I Know What I Saw
by Imran Mahmood
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
You Don’t Know Me
To Dad (Poppy)
Without you, the world still turns but it turns more slowly and in much less light.
I miss you
To Shahida who gave me life
To Sadia who changed my life
To Zoha who made my life
To Shifa who completed my life
‘We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full’
1
Tuesday
The sky is a bruised sea. It threatens to burst and split the night. There is a children’s play park nearby. The gates are shut but unlocked and they push open easily with a gentle squeak. Of course, at this time of night it’s deserted, and I know that I can sleep here until light. Time as it ticks on a watch is not as useful to me as how the light looks when it waxes or wanes. For me the time is hidden in shadows and in the lengths they cast on the ground. I think about earlier today, about Amit and the fruit now warm in my pockets. That at seventeen years old he thinks about me at all is a surprise. I’ve known him a summer, an autumn and now most of a winter. And he brings me oranges when most people bring nothing but chaos and dirt.
The ground here is covered in woodchips, making a decent mattress under the slide where it is dry, shaded from the elements by the wide tin slope. Before, when I knew too much about numbers and nothing about living, I tried to sleep in the tunnel, to use its seclusion, but the curve is death to sleep. Now I crouch under the slide and tear out sheets of newspaper, rolling them into apple-sized balls. I can’t read the financial pages any more so the pink ones are the first to go. Each one is forced into the gaps in my coat sleeves, the wool inflating until I am like the Hulk. And then I do the same to the legs of my jeans. In no time air is trapped in pockets and my body warms – the paper clings on to the heat. The remaining balls I arrange into the carrier bag from Amit’s oranges, and convert into a pillow. I lay the oranges by my head because the scent of them comforts me.
From here all I can see in the blue moonlight is the dulled metal underside of the slide. The position of it, sloping towards me upside down, gives me a sensation of vertigo. Vertigo. Mum wrote a paper about Vertigo, the film, and Proust, and how much the one had borrowed from the other. Madeleine Elster was Hitchcock’s heroine’s name. The connection was obvious, Mum said. Proust’s madeleines and his painter, Elstir, combined into one. And then, wasn’t Vertigo just a yearning for lost time? Wasn’t it the yawning abyss that caused the vertigo?
Mum was an academic above everything else, the kind of person who could only escape the gravity of life by manipulating herself with art. Rothko was her thing. I hadn’t really ever got on with the abstractness of him. It didn’t make sense to me, having a painting of just four colours. ‘But isn’t that just the incredible thing about him, Xander? That a person using four colours and no representational effort can paint oblivion? Don’t you find that amazing?’
She was the kind of person who looked up to rarefied heights, but down was where I wanted to be, with my nose in the dirt and the physics.
‘And you’re sure that you want to read the sciences?’ she’d said once. ‘You’re not exactly your father, you know.’
‘I know.’ Then I wondered how she couldn’t see that that wasn’t what I wanted at all. I didn’t want to be him. Not in a million years. Even so, I slid into Cambridge with four As to read Mathematics. Not science exactly, nor a degree to capture the imagination, but at least it meant something to other people, even if it meant nothing to me.
‘Fuck out of my patch.’
I sit up so quickly that I bang my forehead on the underside of the slide and then there’s this sickening thud in my ears as a wet boot strikes my temple. I cry out and try to focus but all there is is searing pain. It pounds and beats, freezing me even though I need to get myself ready to fight. I claw through the pain, waiting for my firing synapses to create space for me. My eyes shut until the ache recedes a little, just enough for me to move.
I look at him through screwed eyes and see that he’s smaller than me. He in turn rolls his eyes up and down me until he realises the same thing. I have always been big. I’ve taken up a seat and a half since I was fifteen. Never fat, or even muscular. Just big. Bones like old iron.
People avoid me on the streets. There are pockets of men here or there, malignant in places, benign in others, but they react the same. Usually they circle around me, never getting too close, in case they fall all the way in and down into the drain. And I don’t mind the wary distance. I don’t want them near me anyway. I don’t need the company that they all seem to crave in one another. So they leave me alone and I leave them to their hot clusters – of drugs, alcohol and hacking laughter. And if I miss the chance for conversation, I remind myself that I wouldn’t seek it amongst them anyway.
‘My fucking spot,’ the man says. His voice is so deep that I can feel it vibrate in my chest. It curls at the edges in drink. He is perhaps forty but it is hard to tell – street years carve deeper into the skin. In any case he is shades younger than me for sure. I look through the gloom into his eyes for some sentience but I can tell that he’s half-soaked.
‘Not tonight,’ I say, looking him dead in the eyes. My head pounds but I hold his gaze, because I know I have to.
‘Yeah?’ he says, his voice lifting now. ‘I know you. You’re the weirdo.’
He steps towards me and I see something winking in his hand.
My brother once said that statistically speaking the difference between winners and losers is that, over the longer term, losers give up.
‘Put the knife down,’ I say.
His eyes are rimmed in watery fury. There are tears streaming down his cheeks in rivers. No, not tears, rain. It has started to rain. That kick to the head must have been hard. Adrenaline is in play, I can tell, because my focus is too tight. I need to see the wider picture, but the periphery is stepping back into shadow, further and further.
‘That’s my fucking spot,’ he says again and then lunges at me.
My heart starts to race as the chemicals brim. Everything around me slows down. The surge gives me a kick of energy, of life, so that my eyes pop open and I feel myself stepping into the warmth of a chemical power. He comes towards me but I step to the side, dodging the blade easily.
He stumbles so I take the advantage and use his weight to push him to the ground, and then I kick him. These boots are made for kicking. Steel toes behind thick leather. He grunts. I kick him again in the ribs and then, before he has a chance to catch his breath, I drop to my knees and rip the knife out of his hand. It is just a small lock knife, fancy, but the blade’s sharp. I hold it under his chin and poke just hard enough to let out some blood.
He freezes.
‘You had enough?’ I say, my heart loud in my head.
‘Yeah,’ he says, nodding.
I get to my feet, the knife still gripped in my hand.
‘I’m keeping this,’ I say, and fold the knife and put it in my pocket. My heart is still racing. I make an effort to breathe slowly so that the one, the breath, can regulate the other, the heart.
‘It’s my fucking spot,’ he says again but he is crying now, real tears not just rain. ‘You took my spot.’ He rubs under his chin at the spot the knife pricked and for a moment I wonder whether I should just leave and give him his place back.