I Know What I Saw

46 Friday

There is no doubt. Looking at this thing in my hand, there is no doubt. It was me. It was me after all.

I pick up the bag and tuck it inside my jacket and run out of the grounds. I have to get out of here.

I break out again into a run, my hands and sleeves covered in soil. My knees damp and dirty. I remember burying this but I can’t remember what happened before. My head pounds as I run. The boundary wall draws near and I jump it. I don’t want the exit now. These gates are meant for people. Thoughts riot in my head.

Did I know this? Did I know that I killed her? Am I perpetrating huge diversions against myself? Am I just playing chess against myself, pretending that I haven’t seen the plan behind the move? I am drawing myself in tighter and tighter coils into a box.

I must have known it all along. This – what is in this bag – proves it.

After ten minutes of running, I am at Seb’s. I push my way past him when he answers the door and barge into the kitchen.

‘Xander?’ he says, following me, puzzled.

I look at him and the ease drops out of his face like a bag of cement.

‘Shit, Xander,’ he says, taking in my muddied form. ‘What happened at court?’

I walk straight to the table and begin to peel back the wet plastic in my hand.

‘Xander? What’s going on?’

I ignore him and carry on unwrapping. The newspaper-packaged bundle is dry.

‘Xander.’

I peel back the paper carefully and expose what has been lying underneath it for nearly thirty years.

‘The missing piece,’ I say.

How can it be? And yet it is. The fragmented recollections aren’t needed any longer and can’t save me now. The proof is there in front of me.

‘Missing piece of what?’ says Seb, as I sit on the chair nearest to me.

‘The record,’ I say, looking up at him. He’s my only friend, and now the sole witness to my unravelling. ‘I killed her, Seb,’ I gasp. ‘It was me.’

It takes some time for him to cajole me out of my daze. In broken sentences I tell him about the evidence. The record piece, the prints, everything.

‘This will prove it,’ I say, lifting the piece to him with a scrap of the newspaper.

He looks startled, concerned – on the cusp of panic. ‘You have to give it to them. It might help you.’

As he says this he starts to rewrap the thing in its paper.

‘Help me? It incriminates me.’

He stops, mid-wrap.

‘Why did I bury it, Seb? Why would I do that unless—’

‘Don’t,’ he interrupts. ‘No. There must be another explanation.’

He stops and runs his hands through his hair. He is astounded and casts about for what to do or say next, because there is only one explanation.

‘Shit,’ he says finally. ‘Do you remember doing it?’

I shake my head and as I do I feel the tears. I try and blink them back. I don’t deserve to cry at this. I killed Grace.

‘I don’t fully,’ I say. ‘Sometimes when I learn something new, it changes what I remember. I remember this now,’ I say, pointing to the record. ‘I remember burying it.’

‘Shit,’ he repeats. He pushes the record back into the bag. ‘Wait,’ he says then, spotting something at the bottom of it and reaching in.

‘What is it?’

‘I’ve seen this before,’ he says and holds it up.

Seeing it sends a shiver down my spine. It’s a pendant in the shape of a tiny gold shell.

‘Chelle,’ I say under my breath. ‘Michelle.’

The plastic bag lies fat on the table, stained in mud. After a while it begins to shimmer in my peripheral vision. But it isn’t alone. It is here with everything I had forgotten. It’s here with things that I didn’t even know I knew, let alone forgot. I stand up suddenly and push back my chair.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asks.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I don’t know what I can do. ‘I’m going to lie down,’ I say at last and then make my way upstairs. I can’t go now. He’ll stop me. I have to wait till he is asleep.

My head throbs, but it’s not clouding my thoughts. Rather, it’s making them clearer. The threads of my life are being pulled together and there is only one thing left to be done. I see now that this has been stalking me for almost thirty years. Maybe deep inside I thought I could outrun it, but that was never possible.