I Know What I Saw

by S K Sharp

  ‘Got any evidence?’ He shrugs. ‘Because if you do, now would be the time.’

  ‘I need to find whoever it was Kat saw on her way back to the Shelley.’

  ‘Someone in a dark jacket from thirty-five years ago? Good luck.’

  Declan had a black leather jacket once. I remember him showing up in his Capri at the park on my sixteenth birthday. It was a glorious spring day, full of the promise of summer heat without actually being hot. I’d told Mum I was going to the cinema with Kat and I was sitting on a bench, juggling whether I should officially announce that Dec was my boyfriend, when there he was in that stupid lime-green car, black leather jacket and a white silk scarf wrapped around his neck. I remember the look in his eye. Being sixteen meant I was free.

  God, I could laugh at myself sometimes. We were so naïve.

  ‘You should have told them what really happened, the first time you spoke to the police,’ he says. ‘I should have told them.’

  It’s 1985 and we’re sitting on this same bench after school, me with my head in my hands. I’m grounded. I’m forbidden from seeing Declan, who’s about to go to Clapham and might never come back. He tells me it’s OK, we’ll still see each other, even if it has to be a secret, even if he has to come up to Wordsworth Park every evening; that it’s only a month until the summer holidays, that he’ll wait …

  Nine years later and I’m sitting at home. Our home. It’s late and Dec’s called to say he’s going out with a few mates to the pub and he’ll be back late, and is that OK? And I say yes, of course it is; and he says not to wait up, and then he’s gone. He doesn’t ask about my day. He doesn’t tell me he loves me. Just: See you later. I remember wondering who he was with, and why I wasn’t enough.

  Is that normal?

  I remember sitting there alone, and how empty I felt. I remember Dad, back in that summer after Arty Robbins disappeared, sitting on the sofa and staring at nothing. How he looked the way I felt – alone and hollowed out. Only a glimpse, before he realised I was watching.

  But he never gave up.

  Did I get it all wrong? Everything I saw vanishing from my relationship with Declan, everything I remembered that we seemed to have lost: is that simply … normal?

  The Declan of here and now gets up. I follow him along the path between the building site and the car park, watching him. There’s not much left of the boy I fell in love with. He’s filled out, etched himself with lines and wrinkles, sketched bags under his eyes. His shoulders sag and seem to droop with sadness. But when I hear his voice, the years fall away and there he is.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dec.’ Sorry for so many things.

  ‘So am I,’ he says. He keeps walking. Doesn’t look back.

  ‘I don’t mean sorry for this. I mean for everything. For America. For leaving.’

  ‘Maybe it was for the best.’

  ‘Is that what you really think?’

  He stops and stares at the hoarding around the building site as if he can see straight through it. I wonder: does he know where they found his dad? Was it right here?

  ‘I think maybe this was a mistake,’ he says. ‘I think I should go.’

  ‘How long would it take to walk here from your old house, do you think?’ I ask. I’m thinking ten minutes. Ten minutes for Arty Robbins to get to the building site after he left us, although God knows why he went there, of all places. Someone else is there, too. They get into a fight. Somehow it ends with Arty Robbins falling into the pit. He breaks his neck. How long did it take to climb down after him and dig a hole and cover him? Thirty minutes? An hour?

  Declan turns away. He starts back towards the station, and what can I do but let him go? Only I can’t. I never could.

  It’s 1985. He sits beside me on the grass, and I love him so much it terrifies me.

  Ten years later. I’m alone in the woods and sobbing because Dad’s dead and Declan and I were going to be together forever, and he promised me and …

  ‘Declan!’ I run after him. ‘Dec!’ I sound on the edge of hysteria. Maybe I am; maybe I’m crazy because half of me is somewhere else, watching Declan in a pub with a woman I don’t even know, and my heart has just broken in half. But what if I was wrong, like I was wrong about Kat and Gary, and about Arty Robbins and Kat’s mum, and maybe even about Mum and Dave and Dad? What if I was wrong about everything? ‘Dec! Please!’

