I Saw a Man

by Owen Sheers

  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.

  He let himself into his flat, dropped his bag in the hallway, and went on into the living room. As had become his habit ever since the first night he’d moved in, without turning on the lights Michael went towards the windows at the end of the room. He wanted to pause, think. Make sure he was making the right choice. He was no longer certain of what was fact or the creation of his imagination. And he had to be certain before he acted. Closing upon his reflection, on reaching the windows Michael placed his hands against their coolness and leant his forehead against their glass. Which is when he saw Josh.

  From the windows of his flat Michael had only ever been able to see the far end of the Nelsons’ garden. Their pear tree, mature and tall, obscured his view of the rest of it. But above the reach of its crown, even in spring and summer, he’d always been able to make out the last few tapering metres of lawn, the fence at its end and the willow tree beyond, draping its branches into the pond. It was a long garden, so at night the light from the kitchen or the conservatory only travelled so far down its slope. But far enough, with a clear sky and a moon, for him to sometimes see Josh down there, smoking a cigarette before bed, its tip glowing with his inhalations in the dark. Which is where Josh was again this evening, standing by the fence where Michael had first told him about Caroline. Only this evening Josh wasn’t smoking, but was holding the fence with both hands instead, gripping its wood, his head bowed between his arms as he wept.

  From his vantage point in his flat Michael watched from above as Josh’s broad back shook and heaved. Balling one hand into a fist he began to beat it against the wood, not with force, but softly, steadily. Eventually, as if this effort had drained the last of his will, Josh slipped to his knees, which is where he remained, his face sunk in his hands and his back still shaking, coursing with the voltage of his daughter’s death.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WITHIN MINUTES OF Michael’s leaving that afternoon, Josh had returned home. He’d walked back to South Hill Drive quickly, so although Tony and Maddy’s house was just a few streets away, when he’d come into the hall his T-shirt was already patched with sweat. Closing the front door behind him, he’d held on to the handle, keeping the tongue of the latch from clicking so as not to wake Lucy, then gone straight into the kitchen for a drink. Taking a glass from the cupboard, he’d filled it with ice from the fridge, and then water. As he’d drunk, one hand resting on the tap, Josh had listened for his daughter upstairs. She’d been irritable since she’d woken that morning, fractious and running a temperature. At first he’d thought it was just the heat, but when she’d asked him if she could go back to sleep he knew she must have been sick. Ever since she was a baby, sleep was how Lucy’s body had tackled illness. So Josh had said yes, and put her to bed.

  Samantha was away for the weekend with her sister, and he’d dropped Rachel off at her friend’s house for a daylong pool party first thing. So, having put Lucy to bed, Josh found himself unexpectedly alone. It was a hot Saturday in June, and for once he had no daughter to occupy. His time was his own. He thought about taking the paper into the garden, or heading up to his study and getting through some of the emails he’d been avoiding for weeks. But the day had seemed too good for either of those and he felt his free hours too much of a gift. Especially falling, as they had, on a weekend when not just Samantha, but also Tony was away.

  Perhaps he’d sent Maddy a text then deleted it. Or maybe he hadn’t even risked that, and had just gone around and surprised her. Their house was, after all, so close. However he’d done it, with text, phone call, or on the spur of the moment, Josh had gone. For only a short amount of time, perhaps. For less than an hour, certainly, but still, he’d gone. Leaving Lucy asleep in her room upstairs, and unaware of the hallway’s shifting air drawing the back door open, he’d pulled the front door closed, and gone.

  And now he was back, his body evacuated by the urgency of their sex, a boyish thrill of truancy ebbing to a pragmatic efficiency. It had been a risk, but now taken he must restore the day’s rhythm and elide the minutes of his absence. Finishing his water, Josh stripped off his T-shirt, put it in the washing machine, and headed upstairs to take a shower.

  He saw Lucy’s hair first, blonde against the red. For a few seconds he didn’t understand. But
as each stair revealed more of her—her closed eyes, her ridden-up pyjama top, her pale belly—Josh realised he was looking at his daughter, motionless before him.

