I Know What I Saw полностью

‘Amit, no,’ I say to him in a heavy whisper. The darkness bathing the house disguises his expression so I don’t know how he has reacted.

‘Okay,’ he says at last, and follows me back to the pavement.

‘Xander?’ he says after a moment.

‘Yes?’

‘If I were you …’

‘If you were me what?’

‘I’d hide.’ Before I can stop him he has run back to the house and has pointed a finger at the bell. He turns towards me in the darkness and waves me away with his other hand. Then before I can react, he presses.

I have time only to notice that there is a second new lock on the door. A legacy from hearing about my second attempted visit from the police, no doubt. Amit has now turned to the door, and panic grips me as I scramble for a place to hide. I hurry across the road and find a car I can crouch behind. I reach it and quickly duck out of view. My heart is racing. I peek my head up over the bonnet and make out Amit still waiting at the door. I hope nobody is in.

My heart counts the seconds as they thud by. With each passing one, I begin to relax. Ebadi must be out. Then I see a crack of light outline the doorway, growing until it has turned Amit into silhouette.

I cannot make out at this distance what is being said, but Amit is gesticulating with his hands to a figure in the doorway. It must be Ebadi. After a minute Amit seems to turn to go but is stopped by something Ebadi has said. Ebadi steps back into the house and just as I think that the door is going to shut safely between them, Amit follows him inside.

As I wait here in the growing darkness, panic begins to overtake me. Amit has just walked into the house of a murderer and I let him. I don’t even know what he’d planned to say to him. If he went over there and started talking about a dead woman or a missing woman, what was Ebadi likely to do?

I cannot sit here, hiding behind a car, and let him come to harm. Not this time around.

I get up from my position and march towards the house but an unformulated thought stops me. My brain begins to click and shift through the gears and once it has, I stop and turn back. I can’t break the door down. So, then I have to ring the bell. What if he refuses to open the door? What if he opens the door and refuses to let me past? Calls the police? What if, having heard the doorbell and seeing me, he panics and does something to Amit? I can hardly call the police. They wouldn’t come after all the fuss I have created and laid at his door. Or if they did they would arrest me. My heart begins to pump and suddenly I feel light-headed. I don’t feel in control of events and I know now why I have laboured so hard to avoid having to care for another person. My life on the streets doesn’t allow any room for that. I have tried so hard to stay alone and yet here I am.

The safest thing is to wait. He has no reason to kill a boy. An identifiable boy, with long hair, in a school uniform. A boy who would be missed, by hundreds of people. An image of Amit comes into my mind. In it he is being strangled. I shake my head to rattle the picture free. It disappears.

But there are others waiting to take its place. I try to think of something else. Someone else. Rory. Grace. Seb. I screw my eyes shut and see Amit in a box, being buried.

Rory. Grace. I will myself to think of anything but this, so that I can contain this panic of Amit being buried.

It was harder to bury Grace than to bury Rory. The physical interment was one thing. Rory went into the ground with all the rituals of goodbye. The rites signal that it’s time to move away, to move on. When that lid closes, when the box is lowered, when the earth is scattered and the words are said, when the belongings are tidied away, the message is inscribed: move away now. There is nothing left. These goodbyes have been extended too long already.

I breathe in deep draughts.

Grace was different. She didn’t stay in one place to be put under soil. She kept living in my head, in a hundred different incarnations. There were no rituals. One day we were there spinning in one another’s orbits, like twinned planets, the next she had moved out. Ma belle. Gone. And with her everything that she had accumulated, then later absorbed into our lives, was gone too. The debris she left was minimal: a hairclip in the bathroom, a forgotten mug with a work logo on one side, that pendant, some possessions of equivocal ownership like records and books. But there had been no rituals so she, though alive, was harder to mourn.

I’ve held on to the memory of the last time I saw her and how I looked up when I saw the shoes.

‘Xander,’ she said, and crouched down on to the pavement to speak to me as if I were a child. She was dressed for work, her hair like pale honey, shining in places. Newly cut. Newly bright. Her perfume was light, like breath on my face. The shell nestled in a dip in her chest.

The shame I felt when I saw her looking at my hands comes back now.