‘I am, really,’ I said. ‘In a way. There was something wrong with me, but now it’s different. It’s the things around me. I know you’re getting tired of Widow Falkner and her endless tales of woe, so I’ll give you the short version.’
Well, fairly short. I told them the events of the previous days in as compressed a way as I could manage. At the end of it, Mary and Gwen exchanged an alarmed, confused glance. I drained my glass. ‘I mean, what would be the point of giving the police an alibi that I knew wasn’t true, then removing the evidence before they could check it? I mean, what’s the point of that? How would you explain it?’
There was a pause.
‘There must have been a mix-up of some kind,’ said Gwen.
I was now having to concentrate very hard to speak, let alone think. ‘I keep trying to think of logical explanations,’ I said, ‘but all I come up with are illogical ones. For example, I thought that maybe one of you went down there to check whether the alibi was right, found it wasn’t and took it away to protect me. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?’
‘Of course not,’ said Mary.
‘We should have had margaritas,’ said Gwen. ‘Martinis are too dangerous.’
‘You can’t have margaritas here,’ I said. ‘Margaritas are Mexican. They’d be offended.’
‘But martinis are even foreigner,’ said Mary. ‘More foreign.’
We came out of the bar as it was closing and the cold air seemed to clear my head immediately. I hugged my friends and thanked them.
‘You don’t think the police will arrest you, do you?’ Gwen said. ‘They can’t. Not really.’
I pulled my coat tightly around me to protect me from the wind whistling up Camden High Street. Suddenly things came into focus.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure if it all fits together. If suddenly I was found dead and it looked as if I’d killed myself, it would be good enough. A grief-stricken widow, a guilty murderer who felt the net closing over her and couldn’t take the pressure any more. They would be able to close the files on three cases at the same time. If the pieces didn’t quite fit, if it didn’t make complete sense, well, life’s messy, isn’t it? But it would be good enough for the police.’
‘Ellie,’ said Gwen, horrified, ‘you mustn’t say that.’
I saw a taxi and raised my arm to hail it. ‘But if anything happens to me,’ I said, ‘you’ll remember I said it, won’t you?’
I went to bed exhausted, but my nerves were jangling, my mind racing and I knew that sleep was impossible. I tried every trick I could think of to make my brain forget about trying to go to sleep so that it could just go to sleep. I relaxed, I concentrated, I mimicked a supposedly sleep-like regular breathing, eyes closed. I opened them, stared into the darkness and said to myself, That’s what blind people see. I tried to think of something boring, I tried to think of something interesting. I began to wonder how I had ever managed to fall asleep in the past. How can you manage an action that isn’t an action, but instead just a letting-go? I became obsessed with the idea that you can never observe yourself going to sleep, in the same way – I supposed – that you can never experience yourself dying. So I began to think that there must be an earlier falling-asleep you do before you fall asleep, like the pre-med before an operation, so that you don’t observe yourself falling asleep. But you’re not conscious of that either, so that must be preceded by another, and another, so that actually it’s impossible ever to fall asleep.
As a deranged way of trying to tire myself out and force myself into unconsciousness, I went for a journey in my head, as if thinking about something was as tiring as doing it. I walked out of the house, turned left, then left again and went down to the canal, past Camden Lock through Primrose Hill, then out into Regent’s Park, along Euston Road and back through Somers Town, Camden Town and towards home. It was like a feverish dream, except that I was awake and in control of it.
At first I tried to imagine it as a simple walk through the city but then I had the impression I was being chased, but I couldn’t see who was behind me, couldn’t tell whether I was being pursued by one person or many, or even whether it was a person or a thing. I just had the feeling that people were out there and that they were hostile to me. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, I knew that on my imaginary trek I wasn’t being hunted. I was looking for something, following something and I realized it was you. I wasn’t just looking for you but I started talking to you and I wondered whether it made any sense for me to talk to you, whether you existed outside my mind and the minds of people who knew you. Was some remnant of you somewhere in some darker dark than the dark in which I was lying? If I didn’t believe you were out there somewhere – and I didn’t, not really – it didn’t make sense for me here, in the dark, to talk to you, and you were ‘him’ again, Greg, a thing, something past and gone.
Suddenly the temptation to yield not only to sleep but to death felt irresistible, leaving the harsh noises and bright lights, the jabs, pains and torments of life for the absence, for the nothingness, to join you, to be with you, or at least to share nothingness with you. For a time, as I lay there, listening to sounds from outside, watching the beams of headlights crossing the ceiling, I felt that anyone who killed me would be doing me a favour.
I lay in bed, peacefully, stolidly awake, for what must have been hours, waiting for the curtain edges to grow light, and then I realized that the shortest day of the year had only just passed and that daylight was still far away. I fumbled for my watch on the bedside table, knocking a lamp over. It was just after five. I got out of the bed, pulled on jeans, a shirt, a sweater, a thicker sweater on top of that, walking boots, then a bulky jacket of the kind you might wear on a trawler and a woolly hat. I left the house and started to walk, not as I had in my waking dream but northwards.
Remember in the summer when we walked out on Hampstead Heath late at night? It was so warm that we had been in T-shirts and it was never entirely dark. From the top of Kite Hill we watched the glow in the sky over in the far east of London, and the office blocks of the City and Canary Wharf glowed wastefully even after midnight. We saw shadows and silhouettes around us, but we didn’t feel threatened by them. They were out walking like us, or even, some of them, sleeping under the stars, by choice or necessity.
As I walked up Kentish Town Road I saw a few other pedestrians, stragglers from last night or early birds heading for work. There were taxis and delivery vans and cars, because the traffic never stops, barely even slackens. But once I turned on to the Heath, I felt as safe as we had felt in the summer. It was too dark and cold even for criminals or mad people, except mad people like me who were just looking for one of the few places in London where you could escape. I walked up the hill so that I could look over the lights of London, distant and abstract and glittering, as if I was flying above it. I went further up the hill and to the right, and walked deeper into the Heath on paths lit only by the moon, finding my way by memory on routes I had taken dozens of times before. The early-morning air felt fierce and good on my cheeks.
Finally I found myself surrounded by the dim skeleton shapes of oak trees. I stopped and listened. There wasn’t even the hum of traffic that you hear everywhere else in the city. I was in the centre of London and yet I was in an ancient forest as old as England. I looked up at the branches. Were they standing out more clearly as the sky turned from black to grey? Was the dawn coming? Sometimes on these winter mornings you couldn’t tell.
I started to talk to you, not because I thought you were somehow present, not in the wind that was shifting the branches, but because it was a place we had been together and that had somehow become a part of us. I told you the story of my life since you had gone away. I told you about my strange behaviour, my madness, my distrust of you and then my belief in you. How it had been so hard, such an effort, how I had wanted to give up.