His eyes are widely spaced, but that’s where the similarities end. His features are delicate. There’s no heavy brow. He’s got hollows underneath his cheekbones. It’s not Sadiq. It’s not Sadiq. It’s not Sadiq.
‘I …’ I don’t say any more, though maybe I should. ‘Shit. I’m – I’ll do it now,’ I say.
But inside, my thoughts are rushing like water through a burst pipe. It’s not him. It’s not him. I have pushed – I have injured – a stranger. This man wasn’t harassing me. He didn’t follow me. I look at his trainers again. They’re the same. The same stupid trainers.
But of course: he was out running. Trainers. Headphones. All black. How could I have made such a catastrophic error? How could I not have checked?
The voice keeps coming out of the headphones, getting louder and quieter as I move.
I could hang up the phone. I could run away. Get a flight somewhere before I’m stopped. Would I be stopped? All of my knowledge has come from the television. I can’t remember the last time I cracked open a newspaper. I know nothing about the real world, I think bitterly. Reuben would know what to do. He is a Proper Person who knows about global politics and can point to Iran on a map and knows what sautéing is. But of course, Reuben would never be in this situation. Good Reuben.
My body feels strange. My eyes are dry and heavy. The world shifts as I look at it, like I’m in a kaleidoscope. Perhaps I am drunk. I have had four drinks. I lean over and breathe into his mouth. It’s strangely intimate. My lips have only touched Reuben’s, for seven years.
Five breaths. Nothing happens.
She tells me to start chest compressions. There are no signs of life, she says.
I lean down and lace my fingers as she tells me to, the phone on speaker on a step. His chest yields under the pressure, surprisingly so, and I compress a few inches easily.
It happens suddenly, after five chest compressions. He reacts to me, his lips tightening. He sucks in a breath, his slim chest expanding and his body jerking as though the ground’s moved beneath him.
‘He’s … something’s happening,’ I shout.
And then he’s coughing. Hacking, productive coughs. I look away, not wanting to be privy to these moments. Maybe he’ll open his eyes. Maybe he’ll stand and walk away, disgruntled and inconvenienced, but fine, like we are motorists who’ve damaged each other’s bumpers. Maybe. Maybe. I close my eyes and wish for it.
‘He’s coughing,’ I say tonelessly. I can’t tell her I got the wrong man. I can’t tell her anything.
‘Okay, good. The ambulance is nearly with you,’ she says.
Sadiq – no, not-Sadiq – is still lying there. His eyes closed. Chest rising steadily.
‘Can you put him in the recovery position?’ she says.
Another surge of fear rushes through me like the tide’s coming in, and I try to ignore it, biting my lip. It is no longer fear of Sadiq. It is fear for what will happen to me now.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Okay.’ I heave him over.
There is no sign he’s conscious. His eyelids don’t flutter like Reuben’s do just before he wakes on Sunday mornings – the only morning of the whole week that we always spend together; the one where he is not with his charges or helping his MP or leading protests. This man’s arms don’t hold their own weight like Reuben’s do when he rolls over and beckons to me, wanting to hold me, even in his sleep. Instead, they flop on to the ground like they’re weighed down unnaturally, curling like an ape’s.
And then, when he’s in the recovery position, one knee bent up as the woman tells me to, I see the ambulance. The lights are flashing in the glass-fronted shop windows along the street above us. I see the ambulance’s blue light mirrored in the windows across the street, a few seconds behind itself, reflected and refracted across each display.
No. No. I am wrong. I see that it’s not a reflection.
It’s the police. There’s a police car, just behind the ambulance.
The ambulance is for him, but the police car is for me.
3
Conceal
The world closes to just me and Sadiq, lying there, motionless, face down.
And then the panic comes. Panic in such a pure form it could be an injection.
Sweat breaks out over my body. The street light is too bright. I pinch at my coat, at the neckline, trying to get some air. Within seconds, I’m drenched in sweat that feels like needles as it evaporates off my skin.
I stand, doing nothing except feeling the feelings – dread like spilt black ink in the bottom of my stomach, panic like bricks sitting on my chest, guilt like a shrinking feeling in my lower abdomen – and staring at Sadiq.
