I Know What I Saw

by S K Sharp

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘The last part is a summary. She was more graphic.’

  I look round furtively and whisper, ‘So she doesn’t know you’ve already—’

  Kat elbows me, hard this time. ‘Shut up! Anyway, I never said I had.’ But she bloody has, the sneaky cow.

  I raise an eyebrow. ‘Did you leave the party with Gary Barclay last night?’

  Kat rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t you start.’

  ‘Well, did you?’

  Kat shakes her head. I’m not sure if I believe her but I know Kat: if she doesn’t want to say then she won’t, not even to me.

  We reach the path and stop for a bit to see what all the fuss is about, but it’s only lots of workmen over on the building site shouting at each other as they pour concrete into the big hole that they spent most of last month digging. It’s nothing exciting, and then I see Dec on the edge of the crowd, waving at me. I quickly say goodbye to Kat and then I run to him.

  6

  Saturday 1st February 2020

  I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here with Detective Scott, talking about that night in 1985. An hour? Two? I’ve lost myself so deep in the memories that I’ve almost forgotten why I’m here. That’s how it can be, sometimes: I’ll let myself follow one memory and a thousand more pop up all around me. Suddenly, I’m not in 2020 any more but 1992, or 2001, or 1985 – every single memory as vivid to me as this morning’s breakfast.

  ‘That’s it,’ I say. ‘I saw Dec again the next morning, on the way to school. He was waiting for me.’ And this, I think to myself, should be the end of it; because by the time I left Declan and went home, Arty Robbins was already missing.

  Detective Scott gives me a look that he’s given maybe half a dozen times now. A part of him still wants to think I’m making things up, but mostly he believes me.

  At least I think he believes me.

  ‘When you saw Mr Robbins the next morning, did he seem … in any way unusual? Stressed? Secretive?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he say anything about what he did, after you saw him leave his house?’

  ‘He told me he went back to the Shelley and that he stayed the night there.’

  ‘Didn’t that strike you as a bit strange?’

  Not as strange as Detective Scott might expect, but I don’t think I’ll be going into that right now. ‘He stayed there because his mum stayed there, too. No, it didn’t strike me as strange at the time.’ Which is true as far as it goes. ‘You have talked to Anne Robbins about that night?’

  Detective Scott makes a sour face. ‘Ms Walker, for the record, how clear would you say you are in your recollection of events?’

  ‘I recall everything about that night as clearly as I see you in this room,’ I say. I’m tired of this. I’ve spent my whole life being told that what’s completely natural to me can’t possibly be true. I’ve seen the look on Detective Scott’s face a thousand times: that even mix of curiosity and doubt that people have when they start to believe I’m not making it up, that maybe I really do have an exceptional memory. A part of him is wondering what the trick is; another part how good it really is – how far back, and how deep, my memory really goes. If we had time, he might ask. I’d tell him, too.

  ‘One more question: was Daniel Robbins there that night?’

  It takes me a moment to place the name. Daniel Robbins. Kat’s father. Declan’s uncle. Arty Robbins’ brother.

  ‘No,’ I say. And why is he asking about a man who left Wordsworth Park before Kat was even born and who never once came back?

  ‘Are you sure? Would you have known him, if you’d seen him?’

  ‘Probably not. I never met him. I’ve seen pictures, since, but of him when he was much younger. So no, but … Detective, Daniel Robbins had been gone for almost sixteen years. This was his brother’s fiftieth birthday party, held in his father’s pub. If he’d come back, everyone would have known!’

  ‘Thank you for your assistance, Ms Walker.’ As he turns off the tape, I can still feel his scepticism. ‘We’ll be in touch if we need anything more.’

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ I ask.

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘Has Declan got a solicitor?’

  Detective Scott rummages through his pockets and hands me a card. Angela Watson, of Lainton Legal Associates. ‘Duty solicitor. As far as I know, Mr Robbins hasn’t asked for different representation.’

