Standing Down

The jury took four hours and ten minutes, and Judge Rafferty used every one of them to avoid looking at the defence bench.

Ally Magill watched him do it. He had watched him do it for nine weeks, across the gap between the well of the court and the high bench, and in nineteen years of appearing before the man he had come to read those evasions the way a sailor reads a sky. Ally was forty-nine, and he had spent most of those years learning to stand very still while other people talked. He had never once been unaware of that high bench. When he looked at the clock he was thinking about his dinner. When he looked at the ceiling rose above the jury box, which he had been doing since lunch, he was thinking about something he could not decently think about on a Friday afternoon in Court 11 at Laganside, with the jury foreman about to stand.

“Not guilty,” said the foreman, on all eleven counts. Davy Gault, who had waited two years for the word, put both hands over his face and made a sound like a kettle.

Rafferty thanked the jury in his dry, measured Belfast voice, which carried to the back wall without being raised, and discharged them. He discharged Gault. Then he rose, and the court rose with him, and as he turned toward the door behind the bench he looked straight down at Ally for the first time in nine weeks. It lasted perhaps a second.

“Mr Magill,” he said. “A word in chambers, if you have a moment.”

“I’ve a moment, Your Honour.”

---

Judges’ chambers at Laganside had been designed in the nineties by somebody who disliked judges. The corridor was carpeted the colour of wet cement. Rafferty’s room was the one at the end, with a view of the river and a wall of law reports, and he stood at the window with his wig off and his gown half unbuttoned over a belly that the gown had hidden for nine weeks, his close-cut silver hair flattened where the wig had sat. Ally shut the door behind him and stayed with his back to it.

“Congratulations. It was a fine defence.”

“It was a fine jury. I only told them what was true.” Ally watched the back of that silver head. “Eamon, you’ve not asked me in here to discuss the closing speech.”

“No.” Rafferty did not turn around. “I have a short statement. I’d be grateful if you’d let me get through it, because I rehearsed it on the stairs and if you interrupt I’ll lose the thread.” He took a breath. “This morning, before the court sat, I wrote to the Presiding Judge. I have asked to be taken off any list on which your name appears as counsel. That’s all of them, as it happens. I gave as my reason a personal association, which is true and which is all I’m obliged to say. I’m standing myself down, Alastair. I thought you should hear it from me, and not from the clerk of lists on Monday.”

The room was quiet.

“A personal association,” Ally said.

“For nineteen years.” Rafferty turned, finally. His face was composed and his ears were scarlet. “Nineteen years I have said ‘Mr Magill’ to you from that bench and meant something else. I never touched you. I never would have, while you were in front of me. I’m a judge, not a fool. But I’ve sat there week after week listening to you take a witness apart in that voice, and I can’t sit on it any longer. So I’ve stood down. And as of ten minutes ago, I don’t have to wonder whether I’m allowed to ask you something.”

“Ask me.”

“Would you come to the house tonight.” It came out flat, like a statement, and his voice shook on the last word. “No case. No list. Nothing to do with anything, except that I want you there. And if you’d rather not, say so now, and I’ll finish this whiskey on my own and never mention it, and on Monday I’ll be as pleasant to you in the corridor as I have always been.”

Ally crossed the carpet. He did it slowly, because he wanted this man to see him coming, and he stopped close enough to smell the starch of the bands at his throat.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll come. I want to. I’ve wanted to for about eighteen years, and I’d a notion you didn’t know.”

“I did not.”

“You were the most careful man I ever met.”

“I was trying to be a good judge.” Rafferty almost smiled. “It turns out to be possible to do that and make a fool of yourself in private.”

“Catch yourself on, Eamon,” Ally said, quite gently. “Get your coat.”

---

It rained the whole way up the Malone Road, the kind of Belfast rain that hangs in the air and never quite lands, and the wipers dragged back and forth across the glass of Ally’s old Volvo while neither man spoke. Rafferty’s hand lay on the gearbox console. Ally put his own over it at the lights at Stranmillis, and the hand turned over, and they drove the last mile like that.

