Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

As he’d cut across a southern spur of the Heath towards East Heath Road and the streets leading to Rosslyn Hill, Michael had run through the timings of the alternative truth he was trying to create. His lesson with Istvan was at four p.m. It usually took him about thirty minutes of fast walking to arrive at the school in Highgate. From his first lesson he’d always walked, whatever the weather. Partly to avoid being stuck in traffic, but also to open up his sciatic cramp and warm up his body for the rigours of the session. The walk back to his flat was, similarly, his warm down. To arrive on time today, having walked his usual route, he would already have been halfway across the Heath when Lucy fell. It was as simple as that. No one knew he’d been in the Nelsons’ house. No one had seen him enter or leave. If he could arrive for his fencing lesson on time, then he could delete the minutes he’d spent there, edit them from the day, just like when he redrafted a manuscript. A single key held for a few seconds, and a story could be altered forever.

He looked as his watch. It was ten to four. He must have remained at the top of the stairs, or on his sofa, for longer than he’d thought. His best hope now was to catch a bus to Highgate. Looking up, he saw a bus stop on the road ahead. He knew one of the Highgate buses stopped there. But on a Saturday there would be no more than three or four an hour at most. Quickening his pace, his right calf cramped like pig-iron above his ankle, Michael walked on, his leg short in the stride, as if manacled by a ball and chain.

He was still fifty or sixty metres from the road when he’d seen the Highgate bus approaching from South End Green. It was a single-decker, almost empty, carrying just one woman reading a paper towards the rear. Picking up his pace again, Michael had watched as with a painful ease the bus’s left indicator flashed as it slowed to a pause beside the stop. The woman rose from her seat, walked down the aisle, and dismounted from its middle doors. Michael raised his arm, hoping the driver would see him in his wing mirror. He could hear the engine, turning over heavily beneath the shade of the trees. As he’d got nearer he’d kept his eyes on the right indicator, willing it not to take up the rhythm of the left. He’d thought about shouting, but he was wary of drawing attention to himself.

With a deliberate beat the right indicator began flashing, twice, three times, as the bus smoothly pulled away from the kerb and the driver worked through its lower gears to tackle the hill towards Spaniards Road. Michael, slowing in his walking, had watched it go, sensing as it went each of those printed minutes in the Nelsons’ house becoming more indelible with every second.

―

“Step! And step! And—” Istvan, feinting for Michael’s wrist, suddenly dropped, as if he’d tripped. But then Michael felt his blade jab into the arch of his foot. Istvan never tripped. “Come on, Michael!” he said as he rose back into en garde, his tone that of a disappointed parent. “You are slow today. Too slow. Again!”

Michael felt drained of all energy. As if a stopper had been pulled from his chest and his vitality was pouring from the hole. The excitement of reaching the school in time had, he realised, fuelled him through the opening exercises of the lesson. But now, even as he parried and attacked, all he wanted to do was sleep, to lay his head on a pillow and wake up weeks from here and find none of this to be true or all of it to be forgotten.

―

The taxi had appeared from down the hill like a gift. Michael had continued walking towards the road in the vain hope of another bus coming to the stop. But as he’d reached the kerb, he’d seen the taxi instead: a black cab, its orange bar lit. He’d raised his arm, trying to look calm, his heartbeat hammering in his chest.

“You all right, mate?” the taxi driver had asked him as they’d pulled up at some traffic lights. Michael knew he’d been studying him in his rearview mirror since he’d got in. He’d replied to his disembodied eyes, “Yeah, fine. Just this heat, you know.”

“You sure?” the driver pressed. “Cos you look a bit ropey, to be honest.” He reached to his side and waved a bottle through the partition. “Want some water?”

“Thanks,” Michael said as he took the bottle. “Probably a bit nervous, too,” he added, after he’d drunk, pointing a thumb towards his fencing bag. “Got my instructor test today.”

As soon as he’d spoken, he wished he hadn’t. The story needed no more than for him to be there on time. But already he was lying, creating.

“Yeah?” the driver said. “Well, good luck, mate, sure it’ll be a breeze.”

Michael had given a nod and a brief smile to the mirror. He was trying to still his pulse, slow his breathing. “Thanks,” he said again as he handed back the water. “I hope you’re right.”

He’d asked the driver to drop him a hundred metres or so before the school. As he’d driven off, Michael bent as if to tie a lace, waited for the taxi to round a corner, then picked up his bag and doubled back onto the Heath. Cutting through a bank of trees, he’d joined the path he usually walked to his lessons, a feet-worn track emerging from the foliage of the Heath across the street from the side entrance of the school.

Crossing the road, he’d glanced at his watch. It was five past four. As he’d walked on towards the sports hall, he’d felt his minutes inside the Nelsons’ fading with every stride. As if, on passing through the sliding doors into the lobby, he’d be passing into another version of time. One where he hadn’t gone next door, where he hadn’t gone up the stairs, and where he hadn’t come out of the bathroom, his face streaked with tears, to find Lucy in her pyjamas, her eyes wide and one bare foot stepping back into the air behind her.

―

“Distance!” Istvan shouted. A second later, as if to make his point, he landed a hit hard against Michael’s coquille. The impact shuddered through his tired grip. Michael felt a swell of nausea rise in his stomach, chilling his skin. He dropped back two paces, away from Istvan, who was still talking. “This is why I told you to bring the French grip,” he was telling Michael. “To stop you doing this. Again!”

But Michael could no longer hear him. Inside his mask, in slow motion, Lucy was falling again. Everything that had been too quick for him to see at the time, he was seeing now. Her foot travelling back and back, down and down, her toes missing the red carpet by centimetres. The tipping of her body, her left hand opening, as if to catch something. But her arms remaining motionless, as her wide eyes went back and back too, and her other foot lifted from the landing, and carried on lifting until it was higher than her head. Her flung blonde hair, which had already gone now, along with her eyes, and her arms and her feet, dropping below the top of the stairs.

Istvan was coming at him once more, but Michael raised a hand to stop him. Taking another step backwards, he dropped his blade and bent double. He was going to be sick. “Michael?” he heard Istvan say, as if from another room.

His goal of reaching the school on time had consumed him. It had been all that mattered. But now he was here the full tide of the facts had come flooding through. Lucy, who’d come to him with her dolls, who’d stroked her father’s collars until they were frayed. Who’d squirted him with a goldfish from her paddling pool and who’d ridden his shoulders with one hand clasped at his forehead, the other reaching for trees. She was gone, and it was he who had killed her.

As he ran, Michael pulled his mask from his face, dropping it to the floor as he pushed through the doors into the changing rooms. He reached the sink with the first bile rising in his throat. Clutching at its enamel edge, his whole body retching, he vomited long and violently, his knees giving from under him as his body tried to evacuate the memory of what he’d done.