her euphoria, but also her terror of shattering the fragile bauble that held the embryonic promise of happiness. The radio was ploughing through the decade’s number ones and she pulled the embodiment of her hopes to his feet to dance with her to Christina Aguilera. Then they both giggled when the opening bars of Robbie Williams’s ‘She’s the One’ gave them almost no choice but to move the story on. Nearly every night, she felt that thrilling anticipation again. But every time, the delicate glass was crushed in an even ruder conclusion than it had been twenty-two years earlier. He would abruptly cancel the start of their future before it began, walking away before he had slept with her. 

“It’s for the best,” he would smile, closing the door behind him and leaving her empty. However else the dream’s narrative varied, conception never took place. 

Helen would wake soon after, and every time readjust to the reality that he had left her pregnant. Her son did exist.

Her son had always been fascinated by dreams. He would confidently attribute meanings to his quests - often naked, always heroic - to outrun wolves or snakes or whichever wild animal had pursued him this time and would always land on an explanation that granted him another superhero character trait. Helen never disagreed, more than willing to bolster his infallibility He never asked about her dreams.

As he grew, and one by one, discarded each mark of childhood in his wake, Helen gathered them all in her arms, hurrying to keep up behind him. She held every hug, every smile and every tear. Far from forgetting the arguments and harsh words, she cherished those too, holding on tightly to all the pieces that fitted together to complete her son.

The defendant’s expression had changed. His jaw was clenched and his chest was rising and falling as his breathing quickened. The prosecutor was talking about the girl. 

“Her two-year relationship with the defendant had ended six weeks before the attack. “ 

The man in the dock swallowed.

We should be clear that at the time of the attack she was not in a relationship with the defendant. Having recently begun a relationship with the victim, she was a witness to the attack, having spent the evening with him at the Firefly nightclub.”

Helen watched the jury while they shaded in the black and white image of the girl in their heads. She wondered if their conclusions matched her own. She knew what the girl looked like, of course, but what else? The jury’s guess at her essence, her role in the catastrophic convergence of the two relationships was as good as Helen’s.

Dates, locations, times. The product description of a kitchen knife. When the court adjourned for lunch the details still filled Helen’s head as she shuffled out of the courtroom with the other occupants of the public gallery.

“Sorry’” she muttered, as she reached the end of her row at the same time as a couple leaving the bench in front. 

“After you.” 

The woman, leaning slightly on her husband’s arm looked a little older than Helen. She held Helen’s gaze and the rest of the scene fell away as the moment froze. Her eyes sent Helen their undisguised message. I pity you.

Helen walked out into the car park. She wasn’t prepared for the crisp sunshine, and blinked; the December darkness had only just begun to lift as she’d stepped out of the cab that morning. Her eyes on the pavement, she crossed the square and walked. Feeling no compulsion to do anything except walk, that’s what she did, subconsciously counting the footsteps. An hour and a half later, as she walked between the last of the red-brick gables of Watergate Street, she knew she wouldn’t be returning to the court. The river was in front of her, on the other side of Brunswick Street. She raised her eyes at last and waited for the wall of traffic to break, then crossed all four lanes, her eyes on the river. Turning right, she followed the water, icy blue in the low winter sunlight, until she reached the ferry terminal. She hadn’t been conscious of her destination until then. 

Helen leaned heavily over the rail that enclosed the deck, flecks of once-white paint peeling away against the sleeves of her jacket. She stared down beyond the surface of the water, imagining herself falling contentedly to the river bed. The ferry had always been her place, the scene of her earliest treasured memories. It would spirit her away with her grandad to the same locally-foreign shores each time and she adored it. The round-trip ticket let them stay on board all day if they chose. All the way along the bumpy road of childish fall-outs, teenage angst and the pain of her grandfather’s death when she was seventeen, the ferry never broke its promise of escape, of whipping away her worries on the one-way wind. She hadn’t been back for years.

Eventually, the earthy rumble of the engines came close to drowning out the court transcript. She still didn’t move, breathing in the sharp air methodically, willing the familiar mix of metallic and marshy odours to supplant this with a pain that was ordinary, bearable. When they docked for the last time, the sunshine was long gone and the noise of rush hour traffic had replaced the engines. The only passenger, she crossed the narrow gangplank, exhausted, and barely registered the protest from her legs at the solid surface beneath them. 

The exit route herded her first into the coffee shop with its cold metal chairs, uninviting at the best of times but positively forbidding in the early evening gloom. There were no customers as Helen stepped in, just a waitress, who had stopped wiping the counter to concentrate on the TV on the wall, her attention caught by its ‘breaking news’ banner. On the screen facing Helen, a reporter was nodding empathetically towards a couple, as they stood together on the concrete steps outside a court. The woman was maybe a little older than Helen.

“We’re satisfied with the verdict,” the woman whispered into the reporter’s microphone, then turned away, leaning on her husband’s arm.

The picture changed. Helen reached for the back of a chair. The face she hadn’t seen for seven months was in the centre of the screen. Handcuffed to an officer, he looked straight at Helen. The blond hair and ivory skin were indistinct against the white wall behind him. The waitress, the café, the river – the world beyond his face – was lost to Helen as blackness closed in on everything except his ice-blue eyes.

Pity.