The phone rang. Lisa was far too busy watching something crap on TV to answer it, so I went. “They’ve arrested someone!” “What?” It was Adam, full of excitement. He’d been covering a big murder case for the last couple of weeks, the one we’d seen on Crimewatch. “I’m going to be down here in Camberwell until late, so I won’t be able to make it back for the match. Can you tape it for me?” At ten o’clock, the news was alive with Adam’s story. Apparently the boyfriend had done it. Lisa was hugging a cushion, but that didn’t stop her from unleashing her fury toward the man. “Fucking monster.” “Who is that bloke? I know him from somewhere.” “They had him on the news just after she died, doing that appeal for information.” I didn’t see Adam until the next day, by which time his story had been printed on the front page of the Standard. He got home from work and insisted on taking me to the pub to celebrate. It seemed a little perverse to me, but he was buying, so I didn’t complain. “The sick fuck. How could somebody do that? Killing their girlfriend. Fucking psycho. Well, I dunno, some of my exes tempted me at times.” “Yeah, yeah.” “I don’t know how he thought he could get away with it. First he claims he was at home the whole time, then when they show him the phone bill that proves he wasn’t, he says he did go and see her, but she was alive when he left. He hasn’t got a chance, so he makes up some bullshit about some other guy being there with her. So he expects the Met to go out and look for this mystery man, who nobody except him saw.” “Nobody except him and the dead girl.” “Well, yeah. No, there is no other man. It’s just a pack of lies he made up, because he’s got no alibi, he’s got her blood on his shirt, he’s fucking guilty.” He was far too enthusiastic for me to bother saying anything about the presumption of innocence. “He got his housemate to lie for him, say that he was at home. But as soon as the police showed him the phone bill, the housemate cracked, like that.” He snapped his fingers gleefully, took a big gulp of his pint and swaggered off to the toilet. I looked at the copy of the paper that Adam had been proudly brandishing at me. They had reprinted the photos of the dead girl’s boyfriend from the press conference, looking upset. There was a short blurb on him. Robert Carlton, 33, banker, blah blah, Surrey, blah blah, speculation, blah blah, innuendo, blah blah blah. I knew him from somewhere, but I couldn’t place him. Did he work for our firm? No, there would have been more of a fuss around the office. Was he somebody’s husband, boyfriend? No, if someone’s significant other had been involved with something like this, the office gossip production line would have cranked into overdrive to the extent that even I wouldn’t have been able to ignore it. I must have seen him somewhere else. Maybe he was just one of those faces you see every day, a stranger on the tube or in the street, who becomes so familiar that you think you know them. Maybe he looked like somebody I used to know. No, it was definitely him, whoever he was, unless he had a twin brother. My eyes flicked across the page, lacking the patience to read it. There was a potted biography of the dead girl, ‘everything to look forward to’, ‘successful life ahead of her’, ‘tragically cut short’, all the usual bullshit. Murder victims are always ‘in the prime of their lives’. Why do we never read that the victim was some no-hoper drop-out who’s better off dead? Are we supposed to think that it’s a worse crime if they were young and photogenic, preferably with kids? Next to that was a picture of the dead girl’s flat, a terraced house in a fairly generic suburban street, in a moderate state of disrepair. Interviews with friends, relatives, neighbours, random passers-by. Profiles, reconstructions, leader comments. There was almost three pages of the stuff. I wondered if Adam would think it rude of me to turn to the sports pages, and I left the paper open at his murder case. Adam was taking a long time in the toilets. I had a sneaking suspicion that he’d got himself some coke to celebrate. I sipped at the remnants of my pint, trying my best not to finish it before he came back, trying not to think about whether or not he would offer me a line. The picture continued to stare into space in a way I found rather eerie. I picked at the paper, listlessly fiddling with it as if it was a plate of unwanted vegetables, and the picture of the bloke fell into my field of vision again. I gave a shudder of possibility as I realised where I’d seen him before. I’d seen him the night I’d been at the office party. The night he’d killed her. The night I’d gone to that club. I could feel the blood draining from my face as the memory began to come back to me. I’d gone home with some girl that night. I remembered a taxi, going across Tower Bridge. Sitting in the back with her, making vaguely coherent efforts to maul her. Fumbling for change outside a house somewhere. A house in South London. The house that had seemed strangely familiar the other night. I looked again at the picture. The house, the girl, the bloke; I’d seen them all before. Taking the piss out of her accent, from Burnley or Preston or wherever it was she was from. It was her. The dead girl. I was there that night. “Same again, mate?” “Eh? Oh, yeah, yeah, cheers.” Returning from the toilet, Adam was on his way to the bar before sitting down again. I had been there that night. I remembered going back to the flat with her. I