I spent the rest of the week in Court. A friend of mine who knew a solicitor asked if I wanted to do some court clerking. All you had to do, he said, was sit with the client and take a few notes to remind the barrister of what was going on. It paid twenty-five quid a day, cash.
‘Oh and don’t forget to wear a suit,’ he said before putting the phone down.
The case was being heard at the Crown Court in Croydon and I was quite looking forward to it as I travelled down there on the train: meeting the defendant, piecing together a story from the unfolding catechism of the court, weighing up the truth and falsehood of witnesses, seeing the judge and lawyers in action . . .
I met up easily with the barrister – a puppy-fat Oxbridge graduate – and he introduced me to the client. He was a sad mixed-race kid, an eighteen-year-old no-hoper who wasn’t much good at anything, not even looking sympathetic in Court. He was accused of breaking and entering some offices in Lewes. His story was that he’d gone to look for his friend Trotsky who was living down there. He called in at various bars and asked where Trotsky was but nobody had seen him. In the end he got pissed, missed the last train back and was picked up while trying to find somewhere to crash for the night.
The judge didn’t look at him sternly or savagely; he hardly looked at him at all. The whole thing was conducted like a bored ceremony that had considerable power but which no longer had any meaning. Clarifying points of legal procedure for the benefit of the jury, with a bored impatience he made no attempt to conceal, the judge made it plain that he had no interest in either the judicial or human aspects of the case – the only time he showed any alacrity was in arranging adjournments for lunch. The members of the jury were bored too; they wished they were involved in something more interesting like armed robbery or rape. There was nothing about the kid being tried to threaten the indifference or rouse the interest of anyone in the Court. The proceedings left him with only two options: insolence or submissiveness – and since there was nothing to be gained by either of these he looked bored. The nominal object of the court’s attention, he played a part in its proceedings only to the extent that someone getting stitched up by doctors participates in surgery.
If he got convicted, he told me during one of several adjournments, he’d probably end up back inside. He could handle that if he had to. Maybe he’d get off with a suspended sentence in which case he’d have the summer to look forward to.
The case dragged on. Each day I commuted down to Croydon in my suit. The longer the case went on the more money I earned (I’d already begun to think like a lawyer). Somehow the elaborate indifference of the court proceedings coloured – or rather, they did exactly the opposite, drained all colour from – my feelings for the boy. He became simply ‘the accused’, an abstraction, a legal term. Both his case and the circumstances in which he was being tried were dwarfed by the lofty ethics of justice in whose name they were being carried out. In the praxis of the Court all that remained of the ideal it embodied was the shabby paraphernalia of robes and wigs, the elaborate hierarchical etiquette with which only the officers of the court were familiar.
After a brief adjournment the jury proudly delivered their verdict of guilty. It was as if by announcing his guilt they had negatively affirmed their own freedom from civic wrongdoing, demonstrated to the Court their own harmlessness. The judge looked gravely over his glasses and handed out a suspended sentence, pointing out to this sad eighteen-year-old (the accused, the defendant, the client – or did he have some new title now that his guilt had been established and proved beyond reasonable doubt?) that the suspended prison term would be there, hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles. Unimpressed by the classical reference the defendant didn’t even blink. I walked with him back to the station. He borrowed a pound for the train fare to London and bought a pack of cigarettes. That was the last I saw of him. I called in at the solicitor’s office, claimed half a day more than I’d actually worked and multiplied my claim for travelling expenses by improbable complications of route. They didn’t seem bothered one way or the other.