After Anna (29 page)

She didn’t give a fuck.

And she would have told them that and then marched over, ready to say her piece, and afterwards she would say
I know it was a bit out of order but I had to say something. I couldn’t just keep quiet. You have to speak out. People can’t be allowed to get away with that kind of thing. I mean, how could she think it was ok to just be sitting there, drinking with another man? So soon? What a bitch. I had to tell her.

Julia met her gaze. ‘How can I help you?’ she said.

Now she was there, the woman seemed less confident, as though she hadn’t thought about what she was actually going to say when she reached her quarry. ‘You,’ she began, ‘you are the most, the most selfish fucking person I’ve ever known.’

‘You don’t know me,’ Julia said.

‘I know enough,’ the woman said. ‘I know enough to know that you don’t deserve to be a mother to that little girl.’

Who the hell did this woman think she was? All she knew about Julia, about Anna, about what had happened was what she had read in the press, and that was bullshit. Yet she felt she could approach Julia and tell her she didn’t deserve to be a mother?

‘Right,’ Julia said, looking away from the woman in case the sight of her roused even more fury in her. ‘Well thank you for that.’

‘There’s more,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve not finished yet.’

She was a certain type, this woman; a type of people who were angry and bitter and wanted to make other people as unhappy as them, but who were just smart enough to understand that they could not just go around abusing people, and so they found cover for their wish to abuse people in self-righteous anger. This woman did not care about Anna. She just wanted to cause misery, and Anna was a good excuse to do so.

‘What’s your name?’ Julia asked her.

‘Juliet,’ the woman said.

‘Juliet,’ Julia said. ‘It’s a nice name. A bit like mine.’ She leaned forwards, keeping her hands on her knees so that Juliet did not see how much they were shaking with anger. ‘Well, Juliet,’ she said. ‘You know what you can do?’ Julia held up a hand. ‘Don’t answer. I’ll tell you. You can take your fat arse back to whatever shithole you call home. Go and read your shit books and watch crap TV and tend to your loneliness. And get used to it, because that’s going to be your life. Got that, Juliet?’

The woman stared at her, stunned. She’d been expecting apologetic stammering, or meekness, or a fleeing of the scene. Not this. Not
aggression
. She was the aggressive one.

‘Go on,’ Julia said. ‘Off you go. And on your way out you can think about why you don’t have kids, or a husband or a boyfriend. And if you want a clue, here’s one: it’s because you’re a disgusting blubbery whale, although, I have to say that there are probably disgusting blubbery whales out there saying “hang on a minute, don’t compare me to that horrible thing, I’m not that bad”.’

Juliet’s face creased into an expression of pure hatred. ‘You fucking bitch,’ she said. ‘How fucking dare—’

‘What’s going on here?’ Mike pushed his way through the crowd, some of who were tuning into the entertainment on offer. He had two fresh drinks in his hands: a pint of bitter and a glass of white wine.

‘That bitch is insulting me,’ Juliet said. She was breathless with anger, her chest heaving. ‘She, of all people, is—’

‘We need to go,’ Mike said. He stepped in between the woman and Julia and put the drinks on the table. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Now.’

Julia grabbed her coat and bag and stood up and headed for the exit, Mike just behind her. Outside, he took her by the elbow.

‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘that wasn’t the smartest thing to do, was it? After what you were just telling me?’

‘I know,’ Julia said. ‘But I couldn’t just let her insult me. Why should I?’

‘Fine,’ Mike said. ‘We’ll get over it. You want to come to my house? For that legal opinion?’

Mike lived in a detached house in a village on the edge of the Cheshire plain. It was large and dark and felt unlived in. They sat in the living room, Mike with a large whisky in his hand, and Julia, whose car was outside, with a glass of water in hers.

‘So,’ he said, ‘here’s what I think.’

Julia nodded. ‘Shoot,’ she said.

