She released the phone from her shoulder grip and dropped it into her hand, looking at the screen to remind herself who she was talking to. She was on hold, that was it, she was on hold with the court people because she wanted to tell them that the date they were now proposing was not convenient for her. It was her mother’s birthday. They might go out for lunch! She laughed harder, laughed at herself. When had her mother last taken her for lunch?
Perhaps she could explain, though. Perhaps she could explain the whole fork thing to whoever would be, at some point, on the end of the line. Perhaps she could tell them the story; perhaps they’d understand. It was an easy story to tell, she’d told it before, a number of times, a number of versions: to the police, to the duty solicitor, to her psychologist （We need to develop strategies, Laura, to help you control your anger）， to Maya at the launderette.
Tell it again!
She’d been in a bar, not far from where she was right at that moment. It was very late, she was very drunk, and she was dancing, slowly, on her own. Encouraged, perhaps, by the small group of people who were gathering to watch her, she performed, slowly and impromptu, a fairly professional-looking striptease. In the middle of this routine and without so much as a by-your-leave, an aggressively bearded twentysomething—drunk too, but less drunk than she—stepped forward, right into her space, reached out, grabbed her left breast, hard.
His friends cheered and everyone else laughed except for one girl who said, “Fucking hell.”
Laura was thrown off her rhythm, she stumbled backward, grabbing on to the bar to steady herself. Everyone laughed harder. Suddenly, blindly furious, she lurched forward over the bar, groping for a weapon. She happened upon a cocktail fork, a two-pronged affair used for skewering olives, which she grabbed, lunging forward. The man dropped his shoulder, dodged to the right, lost his balance, flailed with his left hand, grabbed the bar with his right and there, she stuck him, right through the center of his hand. The fork went in—it really went in, sank into his flesh as though it were butter—and it stuck.
There was quite a scuffle then, with lots of pushing and shoving and the young man screaming in pain. The bouncers waded in, one of them wrapping half-naked Laura in his jacket and ushering her toward the back of the bar. “Did that bloke do this to you, love?” he asked. “Did he attack you? Did he take your clothes?”
Laura shook her head. “I took off my clothes,” she said, “but then he grabbed me. He grabbed my tit!”
The police were called, and while they were waiting, the two protagonists—the man with the fork in his hand and the half-naked woman with a bouncer’s jacket around her shoulders—were forced to sit almost side by side. “Fucking mental,” the man kept muttering. “She’s a fucking mental. She wants locking up.”
He was trying to extract a cigarette from the pack with one hand, but he kept dropping the pack on the floor, which was making the bouncers laugh. “You can’t smoke in here anyway,” the jacketless one said.
All this while, Laura was silent—the outbreak of mayhem had sobered her up, frightened her—until the man said: “You’re going to get done for assault, you mad bitch, you know that? You’re getting locked up.”
At this point, she turned to look at him and replied, “No, I’m not. I defended myself.”
“You fucking what?”
“When did I say you could touch me?” Laura demanded to know. “You assaulted me,” she said. “You put your hands on me.”
The man’s jaw dropped. “You took your top off, you mental bitch!”
“Yes, I’m aware of that, but when did I say that you could touch me?”
“She’s got a point,” the bouncer said. Fork boy squeaked in disbelief.
Laura smiled sweetly. “Thank you,” she said.
“Yeah,” he went on, “it’s a fair point, love, but still. You can’t just stab people in the hand with a fork. It’s disproportionate, innit?”
* * *
Laura held her gaze in the mirror. She was still in the bathroom, still holding the phone to her ear. There was no sound from the other end, no one said anything. No one was listening. Laura took the handset from her ear, tapped the screen, and scrolled to her mother’s number. She listened to a familiar beeping sound, to a woman’s voice telling her, You have no credit available for this call. She placed the phone on the edge of the basin. She tried to smile at herself in the mirror, but her facial muscles didn’t seem to be working properly; she could only grimace, at her ugliness, at her loneliness.