I Know What I Saw

16 Saturday

By the time I reach south-east London, it is around midday. Even though the world is immense and for all intents and purposes boundless, we find ourselves locked into an orbit of just a few miles. Familiarity draws us in, a home for our troubles. I need it, the familiarity, to concentrate without being distracted by my environment. That’s why I’m here, in Dulwich Park, with the beginning of a headache but a clear mind, to think.

It was always Grace, this place. A memory crashes around me, or a dream. There’s a bench and I’m digging with my hands. The earth gives way and then nothing more.

We could have made it work. I still believe that.

I remember reading to her under the tree there and then reuniting with her after we split up. In a way we grew together in this place, the trees and us, sapling to oak. Once, I took her blindfolded across the park in the middle of summer. Her birthday was in December but she hated the winter. That year we had decided to celebrate it in August when the sun was shining so she could have a birthday photograph in the sun. I had hidden a picnic of sandwiches and champagne by some trees earlier in the morning and then surprised her by having Seb and Nina turn up.

‘Oh, my God. Xander!’

‘Happy not birthday, Mabe.’

I remember another time, a few weeks after the incident with Ariel. I had tried to convince myself and her that I wasn’t jealous, or more accurately that I no longer was, and that I understood my jealousy was a violation of her trust. I walked her casually through the park – a small box burning a hole in my pocket. There was no reason to be nervous, not really – it was just a peace offering but it had the quality of a proposal. Perhaps it was, in a way. We ambled hand in hand towards the boating pond but skirted the edge. There had been a time when Grace pulled me towards boats but eventually she gave up when I’d resisted enough times. I hadn’t wanted to dilute the day that we’d taken the boat at midnight. To get on one of these pond boats seemed like a violation of that memory. We passed the parked green pedalos and were a few paces on when I turned her back.

‘C’mon then, Mabe,’ I said. ‘Just this once.’

She raised her eyebrows in surprise and then lit up. After picking her way artfully on to the boat, she sat grinning on the bench seat, while I paid. The sun was shining hard so that by the time I had manoeuvred us out of the mooring, I was already flushed through with heat. I rested a little then as the boat glided under its own momentum. I produced the box. Heart beating.

‘It’s a conch,’ I said as she lifted out the tiny gold shell suspended on a gold chain. ‘Fibonacci and all that,’ I said, trying to sound careless about it.

She put it straight on and beamed at me as I breathed out relief.

She wore it then, every day.

Until she didn’t.

And then there were the gifts from Ariel. Little nothings, really. Cheap trinkets from China Town: yin and yang notepaper, joss sticks, badges with Buddhist symbols on them. The truth was that I wouldn’t have been so jealous if I hadn’t met him. He was sylph-like and moved as if dancing every step. And there was I, cumbersome, big, static. Still, I think I could have got over it had I not seen how he looked at her, like prey. And more than that, how she didn’t see it. I couldn’t believe that she didn’t know about men who preyed.

Our argument came with a smiling face. A small jade Buddha. It had been a Christmas present (Grace didn’t even see how facile that was, a Buddhist statue at Christmas). She had unwrapped the tissue in front of me and pulled the little figure into the morning light and gazed at it a second too long. Stroked the smooth head a little too delicately.

‘So thoughtful of him,’ she’d said and placed it carefully on the mantel.

A day or two later I accidentally knocked it off. It was a common-or-garden dusting accident.

‘Xander!’ she said when she saw the chip. ‘You did that deliberately!’

‘It was an accident!’ I said, laughing. The laughter went down badly, so in the end to prove it was an accident I agreed that Grace could have it in the bedroom. We only had one bedside table, so there it stayed, in benign splendour, next to me.

The smiling green man made my stomach turn every time I saw it. So one night, as I turned out the light, I winked at the statue and rolled into bed. Later, when it was dark and Grace was fully entombed in sleep, the Lord Buddha suffered another terrible accident. This time, he shattered into a thousand glistening lives.

In the morning, Grace left. Left me.

It was a Saturday and she packed a bag and strode darkly out of the house.

‘Where are you going? It was an accident.’

She said nothing except what she signalled by slamming the front door as she left.