‘As you know, the court acts in the interests of the child. Brian will be trying to show that Anna’s best interests are to stay with him, but not because he offers something exceptional. He’s claiming that you cannot offer a stable and safe environment. Now, even with all of the stuff he’s accusing you of, he can’t prove it. A courtroom is not a newspaper. If he wants to say that you are an alcoholic, he will have to prove it, which he won’t be able to, because you aren’t. Likewise with the anger management issues. So you hit him, once, under extreme duress. That is not an anger management problem. It’s a human response. And we just deny the accusation of a suicide attempt. My point is that it’s pretty hard for him to prove any of the things he’s laying at your door.’

Julia felt mounting excitement. Maybe this was not as hopeless as she had thought.

It must have showed on her face, as Mike frowned. ‘Don’t get carried away,’ he said. ‘There’s more. Like I said, he can’t prove the things he’s accusing you of, but that doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t need to. Remember, the court is only concerned with Anna’s best interests. Whether you have a drink problem is only relevant as it pertains to Anna’s welfare.’ He folded one thigh over the other and took a long drink from his whisky glass. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘This is where it gets kind of grey. In my experience, family courts are very risk-averse. What I mean is that they are looking for reasons why an environment might be unsafe for a child. That’s what Brian is playing on. He’s saying, yes, I can’t prove these things, but are you going to take that risk? When there’s a risk-free alternative? It’s not a bad strategy.’

‘So,’ Julia said. ‘What do you think I should do?’ What do you think a court would do?’

‘I think,’ Mike said, ‘there is a good chance the court would award custody to the father. To Brian.’

Julia wanted to scream at him, shout
no, your job is to say that we can do this, that we should fight, not that I should give up! Not that I should hand over my daughter!

‘Right,’ she said. ‘So what should I do? If I was your client, how would you advise me?’

‘I’d say that the best you are likely to get in court is what you already have – Wednesdays and every other weekend – and that there is a risk of losing that if you do go to court. So there’s no upside to contesting custody in this case, only a downside.’ He looked at her. ‘I would advise against.’

She had known it all along but it took hearing it from Mike to make it real, to make it so that she understood that she was going to see her daughter four days in ten, that Anna would grow up in Edna’s shadow, maybe calling another woman Mum, if Brian remarried. She, Julia, would be on the outside, face pressed to the glass, increasingly a distraction as Anna’s life filled up. Right now they would spend weekends together, but as Anna grew into a teenager and a young woman her weekends would revolve around friends and boyfriends. Parents saw little enough of teenagers when they shared a house full-time. Julia would be living on crumbs.

‘I can’t,’ Julia said. ‘I can’t just let it happen.’

‘I know,’ Mike said, ‘but you asked me what I would advise a client, so I told you. I gave you my professional opinion. If you want me to advise you as a friend, then that would be different.’

‘So let’s say I asked you to advise me as a friend,’ Julia said. ‘What would you say then?’

‘I’d tell you to fight the bastard with everything you’ve got,’ Mike said. ‘That’s what I’d tell you as a friend.’

v.

‘You think I should fight? Even though you would advise a client not to?’ Julia said. ‘I’m not sure I follow the logic.’

Mike smiled. ‘That’s because it’s not about logic. Let me see if I can explain.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘I remember your dad, Julia. He coached the rugby team I played in – if you can believe I ever managed to shift this lump of a body around a rugby field – when I was a teenager. He’d played some semi-professional stuff and given it up after an injury. It was probably around the time you were born, but you won’t remember.’

Julia didn’t, but she did remember playing with the trophies her dad kept in a cupboard when she was a child. She also had photos of him with his teammates. She’d always marvelled at them, at the proof that her dad had an existence that preceded her, an existence when he was a fit, muscular athlete with a full head of hair and a wicked glint in his eye.

‘He was great with us teenagers. We were a rum lot, a bunch of tearaways and thugs, but he whipped us into shape. Got us fit, taught us the game, gave us some discipline. But the thing I remember most – and others remember it too – was that he insisted we adhere to a higher standard than the one required by the laws of the game. He told us that the laws of the game were one thing, but we needed to stick to the spirit of the game.’

