I Know What I Saw

‘I do believe that. That’s what she told me,’ I say, and as I do I feel my eyes stinging.

‘You want to know what she told me? She told me that you didn’t love her. That all you ever loved was a version of her that you had created. You didn’t love anything about the real her,’ Nina says.

‘How can you say that?’ I cry.

‘Because it’s true, Xander. You always thought you were better than her. Cleverer.’

‘I did not.’

‘You sneered at the things she loved. The yoga, the Buddhism, all of it. You even sneered at her taste in music.’

‘Her music?’

‘Yes, you hated her music. You made her feel worthless, Xander, at every turn.’

The words ring in my ears and now there is no room in my head for everything else I have been told in the last twenty-four hours.

I am aware of getting up and of following myself along the hall. Seb calls me back and then I am outside in the night. Wading through the air.

I walk hoping for a sliver of calm but for the longest time it doesn’t come. And then, at last, it begins. Every step rinses a drop of something from inside my head. Each stride cleanses, but only by fractions. I can’t walk quickly enough to stop the thoughts from multiplying, just for a second, so that I can get a proper handle on them. For some minutes I walk in a direction that I’ve walked before, and then I am at the Horniman grounds again. Something brings me back here time and again. It is as if the ghost of Grace is stronger here.

Once over the low wall I sit with my back against the other side of it. It is hallowed, the space here; I don’t need to go further. The wind collects in pockets and then blusters into my clothes, carrying off with it every bubble of warm air. I shiver. A shard of that memory pricks me whenever I am here.

A bench.

My hands in the soil.

There is something in what Nina has said, but I can’t for the moment grasp it firmly. The Buddhism – she was right about that – and the yoga. But was I supposed to indulge her in it as she indulged herself? We both knew that it wasn’t real, this spiritual odyssey of hers. She wore it obviously and mischievously.

But the music was real. At first, I didn’t get it. Pop, maybe – she was young. We all were. But eighties music? The worst of the musical decades, proved by posterity. But later I did get it, when it was too late. She wasn’t interested in the artistry or the symmetry or the poetry of the music. She didn’t care about the lyrics either. It was the mood she loved, how the music made her feel. It reminded her of things that she’d never experienced and of places she’d never seen. It had the power to alter her emotionally.

I have a memory of leaving her a gift. But her reaction to it escapes me. Maybe I wasn’t there when she received it or opened it. But I remember the things before it. I remember Tower Records in Piccadilly. I remember picking out the record and wrapping it and then carrying it to her house in the cold weather. Did I leave it at the door? It was too big surely to go through the letter box. In any case when I bought it, it was so I could tell her that, at last, I understood. It was an LP with her favourite song in it, ‘Fils de la Terre’ by Jack T. She’d originally played it on a cassette over and over again until one day the tape ran thin and just snapped. She was devastated. Resolved never to replace it. It’s not the same if I get another one, she’d said, it could never be the same.

When I bought the record, I wanted her to know that it didn’t have to be the same. It could be better instead. Vinyl not tape. Music to listen to in one place, not on the move. A song to be played at home, in confined space so that it could liberate you.

The cold is biting my back against this wall and my instinct knows I must move and keep the blood flowing. I see the boarded café ahead of me and though it is shut, I make for it at a run. By the time I reach it, I know that I will be warmer. The ground beneath my feet is hard and shocks my bones into life. I start slowly and build the pace gradually, then before I know what is happening, I am running full tilt into the night. Running like a schoolboy, freely, urgently and without any thoughts of conserving energy. I pass the café and keep running.

I run until I can run no more. My lungs are burning hot and screaming for air. Then in my mind Grace appears and she is opening the gift. She unwraps the badly taped and papered package and pulls out the sleeve. She is smiling as she takes the record out of the cover and out of the paper slip, handling it by the edges, and drifts over to the record player. The stylus is up with a gentle microphoned thud and then down once more.

Silence.

A hiss.

Then a rhythmic beat until finally the vocal kicks in.

There’s trouble on the uptrack
And trouble going back
I’ve had trouble with my memory
And less with my back …