Courting Trouble (8 page)

‘And I wanna clean my teeth,’ Chantelle’s voice rasped behind me.

‘’Fraid not,’ the nurse said matter-of-factly.

I was so shocked by her brusque reply that I turned to appraise the woman more closely. She was in her late twenties, with pale skin – pre-Raphaelite pale – with auburn tendrils of hair escaping her nurse’s cap – a look that seemed far too delicate for the wards of an inner-city London hospital.

‘Not till after forensics.’ The nurse’s harsh, nasal Estuary accent belied her exotic looks. If she’d been born in the 1850s, she’d have been ‘discovered’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and made to pose for hours in a medieval dress, fingering a lute, for a series of languorous portraits. Yet here she was, dealing with vaginal swabs, stale ejaculate and genital diseases which she couldn’t quite put her finger on . . . and would much rather not, judging by her off-handedness.

Her voice was prodding, metallic, cold as a gynaecologist’s speculum. ‘It’s protocol. No interfering with forensics till after the physical exam.’

‘But why’s it taking so long?’ I asked the nurse. ‘And shouldn’t she be in a specialist rape suite?’

Lethargy clung to the nurse like satin in summer. She greeted my query with all the enthusiasm with which you’d welcome a yeast infection. ‘Medical emergency comes first. The girl got smacked over the head. We have to make sure there’s no concussion before a rape specialist can examine her. Plus, there’re internal injuries, too. And bruising around her throat. And cracked ribs.’

‘But the poor kid’s been here since last night!’ I protested.

‘Yeah, well, so have I,’ the redhead snarled.

‘Listen up, Nursey. I’m Chantelle’s lawyer,’ my mother growled. ‘So I suggest you get the rape specialist here right now. Otherwise, all you’ll be putting a dressing on is a salad – in your waitressing job after I get you fired.’

One of my mother’s attributes which I most admire is her breezy ability to cut through protocol like a scalpel through the epidermis. Ten minutes later, in a flurry of white coats and stethoscopes, a rape specialist arrived. A screen was propped up around the bed. Roxy and I were to wait outside. ‘They have to take swabs,’ my mother explained. ‘Vagina and mouth. They’ll take samples from under her fingernails, plus other scrapings and cuttings, and pubic-hair combings.’

Happy sixteenth birthday, Chantelle.

Roxy introduced me to the sexual offences liaison officer who had also just miraculously arrived. While we waited she talked us through what Chantelle had told her. The officer had established that there were two men and that it was a Section 1 rape.

‘That’s penetration of any orifice without consent,’ my mother clarified.

The officer’s description of Chantelle’s harrowing ordeal was interrupted by raised voices inside the room – the teenager was too shy and traumatized to take off her hospital gown. We could hear the doctor explaining that she needed to take a vaginal swab. That she’d be really gentle and would use a cotton bud. That it would be a bit uncomfortable and may sting a little, but would be over quickly, as would the injection for a blood sample.

‘I want my gran!’

My mother and I exchanged pained, wretched glances.

When the doctor finally emerged, she told us that the perpetrators had scrawled an inked message across Chantelle’s abdomen in felt-tip pen. ‘They’ve drawn an arrow pointing towards her pudenda with the message “Wash this”. And “Dirty bitch”.’

My toes curled up like dead leaves in my shoes.

‘How can you not take this case, Matilda?’ Roxy insisted.

When Roxy and I came back into the room, we immediately offered Chantelle the glass of water and toothbrush the pre-Raphaelite nurse had now, finally, fetched. The teenager drained the glass, then drew herself in against Roxy like a small animal in need of a place to hide, her hands clutching at my mother’s sleeve. She started weeping. I looked down at her face pityingly. The nurse came back to administer a sedative.

‘Don’t fret, pet,’ my mother said soothingly, stroking the girl’s lank hair. ‘I’m going to get the mongrels who did this.’

‘Is . . . is Gran . . . in . . . trouble?’ Chantelle whimpered.

‘Not if we can help it, possum,’ Roxy said. ‘Isn’t that right, Tilly?’

‘Chantelle,’ I probed gently, ‘are you sure your grandma attacked the right men?’

The young woman nodded. As she turned her head towards me, I saw the necklace of bruises, dark as an aubergine, ringing her throat.

‘Are you one hundred per cent sure the photos she took were of the perpetrators?’

