I Know What I Saw

In these clothes I can visit the places that my ordinary life prevents me from accessing. I walk into the grounds of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, pulling the velvet collar of my coat to my face. I think I’m here because I need a kind of privileged space to think in peace and comfort. Walking liberates me. It frees me from the oppression of stasis and that feeling of being locked in with myself. But when I move across open space, it’s as if the locks come undone and I can bear to be with myself a little longer. The longer I am free, the easier I find my shadow as company. I’m less fraught, less … chemically volatile.

I wonder about what the police said about this man, Squire. Those pictures showed him as pretty badly attacked. He wasn’t when I saw him though, was he? I’m sure they’ve made a mistake arresting me for it. I would have remembered doing that or anything like that to him. But then, do the police arrest people for no reason at all? Though they do have targets and clear-up rates and papers to think about. Or is there another reason that they arrested me? Could I have lost time, like I did at the hospital? But even if I had, I wouldn’t have blocked the whole thing out, something would have stayed with me. I look around the grounds and feel some satisfaction at coming to this place to reason everything out in peace. It’s only when I’m near the café that I realise that we came here once before, Grace and I.

We worked long hours in the City, both of us, occasionally working through till dawn. When we pulled those all-nighters, they’d give us time off in lieu, and on those precious days we made a tradition of heading into south London for some green. It wasn’t quite the idyll of Cambridge, but it was leafy and philosophically a hundred miles away from our north-of-the-river home. It meant different things to each of us. For Grace being out here met her spiritual needs. ‘The grass, walking on it, is grounding,’ she’d said. ‘It takes up all those free electrons floating about. And in Buddhist philosophy—’

I’d have raised my eyebrows when Buddha was invoked. For me there was a simpler equation in the greenery of south London: it was a break from the grind. I think about this and wonder if that’s where it began, this need to escape my life? I don’t know. But we held hands here, I know that. ‘We should buy a place here somewhere,’ she said.

‘We should. We really should.’

‘Somewhere we can grow old together. And you can garden and I can bake.’

I laughed and drew her into my coat. I remember it now. ‘I don’t really see you as the baking sort,’ I said. She pulled away in mock indignation.

‘Hey!’ she said, before adding, ‘but what about that loaf I made once?’

I marvel at this now when I look back, that she’d loved me. When I examine myself for the same glints of beauty and magic that I saw in her, I can’t find them. She said I was honest and gentle. But most of all that I was brighter than her – that’s what attracted her most, she said. Clever men were hard to find, apparently. I rough over this memory because I know how fraudulent this claim of hers is.

From the café I circle round and head out towards Dulwich Park just across the way. There’s a fence around the perimeter edge but the planks are weather-worn and have come away from their nails. I pull a section back and step through into the vast grounds. I let my feet lead me. As I walk I have the sensation of being followed, but when I glance behind me, there are only trees.

The police seemed more interested in the Squire attack than in the woman lying dead in that house. It can only be because they don’t believe me. Did I look unhinged to them? I keep catching myself being hunted by ghosts – is that what they saw in me? I should have insisted on going to the house with them, because what if she’s still alive. Is there some sense in calling an ambulance, even now?

I shake some of the fug from my head. There’s still pain there but it’s ebbing away. To my right the ground climbs up a hill which I follow. The wet grass smells of my childhood and of Rory. If I can help it I hardly ever indulge Rory any more. I push him out whenever he draws close but sometimes, like now, when some scent catches me by surprise, I am taken bodily back to him. This wet grass and suddenly here he is, six or seven and rolling down a hill. Squealing. And then in the next instant, he is no longer six or seven but twenty-six. At the end of his life.

When he was twenty-six, Rory was found dead.

He comes to me like this, the full span of his life in a single slide. Childhood – adulthood – death. When I think of him the memories tug something inside. He fell from the eleventh floor of his apartment block in Holborn, but I’m not sure if I trust all the details of that memory or whether it’s a pastiche of imagined and real. But I do remember roaming the parks with him for hours on end when we were children, with a ten-pence piece for an emergency phone call just in case.