I Know What I Saw

32 Tuesday

Can Grace be dead? How could I have seen it and not remembered – not remembered that it was her? My Grace. Who I loved. Love.

I know that people do repress painful and traumatic memories. But this doesn’t feel like a repression. For instance, I know that I have suppressed what happened with Dad. I have buried it deep into the folds of my past. It is there, still. I sense it all the time, as a kind of grotesque in a room that I walk around every morning and evening. It’s always there, but there are days when it’s so well camouflaged that I can pretend it doesn’t exist. I know that it does and I know that if I could steel myself I could face it down if I had to.

But this isn’t like that. I haven’t buried Grace. I haven’t erased the memory or airbrushed it out of existence. I have a memory of that night – a clear one.

It’s her with me in that Polaroid. It is. I remember her as she was. But the dead woman, when I see her, is older, and less vibrant. The side of her face was flatter – it didn’t reflect the light like Grace’s did. And the hair was a different colour. But when I saw the picture of her in the interview, I was less sure. In that police picture, with her face captured from the side, as if in sleep, it could be her. I can’t be sure that it’s not.

I am back at Seb’s house. The sight of the old house gives me a warm feeling. It takes me to a time that was more – binary. I need to speak to him and tell him everything. I also need the money, it seems. Murder in jealousy or murder for money: the oldest and most hackneyed of motives. I’m sure Seb will have it still. Or maybe he banked it, or I don’t know what. I can’t know exactly but there will be a trail, at least, that he can verify. I bring to mind the look on his face when I turned up with the money and how we had packed it into a trunk in his loft with other things that I couldn’t bear to throw out – letters, photographs, trinkets.

I knock on the door, bathed in street-light. I hadn’t realised how long I had been in the police station. They keep you there, deprived of light and any sense of the day. They strip out all the day’s signposts so that when you are released you have the sensation of being in a time-slip.

Seb opens the door with a look that I haven’t seen before. Is he worried or annoyed? He is in pyjamas but he hasn’t been to sleep – his hair’s still in place. I walk through to the kitchen. Every drawer has been taken out and laid either on the floor or some other surface.

‘What’s going on?’ I say uncertainly.

He looks at me briefly before turning away again.

‘What is it, Seb?’

He remains with his back to me for a minute before simply throwing his hands up. ‘Police, Xander. After they took you, some more turned up with a warrant for a search.’

‘To do with me?’ I say, puzzled.

‘Yes, to do with you.’

I walk up to him and touch him lightly on the arm.

‘But, I mean – you told them I don’t live here?’

He faces me and I can see the effort he is making to control his emotions.

‘I managed to send them away eventually, when I pointed out that the warrant was to do with your premises, not mine, but they’d already started searching through everything. I explained that the house wasn’t yours, but they’ll be back. I think it’s time you told me what’s going on, Xander.’

I nod. I don’t think I can put this off any longer. ‘Maybe we should sit,’ I say and take a seat at the breakfast table.

As I tell him about it all, he sits worrying the edges of a wicker place mat and says nothing. Once I have finished telling him about Squire, the drunk in the park, he gets up and finds two glass beakers, silently pouring an inch of expensive cognac into each. He hands me one, and still he says nothing. Then I tell him about number 42B. I describe it all in detail to him. I tell him about what I saw, about the woman being strangled, how I froze and then how I ran. How I told the police it all and how now it seems as though the place has transformed in just a few days.

And then I slow down, hesitant. I am coming to a precipice in the story and I feel the vertigo of it pulling us into a chasm.

‘Then they tell me there was a murder there after all. But it happened thirty years ago.’

‘What?’ he says finally. ‘You lost time?’

I stare at him in shock. ‘No. I didn’t lose time.’

‘Is it so surprising?’ He puts the place mat down. ‘You were in a pretty bad way back then, Xander. I remember the first time I saw you, after, you know, you disappeared. What was it, a year later? You were a mess. God knows what had happened to you.’

‘I don’t really remember that period very well.’ I feel my head filling with heat. The nerves in my face fizz momentarily and then, without notice, I begin to cry. It’s a flood and I can’t stop it. I bury my head in my arms unable to do anything but surrender to it.

