I Know What I Saw

I Know What I Saw by Imran Mahmood

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

You Don’t Know Me

To Dad (Poppy)

Without you, the world still turns but it turns more slowly and in much less light.

I miss you

To Shahida who gave me life

To Sadia who changed my life

To Zoha who made my life

To Shifa who completed my life

‘We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full’

Marcel Proust

1 Tuesday

The sky is a bruised sea. It threatens to burst and split the night. There is a children’s play park nearby. The gates are shut but unlocked and they push open easily with a gentle squeak. Of course, at this time of night it’s deserted, and I know that I can sleep here until light. Time as it ticks on a watch is not as useful to me as how the light looks when it waxes or wanes. For me the time is hidden in shadows and in the lengths they cast on the ground. I think about earlier today, about Amit and the fruit now warm in my pockets. That at seventeen years old he thinks about me at all is a surprise. I’ve known him a summer, an autumn and now most of a winter. And he brings me oranges when most people bring nothing but chaos and dirt.

The ground here is covered in woodchips, making a decent mattress under the slide where it is dry, shaded from the elements by the wide tin slope. Before, when I knew too much about numbers and nothing about living, I tried to sleep in the tunnel, to use its seclusion, but the curve is death to sleep. Now I crouch under the slide and tear out sheets of newspaper, rolling them into apple-sized balls. I can’t read the financial pages any more so the pink ones are the first to go. Each one is forced into the gaps in my coat sleeves, the wool inflating until I am like the Hulk. And then I do the same to the legs of my jeans. In no time air is trapped in pockets and my body warms – the paper clings on to the heat. The remaining balls I arrange into the carrier bag from Amit’s oranges, and convert into a pillow. I lay the oranges by my head because the scent of them comforts me.

From here all I can see in the blue moonlight is the dulled metal underside of the slide. The position of it, sloping towards me upside down, gives me a sensation of vertigo. Vertigo. Mum wrote a paper about Vertigo, the film, and Proust, and how much the one had borrowed from the other. Madeleine Elster was Hitchcock’s heroine’s name. The connection was obvious, Mum said. Proust’s madeleines and his painter, Elstir, combined into one. And then, wasn’t Vertigo just a yearning for lost time? Wasn’t it the yawning abyss that caused the vertigo?

Mum was an academic above everything else, the kind of person who could only escape the gravity of life by manipulating herself with art. Rothko was her thing. I hadn’t really ever got on with the abstractness of him. It didn’t make sense to me, having a painting of just four colours. ‘But isn’t that just the incredible thing about him, Xander? That a person using four colours and no representational effort can paint oblivion? Don’t you find that amazing?’

She was the kind of person who looked up to rarefied heights, but down was where I wanted to be, with my nose in the dirt and the physics.

‘And you’re sure that you want to read the sciences?’ she’d said once. ‘You’re not exactly your father, you know.’

‘I know.’ Then I wondered how she couldn’t see that that wasn’t what I wanted at all. I didn’t want to be him. Not in a million years. Even so, I slid into Cambridge with four As to read Mathematics. Not science exactly, nor a degree to capture the imagination, but at least it meant something to other people, even if it meant nothing to me.

‘Fuck out of my patch.’

I sit up so quickly that I bang my forehead on the underside of the slide and then there’s this sickening thud in my ears as a wet boot strikes my temple. I cry out and try to focus but all there is is searing pain. It pounds and beats, freezing me even though I need to get myself ready to fight. I claw through the pain, waiting for my firing synapses to create space for me. My eyes shut until the ache recedes a little, just enough for me to move.

I look at him through screwed eyes and see that he’s smaller than me. He in turn rolls his eyes up and down me until he realises the same thing. I have always been big. I’ve taken up a seat and a half since I was fifteen. Never fat, or even muscular. Just big. Bones like old iron.