The Calling

CHAPTER 5

Clive, Zoe’s boss, has cancelled a longstanding community outreach engagement. So a day that started badly soon gets worse; Zoe finds herself addressing a gaggle of sixth formers about the work of Ford and Vargas, and about the nature of human rights legislation.

She tells them about Lisa Williams, twelve years old when she was killed in a hit-and-run. This was back in 2003. The driver was Aso Ibrahim, an Iraqi asylum seeker already on bail for driving while disqualified.

Lacking clear evidence that Ibrahim had been driving dangerously, the Crown Prosecution Service charged him with Driving While Disqualified; the more serious offence of Causing Death While Disqualified didn’t become law until 2008.

Ibrahim served two months in prison. Since his release, he’s been appealing against his deportation.

Zoe tells the class that over the course of nine years, Aso Ibrahim cost the taxpayer several hundred thousand pounds in legal aid for lawyers and interpreters. There were immigration hearings and trials, at which he was convicted variously of harassment, possession of illegal drugs and, three years after Lisa Williams’s death, Driving While Disqualified.

Then she asks the sixth formers what they’d do about him.

The consensus, as she’d presumed it would be, is — send him home.

‘But he’s entitled to stay,’ she tells them, ‘because he’s the father of two children with a British woman. Though he doesn’t actually live with those children, taking him away from his estranged girlfriend and those kids would breach his rights under Article Eight of the Human Rights Act.’

She asks them what they think about that.

She sits back and listens. The kids debate the danger Ibrahim would be in, back in Iraq. They talk about his two children and their right to a father. They talk about the bereaved parents of Lisa Williams, and their right to a daughter.

Zoe lets them discuss it for a bit, then tells them about how the British National Party had used Lisa Williams’s death as a propaganda tool during local elections in Barking.

She tells them how Lisa Williams’s father, a good and broken man, had made a public appeal for the people of Barking not to vote BNP because this injustice had nothing to do with the colour of his daughter’s skin.

One of the sixth formers, a good-looking, supercilious kid called Adam, suggests that Aso Ibrahim should be hung.

Zoe says, ‘Now you sound like my husband,’ and everyone laughs.

Then she tells them about Article Three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Prohibition of Torture, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, dictates that Ibrahim should be granted asylum in the United Kingdom, because rejection of torture is a moral and legal absolute.

She asks if there are any questions.

There are always questions. Adam tries to hold her gaze, but Zoe’s been an expert at that game since before this kid was born.

‘No questions?’ she says. ‘Come on. There must be one. Who’s got a question?’

The quiet girl sitting off to the far side raises a timid hand.

‘Yes?’

‘Stephanie.’

‘Yes, Stephanie?’

‘Do you, like, get a clothing allowance?’

Zoe looks at her, deflating.

Stephanie says, ‘Because your clothes are really nice and everything.’

Her classmates perform a lot of exasperated eye rolling, sucking air over their teeth.

Stephanie blushes, and suddenly Zoe’s fiercely on her side. It’s in her nature.

‘Good question,’ she says. And as she’s saying it, she begins to believe it. ‘No, we don’t get a clothing allowance but we’re expected to meet a required minimum standard of dress every day. And when I say minimum, I mean — going to a royal wedding.’

Stephanie smiles, seraphic. Zoe smiles back, wanting to help her, wanting her to come away from this pointless little forum with something of worth.

‘It’s easier for men,’ Zoe tells her. ‘The dress thing. Their wives buy their ties.’

‘Racist,’ says Adam.

‘I beg your pardon?’

Adam withers a little, not much, crosses his arms, slumps in his chair, looks her in the eye. ‘That’s racist against men.’

Zoe feels the corner of her mouth twist. She knows the futility of engaging this kid. After all, he’s here because he wants to be; he’s just trying to make the kind of obscure, self-defeating point adolescent boys seem compelled to make. But he’s still a prick.

She says, ‘Sorry, what’s your name, again?’

‘Adam.’

‘Okay, Adam. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we step outside this room and conduct a spot poll. We’ll see how many men in this office — that’s about sixty-five per cent of the personnel by the way, and about eighty per cent of the senior partners — bought their own tie.’

Adam grins like the triumph’s his. Zoe’s torn between giving up and laying into him.

Then there’s a discreet tap at the door and Miriam, her PA, pops her head into the meeting room and mimes a phone call with thumb and little finger. She mouths the words: It’s John.

