I Saw a Man (20 page)

Cathy’s eyes were already welling.

“It’s not the first time,” he heard himself saying. “I mean, journalists. They get caught in the crossfire. They get killed.”

Cathy dropped her head. Why wouldn’t she look at him?

“But not by you, Daniel,” she whispered. “Not by you.”

―

When the story broke, it was worse than he’d thought. Somehow, they got to publish their names. Her name. Caroline Marshall. She was thirty-four years old, just recently married. They ran footage of her news reports. Cathy told him not to watch them, but he did, and he knew she did too. She’d been everywhere he had. Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan. She was pretty. Dark blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail or cut into a bob. Her features were delicate, birdlike. She was energetic on camera, as if she cared.

Munro and his team managed to keep Daniel’s name out of it, and Maria’s. “A U.S. drone strike.” That was all the press release said. No mention of Creech, screeners, Intel coordinator, an operator, a pilot. It was as if the Predator had been genuinely unmanned. As if there had been no hand behind its flight, no eye behind its cameras.

The internal inquiry began the following week. Just a month later Daniel was medically discharged, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome by an air force psychologist, his case rushed through the usual procedures. On Daniel’s final day at Creech, Colonel Ellis presented him with a file. It was several pages thick, detailing every mission to which he’d contributed while serving at Creech. Surveillance, house raids, buddy lasing, patrols, intelligence support, command control, search-and-destroy, targeted killings. “You can be proud, Major,” Ellis told him, as he shook his hand. “You’ve done your duty. And we thank you for it.”

Sitting in the car park at the wheel of his Camry, Highway 95 humming with traffic on the other side of the fence, Daniel opened the file and looked through its pages. On the first, at the bottom of a spreadsheet, a single number was printed in bold—1,263, the total number of enemy combatants killed as a result of the missions listed in the file. There was no other figure on the page. No other total, as if this, as far as the air force was concerned, was the entirety of his scorecard and any other reckoning would remain his, and his alone.

The next morning Daniel woke with a desire for the ocean. He’d been brought up in the Midwest. Among fields of wheat and dirt tracks leading to hills. The coast had never been his environment. And yet he woke feeling certain it was the ocean that could settle him. Only the ocean seemed vast enough to smother the harrowing of his anxieties. Simple enough to cleanse his eyes.

And so he’d left. Cathy had told him she understood, but he doubted she did. Despite sharing the house in Centennial Hills, over the last year they’d drifted further from each other every day, drawn apart by their different realities. She’d tell the girls he was working away for a few weeks. No, she didn’t think he should see them to say good-bye. Reluctantly, Daniel had agreed, and a few hours later he’d left, throwing his rucksack onto the back seat of the Camry and reversing out their driveway to leave his home.

He drove for twelve hours straight, stopping only twice for gas and to go to the bathroom. Skirting San Francisco to his south, he’d seen the city’s lights come on in the dark of his rearview mirror. Eventually, running out of land, he’d pulled up at a parking bay overlooking the mouth of the Russian River, his headlights swinging through a thickening of sea mist and spray. When he cut the engine the silence fell like a final breath.

He got out of the car. His legs and back ached. His throat was dry. There were stars above him and the sliver of a new moon. It was dark, and yet he could still make out the breakers on the rocks below, long ruffs of white pulsing along the shore. An oncoming breeze brought salt to his face, over his skin. He closed his eyes and let the wind blow his fringe from his forehead. He could feel, in its passing, the hairs moving on his arms.

And it was then, as he stood before the Pacific Ocean that night, with the river at his back, that Daniel decided what he should do. He would find her husband. He would find the man Caroline Marshall had married and write to him. He would tell him what had happened. Not because he should, but because he had to. Because he knew it was the only way he would ever be able to go on. He was tired of being unseen. Of being dislocated from his actions. Of witnessing but never being witnessed. He wanted to own his life, and he knew that meant owning all of it. If he’d thought he could find the others—the motorcyclist’s wife, the boys’ parents, the old man’s son—then he would have. And perhaps one day he would try. But for now, he’d start with her husband. This is what he promised himself as the breakers hushed below him. He already knew his name, and what he did. The newspapers had told him that. He would not be hard to find. But not yet. First, before he found him, he must find the words. It would take time. But they would come. All of it would come. This is what Daniel told himself as looked over the ocean that night. Because in the end, everything does.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“DISTANCE! DISTANCE MICHAEL!
It’s your best defence!” Istvan hooked a thumb under the padded lining of his mask and slipped it up over his forehead. “You know this,” he said. “If you are so close, how can you riposte? Come on.” He rapped Michael’s coquille with his blade. “Again.”

With a tap on the top of his mask, Istvan knocked it back down over his face and took up en garde. He wore loose tracksuit bottoms, trainers, a T-shirt. A padded brown suede coaching sleeve protected his sword arm. His glove was coming apart at the seams. Two faded Hungarian flags were still stuck on either side of the mask’s wire mesh.

With a quick clatter of blades, Istvan came at Michael again, his body upright and slow in contrast to the speed of his fencing arm as he disengaged to parry in sixte before sliding his blade down Michael’s in a glisé attack. He hit Michael on the outside of the shoulder, almost exactly where he’d hit him before. Istvan stepped back into en garde. “Again,” he said, from behind his mask. “And this time think!”

But all Michael could do was think. Within the closeness of his own mask, beneath its dark wire, he felt as if he were thinking with three brains at once, and none of them his own. A tangle of humming thoughts, of competing images and sounds, flashing then passing, too quick to hold.

