Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

“I am living!” Michael said. He spread his arms in illustration of the room, the dining table, them. And it was true. He wasn’t ready for an Emily yet. It was still less than a year since Caroline had died. But after the last two months in London, he was, slowly, beginning to feel as if he was living again. Caroline’s death had numbed him, like an arm deadened in sleep. But now the blood was returning to his emotional capillaries, as if he was waking. He’d recently rediscovered an enthusiasm for The Man Who Broke the Mirror, for carving a shape to his years with Oliver and threading his theories into the weft of the story. The fencing lessons, meanwhile, although reawakening his sciatica, had also reinvigorated him physically. When he showered each morning now he could taste, just, the hint of a future that didn’t have to be an echo of his past.

Josh took Michael at his word and hadn’t attempted any more introductions since. But their conversation at the end of that night had marked the genesis of another shade to their friendship. A conspiratorial tinge in relation to women, which, on two separate occasions since, had been strengthened further. The first of these had been planned by Josh. The second was not.

Josh’s boss had tasked him with entertaining a delegation of Mexican hedge-fund owners and investors over in London from Guadalajara for the week. They were, he told Michael, cultured men who’d relish the opportunity of having dinner with a successful author. Would he do him a favour and join them for the evening? It would be at the bank’s expense.

A few evenings later, over dinner at a restaurant in Mayfair, Michael found Josh’s estimation of his clients to be accurate. Many of them, as well as being businessmen and investors, were also professors at the university, some of the leading Mexican thinkers in their fields, fluent not just in English and Spanish, but also French, German, and, in the case of one engineer, Chinese.

It was the first time Michael had been out in the centre of London since he’d returned to the city. As they’d walked from the restaurant to a private club, along Curzon Street and up into Queen Street, the capital seemed impossibly grand to him, its classical architecture underlit, a hinterland of solid centuries fortifying the narrow streets north of Green Park. The Mexicans seemed at home in their surroundings, and even more so at the club. They were well acquainted with power, familiar with its global language. As Michael drank with them, watching them flirt with the waitresses, slipping business cards from their breast pockets, they reminded him more of gangsters than professors. As if a faculty had been passed through the prism of Grand Theft Auto, emerging with a hint of danger to their tailoring, a threatening air to their polish.

After the club Michael wanted to go home. He’d drunk more than he had for years. But Josh, who seemed to have become more himself as the night edged towards morning, insisted. The director of the delegation, a venture capitalist and professor of sociology called Ramón, had loved talking to Michael about BrotherHoods.

“You’re a hit!” Josh told him, laying an arm around his neck and clasping his shoulder. “He wants you to give a lecture over there and everything. C’mon, you’re my guest tonight. A couple of hours more, then we’ll grab a cab together. I promise.”

The next venue, to which they were driven in one of the Mexicans’ chauffeured cars, was a lap-dancing club entered through a plain door beneath an awning in a square south of Piccadilly. The same square, Michael realised, as they filed between the bouncers, that backed onto the London Library. This discovery, in a location he knew so well, deepened his sense of being a stranger in a city he thought he knew. As they’d passed down a narrow corridor and on into a low-lit lounge, the host had greeted Josh with a hug. Josh seemed to grow again in the man’s embrace. Handing him his Lehman’s account card, he ushered his guests through, pointing them towards a set of booths at the far end of the club.

The rest of the night was hazy for Michael, with just certain details pushing through to clarity the following day. The club, although apparently plush, had the air of a cross-channel ferry. Its low ceilings betrayed grey stains of damp about the air vents. The arms of the chairs were faded and frayed. From their booth the group had a clear view of the main stage, onto which a succession of women appeared, each heralded by the bars of a new song, to strip and perform on a polished steel pole. Michael couldn’t help staring at them. It had been almost a year since he’d last gone to bed with Caroline, since he’d last been close to a naked body. Not that the women onstage were naked as Caroline had been that night. Their bodies, corded with muscle and spray-tanned, were sheened under the stage lights. Caroline’s skin, despite her year-round tan, had always been matt. Her breasts, too, had been natural, small, but with the shape of a younger woman’s. The breasts of the women onstage were often hardened by implants, strangely immobile across their straining chests as they held themselves in slow, descending positions on the pole. Whenever they bent over, or spread their legs, the pink of their labias blinked suddenly honest amid the show, biology briefly disturbing the fantasy of their dance.

In comparison to Michael, the others in the booth appeared disinterested in the women onstage, familiarity defusing the potency of their display. The dynamics of the group, it seemed, were more powerful than any performance beyond it. But then the women had begun to join them, and everything had changed. Some had just been on the stage, from where they’d sensed the weight of the group’s wealth in the room. The Mexicans ordered bottles of champagne as the women introduced themselves with false names and foreign accents — Croatian, Romanian, Nigerian. As they did, the group’s focus quickly fragmented. Each man, within the radius of a woman’s attention, became individual again. Within minutes the group was breaking up, the Mexicans being led away, sometimes by one woman, sometimes by two, through a velvet curtain and into the private rooms beyond.

When they’d returned, Josh and his colleagues began pairing off with the women too. As Josh took the extended hand of Bianca, a tall Serbian brunette wearing a parody of a green evening dress, he’d called across the table to Michael.

“Hey, Mike! You wanna dance?”

Michael raised a hand and shook his head to show he was fine. Crystal, a petite blonde sitting beside him, leant in to whisper to him, a Russian childhood shadowing her voice. “No, come on,” she’d said. “You must have fun, too. Please.” As she spoke she’d tapped the stem of her glass with her flat-cut nails, chequer-painted.

“Ah, c’mon, Mike!” Josh said, as Bianca drew him away from the booth. “It’s on me.”

When Michael, smiling, shook his head again, Josh had raised his own hands in surrender and shrugged towards Crystal, as if to say, I tried, but he won’t learn. Allowing Bianca to lead him on towards the curtains he’d pointed a finger at Michael, like a coach reminding his young charge his training was far from over.

After going for another two dances, one with Crystal and then another with Bianca, Josh had kept his word. Putting on his jacket he’d leant down from behind Michael and given him a tap on the shoulder. “C’mon, soldier,” he’d said. “Let’s get you out of here.” He seemed suddenly more sober and Michael wondered, not for the first time, how much of the night had been an act on Josh’s behalf, a display, like the girls onstage, for the benefit of the Mexicans.

As they’d made their way out of the club, the host enthusiastically shook Josh’s hand with both of his. While they’d talked, Michael looked back at the booths, where the Mexicans continued to drink and talk with a new set of girls. Their earlier polish had left them and they seemed newly exposed, like children almost, under the glitter balls and the lights. The power with which they’d entered the club had been transferred to the women for whom they’d bought drinks, whom they’d paid for minutes of their time. The Chinese-speaking engineer, Michael noticed, sat on his own to one side, his tie undone, absentmindedly turning his wedding ring with his other hand. Michael watched as, with a sigh, he drank from the champagne flute before him, its rim smudged with pink lipstick.