A Personal History of Thirst Read online

  We sipped our wine, remembering.

  “You’ve got something to tell me, haven’t you?” Daisy said.

  “How did you know?”

  “I’ve lived with you on and off for four years, I’ve broken all your codes, pal. There was an I’ve-got-a-bit-of-news-for-her smirk on your face when you came in.”

  “My God, don’t you find intimacy scary sometimes?”

  “Sure. That’s why I’m glad you’re not as intuitive as me. So let’s have it.”

  “The brief for Thirst’s appeal arrived this morning. Delivered by an ex-convict.”

  “And you’re going to do the appeal?”

  “A brief for a gangster who’s claiming to be my friend, delivered by an ex-convict working for one of the most disreputable solicitors’ firms in London? Out of the question.”

  “More than your job’s worth, I suppose?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re lying.” She picked at her salad. “You’ve decided to do it.”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s up to you—it’s your career after all. I’m not going to interfere, any more than you would with mine.”

  “Why on earth should I do that? I’ve always encouraged you. I happen to think you’ll make a great teacher.”

  “I wasn’t referring to teaching. As you know, my real talent lies in shoplifting.”

  “I see.”

  “And maybe burglary. I was reading the other day about a dramatic increase in women burglars. I think I’ll go to a gym, get fit, and become a cat burglar.”

  “Don’t expect me to represent you when you get caught.”

  “Don’t worry—I know I’m expected to die rather than damage your career.”

  The waiter brought Daisy’s lasagna and my spaghetti, poured us some more Chianti. His eyes dilated over Daisy. He asked with special care if everything was all right.

  “Terrific.” Daisy gave him a dazzling smile.

  “You are the luckiest man in London,” he said to me, “if you don’t mind my saying so. Another bottle?”

  “If you’re going to say things like that, how can I refuse?”

  He nodded. “One bottle is never enough when you’re in love.”

  Daisy and I looked at each other and laughed.

  “Sometimes, Daisy, you have this disgusting way of giving the whole world a hard-on.”

  “On the contrary, dear boy, as you people say. I have to tell you it’s our ultra-hot passion which has that effect. Now, are you going to come clean about that appeal, or do I describe in a loud voice how I recently robbed Boots of five packets of Tylenol, a family-size box of Kleenex, and a packet of condoms?”

  “Don’t believe you. We don’t use condoms, you’re on the pill, and Tylenol is an American brand name—you hardly see it over here. But if it will keep your voice down, I’ll admit that I’m inclining toward accepting instructions to represent Oliver Harry Thirst in his appeal against conviction. Subject, of course, to further consideration.”

  “Inclining toward, are we? And what would tip the balance, d’you think? A blow job under the table maybe?”

  “Daisy—not so loud. Please.”

  “Okay, you asked for it.” She fished in her handbag for a pen, started to write on a paper napkin. When she had finished, she passed the napkin over to me:

  Between Daisy Smith of the one part (hereafter “the Fellator”) and James Knight of the other part (hereafter “the Fellatee”):

  In return for the Fellatee accepting instructions to represent Oliver Harry Thirst in his appeal, the Fellator hereby undertakes at a time and place of the Fellatee’s choice to perform oral sex on the Fellatee for seven minutes or until orgasm, whichever is the sooner.

  “Did I get the legalese right? Just sign at the bottom, please.” Daisy handed me the pen. I signed the napkin. She sighed. “I presume you want to defer payment till after lunch?”

  —

  We managed to finish both bottles of Chianti, which was unusual for us. The waiter waved happily when we left, holding hands. The fresh air only made me realize how drunk I was.

  “I’ll walk with you back to chambers,” Daisy said.

  We crossed Holborn and proceeded a little unsteadily down Chancery Lane. Near Lincoln’s Inn we both stopped on a common impulse. The napkin was now in my pocket.

  “Oh Christ,” I said. A massive erection made walking uncomfortable.

