Autobiography (31 page)

‘Don’t worry, Moz, we’re gonna win this. He hasn’t got a leg to stand on.’
Minutes later Johnny is leaning in to a seated Joyce, and they are both in unified grin.

Although Joyce, Rourke and Marr are all seated in the first two rows, I am alloted a seat way at the back, yet central to the eyeline of Weeks – who will watch my reaction to everything that is said. You are of course directed to sit in specific seating, and I wonder who determines such positioning and with what aim. Like a stillborn play, the dismal proceedings begin. For everyone, I am the center of interest. As the opening pleas are made, it feels like deputy Weeks is fixed entirely upon my face to read my reactions to each statement, but he hardly seems to cast an eye towards Marr, Rourke or Joyce. The muddy black pools of legal precision are insufferably overdone, and even at these opening stages I feel as though the outcome has been strategized in backrooms of closed curtains where my epoch has been cut short. The protagonists of punishment determine that the only function of the unfolding court drama is to force each peg into an unsuitable hole, and make the cold-blooded destruction of one unfortunate party seem fair – and how dare you feel contemptuous of this court, and how dare you raise your voice to the level of the cross-examining barrister, and why exactly would you feel moral indignation towards a regime that cannot succeed in balance, but only in the punishment of one party against the other (never both, and never neither). My heart shrivels up at the black despair of it all.

First into the witness box, Joyce cannot at any stage find the right words with which to explain his position. A blubbering mass of blubbering mess, Joyce cannot even recall the date of his own marriage, as he mispronounces simple words. With feet glued and voice dying, Joyce finds that his mouth doesn’t work properly, and the half-asleep replies chime out a sonata of false notes which leaves him groping in the dark for the light switch. With the drooping sag of bloodlust, John Weeks listens to the humiliated plaintiff. Joyce is nothing and knows nothing, and, small and lost as he is, I feel sorrow for him as he struggles hopelessly by repeating over and over again – in a voice getting smaller by the second
–
‘I just assumed I’d get 25 per cent,’
a comment that would close any case if this were a case of fair judicial outline. The voice of Joyce disappears into a pained whisper, as victims must always whine. In order to get into the High Court, one might assume, a plaintiff should have some documentation to wave about. Joyce had nothing. Yet, there he was, explaining to everyone that he was here in court because ‘a friend’ (who is not herself present at the High Court) had told him he should be getting 25 per cent. An individual with no forensic powers would need only take a quick glance at Joyce in order to see an aggressor posing as a victim. His tatty
‘I just assumed’
gabble, after several hours, had told us nothing at all – except that he had ‘just assumed’
. Luckily for Joyce, almost anything that he says during these hearings proves to be immaterial. He is not the quarry. He is not even qualified enough to be a nonentity. What he is best at is confusion. You can spin as many theories as you like, but the ardent zest to finally topple and silence an outspoken pop artist took its place firmly and unashamedly as this trial began.

Like a well-fed Roman emperor, Andy Rourke took to the witness stand complaining of financial starvation. Too funny to be taken seriously, his evidence blew about in a thousand directions, his throat sounding tighter and tighter, each sentence abandoned halfway through as though he realized the silliness of his own words. Heavy-hearted, Rourke himself could not explain how things either were or are. As he tried to defend a 25 per cent cut for Joyce there were moments in his replies when his brain collapsed, and this shut-down swept the room with an intense and terrible hopelessness, and I imagined that we were all suddenly wondering: what sort of lives are we now leading? Whose deeds bring us here?

‘It is not about money,’
Joyce had said – but far too quickly, and with a seemingly over-rehearsed child-like openness. What, then, was it all about? Cookery? Science?

Johnny, too, was a bad witness, crumbling neatly from the top down. Although he and I were ostensibly on trial together as business partners, we were not actually business partners, and we had not even met once over recent years to discuss the Joyce claim, or the protocol of trial. I got the impression that Johnny’s verbal disclosures jumped about willy-nilly and concluded with his exhausted inclination to accept anything at all that was said against me – in what I assumed was the hope that he might be separated from the one target who did not beg for sympathy. Financially, if Morrissey shouldered the blame, then Marr could be seen as a victim, too, and could run off and play. In the tiredness of stale and over-long cross-examinations, Johnny finally caves in and appears suddenly agreeable to any discredit lobbed my way, just as long as he can be let out of that damned witness box. He will, by now, apparently say almost anything at all in order to stay free, and seems willing to push anyone into the water in order to save himself. Collapsed, he attempts to answer a thousand questions about my behavior, and notably fewer questions about his own behavior. Divide and rule. If we can squeeze in between Morrissey and Marr then any cracks in their relationship will beam and glare like incorrectly described flying objects. It is Johnny, not I, who allows this to happen, and over he trots to the other side, having emptied his bucket. The walls hummed with silence, and yesterday is long ago.

