I’d have raised my eyebrows when Buddha was invoked. For me there was a simpler equation in the greenery of south London: it was a break from the grind. I think about this and wonder if that’s where it began, this need to escape my life? I don’t know. But we held hands here, I know that. ‘We should buy a place here somewhere,’ she said.
‘We should. We really should.’
‘Somewhere we can grow old together. And you can garden and I can bake.’
I laughed and drew her into my coat. I remember it now. ‘I don’t really see you as the baking sort,’ I said. She pulled away in mock indignation.
‘Hey!’ she said, before adding, ‘but what about that loaf I made once?’
I marvel at this now when I look back, that she’d loved me. When I examine myself for the same glints of beauty and magic that I saw in her, I can’t find them. She said I was honest and gentle. But most of all that I was brighter than her – that’s what attracted her most, she said. Clever men were hard to find, apparently. I rough over this memory because I know how fraudulent this claim of hers is.
From the café I circle round and head out towards Dulwich Park just across the way. There’s a fence around the perimeter edge but the planks are weather-worn and have come away from their nails. I pull a section back and step through into the vast grounds. I let my feet lead me. As I walk I have the sensation of being followed, but when I glance behind me, there are only trees.
The police seemed more interested in the Squire attack than in the woman lying dead in that house. It can only be because they don’t believe me. Did I look unhinged to them? I keep catching myself being hunted by ghosts – is that what they saw in me? I should have insisted on going to the house with them, because what if she’s still alive. Is there some sense in calling an ambulance, even now?
I shake some of the fug from my head. There’s still pain there but it’s ebbing away. To my right the ground climbs up a hill which I follow. The wet grass smells of my childhood and of Rory. If I can help it I hardly ever indulge Rory any more. I push him out whenever he draws close but sometimes, like now, when some scent catches me by surprise, I am taken bodily back to him. This wet grass and suddenly here he is, six or seven and rolling down a hill. Squealing. And then in the next instant, he is no longer six or seven but twenty-six. At the end of his life.
When he was twenty-six, Rory was found dead.
He comes to me like this, the full span of his life in a single slide. Childhood – adulthood – death. When I think of him the memories tug something inside. He fell from the eleventh floor of his apartment block in Holborn, but I’m not sure if I trust all the details of that memory or whether it’s a pastiche of imagined and real. But I do remember roaming the parks with him for hours on end when we were children, with a ten-pence piece for an emergency phone call just in case.
When I went to identify the body, I was alone. There was nobody left to me, no one to absorb the despair when it flowed over. Dad had been in a care home for over a year. In patches of lucidity he remembered Rory and in those moments, just as the scales fell from his eyes, and he learned again for the first time that Rory was gone, he’d crumble. His face would collapse, then his chest and finally, if he was sitting in a chair, he would sink to his knees and howl. And I would stand there, watching – with pity, but also with bitterness that he couldn’t help me. It wasn’t consolation, exactly, that I needed, but something to drive away the numbness.
Now as I sit with my back against a park bench, my heart beating fast, that feeling invades me again: the emotionless feeling of isolation. I coax some heat into the sleeves of my coat by rubbing them and think how I am the warmth of my life. How much energy life generates just to be and to continue being, and then when the time comes, as it did for Rory, the furnace just … stops.
I have to beat away the existentialism. Getting up, I tighten the coat around me and trace a path to the main entrance, walking quickly towards it. The ache in my temples has returned and is clouding the few thoughts that I have. She is dead, I know it. I remember now that I felt for her pulse and couldn’t find one. So I let her life be taken. The heaviness of that realisation crests over me. I don’t know anything about her. Who she was, what she did. What her name was. Her face presses up against my skull, becoming slowly, painfully familiar. I need to know more about who she is – was. And who killed her.
I could start by going back there. Maybe by now the police have notified the family and there’s someone there I can talk to. I could tell them that I was the one that found her and alerted police. That’s not too far from a version of truth and if I can comfort them with some— I stop myself in this thought. It’s not succour I have to give them, it’s something else – justice, or vigilantism. Because above all, they’d want him found. I want him found.
I quickly leave and find my way back on to the main road and begin to map the route to Farm Street. I can trace a path from Blue to Green Zones without ever having to look up. There is nothing to see out there anyway, I have come to understand that. There’s only what is at the feet. Everything else is just glister.
After a few miles of hard walking, I look up and the brass glints: 42B. Within I can see that the lights are on.
When I spoke to the police I couldn’t give them a good description of the man, but I can change that. He has to come or go at some point and all I have to do is stay here and watch him do it.
I take up a vantage point just past the sign for what looks like a business property, bordered by railings and sheltered a little from view. I plunge my hands into my coat pockets, forgetting momentarily that it’s not mine. My hand stalls in the pouch as it touches something unexpected. I pull it out. A cigarette pack. Seb – a smoker? He never used to be. I tap out a cigarette and seconds later I am inhaling smoke, relief flooding every nerve. It’s been some time since I had a clean one.
From here the door to 42B is easy to see and I’ll know when anyone comes or goes. The light burns a soft, expensive glow behind the window blinds. I strain to detect motion behind the glass, but so far there’s only the odd shadow falling across the pane to indicate life. I wait, and feel the February light running away and in its place, the cold arriving. It is piercing, but I’ll wait here all night if I have to – for her sake. What was her name? Did he call something out as he put his ear to her lips? Chelle? My heart thuds over something but I am not sure what.
I smoke the cigarette to its embers and flick it into the street. My bones are beginning to seize from the deepening cold. My head drums up an ache once again and I crouch in the doorway to ease the pain. Once the throbbing has died away a little, I lean in against the door in a familiar position. I used to sit this way for hours, in those first days on the streets, when I needed to catch up with the chaos in my head, and to silence it. Eventually the silence descended, on the third or fourth day, in a doorway just like this one. I was watching people flowing past as if they were parts of a river, their legs washing by. Then silence came when I discovered there was only me in the world – me on one side and everything else held aloft on the other. The weight of my existence in perfect counterweight to the entire universe.
I think of Grace sometimes in terms of her weight against mine – hers an equal and opposing force to mine. We were opposites that attracted. For example, I couldn’t get on board with the whole Buddhism thing. I didn’t understand how a rational, mathematical mind could be so seduced by what was essentially fable and myth-making. But she didn’t see what I saw.