‘Oh. You found the plasters,’ he says with a smile when I walk into the kitchen. They tingle a little on my forehead. ‘Nieces. There are eggs and bacon there.’ He points to a covered plate. ‘And fresh coffee in the pot.’ He is wearing a grey suit with a Prince of Wales check, a pale blue shirt and a crimson tie with tiny elephant motifs on it. He takes me in, dressed in his checked shirt and red trousers, and smiles. Then he stands and gathers his keys from the table. The smell of bacon turns my stomach on and off again. But I need to eat.
‘Thanks,’ I say, sitting down. He looks at me as if he is about to say something but changes his mind.
‘Listen, I have to go to work,’ he says, looking at his watch. It’s a Rolex Milgauss. I had one once – because it was named after the mathematician.
‘We can talk when I get back. Should be back around six. Help yourself to whatever you want,’ he says. He pauses when he sees the agitation in my expression. ‘It’s fine, it’s just me in the house.’
‘Thanks, Seb,’ I say. ‘But I’ll get out of your hair. And I’ll get these back to you if you can show me where you put my other clothes.’
He stops in the doorway and turns to face me. His smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
‘Xander. No. Please. Just stay.’
‘I don’t know. I find being indoors – it’s hard for me.’
He stops and then fumbles around in his pocket until his wallet appears in his hands. I recoil but he isn’t giving me money.
‘Then take a walk. Jump on a bus, get some air. Here, take my old Oyster. There’s thirty quid or something on it. But stay – at least till I get back,’ he says.
I nod, but I am sure I’ll be gone for good when he returns. Besides, he hasn’t given me a key.
Once he’s gone I sit and shovel food into my mouth. I pour some coffee and take a deep draught. The caffeine circulates warmly through my body until cell by cell my body shakes itself free from sleep. As the energy returns to my muscles, I go into the living room which is pale and bright. Polished surfaces wink at me from every sharp edge. All this new furniture but I know this room, this house – I know its bones, even if the flesh is new. I look for more signs of Nina, but find none. What happened to her?
A television set the size of a Rothko decorates one wall, a set of stereo equipment with tubular speakers lies beneath. I find just one picture of Seb on the mantel. In it he’s twenty-two maybe, his cheeks pink against an azure sky. There’s just the faintest impression of a college building in the background. And there at the front is Nina, and next to her, Grace.
I think I remember some of this day. I was there during this picture, I am sure of it, though I am not in it. Maybe I’m behind the lens. The odd thing is that in my memory of this picture, I am in it. I can visualise the expression I held, impatience I think it was, because I didn’t want to be in it.
Seb looks the same. Perhaps he’s rounder in the cheek in the picture than now, and less grey. But the eyes are the same shade of blue. And although it shouldn’t, this surprises me. The hands, they’re the same too. And he, above all, is the same. There’s still this current of beauty.
The sofa gives way under the weight of my body. I am sinking into it and the sensation is foreign and alarming. I get up quickly and lie instead on the carpet. The moment my head touches the twisted wool, pain erupts, images of that night cascade. The man is standing over her, pressing his weight on her as she kicks and struggles. I can see it from where I am on the floor, but fear or cowardice binds my hands and mouth.
If I had stood up, then what?
The edge of her face flashes before my eyes in the dying light of the fire. Her skin is already flat, pale. The red stain on her shirt is still spreading. It travels until it reaches her neck and then it spills over, pooling in the dips created by her throat. And then it rises and rises until it is up to her chin. It brims over her lips for a second and then her eyes snap open. She screams as the blood fills her mouth.
I open my eyes and catch the ceiling as it begins to drop on to my head. The walls begin to move, too. I have to get out of here.
Once opened, the front door lets in a wave of cold air that forces me to shut it again. I can’t leave in this weather without better clothes and shoes. I go up to the bedroom I slept in and root around the wardrobe there. A few old suits hang from the rail along with a few white and some pastel-coloured shirts. There are some polished Oxfords and Monks at the bottom but nothing you could wear for long in the cold and the wet. There are some brand new walking shoes with the labels still on but I leave them there and try his room instead.
Seb’s room, softly lit, is laced with the scent of lime and basil. I flick the hangers along, looking guiltily for a coat. There are new cashmere and wool ones, but I take a heavy wool one instead. I try it on and find that it fits nicely enough even though he is a little thicker and shorter than me. His clothes, all those chinos and pale shirts, haven’t changed a bit, either. His life has cocooned him.
I worry about taking them but he has more clothes than he can wear. It’s fine. I look down at the brogues and keep tight hold of the thirty pounds of Oyster. At the end of everything, I know he is my friend. Or was my friend. But friends, real ones, like siblings, can’t be lost through the effluxion of time. They are stars, still in their places, whether you look at them or not.
I walk quickly down the stairs and pause at a mirror by the front door. I peel away the plaster from my face. In less than a day, I have become reborn. Almost thirty years of living have been wiped out with cotton and wool and a bath. Except inside, where I know the layers are tougher and the marks run more deeply.
12
Thursday
In these clothes I can visit the places that my ordinary life prevents me from accessing. I walk into the grounds of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, pulling the velvet collar of my coat to my face. I think I’m here because I need a kind of privileged space to think in peace and comfort. Walking liberates me. It frees me from the oppression of stasis and that feeling of being locked in with myself. But when I move across open space, it’s as if the locks come undone and I can bear to be with myself a little longer. The longer I am free, the easier I find my shadow as company. I’m less fraught, less … chemically volatile.
I wonder about what the police said about this man, Squire. Those pictures showed him as pretty badly attacked. He wasn’t when I saw him though, was he? I’m sure they’ve made a mistake arresting me for it. I would have remembered doing that or anything like that to him. But then, do the police arrest people for no reason at all? Though they do have targets and clear-up rates and papers to think about. Or is there another reason that they arrested me? Could I have lost time, like I did at the hospital? But even if I had, I wouldn’t have blocked the whole thing out, something would have stayed with me. I look around the grounds and feel some satisfaction at coming to this place to reason everything out in peace. It’s only when I’m near the café that I realise that we came here once before, Grace and I.
We worked long hours in the City, both of us, occasionally working through till dawn. When we pulled those all-nighters, they’d give us time off in lieu, and on those precious days we made a tradition of heading into south London for some green. It wasn’t quite the idyll of Cambridge, but it was leafy and philosophically a hundred miles away from our north-of-the-river home. It meant different things to each of us. For Grace being out here met her spiritual needs. ‘The grass, walking on it, is grounding,’ she’d said. ‘It takes up all those free electrons floating about. And in Buddhist philosophy—’