Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

Samantha, when Michael asked her, couldn’t say why Josh had retreated from him. “Who knows?” she’d said, when he pressed her on it one night. “It’s his way, I guess, of coping.” She was stacking plates into a cupboard, reaching on tiptoe to complete the pile. “But it isn’t just you, you know? He’s become more solitary in general. He hardly ever sees anyone.” She turned round to rest against the counter. “I don’t know,” she said and sighed. “He’ll come round. He just needs time, I suppose.” She picked up another stack of plates. “We all do.”

If Samantha had surprised Michael with the keeping of her promises, with her growth after Lucy’s death, then she, in turn, had been wrong-footed by Josh’s reaction to losing his job. At first, he’d done nothing; rarely leaving his flat as if he’d given himself completely to inertia. The only times Samantha had seen him was when he’d come to take Rachel for the day. Michael would occasionally glimpse him coming up the street for these appointments, unshaven, wearing tracksuit bottoms or creased jeans, like the forgotten father of the man Michael had first met when he’d moved in. Samantha became worried about his state of mind. She began to wonder if she should let Rachel go with him alone.

But then, within a few weeks, he’d changed. He’d asked to meet Samantha for a coffee. When they did, he’d told her he’d decided not to reenter banking for a while, but to take a break and do something different. “The whole thing’s going downhill fast, anyway,” he’d said. “And it’s only going to carry on, too, before it ever picks up. There’s enough money, for a while, at least. So don’t worry, nothing will change on that front. But, yeah, I thought I’d stay out of it for a bit. Get some space.” He’d looked down at his cup, then spread his hands, palms up. “I just wanted you to know,” he’d said, as if admitting a new relationship.

Before they left the café, he’d asked Samantha not to file for a divorce. The subject had crossed her mind, but only in the abstract. It was all too soon. She was still processing so much of what had happened. She was still grieving. “Of course not, Josh,” she’d said. “What makes you think I would?”

“I don’t know. Moving out. Everything that’s…”

She’d taken his hand. “You know what we said. Let’s give it time. All of it.”

He’d looked her in the eye, and she’d seen he was scared. Either of what she might do or of what he might say. “Just get yourself together,” she’d said, squeezing his fingers. “For Rachel, at least.”

Josh had seen the advert in the local newsagents, between the rooms for rent and the mother and baby yoga sessions. Three mornings a week, volunteering with a National Trust gardener at two of their properties in Hampstead: Number Two Willow Road, a 1930s modernist home, and Fenton House, a seventeenth-century merchant’s house crowning the hill above Hampstead Village.

For a couple of months, as autumn gave way to winter, those three mornings came to define Josh’s weeks. Clearing bamboo, weeds, and rubble at Willow Road, or pruning the apple trees, their branches furred with frost, at Fenton House. He was unskilled but took to the work well. His mind, he realised, had been looking for this: hours outdoors in which it could wander beyond the repetition of his jobs. Nathan, the National Trust gardener, was a quiet man and was content, once he knew Josh could be trusted, to set him going, then leave him alone. The other volunteers tended to come and go frequently. They were actors between jobs, gap-year students, or just people fulfilling the hours demanded by another organisation — the Duke of Edinburgh Award, community service. Once these were completed, Nathan never saw them again. But Josh proved to be constant, a regular. Often, on finishing a shift he’d stay on, especially in Fenton House, sitting on one of the benches in the walled garden, breathing in the iron scent of freshly turned soil, or listening to the birdsong. Which was why, when Josh applied for a vacancy with one of the conservation teams on the Heath, Nathan had supported him so enthusiastically. Because in all his years of gardening, never before had he met a man who so clearly needed to feel the earth again, in whom the exertion of physical work had so plainly brought peace, and with it, pleasure.

“I know, ironic, isn’t it?” Samantha had said when she’d told Michael. They’d been in her garden, weeding and dividing clumps of perennials. “He’s working for the City again. It’s like he can’t bloody escape them.”

“The City?” Michael said. “How do you mean?”

“Well, they own it, don’t they?” Samantha cleared a strand of hair from her face and sat back on her heels. “The Heath,” she’d said, wiping her forehead with the top of her wrist. “Or at least the Corporation of London does, which in my book is pretty much the same thing.” She threw a handful of weeds onto the pile between them. “So, yeah,” she’d said, returning to her work. “He’s on the payroll again.”

For a moment neither of them had spoken. There was just the tearing sound of the weeds being uprooted, the barking of dogs from the Heath.

“But it’s working for him,” Samantha had said after a while. Michael’s mind had drifted and at first he didn’t know what she was talking about. He’d looked over at her, but she was focused on her work, pulling at the weeds with short, steady tugs. “I even think it makes him happy,” she said, throwing another clump onto the pile.

―

As Michael parted the bodies in the gallery before him, gently touching backs and shoulders as he pressed forward, Josh, looking up from his conversation, saw him approaching. Michael managed to free a hand and raise it, nodding over the expansive hair of a blonde woman between them. Josh didn’t acknowledge the greeting, but just looked back at him, a disturbance in his eyes. His expression stopped Michael in the middle of the crowd. Not because it had been so unexpected, but because it was a look of such long-held animosity, not a sudden aversion. A look of knowledge, not question.

Michael was about to continue towards him when a whine of feedback punctuated Emmanuel’s stepping up to a microphone to ask the crowd for quiet. The heads around Michael all turned in the direction of his amplified voice. As Michael did the same, he glanced over at Josh again. He, too, was looking towards the microphone now. He looked calm, smiling at Emmanuel’s opening jokes. So perhaps Michael had been wrong. Perhaps his guilt was making him see things and fear things that weren’t to be seen or to be feared. He took a drink from his glass and, as Samantha stepped up to speak, tried to focus on what she had to say.

The speeches were short. Samantha thanked her course tutors, Sebastian, the owner of the gallery. And she thanked Michael, too, for his help, and Rachel as well, for hers, raising her glass to each of them in the crowd. She spoke briefly about how the photos on these walls had been found as the result of a loss. But she said nothing else about Lucy or the specifics of her own journey towards those early minutes of the day, waiting to discover what its light would deliver. When she finished speaking and backed away from the microphone there was applause, a few whoops from her fellow students, and then Emmanuel stepped up again to encourage everyone to drink and, if they could, buy one of Samantha’s prints.

Over a final smattering of applause, the crowd began to move again, towards the drinks or to view the work. Michael looked for Josh where he’d last seen him. But he wasn’t there. He glanced over the rest of the room, then pushed his way through to the second space. Josh was nowhere to be seen in there, either. Michael was aware of his heart racing. He realised he had to talk to him. He had to know why he’d been keeping his distance. Why he’d looked at him that way across the gallery.