I Know What I Saw

‘I don’t really remember that period very well.’ I feel my head filling with heat. The nerves in my face fizz momentarily and then, without notice, I begin to cry. It’s a flood and I can’t stop it. I bury my head in my arms unable to do anything but surrender to it.

‘It’s okay,’ he says, and I feel him rubbing my back. This touch, the first in years – it breaks my heart.

In time the tears trickle dry. I look up and see Seb, still here, calm and serene. He sits back in his seat and looks at me kindly.

‘Seb,’ I say, wiping my face with the back of a hand. ‘I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember those first months at all.’

I track back through the years, picking out what I can. The day I left. The day I saw Grace on the streets. How she bought me breakfast. Those days are like stones rubbed smooth from years of worrying at them. But they are like relics on a hill – whole but broken off. Even the good ones are fragments of something visual, pulled and glued together with my own brush. I can’t distinguish the truth from the patches I manufacture. This must be true of all memory. There is no way of knowing its truth. We can only know what we have spun, and then we are left to believe it is real enough to anchor ourselves to our memories of who we are.

But I am wrong. I do remember some things beyond that day in the café. The odd memory stands out, lit with pain. I remember one night when I slept in the carriage of a train at Waterloo. The last trains had run their journeys for the night. The carriages were there, lying empty, warm, or at least warmer than outside. I had jumped a barrier and none of the skeleton staff had seen me do it. It had been one of those old-fashioned carriages with the slam-doors. A window slid down with only the slightest of persuasion and I was able to climb through. The carriage was warm still from the bodies and the heat of the track, or the heat pumped through by the engine. I stretched out on a faded seat, the softness of the fabric against my cheek like an embrace. In minutes, seconds even, I was asleep on the narrow bench. And then a crack of light and a sound from the corner of sleep woke me. All I saw was a fist coming into my face. I was dragged off the seat and thrown bodily on to the platform. The indigo of night had just given way to dawn. It was still too early for commuters. Just a few orange-jacketed staff, and these people who were dragging me along the platform. Kicking me until I heard parts of me snap.

Then I really did snap.

When I hobbled away, my attackers were on the ground, broken and bloody. It had taken just a few seconds and when it was done I hurried away. My shoulder was throbbing. My face was pouring with blood. The back of my head felt as if it might have cracked. The dull sick feeling still clung from when my head had hit the platform.

But if you were to ask me what I did for the rest of the day, I couldn’t say. I can’t tell you what happened for the rest of the year. Or where the year lay in relation to the others. Looking back now, I cannot place very much into any certain time-frame. I think you need people to do that. People are a frame of reference, letting you plot where you are and where you are heading. And to remind you, in words, what each of you did. I didn’t have people. I could have, but I never craved it the way that some of the other people I crossed on the street did.

I blink to see Seb staring at me in concern.

‘They’re saying they know who she is,’ I say, collecting myself.

He leans forward, lacing his fingers together.

I take a deep breath. ‘They’re saying it’s Grace. That she’s dead.’

He takes a gulp from his glass. I am expecting a tirade, anger. Something. He opens his mouth as if to say something and then closes it. Finally, he decides what to say and speaks.

‘Grace? Our Grace. That’s who it was?’

‘Yes. They’re saying it was her. They’re saying that she’s dead.’

He runs a hand through his hair.

‘They think she was murdered? Not an accident?’ he says. ‘And they’re saying it was you?’

It takes a moment for the realisation to hit.

‘Seb. You don’t sound surprised that she’s dead.’

‘I know,’ he says simply.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I knew she was dead.’

Hearing this makes the room reverberate. ‘What do you mean, you knew she was dead?’

I am standing now and see that I have picked up my glass and I am holding it as if I am about to launch it at him. I am watching myself but don’t seem to be able to control what I’m doing.

Seb remains rooted. ‘We all knew she was dead, Xander.’

I hear the words but they are so disembodied that it takes time for them to register.

‘And you didn’t think to tell me about it?’ A rage rises from somewhere I cannot identify. As it rises it drags a red veil across my eyes.

‘Sit down, Xander,’ Seb says to me. His tone is even, as if he is used to this from me.

‘No! I will not sit down. Did you? Were you there, Seb?’

‘Sit down,’ he says again.