The Choice Read online

  “No.”

  The policewoman tries to lead me by the arm over to her car but I walk willingly, like a well-trained dog keen to please. I get into the back of the car myself. The door handle is slick with rainwater.

  She sits next to me in the back seat. I daren’t touch my mobile phone, though I want to. Reuben will be worried.

  I close my eyes and pretend I am in a taxi, that some chatty Uber driver is talking to me. The other police officer gets in the driver’s seat and stalls the car before pulling away. I wonder if she took lots of attempts to pass her driving test, like I did.

  My brown leather handbag is resting at my feet. I could reach it. Touch it. But perhaps that would be a crime.

  “Which station are we going to?” I say. I wait a few seconds before looking up at them.

  They don’t answer. They don’t speak. We just drive on in silence, the night streaking by.

  I feel less and less human for every mile we travel.

  * * *

  —

  It is only a ten-minute journey. The car comes to a shuddery stop and I reach to get out, but it is locked. The woman walks around to my side of the door, opening it like we are at the BAFTAs. She doesn’t look at me, just stands aside like a footman. I stare up at the building. Paddington Green Police Station. I’ve never been here. I’d never been to Little Venice before tonight. And now they will be significant to me.

  I step out of the car. The police station looks more like a hospital. Wide and flat and sprawling, with a tower on its top like a growth. My eyes track it upward. Floor after floor. What are they? Offices? Cells?

  We’re around the back of it, in some sort of secure area. I hear the gates closing behind us.

  “This way,” the woman says to me.

  She doesn’t have a name badge, and she doesn’t speak into a radio. She walks next to me, her right hand extended, ready, I guess, in case I make a sudden movement. I look up at the sky instead, taking in the gray expanse of it, before I am inside. I try to send Reuben a message with my mind. He’s always known what I’m thinking better than anybody. Reuben, I say into the night, looking at the low-hanging orange moon, I’m in trouble.

  The air is cold against my face as I walk. My heels on the tarmac sound like bangs in the night. I can’t believe I’m still wearing them. What must I look like?

  The policewoman pushes open a side door. Immediately I can smell something familiar. I feel nostalgic when I realize that it’s the old people’s home that Mum’s mum was in. Urine mingled with the smell of overcooked stew and dumplings, a sweaty, potatoey, clammy smell.

  We enter a brightly lit room. Everything is some shade of blue. The chairs are navy. The desk is teal. The walls are sky blue. I am walked through a scanner, like at an airport. A man is standing there. He’s swarthy. Maybe Spanish. Italian. There’s something catlike about him. Slanted eyes. He smiles at me, which surprises me, and he has pointy incisors.

  The machine beeps loudly, three times.

  “Coat off. Why’s she still got her coat?” a cockney man behind the desk says to the woman who brought me in.

  “Hang on,” the woman says.

  “And your bracelet,” the man says to me, rolling his eyes.

  My fingers trace over my wedding bracelet. “Oh, I . . . it doesn’t come off,” I say. My words sound slurred.

  “Got to come off.”

  I show it to him, wordlessly. It catches the overhead strip lights.

  “It’s got screws,” he says, seemingly to himself. “Too risky.”

  He disappears down the corridor and comes back with a screwdriver. One by one, he removes the tiny screws I didn’t even realize were there, and my lifetime bracelet is off, my arm feeling bald and raw underneath it.

  The woman swings my handbag onto the high desk, which another woman sits behind. My eyes are drawn to the side pocket where I saw her put my phone. I can see it poking out, on a bed of receipts and chewing-gum packets and a notebook.

  There’s an annex behind the desk, a small room, and it’s got a whiteboard in it that a man is writing on. It’s divided into grids, with times. The man is writing my name down, which he’s reading off something that has been given to him. He’s in full uniform. White shirt with black shoulder pads with numbers on: 5619. A black tie, embossed with a crest at the bottom.

