I Saw a Man (6 page)

―

She was preparing dinner when she told him.

“We got that commission,” she said from the kitchen. “Pete told us today.”

She was chopping vegetables, the tap of her knife on the wooden cutting board steady and quick.

Michael was editing a chapter at the table. “That’s great,” he said without looking up. “Network?”

It was late April and the evening beyond the French windows still held a hint of the day’s light. The previous autumn, without telling Caroline, Michael had planted an arcing
C
of daffodil bulbs at the top of the lawn. The letter had shown itself in March, before pausing in the spring frosts, the tall stems still budded. Only the previous week had it finally thickened into the bright yellow of full bloom.

“Yes,” Caroline said. “Transmission in October. If we can make it work.”

“And can you?” Michael struck his pen through a paragraph and turned the page.

“I think so.” Picking up the chopping board, she tipped the slices of courgette and red onion into a saucepan. “The uncle’s agreed to contribute. He’s our in, as long as we keep him on board.”

There was something about the way she’d said “our” and “we” that made Michael look up from his editing. The words had been possessive more than inclusive.

She was facing away from him, her head bent as she crushed garlic cloves with the flat of the knife. Her hair fell either side of her neck, revealing a nub of vertebrae at the top of her spine. Somehow, all through the winter her skin had held its honey colour, as if it knew where she really belonged.

“The uncle?” he said. “Sorry, love, which one is this again?”

She turned to face him. Her expression was like that of a nurse imparting news to a relative.

“The one about the boy from Easton,” she said, leaning back against the kitchen counter and crossing her arms. She still held the knife in her hands. The scent of the garlic pulp on its blade came to him. “The kid who went to Pakistan. His uncle’s agreed to go back. To make the introductions.”

He remembered now. Three young Muslim boys recruited at a mosque in Bristol. They were only seventeen, eighteen years old. Like backpackers on a gap year, they’d left for a training camp on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Two of them had returned, but a third had not. Sightline had approached his family about making a documentary. That was all she’d told him, months ago now.

He put down his pen.

“That’s amazing,” he said. “Well done. Focus must be over the moon.”

She smiled and looked down for a moment. And she was right. Suddenly it was funny. Suddenly they both knew what was coming, and the knowing of it made her wary attempt at disclosure seem ridiculous. Michael decided to go with the smile, even though a dull ache was already lodging between his ribs.

He leant back and put his feet on a chair. “But who’s on their books who could handle something like that?” he said. “I wonder…”

She looked back at him. “It would be two weeks. Max.”

“When?”

“As soon as we can get visas and travel sorted. And a fixer, but I’ve…” She trailed off.

“But you’re already on to that,” he said.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

And then it wasn’t funny anymore, as if the humour they’d discovered had been sucked out of the room with her confirmation.

Pushing herself from the work surface, she came to him, lifting his legs and placing them on her lap as she sat down.

“It wouldn’t be Afghanistan,” she said. “We’d do it all from Pakistan.”

“Would it be safe?” he asked.

She shrugged. “As safe as it can be.”

She leant forward and took his hands.

“It’s a really important one, Mikey. His uncle, the sources he’s mentioned. No one’s had this kind of access before. No one. I mean anywhere. We’d be the first. And the group he’s with, this kid, they actually want to talk. They want to tell their side of the story. And so does he.”

He knew, as he stroked the back of her hand and she squeezed the fingers of his, that he could only go with this. He could only ride the contours of her desire, and that somewhere under that deepening ache in his ribs, that was also what he wanted. It was what they’d promised each other from the start. To help each other be happy, whatever that meant.

He lifted his feet off her lap and leant forward, taking her face in his hands. “Just,” he said, kissing her lightly, “be careful.”

Her lips were warm, and as she kissed him back, pulling him to her, her mouth tasted of the onion she’d been eating as she cooked.

“Thank you,” she whispered, putting her arms about his neck. “I owe you one Mikey boy.”

