by Owen Sheers
―
The last time Michael had heard Nico’s voice was on a collect call from his correctional facility upstate. Michael was finally moving back to London. His mother, widowed three years previously, was ill. BrotherHoods was due to be published in Britain. It was time for him to leave New York. If he stayed any longer he was worried it would never let him go. Although he’d found his voice in the city, and his story, to remain would have felt like treading water. New York had been about transition. Now that transition had been made, he wanted to move on, which, for a reason he couldn’t quite fathom, meant moving back.
When the phone rang Michael had been on his knees among packing boxes and bubble wrap scattered across the floor of his Sullivan Street apartment. He’d accepted the call, but before Nico came on the line he’d flicked the phone to answering machine. He’d already spoken to Nico twice that week and he couldn’t take another stilted, awkward conversation. Not now, as he was preparing to leave. So instead he’d just listened, standing in his half-empty apartment, a fire truck’s siren insistent on Sixth, as the voice of a man he’d once known as a boy filled his living room.
“Hey, Mikey?” Nico said. He sounded lost in a large space. His voice deep, but somehow shallow, too. “It’s me, Nico. You there? Man, it’s Nico, pick up.”
Michael heard the clang of a door, the crackle and fuzzy speech of a guard’s radio.
For a second or two Nico breathed on the line, deliberate and slow. “Huh, well,” he’d said eventually. “Hasta luego, bro. Take it easy, yeah?”
The line went dead. The message light began to blink. Michael watched it pulse for a moment, then, sliding his keys off the kitchen table, left the apartment. He pushed through the lobby doors downstairs and crossed the street into the spring light of the morning and walked north towards Washington Square. The higher windows of the buildings were catching the sun, making them flash in the corner of his eye. As he crossed over Prince a cooling breeze ushered a scent of cinnamon and bagels down the street. Michael walked faster into it, as if he were trying to outpace the memory of Nico’s voice behind him, or discover some kind of a promise in the sweetness ahead.
CHAPTER THREE
THEY MET JUST three weeks after Caroline moved to London. A mutual friend was screening a film at the Frontline in Paddington, a social club for correspondents, journalists, and filmmakers. As the documentary played in a darkened room on the top floor, the windowpanes crackling with spring rain, images of Harare, Bulawayo, and the Zimbabwean veldt appeared on the screen. The film was about Mugabe’s operation Murambatsvina, “throw out the rubbish,” a forced clearance of urban slum dwellings that had left 700,000 Zimbabweans homeless in winter. Caroline watched as a grandmother in a red bobble hat, overlooked by policemen, heaved a sledgehammer against the crumbling breezeblocks of her home.
Something about the juxtaposition of the rain against the windows and the film on the screen made Caroline nervous. The shower against the glass, the wash of tyres in the street below, the acacia and jacaranda trees silhouetted against a southern sun. She’d lived in Nairobi and Cape Town, and had worked all over Africa. She hated what she was watching on the screen, but she knew she loved it, too. Already, just three weeks after arriving in London, she could feel the pull of those images, an umbilical desire to be a part of it. But then, in immediate response, she felt an equally strong urge to resist. To stay. Whatever had been the catalyst for what she’d felt that morning in Dubai, the residue of it was still a counterweight within her, an instinctive force she didn’t understand but to which she felt compelled to listen.
Caroline first caught sight of Michael sitting a few rows ahead of her, his profile partly lit by the screen. As the film played she studied what she could of him. His fair hair was swept back from his forehead and the collar of his shirt was askew, the label showing. When he turned to say something to the person next to him she saw the suggestion of a break to his nose. It lent him, she thought, an interest beyond good looks. He seemed familiar but it was only later, when she saw his face in the full light of the bar, that she remembered where she’d seen him before: on the back cover of one of the books she’d packed into her hand luggage three weeks earlier.
