The Choice

by Gillian McAllister

  I lean down and tentatively touch his shoulder, his black jacket. It’s softer than I thought it would be, fleecy. He’s in tight black trousers, almost leggings. I was sure that he was in jeans, in the bar. But there are the red trainers. Just the same.

  “He’s facedown,” I say. “On some concrete—he fell . . . he fell down some steps. Seven,” I add uselessly, because my guilt has made me count them.

  “Okay, and is he breathing? I don’t want you to move his neck. Okay? Okay, Joanna?”

  Her tone frightens me. Everything frightens me. It’s like the world’s been filtered, black, and I can feel the hot, sweaty nausea again. I say nothing.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes,” I say. There’s a man lying injured beneath my fingertips, and I did it. I can hardly dare think about it. It’s like looking at the sun.

  I can’t turn him over. I can’t do it.

  The voice from the headphones is still speaking—about imagining a beach scene, waves rolling in and out—and I listen to that instead.

  “Can you look, listen, and feel for whether he’s breathing? Do you know his name?” She enunciates these words like a primary school teacher.

  Look, listen, and feel. I do not know what these words mean. I look over my shoulder, at the illuminated street, slick with rain, and along the canal, to the bridges stacking behind us, almost all aligning, tessellating, like my vision has gone blurred.

  Look.

  Listen.

  Feel.

  I stare at him, facedown on the pavement.

  I run my fingers underneath his shoulder and crouch to look at him. “Oh, oh,” I say to her, involuntarily. His face is sopping. At first I think it’s blood, when my fingers touch the wetness, but it’s cold and thin-feeling.

  And then I realize. My eyes see it as they adjust to the dark. It grows in front of me: a puddle at the bottom of the steps. Caused by a tree a few feet away, its roots pulling up the pavement, cracking it, making it uneven, creating great craters.

  One of which is filled with water.

  He’s totally submerged, in dark water, on the dark ground.

  “He’s facedown, in a puddle,” I say.

  Surely she will help? She is on my side; she must be. She is a good person, working in the 999 call center.

  “Roll him onto his side, quick as you can, out of the water,” she says. “Does he have a head or neck injury?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I pushed him. And he fell, down the stairs,” I say.

  Nobody can blame anybody for being honest. Nobody can prosecute for an innocent mistake.

  “Quick as you can,” she repeats.

  I roll him over. His black hood is still drawn partially over his face. The rest is in shadow.

  “Now I need you to check he’s breathing. Look, listen, and feel, remember? Can you repeat that back?”

  “Look, listen, and feel,” I say woodenly.

  “Look for his chest rising. Listen with your ear at his airways. Feel for his breath.”

  I stare at his chest. I lean my head down. I can hear everything, suddenly. The roar of distant traffic. The trickle of water into the canal. The sound of the raindrops splattering on the concrete. But nothing from him.

  I take my glove off and rest my hand against his nose. There is no breath against my fingers. Nothing tickling them at all. It is still, unnatural, like looking at somebody with a vital detail missing, like eyelashes or fingernails. The contents of my handbag scatter over the ground as I lean over him. Lipsticks I never wear because they make me self-conscious roll all over the place.

  “He’s not breathing,” I say. Panic rushes in again.

  “Is he definitely not?” she says. “Put your cheek to his mouth. I want you to tell me whether you can feel his breath against your face.”

  I wince but do it anyway.

  There’s nothing against my cheek. No movement. No warmth. No rustling of the strands of my hair by a breath. Nothing.

  “He’s definitely not breathing,” I say.

  Her voice is crisp, patient, sympathetic. “We’re going to do five rescue breaths first,” she says. “Because he’s been drowning.”

  Drowning.

  “Okay.”

  “Open his mouth. Lay him on his back. Tilt his chin back. Being careful of his neck. Chin lifted high, all right, Joanna? Tilt his head back. Are you ready?”

  I move him onto flatter ground, and as I do so, his hood falls away and I see his face.

  It’s not Sadiq.

  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 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 rol
ls over and beckons to me, wanting to hold me, even in his sleep. Instead, they flop onto 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. 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, facedown.

  And then the panic comes. Panic in such a pure form it could be an injection.

  Sweat breaks out over my body. The streetlight 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 spilled 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 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 facedown on the ground; a dark canal, opaque with frost, illuminated in yellow patches by the streetlights. 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 backward, 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 spelled 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 colors 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 picture 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 gray 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 postmodern 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 reads. 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 voice mails and a text. An unprecedented amount of contact from my often noncommunicative husband. I stand outside the Tube at Hammersmith, listening to them.

  “Hi. Only me. You all right?”

  “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 look 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 that 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 anymore. 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 I 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, all right?” 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 gray hairs on his head. But I know we must be getting older because the people I mistake for him are older. A redheaded 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.