I Died on a Tuesday, page 14
‘But we can’t be sure of that.’
She looks at him and shakes her head. ‘We must trust them, my love.’
He feels a shot of relief at the word ‘love’. So she still cares for him despite the terrible thing he’s just told her.
She folds her arms. ‘I cannot have our children thinking you are a wicked man who just runs down a girl in cold blood and leaves her to die. They need to know exactly what happened.’
‘Shhh,’ he says, looking around nervously.
Her beautiful violet eyes harden. ‘I will not shush, Robbie. You have to tell the judge what really happened.’
‘But I can’t,’ he groans. ‘I won’t risk the three most precious people in my life.’
Irena stands up.
‘I am leaving now.’
Terror grabs his chest. ‘Leaving the prison or leaving me?’
‘That,’ she says, ‘depends on what you do. If you do not tell the court, I will leave you.’
42
Robbie
He thinks about Irena’s ultimatum, day and night. He turns it over and over while scrubbing brown stains in the toilets – he’s almost got used to his job now – and mopping up piss from the floor.
He thinks about it at night when he goes to his cell and tries to shut out his cellmate’s constant talking. (‘Did I tell you about the time that I knifed this chap in the eye because he was coming on to my girl?’)
He thinks about it so much that his head feels as if it might explode. So he tries to distract himself by making up songs in his head.
Before he was arrested, the music and the lyrics would come to him instinctively as if someone had just placed them in his mind.
But no longer.
‘Gi’s a tune, then, Robbie,’ his cellmate is always saying.
He’s scared of what Bruce might do if he doesn’t, so he tries. But nothing comes out.
Bruce isn’t happy. ‘Did you mime all that stuff on stage, then?’ asks Bruce.
‘No. I … I just can’t sing anymore.’
At night he has vivid dreams about being stuck on a train going in one direction, while Irena and the children travel in the other. He yells out for them as their carriages pass. Sometimes he finds himself being shaken awake by Bruce. ‘Shut the fuck up, man. Some of us are trying to sleep.’
Yasmine comes to visit. He can tell from her face that something has happened. ‘Your crown court plea hearing is in two weeks. There’s a gap, so they’ve brought you forward.’
‘Good.’ He just wants to get it over with now.
‘There’s still nothing you want to tell me?’ she asks.
Has she been talking to Irena? No. His wife had promised not to repeat what he’d told her, even to the children. He trusts her. More than she trusts him, probably. She hasn’t visited since he told her what had happened. When he rings her (that precious phone card has finally come through) there is a distant air to her voice.
On the day of the plea hearing in the crown court, Yasmine brings a suit for him to wear. He’d given her his usual measurements, but it hangs off his frame after all the weight he’s lost in prison. It doesn’t help that he’s still giving Bruce half of every meal in return for protection from the other prisoners, who apparently want to chop off his testicles.
‘It didn’t seem a good idea to go back to the house to get one of your own,’ says Yasmine. ‘There are still people nosing around at the gate and it might make things worse for your family.’
None of the other prisoners give him the customary ‘good luck’ or thumbs-up as he is placed in handcuffs and escorted by officers out through the wing. Instead, they stare at him with steely eyes.
Then he is taken out through a side entrance and towards an armoured prison van.
As he gets in, Robbie looks up at the high wall with the barbed wire on top. He recalls a rumour he’d heard on the wing about someone doing a runner at this point and trying to vault the wall. The coils of wire had caught an artery and the bloke had bled out before the ambulance arrived. He wants to throw up.
After a long, bumpy drive, he feels the van slowing down. He can hear people banging on the side. There’s a narrow band of daylight above the tinted window, through which Robbie can see crowds of people, shouting angrily. There are placards, the same as last time, but now they read: PUT HIM AWAY FOR LIFE.
The van stops. They are in a small walled car park. Maybe because the traffic and the crowds have delayed them, he isn’t taken to the cells. Instead, he’s led straight up into the courtroom. His whole body is shaking.
The press is there. He knows they are journalists from their notebooks and iPads and furious scribbling.
So is Irena. Thank God. And so too – oh no – are the children. He doesn’t want them to hear any of this.
They look at him with doubtful eyes. Their father. The man who left a girl to die. A girl who wasn’t much older than Daisy is now.
Robbie is suddenly aware that Irena is giving him a little wave. At first he thinks it’s a supportive gesture. Then he realizes she is trying to tell him something.
Yasmine notices too. She gets up – clipping her office heels smartly on the floor – and goes to Irena. Robbie can see his wife handing over a piece of paper.
The lawyer looks at it and frowns.
She comes up to him in the dock and gives it to him. ‘I’ve no idea what this means,’ she says, ‘but your wife says she has found something out that you should know.’
Then she returns to her seat.
Robbie reads the words in Irena’s beautiful sloping writing.
I looked up this man you tell me about on the computer. He died last month.
Robbie freezes.
Is she right? How can this be true? He glances across at her and she nods as if she knows exactly what he’s asking. She’d written something else too.
This changes everything.
It does. But it poses another question. If he’s dead, who has been sending him those threatening letters?
