Free Courting Trouble by Kathy Lette Page B

for no fuckin’ reason. What’s that about then?’
    ‘Gee, I dunno . . . Possibly because you brutally gang-raped her granddaughter?’ My mother’s voice dripped angry sarcasm.
    Bash reeked of malevolence. I could feel it coming off him in waves, as strong as aftershave.
    ‘What do nine out of ten people enjoy?’ the raptor rapist sneered. ‘Gang rape.’
    For a moment I saw my mother thinking about borrowing the policeman’s gun and shooting him in his other testicle. She took aim with a verbal bullet instead. ‘Just as well your dick isn’t any bigger, or Phyllis might have actually hit you.’
    I gave my mother a censorious look. Judges take a dim view of the defence team badgering prosecution witnesses. ‘Um, Roxy, as Phyllis’s solicitor, I suggest you make like a turtle and pull your head in,’ I counselled.
    ‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘I never pass judgement on prosecution witnesses, and I’m not going to break the habit of a legal lifetime, for this piece of shit.’
    ‘Anyways, it ain’t rape if you yell “Surprise!” first.’ The thug then leant right into my face, so I copped the full force of his sour breath. ‘
“Surprise!”
‘His laugh was totally B-grade-movie satanic.
    ‘Oy! Shut it,’ the policeman told Bash. The lift doors whooshed open on the ground floor and he manhandled the raptor out of the hospital.
    ‘Men like that need to be taught a lesson,’ Roxy sighed as we walked back to her car. ‘This behaviour springs from cultures that fail to persecute rape. Men think they can get away with it, because they do. Phyllis’s bail hearing’s in the morning. Ah . . . if only I knew a good lawyer . . .’
    My mother drives fast at the most relaxed of times. But today she was so furious she’d decided that amber lights were merely a device to get drivers to accelerate. She was so redfaced with anger that I was tempted to ask the guy at the traffic lights to forget the windscreen and just lean in and squeegee her forehead.
    ‘On the surface, those rapists may seem like clichéd, brainless thugs straight out of central casting. But don’t underestimate them. To my mind, those gangrenous polyps fit the mould of drug-gang members who treat girls like sperm spittoons. They have a Ph.D. in lying, misogyny and deception. It’s time they were booted up the bum, right into maximum-security prison.’
    I clutched the dashboard for dear life as the car caromed off a speed bump and we momentarily took flight.
    ‘Look, what happened to Chantelle is unforgivable. But her grandma attacked in cold blood. All this eye-for-an-eye stuff, it’s so Old Testament.’
    ‘Sometimes it’s the only way, Tilly. Phyllis knows that raped girls often end up too terrified and intimidated to testify.’
    ‘But if you advocate the law of “jungle justice”, society collapses into chaos. I specialize in civil not criminal law. I’ve spent my life cross-examining people who have acted unlawfully – dodgy doctors and dentists and such. I could only act for Phyllis if she pleads guilty. I could do a good plea in a mitigation to the judge for a lenient sentence.’
    I was beginning to make Mother Teresa seem frolicsome, but it was the truth.
    ‘Let me show you where it happened,’ was Roxy’s answer to that.
    The Royal Free Hospital is on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Hampstead Village is a haven of arugula salad and Aga stoves and Cath Kidston cushions. But as you drive south towards Camden, the genteel Georgian properties quickly give way to council estates with a severe shortage of Montessori schools and yogalate classes. Roxy swung her car off the winding, picturesque road and into the mass of grim tower blocks that made up the Tony Benn Estate.
    An inner-city-London council estate is like downtown Haiti, only without the glamour. At one end, an abandoned factory loomed out of the rain like a dark cathedral. It was surrounded by a tidal wave of concrete – cluttered, shabby tower blocks, their