I unravel my coat, letting my shoes drop to the Victorian tile. There is the cold of something hard and flat against my skin but I pull my coat over it, wrapping myself up. Its dampness and weight gives me the sensation of walking through mud. I pull open the door with the edge of my sleeve and I am outside. The cold night air washes over my face and into my lungs. I breathe once, then, keeping my head low, I run. I have to hide. A man like me knows about hiding, but tonight I have to hide from myself because I can sense it coming upon me. A feeling of claustrophobia, of meeting myself in my head, and when that happens, I’ll have to leave myself, become nobody. I’m not hiding from the police, it’s not that at all.
Before. Before, when I was like you, I had your problems and your conveniences. I know you think that we spontaneously appear, caked in dirt, and that we just materialise on the street, but we don’t. Remember, we bring ourselves here from some warm place. We only come when the balance weighs in favour of leaving, when the problems of staying outweigh the rest. I was like you, before. For example, I used to have a brother.
I stop for a breath as I round Hyde Park Corner Tube. I drop my head and hurry towards Westminster – Green Zone – each stride stretching sinew so that I can cover as much distance as possible in the wet.
I had a brother. Have. Had?
As I hit Pimlico the traffic begins to thin. This is London so it never spreads so thinly that it has the feeling of winding down. There is only a shift in patterns. The tempo is reduced by the tiniest fraction. The urgency is less. Commerce is plying its night shift where the demands are different. I remember the thrust of commerce, how it felt under one’s arm, pushing forward.
Memory and history are not the same thing.
When I remember my life before, I am really reimagining it, in flashes, in tiny abstract glimpses. And in that memory, I compose my own rhythm, close enough to match the original percussion, but far enough to be no better than an improvisation inspired by it. But in the end, I always wash up in the same place with the same question. How did it all begin?
Dad, for instance. Could you say, it all began with him?
‘Xander,’ he said once. ‘You’re so bright. Why do you have to be so disruptive?’
He spoke to me, away from Rory. He convinced himself it was so that he didn’t embarrass me, but I knew the truth was that he didn’t know what I was capable of saying.
‘Maths is boring,’ I told him. His brown eyes, large and cow-like, made me despise him.
‘You need the maths to understand the physics,’ he said.
But Mum overheard this and hovered close.
‘Proust. Try Proust, if you’re bored,’ she said.
Only an academic would think of saying something like that to a child, I think now.
As I step on to the bridge, the sound of police sirens makes my heart flutter. If they are racing to her, they’re too late. And I wonder then about that. I was too slow to affect anything. I was much too slow. If I had done something, maybe she would be alive.
The pain asserts itself again and is now a cage over my head. For a minute I wonder if my mind is playing tricks on me. Did I really witness a woman being killed? And then I think of it. Yes. The crack, the thud and spilled blood. I know what’s coming next. It’s knocking. It announces its arrival so mundanely, the guilt. I tense my body against all that guilt, coming for me.
Having crossed the bridge, I’m now skirting the back alleys and cobbled side roads that my body knows intimately. In the Blue Zone there are squats where I could stay but I don’t want to. Homeless communities are everywhere and I know about the sorts of lives that people have survived. I see how the chaos seems to cling to them. I can’t take up their share of space. And I know they’ll try to exert a kinship over me, and I’ll want to tell them to leave me alone, that we are not the same. That above all I did this to myself, for myself.
My immediate viable choices then are to find a dry space in the park or under a bridge, or to walk all night until it becomes light and then sleep. It is halfway to dawn. The adrenaline leaving my body has caused other chemicals to bring on sleep. I pass a navy metal stand, piled high with free newspapers, and pick up four Metros without breaking my stride.
I skirt around the Elephant and Castle and take a seat on a bus – the driver turns a blind eye. There are no more than a few passengers, each of them in his own pocket of life, misery or joy. My left eye is still misty but is now beginning to burn. I press it gently against the cold window to soothe it and see that the rain which had let up has started again.
I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m going and begin to drift in and out of sleep. Then as the bus shudders over some pothole, I’m jolted from sleep into another oblivion and I remember the house again and that a woman was killed. And that I was there.
The night spins around me. This pain, this rain, the tiredness. A swell of nausea builds and makes me retch. I have to find somewhere soon. Just to rest. I press the bell again and again for the driver to stop but he drives on. ‘Just let me off,’ I shout. He glances in a mirror and finally he opens the door.
I find a doorway on the street and lean my weight against it. The space between action and inaction stalls my thoughts. I can see her face in front of me, frozen as it was then. Still. If I had acted she might be alive and yet I wonder if I would have been. Or him, if he would have been.
There is a drip from the ceiling of my tiny patch of shelter that lands in maddening spots on my knee. I separate my legs to make room for it but then it taps on the tile. The rhythm begins to soothe me and I fall into a kind of trance. Sleep paws until I am asleep.
6
Wednesday
One Friday each month, Dad, who was a physicist, would sit us around a table and set us a random topic of discussion. He’d listen and occasionally mediate, and then at the end he’d hand out a prize for the best ideas. Answers, he told us, weren’t important. To think, that was the important thing. The prizes weren’t particularly exciting by today’s standards – an Airfix model airplane once, a small electric motor and some circuits another time. Once there was a skateboard – that was misjudged. But the prizes, like all prizes, were icons – declarations of superiority.
Of the two of us, Rory was the genius. I was the impressionist – a fake. He had the beautiful brain. I had the right arrangement in my head, but it didn’t produce the same music. And Dad, though he loved us both, loved perfection and purity most of all. He loved maths. When he saw numerical puzzles, he somehow saw the Universe in a way that I couldn’t – but Rory could. Rory was a pure mind. But he was younger than me, so for a while I could mask the symptoms of his genius. I remember how urgent it was that I hold him back to give myself a chance of winning something. Maybe just love.
The Fermi paradox: that was the one, now I think back, that changed everything. You’ll know the one, Fermi, a physicist, asked about extraterrestrial life: If there are so many trillions of planets in the observable universe and billions of Earth-like planets among them, where are all the people? And why haven’t we heard from them?
When he set the discussion, Dad played at being the casual benign professor, as if the questions spontaneously occurred to him. But I’d known for some time that they came from the back of a monthly physics magazine. So I occasionally went to the local library when the new issue came out and had a quick preview. And one day there it was: Fermi. Rory loved space and astrophysics and there was no way of beating him without a head start. So, I cheated. For a week I read everything I could on the subject at the school library, and even spoke to the physics teacher after lessons.