The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

  In the jury room the discussion continued. The Crown has to prove all the elements of murder beyond reasonable doubt. Everyone agreed. They listened silently to the reluctant juror. She had not spoken for some time, and her earlier silence lent a significance to her words now as she promised the yellow T-shirt they could wrap it up neatly and quickly if he would just give her a chance and listen. Sympathy swung towards her. The idea of giving her a go was enthusiastically received. It was only fair.

  “We don’t need to be sure of anything. The way the Judge put it, if we have a reasonable doubt about any of the elements of murder, we’re not allowed to find him guilty and we must go back in there and say ‘Not guilty.’ Now, the element we keep coming back to is his state of mind, what they’ve been calling the intention : Did he have the intention to kill or cause really serious harm? I wasn’t sure yesterday, but your arguments turned me around.”

  “My arguments?” asked the yellow T-shirt.

  “Yes. You reminded us that only one shot was fired, and that at the time—the time the shot was fired—no one was there to see it except Carly from her triangle.”

  “And Carly couldn’t see a bloody thing from that triangle,” said the yellow T-shirt.

  “Exactly. So nobody saw the struggle or the firing of the gun. And if we don’t know exactly how it occurred, what hope have we got of knowing what his intention was? He might’ve meant to kill him, but we don’t know. None of us knows.”

  Everyone agreed, even the yellow T-shirt.

  “So,” said the foreman, “you’re saying if we don’t know his intention, we’ve got a reasonable doubt?”

  “Yes, and if we have a reasonable doubt, we have to find him not guilty. We have no choice. That’s the law, if I’ve understood the Judge.”

  “It’s wrong. You know it’s wrong,” said the yellow T-shirt.

  “The thing is, they haven’t done their job properly, so it’s not our fault.”

  “Who hasn’t done their job properly?”

  “The Crown. It was you who made me see it.”

  “You’re right about that. He’s a lazy bastard, that bloke. You know, I saw him doing the bloody crossword while the Judge was talking to us. What a bastard: makes all that money and sits there doing the crossword.”

  The foreman asked whether they were all agreed to return a not-guilty verdict. He asked for a show of hands and looked around the room. One by one, everyone had put up their hands except the bra strap and the yellow T-shirt. There was silence.

  “Oh, come on! If he’s not guilty then the Pope’s not a Catholic! You all know he bloody did it.”

  No one said a word. The bra strap looked down at her feet. It seemed they were all waiting for something. The yellow T-shirt stood up and walked to the other end of the table, where he stood for a moment facing the whiteboard.

  “Oh, what do I bloody care? Let me out of here, for Godsakes. Okay. I pointed this out yesterday. Count me in. My hand is up. Could’ve saved us a day. Count again. I’ll vote not guilty. I can’t stand it any longer.”

  Another show of hands was called for. It was unanimous this time. The foreman went to knock on the door, the signal to the Tipstaff that they required his assistance. The door opened and the Tipstaff asked if everything was all right. “We’re ready,” the foreman said and then, quietly, “It was the girl, the young one wouldn’t come around.” The Tipstaff nodded.

  Everyone stood up. The reluctant juror washed out a mug and had a drink of water.

  “Like Twelve Angry Men,” she said to herself.

  “Like what?” asked the bra strap, standing near her.

  “I was just thinking of that movie, Twelve Angry Men.”

  “Yeah, with Jane Fonda.”

  The Tipstaff had seen it before and felt a knot in his stomach. The interval between the jury’s knock and the announcement of the verdict in any murder trial is a highly charged time. Even impartial cogs in the wheel cannot help but feel anxious. It does not matter how many times you have experienced it, there is always a hollowing of your being in the time between the knock and the verdict, he explained to one of the Protective Services officers, who nodded in agreement.

  The jury takes its place and everyone studies their faces for some indication of the result.

  “Mr. Foreman, has the jury agreed upon its verdict? How say you: do you find the accused guilty or not guilty of murder?” The Associate’s voice has a slight quiver in its clipped precision. Everyone in the room is, for the merest instant, on trial themselves. Nothing can save you.

