Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

The front door of Coed y Bryn closing, the taxi turning on the gravel drive. Then, as Michael turned too, under the duvet, the cab’s engine thick in the dawn, before thinning away between the hedges. That is how she’d left him. With words and sounds. So maybe that was why, as he half listened to Tony telling another anecdote, Michael could still hear her voice so clearly. Because it was the last he’d known of her, and so was the last he held of her.

But although her voice was with Michael in that room, Caroline herself was not. For the first time since her death, as he stood there in the middle of the party, he’d felt alone. Not because he was without her, but just simply alone. As a single man might be, or an only child. Alone and surviving. And this, Michael realised, as he got ready for bed later that night, is what he’d felt give. A loosening in his memory of her, in his dependency. Which was why, as he’d stood in their front room, talking with their friends, he’d felt such a flood of gratitude towards the Nelsons. Towards Lucy and her dolls, towards Rachel and her drawings, and towards their parents, Josh and Samantha, for inviting him into their home.

MICHAEL APPROACHED A desk in the corner of the front room. A pile of art books was topped with a paperweight, a blue butterfly suspended in its glass. A green-shaded library lamp stood beside the books. As far as he knew, this desk was where Josh had put the screwdriver he’d lent him. Michael looked around the art books and behind the lamp. There was no sign of it.

The desk, like the rest of the room, was prepared rather than used. Michael glanced around at the other surfaces: the side tables either end of the sofa, the bookshelves, the trunk in the centre of the room. The screwdriver was nowhere to be seen. Just the sculptures, photographs, paintings, and books of the Nelsons’ lives. The sunlight through the draperies lit shafts of slow-turning air. A car sighed down the street outside. Somewhere farther off, on another road, an ice-cream van began playing a tinny “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”

Michael didn’t want to start opening drawers, looking in the cupboards under the shelves. His hands were dirty and he would leave marks. He checked the time again. The broken blade was his only French grip. His fencing master, Istvan, had told him specifically to bring it this week. He went back to the desk and, hooking his little finger in the handle of its drawer, slid it open. Inside there was a pad of writing paper, a spool of Sellotape, two old chequebooks. He slid the drawer closed again.

―

The fencing lessons had been a suggestion of the bereavement counsellor he’d been assigned in Chepstow. At first Michael had resisted her idea. The thought that his grief might be sweated out like a fever felt crude, and somehow disloyal. At that stage he’d still been consumed with exposing those who’d killed Caroline, his energies channelled into sating his anger rather than assuaging it. But on leaving Coed y Bryn, he remembered what the counsellor had said and pulled out his fencing kitbag from under the stairs, trying not to recall the last time he’d opened it. “It can help,” she’d told him, as she’d made them coffee in her office behind the library. “And not just the exercise,” she’d said, bringing the two mugs to the table between them. “But also taking up a past activity.” She slid one of these mugs towards him. “Something from before.”

He’d found the club on the Internet, a small but dedicated group of fencers, mostly épée and foil, who met twice a week in a school sports hall in Highgate. The first time he’d attended a session was on a blustery night at the end of October. Banks of fallen leaves choked the kerbsides. Others swirled in eddies along the pavements. The hall, in contrast to the night outside, was bright, lit by strip lights buzzing overhead. His kit smelt musty, and his limbs were leaden, unfamiliar with the movements of his youth. But the counsellor was right. For a few seconds, maybe even minutes, he’d forgotten. For precious moments the parts of his mind and chest that had been constricted with Caroline’s death had relaxed. For the first time since Peter had called on him that afternoon it had felt as if he was breathing to the full depth of his lungs. So Michael returned the following week, and had continued to return every week since, finding, behind the mesh of his mask, the anticipation and clatter of the fights, the ache in his thighs and forearms, a release. An action that was neither past nor future, but purely present.

―

Michael had lent Josh the screwdriver a couple of days earlier. The night before Josh had broken his glasses. They’d been sitting in the kitchen after dinner, the remnants of a lasagne in the middle of the table, their wineglasses showing the tide marks of a bottle of red. The girls, after a round of good-night kisses, had already gone to bed. Having settled them upstairs, Samantha had returned to Michael and Josh in the kitchen, where, once again, they’d fallen to talking about New York, a city they’d discovered they shared twice, as somewhere they’d all lived, and then again as a memory.

“But where did they all go?” Samantha said, angling a piece of Brie onto a biscuit. “That’s what I want to know.”

Josh was bent over his glasses, trying to tighten a screw in their wire frames. “What do you mean ‘go’?” he said, not looking up. “Into shelters, hostels, given rooms.”

“But how do we know that?” Samantha countered him. “How do we know they weren’t just all shoved into New Jersey or the Bronx?”

“Because”—Josh lifted his head to look at his wife—“if they were, then I’m pretty sure New Jersey and the Bronx would have let us know soon enough.”

“Not if he paid them enough.”

Josh shook his head and went back to studying the wire frames. He’d changed into a loose-fitting shirt, one side of its collar frayed by the attentions of Lucy’s fingers. He was tired, and looked it.

“You have to admit,” Michael said, looking up from a Vanity Fair he’d been browsing, “it was pretty quick. When I first moved there people were still calling Bryant Park Needle Park, remember that? Then, in what felt like only months, they were screening films there, holding Christmas fairs.”

“That’s what I mean,” Samantha said, tapping the table. “Too quick. Giuliani isn’t stupid. He knew if they were off the streets of Manhattan, maybe Brooklyn, too, then that’s all that mattered. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Shit.” Josh ducked his head below the table. A concave lens lay beside his plate.

“The fucking screw fell out,” he said from under them.

Samantha shook her head and drank the last of her wine.

“Got it!” Josh emerged again, his face flushed. A miniature screw was balanced on the tip of his index finger. For a few moments none of them spoke. Michael returned to the magazine, while Samantha stood and began clearing the table. Fitting the loose lens into the frame, Josh twice tried to drop the screw’s thread into place. Both times it fell to the table instead.

“I’ve got a screwdriver for that,” Michael said after Josh’s second attempt. “In my blade kit. It’s magnetic.”

“Well, look at you, James Bond,” Samantha said from the dishwasher.

“Thanks, Mike, that’d be great.” Josh pushed back his chair. “I haven’t got time to—” he continued as he walked out of the kitchen.

“I can take them—” Samantha started.

“I said it’s fine Sam,” Josh called from down the hall, cutting her off. “No drama. I’ll fix ’em tomorrow.”

The next day Michael called round early at the Nelsons’ front door. He knew the girls would be having breakfast in the kitchen and his appearance at the back of the house would only give Samantha another distraction as she tried to feed and dress them before taking Rachel to school. It was Josh who answered his knock. He was recently showered, the hair above his temples still damp. He wore a laundry-pressed shirt, red tie, and polished shoes. Together with an unfamiliar pair of glasses and a fresh shave, he looked like the younger brother of the man with whom Michael had eaten the night before.