CHAPTER FOUR

WHEN CAROLINE WAS
killed, Michael brought so little back to London he made the move himself, loading his belongings into the back of their Volvo. He’d decided to sell Coed y Bryn fully furnished. Everything within it was resonant with her. Over the last week Caroline’s family had flown over and passed through its rooms, taking certain personal items and anything else they wanted. Michael, too, had kept a few of the smaller mementos: photographs, a box of ticket stubs and cards, a Dictaphone recording of the answer-phone message she’d left him that night in Hammersmith. But everything else he’d let go. The buyers of the cottage took the furniture. He gave her clothes, which he kept seeing filled with her body, to a local charity shop. He wanted to remember Caroline, but under his own volition, not ambushed by the objects around him.

He’d arrived late in South Hill Drive, the car’s engine sounding too loud, too clumsy between the curving banks of town houses, their windows lit with autumn domesticity. There was no space outside Peter’s flat, so Michael double-parked to unload his belongings onto the pavement. He wondered for a moment whether he should leave them unguarded as he parked the car farther up the street. But a glance along its tree-lined camber reassured him. The gentle incline was unpeopled and split into a loop that went nowhere but back on itself. In the aerial view Michael had seen online the shape of the street resembled an old-fashioned tennis racket strung with trees, an accidental growth ballooning from London’s mosaic into the green spaces of the Heath.

Michael was returning to collect the last of his belongings when he first saw Josh. He was walking up the street, a trench coat slung over his shoulder, a briefcase in the other hand. He wore a dark suit and a loosened blue tie. Michael could tell he was drunk. There was a looseness to his body too, a detachment about his gaze.

Michael bent to pick up a couple of boxes. As he arranged them on top of each other he became aware of Josh nearing, then coming to a stop. He looked up. Josh was rooting for a set of keys in the pockets of his coat. As he pulled them out he returned Michael’s look, then glanced up at the block of flats beside them.

“Seems we’re neighbours,” he said, raising his eyebrows. His accent was American, tempered by Europe.

Michael stood, hitching the boxes in his arms. “Almost,” he said.

Josh looked at him blankly, as if seeing him for the first time. He wasn’t as tall as Michael, but he was broader. His dark hair was stitched with grey, a fringe falling in a tight crest above a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

“Well,” Michael said. “Good night.”

He went to move towards the flat.

“Lemme give you a hand.” The thought seemed to come to Josh suddenly, stirring him with its arrival.

“No, really, it’s—”

But Josh had already pocketed his keys and was swinging Michael’s fencing bag over his shoulder. Hooking his briefcase over his wrist, he bent to the last box on the pavement.

“Guitar?” he asked, shifting the bag on his back as he stood.

“No,” Michael replied, leading the way into the flat. “Fencing kit.”

“Fencing?” Josh said from behind Michael as he pressed the timer switch for the hallway light with his elbow. “Never tried it myself.”

Something in Josh’s voice suggested he never wanted to, either.

“Gave mine away,” he continued, as they took the first flight of stairs. “Guitar. Gave it away. Can’t remember why now.”

As they climbed the stairs up to Peter’s flat Josh carried on talking, telling Michael how much he’d like the street, how the other neighbours were “okay, you know, no trouble,” and how much his two girls loved the Heath.

“Like having London’s biggest garden on your doorstep. I mean, the Queen, she’s got nothing on this, right?”

At the turn of the third floor Josh’s conversation gave way to a laboured breathing. Michael was grateful. As they’d ascended he’d felt himself growing tense in anticipation of the question he didn’t want to answer. But it never came, and Josh fell silent with the exertion instead.

Inside the flat, Michael added his boxes to the pile already in the living area. “Just here’s fine,” he said, as Josh entered behind him.

Josh lowered the box and swung the kitbag off his shoulder. As he straightened he kneaded at his lower back with his knuckles. He wore a wedding ring, a gold Rolex, silver cuff links. He was breathing heavily.

