on, you were one of our strongest advocates and you left for what? To be an evening volunteer?’
Zara frowned. ‘Saf, you know it’s more than that. In chambers, I was on a hamster wheel, working one case while hustling for the next, barely seeing any tangible good, barely even taking breath. Now, I work with victims and can see an actual difference.’ She paused and feigned annoyance. ‘And I’m not a volunteer. They pay me a nominal wage. Plus, I don’t work evenings.’
Safran shook his head. ‘You could have done anything. You really were something else.’
She shrugged. ‘Now I’m something else somewhere else.’
‘But still so sad?’
‘I’m not sad.’ Her reply was too quick, even to her own ears.
He paused for a moment but challenged her no further. ‘Shall we order?’
She picked up the menu, the soft black leather warm and springy on her fingertips. ‘Yes, we shall.’
Safran’s presence was like a balm. His easy success and keen self-awareness was unique among the lawyers she had known – including herself. Like others in the field, she had succumbed to a collective hubris, a self-righteous belief that they were genuinely changing the world. You could hear it dripping from the tones of overstuffed barristers, making demands on embassy doorsteps, barking rhetoric at political figureheads.
Zara’s career at the bar made her feel important, somehow more valid. After a while, the armour and arrogance became part of her personality. The transformation was indiscernible. She woke one day and realised she’d become the person she used to hate – and she had no idea how it had happened. Safran wasn’t like that. He used the acronyms and in-jokes and wore his pinstripes and brogues but he knew it was all for show. He did the devil’s work but somehow retained his soul. At thirty-five, he was five years older than Zara and had helped her navigate the brutal competitiveness of London chambers. He, more than anyone, was struck by her departure twelve months earlier. It was easy now to pretend that she had caved under pressure. She wouldn’t be the first to succumb to the challenges of chambers: the gruelling hours, the relentless pace, the ruthless colleagues and the constant need to cajole, ingratiate, push and persuade. In truth she had thrived under pressure. It was only when it ceased that work lost its colour. Numbed by the loss of her father and their estrangement before it, Zara had simply lost interest. Her wins had lost the glee of victory, her losses fast forgotten. Perhaps, she decided, if she worked more closely with vulnerable women, she would feel like herself again. She couldn’t admit this though, not even to Safran who watched her now in the late June twilight, shifting in her seat, hands restless in her lap.
He leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘Jokes aside, how are you getting on there?’
Zara measured her words before speaking. ‘It’s everything I thought it would be.’
He took a sip of his drink. ‘I won’t ask if that’s good or bad. What are you working on?’
She grimaced. ‘I’ve got this local girl, a teenager, pregnant by her mother’s boyfriend. He’s a thug through and through. I’m trying to get her out of there.’
Safran swirled his glass on the table, making the ice cubes clink. ‘It sounds very noble. Are you happy?’
She scoffed. ‘Are you?’
He paused momentarily. ‘I think I’m getting there, yeah.’
She narrowed her eyes in doubt. ‘Smart people are never happy. Their expectations are too high.’
‘Then you must be the unhappiest of us all.’ Their eyes locked for a moment. Without elaborating, he changed the subject. ‘So, I have a new one for you.’
She groaned.
‘What do you have if three lawyers are buried up to their necks in cement?’
‘I don’t know. What do I have?’
‘Not enough cement.’
She shook her head, a smile curling at the corner of her lips.
‘Ah, they’re getting better!’ he said.
‘No. I just haven’t heard one in a while.’
Safran laughed and raised his drink. ‘Here’s to you, Zar – boldly going where no high-flying, sane lawyer has ever gone before.’
She raised her glass, threw back her head and drank.
Artemis House on Whitechapel Road was cramped but comfortable and the streets outside echoed with charm. There were no anodyne courtyards teeming with suits, no sand-blasted buildings that gleamed on high. The trust-fund kids in the modern block round the corner were long scared off by the social housing quota. East London was, Zara wryly noted, as multicultural and insular as ever.
Her office was on the fourth floor of a boxy grey building with stark pebbledash walls and seven storeys of uniformly grimy windows. Her fibreboard desk with its oak veneer sat in exactly the wrong spot to catch a breeze in the summer and any heat in the winter. She had tried to move it once but found she could no longer open her office door.
She hunched over her weathered keyboard, arranging words, then rearranging them. Part of her role as an independent sexual violence advisor was filtering out the complicated language that had so long served as her arsenal – not only the legalese but the theatrics and rhetoric. There was no need for it here. Her role at the sexual assault referral centre, or SARC, was to support rape victims and to present the facts clearly and comprehensively so they could be knitted together in language that was easy to digest. Her team worked tirelessly to arch the gap between right and wrong, between the spoken truth and that which lay beneath it. The difference they made was visible, tangible and repeatedly affirmed that Zara had made the right decision in leaving Bedford Row.
Despite this assurance, however, she found it hard to focus. She did good work – she knew that – but her efforts seemed insipidly grey next to those around her, a ragtag group of lawyers, doctors, interpreters and volunteers. Their dedication glowed bright in its quest for truth, flowed tirelessly in the battle for justice. Their lunchtime debates were loud and electric, their collective passion formidable in its strength. In comparison her efforts felt listless and weak, and there was no room for apathy here. She had moved three miles from chambers and found herself in the real East End, a place in which sentiment and emotion were unvarnished by decorum. You couldn’t coast here. There was no shield of bureaucracy, no room for bluff or bluster. Here, there was nothing behind which to hide.
Zara read over the words on the screen, her fingers immobile above the keys. She edited the final line of the letter and saved it to the network. Just as she closed the file, she heard a knock on her door.
Stuart Cook, the centre’s founder, walked in and placed a thin blue folder on her desk. He pulled back a chair and sat down opposite. Despite his unruly blond hair and an eye that looked slightly to the left of where he aimed it, Stuart was a handsome man. At thirty-nine, he had an old-money pedigree and an unwavering desire to help the weak. Those more cynical than he accused him of having a saviour complex but he paid this no attention. He knew his team made a difference to people’s lives and it was only this that mattered. He had met Zara
