I Know What I Saw

by S K Sharp

  But what does Arty do? He looks for Kat, that’s what. After what Mum’s said, he needs her silence, needs to threaten her or bribe her, or whatever it takes – except he can’t find her, because Kat has left the party with Gary. So Arty leaves too, and goes to the obvious place; he goes to see if she’s home. And she isn’t, but when he gets there, he sees the light on in Declan’s window, and he knows Kat’s my best friend, and that Declan is my boyfriend, and Kat is Declan’s cousin, so what if that’s where she’s gone?

  And so in he comes; and what happened, happens. Arty Robbins – school governor, parish councillor, all-round pillar of the community – beats up his son while his son’s teenage girlfriend hides under the bed. But that wasn’t why he went there, and he still needs to find Kat; and he knows about Kat and Gary, and maybe someone saw her heading out into the park, or maybe he just knows …

  He goes out after her. He finds her.

  Kat was fifteen. Am I seriously thinking she lured Arty Robbins to the edge of that pit and then pushed him in – twice her size? And then went down after him and buried him? Could she really have done all that and then kept it a secret for decades? I didn’t see a trace of it in her the next morning. Christ, we walked to school together! We were right there when they started to fill the hole and she didn’t bat an eye …

  ‘It’s over. It’s finished!’

  ‘You tell me who he is! Tell me and I’ll fucking kill him!’

  Gary.

  Arty goes looking for Kat. He finds her with Gary. He tells Gary to get lost, that he needs to talk to his niece, but what if Gary already knows? What if Kat already told him?

  I hail a taxi. Ten minutes later, I’m outside Saint Joseph’s church. I walk round the back and pick my way between the graves until I find Dad. A wilted bunch of flowers lies against his stone, from when I came here last month for his birthday. I still try to make that little pilgrimage, and on the anniversary of the day he died, too. It’s cold and miserable, a light February drizzle falling like dead, damp cobwebs. There’s no one else here. I squat beside Dad’s grave, running my fingers over his headstone.

  Last night … It wasn’t about you, kiddo.

  ‘You already knew,’ I say. ‘Mum told you, that night before the party.’ Kat and Arty Robbins? It’s like trying to grasp hold of something perfectly smooth and covered in oil. Dad was a gentle man. Not particularly big or strong. A sparkle of wit and a gleam in his eye, and he could cut you to pieces with clever words if he wanted, but I never heard of him raising a hand to anyone. Arty Robbins, on the other hand, was a designer thug in an expensive suit. He would have punched Dad in the face as soon as blink, and that would have been that.

  Good riddance to bad rubbish.

  I wish I could talk to him. I wish he could tell me what happened that night. I know he would, if he saw how much it meant to me. I wish he could explain it and tell me it was all nothing.

  Does it have to be Kat? The police search went on for weeks. For months, it was all up and down the street. And for all that time, Kat never said a word. Never talked about it. Kept her secret …

  She’s been my best friend for more than thirty-five years.

  Tears run down my cheeks, mingling with the whispering rain. I should let this go, but I can’t stop remembering – that’s the trouble. I can’t stop remembering what it was like to be in love with Declan. He’s in my thoughts every day now: the swing over the river; kissing him in the alley behind our house; the feeling when I stood in the window and watched him watching me; how I felt so full of something I didn’t understand that I thought I might burst … And then squatting in the dark in the trees on my twenty-sixth birthday, hugging my knees to my chest and crying like it was the end of the world because I knew it was over – sure that the emptiness I felt was how I was going to feel for the rest of my life. And because of all that, I can’t let it go. I have to help Declan, no matter what it costs. I know he didn’t do this thing, and if the only way to save him is to find out who really—

  But … Please, not Kat.

  She saved my life once. Almost literally. I was in America. Two years had passed since I’d left Declan and I think I’d regretted every single day, and yet I couldn’t go back because what would that change? Nothing. I was miserable and coming to understand not only that the memory researchers I was working with didn’t think there was a cure for what I had, but that they weren’t even looking for one. It was sinking in: this was my future. A constant torment from a past I could never escape.

