‘Do you appreciate that if this case went to trial, you could face a jail sentence of up to seven years?’
My heart seemed to be racing faster than I could keep up with. I tried to breathe.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said in a small voice.
He wrote something on the paper in front of him and handed it to the officer. ‘Luckily for you and your band of merry men, the head of the medical school has requested we take this matter no further.’
I didn’t know exactly what that meant.
‘You need to sign these statements; we’ll take your prints for our file and you’ll be released with a caution. Understand?’
I nodded. ‘Yes.’
Then he looked me square in the eye and said, ‘Let this be the last time we meet, Miss Docherty.’
The rabbit officer rose to lead me out of the interview room.
‘It’s Mrs. I don’t know if that mat—’
‘Hang on,’ the inspector said. ‘Mrs? Who’s your husband? Was he part of this?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Why not?’
‘He’s … I don’t …’ There had to be a way of saying this that sounded less wretched. ‘I don’t know where he is.’
The fat inspector was intrigued. ‘You mean he’s a missing person?’
‘No. No, he … left me,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ The officer was no longer intrigued. He crossed something out on his paper. ‘You’re released. Thank you.’
He didn’t look thankful.
When I got out of the hot police station into the still-warm day, I squinted and held my hand up to my eyes. What time was it? What had just happened? I felt that the smartly dressed man in the brown suit who passed me knew I’d been arrested. I felt it was stamped on my forehead.
‘You’re out!’ Meena cheered, running towards me with a cigarette lolling from her bottom lip. She embraced me with her thin arms and laughed. ‘It was The Professor! He dropped the charges! What a hero!’
My disorientation at the sun and the smells of the street was nothing compared to my disorientation at Meena. She’d looked so floored when we were arrested. Now she just looked flawed. How could she think this was funny?
‘Never again,’ I said, my voice coming out hoarse and catching in my throat.
‘Breaking rocks in the hot sun!’ she sang.
‘Never. Again.’
I started walking and she loped alongside me. ‘I fought the law and the law won!’
I stayed silent, pushing my excess fury through my heels into the pavement.
‘Never again,’ I repeated. ‘I have a caution. Meena, this isn’t … wait.’ I stopped. She stopped. I stared at her. She threw her cigarette into the hedge behind her.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Your name. Why did you give them a fake name?’
‘Fake name?’
‘Amelia Catherine Houghton?’
‘Catherine Amelia Houghton,’ she corrected.
‘So what is that? A name you use when you’re arrested?’
‘It’s my name.’ She stared at me like I was mad. ‘You thought Meena was my real name?’ She laughed again. ‘You think my Irish Catholic mother named me Meena Star?’
‘So Meena is the fake name?’
‘It’s my new name. I just haven’t got round to changing it. Lucky I saved you from calling yourself Marjorie or whatever – they’d have done you for that.’
She started walking ahead of me and as she turned, I let out a little smile. This was so foolish. I’d lived with the girl for five years and had never known her name. I wasn’t the only person reinventing myself in London. In fact, the person I most wanted to be was an invention herself.
‘What else don’t I know?’ I called after her.
She waited while I caught her up.
‘You’re an idiot,’ she said, laughing.
And she grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me on the lips.
A man passed between us, using his hat to push us out of his way. Under his breath, but loud enough for us to hear, he uttered one single word: ‘Dykes.’
Twenty-Five Years
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF our lives were laid out across the tables in the Rose Room.
A metal bucket on the floor of an air-raid shelter, a table laid for a cold but extravagant breakfast, the haunted eyes of a skeleton witnessing a first kiss, and a baby in a yellow hat. Twenty-five stories that had waited patiently within us, now ready to be hung up, admired, celebrated, destroyed. What happens to the pictures once we are finished doesn’t matter that much to me.