I Saw a Man

by Owen Sheers

  With a quick clatter of blades, Istvan came at Michael again, his body upright and slow in contrast to the speed of his fencing arm as he disengaged to parry in sixte before sliding his blade down Michael’s in a glisé attack. He hit Michael on the outside of the shoulder, almost exactly where he’d hit him before. Istvan stepped back into en garde. “Again,” he said, from behind his mask. “And this time think!”

  But all Michael could do was think. Within the closeness of his own mask, beneath its dark wire, he felt as if he were thinking with three brains at once, and none of them his own. A tangle of humming thoughts, of competing images and sounds, flashing then passing, too quick to hold.

  He was trying to focus. On his blade before him, on Istvan’s oncoming attacks, on the brightness of the sky through the high windows of the sports hall. On anything that might stop him, just for a second, from seeing the one image that remained constant: of Lucy, motionless on the turn in the stairs, her pale belly exposed, her one leg caught under her.

  Everything else was indistinct. He didn’t know for how long he’d lain there at the top of the staircase, looking down at her. Or, when, exactly, he’d got to his feet and, stepping over her body, descended it to leave the house. He knew he’d closed the back door when he’d left, and that as he’d picked up his shoes he’d brushed the step clean of their soil. But he couldn’t remember entering his own garden, or his building itself. He knew he had only because the first thing he recalled was sitting on his sofa, his head in his hands, the lights and sounds of the day coming back to him. It was like surfacing from a deep dive, breaking through choppy waves into a terrible clarity of air.

  As the minutes returned to him, so had the same instinctive voice that had persuaded him up those stairs just minutes earlier. But now the note of its desperation was different. Now it was telling him, while he could, that he must change the story. He must change the day’s truth. Michael shook his head against it. He wanted, with a violent desire, never to have been in the Nelsons’ house. Never to have climbed their stairs, never to have gone searching for Caroline. He wanted never to have gone into their bedroom, their bathroom. He wanted never to have been there.

  The alternative was impossible for him to face. He’d only just, in these past months, begun rediscovering his life. He’d lost so much already: Caroline, their future, the man he’d have become with her. And with her fading from him in the Nelsons’ bathroom it had felt as if these losses were just minutes old. He could not, he would not, lose again. This is what the survivor’s voice had told him as he’d sat on his sofa, staring at the carpet. That if he was quick, he could still make it so. He could still shape the story. Lucy was dead. He knew that could never be changed. He’d never meant to frighten her, to cause her to start like that. If he could still save her, he would. But it was too late. So he would save himself instead. Something, he remembered telling himself, must be saved. Eventually, standing from the sofa, he’d washed his hands, collected his fencing kit from the hall, then left his flat, slipping the bag over his shoulder as he’d descended the staircase.

  ―

  “Better! Good!” Istvan took two quick steps backwards. His body was heavy, but his feet were still light, a dancer’s feet. Somehow Michael was following his lesson, muscle memory guiding his arm, his body.

  “Now,” Istvan said, raising his épée as if in salute, “when I lower my blade, attack in patinando, tempo or speed, up to you. Then counter in octave.”

  Michael bent his knees to en garde, his eyes on the switch at the end of Istvan’s blade. As it fell, he took a short step forwards, then lunged, extending his arm towards Istvan’s stomach. Disengaging from the parry, he pushed forward until he felt his own switch depress, and his blade flex in the curve of a hit.

  “Good!” Istvan exclaimed, skipping backwards. “And again!”

  ―

  When Michael had left his building there’d been no one else on the street. At the end of the path to his front gate, he’d turned up the hill passing the Nelsons’ house, its windows as impassive as any other, then continued up the incline to turn left down a narrow path. Emerging from the shade of this cut-through, he’d crossed a tarmac walkway bisecting two of the ponds before leading on into the Heath itself.

  Nothing was altered. A male moorhen ducked for food in the pond to his left, then paddled to a piled nest to feed his chicks. To Michael’s right, farther off, the mixed swimming pond, in full sunlight, was pointillist with swimming costumes and bare bodies. He could make out a line of girls queuing for the showers. The red-and-yellow uniforms of the lifeguards, looking on. The white buoys, bobbing in the swimmers’ wakes.

  As he’d reached the Heath itself, here, too, the scene appeared unchanged from earlier in the day. Picnics, prone sunbathers. A boy on a scooter, about Lucy’s age, was backheeling himself along the path, outstripping his mother, who was pushing a pram behind him. “Joseph!” she shouted as he crested a rise. “Joseph! Slow down!”

  Michael had walked on. He’d wanted to keep his eyes on the ground, to avert his gaze from anyone who might see him. But at the same time he couldn’t help glancing up at the Heath around him, at its life, so abundant and insouciant. A woman in a bikini was talking on her phone; a shirtless man in jeans spread himself across a bench, ridges of fat pinking around his midriff. Another man, propped on his elbows on the grass, tilted his head back, eyes closed to receive the sun.

  How could nothing have been disturbed by what he’d done? Just minutes and metres away a life had ended. Two lives, perhaps. A four-year-old cache of memories, ideas, pains, favourite colours and toys had been extinguished. A genetic pattern, unique in the universe, had been snuffed out. Features and qualities of her parents, her grandparents, great-grandparents, had all died in the instant of Lucy’s fall. And as they had, within seconds, his own life had been burdened with the weight of hers. In an attempt to see Caroline again, he’d taken Lucy away. There would be aching ripples of grief, coursing through Samantha, Josh, Rachel—and through hundreds of others he didn’t know. Lives would change. The hue of the years to come, although they were unaware, was already tainted for these people, the shade of their existence already darker. And yet out here, on the Heath, under an afternoon sun, nothing had altered. What Michael, and Michael alone, knew seemed to make a mockery of time and space, of the very meaning of those words. As if in causing Lucy’s death he’d proved everything to be illusion.

  But it was not illusion. This is what he’d also known as he’d traversed the Heath, his fencing bag slung over his shoulder. It might have felt unreal, there in the open air, beyond the walls of the Nelsons’ house. But it wasn’t. It was very real. It was true, and Michael had known he had only minutes to write himself out of that truth.

  As he’d cut across a southern spur of the Heath towards East Heath Road and the streets leading to Rosslyn Hill, Michael had run through the timings of the alternative truth he was trying to create. His lesson with Istvan was at four p.m. It usually took him about thirty minutes of fast walking to arrive at the school in Highgate. From his first lesson he’d always walked, whatever the weather. Partly to avoid being stuck in traffic, but also to open up his sciatic cramp and warm up his body for the rigours of the session. The walk back to his flat was, similarly, his warm down. To arrive on time today, having walked his usual route, he would already have been halfway across the Heath when Lucy fell. It was as simple as that. No one knew he’d been in the Nelsons’ house. No one had seen him enter or leave. If he could arrive for his fencing lesson on time, then he could delete the minutes he’d spent there, edit them from the day, just like when he redrafted a manuscript. A single key held for a few seconds, and a story could be altered forever.

  He looked as his watch. It was ten to four. He must have remained at the top of the stairs, or on his sofa, for longer than he’d thought. His best hope now was to catch a bus to Highgate. Looking up, he saw a bus stop on the road ahead. He knew one of the Highgate buses stopped there
. But on a Saturday there would be no more than three or four an hour at most. Quickening his pace, his right calf cramped like pig-iron above his ankle, Michael walked on, his leg short in the stride, as if manacled by a ball and chain.

  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 clari
ty, 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?