I Know What I Saw

26 Monday

As I wait here in the growing darkness, panic begins to overtake me. Amit has just walked into the house of a murderer and I let him. I don’t even know what he’d planned to say to him. If he went over there and started talking about a dead woman or a missing woman, what was Ebadi likely to do?

I cannot sit here, hiding behind a car, and let him come to harm. Not this time around.

I get up from my position and march towards the house but an unformulated thought stops me. My brain begins to click and shift through the gears and once it has, I stop and turn back. I can’t break the door down. So, then I have to ring the bell. What if he refuses to open the door? What if he opens the door and refuses to let me past? Calls the police? What if, having heard the doorbell and seeing me, he panics and does something to Amit? I can hardly call the police. They wouldn’t come after all the fuss I have created and laid at his door. Or if they did they would arrest me. My heart begins to pump and suddenly I feel light-headed. I don’t feel in control of events and I know now why I have laboured so hard to avoid having to care for another person. My life on the streets doesn’t allow any room for that. I have tried so hard to stay alone and yet here I am.

The safest thing is to wait. He has no reason to kill a boy. An identifiable boy, with long hair, in a school uniform. A boy who would be missed, by hundreds of people. An image of Amit comes into my mind. In it he is being strangled. I shake my head to rattle the picture free. It disappears.

But there are others waiting to take its place. I try to think of something else. Someone else. Rory. Grace. Seb. I screw my eyes shut and see Amit in a box, being buried.

Rory. Grace. I will myself to think of anything but this, so that I can contain this panic of Amit being buried.

It was harder to bury Grace than to bury Rory. The physical interment was one thing. Rory went into the ground with all the rituals of goodbye. The rites signal that it’s time to move away, to move on. When that lid closes, when the box is lowered, when the earth is scattered and the words are said, when the belongings are tidied away, the message is inscribed: move away now. There is nothing left. These goodbyes have been extended too long already.

I breathe in deep draughts.

Grace was different. She didn’t stay in one place to be put under soil. She kept living in my head, in a hundred different incarnations. There were no rituals. One day we were there spinning in one another’s orbits, like twinned planets, the next she had moved out. Ma belle. Gone. And with her everything that she had accumulated, then later absorbed into our lives, was gone too. The debris she left was minimal: a hairclip in the bathroom, a forgotten mug with a work logo on one side, that pendant, some possessions of equivocal ownership like records and books. But there had been no rituals so she, though alive, was harder to mourn.

I’ve held on to the memory of the last time I saw her and how I looked up when I saw the shoes.

‘Xander,’ she said, and crouched down on to the pavement to speak to me as if I were a child. She was dressed for work, her hair like pale honey, shining in places. Newly cut. Newly bright. Her perfume was light, like breath on my face. The shell nestled in a dip in her chest.

The shame I felt when I saw her looking at my hands comes back now.

‘Come on,’ she said, and stood. ‘There’s a café over there. Let’s have some breakfast.’

Though I hesitated, the need to be with her was too strong.

‘Not that one,’ I said. ‘They won’t have me. There’s a place around the corner.’

I’d known the owner of the café before I took to the streets. He was Iraqi and had been a physicist before he had sought asylum in the UK. ‘Saddam’s bombs. I make them work not so well. So of course, he want to kill me now,’ he’d said. ‘And family.’

‘Mr Xander,’ he said as I walked in. ‘Same as usual for you?’ He stopped then and looked at Grace. Pristine.

‘Please,’ he said, taking a tea towel and wiping down a table in the window. ‘Please to sit.’

Grace smiled and we sat at a Formica table.

‘Very intelligent man. Very intelligent,’ he said pointedly to her about me before withdrawing.

Grace took a breath and then forced a smile. ‘Nina told me about, you know, this,’ she said, opening a hand in my direction. ‘I hadn’t realised it was this bad. Are you okay? I mean I know you’re not okay but—’

‘I am okay,’ I said.

‘You’re not,’ she said. ‘Nina and Seb have both said they’ll have you for as long as you need.’

‘As long as I need? For what?’

‘To get yourself together.’

‘I am together, Mabe. I am together.’

‘Then what’s all this about?’ She dropped her voice to a whisper as a pair of plastic menus were brought to us.

‘Thanks, Udhey,’ I said. He smiled sadly before shuffling away again.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well, what?’

‘You’re a highly qualified, intelligent man. You owe it to yourself to do more than this.’

‘I am doing something,’ I said, picking up the menu.

She forced it down with the palm of her hand and looked into my eyes.

‘I know that with Rory …’

I held up a hand to stop her.

‘Okay. I’m sorry, Xander. I know you’re mourning him still and I know it’s going to take time for you to find your way out. But this isn’t the way.’