The house was a tall red-brick Victorian behind a laurel hedge, with a hall tiled in black and white and the smell of a place where one man had lived alone for twenty years and been neat about it. Rafferty led him through to a long study at the back, with a gas fire popping in the grate, a standing lamp lit in the corner, books on every wall and a decanter on a tray. By the fire stood a deep old leather armchair, cracked at the arms and darkened by decades of use.

“My father’s,” Rafferty said, following Ally’s eye. “He read the Irish News in it every night for forty years. I sit in it to read your skeleton arguments.”

Neither of them knew how to cross the rug, so Ally shrugged off his coat, let it fall on a chair, and began taking off his tie.

“What do you want, Eamon?” He kept his voice level. “Tell me plain. I’m not going to guess, and I don’t want you apologising for any of it.”

Rafferty swallowed. In the lamplight his face had lost twenty years of caution.

“I want to be told what to do,” he said. “I haven’t said that aloud to a living soul. I spend my working life telling people what to do, and I’m so tired of it I could scream. I’d like someone else in charge of the room for a while. I’d like that someone to be you.” He gripped the back of a chair. “I’d like to be on my knees. I’d like you to use me. I’d like to say stop if I need to, and have you stop, and I’d like to say ‘don’t’ and have you know I mean ‘don’t stop’.”

“You’ll say ‘enough’, if you need me to stop,” Ally said. “Plain word. Anything else I’ll take as the other thing.”

“Enough.”

“Good. Say it back to me.”

“Enough means stop.”

“That’s right.” Ally sat down in the leather armchair, the cracked old chair, and spread his knees, and looked up at a man who had sentenced murderers to life. “Then come here, Your Honour, and kneel down.”

Rafferty crossed the rug and went down onto his knees in front of him, slowly, because they were sixty-three-year-old knees, and put both hands on Ally’s thighs. Ally watched him go down and felt his own cock stiffen against the zip without being asked. A shudder ran through the whole big frame. He looked up.

“May I?”

“You may.”

He undid Ally’s belt with fingers that trembled and for a moment could not manage the zip. Ally said nothing and let him find his way. When Rafferty had his cock out, thick and already heavy and flushed with the blood of nine long weeks, he stared at it for a moment with his lips parted, as if reading a charge sheet. Then he took it in his mouth.

Ally’s groan echoed off the bookcases. Rafferty worked at him with the thoroughness he brought to everything, until Ally’s legs twitched. He took him deep, drew back, took him deeper, hollowed his cheeks, and stayed there until his throat clenched and then did it again.

“Christ, Eamon. That’s it. That’s the way.” Ally’s hand settled in the silver hair above the ear. “Nineteen years. Nineteen bloody years and you could’ve been doing this.”

Rafferty made a muffled sound around him that might have been an apology.

“Don’t be sorry. Just keep going. Take me down.” He pushed gently and felt the throat give. “Right to the back. That’s your whole mouth full of me, Your Honour. Eyes up.”

Rafferty looked up, flushed to the collar, mouth stretched, and went on with it. He had one hand on Ally’s thigh and the other down the front of his own trousers, and Ally saw it and said, “Not yet. That’s mine.”

The hand came out at once and lay flat on the rug, as if on a Bible. Ally had never seen a judge so obedient.

“Good,” he said. “Hands on my knees. Both of them. Hold on to me.” He rocked his hips up, slow, and felt the wet heat close around him. “You’ve the loveliest mouth in the Six Counties, Eamon. I’ve watched you talk for nineteen years and I never knew what it was for.”

A choked laugh went round his cock, and the vibration nearly finished him.

“Christ, Eamon. Take it. You’ve wanted this every day of that trial, haven’t you?”

Rafferty hummed yes around him, long and low, and Ally fucked up into that mouth in slow short thrusts and felt the heat of the throat flutter and close. “That’s it. Swallow around me. Good. God, you’re good at that.”

It went on for some while. By the end, spit gleamed on his chin and Ally’s thighs were shaking, and when he finally drew the old man off by the shoulders they were both breathing as if they’d run up the stairs.

“Bathroom,” Rafferty said, rough. “The cabinet over the sink. Water-based lubricant on the second shelf. And the rubbers beside it. I’ll wait.”

