I Know What I Saw

‘Well, maybe fusion. It doesn’t matter. If you could harvest all of the energy on the planet, that would probably be enough.’

‘Not enough. Not if you calculate the rate at which you’d be using the energy and multiply it by the distances you’d be covering.’ I knew this. I’d researched it. Type I civilisations. That’s what he had stumbled on, just from thinking.

Dad smiled and then winked at me.

Rory scratched his head.

‘Could harness the energy of your star. That would be enough.’

‘What?’

‘A planet would need a star to sustain life. If you could collect all of the sun’s power, that would be enough.’

And now through pure thought he’d stumbled on Type II civilisations. I stopped smiling.

‘You couldn’t do that. It’s impossible,’ I said.

Dad rubbed his hands and smiled at Rory.

‘Or is it?’ Dad said, arching an eyebrow at Rory.

Rory raised his eyebrow with his finger. It annoyed me that he couldn’t do it without physically pushing it with his finger.

‘Wait. What if you, I don’t know, built a thing around the sun that captured all of the energy, or most of it? Then you could have something that self-replicated using the sun’s energy.’

I pushed my chair back along the tile and stood up. I gave him a hate-filled look and left. Later, after I’d accused him of cheating and he’d convinced me that he hadn’t, he said, ‘Statistically speaking, the difference between winning and losing is that over the longer term, losers give up. You give up too quickly,’ he added plainly. He wasn’t being mean or smug or irritating; he was just saying it, as an observation.

‘And that’s how you win, is it?’ I snapped.

‘I don’t care about winning. You can have the knife,’ he said, holding it out to me.

‘Then what is it?’

‘It’s solving the equation. Sometimes you have to keep going to solve it. You give up. There’s no fight in you.’

There’s a tapping on the crown of my head. It is sharp, icy, as if needles are being driven in. My eyes flicker but I’m in the warmth of a dream that draws me back.

‘Okay, fella,’ a voice says now. My eyes open reluctantly and I am drawn from one place to another, colder one. A figure looms heavily in the doorway and for a moment I feel as if I am about to be attacked.

Static. A flash of fluorescence on the sleeve.

‘PC 375 X-ray Tango. Calling for assistance on Lordship Lane East, Dulwich. LAS.’

The police.

My heart begins to race. Somehow, they have found her dead body and have already connected me to her.

‘I didn’t do it,’ I say to him. He puts his hand out in the direction of my face and continues to speak into his shoulder.

‘And uniform. Roger that. Sir, we have paramedics on the way. Can you give me your name?’

‘What? Xander Shute.’ As soon as the words leave my mouth, I curse. If I’d been even a little more awake, I would have given a false name. But he’s caught me under the vapour of sleep.

‘Okay, Xander. Just have a seat where you were and keep your head up. They’ll be along any minute.’

I try to blink some sense into my brain.

‘Paramedics?’ I say at last. The sun has just begun to paint light into the sky and the gold gives everything a dreamlike tint.

‘Yes, sir. You’ve had a nasty injury there. Just keep your face turned up,’ he says and gently eases my head back.

The bottle. The idiot who threw the bottle. The cut must have started bleeding. I touch my head gently, fingers hovering in my hair. The tips come back red. I struggle to my feet but then the world begins to spin, forcing me back down.

‘Officer. Wait,’ I call out to his luminescent back.

He dips his face into the radio on his shoulder. ‘Just sit still. Try not to move, sir,’ he says, making a half-turn away.

‘Really,’ I say. ‘I don’t need paramedics. I’ll be on my way in a second.’

He continues to mutter into his shoulder, holding a palm out towards me to pause me. Then when he has finished his call, he crouches over me.

‘They’re on their way now. I’ll just take some details while we wait. Address?’ he asks and then, catching up to the dirt and the tatters, he adds, ‘Or is there somewhere you can stay?’

I shake my head and he ticks a box on a pocketbook form he is holding.

‘Date of birth?’

‘Thirty, seven, sixty-nine.’

‘Family? Next of kin?’

‘No. Mother’s dead. Father too,’ I say.

‘Okay, fella,’ he says and then takes a serious look at my head. ‘What happened there then?’

I stumble around in my head trying to remember. It just happened, but I can’t immediately catch it. There was a man. A bottle.

‘Tripped,’ I say. The woman in the house obscures everything else, but I can’t tell in this spinning state whether I have done something I need to hide. I could have saved her. Does this make me guilty of some kind of manslaughter?

He writes something in his book, licking the tip of the pen as he does.

‘Where?’ he says.

I straighten up against the door to get a better look at him. He is young. His face has the glow of youth.

‘Where did I trip? I have no idea.’

He looks at me suspiciously.

‘In the park,’ I say then. ‘Hyde Park.’