  Daisy, staring at my crotch, put a hand on it. “Take me somewhere, Jimmy—please. I’m gonna die if you don’t fuck me in the next five minutes.”

  The walk down Chancery Lane, across Fleet Street, and down Middle Temple Lane to my chambers had never seemed so long. My mind was reluctant to focus on practical issues like how to cross the road safely. The imminent merging of our flesh had become an obsession. I felt unusually violent. I wanted revenge on her for making me want her so much.

  I experienced no shame as we passed Michael on the stairs, although I knew, vaguely, that I would do so later. I thought that he looked faintly disappointed. My intentions, despite the polite smile fixed on my face, must have been all too obvious.

  Once inside my room, I closed the door, pushed her roughly against it, locked it, and drew my hand up her dress, all in one premeditated movement.

  “D’you want me to do what it says in the contract?” Daisy said.

  “No. I want you much too badly for that.”

  —

  There are moments, unchronicled usually, when a man feels the whole of his stock of seed pass, along with half his soul, into the body of his beloved. On the floor now, we gazed, drunk and exhausted, into each other’s eyes.

  “Wow,” Daisy said.

  15

  My preparation for Thirst’s appeal obliged me to visit him in the Scrubs, one of London’s half-dozen jails of medium security for male offenders that date back to the Victorian era and suffer from serious overcrowding problems. I had visited clients in prison many times by then, but this was different. There was a connection between us. I felt him drawing me.

  As each successive steel gate opened and then shut behind me, I felt like a nervous diver dropping into a black lake. I had my equivalent of an air supply, which is to say my right to leave at will, but the further I descended, the greater the risk that I would be somehow trapped.

  “Prisoner?”

  “Oliver Harry Thirst.”

  “Visitor for prisoner 732 Thirst.”

  “Thirst—732!” His name and number were sent bouncing off the steel and concrete until they reached his cell, while I was walked to the interview room.

  I was unable to shut out, as I usually did on prison visits, the thousand symptoms of a brutal and stunted masculinity—prisoners and screws alike. Viscous lechery, a black network of petty jealousies that bound them fast, infantile fixations that lived on twisted and thwarted in grown men, all were expressed through sustained glares, grotesque grins, childish graffiti. I had the impression that Thirst dwelt at the heart of this darkness. Despite—or perhaps because of—his penchant for betrayal, he was in many ways the recidivist’s idea of royalty: good-looking, muscular, ever ready for violence, an unerring command of the dialect, an indifference to solitude. And he often implied through encoded words and gestures that only this extreme test of incarceration was worthy of his manhood.

  “How are you, Oliver?”

  “Fine, excellent, never been better. Always feel healthy in the nick—no booze, lots of exercise, no tarts to break your balls.”

  At the same time he was more desperate to get out than any prisoner I had ever seen. Without warning his narrowed eyes would dilate with anguish. I felt his envy of my freedom like a physical force pulling at my solar plexus. By turns he was hopeful and despairing.

  “We gonna win, then?”

  “You know I can’t answer that.”

  His quick mind had seen from the start the importance of the appeal. Although the crime was minor, it came at a critical point in his accumula
tion of convictions. If he won, he might be let out early and have strings pulled for his rehabilitation. If not, he would be classified as a lost cause and left to rot.

  I took him through his statement carefully, matched it to the evidence he had given at trial. The world that lay behind the documents was by now exceedingly familiar to me—a world where checks were stolen and traded like an alternative currency, where dishonesty guided the mind as it foraged in the high street, in shops, at night in quiet turnings. Where familiar English words carried subtle, cryptic meanings and almost every deliberate act had, as its objective, a victim. Sitting with him across the cheap prison table, the screw in profile on the other side of the reinforced glass, I felt as if I had stepped through a curtain. The distance any criminal practitioner needs in dealing with his clients, the conscious clipping of normal human intercourse in order to avoid overfamiliarity, was difficult to maintain with Thirst. It was as the social worker had said—he was intelligent. He knew what I was thinking, saw where I was going in my strategy for his appeal, was ready with the kind of answers I needed for my ideas to work.