Zoe thanks everyone for coming, gathers her notes, gives Adam a withering look and Stephanie an encouraging smile, and leaves.

She hurries to her office and dials John’s number.

‘Zoe,’ he says.

She can tell he’s outside. ‘Where are you?’

‘Right now? Next to a canal.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking at a dead pigeon trapped in a shopping trolley.’

‘Lovely.’

‘How’re you doing?’

‘Clive had me speak to the sixth formers.’

‘I told you he would.’

‘Well, he did. Arsehole that he is.’

‘Any progress on the Hattem thing?’

The Hattem thing is Zoe’s biggest current case. She says, ‘I’ve got that bloke coming round later today, tomorrow maybe, wants to liaise about it.’

‘What bloke?’

‘Mark thingy. From Liberte Sans Frontiere.’

‘Hippy?’

‘Trustafarian,’ she says, hating herself. ‘All ganja and yeah.’

Luther laughs. ‘You’ll get through it.’

‘I hope so. I’m sorry I ever said yes to it.’

She runs a hand through her hair, becomes aware that she’s dying for a cigarette.

She holds her fringe in a bunch and tugs slightly, just enough so it hurts a bit.

She’d been doing this since she was seven years old. It relieves stress. She doesn’t know why. Sometimes she worries she’ll get a bald patch, like one of those stressed parrots that yanks all the feathers from its body except the ones it can’t reach, so in the end it sits on its perch like an oven-ready chicken in a Halloween mask.

She says, ‘Did you speak to Rose?’

‘I did. I did, yeah.’

And now she knows why she’s tearing at her hair. It’s got nothing to do with the Hattem case. It’s John and his inability to say no to anyone except his wife.

She says, ‘What happened?’

‘It’s difficult to talk about,’ he says. ‘Too many people around. But I can’t ask her today. I just can’t.’

John knows when anyone else is lying, usually at a glance. The speed and conviction of it gives her the creeps sometimes. But he never knows when he’s lying to himself.

‘It’s a pretty bad one,’ he says.

‘They’re all bad ones,’ she says. ‘That’s the point.’

Zoe’s ashamed as well as angry. And she’s resentful that John can do this to her — make her feel guilty for wanting a marriage.

And here they are, like nightwatchmen patrolling the same ground, the same route, night after night after night.

‘I have to do this,’ he says. ‘Then I’ll talk to her.’

‘No you won’t.’

‘Zoe.’

‘You won’t, John. Because after this one there’ll be another one, and after that one there’ll be another. And then another one after that and it just goes on and on and on.’

There’s a long silence.

‘Fucking Rose Teller,’ Zoe says. ‘That woman’s managed to fuck over more marriages than anyone I ever met.’

‘Zoe-’

She hangs up.

Her hand is shaking.

She grabs the tin of tobacco from her drawer and sneaks outside, to the CCTV blind spot on the corner.

She calls Mark North. ‘You were right,’ she says. ‘I give him chances. I give him chance after chance and he just lies. He just lies and lies.’ She tugs at her hair and says, ‘Christ. You were so right.’

Mark doesn’t say anything.

Zoe smokes the roll-up, picks a bitter thread of tobacco from her tongue. She says, ‘I’m shaking.’

‘Why are you shaking?’

‘I’ve never done this before.’

‘Done what?’

‘Harrington Hotel,’ she says. ‘Ten minutes.’

There’s a silence. ‘Are you sure?’ he says at the end of it. ‘Because you need to be sure about this.’

‘No,’ she laughs, ‘I’m not sure. But I’m done with it. I’m finished. I’ve had enough.’

Mark doesn’t hang up and neither does she.

She can hear her own breath feeding back down the line, ragged with anxiety and arousal.

Zoe calls Miriam and tells her to cancel her meetings until after lunch.

Miriam’s worried — Zoe’s never done this before.

‘It’s a personal thing,’ Zoe says. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see you about two.’

She walks to the Harrington, a boutique place on Tabernacle Street. She hasn’t brought a coat and it’s raining. She hugs herself for warmth.

When the hotel is in sight she breaks into a jog. Click click click go her heels.

Mark’s already booked a room and checked in.

He’s sitting in the over-designed lobby, pretending to read the Guardian. He’s holding a white key card with a black magnetic stripe.

They don’t speak. Just step into the waiting elevator.

Inside, they stand shoulder to shoulder.

Zoe can hear her heart.