  He lets me catch up. Up close, all I see is how tired he is, how exhausted he looks. There’s something in his eyes that isn’t simple weariness at a past that won’t leave him alone. A touch of regret?

  ‘What do you want from me, Nix?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Absolution? No. Explanation? No, not that, either. What I really want is to go back in time and change it all. ‘Just … stay a bit, will you? Talk to me!’

  He sighs. ‘I’ll stay for a coffee, but not long, OK?’

  We turn and walk together back into the park, the playing fields, the playground and the coffee shop and the car park. I want to go back in my head to that summer. I want Declan to take me in his arms and drive me to that place by the river …

  ‘How long were we at your house before your dad showed up? Fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty?’

  He puffs and shrugs and I feel his impatience. ‘About that. Can’t have been much longer.’

  In my memory it feels as though we barely sat down before Declan’s dad came crashing through the door, but I know that can’t be right because that would mean he left the Shelley at the same time as we did, and I know that Dec and I talked for a bit before we started kissing. It’s what Detective Scott says about memories being subjective – like how hiding under the bed felt like half an hour but can’t really have been more than a few minutes.

  ‘Maybe we can make Gary think we know something. Trick him into giving himself away.’ In my head, the words sound hopeful. Out in the open, they sound desperate.

  ‘Jesus!’ Declan shakes his head. ‘Gary’s a mate! Nix, I have to go to court tomorrow. The police have my DNA. They reckon I was out looking for Dad after you left. They know we had a fight. They’re going to say I’m a flight risk and that I should be in custody. My solicitor says there’s a good chance they’ll win this time. She puts a brave face on it but sometimes you can tell when someone thinks they’re fighting a lost cause. They’re going to lock me up, and there’s going to be a trial and fuck knows how that ends. So unless you can show up tomorrow with a signed confession or something, just … drop it, OK?’

  We’re walking the same way Gary and Kat would have come that night on their way back from the Secret Car Park. I picture it in my head. The path from Shelley Street to the High Street, cutting the park in half, exactly as it does now. Wordsworth Lane cuts it in half the other way. Kat and Gary were in his van in the Secret Car Park, a hundred yards down Wordsworth Lane and tucked among the trees. The fences around the playing fields mean you have to walk up Wordsworth Lane until you reach the path. From the path, you’d see anyone heading for the building site …

  No. There are fences now, but there weren’t any then, not in 1985. I know that because I used to walk across the fields all the time, and so did the rest of us – and why wouldn’t Gary and Kat do the same? Why go the long way and not across the field? And if they walked across the field, then whoever they saw was nowhere near the building site. They couldn’t have been.

  Declan picks at a fingernail. ‘Mum said Dad was having an affair. When we thought he’d run away … But Kat? Jesus. He was her fucking uncle!’

  I walk faster now, cutting sideways towards the playing fields. ‘Everyone was at the Shelley. No one saw Arty. It doesn’t make sense that he was out here for an hour on his own, so either he was with someone or …’

  Or what?

  I stand at the edge of the playing field, tracing a line to where the Secret Car Park used to be. It was dark. Gary and Kat couldn’t possibly have seen anyone near the building site.

  I tried to hide behind a see-saw. They were in the playgro
und, then, already close to the gates. Kat said she thought it was Dad. The lights near the gates meant they would have seen him clearly, which makes it weird that she got it wrong. So maybe she didn’t.

  ‘I never stopped loving you, you know,’ says Declan. ‘Right from the first moment I saw you, I never stopped. But you did. We had it, and then somewhere along the way you lost it.’

  ‘What? Me?’

  I see the old pain in his face. And there’s the rub, because it’s not true – at least not the way he thinks. I didn’t stop loving him. Ever. I couldn’t.

  I shake my head. ‘No, I …’

  ‘You went off to America. You knew I couldn’t come with you. You knew exactly what you were doing.’

  ‘You were seeing someone else.’

  ‘I bloody well was not!’

  I know what I saw but I don’t know how to explain it, even to myself, in a way that makes sense; and we went over this so many times before we finally called it quits, and we never really got to the bottom of it. No use dragging it all back up now.

  ‘I was scared,’ I say.

  ‘Scared of what?’ He turns away and then stops and turns back, his arms flailing in exasperation. ‘I don’t need this, Nix. Not now. Not with everything else. Jesus Christ, this could be my last day of freedom! They’re going to send me down tomorrow. I could die in prison for something I didn’t even do.’

  I’d seen Kat’s dad walk out of her life. I’d seen Declan’s dad abandon his family. I’d seen my own parents: how easy with each other they were when I was small, and how all that gradually changed until so little was about feelings, about passion – not like me and Declan … And then, after we were married, I saw how we slowly and steadily took each other for granted and I couldn’t stop remembering how it didn’t used to be that way. How our love had faded.

  And then I saw Declan and that woman in the pub together. The way his eyes ate her up. The way she kissed him. The freshness of it. The way he seemed to spark. It was obvious.

  I look at him. Really look at him: old and sad and beaten. Maybe I’m wrong. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. Maybe there’s some other explanation; and I want to ask him, I want to tell him what I saw and ask if it wasn’t what I thought. I want him to tell me I’m wrong and make it into something I can believe, because I want to believe.

  ‘I saw you kiss her, Dec.’

  Silence. I can’t look him in the eye. What if he tells me I’m right? And does it even matter? It was twenty-five years ago. I can’t change the past and, whoever she was, she’s long gone; but I can change the present, so isn’t that what I should do? Forget this? Forget it all, as best I can? Except that I can’t. I can’t forget anything.

  He’s looking at me, bewildered, like I’m some sort of alien. ‘You saw what?’

  I turn and walk straight up to him and wrap my arms round him and hug him tightly. He freezes, startled. It’s like hugging a postbox.

  ‘I saw you,’ I whisper. ‘I saw you together, and it was the last straw. I knew you didn’t love me any more and so I left. I left because we’d lost what we had and it was the only way I could save myself. I left because I knew that if you found someone else then you’d leave me; and if you did that, I wouldn’t survive. I saw you when she kissed you and … we’d been ghost-walking through our lives for years, and I …’ I run out of words as I cling to him.

  ‘You really thought I was seeing someone else?’ he asks.

  ‘You were seeing someone else. I saw you!’

  ‘Jesus, Nix! No! No, I wasn’t.’

  ‘Wednesday 19th April. Dad was in hospital. He was getting worse. I needed you. I called you but you didn’t answer, so I went to find you. I waited outside your office and I saw you come out with some woman I didn’t know. Long, dark hair, almost to her waist. Glasses. Big lips. I knew something wasn’t right and so I followed you. You went to a pub. The Fox and Hound. You bought two glasses of white wine. You sat next to her, too close. You looked at her with the look of a lover, and then she kissed you. You did nothing to stop her and everything to encourage it.’

  I stare at him and he stares back, open-mouthed and bewildered. I almost want him to tell me it never happened, that I’m imagining it, because if he does then I’m going to slap him and walk out, and it would make everything so much easier.

  ‘Jenny,’ he says after a long silence, and I can tell he remembers. His face turns grey. ‘Christ! That was Jenny, but we weren’t seeing each other. OK, there was some weird spark, but … Shit, Nix! OK, no, it was more than that; we were really attracted to each other and we both knew it, but we kissed, once, and that was all that ever happened. And I’m sorry you had to see it, I really am, but we didn’t have an affair. Fuck! She had a fiancé. She was happy with him, and I had you and I was happy too, believe it or not. We saw each other outside work what … twice, three times maybe. Just a stop for a drink on the way home, and that was that. All it ever was. If we’d both been single, sure, but …’ He rounds on me. ‘You’re the one with the perfect memory. You tell me when we saw each other. Go on. When do I need to account for? When did you not know exactly where I was?’

  ‘I …’ I can’t.

  ‘That day you saw us? She was moving to York. It was her last day and we were probably never going to see each other again, so we decided to go out for a last drink together, only the two of us, because we knew nothing could happen and it would be safe. Up until now I’d forgotten she kissed me, but yes – it was our ten seconds of what if? That was all it ever was. The sum total. Ten fucking seconds. Was that wrong? Maybe. But there was never any affair.’