  There’s something behind him, too. I crane my neck to see. Three miniature televisions are suspended from the ceiling on sturdy brackets. Some people must try to pull them off, I presume. Something opens up in my chest. A hollow feeling. Fear, I suppose. The televisions are CCTV. Of the cells. Little people moving around in the grayish-green boxes, like tiny captive holograms. I close my eyes.

  “Let’s try scanning you again,” the man says. He’s holding my coat.

  I walk toward the scanner. Finally, it doesn’t beep anymore. As if this triggers something, another woman appears by my side.

  “I’m the custody sergeant,” she says.

  I look at the clock. Midnight. Reuben will be frantic. That phone call. And then nothing. I have hardly thought about it since I called the police. Why didn’t I call him again, before it was too late?

  I look back at her. She’s blond, with inch-long mousy roots. She’s in her late thirties, maybe. She’s wearing reddish brown eyeliner, which has clumped together in little brick-colored balls at the roots of her lower lashes. “I’m Sergeant Morris. You have the right to a solicitor—”

  “Okay,” I start to say. Do I know any solicitors? I think of all my friends. Reuben says I’ve got so many. But no solicitors, I am sure.

  “You have the right to have somebody informed of your detention,” she says, talking over me like a robot. “You have the right to consult the Codes of Practice. Do you have any questions?”

  “Sorry,” I say. “How do I get a solicitor?”

  “We can contact the duty solicitor or you can call somebody else,” she says, “so long as it doesn’t interfere with our investigation.”

  My mind reels. “I get one call?” I say.

  “Yes.”

  There’s no question whom I will call: I need only him.

  Right in the corner of the custody suite, still in the open, in full view of everybody, is an old-fashioned telephone. There’s no seat. Three policemen are sipping tea, right next to it, out of cardboard cups with PG Tips written on the side. The phone’s handset is weighty and black with a heavy silver coil like a snake.

  I call Reuben’s mobile and listen to the tinny ring. He never usually answers unknown numbers. He wouldn’t be intrigued by them like I am. But, nevertheless, I hope he does. I want to hear his voice.

  He answers almost immediately, unusual for him. He must’ve been worried.

  “It’s me,” I say.

  “Are you okay?” he says.

  “There’s been an—I don’t know. An incident,” I say.

  “Are you okay?” he says again.

  “Yes. I am.” I look over my shoulder. The entire suite is still full of police. I can’t explain. Not here. “Look—I need a solicitor,” I say.

  I may as well have said I have flown to another country, or given birth. I can hear his stunned silence, heavy down the phone line. “A solicitor?” he says eventually. I hear a faint rasping. He will be rubbing his stubble. “Where are you?”

  “In the police station,” I say in a low voice, although it is not those around me who will be embarrassed for me.

  “Where?” Reuben says, and in his tone is a stunned note of incomprehension. It is almost funny.

  And then I hear it. Not in anything he says, exactly, but in a beat he leaves between words. A beat that sounds a lot like judgment.

  “What . . .” He trails off, then lets out an exhalation.

  I have blindsided him. I have shocked my calm, stable husband.

 
; “Jo—what’s happened?”

  “I pushed that man.” I say it again, without thinking.

  “The one following you?”

  I close my eyes. “Yes,” I lie. It’s too complicated to go into now. I’ll tell him later. “He’s . . . injured.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll come.”

  For once I love his brevity. “It’s Paddington Green Police Station.”

  “I know it,” he says softly. Of course he does. His clients must be here often. “I don’t know a solicitor well enough. Get the duty one.”

  “Okay.” I’m lost in our conversation, and I jump when Sergeant Morris appears right by my side. “I’ve really got to go,” I say.

  “Shall we . . . shall we do the things?” he says.

  “You first,” I say with a little smile, grateful, pathetic tears budding at my eyes.

  “Your . . .” He must be thinking hard. I hear him swallow.

  We started this charade two months into our relationship—Reuben reluctantly, at first. And now he’s the instigator, like a child told their bedtime routine, expectant. We’re on number 2,589. More than two thousand five hundred facts we love about the other. We’ve never missed a day.

