I Know What I Saw

I race through the hallway, surprising myself once again at the mirror. Me, still. But changed somehow. Younger? No, less distinct, perhaps. I pause and then run back into the room to wipe down the things that I have touched. The handle, the sofa. There’s nothing else that I can remember so I shut the door behind me and wipe that handle down too, all with the edge of my damp coat.

My heart skitters as I stand on the cold tiles in my bare feet. The police, I think, if the guy calls the police, and I am found here in this state, I will be undone. I’m sure I can hear a siren in the distance. I must move.

I unravel my coat, letting my shoes drop to the Victorian tile. There is the cold of something hard and flat against my skin but I pull my coat over it, wrapping myself up. Its dampness and weight gives me the sensation of walking through mud. I pull open the door with the edge of my sleeve and I am outside. The cold night air washes over my face and into my lungs. I breathe once, then, keeping my head low, I run. I have to hide. A man like me knows about hiding, but tonight I have to hide from myself because I can sense it coming upon me. A feeling of claustrophobia, of meeting myself in my head, and when that happens, I’ll have to leave myself, become nobody. I’m not hiding from the police, it’s not that at all.

Before. Before, when I was like you, I had your problems and your conveniences. I know you think that we spontaneously appear, caked in dirt, and that we just materialise on the street, but we don’t. Remember, we bring ourselves here from some warm place. We only come when the balance weighs in favour of leaving, when the problems of staying outweigh the rest. I was like you, before. For example, I used to have a brother.

I stop for a breath as I round Hyde Park Corner Tube. I drop my head and hurry towards Westminster – Green Zone – each stride stretching sinew so that I can cover as much distance as possible in the wet.

I had a brother. Have. Had?

As I hit Pimlico the traffic begins to thin. This is London so it never spreads so thinly that it has the feeling of winding down. There is only a shift in patterns. The tempo is reduced by the tiniest fraction. The urgency is less. Commerce is plying its night shift where the demands are different. I remember the thrust of commerce, how it felt under one’s arm, pushing forward.

Memory and history are not the same thing.

When I remember my life before, I am really reimagining it, in flashes, in tiny abstract glimpses. And in that memory, I compose my own rhythm, close enough to match the original percussion, but far enough to be no better than an improvisation inspired by it. But in the end, I always wash up in the same place with the same question. How did it all begin?

Dad, for instance. Could you say, it all began with him?

‘Xander,’ he said once. ‘You’re so bright. Why do you have to be so disruptive?’

He spoke to me, away from Rory. He convinced himself it was so that he didn’t embarrass me, but I knew the truth was that he didn’t know what I was capable of saying.

‘Maths is boring,’ I told him. His brown eyes, large and cow-like, made me despise him.

‘You need the maths to understand the physics,’ he said.

But Mum overheard this and hovered close.

‘Proust. Try Proust, if you’re bored,’ she said.

Only an academic would think of saying something like that to a child, I think now.

As I step on to the bridge, the sound of police sirens makes my heart flutter. If they are racing to her, they’re too late. And I wonder then about that. I was too slow to affect anything. I was much too slow. If I had done something, maybe she would be alive.

The pain asserts itself again and is now a cage over my head. For a minute I wonder if my mind is playing tricks on me. Did I really witness a woman being killed? And then I think of it. Yes. The crack, the thud and spilled blood. I know what’s coming next. It’s knocking. It announces its arrival so mundanely, the guilt. I tense my body against all that guilt, coming for me.

Having crossed the bridge, I’m now skirting the back alleys and cobbled side roads that my body knows intimately. In the Blue Zone there are squats where I could stay but I don’t want to. Homeless communities are everywhere and I know about the sorts of lives that people have survived. I see how the chaos seems to cling to them. I can’t take up their share of space. And I know they’ll try to exert a kinship over me, and I’ll want to tell them to leave me alone, that we are not the same. That above all I did this to myself, for myself.

My immediate viable choices then are to find a dry space in the park or under a bridge, or to walk all night until it becomes light and then sleep. It is halfway to dawn. The adrenaline leaving my body has caused other chemicals to bring on sleep. I pass a navy metal stand, piled high with free newspapers, and pick up four Metros without breaking my stride.