The judge enters and everyone stands.
Official words run over him, asking how he is going to plead.
He gets to his feet.
A sea of faces turn to look at him.
They remind Robbie of the first big crowd that came to see the band play after they’d been signed up. How long ago that seems now.
‘Not guilty,’ he says.
There are gasps around the court.
The judge turns to look at his barrister. ‘I believe the defendant indicated at the magistrates’ court that he wanted to plead guilty. Can you confirm that this new “not guilty” plea is correct?’
‘Yes, Your Honour.’
The court is in uproar.
Part Two
43
Vanessa
‘Heard the news?’ asked Carol excitedly when Vanessa arrived at the office. ‘Everyone’s talking about it.’
‘About what?’ Vanessa asked dully. Her head was still reeling from her discovery about Jack’s vasectomy and the woman at 101 Acres Road. Who was she?
‘Robbie Manning has changed his mind and pleaded not guilty.’
‘You’re kidding.’
Vanessa’s anger bubbled up inside her. How dare he? What if he gets off? If Jack were here, he’d be furious. She waited for him to say something in her head but he was strangely silent. Her husband had been quiet for a while now. Maybe he was angry that she’d discovered his secret. Or perhaps he was finally feeling guilty.
‘So now we’re just waiting to see if Janie is prepared to give evidence,’ Carol continued. ‘If she does, I won’t forget what I said before. Providing she wants witness support, you’ll be my first choice. But she might not ask for it.’
How ironic that she had dreamed of being by Janie’s side so she could tell her how Jack had tried to hunt down her assailant. She’d imagined the girl – now a woman – looking grateful. She’d imagined herself telling Jack in her head and him saying, ‘Well done, Vanessa. I might not be there but you are. We’re a team.’
But they hadn’t been a bloody team, had they? (Oh dear – more swearing.) Jack had hidden his vasectomy, giving her false hope, month after month, that she might conceive.
Why, Jack? Why?
Sometimes Vanessa wondered about the voice in her head. Jack didn’t always talk when she expected him to. Before now, she’d really felt he was communicating with her from wherever he was. But maybe she’d subconsciously been making it up because she couldn’t accept he was gone.
And she still couldn’t, dammit, despite everything.
The confusion in her head almost distracted her from worrying over Lewis. Why was that address in his glove box if he didn’t live there? And why did that woman who had answered the door seem so familiar?
‘I’ll let you know as soon as I hear,’ said her supervisor, cutting through her thoughts. ‘Are you OK, love? You look as though you’re in another world. I said I’ll let you know as soon as I hear if Janie wants support in court.’
‘Thanks,’ said Vanessa. A few days ago, she’d have felt honoured. But right now, her heart just wasn’t in it.
44
Robbie
‘What made you do an about-turn, man?’ asks Bruce when they take him back to prison.
‘I just did,’ says Robbie.
His cellmate and the others are clearly disappointed, like a bloodthirsty crowd who’ve suddenly been denied the spectacle of a hanging. ‘We was expecting you to get twenty years,’ he says. ‘You made me lose a fiver to one of the guards.’
Now a defence has to be built, which will involve long conversations with his lawyer in the Legal Visits room. The trial and prosecution costs all apparently come from the public purse. ‘Won’t go down well in the press, mate,’ warns Bruce, who seems highly knowledgeable about these things.
Yasmine appears both hacked off and, at the same time, relieved that he has given himself ‘a chance’. He wonders why she cares. Perhaps it’s because she saw the same look on his wife’s face that he did. Hope. Fear. Desperation. All bound up in a ball of confusion.
‘It would have helped if you had told me about this man from the beginning,’ says Yasmine during their ‘strategy meeting’, as she calls it.
‘I was scared he was going to hurt my family.’
‘And now he’s dead.’ This is a statement rather than a question.
She has checked Irena’s Google research and found it to be true.
‘I need you to tell me everything else,’ she says.
Robbie closes his eyes. ‘It’s hard. It will bring it all back.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘But it’s imperative that we put the jury in the whole picture. I want them to see you as a young man who made a mistake. To see that boy grow up into a responsible father – maybe the same age as some of the jurors – who carries this terrible weight on his shoulders. I want them to think that they, by the grace of God, might have been terrified into making that same mistake themselves. You will still go down, Robbie. But it might help to cut my estimate of fifteen years by a year or two.’
‘I don’t know where to start,’ he says.
She hands him an exercise book; the lined type he used to have at school. He’d often been told off for writing down song lyrics instead of working.
‘A lot of people find it hard to begin,’ she says. ‘It can be helpful to jot down some notes instead. Think of it as writing your life story. I want to give the jury some background. At the moment, the world sees you as a rich, privileged rock star who wrecked a young girl’s life.’
‘I’ll try,’ he says.
45
Robbie
But he can’t. It’s not just that he’s knackered after a day of cleaning toilets which he now finds peculiarly therapeutic. Nor is it because he’s exhausted from the other men’s jibes (‘Couldn’t face up to what you did then, Robbie?’) or the cold faces of the officers who clearly feel the same. It isn’t even that he’s worn out by his cellmate, who sees Robbie as ‘one of us’, insisting on giving him lurid details of his own crimes.