  Declan and I hadn’t spoken in months. I knew the divorce papers were coming but I still wasn’t ready for the shock of reading them. They paralysed me. I couldn’t leave the apartment. I was drowning in memories. I thought about killing myself as the only way to make it stop. The thoughts grew stronger; and then, two days after the papers came through, Kat arrived on my doorstep.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘Moral support,’ she said.

  She’d taken a week off work and come all the way to America. Declan was her cousin, so she knew the papers were on their way, and she knew how much I’d need her. She was pregnant, too, around the end of her first trimester, although she never told me until later. She picked me up and took me out and made me eat, and drove us to the cinema and even to a theme park, and insisted that we went on rides like we were still teenagers, and talked to me and talked to me until I started talking back. She stayed until she’d pulled me through.

  The drizzle has turned to rain now, cold and heavy. I’m soaked through. My knees feel like they’ve fused solid. I lean on Dad’s headstone to haul myself up.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I wish …’ The words crack into sobs. ‘I wish I had your faith.’

  I know, deep down, that I was already thinking of leaving Declan before Dad fell ill, but the memory I can’t escape is the day I needed Declan at the hospital and he wouldn’t answer his phone. I went to meet him outside his office. I saw him emerge with a woman I didn’t know, and something about them felt off. Was it the easy way they were laughing and joking? The way they walked side by side just a little bit too close? He didn’t see me, so I followed them. They went into a pub and Declan ordered two glasses of wine. I saw the way she looked at him and how he looked at her, and I knew that look because that was how he’d once looked at me. Then she kissed him. I saw how he sank into that softness, the unguarded bliss on his face. He never saw me watching and I never told him.

  It wasn’t why I left. It was the last cut, not the first. Somewhere along the way the fire died, and passion slipped out of our lives without saying goodbye. The shine just … wore off. It happened so quietly that I’m not sure I’d have noticed if I couldn’t remember our days as teenagers as though they were only yesterday. But I could remember, I did remember, and I missed it. And the more I missed it, the more I wondered what had gone wrong. That’s when I started to see all the little things – the thousand cuts that killed us.

  Is that how it is for everyone? Was Kat right, and that’s simply the way it always goes?

  Dad died two days after I saw Declan with that other woman. I was gone by the end of the month. Mum and Dave waited a full two years before they tied the knot. I don’t know why they bothered. I didn’t go to the wedding.

  Not Kat. Please. She’s all I have left.

  I sink to my haunches. The rain is a steady oppression, the sky a dull slate-grey. I want to burst into tears. Relationships evolve. The passion of first love transforms into trust and friendship and loyalty, dependability, quiet things that never set your heart ablaze but which leave you with gaping holes when they’re gone. I know that now. But I’d seen him with another woman. I wasn’t going to let there be a Dave. Leaving was self-preservation. I could survive, if I was the one to go. The other way round … I wasn’t so sure.

  I left. I never gave Declan a chance to explain. I didn’t think he deserved it. At least, that’s what I told myself, but the truth is always more complicated. Is tha
t why I’ve got to save him now? To make up for never giving him that chance? Do I have to destroy the one friendship that’s lasted all these years for the sake of some decades-old memories?

  ‘Nicky? Oh my God!’

  I blink. Kat stands over me, an umbrella held up against the rain.

  ‘Kat?’

  She puts on a stern voice full of drama. ‘The phone! You dialled it. We came. It is a means to summon us!’

  I look at her, blank, uncomprehending.

  ‘Hellraiser? Pinhead?’ She shakes her head. ‘Never mind.’ She crouches beside me and tries to help me to my feet, somehow managing to hold the umbrella over us both as she does so. ‘Oh God, Nicky. You’re soaked!’

  I look up at her, blurry through the tears and the rain. I forget, sometimes, to come back to the present.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ I say, desperate to ask the question I need to ask in a way that won’t sound awful, even though I know it’s not possible.