  For a long time he just held her, rocking her against his chest on the stairs, feeling the warmth leave her skin. The coroner’s report would say this was regrettable. That the body should not have been moved. The police, too, questioned Josh as to why he’d laid Lucy out on the sofa downstairs and hadn’t left her as he’d found her. Although the report stated she’d most likely died instantly—from either the contusion to the back of her head or the break in her neck—there was a chance, however slim, that Lucy, had she not been moved, might have been saved. But Josh knew they were wrong. He’d known, as soon as he’d touched her, that his daughter was dead. Which is why he’d held her like that, tight against his bare chest, so he might harvest the last of her heat, so he might feel the blood and skin he and Samantha had made, that they’d known since she was a baby, cool against his own.

  The police were the first to arrive, a squad car with two officers. Soon afterwards the ambulance Josh had called pulled up alongside. A group of shirtless boys on bikes gathered down the street, sucking on brightly coloured ices. Across the road, a woman three floors up, resting her folded arms on a windowsill, called back to her husband to come and look. A few doors down, an elderly man, an ex–classics professor, had been reading his newspaper in the sun at the front of his house. Standing up, paper in hand, he’d watched along with the shirtless boys and the woman at the window as the paramedics had carried out a stretcher, a blanket bunched at its centre. Later that day, the sun having moved on from his garden, he’d looked up again while folding his deckchair and seen police photographers ferrying their equipment into the house.

  At the police station a detective sergeant, a young woman still in her twenties, took a statement from Josh. At the same time, down the corridor in a room with two desk fans turning at full speed, an officer from the family protection unit ran background checks on Lucy’s name and the Nelsons’ address. Halfway through his statement, Josh, still numb, had become angry. Why were they questioning him? She’d fallen. It was an accident. Did they really think he’d kill his own daughter? The detective sergeant had let him rant, watching him with tired eyes. Going to the corner of the room, she’d poured him a cup of tea and asked him if he wanted any sugar, and if he wanted to call Lucy’s mother. Or they could send a female constable. It was up to him. As she brought him his tea Josh had nodded silently and then begun crying again.

  Samantha was getting ready for dinner when she took the call. She’d just showered and still had her hair in a towel. Martha was already downstairs, waiting for her in the hotel bar. At first Josh wouldn’t tell her why she had to come home. But she’d insisted. His voice was cracked, submerged, and thick. She’d never heard him sound like that before. When he couldn’t finish his sentences for sobbing, she’d simply asked him, “Rachel or Lucy, Josh? Rachel or Lucy?” Which is when he’d told her. Although she didn’t move, Samantha had felt herself fall from a great height. Holding the phone close to her ear, she, too, had begun to cry, as Josh repeated down the line, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Martha drove her, straight to the police station to be with Josh. A policewoman had already visited the parents of Rachel’s friend and explained. Yes, the friend’s mother had said, holding her hand to her mouth and nodding, pale. Yes, of course Rachel could stay for the night.

  Samantha and Josh returned home in a taxi, holding each other as they walked the short path to their front door. By the time Michael had seen Josh in the garden they’d already been back for more than an hour. Samantha had gone straight to bed, where she’d cried herself to sleep. But Josh hadn’t been able to sleep so had paced the house instead, trying to understand. He’d opened a bottle of wine and drunk two glasses in quick succession, then he’d gone out into the garden, where, unaware of Michael watching him from above, he’d wept before the dark waters of the pond, hitting his hand again and again against the fence as he slid to his knees, succumbing to his tears.

  ―

  Michael couldn’t sleep that night, either. He’d come back from the Heath intending to tell Samantha and Josh everything. But the sight of Josh crying had flushed all resolve from his body. He’d remained by the window for as long as Josh had stayed by the fence, and had only moved away once he’d seen him get up and walk back towards the house.