It’s because writing down his life story will make it too real. For years, Robbie has tried to pretend it didn’t happen while at the same time never being able to put it out of his head.
Now he’s waiting for a trial date, when he will have to stand up in court and try to persuade the jury that, yes, he ran that poor girl over but he didn’t mean to harm her.
But try as he does, he can’t put pencil to paper. The guilt is too huge.
And then something happens.
‘You’re not doing the toilets today, Manning,’ says one of the officers who clearly loathes him. ‘You’re going to Education.’
When Robbie had first come to prison, he’d been surprised to find that there were classes in maths and English at GCSE level. Some of the men went along even if they already had academic qualifications (Bruce, to his surprise, had an A-level in geography). Some also did distance-learning courses from the Open University.
Education was meant to be a compulsory part of prison but, somehow, Robbie had slipped through the net. He suspected the officers were punishing him by making him ‘stick to the toilets’ (words that were horribly accurate at times).
As his lawyer had said, an historic case involving a beautiful girl who is now broken had touched the nation’s pulse. ‘The fact that a famous rock star has been charged is the icing on the cake for the headlines.’
But now it seems Robbie has to go to the classroom and face even more hostility.
‘Come on, man,’ says Bruce. ‘It will be a change from all the shit. There are digestive biscuits. Chocolate, if we’re lucky. And the teacher’s OK.’
At least it will give him someone else to talk to apart from his cellmate.
So he joins the line of men queuing up by the door of the wing, ready to be escorted by the officer through to the Education block. They’d been chatting until he got there, Robbie notices. When they see him, they give him stony faces.
‘Going to learn how to run someone over and escape, are you?’ says the man whose nephew had been killed in a hit and run.
‘Nah,’ says someone else. ‘He’s already passed his exams at that.’
‘Won’t be so good at getting the jury to let you off,’ says another.
‘Couldn’t just give them a guilty plea, could you? Cowardly, that’s what I call it.’
‘That’s enough,’ says the officer. ‘Get a move on, you lot.’
The classroom was surprisingly normal-looking. There was nothing to show that this was part of a prison apart from the bars on the window and a clock that had a somewhat ironic DO NOT REMOVE sticker below. On the walls were posters with facts about nutrition and alcohol units as well as a world map. There were examples of writing, too. Someone had made up a poem about missing his gran’s scrambled eggs.
The teacher was a man nudging his sixties, at a guess. He reminded Robbie of his dad, which made his chest lurch. Thank God he wasn’t still alive to see what his son had turned into.
‘We have a new student today,’ he says.
‘Yeah,’ snarls someone. ‘The famous rock star who was too shit-scared to plead guilty.’
‘That’s enough of that, Carl.’ The man turns to Robbie. ‘My name’s Martin. Welcome to the class. Today we’re going to write our life stories.’
A groan goes round the room. ‘Not again.’
‘Robbie, have you heard about the Koestler awards?’
He shakes his head.
‘It’s a writing and artistic competition for men and women in prison. One of the categories is life stories and I’m proud to say that we have had a high level of silver and bronze stars in the past. Eight years ago, one of our men actually got a gold.’
‘Proud?’ This isn’t a word Robbie has heard before in prison.
‘I’d like you to start by writing about something important that has happened to you in life.’
Another wave of groans. Some men pick up their pencils. Others stare gloomily into space. Martin walks around, making suggestions in an encouraging voice. Then he reaches Robbie’s desk.
‘I can’t,’ he says, looking up. ‘I’ve tried – my lawyer wants me to make notes about what happened – but I just can’t do it. It’s like it wasn’t me who … who did it. Even though it was.’
‘Then write it down in the third person. Don’t use the “I” word. Call yourself another name if you want. Some of the men do that here because they can’t face what they did either.’
But Robbie can’t find another name. It doesn’t feel right. He was the one who’d been driving, after all. ‘Be a man,’ his wife would say if she was next to him. ‘Face up to what you did.’
‘Begin by talking about how you got into music,’ Martin suggests. ‘That might help.’
So he has another go. And somehow he finds himself writing a sentence.
‘It started when Robbie and the lads won a music competition at school,’ he began. ‘Mr Brown, their music teacher, entered them for it.’
He stops. Actually, it went further back than that. It had started when he’d spotted that small blue guitar in the toy shop. He can still see it now …
46
Janie
My body is being moved. I can feel it, although I still can’t get my words out. I think I’m being lifted onto a stretcher and then put down again. Then an engine starts.
‘Careful,’ says someone.
‘How fast do you want me to go?’ says someone else. It sounds like a woman.
‘This one’s a blue light,’ says the first voice. ‘I’m going to try the resuscitation pump again.’
Something cold is being put against my chest.
‘Nothing,’ says a third voice.
‘Try again.’
There’s a distinct note of panic, which makes me panic too. Am I dead? I don’t feel it. What if I’m stuck in this no-man’s land for ever?