It’s been one minute. Two. I’m looking down, along the canal. There’s nobody here. Nobody except me and him. I feel myself rise up above the scene. I can see myself: a woman, thumbnail in the corner of her mouth, chewing on it, looking down at a man who’s lying face down on the ground; a dark canal, opaque with frost, illuminated in yellow patches by the street lights. Beyond us, a moon. Beyond that, space.
The sweating’s getting worse. I can’t … I can’t do it. I don’t have the human reserves I need to stay. To help him. To make that phone call.
I turn and look at him again. Perhaps he fell. Maybe I am mistaken. Maybe it’s not as important as it feels right now. Maybe I have misread it somehow. He was pursuing me. He was a pervert, a sexual predator – and he fell. Yes, that’s what happened.
For a moment, my body longs for Reuben, the way it sometimes does, unexpectedly, while I’m shutting the skylight at work, or boiling the kettle when he’s away. That strong, silent soul of his. The way he always stands closer to me than he does to anyone else. That he lets only me in. That he takes great pleasure in sexting me from across the room at parties, and watching me blush. Nobody would believe what he’s like, privately, even if I told them.
Oh, Reuben. Where are you now? Why didn’t you come tonight? Can you help me? I think of him on the sofa at home, alone, and wish.
Sadiq is still motionless. I can’t do it. Not without Reuben. Not alone. It’s better if I just … it’s better if I leave.
Someone will find him soon. It’s London. They’ll think him drunk or disorderly. Clumsy. He’ll be okay.
I stagger backwards, two steps, and then I do what I do best: I avoid it. I turn around and walk away.
I take one step across the bridge to Warwick Avenue. That’s all it takes. One step, and then I’m off. Another step follows. And then another, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.
My heels – those lovely shoes I put on so optimistically just hours previously – make hollow thumping sounds on the bridge. Two minutes ago they were followed by Sadiq. Now I’m alone. And so is he.
I pause twice, but I don’t turn around. As I approach the brightly lit entrance to the tube, though, I am crossing the Rubicon. It’s the point of no return, the Rubicon. Is that right? Didn’t Reuben refer to it once, laughing just a little, in his understated way, when I didn’t know the reference? Not patronizingly. Just … him. I had looked it up privately, when he had left the room. I had spelt it with a k in the middle, and not a c.
And now I’m inside the tube station.
This is it, forever, I tell myself. Always acting. Nobody can ever know. Perhaps if I spend enough time with the lie, in both the telling of it and my own thoughts, I can become it. Like a chameleon, taking on the colours of things next to it. I try not to run, not to draw attention to myself, but I’m hurrying, my walking becoming running, until I remind myself to slow down again.
A man selling crisps and cans of Coke and slowly dying flowers ignores me, staring down at his phone.
I’m safe. Sadiq’s gone now, I tell myself. Far behind me. My breathing slows as I look straight ahead. At the fluorescent lights and the posters for musicals, the billboards for books I’d usually be wanting to read. I descend underground, and the air takes on that synthetic, hot, dusty quality. My heartbeat is slowing down now. I close my eyes and pictur
e him lying there, but I push the image away, looking instead at the platform as I arrive on it.
A woman is already standing there. She’s alone. She’s wearing faded grey skinny jeans, beige boots, a pink coat. Her clothes are neat, her hair absolutely, perfectly straight at this, the end of the day. I imagine she has ‘offline weekends’ and reads post-modern literature.
Why not her? I think to myself. Why me? How come it’s always me?
I look up at the sign. 1 min, it says. And then I see it’s to Harrow, and I cross the platform to the other side.
This platform’s empty, though I can still hear the echo of the woman’s boots across the way.
I can feel my brain trying to figure it out, to package everything away into little boxes, but I don’t let it. The selfie from the bar, it says. That’s evidence. That woman with the pink coat: she’ll say I looked distressed.
Instead of listening to these thoughts, I turn my head and look at one of the posters. She’s watching you, an advert for a psychological thriller reads. A pair of eyes, brown like mine, look out, until they are obscured by the stopping tube.
