‘The one who followed you!’
Reuben is looking at me, an expression of disbelief, almost derision, on his face. ‘You look mad,’ he says in his blunt way.
I nod quickly, looking at the television. I can’t speak. It’s like I’ve only got so much brain power, and it’s all focused on one thing.
The woman is still speaking, the yellow and white tent – tent? – quivering in the wind.
I frown. Why was he only found at six o’clock? Was he drunker than I thought? He must have been freezing.
And then I replay the sentence in my mind. Discovered.
Goosebumps appear all over the back of my neck and on my shoulders. No. Please, no.
‘It’s always a dog walker,’ Reuben says. ‘Some scumbag’s left them traumatized.’
Some scumbag. That’s me.
He stands and goes into the kitchen, his empty coffee cup in his hand, and swills it out before putting it in the dishwasher.
‘The man was taken to hospital at six o’clock where he was unable to be resuscitated. The police are treating his death as a murder enquiry.’
Before I know what I’m doing, I am sliding off the sofa and am face down in our rug. My left hand protests at the bent angle, but I don’t care. I’m not crying. I’m doing something else. Something a wild animal might do. Keening. Rocking forward. My mouth open, but no sound coming out. The regret washes over me. I don’t care. I don’t care that Reuben is just over there, his back to me, pushing the dishwasher drawers into place – I’ll have to tell him now anyway. The dishwasher must be full, because he puts it on: he is so good, and so good to me.
Died.
Died shortly after.
Killed.
Murder enquiry.
Just like that. A life snuffed out. A few moments before, he was alive; a mesh of thoughts and hopes and views on music and books and the housing market. And now. Nothing. The machine off.
Reuben is living with a murderer. If I tell him, he will march me straight to the police station. Asking him not to would be like asking him to write with the other hand. Like telling him to vote Tory. To rob a bank. To smack a child.
And that bloody MP work he’s doing. How could he do that? Help his local MP out, while living with a known criminal? There’s no answer, I think, getting up off the rug and sitting down on the sofa.
It’s not even that. No, it’s something else. It’s because he would – privately, alone, so as not to upset me – quietly wonder at me. He loves me – in all my fecklessness, my messiness, my disorganization, my crap job – and this would give him pause. He’d never let on, but I know it would happen, like coming back into a hotel room and seeing it’s been cleaned, the towels re-stacked, the toilet paper folded into a point. You wouldn’t know unless you were looking for it. But I would know.
Reuben’s standing in the kitchen, his back to me. He turns, looking thoughtful. ‘There but for the …’ he says. ‘Imagine if you’d been a few hours later?’
I start to feel the same panic I felt in Little Venice. A pounding heart. My hands involuntarily making fists. A cold sweat over my back and shoulders. I wouldn’t be surprised if, when cut open, I saw that my blood was black, congealing, or that I was full of cockroaches, or had an anvil, nestled weightily in amongst my organs.
How can I tell him now? Now that it’s murder? It will ruin him. I will be the worst person he knows. An enemy.
And, in the back of my mind, right in the recesses, among the archives and the distant, half-formed memories, is something else. Seventeen. There is no way Sadiq was seventeen. And so … perhaps it was not Sadiq.
I can’t let myself think it. It was him. I was being pursued.
And that is why I killed.
That has to be true. Anything else would ruin me.
I fall asleep on the sofa in the early evening. My mind must be exhausted, but napping isn’t exactly unfamiliar to me: I spent my entire time at university taking illicit naps. My natural reaction is to switch off. To ignore. I sleep deeply, but dream of Sadiq.
Reuben wakes me with another coffee – he drinks so much of it, although it never seems to affect him – and walks out of the living room, probably going to his piano room to write up case notes. As he leaves, he says over his shoulder, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever known you to sleep talk.’
‘What?’ I say.
He laughs under his breath, as he walks down the hall, and says, ‘You were talking absolute rubbish.’
I can’t ask him. I can’t press him. But what if it was something damning? I draw my knees up to my chest and hope that it wasn’t.
I stare at the news, even though they’ve moved on from my story. I hear two sirens rush past, and jump both times, a layer of sweat materializing between my skin and my clothes. There are so many sirens in London.
I have never done anything alone in my life. I’ve led it by committee. Asking everybody’s opinions on how to have my hair cut and where to rent in London. Facebook and Twitter were devices where I outsourced my decisions to others. And now: I’m alone.
I have almost finished the coffee when Reuben walks back in. ‘You were apologizing, in your sleep,’ he says, as if no time has passed at all.
‘What for?’ I say.
‘Don’t know.’ He throws me a strange look. I must look guilty. ‘You just kept saying I’m sorry. Over and over.’
I should laugh it off, but I can’t. All I can think of is what I am sorry for.
Murder. I am sorry for murdering a man.
I meet Reuben’s eyes again. He is looking at me slightly quizzically. The slightest of frowns crosses his features.
‘Oh, right,’ I say faintly. ‘How strange.’
‘Unlike you,’ he says.
No.
Nobody must know. Not even Reuben. Especially not Reuben.
6
Reveal
I have been on my own for what feels like fifteen minutes. I’ve been given a cup of tea that tastes like cigarettes.
I wonder what the other people do in these cells. And then I see their sleeping forms in my mind, on those little screens in the custody suite. I look up, above the door, at the grimy ceiling – how did it become splattered with brown liquid so high up? – and I see it: the CCTV camera, white, like a robot, pointed down at me. I, too, will be on those screens. Being watched.
The hatch opens, and I jump.
‘You’ve eaten, I presume?’ a man says, and I shake my head.
‘We were going to eat after,’ I say.
Kebabs ;) Laura had WhatsApped me, when we were planning our night out.
‘And you’ve been drinking.’
I can’t answer him because he huffs as he slams the hatch, like I am an animal in a pen.
He appears again after a few moments. My body has begun to shiver and jerk. It was an accident, I want to tell him. I hear the hatch slide open and he peeks in.
‘All-day breakfast,’ he says.
He pushes a box through to me. If I wasn’t there to catch it, it would’ve dropped on the floor. It’s in a white plastic tray that’s steaming. It hurts my hands and I carry it by its rim over to the mattress. There’s no table.
He leaves again, and I remember a few weekends ago when I tried to make sweetcorn fritters. They came out like chicken feet, Reuben said.
Even through the heavy door, I can hear somebody say, ‘We’ve got a probable section eighteen in there. Worse if …’
A section eighteen? I wonder what that is. Maybe it’s police speak for somebody who is incorrectly detained; who will be released just as soon as her solicitor arrives.
Hypothesizing makes me uncomfortable, and I automatically reach for a mobile phone I no longer have, am no longer allowed to look at freely. It has been years since I have sat with nothing to do. I can’t even imagine eating my dinner without some device playing in front of me.