In this new disguise, in Seb’s suit, I discover a thing. People smile at me. I want to smile back but the joy is trapped somewhere underneath, like an air bubble.
I pick my way around the perimeter of the grounds, skirt the edge of a sunken ornamental pool and walk uphill. When I reach the top, there is a view of London that stretches out for miles: the Shard, the Gherkin, the Walkie Talkie. London has changed so that there are now pinnacles of glass at every turn. All these buildings with names fit for children have sprung up as if from a giant pop-up book. Grace might have loved this change. Or hated it. Or accepted it, grudgingly. Instead she missed it.
There are a few people by a bandstand, taking in the view, as I crest the slope and walk round the edge. And then I see what I am looking for.
Still here, after all these years. I touch the edge and feel the grain under my fingertips. Our bench. The warm burnt-umber tones have given way to weathered silver, but it is unmistakeably the bench. The plaque is still here:
In memory of Dad.
So Much Lost Time
The memory of her warm body comes crashing back. From here the world is as it was, a pocket in time, she and I together, our nerves exposed and sensitive to the touch. The rush of memory paralyses me. I realise finally that she and everything she was, and all that she was promised to be, is gone.
And I sink.
Sitting on the bench, I feel a knot in my stomach being stretched taut. Here she is, next to me, warm and real, against all of this cold everywhere. Before I can control it, I am crying. And it’s as if I’m being pulled across every second of my life and being burned by it.
When the tears finally peter out, I find myself sitting on the grass and leaning against the seat. I press my hands into the ground to lever myself upright, but the sensation of the damp soil between my fingers triggers something. In the memory I have, I am digging. Clawing into the earth with my fingers. There, just behind the bench. I know it is here. Whatever it is.
And so now I move behind the seat and crouch. There are walkers nearby but they look away, afraid, as if I am about to do something unthinkable. I plunge my hand into the ground and dig. I scrape away a handful of wet, hard soil. Then, before I know what is happening I am digging desperately. One after another clumps of soil are hooked out of the ground. I dig as though beneath this foot of grass, there is a treasure or a life or some precious thing that needs air. I claw again and again but I don’t quite understand why.
Through the damp soil my hands touch plastic and I stop. The corner of something smooth and plastic is poking through the ground but it’s too far below ground to see. I tug at it and it slides out before catching in the mud. Another pull dislodges more earth and finally it comes free, cascading damp earth as it does.
I lay it on the ground and stare at it, as if a dream has suddenly taken on form. I remember this thing. A clear plastic sack. Thick. Inside there is something that has been carefully wrapped in newspaper. Something that I have carefully wrapped in newspaper. At the very outer threshold of my mind I remember this. It comes now in an avalanche. I remember wrapping these things. I recall the nervousness I’d felt as I did it. This has to do with Grace.
The mouth of the bag falls open and I put my hand in. I take a corner of the newspaper wrapping and tear it off. I read the date across the top:
30 December 1989
46
Friday
There is no doubt. Looking at this thing in my hand, there is no doubt. It was me. It was me after all.
I pick up the bag and tuck it inside my jacket and run out of the grounds. I have to get out of here.
I break out again into a run, my hands and sleeves covered in soil. My knees damp and dirty. I remember burying this but I can’t remember what happened before. My head pounds as I run. The boundary wall draws near and I jump it. I don’t want the exit now. These gates are meant for people. Thoughts riot in my head.
Did I know this? Did I know that I killed her? Am I perpetrating huge diversions against myself? Am I just playing chess against myself, pretending that I haven’t seen the plan behind the move? I am drawing myself in tighter and tighter coils into a box.
I must have known it all along. This – what is in this bag – proves it.
After ten minutes of running, I am at Seb’s. I push my way past him when he answers the door and barge into the kitchen.
‘Xander?’ he says, following me, puzzled.
I look at him and the ease drops out of his face like a bag of cement.
‘Shit, Xander,’ he says, taking in my muddied form. ‘What happened at court?’
I walk straight to the table and begin to peel back the wet plastic in my hand.
‘Xander? What’s going on?’
I ignore him and carry on unwrapping. The newspaper-packaged bundle is dry.
‘Xander.’
I peel back the paper carefully and expose what has been lying underneath it for nearly thirty years.
‘The missing piece,’ I say.
How can it be? And yet it is. The fragmented recollections aren’t needed any longer and can’t save me now. The proof is there in front of me.
‘Missing piece of what?’ says Seb, as I sit on the chair nearest to me.
‘The record,’ I say, looking up at him. He’s my only friend, and now the sole witness to my unravelling. ‘I killed her, Seb,’ I gasp. ‘It was me.’
It takes some time for him to cajole me out of my daze. In broken sentences I tell him about the evidence. The record piece, the prints, everything.
‘This will prove it,’ I say, lifting the piece to him with a scrap of the newspaper.
He looks startled, concerned – on the cusp of panic. ‘You have to give it to them. It might help you.’
As he says this he starts to rewrap the thing in its paper.
‘Help me? It incriminates me.’
He stops, mid-wrap.
‘Why did I bury it, Seb? Why would I do that unless—’
‘Don’t,’ he interrupts. ‘No. There must be another explanation.’
He stops and runs his hands through his hair. He is astounded and casts about for what to do or say next, because there is only one explanation.
‘Shit,’ he says finally. ‘Do you remember doing it?’
I shake my head and as I do I feel the tears. I try and blink them back. I don’t deserve to cry at this. I killed Grace.
‘I don’t fully,’ I say. ‘Sometimes when I learn something new, it changes what I remember. I remember this now,’ I say, pointing to the record. ‘I remember burying it.’
‘Shit,’ he repeats. He pushes the record back into the bag. ‘Wait,’ he says then, spotting something at the bottom of it and reaching in.
‘What is it?’
‘I’ve seen this before,’ he says and holds it up.
Seeing it sends a shiver down my spine. It’s a pendant in the shape of a tiny gold shell.
‘Chelle,’ I say under my breath. ‘Michelle.’
The plastic bag lies fat on the table, stained in mud. After a while it begins to shimmer in my peripheral vision. But it isn’t alone. It is here with everything I had forgotten. It’s here with things that I didn’t even know I knew, let alone forgot. I stand up suddenly and push back my chair.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asks.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I don’t know what I can do. ‘I’m going to lie down,’ I say at last and then make my way upstairs. I can’t go now. He’ll stop me. I have to wait till he is asleep.