‘I know ’em. From round the estate. They load the girls up with alcohol and drugs an’ that. They make all the girls do stuff they don’t wanna do. I told my friends not to get treated like pieces of meat. They attacked me ’cause I didn’t want nuffink to do with ’em. They trapped me. They threatened to burn my gran alive if I refused to give ’em a shiner. That scared me. I thought to meself “Don’t be a baby. Just get on and do it, to save Gran.” But I couldn’t. I screamed and fought and then they ripped my top off and shoved my skirt up . . .’

A sorrow as black as night invaded me. I felt my throat clamping. The stairwell where she was attacked must have echoed like a cave. But nobody came.

Her eyes began to glaze over with the dull impassivity of medication. Soon the only hint that Chantelle was breathing at all was the relentless trembling of her legs beneath the sheet.

‘If there’s anything you need, you call me, all right?’ My mother tore a piece of paper from her diary, scribbled down her number and left it on the nightstand. ‘I’ll be back tonight to check up on you.’

We closed the door softly and stood for a moment bathed in the harsh fluorescent light, staring at each other.

‘That poor girl needs counselling. Can we get her some kind of help?’

Roxy trudged down the hospital corridor towards the lift. ‘If a trial’s coming up, then the police discourage counselling. If Chantelle says anything different to the counsellor than what she says to the police, the defence could use it against her.’

‘But a trial may be six or nine months away. Besides, do you think she’ll be strong enough to give evidence?’

My mother shrugged, stabbing the lift button. ‘Right now she’s in startled-deer mode. But if she’s anything like her gran . . .’

The lift doors suddenly suctioned open and we were staring right into the face of one of Chantelle’s attackers. It was the wiry, thin one we’d seen in Phyllis’s photos. He had a diamond earring in his right lobe and prison-issue clothing – a navy sweatshirt, matching jogging bottoms and black plimsolls, and was handcuffed to an officer my mother knew.

‘Jeez, Ray. Don’t
you
get all the cushy jobs. Have you charged the bastard yet?’

‘He’ll be formally charged down at the station. They want forensics first.’ He held up the accused’s clothes, which had been bagged to prevent hair and fibres from falling off.

‘Where’s the other scuzzy dirtbag?’ Roxy said, as we stepped into the lift.

‘Surgery. Shot his ball right off.’ The policeman winced. ‘Nearly hit the femoral artery.’

‘And this drongo?’

‘Leg wound and slight graze on one nut. He’ll live.’

‘Unfortunately.’ My mother glowered at the man in cuffs.

‘Oy!’ The rapist who went by the name of Bash thrust his head forward like a raptor. ‘I neva done nuffink,’ he said in a Norf London accent. ‘Weez innocent, yeah.’ Even at long range, his breath hit you like a solid block. It then melted and just slithered down your face, leaving a trail of nacho cheese and onion relish. ‘Some mad hag comes and blasts us for no fuckin’ reason. What’s that about then?’

‘Gee, I dunno . . . Possibly because you brutally gang-raped her granddaughter?’ My mother’s voice dripped angry sarcasm.

Bash reeked of malevolence. I could feel it coming off him in waves, as strong as aftershave.

‘What do nine out of ten people enjoy?’ the raptor rapist sneered. ‘Gang rape.’

For a moment I saw my mother thinking about borrowing the policeman’s gun and shooting him in his other testicle. She took aim with a verbal bullet instead. ‘Just as well your dick isn’t any bigger, or Phyllis might have actually hit you.’

I gave my mother a censorious look. Judges take a dim view of the defence team badgering prosecution witnesses. ‘Um, Roxy, as Phyllis’s solicitor, I suggest you make like a turtle and pull your head in,’ I counselled.

‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘I never pass judgement on prosecution witnesses, and I’m not going to break the habit of a legal lifetime, for this piece of shit.’

‘Anyways, it ain’t rape if you yell “Surprise!” first.’ The thug then leant right into my face, so I copped the full force of his sour breath. ‘
“Surprise!”
‘His laugh was totally B-grade-movie satanic.

‘Oy! Shut it,’ the policeman told Bash. The lift doors whooshed open on the ground floor and he manhandled the raptor out of the hospital.

‘Men like that need to be taught a lesson,’ Roxy sighed as we walked back to her car. ‘This behaviour springs from cultures that fail to persecute rape. Men think they can get away with it, because they do. Phyllis’s bail hearing’s in the morning. Ah . . . if only I knew a good lawyer . . .’

My mother drives fast at the most relaxed of times. But today she was so furious she’d decided that amber lights were merely a device to get drivers to accelerate. She was so redfaced with anger that I was tempted to ask the guy at the traffic lights to forget the windscreen and just lean in and squeegee her forehead.

