14 December 2021
‘Life can be devastating and devastated at any point, but this is exactly why it can be beautiful.’
In the Seeing Hands of Others by Nat Ogle is a ground-breaking debut novel telling the story of a contentious trial, pieced together in documents from the accused and accuser.
Follow the blog of a nurse on a dialysis ward attempting to live in the aftermath of bringing a rape trial to court in which the defendant was exonerated. Read the transcripts of the police interviews with her, and the accused, the emails and texts between them submitted for trial; his journal, his conversations on 4chan, his drama scripts, him, him, him. How will the nurse, Corina, ever get him out of her head?
In the Seeing Hands of Others is a highly original debut novel. Provocative, blackly funny and moving, it announces a new voice unlike any other.
Publishing 13th January. Find out more here.
Read an extract below:
COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S
BLOG, ‘WITNESS’
SEPTEMBER 2016 (2)
On Borough High Street, buses push bright, cold wind. The sun is hot, just far away. A rough sleeper holds himself in a ski jacket and sleeping bag by the cash machine outside the Sainsbury’s. I want a Dairy Milk, 20 Superkings. It’s so far from here to my bed. I want someone kind, quiet there waiting for me. A female Michael Palin. Clare Balding?
‘I don’t have any change on me,’ I say.
I don’t expect him to believe me. He nods. I think to ask him if he wants me to buy him something to eat, but nearly bump into a man in a suit in the doorway.
‘Oops. Sorry, petal,’ says the man.
And I find that I can’t move. I feel the sun inside my clothes. The world around me deflates, flattens. Traffic. Gliding past. Everything gliding past on stretchers. Someone is stealing my breath, chasing my pulse. The buildings are toppling over like playing cards. Onto me. The roads are falling into the earth. I’m about to die. I’m about to puke. I’m about to shit myself. Black stars eat into everything. I count my breaths. That’s too many breaths. Speeding up? Don’t know what I can do. There’s nothing I can do. Automatic doors keep trying to close. They slide a little way together, detect me stood there, eyes closed, sticky with sweat, then, embarrassed, they open again. There’s nothing that I can do.
—
There was no turning back when my birthday drinks collided with your mate’s stag do in Soho.
‘Weird thing is that I kept thinking how great it would be to bump into you this weekend,’ you said, ‘and in spite of how unlikely, I did sort of expect it was inevitable.’ I said I felt the same, though I’m not sure that I did.
You bought us a round. ‘Where is he, then?’ you said.
‘He couldn’t make it,’ I said. ‘Rehearsals, then after-rehearsal drinks.’
‘Sounds about right. Well, let’s forget about him.’
I was glad for the encouragement, and I don’t think that I did think about him. Not when you were making us laugh with tales of kitchen mishaps. Not when we were dancing together. Not when we all ended up at your hotel bar. Not when you waited with me for my Uber. Not when you said, ‘It’s weird, but I feel sort of safe from the world when I’m around you.’ Not even when I kissed you. Only after that, when we were on our way up to your room, but not caring.
In the morning, when you woke up, you made a sound like you were disappointed in something, which scared me, but I quickly learnt it’s just a sound you made to displace silence, which you found uncomfortable. I remember lying next to you, holding your hands to my face. Your thumbs, thin at the knuckle, wide around the nail, like a spade, always tucked in behind your fingers. I would pull them out, fan your hands, slip my fingers between yours, my thumbs around yours.