Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

She and Tony, like others, had sent them a card with a note expressing their sympathies, offering to help. A week later Tony had taken him for a drink. They still had their place in Vermont, he’d told Josh. It was empty right now, so if he and Sam wanted to get away for a while? But Maddy Josh hadn’t seen since Lucy’s death. For all of August she and Tony had been away, in Italy on the Amalfi Coast. At the end of the month Tony had come back to work, but Maddy, he’d said, had flown straight to America. To see her sister, spend time with her nephews and nieces. Tony seemed strained when he’d told Josh this, and Josh wondered if he wasn’t the only man from whom Maddy was distancing herself. She was a survivor, and always would be. It was what they’d first seen in each other. The ability to move through, to emerge the other side. But now he hadn’t. Now he was left, and she was gone.

Josh didn’t care. Maddy’s absence, like Samantha’s request for him to leave, was also a relief. It removed a low-grade anxiety that had haunted him below his grief ever since it had happened. What if, through Maddy, or through Tony via her, or through some confiding friend he didn’t even know about, Samantha were to learn he hadn’t been in the house? What then? No, he never wanted to see Maddy again. Not now that her scent, her touch, her submissiveness which had so surprised him, excited him, were all no more than markers of his guilt, reminders of those seconds in which his daughter had fallen through the air without her father there to catch her.

In the weeks after he moved out, as Samantha held her grief close within their house on South Hill Drive, so Josh cradled his guilt in those high rooms on the east side of the Heath. He ate badly: late-night pastas in the nearby Italian, take-out curries and pizzas, ready meals from the corner shop, all accompanied by drink. Wine, whisky, vodka. His work suffered, but he knew they were all going to suffer soon enough. He’d seen what was coming, like a rain cloud over a hill. At another time he might have tried to run for cover, to get out while he could. But as it was he was too apathetic to make the attempt, or to care. And in a way it felt apposite — the foreclosures sweeping the Midwest, the collapse of the markets — it all seemed in rhythm with the descent of his own domestic life. There were those who believed it would correct itself, who revered the system like a religion. Somehow, these people thought, it would all be allowed. But if this was a religion, then it was a creed that demanded sacrifice. And not just of individuals and families, the small people in small towns the young men of Wall Street and the City would never meet. They’d spent too much for it to end just there, imagined too much, wanted too much, and gambled too much. The money gods would need a greater sacrifice than that, a public sacrifice. The banks, they’d been told, were too big to fail. But not a single bank, not a lone bank, the collapse of which might just satisfy that ravenous system and trigger the rescue of others.

The first time Josh and Samantha met after he’d moved out she told him she’d started seeing a bereavement counsellor. She asked him to do the same. So he’d registered, but then missed the appointments. He was gaining weight, his secret heavy within him. He was often angry, always tired. Some mornings he didn’t get out of bed but remained curled under the duvet, wishing himself a child again. The only commitments he ever kept were those to Rachel. Whether collecting her from school or taking her out on the weekends, he was always sure to be on time for her and sober. He was always, as much as he could be, the father she’d known before.

Samantha told him she’d explained everything to her: why her father was living in another house, why they weren’t together at this time. But whenever Josh sat opposite her, at a café in Hampstead or riding the Tube into town, her hurt expression, the slow bruise of her being, told him Rachel understood nothing. And why should she? She was just eight years old. The world, which had always seemed so benevolent, had been proved malign. He wanted to tell her different, to reassure her there was so much to come that would give her pleasure, that she would love the world again one day. But it was an effort beyond his spirits, and so they’d end their time together in silence instead, the two of them in a park, a museum, a restaurant, joined and apart in the still presence of Lucy’s going.

With Sam it was even harder. She needed him to be away from her. Her love for her dead daughter was fierce, and overrode any empathy she might have felt for her husband. And there was, too, the weight of all she did not know. All Josh had done which only now, too late, he wished undone. He was weak against her, depleted. She, however, although drained by Lucy’s death, was not. Josh saw again, as he had done in the early years of their relationship, her strength. It wasn’t obvious, or displayed as Maddy’s was. And neither was it aggressive, competitive, as his own had always been. It was purer than that. Constant, sustained, like a slow wave building far out at sea, travelling its power towards an ever-receding shore. He felt distant from her, and not just because of his moving out or the unspoken blame that hung between them. But also because he saw that she was rising, with a mother’s ancient will of survival, to meet the sad suddenness of her situation. She was rising and would take Rachel with her. Their strength would be in their solitude. He could see it happening. With Lucy’s falling, Samantha’s need of him had fallen away too.

He had hoped, in time, that Michael might be the person to bridge their distance. That just as his presence had once made their family motion smoother, so he might ease the journey of their grief. Josh liked Michael: his quiet talk, the way he listened to the girls, his interest, without any intention or demand, in his work at Lehman’s. But Samantha had always liked him on another level. Josh had always known this. That for her, his arrival in their lives had introduced a thread into the fabric of her days she could follow back to her youth before marriage, to her student life of ideas and art, before Ryan McGinnis, money, and a shoe falling from a train had disturbed her trajectory. Because of this it was Josh’s hope that with Michael alongside them, as a friend to them both, but a kindred spirit for Sam, they might draw closer again. That with him as a listener, as a reminder of their family, a sounding board for their grief, Samantha might be slowed on her course. That she might, once she felt secure in Rachel and herself, need him again.

But then, one evening before he’d moved out, Josh had spoken with Michael over the hedge dividing their garden from his building’s next door. He’d left the house for a smoke. He’d wanted to be alone, so he hadn’t talked to him when he’d first seen him. But by the time he’d finished his cigarette he’d been calmer. A week or so earlier, after their jog, he’d walked away from Michael on the Heath. He hadn’t been able to abide company. He’d mentioned Caroline, aggressively. He’d been angry and hurt and had taken it out on Michael. So on his way back up to the house he’d gone over to apologise, to try and start again.

As Michael stood to meet him he’d cleaned some dirt from his hands, wiping his palms together to brush them free of soil. Which is when, with a sudden chill, the idea passed across Josh like a shadow. When Lucy had fallen he hadn’t been in the house himself, but that didn’t necessarily mean his daughter had died alone.

Within weeks of moving in next door, Michael had taken on the communal garden of his building. It was something, he told them over one of those early dinners, he’d inherited from Caroline. He’d never been green-fingered himself, but when they’d moved to Wales she’d introduced him to the pleasures of spending time with plants, of having his hands in the earth, being close to bark and leaf. Samantha and Josh had been grateful. For many years the garden of Michael’s building had been left to no more than the occasional mowing by a contractor hired by the managing agent. Under Michael’s hands it began to come alive again. He pruned back the trees by the pond. He cleared the beds of weeds and fed the acid soil with nutrients. And when the heat wave had come in June, he’d kept it watered, too.