At the close of each day, we are told that we must not make contact with one another overnight (lest, no doubt, we resolve the issues between ourselves and rob the judiciary of its prey). John Weeks, like everyone else, appears to want his day on stage, and somehow the conclusion must be his alone to make, and most certainly not tied up in a friendly fashion by Marr and Joyce and Morrissey in a Wapping pub whilst the squeezers and benders of an oh-so-civil courtroom sleep their cognac sleep.

Johnny telephones me at my squatty room in the nearby Tower Thistle Hotel where I sit alone, wondering how
Hand in glove
led to this. Oddly, the hotel is inches away from where the very first Smiths album was recorded. Things were different now.
Johnny asks me if I would meet his legal team tomorrow evening, and I agree, for it was difficult at this stage to see what the court itself was actually doing for me. Something I say to Johnny makes him laugh loudly, and I hear the Johnny that was once an air of adventure, and because this is now such an unusual recollection I therefore realize how we have moved too far away from one another to ever again have corresponding interests, yet justice had already fouled by listing Morrissey and Marr as a one-and-the-same unit without any conflicting interests, which was blatantly incorrect to anyone who would want to notice such a thing. If anything at all, since Morrissey and Marr were not a working partnership there was no obvious reason why they ought to have stood trial as one, and there were a thousand reasons why they ought to have been tried separately, which was a critical point that was raised by no one. Read one way, the Joyce case should never have reached civil proceedings. Read another way, any case against Morrissey or against Marr should have been declined by the courts since in the eyes of everyone the partnership of the two had ceased eight years earlier, yet the legal process would grind along as if Morrissey and Marr remained an active and unified business, and a judgment would be made on that very basis, which in itself seemed unfair when one considered the truth of the situation.
Johnny promised to call me back with a time and place where I would – for the first time ever – sit down with his legal team for an off-the-legal-record meeting, but the call did not come, and in the courtroom the next day, neither Johnny nor his set of vultures will look my way. Someone must have changed Johnny’s mind, and any notion of camaraderie disappeared, and so much for walking in a pack.

Daily newspaper reports of the ongoing case are plentiful, the lyric
‘Beware! I bear more grudges than lonely high court judges’
appears as a headline, and as John Weeks quite possibly noticed, the reports feature my name and no one else’s in their captions; a photograph of my face, but never of Johnny’s. In a case already seeped in eternity, Wobbly Weeks hasn’t the right to hang anyone, but he will get someone as close to the rope as allowable.

As I take to the witness stand I feel a communal intake of breath, as if now is the absolute point of the entire circus. Joyce’s legal team suddenly sits upright, having spent the last few days dozing like overfed apes. I am now close enough to Weeks to smell the moth-balls. I am asked, unfairly in my view, to give my home address – with no apparent understanding (or, perhaps, with
every
understanding) of how endangered this places me. It is the first humiliating step in reducing the spirit of the witness.

Absurdly, I am asked to swear on the Holy Bible, an action that had not stabilized the evidence of either Joyce or Rourke, but which is trotted out as yet another court procedure aimed to humble and shrink the witness, and to falsely imply that none but the honorable shall succeed in these rooms. Acting for Joyce, the cross-examining barrister is one Nigel Davis, with a face I could never be cruel enough to describe. His task (for which he is paid money) is to impugn the evidence of the witness, therefore whatever I say to Davis by way of reply must be ridiculed by Davis in front of this gathered gaggle. Nigel Davis must only possess patience above wisdom in order to weaken his witness.

Throughout my cross-examination I notice John Weeks repeatedly nodding to Davis. A small nod always seemingly pleased Davis.
By return, Davis smiled meekly at the judge. Crucified by his own enormous teeth, Davis is further weighed down by a colony of purple boils decorating the back of his neck. His most irritating quirk is to repeatedly and repeatedly go over old ground in an effort to wear out the witness or to force the witness to say the wrong thing, or – as had seemed to work with Marr – simply force the witness to agree so that we might all go home and shower this wretchedness off us. The task for Davis is to make confusion seem like a strength for Joyce but a weakness for Morrissey, and to persistently convince the witness that anything they might say by way of reply has no value. When we think we are guilty we can then be easily controlled, and by complicating every question Nigel Davis can first demoralize and then make inferior.
Everything is expressed by Davis with a tone of intolerance, as if his presence in court encroaches greatly upon his precious flower-bedding time. Davis insists that a solicitor whom Johnny and I met only once (but whom we did not engage) was, in legal fact, our acting representative. Joyce’s case involved Davis arguing that this solicitor fully and absolutely represented the wishes of Morrissey and Marr, a falsehood upheld throughout the trial with dismal imperfection by Davis and then Weeks.

