Courting Trouble
Authors: Kathy Lette
Tilly has the day from hell when she’s sacked from her barristers’ chambers in the morning, then finds her husband in bed with her former best friend in the afternoon. She escapes to her mother, Roxy – a sassy solicitor whose outrageous take on men, work and family life is the despair of her more conventional daughter. Roxy comes up with a radical plan for their future – they’ll set up an all-female law firm which will only champion women who have been cheated, put upon, attacked, ripped off or ruined by the men in their lives.
In court, Tilly is against Jack Cassidy, the smooth-talking, politically incorrect, legal love god who broke her heart at law school. Jack is fluent in three languages – English, sarcasm and flirtation . . . but if he’s so loathsome, then why is she committing acute lust in the third degree? When a case lands on the doorstep that threatens to change all their lives, Tilly finds herself dangerously close to taking the law into her own hands . . . Will Jack’s cunning ways and expertise in emotional breaking and entering derail her quest for justice? Or will the women take on the boys . . . and win?
Contents
3 United We Stand, Divided We are Screwed
7 Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Date No Evil
8 The Courage of Your Convictions
12 Having Your Beefcake and Eating It, Too
14 A Stranger in the Dark in the Park
15 Acute Lust in the Third Degree
16 Dinner with a Side Order of Sarcasm
18 Bewigged, Bothered and Bewildered
20 Is That a Gavel in Your Pocket or are You Just Pleased to See Me?
Kathy Lette
Dedicated to my inspirational friend Helena Kennedy, QC, who has promised to defend me when I kill my first book critic.
Rap Sheets
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I left school with the intention of being either a lawyer or a mistress of espionage. As I hate pain and can’t keep a secret, I achieved only one of these ambitions. (Well, that’s what I have to tell you . . . unless you use my code name, of course.)
Today, I am prosecuting myself. The case you must judge involves a moral dilemma. My role is to lay the evidence before you. What you must decide is simple – is it ever right to take the law into your own hands? Especially if you’re a lawyer.
This is a tale of emotional breaking and entering and acute lust in the third degree. As well as these crimes of the heart, this is also a story of violence, vengeance and betrayal. But it’s up to you to decide where to lay the blame and whether to find me guilty.
So firstly, let me introduce you to the witnesses and defendants in this immorality tale.
If I were to show you my own charge sheet it would read:
Matilda Devine
35, accident-prone mother of one and barrister-at-law, 5’7”, red hair, green eyes, size ten – well, eleven after a chocolate binge.
Convictions
: that my arch-rival and frequent opponent in court, Jack Cassidy, is an A-grade ratbag.
Previous convictions
: that Jack Cassidy was an A-grade ratbag way back when I first met him at law school and he always will be.
If I were writing a rap sheet for Jack Cassidy it would read:
Jack Cassidy
38, barrister-at-law, tall, dark embodiment of handsomeness, fluent in three languages – English, Sarcasm and Flirtation.
Convictions
: tried and found guilty of relationship hit-and-run.
Jack was a couple of years ahead of me when we were studying law at Oxford. I had the misfortune of briefly falling in love with him before realizing that his specialist area was lying and heartbreak.
Like some corseted, cosseted heroine from a Victorian melodrama, I was late to lose my virginity. It didn’t happen till university. Which is a surprise, I know. I mean, what typical, tattooed, rock-and-roll-lovin’, inner-city-London state-school boy wouldn’t want a nerdy, flat-shoed female wimp who was always in the library studying Latin and jurisprudence? It defies logic, clearly.
It wasn’t long before Jack carved another notch on his bedhead – a notch with my name on it. If only I’d discovered the cad was sleeping with three other women before I fondled his metaphorical gavel.
After Jack’s carnal double-cross, I’d planned to devour a whole smorgasbord of blokes, but immediately drifted into a relationship with Steve. I was like a holiday-maker who arrives full of intentions to set out on scintillating sightseeing trips, then finds herself simply sinking into the empty sunlounger by the pool and ordering a pina colada. If I were writing a charge sheet for Steve it would read:
Stephen Myer
40, psychiatrist.
Looks
: a charmer of the old-school variety, with a leather-elbow-patched poetic streak. Natural habitat – his study, sipping Burgundy and listening to a Bartók quartet.
Traits
: on our first date he told me that he found long-term relationships to be as annoying and repetitive as bad wallpaper . . . Needless to say, we married shortly afterwards.
Well, accidentally falling pregnant sealed that deal. I did not want Portia (now thirteen) raised in a single-parent family, like me. Portia (named after Shakespeare’s legal heroine rather than de Rossi) obviously can’t have a rap sheet as she is completely innocent, beautiful and the light of my life. No, rap sheets are reserved for people like Petronella. If I were writing a rap sheet for Petronella it would read:
Petronella Willets
35, barrister-at-law, piranha in Prada.
Looks
: blonde; Viking goddess. More groomed than a pedigree poodle at Crufts . . . Only much more bitchy.
When not in court, I tend to dress as though I’ve been hired to de-algae your aquarium. But Petronella Willets always looks sleekly elegant in black, pinstriped pencil skirts and immaculate white shirts. While I tend to gobble down chocolate at any opportunity, health-nut Petronella has her own nutritionist and acupuncturist – hell, she probably has a faecalist who feng shuis her faeces. I refuse to spend a fortune on face creams, believing that the secret of great skin is to be, well, Mediterranean. But Petronella tends to have every tanned pore individually pampered.
