Michael felt drained of all energy. As if a stopper had been pulled from his chest and his vitality was pouring from the hole. The excitement of reaching the school in time had, he realised, fuelled him through the opening exercises of the lesson. But now, even as he parried and attacked, all he wanted to do was sleep, to lay his head on a pillow and wake up weeks from here and find none of this to be true or all of it to be forgotten.
―
The taxi had appeared from down the hill like a gift. Michael had continued walking towards the road in the vain hope of another bus coming to the stop. But as he’d reached the kerb, he’d seen the taxi instead: a black cab, its orange bar lit. He’d raised his arm, trying to look calm, his heartbeat hammering in his chest.
“You all right, mate?” the taxi driver had asked him as they’d pulled up at some traffic lights. Michael knew he’d been studying him in his rearview mirror since he’d got in. He’d replied to his disembodied eyes, “Yeah, fine. Just this heat, you know.”
“You sure?” the driver pressed. “Cos you look a bit ropey, to be honest.” He reached to his side and waved a bottle through the partition. “Want some water?”
“Thanks,” Michael said as he took the bottle. “Probably a bit nervous, too,” he added, after he’d drunk, pointing a thumb towards his fencing bag. “Got my instructor test today.”
As soon as he’d spoken, he wished he hadn’t. The story needed no more than for him to be there on time. But already he was lying, creating.
“Yeah?” the driver said. “Well, good luck, mate, sure it’ll be a breeze.”
Michael had given a nod and a brief smile to the mirror. He was trying to still his pulse, slow his breathing. “Thanks,” he said again as he handed back the water. “I hope you’re right.”
He’d asked the driver to drop him a hundred metres or so before the school. As he’d driven off, Michael bent as if to tie a lace, waited for the taxi to round a corner, then picked up his bag and doubled back onto the Heath. Cutting through a bank of trees, he’d joined the path he usually walked to his lessons, a feet-worn track emerging from the foliage of the Heath across the street from the side entrance of the school.
Crossing the road, he’d glanced at his watch. It was five past four. As he’d walked on towards the sports hall, he’d felt his minutes inside the Nelsons’ fading with every stride. As if, on passing through the sliding doors into the lobby, he’d be passing into another version of time. One where he hadn’t gone next door, where he hadn’t gone up the stairs, and where he hadn’t come out of the bathroom, his face streaked with tears, to find Lucy in her pyjamas, her eyes wide and one bare foot stepping back into the air behind her.
―
“Distance!” Istvan shouted. A second later, as if to make his point, he landed a hit hard against Michael’s coquille. The impact shuddered through his tired grip. Michael felt a swell of nausea rise in his stomach, chilling his skin. He dropped back two paces, away from Istvan, who was still talking. “This is why I told you to bring the French grip,” he was telling Michael. “To stop you doing this. Again!”
But Michael could no longer hear him. Inside his mask, in slow motion, Lucy was falling again. Everything that had been too quick for him to see at the time, he was seeing now. Her foot travelling back and back, down and down, her toes missing the red carpet by centimetres. The tipping of her body, her left hand opening, as if to catch something. But her arms remaining motionless, as her wide eyes went back and back too, and her other foot lifted from the landing, and carried on lifting until it was higher than her head. Her flung blonde hair, which had already gone now, along with her eyes, and her arms and her feet, dropping below the top of the stairs.
Istvan was coming at him once more, but Michael raised a hand to stop him. Taking another step backwards, he dropped his blade and bent double. He was going to be sick. “Michael?” he heard Istvan say, as if from another room.
His goal of reaching the school on time had consumed him. It had been all that mattered. But now he was here the full tide of the facts had come flooding through. Lucy, who’d come to him with her dolls, who’d stroked her father’s collars until they were frayed. Who’d squirted him with a goldfish from her paddling pool and who’d ridden his shoulders with one hand clasped at his forehead, the other reaching for trees. She was gone, and it was he who had killed her.
As he ran, Michael pulled his mask from his face, dropping it to the floor as he pushed through the doors into the changing rooms. He reached the sink with the first bile rising in his throat. Clutching at its enamel edge, his whole body retching, he vomited long and violently, his knees giving from under him as his body tried to evacuate the memory of what he’d done.
When it was over, he heard Istvan from outside.
“Michael? Michael? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he heard himself say. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his glove. “Something I ate.”
He spoke with his head still bowed, his eyes closed. Slowly, raising himself on his elbows, he ran the tap and looked into the mirror above the sink. A man he no longer recognised was looking back at him. He was pale, the last week of sun washed from his complexion. Sweat had stuck his hair to his temples and forehead. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks hollow, the white of his fencing jacket flecked with yellow spittle. He looked exhausted. But what surprised Michael the most was that he also looked innocent. Just as there had been no mark upon the day, so there was no mark upon him. He’d been convinced Lucy’s life, her death, would show; like a bruise of the soul, it would leak into his skin. That all who saw him would see her, too. But there was nothing. Just a tall, pale man bent over a sink, looking back at him, asking him what to do next.
―
It was evening when Michael returned across the Heath. The heat of the day was already leeching towards night. The lowering sun cast the trees with a corona, and midges hung in the air like dust in a workshop. Most of the families had gone, leaving the Heath for the drinkers and lovers, for those who’d come or stayed to see the stars and the city reveal themselves against the sky’s deepening purple.
He walked slowly. The emptiness of his body felt religious, as if he’d been anointed. His mind, too, felt newly clear, as if this is what the consequence of a killing would be: a recurrent surfacing into more and more brilliant orbits of clarity, until the sharpness of it, the depth of its cutting, would become unbearable. It had happened in a second, and yet now it was his for life. This was the equation Michael couldn’t make balance, the sum circling in his mind as he drifted from his usual homeward route into parts of the Heath he’d never seen before.
There had been no one else in the house. Just him and, unknown to him, Lucy, sleeping upstairs. It was a moment in time owned by them alone. And yet it was not just theirs. Already Michael could feel the bleeding of those seconds, breaking the banks of their intimacy. He’d gone up those stairs first as a concerned neighbour, and then in search of Caroline, of the chance of seeing her again. If she hadn’t died, then nor would Lucy. So those seconds at the top of the stairs were Daniel McCullen’s, too. Wherever he was now, at this moment as Michael wandered the Heath, he, too, owned Lucy’s fall, as the furthest ripple of his Hellfire’s blast, the most recent echo of his killing.
And even now, as Michael paused in a clearing, the aftershocks were expanding. Had Josh or Samantha discovered her yet? Or maybe Rachel, coming up the stairs, calling her sister’s name, then trying to understand why she was lying in the turn, her leg caught under her? Michael walked on, following a path back into the woods. Once under the cover of their canopy, he stopped again and leant against the trunk of an oak. He ran his hands around its girth, to feel the solidity of its growth, its undoubtable bark. Why was he returning home? Shouldn’t he be fleeing in the other direction? Leaving London, Britain? Someone must have seen him. He’d been in such a hurry he’d gone straight from his gardening to the Nelsons.’ His hands were still soiled when he’d entered the house. He would have left traces. Footprints. Fingerprints. It would be known.