‘On the surface, those rapists may seem like clichéd, brainless thugs straight out of central casting. But don’t underestimate them. To my mind, those gangrenous polyps fit the mould of drug-gang members who treat girls like sperm spittoons. They have a Ph.D. in lying, misogyny and deception. It’s time they were booted up the bum, right into maximum-security prison.’

I clutched the dashboard for dear life as the car caromed off a speed bump and we momentarily took flight.

‘Look, what happened to Chantelle is unforgivable. But her grandma attacked in cold blood. All this eye-for-an-eye stuff, it’s so Old Testament.’

‘Sometimes it’s the only way, Tilly. Phyllis knows that raped girls often end up too terrified and intimidated to testify.’

‘But if you advocate the law of “jungle justice”, society collapses into chaos. I specialize in civil not criminal law. I’ve spent my life cross-examining people who have acted unlawfully – dodgy doctors and dentists and such. I could only act for Phyllis if she pleads guilty. I could do a good plea in a mitigation to the judge for a lenient sentence.’

I was beginning to make Mother Teresa seem frolicsome, but it was the truth.

‘Let me show you where it happened,’ was Roxy’s answer to that.

The Royal Free Hospital is on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Hampstead Village is a haven of arugula salad and Aga stoves and Cath Kidston cushions. But as you drive south towards Camden, the genteel Georgian properties quickly give way to council estates with a severe shortage of Montessori schools and yogalate classes. Roxy swung her car off the winding, picturesque road and into the mass of grim tower blocks that made up the Tony Benn Estate.

An inner-city-London council estate is like downtown Haiti, only without the glamour. At one end, an abandoned factory loomed out of the rain like a dark cathedral. It was surrounded by a tidal wave of concrete – cluttered, shabby tower blocks, their balconies strung with washing and their facades festooned with satellite dishes. Although there definitely was a rough poetry to the place. A second-hand-furniture shop on the corner boasted a wobbly hand-painted sign in its window which read ‘Sofa King – Our prices are Sofa King low.’

Roxy’s MG Midget swerved through upended green wheelie bins on to the ironically named Buttercup Road, where the shrubs bloomed with discarded crisp packets and plastic bags. Only the weeds seemed to keep growing, like the toenails on a corpse. The whole place looked ready for a Quentin Tarantino remake.

A cluster of adolescent boys wearing black hoodies sat on their haunches, like a row of crows, on the carcass of a rusted car. They seemed suspicious and furtive, like urban foxes, ready to scavenge.

Roxy nosed her car into a kerb and cut the engine. The rain had stopped and the sky was a curdled grey, with lumps of clouds. A film of grit and despondency lay an inch thick on everything and the atmosphere reeked of sewage and petrol fumes. I had little doubt that my mother and I were wearing the only natural fibres for quite a few miles in any direction.

Before us a dank stairwell led up to darkness. The lift was not working and hadn’t been for years, judging by the arbour of cobwebs inside. The stairwell exuded a clammy odour, like the breath of a stray, half-starved dog.

Oblivious, Roxy bounded up the stairs in her leopardskin boots. As I panted along behind her, one thing became clear – there was little chance of me representing Britain in the next Olympics. On each landing there was a tiny window that had once let in light but was now so grey with grime that it might as well have been night outside. When I’d finally wheezed my way to the top floor, my mother was taking pictures of the routes to and from the stairwell. In the gloom, I picked out the mould-flecked walls and bare, broken lightbulbs. Visions of the little girl trapped and assaulted here turned my stomach. Torn fragments of crime-scene tape festooned the area. This bleak bunting marked the spot that had been cordoned off by scene of crime officers that morning. All physical evidence – condoms, weapons, cigarette ends, discarded bottles, cans and tissues – would have been photographed by the SOCO and bagged.

I was bending over, catching my breath, when a footfall alerted me to company. In the darkness, I heard low, heavy breathing, then a figure loomed out of the shadows and made a lunge for my handbag. I thought about running, but who was I kidding? The closest I ever get to an accelerated heartbeat is when the shoe sale is on at Selfridges. At school I was always the last to be picked for the hockey team. (It usually came down to me or the bench.)

My mother always boasts that she’s a member of Athletics Anonymous – ‘Whenever I feel like doing some exercise, I call an anonymous friend who talks me out of it.’ But despite this, she’s strong as an ox and can outrun and out-wrestle most men. And so, in my usual heroic way, I just hid behind my mother.