‘What did he mean?’ Julia asked. She loved hearing about her dad; loved learning what he had been like as a man. ‘What kind of things did he make you do?’

‘Well, he used to referee our games, and he would penalize us if, say, one of the bigger players on our team tackled a smaller player on the other team unnecessarily hard. It might have been a legal tackle, but he would penalize us for it. He called it unsporting conduct. The thing that annoyed us was that he didn’t penalize the other side for it. He couldn’t; they didn’t know that he had added a rule, so when he refereed us we were at a disadvantage. But you know something? We applied his rules even when other referees had the whistle. So it worked.’

‘Sounds like Dad,’ Julia said. ‘But how does it help with this situation?’

‘The lesson I learned from your dad,’ Mike said. ‘Is that sometimes you just have to do what’s right. You can walk away from this, sign the agreement, hand over custody, and if you were a violent, suicidal alcoholic who had a history of negligent parenting, then I would suggest you did. But you aren’t, and the fact that Brian and his mother will paint you that way – successfully, maybe – is not enough reason to accept their terms. Plus, if you do, then you will be admitting that you are what they say you are. I just feel that if you – we –walk away from this, then it will rankle forever.’

‘But what can I do?’ Julia said. ‘If I fight them I might lose Wednesdays and every other weekend. They might push for supervised custody only. I couldn’t live with that.’

‘That’s a risk. The question is, whether it’s a risk worth taking.’

‘Not if I can’t win.’

‘There’s no
can’t
,’ Mike said. ‘It’s not obvious how, I’ll grant you that, but there’s no can’t.’ He paused. ‘The thing is, their case rests, at least partly, on lies. You aren’t violent, you don’t drink to excess. We need to find a way to pick it apart. Find the thread that will unravel it.’

‘How?’ Julia said. ‘How do I fight back?’

‘A couple of ways. I have a couple of ideas.’ He stood up. ‘So why don’t you let Brian know you don’t want his deal, and we can get to work?’

‘That depends on what your ideas are,’ Julia said.

‘Then let me fill you in.’

The next morning, Julia sat at her kitchen table, opened her laptop, and started to type.

Brian, I find what you are doing – exploiting the abduction of our daughter to get custody, although we both know it is your mother behind it – to be appalling, and I hope you feel the shame of it. I do not accept your proposal for custody, and my lawyer will be in touch in due course to formalize matters.

Yours, Julia

Then she hit send. She hoped that she was doing the right thing.

His reply came a few minutes later.

Fine. Send your lawyer’s details. My lawyer will be in touch.

She didn’t deserve a reply to her letter. A defence against her accusations. She didn’t even deserve a signature.

But that was fine. She smiled. From now on Brian – and Edna – were not going to have it all their own way.

vi.

Julia scanned the tweets hashtagged
#notfittobeamum
. It seemed as good a place to start as any other; there was no shortage of vitriol being spilled onto keyboards. What was it that drove these people to comment so viciously on someone they didn’t know and would never meet? Did they think they were somehow making the world a better place? That they were showing other people how to live, warning them of what awaited them if they messed up? Or did they just enjoy it? Were they simply angry, bitter people who could not resist the impulse to lash out; an impulse they would never have dared to indulge publicly, but which they could revel in to their heart’s content under the anonymous protection of the internet?

Julia thought it was the latter, and if it was they had miscalculated. The internet was rarely as anonymous as people thought it was.

She read @vernaldraft tweets; @vernaldraft had quite a lot to say about her, from the merely insulting:

#JuliaCrowne
is the reason why some people should not be allowed kids
#notfittobeamum

To the off-topic:

Why’s slut
#JuliaCrowne
like a washing machine? Because they both drip when they’re fucked
#notfittobeamum

To the frankly chilling:

#JuliaCrowne
should not breed again.
#notfittobeamum #forcedsterilization

Well
, Julia thought,
let’s see what we can find out about
@vernaldraft. She read through the rest of @vernaldraft’s tweets.

Been at the beer festival in Cromer. Best real ale in the country – and the world!