Chapter 57: Priya Raman
I took her up because the alternative was standing in the street.
She went up ahead of me, and she held the rail with her right hand.
My room has one chair, a divan, a table with a folding leg, and a window.
I gave her the chair and sat on the end of the divan, two metres away and lower than her.
I made tea in the two mugs I own, and turned hers so the chipped rim was away from her mouth.
She held it in both hands and did not drink it.
“I've thought about this for a long time,” she said, “and now I'm here I don't know which end to start.”
I said she could start anywhere.
It was the last complete sentence I said for a long time.
“The eighth of November,” she said. “Twelve years ago. Farrow Street.”
I know Farrow Street.
“I was twenty-nine. I worked nights at St Cuthbert's, in medical records. I still do that job.”
“I got the thirty-one bus home. The stop was outside the launderette then.”
“There was a man who'd been at that stop three times. Not on the bus. At the stop.”
“He said his name was Dennis. He asked mine on the Tuesday and I gave him a wrong one, because you do.”
“On the eighth he wasn't at the stop. He was up the street.”
She stopped and started again.
“No. Before that. I need to say that his car was already there.”
“A dark green estate. Two wheels up on the pavement outside the shop with the shutter. And the passenger door was open before he touched me.”
“That's the part I couldn't make anybody care about. The door was open first.”
Her thumb moved on the side of the mug, back and forward, about a centimetre.
“He took my wrist. The right one. And the back of my collar with his other hand.”
“He didn't say anything. That's what I remember most. Not a word, the whole time.”
“I made a noise. Not a scream. Like a cough. I've tried a hundred times since to make the one I should have made.”
“He got me about four steps from the car door. I counted them afterwards. Four.”
“And then he wasn't there.”
She looked at the window.
“There was a young woman. She came from the bridge end. Tall. Grey coat, open. Hair tied back.”
“She didn't shout. I want you to understand that. Nobody shouted.”
“She took his sleeve and his collar and then she turned her back on him.”
“I've thought about that for twelve years. Why would you turn your back.”
O-goshi. Hip below his, and you turn your back because your hips have to be under his weight.
I did not say it out loud. I could not have said anything out loud.
“And he went over her. Over the top. And his head hit the kerb edge.”
“It sounded like somebody putting shopping down too hard.”
“She stood over him for a second. Maybe two.”
“Then she looked at me and she said, 'Do you know him?'”
“And I couldn't answer. My mouth wouldn't do it.”
“And a light came on in the flat above the shop, and a car turned into the top of the street with its headlights on.”
“And she ran.”
I had my hands on my knees, and the sound in the room was the boiler and not me.
“I sat down on the kerb,” Priya said. “About a metre from his head. I don't know how long for.”
“They took him away at ten to twelve. I know because it's on a form I got seven years later.”
“He was called Dennis Kerrigan. He was thirty-six. He had a wife in Kilburn.”
“He woke up after eleven days.”
“He was never charged with anything. He was the injured party.”
Here is what I had believed for twelve years.
That a man and a woman had been shouting at each other on a street, and I had walked into the middle of an argument that was none of my business and put a man in a coma.
That I had misread a hand on an arm because I was twenty-two and angry and had nothing left that I was good at.
That I had a nature, and that on the eighth of November it had got out.
I built three years of kneeling on a hardwood floor on that.
“He wasn't arguing with me,” Priya said. “I want to be sure you've heard it. He had my wrist and my collar and he was putting me in a car.”
“You didn't overreact. There wasn't anything to overreact to. There was a car.”
I did not say anything.
I sat with my hands flat on the fronts of my thighs, palms down, fingers together, thumbs tucked, which is the position I had held eleven times at a dinner table.
And I could not make them move.