  This is where Declan tells me to leave. Sends me home, back where I belong, me and Chairman living alone together. Or is this where I slap him and call him a liar, because the clarity of his memory tells me how much that one shared moment meant to him?

  There’s a long silence.

  ‘It wasn’t only that,’ I say quietly.

  More silence, then Dec exhales, a long sigh that I know is his way of letting something go.

  ‘I know.’ He turns away and seems to shrink a little, fiddles with something in his pocket – a nervous tic, something for his hands to do. ‘I know, and I felt it, too. It wasn’t …’ He gives a bitter chuckle. ‘I don’t even know how to describe it. We were …’

  ‘Adrift.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It wasn’t that you were having an affair,’ I say. ‘I believe you when you say that you weren’t. It was that you were thinking about it.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I’m not sure I understand that. But … maybe that doesn’t matter any more. I forgive you.’

  I let that sink in. It’s an odd feeling. Not the huge pathetic relief I’d expected. Some of that, yes, but with a spike of anger and a big dollop of fear. The fear is that forgiveness means he’s stopped caring. The anger – do I need forgiving?

  ‘I haven’t,’ I say. ‘I haven’t forgiven either of us. I don’t think I ever will. I’m not sure I can.’

  He looks at me, long and deep. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we were special!’ God, how stupid I must sound. ‘We were so perfect, like we were the whole world. And then it stopped being like that. It changed. It became,’ and I’m floundering for words that don’t even exist, ‘ordinary. I hadn’t had anyone else. You were the first, the only … Oh God.’ I look away. ‘Because I could remember what it was like when we were together at the start. I could remember every kiss, every special moment. I could remember all the little things that we didn’t do any more, everything we’d lost.’

  I choke up. Dec smiles, gently shaking his head. I feel his arms slowly wrap themselves around me, hugging me tighter.

  ‘I never stopped being in love with you,’ he says. ‘Not even after you were gone. I know what you mean. About the distance between us. I thought that was you. I thought you’d decided I was boring.’

  I believe him. For the first time in a very long time, I believe him. I think abo
ut all the years we lost – the decades I wasted because I was afraid – and I start to cry.

  ‘Hush,’ he whispers. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘No,’ I sob. ‘It really isn’t. We were the best, and we threw it away. Both of us.’

  He stares right through me, as though he’s looking all the way to the stars.

  ‘I don’t want to go home.’ I suddenly don’t care about Mum and Dave and Dad, and who killed Arty Robbins; I care about this man in front of me who might only have one day of freedom left. ‘I want to be with you.’ I want us to stay like this, the way we used to be all those years ago.

  I let him hold me and it’s perfect. It’s all I ever wanted.

  16

  Tuesday 11th February 2020

  This time, I don’t resist. This time, I let myself have what I want. Declan. My Dec. We go back to his flat and he leaves me alone to make tea. I watch him laugh and smile and feel like I could do this forever, reliving our life together. He opens a bottle of wine and we order food, and then his mum shuffles out of her room, and for an instant I’m speechless at how haggard she looks. Anne Robbins was never a strong woman, not even twenty years ago when I last saw her, but now she looks like a ghost, as pale and thin as a stick.

  ‘Mum, you remember Nicola?’

  Anne Robbins looks at me for what feels like an age, then shuffles into the kitchen for a biscuit, turns round and shuffles out. If she recognises me, she gives no sign.

  ‘Is she …?’

  ‘She’s had a long day,’ says Dec, with just a hint of apology.

  I pour myself another glass of wine. I’m a little tipsy now, which makes it easier.

  ‘I don’t think your mum ever forgave me for who my dad was,’ says Dec without bitterness; and he’s right, I don’t think she did.

  ‘Come here.’ I open my arms to him, and I don’t know whether it’s the wine or whether any of this will still mean anything in the morning, but right now I don’t care. He comes to me and wraps me in his arms and pulls me into him, and I tilt my head and kiss him, and he kisses me back, and for a moment I’m sixteen again.