I Know What I Saw

19 Sunday

It is late and the house shrouded in darkness should be enough to help me drift off, but it isn’t. There is wine in my veins but not enough to bring on sleep so I go downstairs. In the living room I see that Seb has left the turntable spinning. Then in the back of my head I remember that as a student he’d leave his record player spinning empty – something to do with the mechanics suffering more wear by being switched on and off. The smoothness of the motion throws me back and the memories come. All at once. Sheets of them.

It was after the fight with Grace. We sat on our bench at the Horniman and started again. Something had shifted in our relationship and we began to like each other again. At first we went for walks again in the Horniman grounds. Then later we explored more and more of London. We shopped in markets on cobbles behind Borough. We hung around Soho cafés and Whitechapel bagel shops and on hot summer nights we’d chew through hot salt-beef and rye. We went like tourists to Greenwich to see where Mean Time started. Every weekend gave us another chance to both escape and dive into the world. When I remember it now, I remember it imperfectly, memory filtering out the flies and grit of ordinary happy life. When I remember how we attacked our new lives, I see only the stylised memory. Diving into the waves and always coming up glistening. Camden Market, Portobello Road, St Paul’s Cathedral.

It wasn’t long before we began to look for a real home. Not the rented extravagance that we’d been living in near work, but something we could bed our roots into. Something that was capable of anchoring us, harbouring us, together.

Money was no object, or no obstacle at least. Work was so good at that time that it’s hard to explain to people who weren’t there to see it, just how idiotic it was. We had so much spare cash that it was unthinkable that we wouldn’t just buy something outright. So, we began to save. At first just a slice of extra cash diverted into a savings account. But then, after the first few thousand pounds, the lunacy of it hit us.

‘Well, what else shall we do with it? I’m not sticking it into one of your funds,’ Grace said, over takeaway Chinese food one evening. She was sitting cross-legged on the carpet. Ra-ra skirt. Black tights. Her hair shining a clover-honey blonde in the low light. She touched her shell pendant absently.

‘Not the stock market. I’m not saying that, but the market’s about to become quite volatile. That’s what the modelling is telling us at any rate.’

‘What, then?’ she said, rubbing her chopsticks against each other to remove the splinters.

‘Maybe vary the portfolio a bit?’ I said. ‘We could take a selection of low-risk bonds maybe and you know, let the money work.’

‘No way. Inflation risk too high,’ she said through a mouthful of rice. ‘Not to mention the currency risk. And we’d be tying it up to the maturity date however long in the future.’

Currency was really Grace’s thing and I trusted her instincts.

‘But we’d get gilts, obviously, so there’d be no currency risk. It’s all sterling,’ I said.

She nodded and put her sticks down. ‘There’s still inflation and the lock-in. It’s not looking good out there, inflation-wise. We’re much better off getting, what, six per cent in our special interest account?’

I nodded. I hadn’t expected anything, I was just having the conversation. One of those conversations without any pressure or urgency. We could do it or not, it didn’t matter that much – it made a difference of just a point or two. But we were mathematicians still. At heart, we wanted the maths to make sense. It wasn’t really about having more money; it was just getting the numbers to chime in a way that felt rhythmic to us.

‘Though,’ she said finally, ‘we could just buy dollars. That’s going only one way at the moment.’

It was all just money. If we lost anything or made anything, it wouldn’t be life-changing. Solid international currencies were pretty safe.

I skewered some chicken and black bean sauce with a chopstick.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said.

After Grace. After the whole thing. After she left, that final time, I emptied out the account and took it home in hundred-dollar bills. Hard cash. It sat there in the living room – the same room we’d spent so many nights in, curled on the sofa, watching TV into the vanishing night – a quarter of a million dollars. In cash.

Except by then there was no TV and no Grace. Just me and a block of money where the TV used to be and odd scraps she’d left behind in drawers and cupboards.

When we gave notice on the flat, I needed somewhere to put it all. It had been so frustrating getting the money out of the bank that the idea of taking it back there was just too much. The telephone conversation I had with the bank clerk the week before I withdrew it all comes back to me.

‘We can’t close the account unless we have both signatures. It’s a joint account, sir. We’d need Ms Mackintosh to sign her consent.’

‘But I added her name. I’m the one operating the account,’ I explained.

‘Yes, sir. But when you added her name, you agreed that the account could not be closed without both signatures.’

I looked at the phone, wishing that it would become sentient just to witness my frustration.

‘But that is stupid.’ I thought for a moment, frustrated by everything. ‘Can I withdraw as much as I want in cash, at least?’

‘Yes, sir, there are no restrictions on withdrawing cash. Except for dollar amounts above ten thousand dollars, you would need to order the cash a week in advance.’

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I’ll have the lot. I’ll be round in a week to collect it. I’ll bring my own bag.’ She stuttered immediately, trying to say something, but I holstered the phone.

I try to sleep again but the bedroom is too warm for me so I come back downstairs, to the kitchen where it is cooler. At the sink I quietly pick up dishes and begin to wash. The window on to the garden reflects the darkness so well that it becomes a mirror. I study my face briefly. There are deep lines there that I don’t see when I picture myself. The hair has grey strands that aren’t there in my mind either. But the eyes. The eyes seem younger than I feel. When I look into them I’m staring into a memory of a younger person. I catch flashes of myself as a child. There’s either innocence still buried in the layers of life or something else. Vulnerability perhaps. I see that boy and I want to hold him.

