Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

At first Daniel hadn’t understood. He had confessed, he’d stepped out of the shadows. Wasn’t that enough? But as he’d worked at Sally’s that day, clearing out the stables, restocking the kitchen, cutting back the ferns along the brook, he’d come to see that no, it wasn’t enough. To confess and leave was easy. But to confess and stay, to remain circling over your deed, to hunger after the detail of it, that was something else. He of all people should know that. So perhaps it was a form of punishment, these questions? Michael’s way of making him pay through recollection, through offering up his life for dissection? A way for him to reap some kind of a victory from his loss; a victory through knowledge.

―

Opening his fist to reveal a handful of pellets, Daniel flattened his fingers and let the mare nuzzle into them, working her lips against his palm. As she did he ran his other hand along the muscle under her mane. The sun was warm against the back of his neck. He could hear the sound of a shower through the open window of one of the guest rooms. For the first time in what seemed like years, he felt content, calm.

―

Today Daniel would send his third letter to Michael. Having replied to his first Michael had sent Daniel another set of questions. Some asked for clarification or more detail. Others, though, were entirely new. Daniel understood Michael was a writer, but at the same time he couldn’t imagine what he might do with the answers he was giving him. But despite this uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, Daniel had still decided to reply. And now, in response to a third letter from Michael, he would reply again today. Partly to pay his dues to the husband of the woman he’d killed, but also for himself. Because that’s who else Daniel was writing these letters for now, himself. As a form of focused remembering, of purposeful recollection, and as a way to trace, through his answers to Michael, the convoluted paths that had led to what happened.

―

“I said not too much!”

Daniel, his hand already digging in the bin for more pellets, turned to see Sally behind him.

“It ain’t about reward, remember. You want her instinct to work for you, not her goddamn hunger.”

She was leading another horse out of the yard into the field. “Feels good, though, eh?” she said, as she passed him. “To have that connection? Without even touching?”

Daniel held the mare’s jaw as she nudged under his arm, searching for the pellets.

“Yeah,” he said, although Sally was too far away to hear him. “It does.”

IT WAS TWO months after Michael and Josh had gone jogging on the Heath that Samantha told Michael her husband had left. They were in a café in South End Green, its French windows drawn open to the pavement. An overcast day had broken, its vanilla sunlight suggestive of autumn. A couple of buses were parked up nearby, casting shadows over their table.

Josh, Samantha told Michael, had moved out the day before. They’d talked for several hours, Samantha said, and agreed that for the time being it was the right thing to do. She was going to come round and tell Michael at some point, but as she’d bumped into him now, well, he may as well know.

Michael didn’t know what to say. He offered her his sympathies, asked if she was all right. He hadn’t expected them to break. He’d thought, in these last quiet months, they’d been holding each other closer, not coming apart. “God, Sam,” he said, “that must be tough.” Samantha nodded, her jaw tight, holding back. Then, suddenly, she laughed. A short, manic burst that made Michael think she might cry, too.

“It’s amazing, really,” she said, through the tail of it, “that we’ve lasted this long.”

―

Michael had seen hardly anything of either Samantha or Josh since Lucy’s death. The funeral had been for close family only, conducted just two days after the coroner had returned a verdict of accidental death. In the week afterwards Michael had gone for a coffee with Samantha, in the same café in which they were sitting now. She’d cried through most of their time together and left while her coffee was still warm. He’d seen her only a couple of other times since then and usually like this, unplanned, crossing paths around the shops, the supermarket. He’d found it almost unbearable, this sudden distance between him and the Nelsons. Having decided upon his course of action and justified his choices, the only outlet for Michael’s guilt — the possibility of his helping Josh and Samantha — had been denied him with their absence. In the wake of it he’d been left, distracted and hollow, with the hauntings of what he’d done, of what he’d seen.

Since that run on the Heath a couple of months earlier Michael had seen Josh just the once. Michael had been gardening at the time, working on the borders along the hedge that divided his building’s strip of lawn from theirs. It was evening and Josh had come out to smoke a cigarette down by the willow. On his way to the pond he’d only nodded at Michael, but on his way back up to the house he’d come over to speak with him. He was sorry, he’d said, about the other day, on the Heath. He shouldn’t have gone off like that. Michael told him it was fine, that he understood. Which is when Josh had looked at him as if he didn’t know him, as if someone had just reminded him of how recently this stranger had entered their lives.

“See you around,” Josh had said, as he’d turned to go. But Michael hadn’t. Since then, Josh and Samantha had kept themselves closer than ever. The house, when he passed it, betrayed little sign of being lived in. Rather, it was as if they were held within it, the way a box filled with tissue paper holds a blown egg, or a single, almost weightless, filigreed gem. Their loss had become delicate, and it seemed to Michael this was why they’d stayed inside, fearing any exposure or disturbance that might further its fracture.

Rachel, too, he’d seen only once, in a bookshop in Hampstead with her mother. He hadn’t approached them. There’d been something in Rachel’s expression that had stopped him. She’d always been a serious girl, but this was different. As he’d watched her, she’d moved through the shop as if a trick had been played on her, one that no one had told her about. A truth the rest of the world had always been in on, but about which, until now, she’d been kept in the dark. With a sullen slowness, she’d picked a couple of books off the shelves, flicked through their pages, then put them back. She was disengaged, her curiosity defused. And yet Michael was sure, had he gone to her, she would have known. In the way that cats or horses know. She would have sensed his falseness, the ugliness of his endeavour.

For much of the summer Rachel had stayed at Martha’s in Sussex, in the company of her cousins. This was where Samantha was going when Michael had seen her on the street. To pick up Rachel and bring her home. But she had some time, she’d told him, before her train. Would he join her for tea?

“I didn’t want Rachel to be there,” she explained to Michael, as she stirred in her sugar, “when Josh left.”

“Does she know?” Michael asked. “That he’s moved out?”

Samantha looked into her cup, as if she’d been caught stealing. “Not yet,” she said. “But I’m going to tell her tonight. Explain.”

“It would be best,” Michael said. “Before she comes home.”

“It’s the right thing,” she said, looking up at Michael. “You have to believe me. It’s all been so much worse since…He’s been so much worse.”

One of the buses started up and pulled away from its stand. Samantha watched it edge into the road, dislodging a wedge of sunlight onto the pavement.