Verbal flights from a flurry of defendant witnesses were supplied. Firstly, by Patrick Savage (the Smiths’ accountant), who spoke directly to the judge and said
, ‘Andy Rourke told me “We get 10 per cent”.’
Judge Weeks decided that such a conversation between Savage and Rourke
‘never took place,’
thereby dismissing the evidence of the Smiths’ accountant.
Further evidence from Scott Piering, Geoff Travis, Joe Moss and Andrew Bennet-Smith all maintained that Joyce and Rourke were not equal partners to Morrissey and Marr, and that the division was palpable no matter which way the circumstances were viewed.

With his venomous face game for controversy, it seemed deputy Weeks would dismiss all witness evidence against Joyce – from all of the above key witnesses, not allowing this healthy gathering of plausible sources to have the most remote effect upon the will of Weeks. In effect, John Weeks quite impossibly deemed the evidence of Savage, Travis, Bennet-Smith, Piering and Moss to be ‘unreliable’. By contrast, Joyce had no witnesses and nor did he need them. Neither his wife nor his accountant (who both held great importance in his written testament) is called upon to give witness testimony. For Joyce, the less that anyone spoke for him the better. A sane voice would ask why Joyce’s accountant – who had apparently stirred the action in the first place – was not called to court. Yet sanity was not required as one painfully unjust day bled into another.

Why was Weeks disinclined to accept anything at all that was said against Joyce by a slew of enlighteners; by, in effect, those who were witness to the truth of these affairs? Their presence in court was due only to their profession, and not due to any obliging friendship that they may have with Morrissey or, less importantly, Marr. On the other hand, any evidence spoken in my favor was somehow very skilfully turned against me – as if the witness had been misled or mistaken in thinking anything positive of me. When Joyce himself admitted that he found me to be
‘too honest’
a person, the crumpled Weeks assumed that Joyce meant ‘artistically honest’ but not personally honest, and Weeks settled for this assessment without finding out whether Joyce’s meaning differed to the one chosen by him. At this point, with Weeks insisting that Joyce meant ‘artistically honest’ (even though Joyce had made no reference to art), it is interesting to wonder what John Weeks had known of my ‘art’, and why it seemed safe for Weeks to attribute honesty to my art, but not to my character. For a deputy judge who admitted that he hadn’t heard of
Top of the Pops
, it seemed unlikely that he would know anything about Morrissey – unless privately enlightened by his friends. It is also interesting to wonder why Weeks found it impossible to link honesty in art to honesty within the person who had created the art, or that he could not see how one automatically led to the other.

For John Weeks, nothing spoken under cross-examination had provided anything at all in my favor, yet the constant inaccuracies and assumptions vomited out with leaden fatigue by Joyce had said so much to the judge. The extraordinary zeal with which Weeks battered out his final judgment raised questions on how far judges should be allowed to go in their assassination of a defendant. Certainly, a witness such as I, with no criminal record, and one who believed that he had always acted with kindness and generosity towards the plaintiff, could not possibly have deserved the skewed and vile attack as spewed forth from John Weeks
. If such actions as mine are ultimately not thought to be correct it is only because they are ultimately not thought to be, but this does not show that they were originally designed to be incorrect, and certainly, nothing I had ever done had broken any existing laws. So why did John Weeks use words so violent and apparently preferential in his final judgment? Why did Weeks not simply admonish Joyce for failing to sort his own personal business out all those years ago when the time was right? Why was the failure of Joyce to organize his own personal life deemed to be the responsibility of Morrissey and Marr in 1996 – even though the judge also said that he had no doubt that Joyce had always been equal to Morrissey and Marr? If, as the judge insisted, Joyce had always been equal to Morrissey and Marr, why would that same judge also deem Morrissey and Marr accountable for the supervision of Joyce? How could this ever be the case if all three were of equal partnership liabilities? And if indeed they were, why did the judge not take Joyce, as an ‘equal partner’, to task for any alleged business failings made by Morrissey and Marr? If all three were ‘equal’, how could there ever be a point when that equality separates? Weeks wanted it both ways: he mysteriously sees unquestionable equality from the very start of the Smiths, yet all supervision and responsibility were the duties only of Morrissey and Marr, and not Joyce.