Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

Josh reached out and held Michael by the shoulder, his grip firmer than necessary. “Are you serious?” he said. “Christ, don’t be ridiculous. And anyway, you didn’t bring it up, I did.”

A drift of voices came down the garden. Some of the guests had moved into the kitchen.

“If there’s anything we can do,” Josh said, “just let us know. I’m serious. Please.”

Michael nodded. “Thanks.”

The back door opened and the chatter of the party became louder.

“We should get back,” Josh said, stubbing out his cigarette and slipping the butt in his pocket. “Or at least I should.”

“No,” Michael said, letting go of the fence. “I’m fine. I’ll come, too.”

As they walked up the garden Josh touched Michael’s arm again. “So what’s it you do, Mike? To keep the wolf from the door?”

“I’m a writer,” Michael said.

“Yeah?” Josh said. “Anything published?”

“One book. Too many articles.”

“Hey, that’s great!” Josh said with too much enthusiasm.

“And you’re with Lehman’s?” Michael asked.

“Yeah, in brokerage, mostly,” Josh said, as if that’s what everyone did. “Hey, listen, there’s someone here I want you to meet. Old college buddy of mine, Tony. He and his wife have just moved over. He’s a publisher.”

As they neared the back door, Samantha appeared at the top of the steps. Her face was tense. “Joshua?” she said, showing her palms in exasperation.

“Is Tony in there, honey?” Josh asked. “I want him to meet Mike. Mike’s a writer, did he tell you that?”

―

In the years to come, Michael would often think how it was Tony, more than anyone else, he had to thank for his friendship with the Nelsons. Or perhaps to blame, given what happened because of it. Had Tony and his wife, Maddy, not been at the party that day, then it was more than possible Michael would have remained no more than a neighbour to Josh and Samantha. Morning greetings, occasional conversations over the hedge dividing his communal garden from their private lawn, glimpses of them emerging from a taxi at night, a streetlight catching their clothes as they passed into the shadows.

Perhaps there would have been other parties, and maybe at one of them someone else would have performed a similar role to Tony’s that Saturday in November. But Michael doubted it. There are narrow windows for certain beginnings. Multiple strands of personal histories, psychologies, emotions that intersect once only, and then never again. There is, in the end, a time for everything. This is what Michael told himself in the years afterwards. Sometimes in consolation, more often in regret. That however much he tried to unpick those threads, however much he attempted to locate the source moment of what had happened, he could not. There was always another beyond it, connected by the most fragile of strands, but connected still. Time had travelled through all of them — him, Caroline, Samantha, Josh, Lucy, Rachel — and there was nothing they could have done about it. None of their choices had been malign. And yet combined, they’d created darkness more than light.

For the other residents of South Hill Drive, the nature of Michael’s friendship with Samantha and Josh was difficult to fathom. Viewed from a distance, it seemed both unlikely and imbalanced. Him, a young single widower, reticent with grief, a freelancer adrift on the hours of the day. Them, a young family busy with the tides of life, with the schedules and demands of their shared hours.

But it wasn’t just the differing makeup of their lives that led others on the street to comment or question. It was also the momentum of their relationship, the speed at which they’d become so intimate following that party. Over the next seven months their involvement in one another’s lives deepened to a degree that all of them had only ever experienced before after a period of years. Within a few weeks Michael and Josh were regularly to be seen leaving of a morning for their jogs on the Heath; when the girls came home from school and nursery they soon got used to Michael joining them in their kitchen, having tea with Samantha or even helping with their homework as she prepared dinner. He and Samantha often met during the days, too, at the cafés edging the Heath or in the canteen of Kenwood House. Three or four times a week, as Josh exited the Tube station in Belsize Park, Michael’s phone would light up with a text on his desk—“Come round for a drink?” By the time it was Christmas it already seemed natural that Michael should join them for lunch, arriving at their back door with an armful of presents for the girls and a bottle of champagne for their parents. All of which puzzled their other neighbours on the street who followed, through windows and rumour, their accelerated friendship. What these neighbours couldn’t appreciate, however, was that the source of their surprise was also its reason. It was exactly because of its newness, its lack of depth, that Michael, Samantha, and Josh had embraced their newfound companionship with the familiarity of years.

When Michael had first met them that winter, there were already undercurrents pulling at Samantha and Josh’s marriage. In their differing ways, despite apparently having achieved all they’d hoped, both were honeycombed with disappointment. In the last couple of years that internal fragility had begun to show. Josh, Michael came to learn, beyond his public bonhomie, could be spiteful and demeaning to his wife. Samantha, meanwhile, met his outbursts with a deepening silence, an ingrained resentment that increasingly manifested itself in an outward disregard for Josh and his work. They both drank, Samantha for solace and reward, Josh to rediscover the optimism of his youth; to feel the muscle memory of when his life was just that, his. The first time Michael had heard them arguing through the conjoining wall of his building and their house he thought maybe a burglar had broken into their home. But then he’d recognised Josh’s accent in the muffled shouts, Samantha’s pitch in her tearful retorts.

For both Samantha and Josh, Michael appeared at this stage in their lives as someone unattached to their pasts, or to any of the areas of their marriage in which its stresses were bred. He wasn’t a work colleague of Josh’s, a university friend of Samantha’s, or a parent with a child at Lucy’s nursery or Rachel’s school. He was free of association with their histories, and as such their only shared acquaintance. All their other friends were either Samantha’s or Josh’s before becoming “theirs.” It often felt as if in Michael’s presence Samantha and Josh were able to forget their married past, and yet remember the best of themselves, too, and that this was why, beyond anything he ever brought himself, they’d become so attached to having him in their home.

In a similar way, Michael was surprised to find relief in Samantha and Josh’s unfamiliarity with Caroline. Josh thought he may have once seen one of her reports when staying at a hotel in Berlin, but he couldn’t be sure. What was certain was that neither of them had ever known her in person. Her death, for Samantha and Josh, was just another fact of Michael’s life. Something with which he’d arrived at their door along with the rest of his past, rather than a loss with which he’d been burdened, as some of his older friends had seen it. To Samantha and Josh, Caroline existed only in Michael’s telling of her. When he talked about her with them, he found himself speaking about her life, not her death. So for them, there was no “before” Caroline, but just this echo of a person, still sounding in the man sitting at their table, not as an absence, but as a part of him.

Over those first few weeks after meeting Josh and Samantha, Michael came to realise that rather than avoiding the questions of strangers, perhaps he should have been seeking them all along. In the Nelsons’ lack of familiarity with Caroline he’d discovered a taste not just of what his life might be like in the years to come, but also what it had been like before her death, and even — and at this a sharp guilt would stab through him — of what it had been like before her.