  “Not guilty.”

  “And that is the verdict of all of you?”

  Some of the jurors nod, some smile. The bra strap takes the arm of the reluctant juror. She rests her head on the woman’s shoulder. The yellow T-shirt looks away. Yadwiga is smiling through her tears. The defendant’s solicitor has his back to the Judge with this thumb up to Ray, but Ray does not see. He has his head in his hands. The Judge begins to thank the jury for their attention and their diligence. He reminds them of their importance to the legal system and to the community. Senior and junior counsel for the defense are beaming. The informant is seated behind the Prosecutor. He says nothing as he watches the jury file out of the court into the jury room.

  A little later on there will be an uncomfortable moment in the alley at the back of the court. Taxis will arrive to take the jurors home. Some of the jurors will be waiting, belongings in hand, as Ray Islington talks to his lawyer. None of them will look at Ray Islington except for the yellow T-shirt. He will prop himself up against the wall of the court until the newly free man has to look at him. The yellow T-shirt wants to say something. He is going to, is about to, when he feels the firm hand of His Honor’s Tipstaff on the small of his back and hears, just quietly, “Move along, my friend. Show’s over, thank you.” But in that time there is just time for the bra strap to smile at Carly and whisper something to her as she and her mother push by.

  I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all. No one was expecting it. Because he did it, so you would have thought they’d find him guilty of something. Should’ve been murder, for Christ’s sake. I’m not shouting. Now, come on. No one’s blaming you. Well, I’m not. When did you talk to one of the jurors? I don’t believe it. She couldn’t have said that. You must’ve misunderstood her. Let me get this straight. She said they acquitted Ray because they didn’t believe you could’ve seen him do it? But you did see him. Yes, you did. You told me you saw him. No, I did not. How can you say I put you up to it? I didn’t put you up to anything. I just wanted you to tell them what you’d told me. No, I did not make it up. Don’t you start blaming me.

  Don’t worry about your mother. Well, she shouldn’t be. No, there’s nothing to be afraid of. He wouldn’t dare. Carly, he wouldn’t dare. Because he knows if he does, he’ll have me to answer to. Yes, well, I’ll come over, then, won’t I? Of course you can come here, but not right now. I need some time to think. Get a few things organized. Soon, I promise. Very soon. Business. Just some business, that’s all. No you’re not. You’re my big girl, aren’t you? You’re not scared. No, you’re not.

  The dumpy woman is an “early bird.” If your car is in the car park before nine thirty in the morning, you are an “early bird.” She could stay in the city all day without spending another cent on parking. It occurs to her that perhaps never before has she parked the car in the city with hours on her own to do with as she pleased. No responsibilities, no children, no husband. Geoff had been her husband, a shy husband. She walks outside through the Lonsdale Street door of the Court. She sees Yadwiga and Ray surrounded by journalists, photographers and television crews and crosses the road quickly. She walks up William Street to the Flagstaff Gardens. There had been a clock outside the station. She had used it to determine whether or not she was going to be late for Court. It was gone now. There was gravel where it had been. She still has her watch but it is unreliable. He had bought it for her birthday once.

 
The Flagstaff Gardens feel smaller from within than they look on the outside. It is a city block of green amid the gray. Who else comes here? Office workers? Homeless people? Geoff used to take the children to the park near their home when they were small: nothing so elaborate as this. It was more of a reserve than a garden. She tries to remember its name. It has a sports oval. The Ludstone Reserve. She could see the sign with its name in her mind. They were so young then. She hopes they will remember those times at the Ludstone Reserve. Who was Ludstone? Perhaps she could have gone with them? Why hadn’t she gone to the Ludstone Reserve with Geoff and the children?

  Having sat in the gardens for the best part of an hour, she walks all the way down William Street to Bourke Street, to the mall. Myer is having a sale of sheets and towels. She had not been there for some time. The second floor across Little Bourke Street has sewing machines along with the sheets and towels. Not everything has been reduced, only the stock in the bargain displays. She had loved him. Was it really true that he had gone to Yadwiga like that?