  Going to his bathroom, Michael had undressed and showered, standing with his head under the beating water until the tank ran cold. As he’d watched the dirt wash from his knees and swill down the plughole he’d thought, briefly, about killing himself. It was too overwhelming. The vision of Caroline, Lucy’s falling, Josh’s weeping. He wanted to leave it, escape. But then somewhere deeper, below thought, he’d recognised this impulse as chemical, a passing reaction he must let work through its process. Which it did, the urge subsiding as Michael dried himself then went into his bedroom to try and work out what it was he should do next.

  Of one thing he was now certain. He could not confess. He could not tell Samantha and Josh he’d been inside their house. As he’d lain on his bed through the rest of the night, his eyes open in the dark, this is what Michael repeatedly told himself. That now, having set his course in those seconds on the landing, and then in his leaving, there was nothing to be gained from further accumulation of anger or grief. Lucy was gone. He had seen her die. But he had not killed her. He had witnessed, but he had not committed. Telling her parents would not bring her back to life. It would only, most likely, take him away from theirs, exactly when he might be of most help to them, as a friend and a neighbour.

  Michael knew this logic seemed perverted and was also dependent upon him not being caught, on a trace of his presence not being found in the house. And even if he did escape suspicion, he was so disoriented he didn’t know if he’d be able to justify his thinking in another hour’s time, let alone the next morning. But he did know, in a bald sense, that it was true. He had to be practical, to think, now that it had happened, now that Lucy was dead, how the most good might be done.

  As he lay on his bed, the dawn light rising up the wall beside him, Michael endlessly turned over combinations of reasoning until he’d convinced himself that this was the only way forward. That from now on all his effort, all his actions, should be directed towards healing, not blame. It was an argument, he decided, as the sun edged higher and the first swimmers arrived in the ponds beyond his window, to which he could hold only if it overwhelmingly became his defining purpose. And yes, his atonement, too, his penance. To carry the knowledge of Lucy’s death alone, while doing all he could to help her parents recover from their grief, just as they’d helped him recover from his.

  As Michael made these promises to himself he became painfully aware of the presence of the Nelsons’ home, just the other side of his wall. Its weight seemed improbable and yet painfully tangible. All through the rest of that day, as he forced himself to get out of bed, to dress, eat, he could feel it pressing against his own small rooms. And the thought of Lucy, dead, pressed upon him too. It seemed unthinkable that her vitality could be stilled in such an instant. That all she was, all she had been—all her memories, the imagined lives of her dolls, her favourite toys and colours—had become, the moment she’d hit those stairs, no more than Oliver’s description of a spongy organ, heavy with death inside her skull.

  But most terrible of all was the fact that he’d been responsible for that reduction, that grotesque transition from body to corpse. This, beyond his grief, was the cutting edge of her death for Michael, the sickening knowledge he’d carry for the rest of his life. That it was he who’d caused Lucy to fall. He who had killed her.

  Although for the rest of the day he kept to his flat, Michael was unable to stop himself constantly checking the windows. But however many times he looked he saw no more of Josh in the garden, and nothing of Samantha either. He kept his phone in his pocket. He listened for sounds
from their house, but heard nothing. And yet he knew they were there, just next door, the two of them, scoured by the loss he’d caused, woken like childless newlyweds into their altered lives.

  Around mid-morning, as he was filling the kettle at his sink, Michael saw a car pull up in the street. A woman got out, went round to the passenger seat, and opened the door. Rachel, a blue rucksack over her shoulders, stepped onto the pavement. Taking her by the hand the woman, who was short and tanned with a neat grey bob, walked her down the path to her front door. Minutes later the woman reappeared, got back in her car, and left.

  Michael wanted to speak to them. He thought about calling, or sending a text. But he could not until he, himself, had somehow been told. These were the rules he’d set himself. Having deleted his minutes in their home, he must now act and react as if his truth was the only truth. As if he’d walked across the Heath to his lesson, and then he’d come back. He had slept and now it was Sunday. A quiet day, a high bank of clouds pressing a humid heat upon the city. A day when families stayed close, until later in the evening, which is when, often, Sam or Josh would call him and ask him to join them for dinner.