“He’s married, you know.”
“Who is?”
“Him … Him, across there, in that office block, that stinking office … He’s married. But not to her, not to that woman, his colleague from the café. No, he’s married to someone else.”
“Oh. Him.”
“Yes. Him. He has children too, two daughters. I’ve seen him with them. I know where they live. I know what she, his wife, does. I know everything there is to know about them … With their perfect life that isn’t perfect, him acting like it’s the most natural thing in the world, you know, that’s how bad he is, a walking male cliché. He acts like he’s doing nothing wrong. He swans around that stinking office in his expensive clothes that are a little too tight for comfort, he swans around that stinking office without a care in the world. But I know who he is. I could change all that. I could change all of it. He doesn’t even remember me … We have already met, we have spoken to each other before today, you know …”
“Where? When did you speak?”
“We have spoken before, briefly. He placed his hand on my shoulder … He tried to comfort me.”
“When? Where?”
“Yet … that moment, the moment we shared, he has no recollection of it now … He doesn’t want to remember, he has blotted me out of his life … He chooses to ignore who I am, what I did … What I did to change things in his life …”
“What!?”
“When I chose to kill his father. When I took his father from him … Has it taken you this long to work it out? A cliché as grand as this?”
“Where did you speak to him, his son?”
“At his father’s funeral.”
“You went to the funeral?”
“Yes.”
“Why on earth would you do that?”
“I sat on the back row in the church, near Old Street. On my own. Looking at the coffin, with him inside, all alone. The family mourning his death, openly, repeating the patterns and action of the mourners they had observed before them as children. I could see him, the son, ahead, sitting up at the front, next to his wife. During the ceremony, I think it was Catholic, he turned around to look at me three times. I knew that he had noticed me … He must have been wondering why I was there … A friend of his father’s maybe? A friend of his mother’s? But that didn’t make sense to him. I’m too young, too different from them … Maybe he thought I was someone connected with the church? You get that don’t you?”
“Get what?”
“Lone women, with no direction, who dedicate their whole lives to subservience in the church …”
“But you said you both have spoken to each other … That he touched your shoulder?”
“We did …”
“Why did you do that?”
“I wanted to tell him that I was sorry …”
“Sorry?”
“Yes. Sorry.”
“So … he knows …?”
“Knows?”
“That you killed his father?”
“No. He was too stupid, thinking of himself too much to realise just what I meant. When I think back about it now it must have happened too suddenly for him to have realised, let alone to remember later on. But when I think back … to that moment … It was the longest moment in my entire life. My only moment. The only moment that mattered if I think about it. To say sorry … To admit … So, I was standing outside when he approached me. I was watching all the mourners as they stepped out of the church after me. There were quite a few. I just wanted to watch them. I didn’t want to speak to anyone. I wanted to quietly leave when I had finished, you know? When I had had enough. But then he just walked over to me. He just smiled and asked me if we knew each other. I told him that I knew his father. His smile broadened. I looked at him and after a short intake of breath I just let the words tumble from my mouth: ‘I’m sorry, for what happened. I’m sorry your father had to die.’ It was at this moment that he put his hand on my shoulder. It felt right, so right. But he didn’t even give me a second thought, couldn’t even remember me, so, so it’s all over isn’t it? It’s all come to nothing … Everything is just moving along as it always does, in steadfast indifference … Nothing we do matters, nothing I could ever say matters. I killed him and it doesn’t matter.”
“How could he recognise you …? In the café … Funerals are stressful times.”
“He had to recognise me. That’s all he had to do …”
“But … Well, at least … at least you got to say sorry to him.”
“It means nothing if it’s never heard, absolutely nothing.”
I shuffled closer to her. I was happy that we had found shelter beneath the engineered hulk of the bridge.
It was my grandfather’s funeral. I was standing around the open grave as his dark coffin was lowered into the sodden, muddy hole. I was standing with my father and mother. She was crying, my father stoically staring at the coffin, his father inside. We sheltered from the rain under my father’s large umbrella. My brother was facing me, on the other side of the open grave, standing with an aunt. I remember the sound of the rain hitting the muddy earth, the gravestones, the scattered sarcophagi and the umbrellas of the collected mourners present, drowning out the pious words of the vicar. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying, although I knew he was saying something as I could see his mouth moving, forming words. I could see him gesticulating above the coffin. But I couldn’t hear anything. It was useless. It became meaningless. It didn’t seem real, something that was supposed to be the only thing in life that was real and meant something, but it just didn’t seem real at all. Everyone seemed to be acting out their parts, in the mud and the rain. None of this seemed to bother those present, as if they had heard it all before anyway, accepting it all, as if that was how it should be. I looked up at a relative whom I barely knew. She was loudly sobbing. There was something odd about her tears and sobs, something not quite right, as if she was really thinking of something else, pretending to listen and care, her mind elsewhere, hoping it would all soon be over, so she could get back to her car and out of the rain. I looked at everyone else. It was obvious that they didn’t really want to be there. It was obvious to me that they had simply been told to act that way.
* * *
The rain was horrendous. It was pouring towards the earth like the soil demanded it. I wanted it to stop, as much as I knew how futile my wishes were. The clouds were darkening further, and the whole canal — especially looking out from underneath the bridge — began to take on an altogether threatening hue: dark, angry and metallic, like it was primed with violent electricity. Threatening. The once murky water looked jet black, like a river of oil. She blew her nose on a handkerchief and brushed her hair back behind her ears.
“I don’t mind the rain …”
“It rains too much for me to like it …”
“All I wanted was for him to recognise me …”
“But … why?”
“So he can see I’m just like everyone else, that I’m not some monster. So he could see that I was just like him … before …”
“Before what?”
“Before the police eventually find me and I’m not given the chance to make people realise that I’m just like them …”