Professional ethics is a cunt

The Magistrates’ Court : 10.30 am

I had spotted the defendant outside the cinema as I passed by in my taxi. A humane thought did dart across my mind to offer him a lift to the hearing, but, lightning quick, darted out again. Now how would that look to turn up in the same cab as the defendant? He had better not be late. No, he’ll make it alright. If he did show up late, of course I’d be the one left holding the baby and making excuses for him, but ultimately it would be his problem, not mine.

He did make it on time and, looking sheepishly awkward as he shifted uncomfortably in his suit, ran his finger inside the collar of his shirt, pulling on it to loosen his tie slightly. I could imagine his mother, a fifty-something with dyed red hair that had been carefully set with half a tin of lacquer, straightening his tie on the doorstep and wishing him well. Like a schoolboy on his first day at school. But she was a figment of my imagination. An unhealthy one that I had to stamp out of my mind. It’s always difficult having real people as clients instead of companies. My human side is always sorely tempted to fabricate a life beyond what I see. The life they step back into once they leave my office. It’s a bad habit.

I stood up and addressed the judge so as to mitigate the sentence he was about to pass on my client, explaining how the man he had drunkenly beaten to a pulp outside a greasy kebab shop one Friday night had provoked him. Therefore it was decidedly wrong to send him to jail.

Seven and a half minutes, and one small fine later, we were sitting in the corridor. My client was quietly jubilant as the reality and relief gently settled in, like a shipwreck on the sandy bed of the ocean floor.

I tidied my papers away and he, hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, turned to me and said,

“Thank you.”

“It’s my job. I’m paid to do it.” I replied, somewhat indifferently.

“You remind me of my ex-girlfriend.” He said.

I forced a smile but continued filing my papers without looking at him.

“Yeah, she was a posh bird too. She spoke just like you.”

“Really?” I replied flatly. I suppressed the urge to ask ‘and whereabouts in Epping Forest are the decomposing remains of her carefully dismembered corpse to be found?’.

“Yeah.” Then an awkward silence. “I’ll bet you’re the type of girl who likes the theatre.”

I looked up at him and smiled warmly. I was oddly touched.

“Yes. Yes I am.”

“I knew you were. You’re just like her.” He gave a broad smile, as though he had found his lost true love once again. It faded as the realisation dawned on him that I was not his ex, but me. His shoulders sank as he continued his wistful silent reminiscence. Then I made the connection in my head: in the courtroom, he had needed me. He had been utterly dependent upon me to change the path and the total outcome of his life. This feeling must have triggered off a false recognition, much like a muscle memory.

“Would you…would you have dinner with me?” he asked, eyes lowered to the floor in front of him and hands clasped.

“No.” I said, slowly and gently. Without contempt or disdain.

“Oh.” he whispered.

“You know how doctors can’t go out with their patients?”

“Yeah.”

“Same thing…Professional ethics.” I shrugged and smiled weakly.

Ahh yes. Professional ethics. Two beautiful words embodying a divine level of complete emotional detachment. Untouchable and immune to the intrigues and conspiracies of the wingéd cunt. These two words are shiny and sterile and clean, like surgical steel implements. Like a long black barrister’s robe, they cloak you with coldness when you long to be humane. Know, dear readers, that I didn’t want to go out with the guy, but professional ethics prevented me from being a human being: offering him a cab ride, or a coffee so he could spill out his feelings about how he misses his ex and how she had quite visibly broken his heart. It may have done him good to talk to someone who wasn’t going to judge him.

These generic words somehow sanitised the guilt at hurting his feelings by saying ‘no’. They distanced the blame from myself. They purified and purged. They erased the element of choice from my conscience, so as far as he was concerned, I had not chosen to say ‘no’ and therefore not to maintain the presence of a vision of his ex in his life.

But I just thought it interesting how we sometimes impose a memory of someone else upon a new lover, then get all pissed and miserable when they don’t act the same way. And how the new lover cannot possibly live up to the memory of the ex, who has since gone through a process of apotheosis in the fantasies of broken-hearted denial?