I was helping a poor Algerian in a compensation claim for wrongful detention. These cases are heard in civil courts, with lawyers arguing about the damages the State should pay an innocent person for having ruined his life. On this particular day, the parade of legal errors was being played out before an especially loathsome magistrate who eyed each claimant with a mocking sneer, as if to say You, innocent? What else am I supposed to believe?

The Arab in question, a labourer who had been cleaning the façade of a building where some crazy woman was living, had done two and a half years of a custodial sentence for a rape he hadn’t committed, before being acquitted by the Assize Court when the lunatic retracted her accusation.

He bent my ear for a whole hour before the hearing, trying to explain how much the occasion meant to him, thinking that here, at last, was a chance to pour out everything he had held pent up inside: the promiscuity rife in the prison, the treatment reserved for sex offenders like him by his fellow inmates, the two showers a week, his wife who had returned home with his children to the bled, the village in Algeria, his family who didn’t speak to him anymore, the flat he’d lost . . . He had so much to say. The court could have taken five minutes to listen to him, if only by way of apologizing for the fact that some investigating magistrate had totally fucked up his life by remanding him in custody for thirty months without any evidence. But no, the Chief Justice cut him off contemptuously: “Monsieur, at the time you were working without any papers. You have no grounds upon which to make any claim whatsoever. As far as we are concerned, you don’t even exist!”

I was so utterly ashamed I could no longer find the words in Arabic. I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I started babbling something and then it just came out, all on its own: “Your Honour, I, too, am working without any documentation, and for the Department of Justice no less. So, since I don’t exist, see how you manage without me!” And I walked out, leaving them all to it.

Despite my disillusion, I made dazzling progress on the career front. My colleagues will say I must have slept with a lot of people. Or in the cruder version that made it back to me: There must have been kilometres of cops’ dicks involved, etc., etc.