  From linen and haberdashery she goes all the way to millinery. Most of the hats seem stupid to her, but one catches her eye. It is a crushed green velvet with something thinly embroidered, something like faint flowers against soft grass. Flowers from a distance. But she has no need for a hat. He has been buried almost a year. The place has changed. She did not get into the city very much—not as often as the people around her. They even browse faster than she can.

  She stays in the store for hours. So many people ask to help her, but what can any of them do? She goes into almost every department and subdepartment: crockery, earthen cookware, china, glass, silver, white goods, computers and cosmetics on the ground floor and out into the street. The buskers are packing up. It is almost dark.

  As an “early bird,” her car is near the entrance. “Good night, missus,” a Lebanese boy calls from inside the booth. She had smiled at him every day she had parked there. Sometimes she had taken the train. She does not have to go straight home tonight. It is strange to her. She feels nothing, keeps expecting him home. She can’t wait to tell him that Ray got off. She sees it with her own eyes. “Well,” he might say, “these things happen.”

  The supermarket near home stays open twenty-four hours now. She could get her shopping over and done with at night, leaving more time for herself on the weekend. More time to take care of herself, rest up, meet a shy man and start a family with him, have him hold her in the middle of the night when the wind is howling and the light over the Ludstone Reserve sign is shaking in sympathy with every other light in the city.

  She parks the car in the supermarket car park. It is surprisingly busy for this time of night, but then, she has never shopped at this time before. The big receiving depot opens onto the car park. Its corrugated iron doors are wide open and a huge delivery van is being unloaded. Newspapers fly around her. Ray Islington’s face and the headline I DIDN’T MEAN TO SHOOT MY FRIEND take up the front page of the tabloid.

  In the supermarket a kilogram of polyunsaturated mayonnaise is selling for three dollars fifty. This week’s special in the meat department is barbecue steak, four dollars fifty a kilogram. The specials are important now. How long can she accept money from her sister? The dog might have to go. But Amy will be heartbroken. She thinks of her daughter. Her sister should have picked her up from the psychologist by now.

  In one aisle a young man begins unpacking bananas, in another aisle it is toilet paper, another, Glad Bake nonstick cooking paper, Chum dog food of the hearty stew variety, quick-frozen peas and scrub-free bathroom cleaner. Blades in Stanley knives are changed when it becomes too hard to cut the packing. It is getting late but the stock from the receiving depot keeps coming. The price guns shoot out the price rapaciously, in a succession of conscious and voluntary acts, and the young men scream old love songs down the fluorescent-lit aisles as they stack the shelves. Don’t pull your love out on me baby / If you do then I think that maybe / I’ll just lay me down and cry for a hundred years . . . And from the depths of the receiving depot and the fresh produce deliveries comes a sound most of the night fillers cannot hear. Those few that can hear it mistake it for something mechanized, in need of servicing. It is a sound like nothing these young men have ever heard, and not one of them would be able to guess its origins by just listening. A soft woman lies facedown in the almost dark of the receiving depot on a bed of cos lettuce leaves and discarded tabloid killers, wheezing, coughing, choking on the dust and debris of no-name-brand packaging and a life marked down, drastically reduced.

  THE HONG KONG FIR DOCTRINE

  A momentary loss of muscular control and now you don’t speak. Now you do not speak. Not to me. Others may hear you and I may overhear that they have heard you and then try to warm myself on this. But ever since that loss of control, my loss, my first loss, I can only imagine the sound of your voice.

  Of all the ebbs and flows in feelings and in circumstance, of all the possible endings, this one, the one we are living now, was unimaginable. Yet, in the middle of the night, night after night, ever since this version of the end, since this too-real ending began, I imagine you imagining that it was deliberate on my part. I imagine you bringing to bear on this that mode of thought, that cast of mind, which I have always championed, promoted, propagated, the one that is mine, the only thing I have left.