remembered the doorbell going. I remembered hearing him, at the door. I remembered wondering whether or not I would fit inside the wardrobe. What had happened? Of course, Adam would want to carry on talking about the case. This was a big break for him, a front page story, and he was entitled to his moment of glory. I didn’t want to be talking about it, though. Not now. It had been a shock. I needed time to figure out what to say. I could be charged with withholding evidence, or something. I had to go to the police, tell them what I knew. But what did I know, exactly? That I recognised his face from somewhere, but I wasn’t sure where? That I vaguely remembered being with the dead girl that night, but I wasn’t sure when? I had to get things clear in my mind before I spoke to anyone, never mind the police. I had to change the subject. Strange how your mind goes entirely blank of things to say when you really have to say something. Like when you’re in a pub with your friend and somebody you don’t know, and your friend goes to the toilet. Like when your soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend says ‘talk to me’, or ‘what are you thinking?’. Because you can’t say what you really are thinking, because she wouldn’t want to hear it. So you have to think of something to say. When I was sixteen, I always used to promise myself that I would never let myself descend to the level of small talk. I would always have something profound to say, or I would remain silent. But of course it doesn’t work like that. Very few things do work the way my sixteen-year-old self thought they did. Small talk isn’t a crime against humanity. As well as taking your mind off the horrors of existence, it has a very useful social function. In exchanging these pointless pleasantries, you’re sussing out who you can be bothered to have important conversations with. It’s a bit like the way you audition prospective sexual partners when you’re dancing. If they do the little things well, the big things should follow. Now that the pressure was on, though, the nerves were getting to me. I wasn’t sure that I could perform in these circumstances. My mouth was dry. What if the words didn’t come out right? Adam came back from the bar, moving in that strange half-shuffle that is reserved for carrying multiple pints through pubs. Between his teeth he gripped a packet of crisps. As soon as he had arranged himself back on the stool, he chugged: “You know the thing that really gets me about this?” He paused, and for a moment the hope rose inside me that it wasn’t a rhetorical question about his case, but an opportunity for digression. It wasn’t. It was merely a brief interlude while he lit a cigarette and took a sip of his new pint. “The sick fuck, going on Crimewatch and all the rest of it, doing those press conferences and that, when it was him who fucking killed her. I mean, I was there at those press conferences, and he was so convincing. I completely fell for that grieving boyfriend act. Makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean, him sitting there, calm as you like, thinking, ‘I’ve got away with this’, while all the time the waterworks are gushing away. Fucking sick, mate.” “Yeah, you never know, do you? They always say it’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch.” What the hell was I saying? Who is this mysterious ‘they’ who always say that? What authority do they have? Why have I found myself believing it? It wasn’t even a case of believing it. It was just a phrase that had become accepted as being a suitable way of filling a gap in this kind of situation. It didn’t mean anything, any more than the poems about best friends and special husbands inside greetings cards mean anything. My sixteen-year-old self would not have approved. There weren’t many things in my life of which my sixteen-year-old self would have approved. I wasn’t completely honest all the time. Soft drugs had led to occasional harder drugs, and I wasn’t upholding his anarchist principles very well, either. I had made the predictable male mistakes in my relationships with women. I had given up on most of my dreams. I wasn’t living for rock’n’roll. I wasn’t having regular group sex with supermodels. I wasn’t a vegetarian. I complained about paying taxes. I didn’t give a shit about politics. I was working for The Man. I was a slave to the system. I still agreed with him that jogging was for cunts, though. I decided that my sixteen-year-old self could fuck off back to his protest songs and his anxieties about when he would lose his virginity, and took another slurp of my pint as I prepared to unleash a few more clichés. “You have to wonder about human nature sometimes, don’t you? I mean, maybe we do have something intrinsically violent in us. Maybe it’s some primal thing that needs to be released. After all, what’s sport if it isn’t ritualised hunting and warfare?” “No. He’s not right. He’s a fucking animal. Ten to one he was abused as a kid.” I wasn’t in the mood for a debate on the subject, and I was glad to notice a match had just started on the big screen. It was only Wigan against Tranmere, but it would do. The average man is utterly incapable of continuing any coherent conversation if either breasts or football come into his field of vision, and we were no exception. Adam’s eyes drifted upwards involuntarily, hypnotised, and we slipped into a solemn hush as my mind raced around trying to balance itself.
Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth