The tribunal

Fiction, about three adults over 18. Two of them speak. The third sits at the side of the room with a notebook and says nothing at all from beginning to end, and she is the one I could not stop looking at.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

There were three chairs and a table and none of them belonged in that configuration. They had moved the dining table against the wall and put one chair behind it, one at the side, and left a clear space of carpet in the middle where I was to stand.

Carpet. Beige, with a slightly worn patch by the door. I looked at it a great deal.

I need to explain what I am like, or the rest of it will not make sense.

I cannot bear anyone being cross with me. Not in a mild way. If a colleague is short with me on a Tuesday I will still be turning it over on Friday night. My ex used to say that arguing with me was pointless because I would agree with anything to make his face go back to normal, and he meant it as a complaint and he was right.

So every warm version of this has failed for me. Being told off by somebody who loves me and is doing a voice is unbearable, because half of me is watching their face for whether they are really annoyed underneath it, and once I am doing that I am gone.

What I wanted, and could not ask for in those words for about two years, was to be dealt with by somebody who did not care.

He read the charges from a printed sheet. Two of them, particularised, with dates.

The offences were invented and both of us knew that. That is not the point and it made no difference whatever. What mattered was the format: a date, a description in flat administrative English, and then a pause while he looked up to check I had understood the first before he moved to the second.

He asked whether I accepted them. Not whether I was sorry. Whether I accepted them.

I said, "Yes."

He said, "Say it as a full sentence, please."

And I said, "I accept both charges," to a man in a shirt behind our dining table, and heard my own voice do the thing voices do in official rooms, which is get smaller and more precise at the same time.

Kath sat at the side and wrote it down.

That was the piece I had been most frightened of and it had taken three separate conversations before I agreed to it. A third person, in the room, not participating. Her entire function was to record. She had a notebook and a biro, and she had agreed in advance that she would not speak, would not react, would not catch my eye, and would leave immediately at the end.

It had to be her and it had to be somebody I would see again. That sounds backwards and I have had to defend it to myself since. A stranger would have been easier and would have proved nothing.

Kath has known me for nineteen years, she was at my wedding and at the other thing after my wedding, and the entire weight of it came from the fact that on Thursday she would be sending me a photograph of her dog as though none of it had occurred.

I had thought it would be humiliating in a way I could not manage. It was humiliating in a way I could manage, which is a different thing entirely, and I have spent a long time trying to work out the difference.

I think it is this. A person watching you is an audience. A person recording you is a procedure. She was not looking at me with any expression at all. She wrote when there was something to write and stopped when there was not, and the small scratch of the biro is possibly the coldest sound I have ever heard.

The sentence was pronounced as a number. Eighteen.

No explanation of how it had been arrived at, which I had asked for in advance and which is the single best decision we made about the whole thing. An explanation is a justification and a justification invites a conversation. Eighteen is arithmetic. There is nothing to say to a number.

He said where, and what with, and that I would count them, and that a miscount would be repeated rather than added to. Then he said, "Do you understand the sentence?" and I said yes, and he said, "Then we will proceed."

I will not do the eighteen. It was over a table, it was steady, and there was a pause of two or three seconds between each one during which nobody said anything except me, saying the number.

What I want to write down is what it was like inside, because it was not what I expected at all.

It was restful. I am aware of how that reads.

There was nothing to manage. No face to read. Nobody was angry, and because nobody was angry there was nothing for me to fix, and for the first time in something like twenty years I was in a room where somebody was doing something unpleasant to me and I did not have to look after their feelings about it.

He did not want anything from me. He did not need me to be sorry, or brave, or grateful. He needed me to count to eighteen.

Somewhere around eleven I stopped bracing and simply let it happen, and the counting went from a task to a rhythm, and I have never been so completely inside a single minute in my life.

At the end he said, "The sentence is served. The matter is closed."

Kath wrote one more line, closed her notebook, and left without looking at me, which we had agreed and which I was still grateful for. The front door went. I heard her car.

And then the room changed so fast that it made me laugh out loud.

He was on the floor beside me before I had properly stood up, with the blanket off the back of the sofa, saying my name in his own voice, the one that has a Cardiff underneath it that he lost thirty years ago except when it matters.

I cried for about four minutes and it was nothing to do with the eighteen.

He got the table back to where it lives. He did it while I sat on the floor with the blanket, and he made a lot of noise about it deliberately, and by the time the chairs were back it was our dining room again and there had never been a tribunal in it.

Later I asked him what Kath had written. He said he had not read it and did not intend to, and that she had taken the notebook with her.

I think about that notebook more than I think about the eighteen. Somewhere in Bristol there is a woman with a spiral notebook containing a record of a thing that happened to me, written in a hand I have never seen, that I will never read.

I find that I do not mind at all. It happened. It was recorded. It was closed.

Nobody was cross with me for a single second of it, and that is the only reason I could let any of it in.