  Declan has used a solicitor twice before, that I know: the first time when we almost bought a house together, the second when we got divorced. I don’t recognise the name Lainton Legal.

  I thank him and get up to go. ‘Do you want references for the medical experts who can tell you about my condition?’ I expect him to demur but he smiles and says yes, that would be helpful. As he escorts me to the front desk, I ask when Declan will be released and get a bland can’t-talk-about-that sort of answer. As I’m about to leave, though, he stops me.

  ‘Off the record, Ms Walker, he did do it.’

  I look at him, shocked that he’d say such a thing. Is he even allowed to? I want to tell this Detective Scott that I lived with Declan for ten years; that whatever Declan’s faults, violence wasn’t one of them. But I’ve done what I can. I’ve given my statement. The police will have to let Declan go, and I need to walk away from this.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I say, and maybe they’ll discover what really happened to Arty Robbins or maybe they won’t, but either way, Declan probably won’t even call to thank me. He’ll put it behind him; Detective Scott will move on to another case; and a few weeks from now, it’ll be like none of this ever happened.

  Except for me. For me, all this will be in my head forever.

  It’s dark outside the police station when I leave. I walk to the end of the High Street and sit on one of the benches at the entrance to Wordsworth Park and my head is full of Declan. I call Kat but the call goes to voicemail. I leave a message asking if we can meet. I need to unload. I need to talk the memories out. If I don’t, next week is going to be hell.

  I’ve always remembered things – that was simply the way it was. I was like a sponge with new words, with stories, with facts and figures. My teachers at primary school thought I was some kind of prodigy. ‘Gifted and talented’ they’d probably call it these days, but Mum didn’t want a daughter who was different, thanks; and certainly not a prodigy, so that was that. Looking back, I think she hoped it would go away if she ignored it. It didn’t, of course, but she never really accepted that she was wrong.

  It wasn’t until secondary school that I understood I wasn’t clever exactly; it was just my memory, and that wasn’t always so great. I mean, it was still mostly great because I could remember all the lyrics to every song and never had to do any revision for anything except maths, because most subjects were simply remembering what you’d been told in class … But while everyone around me was worrying about how their bodies were changing, and who liked who and who didn’t, I had to worry about what was going on in my head, too. It was like living inside an amplifier, where every taunt and jibe stayed as fresh as the moment it was said. Stupid things, but I still remember them even now – like the time in primary school when Justin Moore pulled my pigtails hard enough to make me cry and all his friends laughed at me. Playground nonsense, forgotten in five minutes by the rest of them, but I never wore my hair in pigtails again. Later, I took to keeping a low profile. I tried to fit in. I’d fake answers in tests and mock exams, deliberately not doing as well as I knew I could so I didn’t end up getting top marks and being singled out for being a nerd. After the first couple of disasters, I was probably the only adolescent girl in history who spent most of her time desperately staying away from the boys she fancied, killing the crush before it blossomed and then cut me to pieces with months of heartbreak when it inevitably ended.

  And then I found Declan, and I was happy. Deliciously, deliriously happy. And lucky, too, because we stayed together through the last year
s of school. I don’t know a single one of my friends whose first true love lasted more than a few months, but it seemed that Declan and I only ever got stronger. When I was twenty-one, I married him. We were going to be together forever.

  Until we weren’t.