A call from Reuben lights up my phone as I emerge from the underground. Shit. I didn’t even let him know I was okay.
I don’t answer it. When he rings off, I can see he’s left two voicemails and a text. An unprecedented amount of contact from my often non-communicative husband. I stand outside the tube at Hammersmith, listening to them.
‘Hi. Only me. You alright?’
‘Hi, me again … just getting a bit worried now.’
‘Jo – call me?’
I could call him now, and tell him.
But I know what he would do. I have known – and loved – him for seven years, and so I am certain of what he would say.
He would hand me in. I know he would. And I can’t … I can’t. I can’t go back tonight. I can’t be marched to the police tonight, and back to that man lying on the pavement. Back to that sweaty, claustrophobic panic. I’ll tell him tomorrow. When nothing good could come of handing me in. Sadiq will be fine. He will get up, and he will be fine.
It is familiar – comforting – to me, to procrastinate. I’ve been doing it my whole life. Preparing for nothing. I will start the essay when I’ve made a cup of tea. When I’ve read the Guardian. I will cancel that direct debit next month. Definitely before the next payment. Definitely.
Nobody follows me. Nobody says anything to me on the way home. I pass a few people near the Hammersmith flyover and none of them looks at me. The universe has changed, for me, but nobody knows. The molecules of the air are the same. The rain is the same. But somewhere, a man lies on a slab of concrete because of me. It feels far away, now I’m nearly home, a tube ride away from it all. As though it’s theoretical, an abstract concept. As though, if I can just turn it around, and look at it differently, it might be different.
I send Reuben a text. Almost home, all fine :) x
I guess that is why I start running. Because I’m away from the scene, and don’t have to act normally any more. And because I keep seeing Sadiq’s face in the bar, imagining him behind me, chasing me. Imagining the police. A manhunt.
I trip on an uneven paving slab, and I can’t stop myself. I hit the ground, and skid along it, my wrist mangled, trapped underneath me.
I sit for a second in the road, tempted to cry like a child, but get up. I check my hands. Only a slight graze. My left hand throbs, but I ignore it.
I keep running and now can almost see our basement flat. My parents and Wilf think we are stupid, that we should shell out for a two-up two-down in Kent and commute in, but we like it. We like to be in London, we say, like it is a friend we don’t want to move too far from.
I descend the stairs to our door – there are only five steps – and I wonder if I will always think of this when I am walking down them; if I will always remember this night. But I shake the thought away. Reuben opens the door before I have to rifle through my messy bag for my key – he knows these things about me, and he is always trying to help.
‘Hi, alright?’ he says, and I see that I have worried him.
He pauses for a second, framed in the light from the narrow hallway, his eyes taking me in. I must look wild.
I pat my hair down, trying to appear normal. ‘Yeah – sorry,’ I say.
He turns and ambles into the kitchen where he opens our large silver fridge, waving a pint of milk at me.
I shake my head. ‘I want wine,’ I say.
‘Oh, oh no,’ he says, setting the milk down and coming straight over to me.
I almost wince as he takes my hands, but manage not to.
Reuben is tall and lanky. His hair is ginger and his beard – currently at stubble length, though it varies – is a darker auburn. His skin burns easily and is freckled. His hips are slim. His face is more lined, these days, at thirty-two, though there are no grey hairs on his head. But I know we must be getting older because the people I mistake him for are older. A red-headed man in the street I’ll think for a moment is him – he will have Reuben’s light gait, his gracefulness, his grumpy way of looking at people – won’t be. And, on closer inspection, the man will be about forty, and I’ll be surprised that I might have mixed them up at all. He doesn’t like pointless chatting and his worst quality is that he’s so blunt he is often rude. His hopes are to live in a better world, I suppose.
He is my most favourite person in the entire world.
I think often, recently, of the babies we will have. They will have his beautiful, bright red locks, his pale eyelashes, his green eyes. People on the street will smile at me and my ginger family.
‘What happened?’ he murmurs into my hair. ‘The man from the bar?’
I nod, once, against his chest.