  “The piece of hair right by your temple that never, ever goes into a ponytail,” he says.

  “The way you file your post immediately,” I say.

  “I’m sure you’ve used that one before.”

  “Nope.”

  “Two thousand five hundred and ninety tomorrow,” he says.

  I hang up first.

  * * *

  —

  In there,” Sergeant Morris says to me after the call.

  “Where?” I say.

  She points to a room next to a toilet. I go inside, and a forensic scenes of crime officer introduces himself to me.

  It’s a blur, what happens next. Fingerprints. A DNA swab, hard and dry against the inside of my cheek. A Breathalyzer. A photograph. Just like in the movies. A blood sample. The underneath of my fingernails are scraped, even though I tell him I was wearing gloves.

  “Take off your shoes,” he says, when I think we’re done.

  “My shoes?” I say dumbly.

  “Yes.”

  I take off my silk-covered heels and hand them over.

  He delves into a basket nearby and pulls out a blue blanket stamped with HMP. I see that, bundled up with it, are a pair of gray tracksuit bottoms, a T-shirt, and some black sneakers. “We need your clothes, too.”

  “My clothes?”

  “For forensics.”

  “Right . . . okay,” I say.

  When I’m finished, and in prison-issue gray clothes, I emerge into the custody suite and am given back to Sergeant Morris.

  “Do you want to look at our Codes of Practice?” she says.

  “No,” I say blankly.

  “Okay, then,” she says, in the tone of voice of a weary mother letting her child spend all their birthday money on sweets.

  I look over my shoulder as we walk. Am I supposed to read the codes? Should I want to read the codes?

  She leads me down a corridor. The vinyl flooring—a kind of rainy blue-gray—squeaks underneath her shoes as we walk.

  I don’t know where I’m going, and I don’t ask. I wonder if my mobile’s in a clear plastic bag in a locker somewhere, buzzing sadly. If I ever leave it alone for more than an hour I come back to hundreds of texts and tweets and WhatsApps and Snapchats and emails. Reuben despairs of all the noises it makes; he says that every day I am in touch with everybody I have ever known.

  Our surroundings get grimmer as we walk. Along two more corridors and through heavy doors—painted blue, just like how a child might draw a police station, a nick. She holds each door open for me, not in a polite way, but more so she can watch me go through and make sure it locks behind us.

  We round the corner, and I see that we are into the female cells. It’s exactly how you’d imagine it. There are rows and rows of them. My eyes trail upward like I am watching rocket fireworks. There are more above those. And more again above those. There are bars. Bars everywhere. Metal flooring with holes in so that I can see right up. I feel vertiginous. We walk up a flight of stairs, onto the first floor, and along a corridor.

  We come to a stop outside a door with a 13 written on it. It has a blackboard outside it. On it she writes: J Oliva.

  I can hear someone retching. I turn my head to the sound. A groan, a guttural noise, and then a splash. And like I’ve opened the door to it, I notice all the other noises. Moaning. A woman shouting. Like we are in a closing nightclub at the end of a particularly violent happy hour. I draw my arms around myself. I pretend my arms are Reuben’s.

  I breathe deeply, trying to calm myself, but it only enhances the smell of the place. Wee. Old food. Vomit. Stale alcohol.

  “In,” she says. “Time one oh six.” She makes a note in a book.

  “In?”

  She pushes open the door. I haven’t thought about it. About where we are. About where I’m being put. I didn’t think . . . there were no handcuffs. Nobody forcing my head down as I got into the car. I didn’t think I would be here. It’s a complete shock to me.

  There’s a blue plastic mattress on the floor. No—mattress is too grand a term. It’s of the type we used to lay down in PE for gymnastics and tumbling. There’s a smaller one, too, which I guess is supposed to be a pillow. There’s no window. There’s a tiny vent in the wall, top left, next to the high ceiling. There’s an arrow on the ceiling, pointing left. It’s huge and black, and I must be staring at it, because she says, “It points to Mecca.”

