The Water Is Warm Read online

  ‘You must not talk to these people. They will think that you are a journalist…a western reporter.’ It was Dharan who first made me see sense.

  ‘And if they asked you for your passport, or where you are staying, what would you tell them? That you are staying here?’ Karunya was wringing her hands but I also caught Dharan’s glance towards her as she spoke and I saw straightaway the fear that he felt. I was putting the whole family in danger by being there.

  ‘It’s not like the south here,’ Karunya added.

  I had not thought it through. I could not possibly have stayed there or hidden away in their home while I sorted myself out and my presence must have been a constant reminder of their hopelessness. They must have felt themselves waiting for a knock upon the door. ‘Is there an Englishman staying here?…show me his registration details.’ That’s all it would have taken.

  ‘I have been so selfish,’ I told them. ‘I am so sorry. I must leave as soon as possible.’

  ‘You have not been selfish,’ Dharan came straight back with that, but it wasn’t true. ‘We only wish we could help more. But it is not safe for you here.’ What he also did not say, of course, was ‘please stay.’

  I have realised now how little I had known about what was happening in the north of the island. The only information that we had received when in Unawatuna had come from the mostly Sinhalese press, and news reports were controlled and limited in what could be said; I suppose there were many reasons for that, including the dissemination of propaganda but also a wish not to deter international tourism.

  According to figures put out by the government here in the press, tourism has actually increased over the years of the civil war, with only a small dip in numbers after the tsunami. Although there was a gunboat attack by separatists in Galle in October 2006, the war seemed far away when we were living in the south - something we read about but didn’t see. The hotels along the south coast remained open and the tourists came back to them once the damage from the tsunami was mostly repaired. Living among tourists, as we did, made the conflicts seem a long way off and very remote from the way of life that we led. I did not know what it was like to live next to a war zone in a territory that felt occupied and very different.

  Eleven days before Josh died it had been Independence Day, 4 February, and the newspapers were full of pictures about the displays of military power shown in parades that were held in Colombo as part of the celebrations. President Rajapakse, who was elected in November 2005, made a speech from outside the army headquarters in Galle Face Green in Colombo about the intention of the government finally to rid the country of the LTTE. There is talk of wanting the civil war to finish before the next Independence Day, which will be the sixtieth anniversary of the 1948 independence from the British. Dharan and Karunya read the newspapers telling them of the speeches, the rounding up of Tamils in Colombo and the build up of military might; and they were afraid. Of course they were afraid and they needed to keep themselves away from the attention of the local military.

  So I packed my bag that afternoon, said goodbye to them and their children and took the so called sleeper train from Trincomalee to Colombo discovering once again that it was anything but a train where anyone could sleep, especially as it was necessary to change trains at a place called Galoya in the middle of the night. And here I am back in Colombo. Bustling, sprawling Colombo, where it is much easier for a westerner to disappear. I think that the urban sprawl has a population of something like 5 ½ million and so no one is going to pay any attention to me here, seemingly just another tourist.

  I have now holed up in this western-style hotel which is very different to the last one. It is completely characterless, clean and air conditioned. I even get called ‘sir’ by the people who work here and I can move around without anyone paying me the slightest attention, unlike when Dharan and Karunya looked after me. It’s much easier like this and I can pretend to a western identity in a way that, at times, I even find myself enjoying. I have used my French passport and make out that I do not speak English particularly well which means that I get left alone. No one has asked me about a visa yet.

  My hotel room overlooks the Galle road, which is busy and noisy, so I can sit and watch the traffic that, from here, reminds me of ants following each other in a line. Then there is the railway line that runs along the coast with the overfilled trains tugging their loads slowly along the rails with people swarming all over them like bees. Beyond that there is the beach and, after that, the sea. I can sit at this window and look down on the scene below with complete detachment. It’s a bit like watching a film. The best scenes are at night and so I am sitting here now with the lights in my room switched off peering down on the muffled life below watching the many colours flowing beneath me. It’s quite pretty really.

  Before coming here, I spent my first night in Colombo in a much cheaper national style hotel where I washed myself and my limited clothes (or, rather, Josh’s – I will only wear his) thoroughly before setting foot in this brightly lit place. They no longer smelt of Josh, they just stank. I have even shaved and I think I look vaguely respectable.

  Being an illegal immigrant, now that my visa has expired, leaves me with this constant feeling that someone is going to grab me by the back of the collar suddenly and haul me away to a waiting aeroplane bound for London, but so far at least it hasn’t happened. I remain, therefore a credit card waving westerner who has the power of money and, on that basis, I am being treated politely by many people. If they knew my correct standing, they would treat me in a completely different way – like the policeman did when transporting me to the hospital in Tangalle after Josh died. Money conquers all…really??

