I Had to Die Twice to Write This

I got onto the garage roof at half past one in the morning, over a wall and a refuse bin, and I stood up there for a while looking down at the street to see whether anybody was going to look back. Nobody did. It was a Wednesday and it was cold and there was nothing on that street to look at.

The window I wanted is the side one on the third floor, the one that does not face the road. It has not shut properly in a long time. The bottom of the frame has dropped, so when you close it the upper catch does not seat, and the whole thing holds on the lower catch alone, and if you push along the left edge it comes open.

I did not find that out that night. I knew it, the way I know where the light switch is in my own flat in the dark, and I have stopped being able to explain how I know things like that, and I am not going to try again here.

I pushed along the left edge and it opened. Inside it was dark and it smelled of dust and of something faintly sweet, which is how a flat smells when an old man has lived in it for a long time and has recently stopped. I turned on the light on my phone.

A bed frame with no mattress. A wardrobe with the door hanging open. A radiator painted so many times that the layers showed where the paint had flaked away, and the bottom layer was green. The ceiling was low. The front door was shut and there was a wardrobe standing beside it, and when I opened the door to see, it struck the wardrobe, and I had to ease it open slowly.

I stood in the middle of that room without moving for longer than I intended to.

In the corner there were two boxes. Somebody had packed them properly, stacked and closed, which means it was done by whoever cleared the place out after he died, and then left there, because throwing things away costs money and leaving them costs nothing.

The first box was bills and appliance manuals and a folded map of a city I have never been to. The second had books in it, most of them swollen with damp, and underneath the books there was a stack of pages held together with a rubber band that had gone hard and split.

I want to describe what happened next accurately, because I have caught myself in the last few weeks making things neater than they were, and I do not want to do that here. I did not recognise the handwriting immediately. That is the thing people always assume, that I looked down and knew, and it was not like that.

What I noticed first was the paper, because it was the same paper I use, the cheap ruled kind with the pale blue lines that you can buy in any shop, and I remember thinking that this was an odd thing for a man of that generation to have used, and then I turned the first page over.

It was not a letter. It was not a diary either. It was arranged in sections with numbers at the top of them, and the numbers went up to eleven, and after eleven the pages simply stopped in the middle of a line, and there was nothing after that but three blank sheets and the split rubber band.

I read the first page standing up. Then I sat down on the bed frame, which was a stupid thing to do because it had no mattress and the metal cut into the back of my legs, and I read the first page again.

I am not going to write here what it said. Not yet. There is a way this has to be told and if I put it down now it will mean nothing to you and everything to me, and that is not a fair way to do this.

What I will say is that I have written those words. Not words like them. Those words, in that order, with the same comma in the wrong place, and I wrote them