  I don’t know when things started going wrong. Does that seem odd, given how I remember everything else with such clarity? But it’s true, because there was never one thing. Even the woman I saw with Declan at the very end – she was just the last straw. I saw him kiss her and it was like a thousand other little things, stretching back for years, all clicked into place. So no, I couldn’t tell you when the first crack appeared between us; and believe me, I’ve looked and looked and looked; but it’s memories of the little things that always pop into my head, like those songs from my youth that still get played on the radio again and again. Maybe it was the day he came home from work and went straight to the telly without saying a word. Maybe it was the time I was upset and he didn’t come and find me and give me five minutes of his time. Maybe it was the evening I was planning to go out with friends and asked if he wanted me to stay at home and keep him company instead, and he said no, thanks, he had work to catch up on. It was weekends spent in Asda and Tesco and B&Q and never picnicking in a field or by a river. I remember every romantic trip we ever planned and never took. I remember him having a shower one day, and me walking in ready to have sex and nothing happening, because everything was too awkward and uncomfortable; and at the same time I remember exactly how much he’d wanted me in those first few years, and how nothing else would have mattered …

  I went to see Kat a year before I ended it: Kat who was still my best friend then and is still my best friend now. She’d dumped Gary for a second time a few months earlier but now they were back together again, and so I’d gone to try and talk her out of it – as far as I could see, Gary was the same jerk he’d been when we were teenagers – but somehow we ended up talking about me and Declan instead; how nothing was the way it used to be, how everything was bland and mundane, how there was no passion in our lives and how that could only mean he didn’t want me any more. I went on and on: how he used to call me at work during the day to say he loved me, and now it was only ever to ask if I could pick up some milk on my way home; how he always used to stop to kiss me on the way out every morning, never mind the bed-hair and the pillow-face; how sometimes it would turn into more and we’d both be late, but now more often than not I didn’t even see him before he left; how we always used to eat together in the evenings but now we often ate on our own; how we used to go out two or three times a week, but now it was barely once a month.

  ‘It’s the same thing as with Mum and Dad,’ I said. ‘I remember them from when I was really small: how they used to be with each other, how they used to hold hands all the time. They were always touching each other. Little things. I remember when I was seven or eight, sitting in the lounge, the three of us watching telly together, and Mum and Dad were sat side by side, Mum’s hand on Dad’s leg and his hand on hers. Now they just … sit and do their own thing. Dad’s got his bridge club and his golf, and Mum has her Oxfam thing going. They never do anything together any more.’ I’d watched it all happen. The disintegration of love into teamwork, into the business of making a family and fitting in; the distance growing between them; Mum’s affair with David Crane that year when Declan’s dad disappeared, even if she always swore there was nothing going on; Dad finding out, leaving, coming back three days later. The two of them getting on with things like nothing ever happened. As if raising a child was like running a family business …

  ‘It’s the same thing,’ I said. ‘Only now it’s happening to me and Dec and I don’t understand what I did wrong.’

  I looked at Kat, hoping she might have an answer, and found her looking back at me like I was some sort of idiot.

  ‘You do realise you’re describing every relationship ever?’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘Well, you are. I don’t know about your mum and Dave Crane, but whatever it was, it obviously didn’t last, and your mum and dad are still together. Look at them. They still love each other. It just changes, that’s all. It can’t be all … teenage passion and hormones forever. God, imagine how exhausting that would be!’ She laughed. ‘Christ, I’d go mental if Gary was all over me all the time like he was back when we started. Trust me: Dec loves you. It’s obvious. Is he sleeping with someone else?’

  ‘God, no!’

  ‘No mysterious late nights at the office? Strange phone calls? Doesn’t come home with an unfamiliar perfume on his jacket? Lipstick on his shirt? That sort of thing?’

  ‘Don’t take the piss, Kat.’

  ‘Nicky, I’ve known Dec since I could barely walk. He’s a big pussy-cat. You have nothing to worry about.’

  Maybe she was right. I couldn’t decide then, and I can’t decide now. Afterwards, I tried to tell myself that the way things were with Declan was just … normal, but it was so bloody hard when I could remember every perfect moment, every kiss, every tenderness, every fling of passion. It was all right there in my head – all our past, the intensity of the love we had. When I took all that and put it beside the present, it felt like I was living in a desert.

  It got worse. I got worse. And I know it was me, that Declan didn’t really do anything wrong. He hadn’t strayed, not then. He saw my unhappiness and we talked it through and he tried to make it better, but that was never going to work, not when the gulf that I felt between us was a gulf to a past that only I remembered.