He was trying to focus. On his blade before him, on Istvan’s oncoming attacks, on the brightness of the sky through the high windows of the sports hall. On anything that might stop him, just for a second, from seeing the one image that remained constant: of Lucy, motionless on the turn in the stairs, her pale belly exposed, her one leg caught under her.

Everything else was indistinct. He didn’t know for how long he’d lain there at the top of the staircase, looking down at her. Or, when, exactly, he’d got to his feet and, stepping over her body, descended it to leave the house. He knew he’d closed the back door when he’d left, and that as he’d picked up his shoes he’d brushed the step clean of their soil. But he couldn’t remember entering his own garden, or his building itself. He knew he had only because the first thing he recalled was sitting on his sofa, his head in his hands, the lights and sounds of the day coming back to him. It was like surfacing from a deep dive, breaking through choppy waves into a terrible clarity of air.

As the minutes returned to him, so had the same instinctive voice that had persuaded him up those stairs just minutes earlier. But now the note of its desperation was different. Now it was telling him, while he could, that he must change the story. He must change the day’s truth. Michael shook his head against it. He wanted, with a violent desire, never to have been in the Nelsons’ house. Never to have climbed their stairs, never to have gone searching for Caroline. He wanted never to have gone into their bedroom, their bathroom. He wanted never to have been there.

The alternative was impossible for him to face. He’d only just, in these past months, begun rediscovering his life. He’d lost so much already: Caroline, their future, the man he’d have become with her. And with her fading from him in the Nelsons’ bathroom it had felt as if these losses were just minutes old. He could not, he would not, lose again. This is what the survivor’s voice had told him as he’d sat on his sofa, staring at the carpet. That if he was quick, he could still make it so. He could still shape the story. Lucy was dead. He knew that could never be changed. He’d never meant to frighten her, to cause her to start like that. If he could still save her, he would. But it was too late. So he would save himself instead. Something, he remembered telling himself, must be saved. Eventually, standing from the sofa, he’d washed his hands, collected his fencing kit from the hall, then left his flat, slipping the bag over his shoulder as he’d descended the staircase.

―

“Better! Good!” Istvan took two quick steps backwards. His body was heavy, but his feet were still light, a dancer’s feet. Somehow Michael was following his lesson, muscle memory guiding his arm, his body.

“Now,” Istvan said, raising his épée as if in salute, “when I lower my blade, attack in patinando, tempo or speed, up to you. Then counter in octave.”

Michael bent his knees to en garde, his eyes on the switch at the end of Istvan’s blade. As it fell, he took a short step forwards, then lunged, extending his arm towards Istvan’s stomach. Disengaging from the parry, he pushed forward until he felt his own switch depress, and his blade flex in the curve of a hit.

“Good!” Istvan exclaimed, skipping backwards. “And again!”

―

When Michael had left his building there’d been no one else on the street. At the end of the path to his front gate, he’d turned up the hill passing the Nelsons’ house, its windows as impassive as any other, then continued up the incline to turn left down a narrow path. Emerging from the shade of this cut-through, he’d crossed a tarmac walkway bisecting two of the ponds before leading on into the Heath itself.

Nothing was altered. A male moorhen ducked for food in the pond to his left, then paddled to a piled nest to feed his chicks. To Michael’s right, farther off, the mixed swimming pond, in full sunlight, was pointillist with swimming costumes and bare bodies. He could make out a line of girls queuing for the showers. The red-and-yellow uniforms of the lifeguards, looking on. The white buoys, bobbing in the swimmers’ wakes.

As he’d reached the Heath itself, here, too, the scene appeared unchanged from earlier in the day. Picnics, prone sunbathers. A boy on a scooter, about Lucy’s age, was backheeling himself along the path, outstripping his mother, who was pushing a pram behind him. “Joseph!” she shouted as he crested a rise. “Joseph! Slow down!”

Michael had walked on. He’d wanted to keep his eyes on the ground, to avert his gaze from anyone who might see him. But at the same time he couldn’t help glancing up at the Heath around him, at its life, so abundant and insouciant. A woman in a bikini was talking on her phone; a shirtless man in jeans spread himself across a bench, ridges of fat pinking around his midriff. Another man, propped on his elbows on the grass, tilted his head back, eyes closed to receive the sun.

How could nothing have been disturbed by what he’d done? Just minutes and metres away a life had ended. Two lives, perhaps. A four-year-old cache of memories, ideas, pains, favourite colours and toys had been extinguished. A genetic pattern, unique in the universe, had been snuffed out. Features and qualities of her parents, her grandparents, great-grandparents, had all died in the instant of Lucy’s fall. And as they had, within seconds, his own life had been burdened with the weight of hers. In an attempt to see Caroline again, he’d taken Lucy away. There would be aching ripples of grief, coursing through Samantha, Josh, Rachel—and through hundreds of others he didn’t know. Lives would change. The hue of the years to come, although they were unaware, was already tainted for these people, the shade of their existence already darker. And yet out here, on the Heath, under an afternoon sun, nothing had altered. What Michael, and Michael alone, knew seemed to make a mockery of time and space, of the very meaning of those words. As if in causing Lucy’s death he’d proved everything to be illusion.

But it was not illusion. This is what he’d also known as he’d traversed the Heath, his fencing bag slung over his shoulder. It might have felt unreal, there in the open air, beyond the walls of the Nelsons’ house. But it wasn’t. It was very real. It was true, and Michael had known he had only minutes to write himself out of that truth.

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.