by Owen Sheers
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 kidnappe
d, 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.
It was standard procedure, that’s what she’d told him. Nothing to worry about. Which was when Michael had wanted to ask her. Because he knew what else would be standard procedure. He’d had friends in New York who did jobs like hers. So which colleague or friend had she chosen? Who had she decided should be the person to come and tell him? But he hadn’t asked her and she hadn’t offered. As if in superstition of some jealous god, they’d left it unspoken as they’d picked up the glasses and cartons and, with a chill edging the evening air, headed inside to bed.
So the first Michael knew of Caroline’s choice was when Peter arrived at the cottage a few weeks later. It was late in the afternoon, grey clouds piling above the hills, the River Severn flashing in the distance like a falling coin. Michael was out the back, heaping branches and brambles onto a bonfire. At first he’d mistaken the crackle of tires on the gravel as the sound of the flames. But then he’d heard an engine cut out and the slam of a car door. When he’d come round to the front of the house he was still wearing his gardening gloves, a fistful of blackthorn bunched in one hand. Peter was standing beside the front porch. On hearing Michael’s footsteps he’d turned towards him. The look in his eyes, like that of a child, stopped Michael in his tracks.
Michael had met Peter only a few times before. At a Sightline Christmas party, at some drinks for Caroline’s birthday. There had been a dinner once, too, with him and his wife at their house in Bristol. Michael liked him. He had the easy, dry manner of a man who’d decided to avoid arguments. Not because he couldn’t win them, but because he didn’t want to have to. According to Caroline, if he’d wanted, Peter could have risen high in broadcasting. But he’d chosen to stay at a level that kept him close to the making of programmes instead. “Close,” as he once said to Michael, smiling in resignation, “to the stuff they’re actually about.”
For a long second, as they’d faced each other outside Coed y Bryn that afternoon, neither man had said anything, the gaps in their mutual knowledge growing between them. But then Peter had said his name—“Michael,” and that’s when he’d known. Caroline had chosen Peter. Peter was the man who’d bear her last message, the man who’d come to him across the gravel as he sank to his knees, whose voice would say his name again—“Michael”—and whose hands would come to rest lightly on his shoulders as he buried his face in his gloves, inhaling their scent of wood smoke, the blackthorns scratching at his skin.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE NELSONS’ HALLWAY was flooded with light, the frosted pane above its front door bright with afternoon sun. As Michael walked its length he passed a series of black-and-white photographs hung on the wall to his right. A couple kissing on a bench in Washington Square; an elderly Chinese man looking into an out-of-frame glare; the skyline of Manhattan, miniature between two leaves in the foreground. To his left, halfway along this line of images, a broad staircase climbed the other floors of the house.
The photographs were taken by Samantha. Beneath them she’d hung framed drawings and paintings by her daughters, garish with primary colour. In the first a palm tree arced out from a yellow beach beside a blue sea. The artist’s name was written in crayon above its jagged green leaves—Lucy, age 4. Next to this was a crooked picture-book house bordered by a scribbled hedge, another darker scribble describing smoke from its chimney—Rachel, age 6. As he walked on Michael passed horses, Mummy and Daddy, a red fire engine, and there, at the end of the wall before the door into the front room, a tall stick man wearing a red T-shirt and brown trousers, his hair a rough patch of yellow and his name written above in blue—Michael.
Pausing at his portrait, Michael turned towards the stairs and listened for movement from the floors above. There was nothing. He glanced at the front door to check it was fully closed, which it was. Perhaps it was simply a mistake. It was a beautiful day, so why would they have stayed inside? Josh had probably taken the girls to fly a kite on Parliament Hill, or to swim at the lido below it. Dealing with both of them on his own, he’d maybe just forgotten to close the back door.
Turning from the stairs, Michael went into the front room. He knew he was cutting it fine. If the screwdriver wasn’t in there, then he’d have to leave without it. The room was lit by three tall windows, buttresses of sunlight falling through their draperies. The furnishings were pale, the carpet oatmeal, the shelves white. It was a cabinet of a room, a display case of a shaped and presented life. Artefacts from around the world, art books, travel guides. An oil painting of the Norfolk coast. Side tables deep with photographs of parents, the girls, Samantha and Josh on their wedding day. An old trunk served as a coffee table at its centre. Standing within this lit order Michael held his dirty hands in front of him, palms up, like a surgeon before an operation.
