clearly wanted to rip me to pieces and piss on the leftovers. But one of the few intelligible bits of that voicemail to Melissa had been something along the lines of snuck up on me, thought he was a burglar, scared the shit out of . . . and then more mumbling and sorry I’m so sorry (having to listen to that voicemail being played in a courtroom was, in the face of some stiff competition, definitely one of the worst moments of the whole thing). By the time I recovered enough to have any idea what had happened, the story had solidified itself, in basically the form that my defense eventually used at the trial: Rafferty calling by to see if I could back up Susanna’s story; the open door (my mother and Louisa and the postman all testified to having found the door unlocked or even swinging open, over the previous few weeks; apparently the postman had lectured me about it, but he didn’t think I’d taken it in); the startle on the dark terrace, the poor triggered PTSD sufferer flashing back to the attack that had devastated his life, lashing out in a frenzy of what he truly believed to be self-defense (expert testimony from the shitbird neurologist and from several psychologists, as well as some pretty crushing stuff from my family and Melissa), and then horror-stricken to the point of suicide when he snapped out of his trance of terror and saw Rafferty’s bloodied face.
It had some kind of truth to it, I suppose, in its own tangled, oblique way. My solicitor took me through it methodically, relentlessly, like a strict old-fashioned tutor drilling a backward student in Latin declensions. At first I refused point-blank even to think about testifying. It wasn’t only, or even mostly, what Rafferty had said—if you got into a courtroom, you’d be fucked. It was simpler than that. There were very few things left in the world that seemed like they would make me feel worse, but expanding on the finer details of my fuckedupitude to an audience consisting of my family and my friends and Melissa and assorted media and the entire world was pretty much top of the list.
But the solicitor kept banging on about how it was my only chance of avoiding a murder conviction and an automatic life sentence, so in the end I went with it. I think, or maybe I just want to think, that I did it mainly for my parents’ sake. I couldn’t shake the image of my mother stepping into the Ivy House, Toby? Toby are you all right?, the cold draft through the open garden door; the thing lying on the earth, the moment of horror, the dizzying confusion when she saw Rafferty’s face; rushing through dusty rooms and up dark staircases, Toby! voice rising and cracking, Toby!; and, at last, me, doing my best to die right there in front of her, just not quite able to cross that final borderline.
So I got up there on the stand, stripped and splayed and did my little dance in front of the world. I shook and hyperventilated, right on cue, as my barrister took me through the burglary step by step. I stumbled through in-depth descriptions of every single humiliating aftereffect (And what happened when you tried to go outside alone? And when the credit-card company asked for your middle name you couldn’t remember it, is that right? And we can see that your eyelid droops, is that a result of . . . ?). I lost my train of thought and had to ask for questions to be repeated. When someone dropped a notebook I jumped practically out of my seat. I stammered and slurred my way through Hugo’s death, jammed up so badly that my barrister had to ask for a break when it came to the fight with Rafferty. I tried not to look at the jury’s faces as they carefully assessed just how much of a wreck I was, at the pretty blonde in the front row and her big pitying eyes. On cross-examination the prosecutor went after me hard, trying to push the line that I was faking it, but he backed off fast when it became clear that I wasn’t at all, that I was in fact on the verge of breaking down utterly.
The prosecution’s version was that I had held a grudge against Rafferty over Hugo’s death, and when he had shown up looking for