  And then he did stray, and that was that.

  It’s dark and now it’s cold. I’m sitting on a bench, staring at the boarded-up building site where Arty Robbins died. If I wanted, I could walk down the cycle path and cross Wordsworth Park to Byron Road. I could visit Mum and dick-face Dave. I could go back to where the rot started – that summer of 1985 – and face it down, but what would be the point? What difference would it make?

  Off the record, Ms Walker, he did do it.

  I don’t know what to make of Detective Scott. Why would he declare Declan guilty like that? Does he think I’m lying? Does he think I’m making it all up? But I’m not, and I really did talk to a dozen memory experts in America in the late Nineties. One of them really did write a paper on hyperthymesia, although I wasn’t his principal subject. But they were in it for the science; I was their research, not their patient. In the end I stopped seeing them. What I wanted was something to make it all go away. The truth is, I still do. I don’t want to remember everything, because remembering everything is what drove me from Declan. But there isn’t a cure, and never will be, and so after all those years in America, I came back to London and settled for the compromise of a quiet existence, innocuous, uneventful and alone.

  It’s getting late. I head home, trying to shake away the ghost of Arty Robbins and of that summer. We all knew the police were looking for him even before a day had gone by; when they didn’t find him, you could see the lace curtains of the front rooms along Byron Road twitching with the talk: Where’s he gone? What did he do? What did his wife do to drive him away? How terrible for the boy! As far as anyone knew, he’d simply walked out on his family, on his life, on everything. Done a Reggie Perrin, Dad said. There were rumours for a while that his estate agent business was bankrupt; but this was the Eighties, when estate agents couldn’t walk five yards without tripping over money, so if it wasn’t that, what was it? Gambling? Money laundering? It had to be something, right? This was … Arty Robbins. Bighearted, generous Arty Robbins, who wasn’t afraid to splash the cash; who’d bought the school a new minibus and new kit for the Wordsworth Park Juniors football team; whose adverts all but paid for running the local paper; and who’d invited a hundred people to his dad’s pub for free food and drink, just because he could. Who, as it turned out, was one of the private investors in Parklands, and whose estate agency was making money hand over fist. There were no secret hidden debts, no criminal gang connections
– nothing. No one could understand why he’d simply walked away from his life.

  The police suspected foul play and for a while it was a murder investigation, but the rest of us never believed it, and now I wonder why. Because the police never found a body? Because of all the stories that came out after he was gone? I don’t know. Back then, I didn’t care – all I could think about was Declan, and how it might as easily have been my own family coming apart. I think, sometimes, it was only because of Arty Robbins that Dad didn’t do the same. Like it jolted him: the idea that families really could and did disintegrate, and that ours was worth saving.

  There were plenty of whispers after Arty vanished, mind you, most of them about his wife, Anne. No one could say exactly what she’d done but it became her fault somehow, the Arty-shaped hole in our community. Mum caught a slice too: everyone knew that she and Arty Robbins had had a row that night at the Shelley. I’m sure some people wondered if they’d been having an affair. Mum laughed it off and it went away, but it gave the gossips something to chew on. After a time, the whispers started about the way Arty had treated Anne – the abuse, the bruises, the fractured wrist that week before he disappeared – and perhaps that’s why no one else ever put two and two together about Arty and Chloe Clarke. No one ever knew about that except for me and Kat; and Chloe, of course. I kept my promise and never said anything about it, not even to Declan.

  Declan. Declan, Declan. He made everything OK when Dad walked out for those three horrible days in August. But it was only three days, and afterwards it seemed that everything slowly went back to normal. The neighbourhood adjusted around us. It didn’t change the fact that no one ever knew why Arty Robbins had run away or where he’d gone, but the police stopped asking questions, the articles and adverts in the local paper slowly faded away, and everyone quietly forgot.