  “I like it. Yeah, that’s just the way they think in the appeal court. More technical.”

  We are all most easily seduced by understanding. As a kind of trade-off for his effortless penetration of my mind, I was drawn reluctantly into his.

  —

  But I had only to step out again, into the light, for his influence to collapse. His world ended where mine began—the frantic thrust of daily affairs absorbed me totally. For him the great day no doubt arrived with agonizing slowness, while for me the time passed in a flash.

  16

  I slept little the night before. Old hands, even the toughest of them, confessed without shame to attacks of nerves before appearing before the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of Criminal Appeal. It made no difference that I was being “led” by a Queen’s Counsel, which meant that I would probably not have to say anything.

  I had prepared the case and done the research, and Harry Beaufort, Q.C., was dependent upon me for his lines. The case was in the ten-thirty list, and at about nine he was looking at the papers for the first time.

  Beaufort was short, aggressive, and fifty, with a red face and an intimidating temper. I had chosen him because he often prosecuted and was therefore likely to gain the respect of a conservative court. He was unused to concepts borrowed, in part, from the law relating to bills of exchange and said “fuck” and “shit” a lot as I tried to explain the case to him. Then, at about nine-thirty, he said, “Got it,” and I could see his mind close around the case like a steel trap.

  “I suppose we’ll have to see the illustrious client.”

  We put on our wing collars and gowns and walked across the Strand to the huge palace-like building that houses the Royal Courts of Justice. A lift took us down to some underground cells.

  Thirst was classified as dangerous, which meant that there were a lot of burly warders standing around his cell. They knew Beaufort and called him “sir” with tangible respect. He used his angry voice to make them open the door quickly, without the usual standoff.

  He and Thirst stared at each other from opposite ends of a social scale. Thirst was sitting in the corner of his cell and did not seem nervous. I knew enough about criminals by then to realize that he expected to lose the case. It’s hope that causes tension.

  “What’s the story?” Beaufort said.

  “No story. Mr. Knight had some good ideas, so I appealed.”

  “I know that—why the fuck do you think I’m here?”

  Thirst smiled, almost shyly. I could see he liked Beaufort.

  “So I ask again, what’s the story?”

  Thirst looked flustered for a moment under Beaufort’s stare. I had no idea what was going on until Thirst lowered his eyes.

  “I’m going to go straight this time, Mr. Beaufort, if you and Mr. Knight get me off.”

  “If we get you off it’ll be thanks to this wizard.” He jerked a thumb at me. “I don’t give a damn if you go straight or not—have you any idea how many Jack the Lads I’ve seen in this very cell over the years? You know what? You all look the same to me, every one of you. That’s what I’ve come to tell you—every little Jack the Lad who ever thought he was getting away with something looks about as interesting to me as a week-old dog turd. Because that’s what you’ve made of your life, you’ve turned it into a stale piece of shit. If you remember that, it’ll do you more good than a thousand probation officers. As for the appeal, you’ve got no chance, none at all.”

  He waited for this depressing advice to sink in. Then:

  “Unless the Chief’s in the right mood.”

  Thirst’s face lit up again with that awful beam of gratitude. Beaufort could play him like a cheap whistle if there really was a chance.

  “So—” Thirst began.

  “So start praying. We’re going up to court.”

  The Chief’s Court in the Royal Courts of Justice may be the most intimidating piece of theater to be produced by a theatrical nation. Oaken terraces slope down to a well where humbled advocates plead heavenward.

  As we entered, three empty red thrones waited on a dais so lofty it could have been part of another floor, quite separate from the one where we sat—and dedicated to other, more important business.

  On a level with the dais but clinging shamefully to another wall was an iron cage with an inner door that led through labyrinths measureless to lawyers down to the sunless cells from which we had just emerged. It was part of the Victorian intention that when the court was sitting, the eye would move from the resplendent ones in ermine to the occupant of the cage and back again.