The only people Caroline knew at the screening had already left, so taking a last swig from her bottle of beer, she approached Michael. He was talking to an older man, a grey-haired reporter with a beaten manner who’d made his name filing stories from the front lines of Vietnam. Caroline didn’t wait for a break in their conversation.
“ ‘All they got is the facts,’ ” she said as she squeezed between them, putting the empty bottle on the bar. She looked up at Michael. “ ‘But what about everything else?’ Good line, that,” she continued, holding his eye. “True, too.”
Michael looked down at the woman who’d interrupted them. At first he had no idea what she was talking about. When he did, he couldn’t tell if she was serious or taking the piss. She was smiling up at him, but her face betrayed nothing.
“Thanks,” he said. “But it wasn’t mine. I just wrote it down.”
She cast a glance at the rest of the bar. “Join the club,” she said. “Think anyone here’s ever told their own story? And anyway, isn’t that the important bit?”
Michael looked over to his friend. “Think that’s true, Bill?” But Bill had already turned away and was talking to someone else.
“Caroline,” she said, holding out her hand.
“Michael,” he replied. Her grip was small but firm. As she pushed herself onto the stool Bill had vacated, Michael noticed the slimness of her thighs. She wore jeans, biker boots, and an oversized jumper. Its neckline was broad and fell loose from one shoulder. There was, Michael could tell, a heat to her tanned skin. When she looked at him again he saw her brown eyes were flecked with gold. A few weeks later, lying in bed together, he’d call those eyes her “fool’s gold,” bait for men like him. But for now he just returned the forthrightness of their gaze.
“I really did like it,” Caroline said. “That line. And the rest of the book, too.”
“Are you a writer?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. She looked out at the bar again, as if weighing the crowd. Michael waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t.
“Do you want to get something to eat?” she said, turning back to him. “There’s too many swinging dicks in here to hear yourself think.”
He couldn’t place her accent. Her words began in Europe but then migrated, like a swallow, mid-sentence to Africa.
Michael laughed, and as he did Caroline thought she might want to sleep with this man whose book she’d once half-read on a plane, and who she’d now discovered in a bar in London.
A woman behind them raised her voice, shouting over a balding man shaking his head.
“But that’s nothing!” the woman said, gesticulating with a half-full glass of wine. “I mean, were you in Somalia?”
“Jesus!” Caroline said, wincing away from her. As she did, she heard Michael in her ear.
“Even those who haven’t got one,” he said, “are at it.” Which is when, she told him one morning over breakfast a month after they were married, she’d been sure.
―
They found shelter from the rain in a Lebanese restaurant near the Tube, where they ordered food but left much of it untouched. Instead they got drunk on two bottles of rosé from the Beqaa Valley, where, Caroline told Michael, she’d once spent a week trying to film hashish growers during the civil war.
By the time they left, the kitchen was clattering with the sounds of cleaning, the waiters turning chairs over the tables. Outside, the rain had stopped. As they walked to the Tube, the wet pavement reflected the street’s neon signs. Slipping her arm around Michael’s waist, Caroline tucked the tips of her fingers into his jeans. He put his arm about her shoulder and in reply she rested her head against his chest. For a few paces they walked like this in silence. But then Caroline felt Michael take a deep breath under
her cheek, and she knew what was coming. He had a girlfriend, he told her. She was still in New York, staying there for her job. But they’d decided to try and make it work. To try and stay together.
As soon as Michael heard himself say it he knew the situation sounded hopeless. Caroline, too, recognised the familiar notes of a dying relationship. But she still listened to him as he apologised and qualified, only ducking from under his arm as they reached the entrance to the station and he stopped talking. She backed away from him, her hands held up in mock surrender.
“In that case, Mr. Writer,” she said, “I’ll get a cab.” Turning on her heel, she walked towards the kerb, already raising her arm to hail a taxi. “Thanks for dinner, though,” she called over her shoulder. “It was fun.”
“Yeah, it was,” Michael replied. “Look—” he started, but she was already out of earshot, on tiptoe, flagging down a cab.