―
When Josh’s promise of an invitation had arrived, it had brought Michael to a party in this room, which is where he’d first met Samantha and the girls. It was a clear Saturday afternoon in November. A week of strong winds had blown the last leaves from the trees on the Heath. The sky was a high blue, a last gift before winter, the air crisp under it. Michael had been to a fencing lesson that morning, one of his first. As he’d returned across the Heath his breath had steamed before him, his footprints leaving a trail through the frosted grass. The dog walkers were scarved, the joggers wearing gloves. As he’d approached the ponds behind the street he’d noticed most of the weekend swimmers were wearing caps.
It was Samantha who’d answered the door. The folded note Michael had found a few days earlier on the doormat at the bottom of his stairwell had been written by her, too. A confident, flowing hand. His name on the front and a simple message inside—We’re having a party on Saturday. From around 2pm. Do come if you can. Samantha and Josh.
“Oh, hi! Great you could come,” she said. “Come in, come in.”
She wore a long-sleeved red dress, a grey cotton belt tied above the slight swell of her stomach. Michael could tell she didn’t know who he was.
“Michael,” he said, as he stepped inside. “From next door?”
“Yes, of course!” She had an easy, natural smile. “Josh told me all about you.”
Michael offered her the bottle of Sancerre he’d brought.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said as she took it. “Honestly, no need. Thank you.”
There was a swell of voices in the room behind her, a cacophony of registers and conversations. Leading Michael towards them, Samantha called over the heads of her guests.
“Josh? Josh? Look who’s here.”
“Who?”
Michael recognised his voice from the night he’d moved in. Authority laced with surprise. She touched his arm.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” she said, looking genuinely alarmed. “I’m useless with names.”
He reminded her and she called to Josh again. “Michael,” she said, leaning into the crowd, one hand on the door frame. “From next door.”
She turned back to him, flashing another smile. “I’ll just pop this in the fridge. Josh’ll sort you out.”
He watched her walk away. Her blonde hair was up, held by a clasp in the shape of a red flower. Her heels, also red, were sudden and sharp on the kitchen tiles.
“What can I get you?”
Josh’s question arrived with his hand, firm on Michael’s back, guiding him into the room. It was loud with people, more smiles, drinks. Children holding glasses of orange juice in both hands passed between the legs of the adults, or offered bowls of nuts and crisps
to the friends of their parents. As Josh led Michael towards a table of bottles and glasses he seemed markedly different from the man who’d looked out at the nighttime Heath a few weeks before, a man on his first drink, not his last.
As Josh poured him a glass of wine, Michael tried to listen to what he was saying. But the room’s activity had caught him unawares. His attention was already scattering in anticipation. He’d been back in London for five weeks now, but he’d yet to open himself to a social occasion like this. His recovery, he’d already learnt, would rely on routine, in avoiding anything that might accentuate the space of Caroline at his side. His memory had become a minefield. He’d never known his body to respond so quickly to thought, or imagined his mind could produce such physical pain, such tears. He was not used to crying, but even now, six months after her death, a thought of Caroline, the shadow of an image, the recall of how she tied up her hair before a shower or dabbed spots of moisturiser on her cheeks, could be enough to make his chest thicken, his breath shallow, and his eyes fill.
To avoid such uninvited memories, he’d kept himself away from older friends, or from anyone who’d known him and Caroline as a couple. He’d declined his editor’s invitations to book launches, and had only agreed to meet with his agent at a restaurant away from his office. Cinemas, galleries, or theatres to which he and Caroline had once gone together were out of the question. In this way, London had been diminished by his grief, and so though familiar, made strange again, too.
As Josh poured himself another glass of red a child appeared at his leg, a girl tugging at his shirt. Her blonde hair had come loose of its bow. Smudges of chocolate were smeared across her T-shirt, its patterned hem hanging wide from her belly.
