It would depend on what Frankie and Joan, the nurses, said on oath.
And on what Ray said, too.
Ray had never seen justice operate at first hand, and while he understood it and knew how it was meant to work, he felt anxious. What if the defence barrister wasn’t as persuasive as the prosecutor? Supposing the defence had the balance of evidence slightly in their favour, but the prosecuting barrister was the more accomplished orator and cross-examiner? An innocent man might easily go down. Or a guilty man get off. It all rested on the intelligence of the jury, on their ability to see through all the arguments, specious and otherwise. They had to be able to see through, say, the prosecutor’s efforts to establish a defendant’s guilt even when it was clear to everyone in the room that the man was not guilty.
In the case of Dunstan, Ray was still undecided.
Ray’s reverie was interrupted by the sound of the door opening. He looked up and saw the two nurses, Joan and Frankie, entering the room. He caught Frankie’s eye, but she immediately looked away, first at Joan and then down at the ground. Joan didn’t look in his direction. Together the two women sat in a similar position relative to Ray as Henshaw, although several seats away from the engineer, and Ray was left to contemplate the backs of their heads as they leaned close and whispered to one another.
The first day was adjourned and Ray was yet to be called. He decided to walk back to Earls Court. His route took him through Covent Garden into Soho, where he stopped for a drink in the Golden Lion on Dean Street. He got himself a half and sat at a table on his own, but it wasn’t long before a man came and sat opposite him, without asking if the seat were free. The man was wearing a denim jacket, a T-shirt bearing an illegible slogan, and a pair of jeans. The newcomer launched into a conversation that seemed as if it had already been started earlier. He asked Ray if he liked the pub and if he thought he might want to come there again. Ray didn’t know what to say and he kept his replies short, but there was something in the man’s appeal Ray found hard to resist. Possibly it was nothing more than the fact that the man clearly wanted something — and wanted something from Ray.
Ray couldn’t deny he felt pleased to be wanted.
After a while, the man asked fewer questions, but they became more pointed. Encouraged by Ray’s answers, the man gave him some directions. Eventually the man got up and left the pub and Ray walked out behind him, following him to a public toilet just off Shaftesbury Avenue. Ray waited for a moment while the man went in and then he went in also. The light in the toilet was completely different from that outside. There were skylights, but they were of thick glass and the air inside was damp and gloomy. There was a smell of disinfectant and pools of water on the floor. The attendant’s heavy wooden door appeared locked. On the right-hand side were four cubicles, faced by a urinal on the left. Ray walked up to the third cubicle along, which was shut. He gave a short double-knock and immediately heard a bolt being drawn back within. The door was pulled open and Ray stepped inside. The man, whose semi-erect penis was poking out of the fly of his jeans, pushed the door shut behind Ray and locked it.
Without speaking, the man sat on the pulled-down toilet seat and placed his hands on Ray’s belt. His eyes swivelled upwards to seek approval. Ray felt incapable of voluntary movement and imagined — hoped, even, although he would have not liked to admit it — that his lack of any signal would be taken as acquiescence.
The man unbuckled Ray’s belt, unzipped his fly and lowered his trousers, followed by his underpants. He started to rub and stroke Ray’s penis, which responded by becoming stiffer, longer, heavier. The man glanced up at Ray, who was looking down on what was taking place with something close to disbelief. The man might have thought that the expression on Ray’s face was a smile. It might even have actually been a smile.
The man put Ray’s penis in his mouth and started to move his head backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. His left hand alternately encircling Ray’s penis at the root and lightly squeezing his testicles, the man moved his right hand down to his own penis, which Ray could see was now fully engorged. The man moved his right hand quickly up and down the shaft of his own penis while continuing to suck on Ray’s and to fondle his balls. After a few moments, the man convulsed and jerked backwards as he ejaculated. He stopped rubbing himself, but his penis remained hard and erect and white in the greenish underwater light of the cubicle as he continued to do what he was doing to Ray, who was trying to shut down the workings of his own mind so that he might relax enough to achieve the same kind of release. Suddenly into his mind popped an image of himself on the beach at Whitley Bay, the damp sand under his feet, the hard convolutions of the shell in his hand, the tall white lighthouse rising out of the sea. The feeling — the conviction — that life was short and unpredictable. The promise that he would not live in regret. And he suddenly exploded with the very opposite of regret, with joy, a great, spontaneous, shocking rush of joy.
And the man grinned as he wiped his face with the back of his hand.
In the morning, just before ten, there’s a knock on the door. I open it.
‘Ksssh—’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I say, interrupting him, although I notice he’s not looking as annoyingly chipper as usual. The annoyingly chipper look, though, is, I suspect, paper-thin.
‘Shall we go for a drive?’ he says.
‘I thought we were going for a walk.’
‘Summat I want to show you. We can go in your car.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘I thought you were picking me up.’
‘My car’s fucked, mate.’
‘Right. Hang on.’
I go back inside for the keys. This is a bad idea, I can tell. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant.
‘Come on then,’ I say, locking the front door behind me and opening the car.
Lewis sits with his legs far apart, so that I keep knocking his right knee with the gearstick. He neither apologises nor makes any effort to move his leg.
‘Where are we going, then?’ I ask him.
‘Get on to the M60,’ he says. ‘Westbound.’
For some reason I’d expected us to be going in the opposite direction.
‘Are you going to tell me where we’re going or what?’
‘I’ll direct you,’ he says, adding, ‘if that’s all right.’
It’s my turn to say ‘Whatever’.
The motorway is pretty quiet, unlike Lewis.
‘All that teaching you do,’ he says, ‘do you enjoy it?’
‘Depends,’ I say.
‘On what?’
‘On how good they are, or how willing they are to take advice.’
‘Which ones are willing to take advice? The good ones or the others?’
I see the gilt domes and trashy cupolas of the Trafford Centre coming up on the right-hand side.
‘Generally,’ I say, ‘the worse they are, the more resistant they are to accepting any advice at all, whether it’s from me or the other students.’
‘Take the next exit,’ he says. ‘What about the good ones?’
‘Now and again,’ I say, indicating to leave the motorway, ‘you get someone who’s very good and knows it and doesn’t really see the point in listening to what anyone’s got to say about their stuff. Left or right?’