‘Maybe.’
‘For Chrissake, Jacob. You can’t just… You’ve been attacked. We need to go to the hospital. We need to tell the police. We need to report it.’
He turned and faced her and she saw the hard certainty of his father, the man who wouldn’t be argued with, the man who could make his own submissions, had his own cross-examination ready to hand.
‘No, we don’t. We don’t need to report it. I’m fine and I won’t let you take me to the hospital.’
She knew this Jacob. It was the teenage version of the three-year-old who had screamed for thirty minutes when she tried to put on his shoes.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘We’ll try a different tack. We’ll sit down have a cup of tea. You can tell me what happened.’
‘I need to sleep.’
He was right. She too needed to sleep. It was after 1:30 a.m. and she needed to be up at six to prepare her cross.
‘What happened, Jacob?’
‘I’m going to bed.’
‘Did you hurt someone?’
‘I said I’m going to bed.’
‘Jacob, I need to know. Who hurt you? Did you hurt them? What happened?’
‘No, you don’t need to know. You don’t need to know anything.’
‘Jacob…’
‘I’m not your property.’
He walked past her out of the bathroom and down the corridor to his room. She followed and stood staring at the closed door, listening to him move about until there was silence. The cut would heal. There might be a scar, but it was small and looked clean. She felt the gulf between them. She couldn’t hold him, couldn’t control his life.
Chapter Sixteen
Mel
The alarm went off at 5:45 a.m. Still in her pyjamas, she made herself a cup of tea, skimmed once again through the social worker’s statement and refined her lines of cross-examination. By 7:15 a.m. she had showered, thrown on her court gear and a pair of trainers and was sprinting out of her front door to the tube.
Worry about Jacob clouded the journey from Finsbury Park to Hatton Cross; the wound, his secrecy, her frustration, all nagging like a rotten tooth. For the first half hour she’d been standing squeezed between commuters, hanging from the overhead rail, avoiding eye contact, her bag on the floor between her legs. But as the train pulled away from Knightsbridge she found a seat and was able to look over her papers. At one point she sensed a neighbour glancing at the typed script. He was about twenty years old, stick-thin, wearing paint-stained jeans and a faded brown T-shirt, unlikely to be involved in the hearing. Instinctively, she shifted to block his view.
On the bus to the court, more thoughts about Jacob filled her head. She pushed them away. She had a job to do and she would do it well.
The West London Family Court is a solid rectangle of two-tone brick and grey tinted windows, set back from the A312 behind a car park, trimmed with low hedges. As she walked down the broad walkway to the sliding glass doors and the security desk it seemed to Mel she could have been in any country in the world.
She queued at the entrance desk, allowing her bag to be searched and her person to be frisked by a hatchet-faced security woman with cropped brown hair. She pondered how it would be to have a proper job, one where you went to the same place every day, had your own office, your own desk, plants on the windowsill, your name on the door, paid holiday leave, set hours.
Like Paul, she thought, remembering their frantic coupling, in the North Bank University Politics Department, crushed against a pile of stacked boxes. The top half of his door was frosted glass, but if you stood behind the bookshelf you could not be seen from the corridor. She recalled balancing on one foot as the stack of boxes behind her threatened to collapse at any moment, after which there was some complicated shifting, both she and Paul ending up, cramped and half-clothed, on the carpeted floor beside the desk. Throughout their glorious contortions there had been the thrilling awareness that anyone, at any moment, might knock on the locked door.
The security woman brushed down Mel’s body, looking for hairspray, lens cleaner or any other weapons a barrister might attempt to smuggle into the Family Court.
‘Right,’ said the woman, ‘you can go through.’
Mel turned towards the robing room, halting briefly in surprise to see the skinny young man from the tube journey, seated on a hard chair in the reception area. She offered a faint smile. Either he didn’t see her, or he decided not to react. Whatever the reason, there was little chance he was involved in the same case.
She was wrong. The young man turned out to be Ezra, feckless father of five-year-old Mason, whom she was endeavouring to have returned to his alcoholic mother. Ezra was twenty-one years old. He had never looked after Mason and it was clear from his monosyllabic evidence that he had neither the desire nor the capacity to do so now. Mel was reassured. The last thing on Ezra’s mind would be reporting her to the Bar Standards Board for reading court documents on public transport.
It quickly emerged that the local authority had failed to obtain the required evidence. Mel managed to expose every shortcoming. After that it was easy to persuade the District Judge of the merits of removing Mason from his apparently capable foster parents to the care of his irresponsible mother. Her spirits lifted as she strode out through the sliding glass door to the walkway. In the bright summer sunshine, the municipal architecture had a new stylish appeal.
For two hectic hours she had not thought about Jacob, but she was thinking about him now. It was after midday and he would surely be awake, though not necessarily out of bed. She must speak to him. Yet she feared what she might discover. When she was busy she could contain such fear. With any lull, the fear jumped out.
There was no one at the bus stop. She pulled out her phone and tapped on Jacob’s number. No reply. But he would see she had called. She zipped the phone into the side pocket of her bag. When the bus arrived, she jumped on and found a window seat from which she could gaze at the grey suburban landscape gliding by in the summer heat. As the bus was pulling up at the station she heard the ringtone. She looked at the name on the screen. Not Jacob, but Paul.
‘Hi Mel.’
‘Hello.’
‘Can you talk?’
‘I’m about to get off a bus.’
‘Are you going back to chambers?’
‘Yes.’ She needed to show her face. Her diary was looking sparse.
‘Call me when you get there.’ He sounded peremptory. ‘I’ll be in my office. There’s something I need you to look at. I’ve had an email. I’ll forward it. Ring me when you’ve read it.’
It sounded ominous. Had Caro found out? In some ways it would be a relief.
She waited till she was alone in one of the downstairs rooms, before opening the email. It was from Natasha.
Hi Paul, Remember me? I was on Politics and Law a few years ago. Guess what? I got a pupillage with your mate Melanie Goddard! How cool is that? Hope you’re OK. Thanks for all your help on the course. Maybe meet up sometime. Natasha x (Baker)
She stared at the screen. Was Natasha crazy? She rang him.
‘I read it,’ she said.
‘How does she know we’re friends?’
‘You must have told her.’
‘Well, I didn’t. I barely know her. Did you?’