  She passes me the blanket.

  It smells strongly of urine, much worse than outside.

  To the left there’s a toilet. No lid. Metal, like on a train or an airplane. I remember when Reuben and I flew to Berlin and I used the toilet during turbulence. It stinks. That synthetic cleanness combined with all the dirty things that have gone down it, so they become interchangeable. The bleach and the dirt. They smell the same. There is no toilet roll, and no flush. I blink, looking at it, until I realize Sergeant Morris has left me. The door slams shut and I jump, and then I keep shivering as the word for it reverberates around my brain.

  It’s a cell. It’s a cell.

  It’s my cell.

  5

  CONCEAL

  I haven’t told him. I haven’t told him, I haven’t told him, I haven’t told him.

  I look at him as he stirs our porridge on the hob.

  He is always cooking. He does the cooking, and I do the washing. Two years ago we divided the chores up to stop arguments. Needless to say, the dishes are stacked neatly, the dishwasher never used to store dirty plates, while the laundry basket is overflowing, belching washing.

  My hand is getting worse. It is damaged and dysfunctional. It doesn’t do what I want it to. It was stiff this morning.

  Reuben is serving the porridge. The kitchen and living room of our flat are open plan. It is basically a studio, even though it has two bedrooms. But we love it; we don’t care that we can hear the upstairs neighbor come home in her high-heeled shoes at three o’clock in the morning. We like the unapologetic griminess of it, of London. The artificially warm air, the hot dust smell of the Tube that tells me, after a holiday, that I’m home again. That my feet in flip-flops go black in summer from the smog. The way everybody looks like utter rubbish on the Underground at the end of a night out, all pale skin and smudged eye makeup in the bright, harsh lights. That, once, we saw a man with a snake on the night bus, and nobody even stared. All of it. All worth the price tag and the lack of space. Our parents don’t understand it. Reuben’s wonder why we don’t sell up and get out of there. There are other economies, his dad will say to us.

  A picture of our wedding day is hung on the wall opposite the cooker. It
isn’t staged. “I don’t want a massive, pretentious canvas of us grinning,” he said to me soon after he proposed. And, after all, we didn’t even end up having a big wedding. It wasn’t the best day of our lives. We were pretty nonplussed by it all, after his nonproposal (“I don’t want to patronize you . . .” it began). It was a small affair. I wore a knee-length dress. We went out for a boozy lunch afterward, at ASK Italian. He drank too much red wine and didn’t remove his hand from my lap even once, ate his pizza one-handed. And then, out in the courtyard—he used to smoke—we had a moment I’ll remember forever.

  “We did it,” I said.

  He nodded vigorously, his cheeks hollowing as he sucked on the cigarette. “We did the thing we wanted to do,” he said plainly, summing up my happiness exactly.

  That simple joy of living our lives for us. Sod everyone else.

  We held hands, then, under the umbrella, as he smoked in the rain. I wore red shoes and felt luckier than I thought it was possible to feel.

  I stare at the photograph now. It’s candid, both of us facing each other. I’m laughing gleefully. Reuben’s eyes are raised heavenward, but there’s a tiny smile on his face.

  How could I tell him? He would stop looking at me in that way. That tiny, knowing smile of his. I’m one of the only people he likes. And so how can I tell him, before anyone else?

  * * *

  —

  It gets to be too much at four o’clock in the afternoon. I’ve escaped into the bathroom twice and dialed 999, then stopped myself at the last moment. My hand is still throbbing. It looks just the same—no bruising—but my wrist still feels weak and useless. I will see if it gets better. And then I will go to the doctor, once all this is sorted.

  I tell Reuben I’m going to go for a walk. I’m light-headed—I have hardly eaten—but I put my jacket on anyway to leave. Reuben looks out at the twilight but says nothing. I look both ways before ascending the stairs out onto the street, as though the police might simply be waiting there for me, too worried to knock.