“I’d offer you a drink, but—” Michael gestured at the empty room by way of finishing his sentence; the ghosts of hung pictures faded the walls in a series of squares and rectangles. The shelves were empty, the kitchen bare. It smelt of packing tape and old tea.

Josh waved a hand, dismissing his aborted offer. Taking off his glasses, he cleaned them on his shirt as he walked over to the windows, the same ones Michael had seen in the first email Peter had sent him, two long frames taking up most of the wall looking over the Heath.

“You know,” Josh said, turning to Michael, “five years I’ve lived on this street, and this is the first time I’ve ever been in this building.”

He tapped the glass, as if trying to touch the night. “You see this view?”

“Not yet. I mean, not here.”

“Great view,” Josh said, ignoring Michael’s qualification. “Great view.”

He turned back to the window and looked into the darkness. A single lamp on the Heath burned orange through a gauze of mist, illuminating the edges of the turning trees. “Seven years and still not tired of it,” he said, speaking to the window.

But when he looked back at Michael he did look tired, as if the climb up the stairs had brought a painful memory to the surface of his skin. Josh nodded, as if in agreement with his own observation.

“Well, thanks again,” Michael said.

Josh looked up at him, as if trying to decipher who his new neighbour might be. For a moment Michael returned his gaze, unsure as to what to do.

“Don’t mention it,” Josh said eventually, crossing the room and picking up his coat and briefcase. “Josh,” he said, holding out his hand. “Joshua Nelson.”

“Michael,” Michael answered. They shook, a short, businesslike chop. Josh, Michael felt, shook hands a great deal. Now that he was closer to him he could smell the drink and smoke on him, lacing his breath. “Good to meet you,” he said. “And really, thanks for the help.”

“You should come round,” Josh said, as he went into the hallway, putting on his coat. “My wife, she’s always having drinks, parties, you know. She likes meeting people. New people. You should come.”

“Thanks, I will.”

Raising a hand in farewell, Josh walked out the door.

“See you around, Mike,” he called from the stairwell. “Happy home.”

―

Michael closed the door and went back into the living room, its drift of boxes and bags abandoned on the carpet. He turned towards the windows and saw himself, the lamp on the Heath burning in his chest. Slowly, he approached his reflection. As he did, the lamp’s sodium glow slipped into his stomach, and then his groin. He stopped short of the window, as if facing down the man staring back at him. A tall man in a blue sweater and jeans, his long arms hanging at his sides, his blond hair receding.

This is where they would start again, he and this man in the window. In this flat with its view of the Heath, its stained carpet and its forgotten yet remembered pictures on the walls. This is where he would have to make peace with his past, and with the man in the window who’d let it happen.

His phone began ringing and both men reached into their pockets to check the screen. It was Peter. He’d already called Michael twice that day. Both times Michael had let the phone ring out in his hand, as he did again now. He took another step towards the window and put the phone on the sill. A single print, from where Josh had poked the glass, was smudged over the dark pond below. Michael rested his head against the pane and allowed the night to cool his brow.

Below him his phone vibrated with a message, lighting up and turning on the sill like a dying fly. Michael glanced at it but left it alone. There was nothing else to say. Caroline was dead and he’d been left holding the shell of that truth, bereft not only of her, but also of the man she’d been making him.

―

Caroline never told Michael she’d chosen Peter. A week before she’d left they’d picked her “proof of life” questions together, but that was all.

What was the name of her cat in Adelaide Road?

What was the colour of her neighbour’s truck in Melbourne?

What gift did she take her host when she last visited Cape Town?

These were the questions someone from Sightline, probably Peter, would have asked her captors down the line. Their answers, should she have been kidnapped, would have proved she was still alive.

MISTY

ORANGE

MARMITE

They’d made a game of choosing the questions, sitting outside the French windows at Coed y Bryn in front of the opened
C
of daffodils, a bottle of a wine and an Indian takeaway at their feet. Together, they’d gone hunting for stories she still hadn’t told him from her life. Anecdotes from her childhood or student days in Boston. Family fables that still left her creased with laughter from across the years.