Michael watched as Caroline climbed inside the taxi. With her hand on the door, she called across the pavement to him again.
“Let me know when it’s over,” she said, before closing it and leaning forward to give the driver her address.
As the cab edged into the traffic Michael didn’t wave, and nor did Caroline, but neither did they take their eyes off each other. For as long as they could, Caroline framed in the cab’s rear window and Michael from the pavement, they watched as she became just another car on the road, and he became just another man on the street, his tall body silhouetted against the illuminated entrance to the Tube.
―
In the months following their meeting, Michael and Caroline’s friends often agreed it was timing, more than anything else, that had brought them together. Few thought them compatible, and no one mentioned love. But whatever had happened that night, at least they all recognised it was mutual, and that rather than heady or rash, the climate of their meeting had been surprisingly calm, like a return more than a beginning, a recollection coming clear.
The next time they saw each other was for dinner in Covent Garden. Caroline, who Michael had last seen climbing into that cab wearing her jeans, boots, and a jumper, arrived at the restaurant in a floor-length grey coat over a tightly fitting black dress and high heels. She’d straightened her hair and was wearing makeup. As she left her coat at the desk and walked towards him Michael saw the eyes of other diners catch on her as she passed. Caroline, he realised, was a woman who, if she chose to, could provoke this kind of reaction on a daily basis. As he stood to meet her it was the fact that she didn’t, as much as her attractiveness, that excited him. When he pulled out her chair for her Michael felt as if he’d somehow won a suitors’ competition that had been running, without his knowledge, for years.
As far as Caroline was concerned, she’d already decided she wanted Michael. Not just because of what else she wanted in her life, and not because she was attracted to the subtlety of his humour and his looks, both of which had grown on her gradually, like a secret she’d been let in on. She’d found these qualities in previous relationships, and had learnt they were insufficient, in the end, to hold her attention. But what she’d never encountered before was Michael’s stillness, his capacity to hold the world lightly without appearing aloof or frivolous. She wasn’t aware of it over that dinner, and perhaps she never came to appreciate it over their brief marriage, but it was a manner born more of place than of character. Had she ever travelled to Cornwall and visited the coastal villages and towns where Michael was brought up—Gorran Haven, Saint Mawes, Mevagissey—she’d have met other men possessed of a similar quality. Fishermen, farmers, storekeepers. In all of them she’d have been able to trace that same wary ease with the world, an outlook bred through generations of coastal families by the giving and taking of the sea. It just happened that rather than stay close to the landscape that had shaped him, Michael had left for London, where a resonance of that coast remained with him. In later years he’d even go so far as to wonder if it hadn’t been the Cornish sea with which Caroline had fallen in love. As if what she’d sensed making her whole wasn’t as much himself as the place he was from, unseen to her yet known through its echo in him.
They slept together for the first time that night, in the flat Caroline was renting in Farringdon. As her small hands explored under his shirt Michael unzipped her dress and pushed it off her shoulders. Her body was taut, spare, her underwear surprisingly ordinary. But she was not. He’d stayed and the next morning she’d woken him with her hands again, guiding him inside her from behind as they lay half-dazed with sleep, sunlight washing through the sheet she’d hung as a curtain.
It was several weeks later that their sex became a conduit for something else. It was another night marked by rain. Michael had already given Caroline a set of keys to his flat by Hammersmith Bridge, but he was working late at the library that day, so rather than have her come round he’d agreed to meet her the following morning instead. As he’d cycled home a storm that had been threatening all day finally broke. By the time he reached his flat London was polished under rain, the Thames either side of the bridge pock-marked by the deluge. Wheeling his bike into the hallway, he’d stripped off his coat, shoes, and socks, then gone through into the kitchen. As he did he’d noticed the message light was blinking on the phone. Hardly anyone used his landline anymore, so as he pressed play he’d half expected to hear Nico’s voice following him from across the Atlantic.
