I Know What I Saw

I splash some water on to my face in the sink and return to the living room. There’s a small bookcase in an alcove. And when I see the books I remember how I keep meaning to read and yet never seem to manage it. I run a finger along the spines. A few of the titles mean something to me. I pick out a Maupassant and study the cover. Le Nœud de vipères. The Nest of Vipers. Rory gave me this copy.

The Christmas that he gave it to me comes flooding back. We are in the drawing room. I am sixteen and sullen, he is innocent as he always was. The fire is flickering in the fireplace and Dad is sleeping in his favourite chair beside it. I remember the feeling of blackness radiating in waves from me. But there is a whisper of frustration through the hate. And it is love. The love won’t be rinsed away. It won’t leave me and him. It stains us both.

48 Tuesday

It has been three days since I delivered the bag to Blake. I know there’s no longer any spare time.

I am in the kitchen, giving Seb some space. I need space, too. There are thoughts to pack and curate. Which to preserve and which to consign? The telephone rings, piercing the silence. I put down my mug and answer it.

‘Xander,’ the voice says. ‘It’s Jan.’

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘I thought it might be you.’

‘Did you? But you didn’t think it might be clever to tell your lawyers before you walked into a police station with evidence in your own murder case?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I thought you might have stopped me.’

‘Too right I would have.’ She breathes heavily into the phone as if composing herself. ‘Anyway, they found a print.’

My heart sinks. In the gap of time that opens out, I see that today might be the day that I have to take those last steps. I was never expecting good news. The fact that I had the record at all after all these years is enough to convict me, but still the news shocks me. In the quiet of the line a ringing starts in my ears.

‘The print would have degraded by now,’ she says. ‘But only a normal print. A surface fingerprint from sweat might last a few days,’ she continues, ‘but that wasn’t your print. Your print was visible.’

Your print. My print.

‘It was in blood.’

The chemicals rush to my temples and I want to drop the telephone but instead I hang up and sink to the floor. The silence begins to gather itself again and collect around my ears. The whine starts as a low hum and then steadily gets louder. Soon it is so loud that the walls around me are bouncing the sound of silence into my head.

I have to leave.

I walk faster and faster until I am almost running. People on the pavements slip and slide away from me as I bowl through. I can hear my voice, squeezed and scratched, shouting out at the pedestrians. ‘Move! Move!’ I say, ploughing through them.

This is wrong. Through that one piece of evidence delivered straight to the police, I had stopped and surrendered, confessed my guilt. Why, now, am I so surprised? The truth, I realise, is that even at the point I had handed the evidence to the police, I wasn’t sure what was me and what was my imperfectly stitched-together memory.

I can’t let this fractured mind of mine fracture my resolve, though.

Something like this happened before, with Rory. When he jumped. I remember it clearly now, how I felt when I heard about it. If only I’d been there, I might have been able to stop him. And now when I reconstitute the memory, I remember being there. I remember seeing it unfolding before my eyes.

I was standing next to him on his balcony. Night had descended across London but there, high up above the streets, it was somehow still light. Not light in a luminescent sense but in the meaning of lightness. There was a weightlessness there.

He was clutching the railing, his fists white against the night. He might have been drunk. And if I was there, I was in a cloud of dark anger. He’d said something to me and I something to him which he’d bitten against.

‘You hadn’t earned that. That love,’ I might have said.

And he just drank and swallowed back his response. If he had one.

‘You can wish I were dead,’ he said at last. ‘But I’m not. I am still here. I’m still your brother. I still love you.’

His eyes would have been red – were red. The water was building up in them from the wind here at the top of the building.

‘You don’t love me,’ I said. ‘You, none of you ever loved me. You were all oblivious to me. And this … this is just guilt.’

‘Then I confess,’ he said, turning to me, tears falling freely now.

I shook my head and walked back into the flat. The floors were smooth and warm under my socked feet. In the low fridge in the kitchen area, I found myself a can of something to drink. Clicking it open, I headed back out to the balcony.

When I got there Rory was straddling the balcony barriers. They were metal so they could hold his weight, but I was alarmed.

I ran and stretched out my hand for him. He pulled his own back and as he did he wobbled on the rail.

‘No!’ I shouted.