I Saw a Man (21 page)

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.

When it was over, he heard Istvan from outside.

“Michael? Michael? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he heard himself say. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his glove. “Something I ate.”

He spoke with his head still bowed, his eyes closed. Slowly, raising himself on his elbows, he ran the tap and looked into the mirror above the sink. A man he no longer recognised was looking back at him. He was pale, the last week of sun washed from his complexion. Sweat had stuck his hair to his temples and forehead. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks hollow, the white of his fencing jacket flecked with yellow spittle. He looked exhausted. But what surprised Michael the most was that he also looked innocent. Just as there had been no mark upon the day, so there was no mark upon him. He’d been convinced Lucy’s life, her death, would show; like a bruise of the soul, it would leak into his skin. That all who saw him would see her, too. But there was nothing. Just a tall, pale man bent over a sink, looking back at him, asking him what to do next.

―

It was evening when Michael returned across the Heath. The heat of the day was already leeching towards night. The lowering sun cast the trees with a corona, and midges hung in the air like dust in a workshop. Most of the families had gone, leaving the Heath for the drinkers and lovers, for those who’d come or stayed to see the stars and the city reveal themselves against the sky’s deepening purple.

He walked slowly. The emptiness of his body felt religious, as if he’d been anointed. His mind, too, felt newly clear, as if this is what the consequence of a killing would be: a recurrent surfacing into more and more brilliant orbits of clarity, until the sharpness of it, the depth of its cutting, would become unbearable. It had happened in a second, and yet now it was his for life. This was the equation Michael couldn’t make balance, the sum circling in his mind as he drifted from his usual homeward route into parts of the Heath he’d never seen before.

There had been no one else in the house. Just him and, unknown to him, Lucy, sleeping upstairs. It was a moment in time owned by them alone. And yet it was not just theirs. Already Michael could feel the bleeding of those seconds, breaking the banks of their intimacy. He’d gone up those stairs first as a concerned neighbour, and then in search of Caroline, of the chance of seeing her again. If she hadn’t died, then nor would Lucy. So those seconds at the top of the stairs were Daniel McCullen’s, too. Wherever he was now, at this moment as Michael wandered the Heath, he, too, owned Lucy’s fall, as the furthest ripple of his Hellfire’s blast, the most recent echo of his killing.

And even now, as Michael paused in a clearing, the aftershocks were expanding. Had Josh or Samantha discovered her yet? Or maybe Rachel, coming up the stairs, calling her sister’s name, then trying to understand why she was lying in the turn, her leg caught under her? Michael walked on, following a path back into the woods. Once under the cover of their canopy, he stopped again and leant against the trunk of an oak. He ran his hands around its girth, to feel the solidity of its growth, its undoubtable bark. Why was he returning home? Shouldn’t he be fleeing in the other direction? Leaving London, Britain? Someone must have seen him. He’d been in such a hurry he’d gone straight from his gardening to the Nelsons.’ His hands were still soiled when he’d entered the house. He would have left traces. Footprints. Fingerprints. It would be known.

Stepping off the path, Michael put down his fencing bag and slid down the trunk. He pressed the heels of his palms against the sockets of his eyes and tried to think clearly. Because of the dirt on his hands he’d touched nothing. Or had he? He couldn’t be sure. What about when he’d tried to catch her, or when he’d closed the door? But even if he had, what crime had he committed? He hadn’t broken an entry. He was a regular visitor, so had he trespassed at all? His fingerprints were always on that door handle. And Lucy. He hadn’t touched her, either. He’d just seen her, witnessed her fall. But would she have fallen had he not been there? Would she have even woken? Perhaps. There had been that scooter, after all, its sudden whining. And the ice-cream van, too. But where had Josh been? Had he, in fact, been in the house after all? And if not, then why had he left Lucy alone?

Michael opened his eyes. He couldn’t leave. He had to return. He had to tell them, explain. He had to explain, to try, impossible though it seemed, to answer their questions. He had, now that his head was clear again, to undo his first panicked leaving, his first running away. Pushing himself up, he shouldered his bag, his blades shuffling against each other, and continued his slow drift south.

Emerging from the woods, Michael found himself walking into the full glow of the evening. The tall grasses, swayed by a breeze, were lit like the summer hairs on a woman’s arm. Parliament Hill, where he’d sat so many times with Josh, was ahead of him to his left. The day’s scattered crowds had gathered there to witness the last minutes of light. A jogger rose on the path towards the crest of the hill. A dog bounded through the dry grass in pursuit of a ball. Life, in the final moments of the day, had been coaxed to the surface in all its complex, simple beauty. As if to say, through the coming hours of darkness, do not forget this. This is what you wait for, what you work for, what you love for. This is what we are given and what we shape. This, one day, is what we will lose or have taken from us, whichever may come first.

Michael turned away from the hill and walked on, the grasses brushing his bare legs and his hands. Parliament Hill’s view was not for him this evening. And nor was the company of its crowds. His destination was a house a couple of streets away. It had to be, he saw that now. The house in which he had seen his dead wife and where, with no intention or malice, he’d caused the death of his neighbours’ daughter.

He took the longest route possible, remaining on the Heath for a couple more hours until he could no longer avoid the surrounding pavements and streets. Instinctively, he felt as if while he was on its sandy soil, among its plants and trees, he would be safe, suspended. A colonnade of London plane trees led him down towards the shops of South End Green. As he approached their lit windows, a waiter laying tables outside the Italian restaurant, Michael steeled himself for what would meet him on South Hill Drive. Any minute now, he thought, the blue pulse of a police car or ambulance would beat across the street before him, like the swing of a lighthouse, warning of what he’d done.

But when Michael neared the corner of the street there was no pulsing light. Just summer drinkers and smokers spilling into the garden of The Magdalena. A TV inside was showing a football game. Waitresses carried swaying towers of pint glasses. A tethered dog at the entrance lapped at a steel bowl of water.

Michael walked past the pub, listening for snatches of conversation and watching for expressions that might betray the news of what had happened on the street today. But there were none. Just as, when he reached the Nelsons’ house, there was no squad car or ambulance. No police tape cordoning off the area. No stern-faced officer at the door. The house was dark and as silent as when he’d entered it that afternoon, just one of many in the street’s grand curve, each as implacable and settled as the other.

For a moment, as Michael walked past its front door, he thought perhaps it had all been a vision. Caroline in the bath, Lucy appearing and then falling. Perhaps his wish it hadn’t happened wasn’t a wish at all, but reality. Reaching his front door, he felt a rush of excitement at the possibility. Had his mind conjured not just Caroline, but everything else he’d seen in the house, too?

He climbed his staircase, listening to his own footsteps, and for any other sound he might pick up from the staircase next door. As he reached the second floor another thought reached him. What if it had happened, exactly as he remembered, but no one had found her yet? What if Lucy was still lying there, alone, on that darkening staircase, waiting for her discoverer? Michael could still be that person. He could still be the one to find her, to call the ambulance, the police.