I Know What I Saw

24 Monday

Morning comes and I crawl from my cardboard sleeve and pat myself clean of loose debris. At the mouth of the alleyway, in the bins, I find some packaged sliced ham and peel back the film. My thoughts in the cold of the morning feel crusted in ice. I crouch and unwrap the foil strips that I had tied around my wrists and ankles. The flesh underneath is warm and I close my eyes at the comfort. Once I found sheets of foil down the alleyway of a group of buildings in Soho. They’d been perfect large squares – something related to photography or art I decided – and I’d covered my waist and the full length of both arms with the foil. Parts of them had lasted months until, like everything, they finally withered away.

I have to move now that I am breakfasted. I head to Paddington Green Station at a march. Twenty or thirty minutes later I am there and go straight to the bored desk sergeant.

‘I have information to give about a crime,’ I say.

He looks up as if he is surprised. Then he is appraising me, almost dismissing me. It is only my voice, the undisguisable education feathering each word that keeps him from pushing me out of the door or into a cell. Seb’s clothes are losing their power with dirt and usage.

‘Is Conway here? Or Rachel Blake?’ I say.

He turns to a phone and dials it before mumbling into the mouthpiece. ‘DI Blake’ – he emphasises the name – ‘is on her way. You can wait there.’ He nods to some painted blue metal seats behind me.

A second later Blake appears in a polka-dotted dress. She looks different. It’s not the dark hair tied into a ponytail or the dress which tries to recast her from severe to softened. It’s her face. She has a look that I have seen before: of a person who has walked into the night and kept on walking. She opens the low gate and beckons me through without a word or even a glance. I follow her as she tries one of the rooms we have been in before but it’s locked. She keeps pulling door handles until finally one gives way. It looks the same as the other rooms I have been in, featureless and bland.

‘I have some information,’ I say. ‘About number 42B.’

She rubs her face vigorously for a second and when her hands leave, her face looks raw.

‘I haven’t got time for this, Xander. There’s no murder. You’re already under charge for perverting, don’t make it worse for yourself.’

I nod impatiently, waiting for her to finish.

‘I know all that, but I’ve been back there. There’s a new alarm.’

She stands up and makes for the door but then pauses to face me.

‘You went back? To 42B? If Simon Conway was here, you’d have had your bail revoked and you’d be lying in one of those cells,’ she says, pointing along the corridor. She sits down again and looks at me.

‘Look. I don’t know how you ended up like this. But you seem to be getting yourself together now,’ she says, waving a hand at Seb’s clothes. ‘Don’t ruin it.’

‘Me, don’t ruin it? There’s a whole new alarm system in the house. Don’t you find that at all suspicious?’ I say.

‘No, Xander, it’s not. I think it would be more surprising if he hadn’t had a new alarm put in after the police turned up at his door, asking about a murder. And so what if he’s got an alarm? Why is it suspicious?’

I look at her in exasperation until her face gives way.

‘Look, I don’t know what you think you saw. I mean, I believe that you think you saw something. And maybe you did. Who knows? But you didn’t see it there, if you did. You’re mistaken.’

My heart starts racing and I can’t tell why. My throat begins to tighten.

‘I am not mistaken. It was there. I saw it happen there. A woman has been murdered and you aren’t doing anything about it!’ I am shouting now. ‘But if you won’t I will.’ I look down and see that I am standing up.

‘No, you won’t. You’re going to go home. And so am I. We’re both going to get some sleep, and I’m going to forget you came here. And then next week you’re going to answer your bail for a further interview in relation to the assault on Mr Squire. For most people that would be plenty to be getting on with. So please, let’s go now.’

I walk out of the room and don’t turn back until I am out of the station. Anger pushes blood through my veins at pressure. I don’t know what I can do to make them hear me. A woman died, horribly. I watched it happen. I worry about her decomposing somewhere cold. I worry for her family.

The light is brighter outside than it feels it ought to be. I shut my eyes against it as I walk and as I do, an image of that room slams into my head. The scent of woodsmoke from somewhere fills my nose and that forces the room in my head to drop into sharper focus. A fire burning in a grate, the crackle and hiss of the logs. And then that song.

