Court Number Two, by Brian Ashworth

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

The corridor outside Court Number Two had green tiles halfway up the walls and cream paint above them, and the cream paint was peeling in long curls, like the skin on boiled milk. Brenda sat on a wooden form between her father and a policeman and tried to look at nothing in particular.

In ten minutes, or twenty, or an hour (nobody would tell her which), a man in a black gown would open the door and call her name, and she would have to go in and stand in a box and tell a room full of grown men what she had seen on the Coventry Road on the fourteenth of March.

She had seen it. That was not the trouble. She saw it still, most nights, when she closed her eyes: the lorry coming round the corner too fast, the boy on the red bicycle wobbling, the terrible, ordinary sound, like a dustbin lid dropped in the street. She did not need to remember it. The trouble was that she could not stop.

The trouble was also the man at the far end of the corridor. He sat with his solicitor, a small, tidy man in a grey overcoat, turning his gloves over in his hands, and he did not look like a man who drove lorries too fast round corners. He looked like somebody’s uncle. Twice he had glanced along the bench towards her, and twice Brenda had felt her whole body go hot and then cold, as if she had been caught doing something wrong, which was stupid, because she had not done anything at all.

Her father patted her knee. ‘Just tell the truth, duck,’ he said. ‘Nobody can touch you for the truth.’ He said it the way he said everything, as if it were obvious, and she loved him for it and wanted to shake him. What if they asked her how fast? She did not know how fast. Fast. Fast was all she knew. What if the man in the gown smiled at her, the way teachers smiled before they told you that you were wrong?

The door opened. Her stomach dropped, like the first step of a staircase that is not there.

‘Brenda Ridley,’ called the usher.

She stood. Her legs were made of string. But as she walked past the man in the grey overcoat she found that she was looking straight at him, and that he was the one who looked away.

How does the writer show Brenda’s thoughts and feelings as she waits to give evidence in court?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Brenda
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.