The piranha’s true antithesis is my mother. It feels strange to write a rap sheet for Roxy, as she’s guilty of only one thing – an over-protective, lioness-type love for her family. But if I
were
to write her a charge sheet, it would read:
Roxanne Devine
55, but depends who’s asking. If it’s a toy boy, then she’s approaching 40, only she doesn’t say from which direction. My mother’s appetite for men borders on the carnivorous. Her motto is ‘Have Your Beefcake and Eat It, Too’. Her latest beau, a 30-year-old DJ, is so good in the sack that he regularly launches her into the stratosphere. She calls him Cape Canaveral. ‘Let’s do launch,’ she texts him on a nightly basis . . . Which is way too much information for any daughter to cope with.
Looks:
at five foot one and ten stone, she’s a butterball, with skinny, miniskirt-clad legs tapering off into leopardskin wedges. Her wild, dyed-blonde hair is piled high on her head in a skew-whiff beehive. My mother has the kind of walk that should always be accompanied by a brassy saxophone solo. She dances everywhere, with everyone – on tables, in aisles. And often in an alarming amount of gold lamé. Resilient, strong, indomitable – in other words, Australian.
History:
if what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, then my mother is made of titanium. Roxy ran away from her conservative Irish Catholic family in Sydney to Britain aged 18 to take part in the anti-nuclear demonstrations. Here, she fell in love with an environmental activist called Danny. After a passionate three-year relationship, he told her he had to disappear for a while as the police were after him, but promised to send for her soon, as he loved her so deeply. It was after he’d gone to ground that Roxy discovered she was pregnant with me. Her strict, religious parents disowned her. She waited and waited, but Danny-boy never returned.
My sassy and sexy mother now maintains that men have only two emotions: hungry or horny. ‘If you see him without an erection, make him a sandwich’ was her only dating advice.
Career:
heartbroken by my father’s abandonment and determined that nobody would ever take advantage of her again, Roxy put herself through law school to become a solicitor. ‘Making me self-tort’, is her Twitter-profile legalistic quip on the subject.
My mother has ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ tattooed across her chest and, in case medics don’t see the message, ‘PTO’ on her back. She’s stipulated in her will that she’d like her ashes to be fired into the sky from a cannon. ‘When I die, I want to be covered in scars, glory, scandal, totally zonked, declaring loudly, “What a bloody great ride!!”’
When my husband, Stephen, a very smug non-smoker, nagged my mother to give up cigarettes, her response was to challenge him to a race up Parliament Hill. When he declined with the comment, ‘That’s so silly, Roxanne, at your age!’ Roxy upped the ante and offered to smoke during the race. When Stephen arrived at the top five minutes after she did, my mother just couldn’t resist lighting another fag from the one she’d sucked to the filter, and cackling, ‘What kept you, possum?’
But I admit, my mother can be borderline too much of a good thing. The woman takes no prisoners – unless she’s performing a citizen’s arrest on a drug dealer or has tied a toy boy to her bed with silk stockings.
Her heart is pure gold. An old hippy, she grows her own vegetables, dispensing herbal cures to local crackheads and, as well as saving the orang-utan, lion and humble bumblebee, is a foster-parent for traumatized dogs. ‘Nobody wanted him. He’d been in the pound for ten years and yet he’s so adorable!’ Needless to say, what she sees as a harmless unloved pup, I see more as the Hound of the Baskervilles. And yet, although my mother and I are opposite in every way, we love Portia with equal passion.
As well as the main defendants in this case, there’s also a granny with a grudge, a few crims with testicular trauma and an entire den of thieves – and that’s just in my law firm. But one thing’s for sure. There’ll be a waterproof-mascara shortage after I’ve presented all the facts in this curious tale.
It all began two years ago, on the worst day of my life. When everything that
could
go wrong
went
wrong . . . and my world changed for ever.
Courting Disaster
The question on most women’s minds is – why doesn’t chocolate go straight to your boobs? It may not be particularly Einsteinesque or existential, but it was definitely the question consuming me as I consumed my second block of Green and Black’s hazelnut milk to alleviate the pain of losing my court case to my arch-enemy; my barrister’s job at Diplock Chambers; my domestic stability; and quite possibly my sanity. And all on the same dismal day.
As I cracked open the silver foil on block number three, I tried to ward off despondency, depression and feelings of worthlessness by reminding myself that I was once the fastest, most victorious little sperm out of millions . . . But I was beginning to think of that as my one moment of glory. How had it come to this? That I, Matilda Devine, law graduate, feminist, voted Best Legs in law school (I feigned disdain while secretly thrilled), cryptic crossword queen and 33-year-old mother of an eleven-year-old darling daughter – would be curled up in the foetal position in my pyjamas, crunching my way through an entire cocoa plantation while sobbing hysterically to Puccini’s
Madame Butterfly
death aria.
The dreadful day began when I asked my husband, over tasteless organic cereal (
his
choice; Stephen says it’s important to massage your bowels daily with bran flakes), what time he’d be joining me to watch our daughter, a tap-dancing cupcake, performing in the school musical. I was so excited about Portia’s stage debut that only a Red Arrow fly-past would suffice by way of celebration.