Ally went, found them, and came back to find him exactly where he’d left him, kneeling on the rug with his hands on his thighs, his jacket gone, his white shirt open on a broad chest thick with grey hair. Ally lingered in the doorway, simply taking him in.

“On your front,” Ally said. “Forearms on the seat of the chair.”

---

Ally got out of the armchair and out of his trousers. Rafferty rose, stiffly, and finished undressing by the fire, folding each piece onto the back of a chair because he could not help himself, until he stood naked and pale and heavy-bellied in the gas light. Ally kept his shirt on, open.

Rafferty turned. He lowered his chest across the seat cushion of his father’s armchair and folded his arms on the cracked leather, with his bare knees apart on the rug and his big pale backside raised in the lamplight, and he rested his forehead on his wrists. Ally knelt behind him and for a minute simply looked.

“Is that right? Is this how you want it? You know the word.”

“Enough. I know it. This is how I want it.”

“Say yes.”

“Yes, Alastair. For God’s sake.”

He kissed the base of the judge’s spine, and the dimples above it, and bit the soft flesh of one cheek until it showed, and Rafferty yelped and pushed back for more. “You like that.”

“I like everything you do.”

“We’ll see about everything.” Ally squeezed the lube onto his palm and warmed it. “Hold still now.”

He slid one thick finger into him. Rafferty drew a long shuddering breath. The second finger went in easily. The third made him cry out, a hoarse strangled sound, and rock back onto it. “Full of my fingers and still asking for more, Eamon.” Ally’s thumb pressed the soft place behind his balls and the old man’s thighs began to shake. He muttered something into the leather that Ally didn’t quite catch.

“What was that?”

“I said, don’t stop.”

“That’s not ‘enough’.” Ally leaned over his back, his belly warm against the broad spine, and spoke into his ear. “Is it?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t.”

He worked the three fingers deep, spreading them, curling, until Rafferty was shaking from his shoulders to his heels and the muscle around Ally’s hand was trembling too. He rolled the rubber on. He stroked himself with the water-based lube, a long wet drag, and pressed the head against that clenching heat.

“Push back on me. Slowly.”

“I am.”

“Good man. Slower.”

He pushed in. The head was tight at first, and then the rest of it opened and took him, and Rafferty’s head came up off his wrists and he gasped at the ceiling. “Oh, Jesus wept.”

“Not quite,” Ally said, and went all the way in, and stayed there, still. “That’s the lot of me. How’s that?”

“Wile big.”

Ally laughed, helplessly, and the laugh moved through them both and made Rafferty groan. “Catch yourself on.”

“I’m perfectly serious.” The voice was muffled and shaking. “I can feel you right up in my…” He broke off, and Ally drew back and pushed forward, and the sentence went out of him in a long moan. “Oh, sweet God, do that again.”

“Like that?”

“Like that. More. I’ll not break.”

“Say what you want, Eamon. Out loud, in this room.”

“Your cock, Alastair. All of it, in me, until I can’t sit straight in my own court on Monday.”

The rhythm built. Ally kept one hand on the swell of the judge’s hip and fucked him in long smooth strokes that rattled the armchair on its castors and made the decanter ring on its tray. Rafferty took all of it, grunting, swearing in a voice nobody in Court 11 had ever heard from him, his forearms white against the leather and his silver head swinging between them.

“Fuck me,” he was saying, “fuck me, fuck me. You’ve no idea what I’ve wanted. I’ve sat up there and watched you walk down that room, those big shoulders, that damned beard, and I wanted to be bent over the bench in front of the whole court. God forgive me.”

“The whole court?”

“Don’t laugh, Alastair. Keep going.”

“Slower,” Ally said, and slowed, long and deep, so that every stroke dragged. Rafferty whimpered into the leather. “Now. In the voice you use for sentencing. Tell me what the court wants done.”

A pause. Then, in the cold, level, courtroom diction that had sent a hundred men down, muffled against the cracked seat and shaking at the edges: “The court directs that Mr Magill continue as he is. The court observes that counsel has been a very long time about it. The court would like it a great deal more firmly, and would like to hear him grunt.”