  Beaufort sat in the row in front of me and below, reserved for Queen’s Counsel. He put on his old gray wig carelessly and lounged against the bench with the silks whose cases were before ours.

  A loud noise like the crack of a whip sent everyone, including Beaufort, to his feet. The Chief and his two assistant judges, in their Gilbert and Sullivan robes and wigs, walked briskly along the dais. We all bowed and sat down.

  “Yes?” the Chief snapped.

  “The Queen against…” the clerk shouted. One of the silks stood up and started to present his case. The Chief waited irritably for about a minute before interrupting.

  “You mean to say, Mr. Cruikshank…” In an incredulous tone, the Chief restated the barrister’s argument in terms that made it sound absurd.

  “He’s in a hell of a mood today,” Beaufort said.

  While the other silks argued their cases, Beaufort studied the books that we had brought with us and which I had carefully tagged at the relevant cases. His concentration was furious for about forty minutes, then he relaxed and listened to the other arguments.

  About halfway through the morning, I happened to look up to the public gallery, to see Daisy sitting there. We’d had a dreadful argument the night before, identical in many ways to the one we’d had after meeting Hogg, but this time I had commanded the moral high ground: wasn’t I representing Thirst in his appeal the very next day? Daisy had been more than usually contrite that morning. Now her chaotic blond hair tumbled over that huge dirty white sweater, and she waved gaily. America had at least left her unintimidated by British pomp. I wrote a hurried note: Sorry we can’t meet for lunch. I was sure Beaufort would want to talk about the case if it was not over by then. My solicitors’ clerk delivered the note and came back with another, written in her large generous hand and relying, for security, on some paper-folding trick:

  Jimmy darling, I just had to come and see you on your big day. I’m so sorry about last night, don’t know what got into me, it must have been the time of the month because I’ve just started….I do understand about your career and everything and I just love you to death. Good luck with your case, I know you’ll win. Love, your adoring Daisy. P.S. You’re a terrific fuck, too.

  I hurriedly folded the note and was slipping it into an inside pocket when the head usher yelled
out: “The Queen against Thirst.”

  The inside door of the hanging cage snapped open, and Thirst strode forward between two heavy warders.

  From the moment he entered the cage I knew that Daisy’s eyes were fixed upon him. I could feel her fascination, I knew her so well. For a moment I felt that I had our three fates in my hands. If I lost the appeal the animal would be caged indefinitely. But it was too late; the machine that was Beaufort’s mind had already taken over—and anyway, I didn’t believe in premonitions.

  “M’Lud…,” Beaufort began. As I listened, I had to admire the sophistication with which he had packaged my complicated argument. In turn he lolled casually against the bench behind him or turned sideways to put his foot up on his own bench, talking to the Chief as if on equal terms. The way he put it, you would almost believe there was no room for doubt. The Chief seemed amused.

  “But if I understand you aright, Mr. Beaufort, you don’t attempt to say that your client did not intend the fraud?”

  “I submit that there was no fraud, M’Lud. This check, uniquely in my experience of cases like this, never could have had any validity, and the shop had actual or constructive knowledge when they accepted the check. There was no charge of attempt or conspiracy on the indictment.”

  “Was this put to the Court at first instance?”

  “I’ll let m’learned junior answer that.” He sat abruptly down and started fiddling with some papers, quite as if he no longer had any part in the case. I stood up, with a huge hole where my stomach had been.

  “Yes, it was, My Lord.”

  “Well, where in the transcript do we find it?” The Chief was suddenly furious again. For an awful minute I fumbled and found the passage. The three old gods peered suspiciously at their copies. I could feel Thirst and Daisy boring into my mind.

  “But it wasn’t put to the jury in the judge’s summing up?”

  “No, My Lord.”

  The Chief conferred in whispers, first with the judge on his left, then with the one on his right.

  “Yes, very well, Mr.—er—Knight.”