‘It’s okay,’ he says, and I feel him rubbing my back. This touch, the first in years – it breaks my heart.

In time the tears trickle dry. I look up and see Seb, still here, calm and serene. He sits back in his seat and looks at me kindly.

‘Seb,’ I say, wiping my face with the back of a hand. ‘I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember those first months at all.’

I track back through the years, picking out what I can. The day I left. The day I saw Grace on the streets. How she bought me breakfast. Those days are like stones rubbed smooth from years of worrying at them. But they are like relics on a hill – whole but broken off. Even the good ones are fragments of something visual, pulled and glued together with my own brush. I can’t distinguish the truth from the patches I manufacture. This must be true of all memory. There is no way of knowing its truth. We can only know what we have spun, and then we are left to believe it is real enough to anchor ourselves to our memories of who we are.

But I am wrong. I do remember some things beyond that day in the café. The odd memory stands out, lit with pain. I remember one night when I slept in the carriage of a train at Waterloo. The last trains had run their journeys for the night. The carriages were there, lying empty, warm, or at least warmer than outside. I had jumped a barrier and none of the skeleton staff had seen me do it. It had been one of those old-fashioned carriages with the slam-doors. A window slid down with only the slightest of persuasion and I was able to climb through. The carriage was warm still from the bodies and the heat of the track, or the heat pumped through by the engine. I stretched out on a faded seat, the softness of the fabric against my cheek like an embrace. In minutes, seconds even, I was asleep on the narrow bench. And then a crack of light and a sound from the corner of sleep woke me. All I saw was a fist coming into my face. I was dragged off the seat and thrown bodily on to the platform. The indigo of night had just given way to dawn. It was still too early for commuters. Just a few orange-jacketed staff, and these people who were dragging me along the platform. Kicking me until I heard parts of me snap.

Then I really did snap.

When I hobbled away, my attackers were on the ground, broken and bloody. It had taken just a few seconds and when it was done I hurried away. My shoulder was throbbing. My face was pouring with blood. The back of my head felt as if it might have cracked. The dull sick feeling still clung from when my head had hit the platform.

But if you were to ask me what I did for the rest of the day, I couldn’t say. I can’t tell you what happened for the rest of the year. Or where the year lay in relation to the others. Looking back now, I cannot place very much into any certain time-frame. I think you need people to do that. People are a frame of reference, letting you plot where you are and where you are heading. And to remind you, in words, what each of you did. I didn’t have people. I could have, but I never craved it the way that some of the other people I crossed on the street did.

I blink to see Seb staring at me in concern.

‘They’re saying they know who she is,’ I say, collecting myself.

He leans forward, lacing his fingers together.

I take a deep breath. ‘They’re saying it’s Grace. That she’s dead.’

He takes a gulp from his glass. I am expecting a tirade, anger. Something. He opens his mouth as if to say something and then closes it. Finally, he decides what to say and speaks.

‘Grace? Our Grace. That’s who it was?’

‘Yes. They’re saying it was her. They’re saying that she’s dead.’

He runs a hand through his hair.

‘They think she was murdered? Not an accident?’ he says. ‘And they’re saying it was you?’

It takes a moment for the realisation to hit.

‘Seb. You don’t sound surprised that she’s dead.’

‘I know,’ he says simply.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I knew she was dead.’

Hearing this makes the room reverberate. ‘What do you mean, you knew she was dead?’

I am standing now and see that I have picked up my glass and I am holding it as if I am about to launch it at him. I am watching myself but don’t seem to be able to control what I’m doing.

Seb remains rooted. ‘We all knew she was dead, Xander.’

I hear the words but they are so disembodied that it takes time for them to register.

‘And you didn’t think to tell me about it?’ A rage rises from somewhere I cannot identify. As it rises it drags a red veil across my eyes.

‘Sit down, Xander,’ Seb says to me. His tone is even, as if he is used to this from me.

‘No! I will not sit down. Did you? Were you there, Seb?’

‘Sit down,’ he says again.

‘Thirty years, Seb. All this time I have been – been searching for her in some way. How could you have known and not said?’

‘Because,’ he says and then sighs and relaxes back into his chair again. ‘Because you already knew.’