The Book of You. Claire Kendal

eyes are pale, watery blue. They are small. Your lips are thin. They are pale too.

      You touch my arm and I shake you off, walking down the path to the waiting taxi.

      ‘I was coming to check on you,’ you say, as if I haven’t spoken at all. ‘Your phone’s still not on,’ you say. ‘I worry when I can’t get hold of you,’ you say.

      With you beside me it seems a long walk through the path of Miss Norton’s wintering rose bushes, but I am at the taxi and must have reached it quickly.

      I open the rear door and get in, trying to pull it closed behind me, but you catch it before I can.

      ‘Move over, Clarissa. I’ll come with you.’ You are bending over. Your head and torso are inside. I can smell your toothpaste. The mint is strong. You’ve probably used mouthwash too.

      The composure I have practised so carefully dissolves. ‘This man isn’t with me,’ I say to the driver, the same one who picked me up yesterday morning. ‘I don’t want him getting in.’

      ‘Stop bothering her. Get the fuck out of my car or I’m calling the police,’ the driver says.

      My mother has told me all of my adult life that taxi drivers see it as part of their job to be protective; they know that’s why women pay for taxis. My mother is often right, and I am lucky with this driver. In my mother’s visions of taxi drivers as heroic saviours, they are always big and burly men.

      This one is a woman, middle-aged and short, but stout and tough and fearless seeming, with beautiful cropped spiky grey hair that I am certain she would never dream of dyeing. She wears jeans and a fuzzy orange wool sweater. She does not show you the warmth and joviality that filled her car during yesterday’s brief journey. She is opening her own door, showing you she’s prepared to enforce her words.

      You withdraw your head and torso and stand just inches from the door as I slam it closed and the driver slams hers.

      You bang a fist on the roof. ‘How can you treat me like this, Clarissa?’

      The driver presses the button to lower the front passenger window, shouts threateningly at you, and moves off.

      ‘Clarissa? Clarissa! I don’t deserve this, Clarissa.’

      I still refuse to look at you. I’m trying so hard to stick to the advice, to do this right. I can see in my peripheral vision that you are running beside the taxi to the end of the street, slapping the trees and lamp posts as you pass them. I can hear you calling my name. The driver is muttering under her breath about what a fucking crazy idiot you are. She is apologising for her language and I am apologising for being so troublesome. We each tell the other that no apology is needed, though I know she is just being nice and mine is. I thank her for being so kind.

      Before I get out of the taxi I take her card: she is a potential witness against you.

      Despite the film of sweat on my back and brow even in the cold of the morning, it has been a fairly successful start to the day in terms of managing you.

      As I move in a daze through the station my new phone bleeps, announcing that I have an email. I look at the screen like a little girl daring herself to stare into a mirror in the dark, frightened that the face of a monster will appear. To my astonishment, the email is from the long-silent Rowena. She’s visiting Bath tonight, and she’s commanding my presence at a French restaurant I’ve never been to but Henry once said was gruesome. I email back, I’ll be there, and two kisses. Then I switch off my phone and step onto the train to Bristol.

      Clearly, the witness box was placed so its occupant would directly face the jury. But still the woman seemed so far away. In front of the jurors was an orchestra pit of twelve barristers in their wigs and black robes. Clarissa had to look over them all to get the witness in view.

      She was extremely thin, almost worryingly frail. High cheekbones. Small straight nose. Rosebud lips. Delicate chin. Softly arched brows. Tiny seashell ears that belonged on a fairy. Her dark blonde hair was in a short ponytail.

      But the closer Clarissa looked, the more she saw that the woman’s ethereal beauty was damaged. Her skin was too thin, too transparent. The firm set to her mouth and the lines etched around her huge green eyes were at odds with Clarissa’s guess that she was in her late twenties. Something had taken an unnatural toll on her.

      ‘She looks like you,’ Annie whispered. ‘She just needs to grow her hair longer and you’d pass for twins. But she’s the mean version. She’s hard.’

      And probably ten years younger than I am, Clarissa thought.

      The woman sipped from the glass of water that the usher poured for her, giving him a weak nod of thanks. Her skin was so drained of blood it was hardly darker than the white gauze of the top she was wearing. The top wasn’t warm enough; she probably had goose bumps. Her hands were shaking as she held the Bible. Her voice was trembling as she took the oath.

      The judge spoke. ‘You are not to infer anything about the defendants from the presence of the blue screen blocking Miss Lockyer from their view. That is a very usual sight in court, simply to make witnesses feel more comfortable. That is all it means.’

      Clarissa nodded agreement up at his high bench. She could see that the others had turned their heads to the left to do the same. She wasn’t sure she believed him, though.

      ‘This witness will need a break every forty-five minutes,’ the judge said.

      The woman nodded gratefully at him and then it really began. Carlotta Lockyer seemed to be the only person in the room. And though Mr Morden was speaking too, and asking questions, he, and everyone else, seemed to disappear. There was only Miss Lockyer’s voice.

      I started dealing for Isaac Sparkle the summer before last, to fund my habit. Within a week I’d smoked it all myself and was money down. I thought if I ignored it, tried to avoid him, it would disappear.

      On Saturday, July twenty-eighth, I was walking home. I’d gone out to shoplift, but hadn’t managed to get anything. There was a white van on my street, partly on the pavement. When I was level with it one of Sparkle’s couriers, Antony Tomlinson, got out the front. Sparkle got out the back with one of his dealers, Thomas Godfrey.

      Sparkle said, ‘Get her in the fucking van.’ They picked me up and forced me in.

      Sally was in the back seat. She’s a working girl, another user. The van stopped after about five minutes. Godfrey said to Sally, ‘Get the fuck out.’ There weren’t no door handles in back. Sally had to climb between the front seats, over Tomlinson, then out the front passenger door. I was screaming, begging them to let me out too, but they drove up to the motorway.

      Godfrey told me to shut up. He smacked the side of my head. Then he took out one of those green disposable lighters. The flame was on high. He put it to my right earring. I could feel the hoop getting hot, really burning. I was crying. I was pleading with him to leave off.

      We stopped on the way to pick up another man. He got in the van and said, ‘You got her. Good.’ The van driver, Doleman, said, ‘Someone should fuck her up the ass. Teach her a lesson.’

      They took me to a flat in a poor part of London. No electricity. So cold. The only light was from a street lamp outside the lounge window. The boy they’d picked up played music from his phone. They were yelling, ‘Strip off and dance.’ I begged them not to make me. Godfrey punched me in the stomach. ‘Do it.’ I was crying but not proper crying – he’d knocked the wind from me.

      I took my clothes off, and I danced. I can’t describe how humiliated I felt. Like I was an animal performing for them. ‘She ain’t doin’ nothin’ for me,’ Godfrey said.

      ‘We’re gonna teach you some discipline, like my father taught me,’ Sparkle said.

      I had to stand on one leg with my arms out. I was still naked. They was cheering like they was at a football match. Look at her tits wobble. Look at her hairy cunt. I wanted to