I need to sleep. The dishes are done and draining on the rack but still I stare at the window. No longer looking at my face but through it into the garden. My hands are pink from soap and hot water but it disappoints me that the dirt has gone. It’s as if I have turned my back on myself.

I need to sleep. The peace I felt from the evening with Seb has burned away like morning mist in the sun. The woman is in my head, clamouring, and I desperately need to get away.

From the window I see that the early morning light is still an hour or so away. The dark sky has that tender, wintry quality, so that the approaching light, when it comes, will seem fractured. I get Seb’s coat and wrap it round my body and slip into the garden.

Some of the chill of the February weather has gone but it is still cold enough to draw fog from my lungs. I crouch at the edge of the lawn, in the shrubbery to touch the earth. It feels cool and comforting. If I don’t sleep I won’t be able to think. I feel my way in through the veil of slowly descending light and pat at the bushes. They are thick here. I crouch down and shuffle my way in, cracking joints as I do. Years of cold have damaged me.

As soon as my head touches the soil and the night settles on my skin, I begin to feel free. Seb, Ebadi, the neighbour, the woman, her face suspended in agony – all of it is far away. Unreal. But I am a person trapped with hands and feet in each of those lives. Blake and Conway both drift away, unenclosed by bricks and walls. Rory, he clings for a moment with Grace and the dollars.

I think of that day decades ago, watching Seb staring into bin-liners of dollar bills. I’d needed somewhere to put it all now that the flat was vacant.

Seb was shocked and at first I didn’t understand why. I walked over to the bags and tried to inhabit his shock – seeing it for the first time, a quarter of a million, in cash.

‘Dollars are a better bet than sterling right now,’ I said, to help rationalise it.

‘Xander?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘It’s not normal,’ he said. ‘People don’t have this much cash in a bin-bag.’ His palms out in exasperation.

‘I just … I just need to simplify my whole life at this point,’ I said and tied away the paper faces staring up at me.

I remember that Nina wasn’t there. But I have the sense now looking back that she was about to walk in on the scene. And that we – Seb – were desperate for her not to see this.

‘And what do you propose to do with it all? You can’t keep it here,’ he said, looking around the kitchen as if I was asking him to put it in a cupboard.

‘Well, where else do you expect me to put it? I don’t have a place yet,’ I said.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Xander. Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t face it yet. And maybe. I don’t know. I’m still hoping that we can use it. To buy the house – Grace and I.’

He stopped and considered me for a minute before walking around the box to put an arm on my shoulder.

‘Oh, mate. Don’t do that to yourself. It’s over.’

‘It was over before but that didn’t mean we couldn’t get back—’

‘Not over like this,’ he said, letting go of me.

‘What? How can you know that?’

In the gulf between question and answer, I thought he’d begun to understand but I was wrong.

‘Nina told me. It’s finished, Xander. It’s time to move on,’ he said, smiling sadly at me.

And then the memory fades away once again. That life is a dream away, a whole dimension away. I shut my eyes and curl into the thick roots of the shrub. The scent of mulch and wood fill my nose. As I breathe I feel embraced back into the Earth.

I am in the Green Zone. Mayfair. 42B is pulling me into its field again. I feel rested, better. I am ready for this. Only an hour ago my eyes had opened to a sense of morning in the soil, a beautiful dampness rising from dirt that only dawn brings. That smell. Light was shifting and I rolled from under Seb’s shrub and stretched my limbs, the embers of a dream bumping in my head. All I remembered about it was my hands plunged deep into mud, searching for something. Uncovering something. An unburial. I stopped the thought, reminding myself I had to focus. Ebadi. The name repeated in my head until I knew I had to come back here.

I walk past the house, scanning it for signs of life. There’s nothing. The house is cloaked in silence, curtains drawn. I sit on the steps a few houses away on the opposite side of the road and stare. There’s no sign of building work. But even as I think it, I have an idea, the truth of which rings through me. If I get closer there will be something. There will be dust on the pavement. Drops of hardened tile cement on the step. A rogue blister of grout crusted to a gate post. A splash of wet plaster. Somewhere there will be a spot missed.

I cross the road and my heart begins to drum, the closer I get. I am on the cusp of understanding. There’s bound to be something if I look closely enough. Then I am there at the door itself. I study it for traces of work but the door remains resolutely polished clean. The threshold step is smooth. I run a hand along its surface but there is nothing to give it away. Backing slowly up the path, sweeping every inch, I stoop from time to time and fan my fingers across the surface. But there is nothing here, not a single streak of white or bright.

What has happened? None of it makes sense.

Withdrawing to my step across the road, I turn it around and come to another resolution. Each of these subsequent conclusions is the retreating end of a wedge, each thinner and more fragile than the last.

Ebadi can’t alter the chemical properties of the admixtures used in the cement. The rate of cement hydration would remain at a fair constant. That’s simply chemistry. If the mixture went down on Wednesday, it would have crystallised to some extent by now, but that process would still be ongoing. In other words, the grout lines and the adhesive would still be hardening. It is still only Sunday. The mix in this relatively cold weather would still be hydrating the cement. I still had some time left, if I could get to the tiles and lay my fingers across them, I could prove that it was recently laid. The grout would come away under my nail. The tiles could be moved without cracking them.

Somehow, I have to get inside.