I Know What I Saw

I have only been here for a few hours and already the cell is crushing me. If I sit down too long, the walls begin to reverberate, and there is a humming from the lights, or from something else, that I can’t shake. It buzzes deep into my skin and under my flesh so that I have to stand every few seconds to shrug it off. Thankfully there is other noise. I can hear men and women talking, their jocularity slamming hard against this doom that I am in. Murder.

When they processed me, they gave me a form asking me whether I felt suicidal. ‘Of course I do. I’m also highly claustrophobic,’ I wrote. Now, when I look back, I don’t know why I did that. I thought, idiotically, that they would take pity on me and think again about their bail decision. As if they might just say, we can’t keep him here, he’s claustrophobic. Let him, the murderer, go.

Somebody brings me a meal boated in plastic. I eat even though I’m not hungry because I always eat whenever there is food. I eat as much of it as I can and save whatever is dry in my pockets. The food is hot and smells plasticky, like Wotsits.

A vision comes to me of Rory and me tracking through an overgrown patch of scrub grass somewhere, a packet of Wotsits each in our hands. I remember it had been sunny after a morning full of showers. We were walking slowly through a park, picking a path through long grass. I began to wade on ahead, running slightly, cutting swathes through the damp grass. I was an explorer, preparing the way for the others in the expedition. But when I looked around, Rory was gone. My heart dipped for a second and I marched back again, retracing the flattened grass. At first, I thought he’d vanished and so I began to panic. But then I saw him right there on the grass, crouched down and sobbing. I went and knelt next to him. I remember the feel of the long, wet grass on my knees, the impressions they made afterwards. There were tracks down his cheeks.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Wotsits,’ he said through shudders of breath. And there they were, scattered along the grass, wet, soggy. There was orange stain on his hands. ‘They’re all ruined,’ he said. Rory, so bright for his age, so old for his years, was at that moment no more and no less than he was. Six.

I took his empty packet and tipped half of mine into his.

‘But they’re yours,’ he said between gulps.

‘I’m not that hungry,’ I said, pulling him up to his feet.

The lights go low when the night sets in. Ten-thirty, the information sheet said. A signifier of the end of a day in a room without windows. I lie down eventually on the bench and pull the blanket over my head. The mattress is thin but this isn’t the worst bed I have had in my life. The bed isn’t the problem. When I am out, even when my clothes are wet and stuffed full of newspaper and there is ice under my head, I can still manage some sleep. All I need is the knowledge that the baggage of my life is scattered behind me in tiny mounds, as if from holes in my pockets.

But here, there is nowhere to cast the debris away. If I don’t get bail tomorrow, I could be in prison for a year before my trial. The idea of being in a gaol with bars and guards makes me feel faint. My palms are clammy and my heart pounds in my chest. I think for the fourth time this evening that I am going to have a heart attack. It’s the same feeling I had when I was locked in the police car. My breath is shallow and is coming out too fast.

It passes. And as soon as it does and my breathing becomes level again, desperation gives way to relief, which itself gives way to a different desperation. I know I can survive the night, but I can’t do a year without giving up something of my head. But more than that, if it was twenty years? I’d be dead in two. Less.

They have taken away my belt (Seb’s belt) and my laces (Seb’s brogues). They think that I can string myself up by my shoelaces. I laugh at the thought of that but then I begin to choke because I know that if it could be done, I might consider it. And if it could be done, I would find the way.

I lay my head back on the mattress and begin to breathe as rhythmically as I can, counting the in breath and the out. It helps. I feel as if I am putting a blanket over the mouth of my thoughts, muffling them, snuffing them out like sputtering candles.

I shut my eyes and take myself to Grace and that night. The flames are licking the walls and a record plays. The music is warm, cossetting, unless that is the fire inflecting the music with heat. The crescendo begins its journey, meandering and climbing through the first minutes of introduction. And then.

My eyes snap open.

An officer is at the door. He’s checking to see if I am alive because of what I put on that stupid form.

‘I’m fine!’ I say. ‘Just let me sleep, for God’s sake.’

‘Can’t, mate. Have to check you every hour,’ he says, and leaves.

And that is how it is for the next eight hours.