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Back I Know What I Saw Save as PDF
Chapters (59)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise for I Know What I Saw
  3. By the Same Author
  4. Dedication Page
  5. 1
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  54. Now read on for a preview
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  59. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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