Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

When the girl answered, her voice was quiet. “Yes,” she said. Then, her composure breaking, “I’m so sorry.”

But Samantha had already hung up. Three hours later a Lincoln Town Car was taking her to the airport, her bags in its trunk and her Mirage print with its distant, lost skyline, angled between her legs.

―

“I got that bit right, anyway,” Samantha said.

“What do you mean?” Michael asked her. “Right?”

“The leaving. I did it like in a film. Cut up some of his suits, soil on the carpets.” She said this without emotion, looking away. There was no suggestion of anger in her telling. She took another sip of her Baileys. It was another woman’s story now. From another life.

“And then what did you do?” Michael asked her.

She turned back to him, as if he’d disturbed her. “Oh,” she said. “Came back here. To London. Had to earn some cash, so started temping.”

“And the photography?”

Josh appeared at the door. He looked irritated. “Honey?” He held a hand towards Michael. “Sorry, Mike,” he said, before turning to Samantha again. “Lucy wants you.”

Samantha raised her eyebrows, as if to say This — this is what happened.

She put her glass on a side table and rose from the sofa. “Okay,” she said. “Tell her I’m coming.”

“I should be going,” Michael said, also getting up from the sofa.

Josh leant into the hallway. “Mummy’s coming, honey!” he shouted up the stairs. “You know how it is,” he said to Michael as Samantha passed him, laying a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Have to get the kids down.”

Out in the hallway, as he was going to the door, Samantha turned and came back down the stairs. She waited until she was close to Michael before she spoke. “Josh told me about your wife,” she said, looking up at him. Without her heels, she wasn’t much taller than Caroline. She took his hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her eyes searching his, as if looking for the debris of Caroline’s death.

“Thank you,” Michael replied.

She gave him another smile, a tired acknowledgement, and Michael recognised again that she was far from sober. How much, he wondered, had she meant to tell him? Letting go of his hand, she returned to the stairway, Lucy’s cry drifting down from above, “Mummy!”

“Coming, sweetheart,” Samantha called up to her daughter. “Coming.”

―

As Michael had climbed his own stairs next door he couldn’t help seeing, in his mind’s eye, the Nelsons’ staircase tracing his ascent on the other side of the wall. Unlike theirs, his was communal, shared with the other occupants of his building. On each landing he passed two numbered red doors, each leading to the homes and lives of others. Through the bare wall beside him the Nelsons’ stairway, with its dark wood banister and red carpet runner, rose through their lives only. The girls’ bedrooms, Samantha and Josh’s bedroom, a playroom, the bathrooms, a spare room. On the top floor, Josh had mentioned, a study.

They were the same generation, Michael and the Nelsons. Samantha was a year younger, Josh a few years older. And yet to Michael their lives might as well have been decades apart. Everything he’d lost in the shipwreck of Caroline’s death had washed against the shore of Josh and Samantha’s thirties with ease. The house, the children. Their grounded life, solid and settled in comparison to his own, newly cut loose as he was, living in a set of rented rooms four stories up in the air.

Reaching his door, Michael turned the key in the lock and opened it. His flat was dark, the scent of its air still not his own. He went into the kitchen without turning on the lights. A TV in the flat below played a Saturday-night talent show. His head was fuzzy with the long afternoon of drinking. He ran himself a glass of water from the tap, drank it down, then ran himself another. Taking the glass to the long windows at the end of the room, he looked out over the Heath. The lamps lining the path had come on, the branches of the trees lit along their undersides. This was the view he’d looked out on every day since first moving in. The dark waters of the ponds, the suggestion of a swan drifting along one of their banks. The concrete path, the foot-worn tracks, the wind-stripped trees. In the distance, more of London’s streets, edging in on the Heath’s green. The same view, and yet that night, as Michael looked over it again, drinking his water, somehow different, shared as he now knew it was, with the Nelsons next door.

TURNING FROM THE desk, Michael took another glance over the side tables in the front room. The screwdriver was nowhere to be seen. He thought about where else Josh might have put it. In his study? In a drawer in his bedside table? But he couldn’t very well go searching the house. It was one thing for him to be there, another again to start rifling through bedside tables. He would just have to do without his French grip. He could ask to borrow one of Istvan’s, but he already knew what he’d say.

“It’s a relationship.” That’s what Istvan had told him as they’d zipped up their jackets at the beginning of their second lesson, his Hungarian accent eliding into his English. “Do you use other men’s wives?” he’d said, pulling on his glove. “No. Or if you do, you get into trouble, yes? So don’t use another man’s blade. It will only end up hurting you, not your opponent.”

Coming back out into the hallway, Michael paused at the foot of the staircase. The stairs were wooden, painted white, with a red carpet running down their middle secured by silver rods in the crook of each step. In all the months he’d known the Nelsons, Michael had never been up these stairs. All the dinners, conversations, drinks they’d ever shared had been confined to the kitchen and the conservatory. Only when other people had also come round had they ever moved into the front room. The ground floor had been the extent of his jurisdiction within their home.

Another car passed down the street. In its wake, Michael heard a pushchair trundling down the pavement. Standing in the hallway, he listened as its wheels grew louder, kicking over the edge of a paving slab prised up by a sycamore’s root. As the pushchair faded down the street he saw that root clearly in his mind’s eye, its bark polished to worn leather by the thousands of shoes that had stepped on it. Farther off, the ice-cream van started up again, a tinkling rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Closer, somewhere in the front room behind him, a fly was needling at a window.

Michael looked back down the hallway towards the open back door. He knew the front door beside him was secure, the tongue of its deadbolt buried in the mortise. Despite the heat of the day, he’d seen no open windows in the house. Would Josh really have left without locking the back door, too? What if he had, and it wasn’t just a mistake after all? Michael’s mind began working on this conjecture, making any number of scenarios suddenly seem all too possible. The Heath had been full of people ever since the heat wave began. From across the other side of the ponds the houses on this part of the street presented an attractive and vulnerable prospect. Over the decades, successions of owners had set more and more windows in their back walls, as if the houses were thirsty and could never quite get enough of their view of the water, the Heath. Looked at from the other way, however, these windows made a gallery of the houses, especially in the long evenings of summer. It wouldn’t be difficult, from far away even, to track the movements inside one of them.

A little farther up the street there was a tangle of hidden paths between the ponds and the gardens. Michael and Samantha had taken the girls looking for late conkers along them just a couple of weeks after they’d all met. Now, in summer, the foliage over those paths was overgrown. Someone could easily sit there out of sight for hours, watching a house for when its owners left.