‘Awful.’ He says, rubbing his hands up and down my back.
I swallow stomach acid that’s sloshing around my mouth and turn my head to the side to look around the kitchen. As I thought it would be, it’s immaculate. I can see the soil in our many plants – it was one of my recent fads, to set up a kitchen garden – is wet. He’s watered them. He’s washed up, too. He’ll no doubt have done some work, watched a film. He is calm, organized. I piss away my evenings, spent shambolically on BuzzFeed and looking up old school friends and thinking I ought to preheat the oven but don’t want to move, and then it is eleven o’clock at night and I haven’t eaten.
‘Have a good night?’ I manage to say, though every few seconds the wave of sweating begins again and I can almost feel my pupils dilate and my hands shake.
‘Sure,’ he says, looking down at me briefly.
‘What did you do?’
‘Load of box-ticking,’ he says. ‘Form-filling for my client.’
Reuben is one of those people with too many jobs. He’s a social worker, for an Islamic charity. He is starting to assist his MP at her surgery, especially where gang culture is concerned. He’s a social work expert, occasionally appears in court and tells lawyers what social workers should have done; whether they did the right things. He doesn’t sleep much and there is forever something on his horizon. He is fastidiously organized, writing up case notes late at night and filing them immediately. He never seems to wane in his enthusiasm. He can never not be bothered. He never puts things off.
He releases me, and a peculiar sensation comes over me, as though these are my final moments in this world: a world of these First World problems. Writing up case notes and tidying the kitchen. I’m wrong, of course, I tell myself. Everything’s the same. I’ve avoided changing my world by avoiding making that call. I step back towards Reuben, riding on a wave of relief, and he immediately raises his arm, as he always does. I step underneath it, and it seamlessly falls around my shoulders.
‘Be alright,’ he says to me. It’s one of his phrases. ‘You’ll be alright,’ got shortened; a couple’s language we often speak.
I nod, tears in my eyes, which he wipes away.
His hand slides down my back. Even my coat
is damp with sweat, but he doesn’t say anything. He never would.
He pours me a glass of red and I sip it in my right hand, my left hanging limply. It’s becoming stiff and feels strange. I’ll enjoy tonight, our wine together. I’ll try to dispel the shakes, the dread. And then tomorrow – tomorrow I will face it.
Reuben goes to sit down in the living room. It’s in the same room as our kitchen.
I look out of the window. Our neighbour is outside. She’s one hundred and two years old. Her seventy-year-old daughter comes to visit her, bringing her teenage dogs. Everyone is old in that flat, Reuben and I joke. Edith’s face appears beyond our plants, and I make out her features before raising my hand in a wave. An alibi, I think uselessly to myself. I’m glad she’s a night owl.
Reuben comes into the kitchen again and picks up a piece of paper from the kitchen counter, his body just brushing mine.
I’m remembering again. The feel of Sadiq’s body against my gloved hands. The way he tumbled so easily, like a domino, falling after the gentlest of flicks.
‘Edith behaving herself?’ Reuben says to me, throwing me a look.
I once told him I pretended Edith was a robot; that nobody could be that old. That she was a government experiment. He laughed so hard his face went bright red, and he said, ‘Never change, Jojo.’
‘Yes,’ I say woodenly.
And then I’m remembering before that. The feel of his hand in mine in the bar. His penis against my leg. It’s not fair.
‘Got time for number seventy-eight?’ Reuben says, gesturing to the list on our blackboard.
Written in red chalk, it’s the top one hundred movies of all time, according to some worthy poll. We are rubbish with films – a rite of passage we both somehow missed during our teens. I was too busy overachieving – studying and amateur dramatics and ballet and clarinet – and Reuben was becoming Reuben; learning. He’s the most well-read man I’ve ever known. Can give you chapter and verse on Lacan, Marx, Kant. He was adopted as a baby into a very scholarly family who ran a pub. His entire childhood was spent reading books in the rooms above the bar. Even now, when we go to visit them in Norfolk, they talk about economics, politics. The bar is littered with paperbacks they’re halfway through.
Anything You Do Say Page 3