I traced circles in the menu with my thumb before looking up. ‘But you know the way, I’m guessing.’

She sighed and straightened in her seat. ‘There are a thousand ways to the truth, Xander.’

‘Truth? You think his death had truth? Do you think it was just? That it had its own morality somewhere? Really?’

‘Well, whatever this is,’ she said, ‘it’s not moral.’

The words stung. They always stung when she said them.

‘What? What am I doing that’s immoral?’

‘This! The begging, Xander! You have everything going for you. Some people don’t. Some people are reduced to this because of circumstance. What’s your excuse?’

‘I don’t need an excuse, Grace. It’s called free will,’ I say. ‘You would have understood that a year ago. Before you changed.’

She humphed. The sound and smell of the cooking together squeezed my stomach a little.

‘You tell me what’s so good about your life. If you had twenty-four hours to live, would you spend ten of them working? No, you wouldn’t. You’d be here. You’d be out. Living.’

She sighed then and looked at me, resigned.

‘Let’s just order,’ she said.

When the bill came, I instinctively reached for my back pocket and then stopped in embarrassment. Grace pretended not to see and left a twenty-pound note, telling Udhey to keep the change.

‘You know there are still all those dollars,’ I said. ‘They’re at Seb’s so – just take them when you want.’

‘Yes, he told me. I still can’t believe you took it all out in cash!’

She got up to leave and then changed her mind and sat back down again and took the purse out again. I held my hand over it quickly.

‘No. I’m not taking your money.’

She looked at me in surprise. ‘I wasn’t going to give you money, Xander. Why are you in so much trouble? You’ve got a quarter of a million dollars. You don’t need my money. That is my whole point!’

‘Then what?’

She sighed. ‘I just wanted to tell you that we’re … I’m going away for a few weeks in December.’

I tried to master the muscles in my face as I took in the news. We.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ I said.

‘Just – here,’ she said, getting something out of her purse and sliding it across the table.

‘What’s that?’

‘The spare key. To my place. I just thought, if you needed somewhere, it’s going to be empty over Christmas and – well, you’d be doing me a favour, actually. Have someone watching the place.’

I slid the key back over to her. ‘I don’t need it. Thanks,’ I said, and stood up. She picked it up and moved it nearer to me.

‘Take it. If you don’t use it, don’t worry. You can post it back through the letter box when you get a chance. Just in case you’re – I don’t know. Desperate.’

Reluctantly I took the key and put it in my pocket. We stepped out into the street and stood not knowing what to say next. Eventually she just touched my arm and walked away.

That might have been the last time that I saw her.

A chill wind rips through my clothes and I am shaken back into the street. Amit is still in that house. It has been too long. I have to act soon, otherwise …

I look around on the street for something to hold. Something heavy like a brick is what I need. I can knock on the door and when he opens it, I can clump him with it. Force myself in. Or, better, smash an upstairs window with it and lure him outside to investigate, and maybe that will get him or Mrs Wilbert from the main house to call the police.

After a hurried search I quickly learn that there are no spare bricks in Mayfair. I begin to pace in small circles as desperation takes hold of me. I don’t have a mobile so I can’t make a call even if I wanted to. And the phone boxes, once on every street corner, have vanished over the years.

I take a breath and cross the street towards the house. There are no windows on the ground floor that I can look through. The windows at this level must look out on to the high-walled garden at the back. But there is a letter box.

Through the flap my vision is blocked by a fringe of bristles. I put my ear to it and listen. Nothing. Until I hear the noise of a door being unlatched and the faint drift of voices being chased by their makers. They are coming back. He’s safe. I drop the flap and run back to the car and crouch.

A minute later the door opens and to my relief there is Amit, framed in light. He is shaking the man’s hand. Ebadi. He waves as Amit turns to leave, and slowly the door shuts.

I breathe again.

On my feet I beckon to Amit, who is twisting his neck, looking for me. He catches sight of me at last and runs over. I scrutinise his face for signs of harm or alarm until, at last, he reaches me.

Smiling.

‘Amit. Are you okay?’ I say, staring into his expression.

‘What? I’m fine,’ he says, putting a hand through his hair.

‘What the hell happened? When you went inside I thought you might have been killed!’ I am losing control over my voice.

‘It’s fine, Xander,’ he says, laughing. I find myself relaxing a little but my throat is still tight.

‘So how did you get in?’

‘Oh. I told him I used to live here when I was a kid and if it was okay could I see my old room again,’ he says, straightening up.

‘You did what?’ I can’t quite believe how brazen he had been.

‘I found something out you’re definitely going to be interested in,’ he said and nodded at me to follow him down the road.