  ‘OK.’ I feel her tension. ‘But, you know … twenty-first century: we have telephones and emails and texts and Skype.’ We struggle upright. ‘Gary was going to take me to Ikea this afternoon.’

  ‘That summer. You know I kept telling you how I thought Mum and Dad were going to get divorced?’

  ‘Yes …’ It’s the cautious yes I’ve come to recognise from Kat: a yes that means no, not really, but she trusts my memory to be right. She looks around the churchyard and then up at the rain. ‘We also have cafés and pubs and coffee shops.’

  ‘I think … I think it might have been something else.’

  Another long pause. She’s waiting for me to explain. And now I really need to ask the question and I don’t know how.

  ‘OK.’ She laughs but I hear a wariness. ‘This is all a bit Wuthering Heights, though, isn’t it? Can’t we at least go somewhere dry? You’re drenched!’

  A deep breath and I take the plunge. I have to. ‘The night before the party, I heard Mum and Dad arguing. And then again, the night after. I thought it was about me and Declan but … I told you I saw Arty Robbins sneaking around your house. Do you remember? How I thought he and your mum …’ I can’t do it. I can’t ask, even though she must know by now what’s on my mind.

  A silence hangs between us, getting longer and longer.

  ‘Kat, did you have anything to do with …’

  Another blank silence. I can’t say it.

  ‘With?’

  ‘With what happened to Arty Robbins?’

  Kat stares at me, too stunned to answer.

  ‘It’s OK if you did. I won’t tell. It’s just that we need to find a way to save Declan, that’s all. He didn’t do it.’

  The shock on her face sears me. Shock and horror and – is that fear? ‘I … Jesus! What? Nicky, I … No, I absolutely did not have anything to do with what happened to Arty. Why would I?’

  ‘Because he was abusing you, and you wanted it to stop and he wouldn’t.’

  I’m right. And in a stroke, I’ve sucked all the joy right out of Kat and stripped her back to some bitter old memory.

  ‘Kat?’

  She turns away.

  ‘Did your mum know?’

  No answer. It’s like she doesn’t even hear.

  ‘Kat!’

  Now she rounds on me. ‘Oh, for God’s sake! No. Of course she didn’t!’

  ‘Are you sure?’ It’s hard to imagine Chloe Clarke, even thirty-five years ago, pushing a man like Arty Robbins into a pit, but it’s not hard to imagine her trying – not if she knew he was abusing her underage daughter …

  ‘I think I would have heard about it, don’t you?’

  Maybe not if Chloe Clarke knew that Arty Robbins was dead.

  ‘I’d really like to go somewhere warm and dry now,’ says Kat.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She just looks at me.

  ‘It’s … I think Mum found out. About you and Arty. That’s the thing. I think that’s what she and Dad were arguing about. And whatever happened in the Shelley that night, between him and Mum, I think that’s what it was.’

  Kat nods like this is old news. I suppose, for her, it is. It’s what she was afraid of, back then when it happened.

  ‘Did you know he attacked my mum after we left? Actually attacked her. I remember the bruises. That’s why there was a policeman when I got home.’

  Kat still holds her umbrella over us both. It’s not quite big enough, and I feel the drops of water sliding off and hitting my shoulder. I’m cold. She sighs and I hear the defeat in her. ‘He was nice at first. He knew what he was doing – not like the boys at school. He gave me presents. I was … I was pretty fucked up back then. I went to him. I was hoping to find out something about my dad. My real dad. You know? His little brother. He said he could help.’ She stops. ‘Does any of this really matter now? It was thirty-five years ago.’

  ‘Thirty-five years ago, someone killed him.’

  ‘What, and you think it was Mum?’ Kat howls with laughter. It’s a beautiful sound; and for a moment I have her back, my indomitable Kat.

  ‘No, she was at the Shelley all night. Actually, I was wondering if it was you.’

  Kat stops. ‘Me?’

  ‘Or Gary.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Nicola!’

  ‘Kat! Just … I need to know. Whatever you did – whatever you know – I won’t tell a soul, I promise. I just need to find a way to save Declan.’