  Like every city, Colombo is busy. The streets are full and noisy but there is an air of greater world commercialism and variety here than in India. Although India has opened its doors to outside commerce since the liberalisation policy of the Narasimha government in 1991, of which I had read so much in the Indian press when I was there, there are still reminders in the less urbanised areas of India of the times when you could not even buy a can of coca cola (the Indian equivalent was Campa Cola) and the cars were confined to a few styles which, to a western eye, were relics of the past - like the old Ambassador car. It’s different here.

  Josh and I came to Colombo quite a few times while we were together and I have broken off from reading and writing for a couple of days and wandered the streets, returning once again to the Viharamahadevi Park where he and I had once spent a lazy morning loafing around in the sun when he first came back from Sweden – before we went off to get pissed in a pub together on Galle Face Green. There is a statue of the Buddha near to the edge of the park opposite the white and domed town hall and so I went back there, finding some shade under a Banyan tree where we had sat before, and just watched the world go by. The park is a meeting place for lovers and there are signs asking people to ‘behave yourself more politely as this is a place where children are moving about’ (there is also a sign that suggests that ‘playing within the park is prohibited’, so I was not too sure what the children might be doing when moving about). The monsoon has not yet broken and the weather is hot but beginning to feel humid so it is easy to doss around in the park watching as the world passes before me.

  I know that I can’t stay here long. It’s expensive and also I can’t remain in one place for more than a couple of weeks. So, I want to get on with writing about London but, being back in the park reminded me of something that I first saw there when Josh came back from Sweden, unsure of himself and not knowing what was going to happen. I am not going to get anywhere with writing until I have got that out of my head.

  I want to write about that split second when in a conversation with Josh there would be a pause and he would look down at the ground. That’s all. Whenever he did it, every single time, I felt a massive drop, as though every shield, every self-protective aspect of myself, vaporised and nothing else mattered. It left me feeling that I could not s
peak and that everything was suspended in silence. And then I used to feel a huge injection of warmth for him flowing through me – I could taste it in my mouth, feel it in my legs. I had an instantaneous, instinctive wish to reach towards him, to touch his arm and say ‘it’s OK’…to look after him. I wanted to be part of that hesitation. And then I would look at him, touch him, look into his brown eyes and smile because I could not help myself doing so. That moment was Josh and I can see him doing it, right now, as I write this.

  Well, that is the here and now. In this western-style hotel as an observer of the life around me but surrounded by things that I have seen before in a very different setting – this is the hotel where Josh and I stayed before he flew back to Sweden after we first met here. And that is the park where we sat under a banyan tree, amongst lovers.

  And, back en piste, this is what happened next in London, when Catherine’s case came to court – this takes me down memory lane in a somewhat different way and I think that I had better chain myself to this desk to finish writing about it in one sitting before I get chucked out of this place.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  So, back I go to beautiful Birmingham. By the time of the hearing there the police had begun their separate investigations into whether Catherine had committed the crime of child cruelty and had interviewed her. Catherine had not been charged, however, because the police were waiting in the wings until after the family hearing before deciding whether to prosecute her. That all added a further hanging cloud of tension over what we were doing.

  The September hearing was therefore the fact finding hearing in the family proceedings and so the law and procedure were different to a criminal trial. It was the local authority, represented by the little shit with a squeaky voice Nagan – as the silk called him - to prove that it was more probable than not that Catherine had mistreated Martha if the case was to go any further.

  Nagan was hopelessly outclassed by the silk. She swept into action from the very start, casting words like icicles at Nagan in a performance of frozen steel - she was known as the ice maiden in chambers. I know why. A story about her?

  ‘Is the golfing story true?’ I asked her during a break from the trial.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I hadn’t chosen my moment well. But I went on and told her the story that was attributed to her in chambers. It went like this:

  ‘Is it right that you play golf?’ the silk was said to have asked an annoying junior that was against her in a case. A bit like Nagan, I suppose.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Got a good handicap?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Ever thought about taking it up professionally?’

  ‘No, why do you ask?’ the junior had apparently said, falling into the trap.

  ‘Because at least then you might be able to say that you haven’t been a professional tosser every day of your life.’

  When I asked her about it she looked at me with utter disdain, as if I was a schoolboy who had just asked his teacher whether she ever masturbated.

  ‘How scandalously untrue,’ she answered.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I thought I had really put my foot in it.

  But then she smiled, her red lips spread very wide, exhaling waves of cigarette smelling breath from her mouth.

  ‘The word was cunt, not tosser.’

  She went to work with Nagan from the outset. He made the mistake of trying to robing room her, as it was called, by asking whether we were prepared to throw our hands in because, he said, Dr Springton was bound to come up to proof and establish his case way beyond the balance of probabilities. The silk turned to me and said: ‘How risible.’ She then told Nagan that he was utterly despicable before she swept out of the robing room.

