Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

Coed y Bryn was an old Welsh longhouse, a low-ceilinged cottage and barn built into an isolated hillside outside Chepstow. The nearest other building was a rural chapel, used only for weddings and funerals. Woods and sky filled the views from its windows. It was not, Michael was told by his friends, a place to be alone. With Caroline gone, they’d said, he needed people, distraction. Eventually one of her work colleagues, Peter, had offered him a flat to rent in a fifties block overlooking Hampstead Heath. When Peter sent through the details, Michael didn’t open the email for days. But then one night, after another long day on his own, he’d uncorked a bottle of red and sat down with his laptop beside the fire. Opening his browser, he’d clicked on Peter’s message and looked through its attachments.

The first photograph was of a pair of wide windows, their frames filled with trees and the undulations of the Heath. As an autumn wind buffeted the back of the cottage, the fire crackling beside him, Michael scrolled through the other images — a broad street of Georgian town houses, occasionally interrupted by modern blocks; two sparsely furnished bedrooms; a living area, the carpet stained and worn; an outdated galley kitchen in magnolia and pine.

It was a flat of many lives. Many people had stood at those windows and lain on those beds. With Caroline gone, Michael needed to start again. But he also did not want to start again. So he’d replied to Peter and said yes. Partly because the flat looked more like a holding pattern than a new beginning. But also because he knew Peter was only doing what Caroline had asked of him. Trying to take care of her husband, to help. Michael hoped perhaps once he was settled back in London, Peter might feel less diligent about his duty; that, having housed Michael, he might feel able to leave him alone.

―

When Michael and Caroline had moved from London to Wales they’d hired the removal company’s largest lorry to bring their combined belongings to Coed y Bryn. They’d both led independent, largely single lives into their thirties and although neither had been rooted for long, both had been keepers rather than leavers. Michael’s books and belongings were scattered in storage lockers and friends’ spare rooms on both sides of the Atlantic, while the detritus of his teenage years was still in the attic of his late parents’ house in Cornwall. Caroline, despite her nomadic lifestyle, had fostered a magpie’s attraction for artefacts, shoes, and furniture. Between them, through a decade’s succession of apartments and flats, they’d accumulated enough belongings to fill a house twice the size of the cottage.

The addresses that had led Caroline to Coed y Bryn were a paper trail of the regions she’d covered as a foreign correspondent for a U.S. satellite station. Since leaving university she’d had homes on several continents. Often they were no more than places to pass through. A series of studios, company flats, rooms in shared houses in Cape Town, Nairobi, Sydney, Berlin, and Beirut. In 2001, still in her twenties, she’d been embedded with an Uzbek division of the Northern Alliance as they’d fought their way towards Kabul. In 2003 she’d celebrated her thirtieth birthday with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and an American marine in the back of an armoured car on the outskirts of Baghdad. Until she met Michael, her life had been a sequence of erratic excitements. Airports relaxed her, as if transit was her natural domain. Arrivals and departures were her strongest memories, bracketing, as they did, the chapters of her life. For Caroline, giving herself to the rhythm of events was a kind of freedom. Being sent on a story at short notice, having no say in where she went, or when. And it was familiar, too. Born in Cape Town, brought up in Melbourne, university in Boston. She’d always been the newcomer, the outsider, her belongings left in storage while she moved on again.

As Caroline grew into her job through her twenties she began to pride herself on her ability for assimilation, on her detachment from attachment. When she changed planes on a grey day in Amsterdam her tanned skin spoke of rocky deserts, souks, and bazaars. In clubs and bars men sensed her transience like a pheromone. She would soon be gone. This is what she tried to communicate in the directness of her stare, which somehow gave her petite frame presence. She rarely wore makeup and her blonde hair was seldom as sleekly groomed as that of the other women perched along a hotel bar. Sometimes, if she’d just landed, a hint of stale sweat lingered on her clothes.

But still they came to her. Men who worked in offices, whose bodies remained structured by suits, even when they no longer wore them. In cafés, crowded pubs, sometimes even on the street, they came to her, recognising her brevity, as if she were a comet they knew would trace their nights only once in a lifetime.

She witnessed the aftermath of horrors. She saw what humans could do to one another. She lost friends. In Bosnia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Iraq. One night in Kabul the body of her interpreter was found eyeless and tongueless on a sofa in his home. She grieved, and her family worried. But for Caroline these deaths, although felt, were another passing through. They and the grief in their wake were the price of life. She took them, like all the other leavings and lost friendships, in her stride.

She was not always happy. As she edged into her thirties she recognised she was becoming cursory; how depths — of time, connection — had a tendency to unnerve her. But she was comfortable. Life, she felt, was an instrument, and the trick was to find the tune you could play on it. In this respect she considered herself lucky. She’d found her tune early, and she was playing it well.

And then, one day, waking alone in a hotel room in Dubai, she’d felt differently. As if the same chain of experiences that had taught her the price of life had finally, on that morning, revealed its value, too. It was a lesson of omission. A learning from what she didn’t know, not from what she did. Her aunt had died the week before and she hadn’t travelled back to Australia for the funeral. Her mother had said it was fine, that everyone would understand. Caroline was never sure if it was this phone call that had been the catalyst. At the time she’d have said it wasn’t. But whatever the impetus, she’d wanted it to stop, to play a different tune. She’d wanted to wake up and know, straightaway, where she was. She’d wanted to be wanted, to be missed and needed, not merely understood.

When she returned to Beirut from Dubai, Caroline applied for a transfer to the London office. London was on the other side of the world from her family in Melbourne, but she didn’t want home. And she didn’t want America, either. She wanted something older than both, so she opted for London. Her scattered acquaintances — cameramen, photojournalists, editors, reporters — all passed through the city at some point on their travels. And there, on London’s doorstep, was the rest of Europe too, as a fallback, a safety net for when the impulse rose in her, as she knew it would, and she needed to leave and arrive again.

In contrast to Caroline’s movements across the globe, all Michael’s previous addresses, except for his childhood home and one apartment in Manhattan, had been in London. Having left Cornwall to study in the capital, he’d stayed on after graduation, joining the Evening Standard as an intern. Over the next five years of jobbing journalism — diary pieces, reviews, news features, and comment — Michael had steadily increased his word length and salary until, in his late twenties, fearing the ossification he’d detected in some of his older colleagues, he’d left the Standard and moved to Manhattan. He’d arrived in the city holding a journalist’s visa and equipped with a list of British editors who’d agreed to use him as a stringer, feeding their publications’ appetites for all things New York. Which is exactly what Michael did. But he hadn’t moved to America to follow the same path he’d been cutting in Britain. The distance he’d flown from London to New York had been about attempting another journey, too: from being a journalist, which he’d called himself ever since university, towards becoming an author.