I have stopped walking and I know that to look at me now, motionless in the middle of the street, I’m one of those people you see shaking their fists at the world. Grizzled, angry, strange. But the memory is coming and I need it to crystallise. I have to keep hold of it, no matter what. So I sit where I am on the street without opening my eyes because I know if I open them, the pull of this memory will go. If there are people walking by, staring at me, I don’t care.

The ground is cold and hard. I try desperately to land the memory but it feels wispy and insubstantial. I lean hard against the low wall behind me to feel something solid. There’s something my mind has stored and now with synapses firing, it has found some significance to it. What is it?

But the image dissolves, and in its place is Ebadi’s home as it was on the police video. I scream for the memory devoured now, roughly, rudely, by the vulgar new one. The footage is eating my memory, contaminating it and invading the peace of my mind like an earworm.

I have to think of something else to destroy the memory worm: Seb, the house, the dollars, Grace, Rory. I slide one image after another into my head to shake my head back into order, but it’s no good. I can feel the invasive thoughts knocking. The resilience of them.

And now that word, resilience is setting its own hares racing. I wasn’t resilient enough. That was the problem. That’s what she thought. Grace.

When I saw her in her new flat, surrounded by boxes, she said she’d wanted me to do something nice for her. I chose dinner at a Café Rouge. It had been a student hang-out and now that we were fully grown, being there was dizzying, as if I was looking down at us from a height.

We ate solemnly. The meal had a biblical quality to it and by the end of it, I was more certain than ever that it was over. Finally, to break the gloom I reached into my pocket and presented her with the small box that was waiting there.

‘It’s your conch,’ I said as she took in the tiny gold pendant. ‘I found it in a drawer.’

She peered into the box and smiled sadly before taking it and closing the lid. We ate the rest of our meal in silence.

‘I think it’s time for me to go,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I’ll run you home.’

Grace pulled up outside what had been our house. I looked at her face and was shocked by how unfamiliar she had become, and how quickly.

‘I can come in for a coffee,’ she said, looking at her watch, ‘but only for fifteen minutes or so.’

‘No need,’ I said and got out of the car. I walked up to the front door and put a key into the lock. I looked round to watch her leave but then stopped. She’d switched off the ignition and was now climbing out of the car.

‘I can stay for longer,’ she said evenly, walking towards me.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘There’s no need.’ I removed the key from the lock and waited for her to leave.

‘Well, I’m coming in anyway,’ she said. ‘Just for a minute.’

I sighed then and put the keys away into my pocket. ‘You can’t come in. I can’t even go in. I’ve given the place up.’

Her mouth dropped into a small O. ‘Why didn’t you say?’

I shrugged.

‘Well, get back in then,’ she said, indicating the car. ‘I’ll take you to your new place.’ She was halfway to the car before she realised I wasn’t following.

‘There is no new place,’ I said.

‘What then? Where are you staying?’

‘Seb and Nina’s,’ I said, lying.

Grace took a step towards me, hooking a stray golden curl over her ear. ‘Nina never said.’

I shrugged again. ‘Maybe she doesn’t know yet.’

‘You mean you haven’t moved in yet? Where have you been staying?’

I walked towards the car and opened the driver’s door for her to get in. ‘Here and there. Don’t worry. I’m not as fragile as you think,’ I said, and shut her in with a soft thud. She looked dolefully at me through the glass and then wound down the window.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s me. I’m too fragile, I think. To help.’

‘But if you knew that just seeing you, what it does for me,’ I said before stopping myself. ‘Forget I said that.’

She shivered in the damp air and then fussed around her collar for a minute. I saw the shell there glinting under her chin.

The window rose smoothly up and then, with a small smile, she drove away.

That was almost the last time I saw her, I think. We met in the street once. And then, that was it.

I have to walk. I have to walk my thoughts into the pavement. Grind them into the concrete and stub them out. When I focus my eyes again, I see that I am at the library. I look up at the building. It is a cathedral. I begin to walk around it. Each step I take feeds a stream of invasive thoughts into the ground. I can feel myself shedding them as I circumambulate the building, until dozens or more circuits later, I am nothing but a pilgrim.

Me on one side and the universe once again on the other. In perfect balance.