But it wasn’t Nico.
“Hello, Michael.”
She sounded as if she were sitting there in the kitchen, raising her head from a book to welcome him home. He could tell she was smiling.
“Guess who’s upstairs? Want to come and join me?”
He’d found her in the bathroom, its steamed air scented with amber, the water drawn to the rim and tea lights balanced around the sink. She was sitting up in the bath, her knees against her breasts like a shy girl. Her shoulders and arms were sheened in the heat and the mirror above her was an oval of mist.
She’d watched him undress, the faintest of smiles playing across her mouth. As he stepped into the bath goose bumps broke out on his arms and legs. Slowly, he’d sunk into its warmth. Neither of them spoke. As he went farther, submerging his shoulders and head, she’d lifted herself to give him room, revealing her breasts, rising slick above the water. When he rose again he drew her towards him, sending splashes swilling over the bath’s rim. Which is when she finally spoke. “What took you so long?” she said, speaking into his neck. “A girl could get bored up here all alone.”
Afterwards they’d stumbled into the bedroom, wrapped in half-undone towels and each other’s limbs, their wet bodies imprinting patterns of their embrace across the duvet and pillows. Drugged by the warmth of the bath, they’d moved slowly, as if they’d just woken. Caroline’s hair was damp, and felt as heavy as velvet when Michael wrapped it about his knuckles. She’d turned over so he could enter her from behind, her back, hips, and arse making the shape of a cello as she rose onto the heels of her palms and pushed herself against him. But she wanted to see him as well as feel him, so, pulling away, she’d turned round and drawn him on top of her. The friction of their bodies released the amber perfume of the bath oils still on their skin. Michael travelled steadily inside her, inching himself deeper until she held his full length and he came, powerfully and suddenly.
For a moment they’d lain in the wake of his climax, the full weight of his body pressing her into the bed, their hearts working against each other. But then, before he began ebbing from her, Caroline rolled Michael onto his back and sat astride him. From that position, with his hands cupping her breasts, she’d looked down at him, her hair swinging about her face, obscuring then revealing her fool’s-gold eyes as they held his. Grinding her hips with a heightening tempo, she’d pushed herself down against the firmness of his stomach. As she’d worked faster and harder her head began to rise until, showing him the full tautness of her throat, she, too, came, crying out over the sounds of the rain-loud city beyond their window.
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When Michael woke the next morning it had been as simple as a single thought repeating in his mind, a voice belonging to both his past and his future self. “I don’t want this to stop.” But with it came a fear he hadn’t experienced so purely since childhood. It was the trepidation of happiness, a spreading sensation in his chest provoked by a joy so palpable that by its very nature it was unbearably fragile, too—beaten thin in its expansion, ephemeral before the certainties of life, death.
As Caroline showered, she, too, became aware of a shift in her perception. In previous relationships her single life had been a whispering promise she’d had to keep at bay. But now that whisper had faded to silence, and she realised where once she’d only ever wanted herself, now she wanted Michael too. As she’d lain on top of him the previous night, both of them breathing like sprinters, distant cars sounding over the bridge, she’d felt a subtle conception somewhere deep within her. Not of a child, but of what, if she allowed it, could happen next. Because this was no longer about sex or feeling wanted or new experience. And this is what she told Michael over their breakfast that morning. That it wasn’t about infatuation or abating loneliness. It was about something else now, but whatever it was, she could speak of it only in terms of what it wasn’t because she’d never felt it before. But, she said, pouring them coffee and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, what she did know was that she wanted more of it. Whatever it was, she wanted more.
―
The following spring they watched, Michael’s arm across Caroline’s shoulders, as the removal company’s lorry manoeuvred its way down the lane towards Coed y Bryn. As it lumbered towards them, rocking in the potholes, broken stalks of cow parsley shivered in its wing mirrors, as if it had been decorated expressly for this, its arrival at their marital home.