I Know What I Saw

48 Tuesday

It has been three days since I delivered the bag to Blake. I know there’s no longer any spare time.

I am in the kitchen, giving Seb some space. I need space, too. There are thoughts to pack and curate. Which to preserve and which to consign? The telephone rings, piercing the silence. I put down my mug and answer it.

‘Xander,’ the voice says. ‘It’s Jan.’

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘I thought it might be you.’

‘Did you? But you didn’t think it might be clever to tell your lawyers before you walked into a police station with evidence in your own murder case?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I thought you might have stopped me.’

‘Too right I would have.’ She breathes heavily into the phone as if composing herself. ‘Anyway, they found a print.’

My heart sinks. In the gap of time that opens out, I see that today might be the day that I have to take those last steps. I was never expecting good news. The fact that I had the record at all after all these years is enough to convict me, but still the news shocks me. In the quiet of the line a ringing starts in my ears.

‘The print would have degraded by now,’ she says. ‘But only a normal print. A surface fingerprint from sweat might last a few days,’ she continues, ‘but that wasn’t your print. Your print was visible.’

Your print. My print.

‘It was in blood.’

The chemicals rush to my temples and I want to drop the telephone but instead I hang up and sink to the floor. The silence begins to gather itself again and collect around my ears. The whine starts as a low hum and then steadily gets louder. Soon it is so loud that the walls around me are bouncing the sound of silence into my head.

I have to leave.

I walk faster and faster until I am almost running. People on the pavements slip and slide away from me as I bowl through. I can hear my voice, squeezed and scratched, shouting out at the pedestrians. ‘Move! Move!’ I say, ploughing through them.

This is wrong. Through that one piece of evidence delivered straight to the police, I had stopped and surrendered, confessed my guilt. Why, now, am I so surprised? The truth, I realise, is that even at the point I had handed the evidence to the police, I wasn’t sure what was me and what was my imperfectly stitched-together memory.

I can’t let this fractured mind of mine fracture my resolve, though.

Something like this happened before, with Rory. When he jumped. I remember it clearly now, how I felt when I heard about it. If only I’d been there, I might have been able to stop him. And now when I reconstitute the memory, I remember being there. I remember seeing it unfolding before my eyes.

I was standing next to him on his balcony. Night had descended across London but there, high up above the streets, it was somehow still light. Not light in a luminescent sense but in the meaning of lightness. There was a weightlessness there.

He was clutching the railing, his fists white against the night. He might have been drunk. And if I was there, I was in a cloud of dark anger. He’d said something to me and I something to him which he’d bitten against.

‘You hadn’t earned that. That love,’ I might have said.

And he just drank and swallowed back his response. If he had one.

‘You can wish I were dead,’ he said at last. ‘But I’m not. I am still here. I’m still your brother. I still love you.’

His eyes would have been red – were red. The water was building up in them from the wind here at the top of the building.

‘You don’t love me,’ I said. ‘You, none of you ever loved me. You were all oblivious to me. And this … this is just guilt.’

‘Then I confess,’ he said, turning to me, tears falling freely now.

I shook my head and walked back into the flat. The floors were smooth and warm under my socked feet. In the low fridge in the kitchen area, I found myself a can of something to drink. Clicking it open, I headed back out to the balcony.

When I got there Rory was straddling the balcony barriers. They were metal so they could hold his weight, but I was alarmed.

I ran and stretched out my hand for him. He pulled his own back and as he did he wobbled on the rail.

‘No!’ I shouted.

‘Don’t come closer,’ he said. ‘I haven’t decided yet. I need to think it through. Wait.’ He held out a hand in my direction. I stopped in my tracks but was on my toes, ready to leap out and grab him. He looked like that boy I remembered, the one who cried over crisps. All I wanted to do was comfort him, rescue him.

‘Okay,’ I said and held out my palms. ‘Take your time.’

I waited and watched as the machinery in his head whirred. I followed him in my head, tracing the paths I knew he was taking and suddenly I realised where he was heading.

‘But you know you can’t redeem anything through death,’ I said quickly.

‘Ha,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure Jesus would agree.’

I swallowed. We were there – at Jesus – more quickly than I expected.

‘You’re Jesus now?’ I said. ‘Okay, then you’ll have to be killed. Suicides don’t provide redemption. Besides, an atheist like you? Come on, Rory. Stop being an idiot. Get off that wall.’

‘Okay, brother,’ he said, smiling from the corner of his mouth. ‘Okay, I’ll get off – but you tell me. What’s the penance? There has to be one.’

He teetered for a second and then steadied himself with a hand. I was halfway to him by the time he was stable again. His hand flung out again by way of warning.

‘You don’t need redeeming,’ I said, stopping. ‘Not you, of all people. Come on. Back here.’

He laughed a little. ‘But the oblivion. There’s the oblivion I relegated you to. That’s a crime,’ he said, his voice becoming shrill.

‘I was being dramatic.’

‘No. Not dramatic. You were being truthful,’ he said seriously. ‘So, tell me, Xand, how do I recover from that?’

The wind up there felt strong. It came upon him suddenly, buffeting him and panicking me.

‘You can live,’ I said quickly.

‘And then what? I knew it all along. I saw it. I saw how he was with you and how he was with me. And I did nothing. I didn’t want to. I wanted it to be like that.’

‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ I said and the words or half of them were carried away by wind.

‘I do, Xander. What do you think all of this is? My life’s misery hasn’t just been about this,’ he said.

He was crying then and tears ran down his cheeks in fat streams, and suddenly I was thrown back to that same day in the park, Rory on his knees, Wotsits sodden on the grass. I stepped forward and he yelped, holding out his hand.

‘No!’ he said, eyes blazing.

In a single step, I could be up against him. It would take just one step. I fixed my eyes on his. He was crying so hard that all I wanted was to hold him. He was crying so hard he was in danger of falling.

I took the leap and threw my arms around him. He stiffened before collapsing into me. He sobbed and as he did he clutched at me. I pulled him back over the rail and he crumpled to the floor. We stayed like that for some minutes.

‘Come in, Rory,’ I said, once he had stopped crying.

He looked up at me, his face wet and red at the eyes and pulled himself to his feet and allowed me to usher him in.

When I left late the next morning, he saw me to the door and embraced me.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. But I didn’t read any sorrow – only desperation.

When he dropped to his death some days later, I buried this episode in my head. And now it comes back to me.

And yet.

And yet there is a version of this memory in which I threw my arms around him and held him as he teetered on the balcony. I smothered his sobs and then once they had subsided, I wiped his eyes. My hand was there on his head, stroking his hair. I whispered to him, my love. And my forgiveness.

And as his breathing settled into a steadier, slower rhythm, I leant into him.

And, gently, I pushed.