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Radical Middle | 203<br />
He said “I don’t use jailbirds”, and hung up.<br />
I well recall the sense of shock. You stare in offence at the<br />
innocent dead phone in your hand even while your rational<br />
lobe wonders what is the point of staring at the phone.<br />
You might not want Johnson at your breakfast table but you<br />
had to grant that he was a doer. While I was cross-examined in<br />
pernickety line-by-line legalism on his Height Street Diary, he sat<br />
wincing, and what I was seeing was not a rude ruffian but a sad<br />
old man. I was keen to give him credit for what he got right, but<br />
the Diary was where he went “wacky”, and his lawsuit had made<br />
his wackiness crucial, and the more we on with the Diary the<br />
more imperilled was Mostert’s blood pressure, and finally mine<br />
too, and my moment to respect the non-wacky never happened.<br />
When I got off the stand, Goldblatt produced my two letters,<br />
as nursed by rachel and andy unbeknown to me.<br />
My jaw hung open. Johnson shrunk into himself like a paper<br />
bag crumpling. Had Mostert’s cardiologist been there he’d be<br />
yelling for an ambulance, and the judge was livid.<br />
The judge was livid at Johnson’s side for rushing to war in<br />
disdain of a peace offering, and at my side for coming up with<br />
this now. I saw his point: seventeen potentially productive<br />
adult persons had spent three days trapped in farce.<br />
To me, this was a dramatic moment. I knew now that we<br />
would win. Second, I had a flood of gratitude for rachel, who<br />
would never invade a real privacy but had the nous to invade<br />
a nominal one when invasion was right. Third, the judge’s<br />
dumping on Johnson sounded like a verdict, and a right one,<br />
saying you can’t come to court if you won’t open your ears.<br />
But no, it wasn’t the verdict. Odd enough, it wasn’t even<br />
recorded. The entire long argument that was called “evidence”<br />
was part of the record, but this bit now was “argument”; the<br />
stenographer can snooze.<br />
When the official argument ended, though, we got judgment<br />
on the spot. The judge went 105% with our view. “a glance at<br />
the contents of the Height Street Diary shows what the writer<br />
of the article intended to convey by the word ‘depraved’ … I
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