The alternative was impossible for him to face. He’d only just, in these past months, begun rediscovering his life. He’d lost so much already: Caroline, their future, the man he’d have become with her. And with her fading from him in the Nelsons’ bathroom it had felt as if these losses were just minutes old. He could not, he would not, lose again. This is what the survivor’s voice had told him as he’d sat on his sofa, staring at the carpet. That if he was quick, he could still make it so. He could still shape the story. Lucy was dead. He knew that could never be changed. He’d never meant to frighten her, to cause her to start like that. If he could still save her, he would. But it was too late. So he would save himself instead. Something, he remembered telling himself, must be saved. Eventually, standing from the sofa, he’d washed his hands, collected his fencing kit from the hall, then left his flat, slipping the bag over his shoulder as he’d descended the staircase.
―
“Better! Good!” Istvan took two quick steps backwards. His body was heavy, but his feet were still light, a dancer’s feet. Somehow Michael was following his lesson, muscle memory guiding his arm, his body.
“Now,” Istvan said, raising his épée as if in salute, “when I lower my blade, attack in patinando, tempo or speed, up to you. Then counter in octave.”
Michael bent his knees to en garde, his eyes on the switch at the end of Istvan’s blade. As it fell, he took a short step forwards, then lunged, extending his arm towards Istvan’s stomach. Disengaging from the parry, he pushed forward until he felt his own switch depress, and his blade flex in the curve of a hit.
“Good!” Istvan exclaimed, skipping backwards. “And again!”
―
When Michael had left his building there’d been no one else on the street. At the end of the path to his front gate, he’d turned up the hill passing the Nelsons’ house, its windows as impassive as any other, then continued up the incline to turn left down a narrow path. Emerging from the shade of this cut-through, he’d crossed a tarmac walkway bisecting two of the ponds before leading on into the Heath itself.
Nothing was altered. A male moorhen ducked for food in the pond to his left, then paddled to a piled nest to feed his chicks. To Michael’s right, farther off, the mixed swimming pond, in full sunlight, was pointillist with swimming costumes and bare bodies. He could make out a line of girls queuing for the showers. The red-and-yellow uniforms of the lifeguards, looking on. The white buoys, bobbing in the swimmers’ wakes.
As he’d reached the Heath itself, here, too, the scene appeared unchanged from earlier in the day. Picnics, prone sunbathers. A boy on a scooter, about Lucy’s age, was backheeling himself along the path, outstripping his mother, who was pushing a pram behind him. “Joseph!” she shouted as he crested a rise. “Joseph! Slow down!”
Michael had walked on. He’d wanted to keep his eyes on the ground, to avert his gaze from anyone who might see him. But at the same time he couldn’t help glancing up at the Heath around him, at its life, so abundant and insouciant. A woman in a bikini was talking on her phone; a shirtless man in jeans spread himself across a bench, ridges of fat pinking around his midriff. Another man, propped on his elbows on the grass, tilted his head back, eyes closed to receive the sun.
How could nothing have been disturbed by what he’d done? Just minutes and metres away a life had ended. Two lives, perhaps. A four-year-old cache of memories, ideas, pains, favourite colours and toys had been extinguished. A genetic pattern, unique in the universe, had been snuffed out. Features and qualities of her parents, her grandparents, great-grandparents, had all died in the instant of Lucy’s fall. And as they had, within seconds, his own life had been burdened with the weight of hers. In an attempt to see Caroline again, he’d taken Lucy away. There would be aching ripples of grief, coursing through Samantha, Josh, Rachel — and through hundreds of others he didn’t know. Lives would change. The hue of the years to come, although they were unaware, was already tainted for these people, the shade of their existence already darker. And yet out here, on the Heath, under an afternoon sun, nothing had altered. What Michael, and Michael alone, knew seemed to make a mockery of time and space, of the very meaning of those words. As if in causing Lucy’s death he’d proved everything to be illusion.
But it was not illusion. This is what he’d also known as he’d traversed the Heath, his fencing bag slung over his shoulder. It might have felt unreal, there in the open air, beyond the walls of the Nelsons’ house. But it wasn’t. It was very real. It was true, and Michael had known he had only minutes to write himself out of that truth.
As he’d cut across a southern spur of the Heath towards East Heath Road and the streets leading to Rosslyn Hill, Michael had run through the timings of the alternative truth he was trying to create. His lesson with Istvan was at four p.m. It usually took him about thirty minutes of fast walking to arrive at the school in Highgate. From his first lesson he’d always walked, whatever the weather. Partly to avoid being stuck in traffic, but also to open up his sciatic cramp and warm up his body for the rigours of the session. The walk back to his flat was, similarly, his warm down. To arrive on time today, having walked his usual route, he would already have been halfway across the Heath when Lucy fell. It was as simple as that. No one knew he’d been in the Nelsons’ house. No one had seen him enter or leave. If he could arrive for his fencing lesson on time, then he could delete the minutes he’d spent there, edit them from the day, just like when he redrafted a manuscript. A single key held for a few seconds, and a story could be altered forever.
He looked as his watch. It was ten to four. He must have remained at the top of the stairs, or on his sofa, for longer than he’d thought. His best hope now was to catch a bus to Highgate. Looking up, he saw a bus stop on the road ahead. He knew one of the Highgate buses stopped there. But on a Saturday there would be no more than three or four an hour at most. Quickening his pace, his right calf cramped like pig-iron above his ankle, Michael walked on, his leg short in the stride, as if manacled by a ball and chain.
He was still fifty or sixty metres from the road when he’d seen the Highgate bus approaching from South End Green. It was a single-decker, almost empty, carrying just one woman reading a paper towards the rear. Picking up his pace again, Michael had watched as with a painful ease the bus’s left indicator flashed as it slowed to a pause beside the stop. The woman rose from her seat, walked down the aisle, and dismounted from its middle doors. Michael raised his arm, hoping the driver would see him in his wing mirror. He could hear the engine, turning over heavily beneath the shade of the trees. As he’d got nearer he’d kept his eyes on the right indicator, willing it not to take up the rhythm of the left. He’d thought about shouting, but he was wary of drawing attention to himself.
With a deliberate beat the right indicator began flashing, twice, three times, as the bus smoothly pulled away from the kerb and the driver worked through its lower gears to tackle the hill towards Spaniards Road. Michael, slowing in his walking, had watched it go, sensing as it went each of those printed minutes in the Nelsons’ house becoming more indelible with every second.
―
“Step! And step! And—” Istvan, feinting for Michael’s wrist, suddenly dropped, as if he’d tripped. But then Michael felt his blade jab into the arch of his foot. Istvan never tripped. “Come on, Michael!” he said as he rose back into en garde, his tone that of a disappointed parent. “You are slow today. Too slow. Again!”