  Although it seemed like a game, a type of contact sport, nobody lost sight of the significance of what was being decided. People lose their children on the strength of findings made on no more than the balance of probabilities. Miss an argument or fail to take a point and a case can swing all too easily from 40:60 one way to 60:40 the other way. I remember Jennifer’s incredulity after she had lost the unlosable case of all time before a maverick judge who had found that her client had caused a subdural haemorrhage to her child. She sent me a note sometime afterwards where she made the point that it was a good thing that big everyday decisions are not made on that basis:

  Clara, now flat, stropped. ‘Am I clear,

  To cross this main road, mummy dear?’

  Mummy yawned: ‘You probably are

  …how did I miss that big red car?’

  I remember that I had burnt many candles at both ends preparing a chronology of the medical records which at times had to cover things in a lot of detail, sometimes down to the minute – when was the ambulance called, when did the paramedics arrive, etc. It was all needed to put together the huge jigsaw puzzle of what had happened. To her credit the silk worked hard on the case and kept firing emails to me at all times of the day and night getting me to research new points that had struck her. By the time we went to Birmingham for the trial I knew the case like the back of my hand. I still do. How could I forget it?

  We also had to make some big tactical decisions about the evidence that we would call. Should we call the ENT specialist about the bleeding on the third occasion and should we call our expert who simply agreed with Dr Springton?

  In the end, we did not call the ENT consultant because the statement that he produced left matters neutral. When he had seen Martha some hours after she arrived in hospital he did not find any source of bleeding and, although he said that he would be surprised to have missed a source of fresh bleeding from the back of the mouth, he could not say more than that. He referred to the delay in the investigation, the speed of oral healing, the difficulty in identifying the amount of bleeding due to the effects of saliva and the inevitable imprecision of examination of the mouth and respiratory tract when searching for what could be a small nick that might be partially or completely healed. To have called him to give evidence could only have made things worse.

  Nor did we call our own expert since, if we had, we could not have cross examined her and would have had to simply tender her in evidence. So, if she had said something that we didn’t like we could not have contradicted it since, unlike Dr Springton, she would have been our witness.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The case could have gone either way. The silk, my leader, did a brilliant job. She drove nails into Nagan and made him come across as a halfwit. She spoke to the judge in a man to man way or rather silk to silk way, knowing the judge had been a silk himself when he was at the bar. She kept strictly to time and went straight to the point with each witness. She hammered in our arguments and kept the case firmly on line for her to make the closing speech that she wanted. ‘Yes, it may seem implausible in the rarefied atmosphere of the court but the mother’s account is entirely possible.’ She drove that point home time and time again so that, in her speech she could say to the judge: ‘Our client is a woman of impeccable character and a devoted mother. She has given a perfectly possible explanation. Why should you not believe her? Things that are merely possible do happen. That’s why we close the curtains before getting undressed in hotels.’ The judge liked that one and I bet it stuck in his memory.

  Springton’s evidence was always going to be a problem for us, so the silk left much of it alone. We had agreed that detailed questioning of him would not improve things although she made him look really stupid over his use of statistics. His suggestion that an unusual event that happens three times makes it three times as unusual, was turned by her into a joke. ‘So, if, unusually, I have three red headed children it makes me three times unusual, does it?’ The judge got the point and even smiled when she made it. Throughout the rest of the case the silk just kept saying ‘repetition of an unusual event does not mean somebody is to blame.’

  Nagan’s approach with Dr Springton was to say, ‘Just for His Honour’s assistance, I want to explore the core rea
soning that led you to conclude that, on the balance of probability, the three events with which we are dealing were caused non-accidentally by the mother.’ He then tried to go through each of the events labouring the material that was adverse to Catherine. His approach was a mistake; he had his case already there on paper and wasting court time by being long-winded is a sure way of getting up a judge’s nose. I can picture Nagan now; he had all the accoutrements and phraseology of the job, he knew all of his lines but the trouble was that he lacked skill and subtlety and that led to arguments in court. Also, he really did have a squeaky, irritating voice.

  ‘Your Honour, every point that my learned friend is covering with this witness is already in the doctor’s report. This is time wasting.’ The silk rode into action, having bided her time.

  ‘I’m entitled to put my case to the witness.’

  ‘Yes, but my learned friend is not entitled to keep us all here until midnight while he labours through things that are already in the report.’

  ‘You don’t need to go over things that are in the report. I have read it.’ The judge kept firm control - but he smiled at the silk and smiles don’t appear on the transcript.

  There was lots of that. The silk waiting until she was on solid ground to intervene in what Nagan was doing and then sending the arrows of Agincourt down on him. Once she had made her mark, or riddled his body with arrows, she then sat back in her seat and looked bored, one shapely leg over the other, as she stared at the ceiling. She didn’t take one note of the evidence, leaving that lowly job to me. The judge, who eventually gave up on telling Nagan ‘this is already in the witness’s report,’ just stared out of the window.