Ally nearly lost it. He bit down on a laugh and on the swell of the judge’s shoulder, and drove in, and grunted, as directed, loudly.

“Better,” Rafferty gasped. “That’s… that’s a good sound. Louder. Nobody’s coming.”

“Then you’ll be louder as well, Your Honour.” Ally grunted again, deeper, on purpose.

“That’s it. Do it again. Fuck me properly, Alastair.”

“I’m keeping going.” Ally leaned down and took the back of that scarlet ear between his teeth. “Is it a ruling, Your Honour?”

“It’s a direction.” Rafferty gasped a laugh, and his hips jerked back to meet him. “I direct you to fuck me until the court rises. Do it. Now.”

Ally did it. He braced both hands on the chair, dug his knees into the rug, and pounded into him with everything in his big body, the slap of flesh loud in the quiet room, the old chair walking across the floorboards with every stroke. The sound Rafferty made climbed and cracked. The rain on the window was nothing against it.

“I can feel you,” Rafferty gasped. “Right there. Right there. I’m going to…”

“Go on.”

“I haven’t touched myself. I’ll make a mess of…”

“Make it.” Ally reached around and laid his palm flat and still on the judge’s belly, not on his cock, and held him against his chest. “It’s your father’s chair. He’d have enjoyed it. Go on, Eamon. Now.”

Rafferty came hard, his whole back arching, the big frame locked solid, and he spilled over the cracked leather in long shuddering pulses without a hand on him, groaning what could have been a name. The grip around Ally’s cock closed on him, and he followed with a roar he’d never used in court, driving deep and pouring into the rubber while Rafferty’s body wrung out every pulse.

For a long moment neither man moved.

“Oh, Christ,” Rafferty said eventually, from somewhere in the leather.

“Are you all right?”

“I’ve defiled my father’s chair.”

Ally put his forehead against the sweating back and laughed until his shoulders hurt.

---

They ate cheese on toast at one in the morning at the kitchen table, Rafferty in a plum-coloured dressing gown, Ally in his shirt alone, and drank the whiskey after all. Ally learned that the judge had never once, in thirty years on the bar and the bench, told a single soul, and that he had a sister in Armagh who had always known and never said. He learned that the judge’s father had been a postman who read Yeats in the chair, and that he kept six hives at a cousin’s farm in Ballynahinch and had never told a colleague, because the bench would never have let him hear the end of it.

“Bees,” said Ally.

“They’re very orderly,” said Rafferty. “They have a hierarchy and nobody argues with the queen.”

He slept in the judge’s bed. In the morning he woke to rain and the smell of toast, and a note on the pillow in a small upright hand: Gone for the paper. Do not leave. This is a direction.

---

On Monday morning Ally was on his feet in Court 6 before His Honour Judge Lavery, arguing bail for a man who had stolen forty tonnes of copper cable from the Harbour Estate, when his phone buzzed twice in his breast pocket against the front of his gown.

He didn’t look at it. He finished his submission, and Lavery, who disliked him, refused bail on an argument that Ally thought was feeble and a great pity. He bowed. He took his seat. Only then did he draw out the phone beneath the bench and turn the screen toward his chest.

The Gault costs application has been reassigned to Lavery, it read. I have never been so bored by something I am not permitted to read. I understand that chips are a matter of public interest. One o’clock, the Lisburn Road, my shout. You will let me pay, counsel, or I’ll hold you in contempt.

A second text had come in under it.

I am aware that I have no power to do so. I am hoping you’ll humour me.

Ally read it twice behind his hand. In front of him Lavery was calling the next case. He thumbed a reply and sent it, and sat back, aware that he was smiling like someone who had won something and that the clerk of the court, a woman called Hazel who missed nothing, was watching him over her glasses with a face of frank interest.

Contempt is a matter for the bench. You’ve recused yourself. You’ll have to ask nicely.

The answer came before Lavery had finished his sentence.

I have never asked nicely for anything. One o’clock. Bring your appetite, Alastair. I’m told it’s the only thing you’ve got that’s bigger than your closing speeches.