  At night in the dark I lie awake, imagining you sifting the evidence against me to determine whether this development which weighs you down more and more with each day, a development we had more than once talked of, dreamed of, hoped for, but never planned—this onetime dream which you now must see as a heavy and hateful burden—I imagine you trying to decide whether or not it is the result of a conscious and voluntary act on my part. And because of the soundness of your mind and because, if we except the odd principle here or doctrine there, I taught you so well, you will have to conclude that I deliberately made you pregnant. If I were you I would find the same way. And yet, it is not so.

  I can only conclude that you think it was deliberate; otherwise, why would you not speak to me? Why don’t you speak? Say anything. You always have. You have always felt free to say anything, sometimes apologizing later. In truth there were so many things I wanted you to say that you would never say, not even on request. There were other things I’d rather you had not said. I would take anything now. Tell me that he knows, knows everything. Tell me he is on his way around here. Just speak to me. Tell me it’s all my fault, that I have ruined everything for you, that you no longer care for me. Or tell me something I don’t know.

  I used to call you when I knew you were unavailable just to hear your voice on the machine. In my mind I would replay the voice you use with your children. I have always loved hearing it. I have heard your children singing. I do not think that they will sing to me. You look at them, then at yourself, and have to blame someone, as though it were one of them whose laughter, whose future was being extinguished.

  The guilt is not new. For more than two years now you have looked at your husband with sorrowful eyes. Responsible in large part for his position in the firm, for whatever success he has achieved, you have dreaded being responsible for the shell of a man he promises to be should you ever leave him. And you will leave him. Not as we had planned, not for a long time, not for me.

  Your children love him, as they should, and their love for him occasionally makes you wish I had never been born. You do not love him as you have loved me. But nor can you ever hate him. He is pathetic, which you struggle not to see, but he is well-meaning, even kind at times. Why should you hate him? You have no reason to. As the father of your children, he must always have top billing in your dramatis personae whereas I can be killed off in an instant. A warrant for my execution was drafted at the moment of this conception. But when I die this last time—and I died every time you closed a car door without me, stayed out late for drinks at work, hung up the phone, left my home in a cab or got undressed in front of him—when I die this time
, I leave a child behind.

  None of this could have been imagined: not two weeks ago when it happened, nor fourteen years ago before I had even gone to the bar, back when I was still masquerading as a member of the Law Faculty, and you were doing an even worse impersonation of a law student. Your husband was a slightly better student than you, though you have long since been a better lawyer. He plods along diligently enough, at least until recently, but you take the problem apart, queen of the defense and counterclaim. Your letters of demand have always amused me. You manufacture causes of action where there are none. But the secret to besting you in litigation is simply to outlast you. I don’t think your opponents realize how quickly you get bored. You own to a thoroughness and diligence you do not possess. You never did.

  I learned this fourteen years ago when marking your exam papers. I should have failed you, but I felt sure some spineless toady of the Subdean would have second-marked you to at least a pass, especially when he realized that you were who you were. When this dawned on me, I didn’t fail you, either. Instead I laughed out loud when, by referring to a deeming provision as a demon provision, you demonstrated that you had not read any of the texts or cases and were relying solely on your own scrappy lecture notes, or maybe Tom’s.

  You thought I didn’t remember. But I remember everything, or at least I used to. That’s why they brief me. I was never sure why you did. Tom only began briefing me because you told him to. He has never really forgiven me for not giving him a credit. He was lucky I didn’t fail him. It was you who stopped me. Not anything you said, but even then you had so caught my attention that I could not in good conscience fail your boyfriend, as he was then. I could never have satisfied myself that it was really his answers that failed him and not the recurring images I had of his hand in the back pocket of your jeans. Anyway, he wasn’t such a bad student and isn’t such a bad husband. How many women would not trade places with you? Still so very attractive, looking younger than your years, with two beautiful children, a partner at a prestigious law firm, and married to another partner about whom the worst you can say is that after all these years he has become too much like a brother.