Street a few decades ago with men who looked like a young Michael Caine lowering their spectacles and wolf-whistling.
She was clearly a bitch. I just had to find hard evidence.
‘Hey Ben!’ she trilled, spotting him and breezing over. ‘What’re you doing here?’
She knows Ben? And what the hell do you think he’s doing here, I thought. Ordering a frittata, getting a slippy gearbox checked out, waiting for the results of a splenic biopsy?
‘Waiting with Ron here. Her washing machine’s knackered.’
Georgina’s eyes moved reluctantly to me, only for a moment. ‘Ahhh. Nightmare, right?’
I nodded. Annoyingly, I felt a little of that beautiful person dazzle, as if a celebrity had acknowledged me, and couldn’t speak.
‘What’re you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Getting clothes washed, I guess?’
‘Dropping some stuff for the dry-cleaning service,’ she said, unlatching some probably-incredibly-expensive slinky things in monogrammed garment bags from her shoulder, by way of demonstration. ‘Cashmere, etcetera.’
I couldn’t help but notice she had slender arms like carved willow and tiny, fluttery-butterfly, delicate hands, screws of translucent tissue paper. In the genetic lottery, she’d won a triple rollover.
‘Listen, we should totally do that thing we talked about? The dinner?’ she said.
‘Sure. Let me know when?’
‘Certainly will,’ she said, with a little feline moue, and a flirtily-eyelinered wink. ‘See you around, yeah?’
She left her dry cleaning, breezed out and did a tips-of-the-fingers coy wave to Ben as she went. I said, trying very hard not to sound like a bitter nosy nag and failing: ‘Uhm. What thing you talked about?’
I fully expected Ben to dissemble about some vague plan to hit up the Pizza Hut all-you-can-eat buffet for a gorge-til-you-gag.
‘A date.’
‘A date?’ I repeated, as if he’d said ‘bumming otters, hanging on to their whiskers like they’re handlebars’.
‘Yeah. Is it that amazing?’
‘I didn’t think she went out with students, that’s all. Thought it was strictly cool successful older guys in other cities.’
‘Like you, you mean?’ Ben smirked. Touché. And before I could retort, Ben continued: ‘Everyone was second guessing so I thought I’d ask her. He who dares wins.’
This got worse. He’d asked her? I couldn’t deny that in some ways, it was a match ordained by heaven: the prom king and queen of English Literature & Language.
‘Cashmere, etcetera,’ I mimicked.
Ben didn’t rise to it. I had a sense that karmically, I’d pushed hard on a swing door.
24
Pete Gretton and I share the press bench in the later half of the week for the opening of a medical negligence trial. It concerns the very untimely death of a twenty-nine-year-old woman in a liposuction procedure, and two NHS doctors and a nurse at a private practice being prosecuted for negligence and manslaughter. There are several stringers from the agencies – a more geographically mobile, less seedy strain of freelancer than Gretton. He’s here because we’ve heard there’ll be some fairly gory details of operative complications and dislodged fat particles. Gretton is a rogue collection of cells himself, travelling around the arteries of the building and causing dangerously high blood pressure whenever he comes to a halt.
‘They can’t all be to blame,’ he mutters, before the court’s in session. ‘How many people does it take to stick a drip in an arm? CPS are simply chucking a handful of mud and hoping something sticks. Chewit?’
I shake my head at the proffered packet. ‘No thanks.’
‘On a diet?’
‘Get lost.’
Gretton bares yellow incisors. ‘Not to worry, most men like some meat on the bones. Hey, mind you, sounds like this ’un was taking it too far. Pushing twenty stone, I heard. Spherical.’
He chews noisily, giving me a view of his half-masticated sweet.
‘Shut up,’ I hiss, glancing at the heavy-set family in the public gallery, and twist my body as far away from him as possible. I need an I’m Not With Stupid t-shirt.
Solicitors are in hushed conference with barristers, papers are shuffled, people in the public gallery cough and shift in their seats.
A couple of the wigged-and-gowned fraternity are having a quiet chuckle about something that’s probably hilarious if you’re familiar with the intricacies of malpractice, and I see the family peering at them in irritated disbelief. I sympathise. It’s hard to believe that your earth-shattering calamity is merely another day at the office for people who do this kind of thing for a living.
Most of the time, journalists are rubber-necking tourists who can grasp the basic concepts involved. Dog bites man, man bites dog, man bites man because his dog looked at him funny, and so on. With a case like this, you have to become a short-term expert in a specific area of a highly skilled profession. Whenever a judge tetchily instructs a barrister or witness to simplify the terminology for the sake of the jury, the press bench heaves a near-audible sigh of relief.
As I leave the courtroom at lunchtime, I see Zoe in conversation with a woman I recognise from the public gallery.
Gretton’s seconds behind me, as ever.
‘What the fuck is she up to?’
‘Talking,’ I say.
Zoe and the woman look over at us; Zoe bends her head conspiratorially.
‘You want to grow some fuzz on your balls,’ Gretton says. ‘She’s talking to someone involved in this case. Don’t you care?’
‘Not really. She might be asking the time, for all we know.’
‘You’re bloody naïve, you are.’
‘It’s called trust.’
‘Trust? That girl doesn’t lie straight in bed.’
‘You didn’t like Zoe from the start, did you?’
‘I’ve got her number.’
I smile. ‘Takes one to know one, perhaps.’
Gretton trousers his Chewits and marches off, nostrils flaring.
Zoe walks up to me. ‘Pub o’clock?’
I nod. Since I took Zoe to The Castle, she’s assumed it as a weekly routine, and I surprised myself by not only acquiescing but actually enjoying it. Normally my lunchtimes are spent in jealously guarded semi-seclusion in the press room. I didn’t expect to make a friend.
Outside, I say: ‘Gretton got all unwound about you speaking to that woman. Who was she?’
‘Guess!’
‘Sister of my lipo victim?’
‘Mum. I saw them milling around earlier and I could tell she was going to appoint herself the gobby spokesperson so I got in early. I told her what Gretton said about how her daughter would be still be alive if she’d had her spoon surgically removed from the Häagen-Dazs.’
I stop in my tracks. ‘You didn’t?’
‘I did, and I said if she wants to talk afterwards, she should talk to you.’
‘But … Gretton said that in the press room.’
‘So?’
‘I