  ‘Nicky, Dec’s my cousin. He can be a jerk and we don’t talk much these days, but he’s still family! If I knew something, don’t you think I’d tell the police? Christ! No, I had nothing to do with it. I have no idea who did it, OK?’ She picks up the pace again, almost marching me down Church Lane. ‘I’m not proud of who I was back then. Actually I’m pretty fucking mortified you found out; and yes, I was happy when Uncle Arty vanished out of my life. But he’s gone now, and I certainly didn’t … Jesus, I told you, I was with Gary the whole time you were with Dec. No one else knew about me and Arty, and I’d really rather—’

  ‘Did Gary know?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure there’s no way he—’

  ‘Jesus, Nicky! Now you think Gary did it? I told you! He was with me.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Anything to save Dec, is that it?’

  ‘No! I—’

  She pulls away from me, leaving me standing in the rain. ‘I was going to go to fucking Ikea. We were going to have stupid Swedish meatballs, and then I was going to buy some ridiculous flat-pack furniture and laugh at Gary as he tried to put it together, and maybe get a pointless picture of some kittens and maybe a rug, and a lampshade I don’t need called NurdleFlurdle or something. And then you called and said it was really urgent, so I dropped everything and came and … And instead of Ikea, I’m standing in a fucking graveyard in the pissing rain talking about …’ She sniffs, and oh God, is she crying? She is. My best friend for nearly thirty-six years and I’ve done this to her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and I’m crying, too.

  Kat stares at me, and I know she’s looking for something to make everything better and undo this. And I want it too, and I know I’ve pushed too far, too fast, too hard, and all I can think is to talk about Arty’s murder instead, which shouldn’t be any better and yet somehow is. How absurd is that?

  ‘I think it might have been my dad,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  I tell her about the mud on Dad’s jacket. How I thought she was right – how she did see Dad in the park that night. About what Dave told me as I left Mum’s house on Thursday and how I don’t believe him. By the time I finish, I’m done. Spent and sobbing. I turn away from her and start back for the church.

  ‘Nicky?’

  I don’t want to look. I don’t want another memory of Kat’s face that way, stricken with grief and betrayal.

  ‘Nicky!’ I feel her hand on my arm, grabbing me, spinning me round. I flash back to that Monday morning after my n
ight with Dec – Mum smacking the bowl of Shredded Wheat out of my hands …

  But the slap doesn’t come, and then Kat has her arms around me. After what I’ve put her through, she still wants to comfort me.

  ‘Daft bloody cow,’ she says. ‘Your dad? Your dad?’ I can tell that she’s fighting back the tears but she squeezes me a little and then lets go. ‘Come on, before you catch pneumonia.’

  We walk quickly through the rain, heading for the shelter of the High Street. Kat says she’s going to call a taxi and take me home, because she’s right, I am soaked to the skin. She tells me I’m an idiot, and how can I possibly think that my dad had anything to do with Arty Robbins’ death. I watch her as she talks, remembering the party and the way she looked at him, so intense. I didn’t understand but now I do. She was afraid. And earlier, outside, just after we arrived and I told her I’d seen Arty slipping into her house … I thought it was the scandal of her mum having an affair with a married man that frightened her but it wasn’t. She was terrified, and I was too busy thinking about Declan to see the truth.

  We reach the High Street and scurry into the shelter of the shopping mall. I’m shivering and cold and I want to sit in a corner with a hot chocolate, but Kat says I have to keep moving to stay warm. I tell her about her mum’s photographs, and so we go into Boots. The young man behind the counter takes the negatives and tells me the prints will take two or three days, then asks whether I want to collect them or have them posted to my home. I give my address and then ask for a second set of prints to be delivered to Kat’s mum. I don’t want to come out here again, not unless I have to.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asks Kat.

  ‘I thought Declan might be in one of them, so he could prove where he was. Even if he isn’t, I’ll see who was still there. I’ll probably know who they were. They might remember something.’