I Saw a Man

by Owen Sheers

  They married at the town hall in Prague, with three friends as witnesses, and honeymooned on Ko Tao in Thailand. The first house they’d bought was in Clapham, and their next, when Rachel was born, in Kensal Rise. But Josh was good at what he did. He was ruthless in his work. At first Samantha had liked it: his competitive drive, his refusal to come out anywhere other than the top, his willingness to take a risk. He got promoted. He rose. Before she became pregnant with Lucy they moved again, this time into a four-storey house backing onto the ponds on Hampstead Heath. A Georgian town house of solidity and peace. They’d have preferred to have been flanked by the same, rather than have a fifties block of flats to their left. But it was still more than they’d hoped. A family home. Somewhere they would stay. When they’d moved in, Rachel, at just two years old, had been the first across the threshold, carrying her own box of crayons and toys. Her parents had followed behind her, Josh insisting on picking Samantha up and carrying her inside like a newlywed. Five years later, on an overcast day in August, he’d left through the same door, alone and carrying no more than a couple of suitcases.

  ―

  Michael withdrew his hand from Samantha’s. “How do you know?” he asked her. “About Maddy?”

  “Oh,” she said, “it’s been brewing for years. From before Tony even married her, in a way. I suppose I don’t know for sure. But I’d be surprised if I’m wrong.” She lifted her teacup to drink. “She’s probably just playing with him,” she said, as she put it back on its saucer. “To alleviate her boredom. She’s that kind of woman.”

  “But Tony,” Michael said. “Josh adores him.”

  “No,” Samantha said clearly. “He wants to be him. He aspires to him.” She waved a hand in front of her face, as if clearing a spider’s thread. She didn’t want to talk of it anymore. She gave him one of her smiles; distancing, a polite mask. “I’m enrolling in an MA,” she said by way of changing the conversation. “In September. Photography, at the Royal College of Art.”

  For the rest of their time in the café, Samantha talked about her future, not her past. However much Michael wanted to help her through her loss, so far she’d barely mentioned her grieving to him, or the circumstances of Lucy’s death. He’d tried to broach it, gently, when they’d gone for a coffee in the week after the funeral. But Samantha had just shaken her head. “I’m sorry, Michael,” she’d said, crying quietly. “I can’t.”

  Since then, recalling his own weeks after Caroline’s death, he’d come to understand why Samantha might be holding her loss close. It was as if her grief was a newborn, an infant with whom she, and she alone, was learning to communicate. He knew she’d talk about it when she was ready, but until then his just being there would have to be enough, however impatient he was to be of more tangible help. So as they finished their teas and another bus moved on, unlocking more of the sky above them, Michael had listened, aware that this, as much as anything, could be a form of contribution. The promises Samantha was making to herself were, he felt, as much to bolster her decision to split from Josh as they were promises to be kept. The MA, finding a job, to pick up her yoga classes again, to join a friend’s book club. How many of these might come to fruition, Michael couldn’t tell. He remembered making similar plans himself in the months after Caroline died—to move back to America, to stop writing and work for a charity or NGO instead, or even to try and use Caroline’s insurance payout to set up a foundation for young journalists in her name. And yet he’d remained in Britain, moved to London, and had, in the end, even through the turmoil and sleepless nights of the past two months, eventually returned to the comfortable pastures of The Man Who Broke the Mirror. But he knew now that the keeping of his promises had not been the point. And it was the same with Samantha. For now, their potency was in their making rather than their practice. And so Michael listened, realising that if what Samantha had said about Josh was true, and they’d separated for good, then it was likely that it would be in her alone his atonement would be focused. That it was to her his attention and time must be devoted.

  As they left the café, Samantha paused on the pavement outside. She had a small case with her, on wheels, as if she might stay away for longer than just the one night. Michael was about to ask if she wanted him to walk her to the Tube station, when he saw she still had something to say. Something she didn’t want to leave unspoken.

  “It hasn’t been just Josh,” she said, as she put her purse back in her handbag. “It wouldn’t be fair to make you think that. It’s been me, too.”

  Michael stepped aside to let a woman with a pram pass. Samantha watched her push it on down the pavement, a child’s arm hanging from its seat. Out in the light Michael saw how Lucy’s death had etched lines about Samantha’s eyes, her mouth. She turned to him. “I haven’t…” she began, her eyes welling again. “I haven’t been able to forgive him, Michael.” She took hold of his arm. “For what happened. I mean, he was there.” As she said this she squeezed his arm, her fingers pressing into his flesh. “He was there,” she said again, breaking down.

  Michael held her as she cried, feeling the stabbing breaths of her sobs, just as he’d felt the spasms of Josh’s back on the Heath. Over her shoulder he watched the child’s arm hanging limp from the pram as its mother pushed it up the street. In reply he saw a flash, as he did all the time, of Lucy’s arm, hanging off the edge of the stair, her other twisted behind her. No, he wanted to say to Samantha as he held her. No, Josh wasn’t there. But I was. This is my fault, everything—your grief, Josh’s leaving, Rachel’s hurt. I watched her fall. I heard her die. Because I was there, in your house. I was there.

  But what good would it do? How would his confession help this woman sobbing in his arms? It wouldn’t. It would be for his sake, not for hers. This is what Michael told himself as he gently pulled back from Samantha and, gathering herself, she, too, pulled away from him.

  “God,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “I must look a state. I’m sorry.” She took a breath. The storm had been sudden but had passed. “I want to forgive him,” she said, frowning. “I really do.”

  “You will,” Michael said. “In time.”

  “You think so?” Her eyes held a child’s look of hopefulness, the willingness to be told an adult’s untruth, a lie even, if it would just make it all better.

  “Yes,” Michael heard himself say. “Of course you will. It was an accident, Samantha. A terrible accident. No one wanted it to happen, and everyone wishes it hadn’t. But you can’t blame Josh.” Again, he wanted desperately to say more, to tell her. But he had to protect her. “Josh wasn’t able to stop it happening,” he continued. “But he didn’t make it happen, either.”

  “I know,” she said. “I just keep thinking of everything we could have done. Everything we should have done.”

  “Don’t,” Michael said, holding her by both her shoulders. He bent his head to catch her eye. “You’ve got to look forward now. Think of Rachel, like you said. And yourself. And help Josh, if you can.”

  Samantha nodded. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I know.” She looked up at him. “That American pilot?” she said, weighing her words carefully. “Have you forgiven him?”

  Michael wasn’t expecting the question. Of course not, he wanted to say. Why would I? Just because he broke cover and wrote to me? He thought of Daniel’s most recent letter. How willing he’d been to answer his questions. How he seemed to see himself as another victim of Caroline’s death, not the perpetrator of it. But Michael had to be careful. Samantha was looking to him for a way forward. And yet he couldn’t lie. Not about this. “It’s very different,” he said eventually. “He aimed at Caroline. He had intent to harm. If not her, then someone. So I’m not sure if I have, yet. But,” he went on, seeing disappointment bleed into her expression, “I suppose I’ve come to understand. A bit. That he didn’t mean to kill Caroline personally. That in that way, at least, it was an accident.”

  Samantha nodded again. She had no idea that Daniel and his missile h
ad killed her daughter, too. “Thank you, Michael,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers. “Thank you. You’re a good man.”

  He didn’t reply. He couldn’t. He was sick with himself. He’d secured those false minutes again. For Josh this time, as much as for himself. Perhaps, he thought, this was also to be the breed of his atonement. His contribution to Josh’s healing. A making of his lie into a truth, a blending of their shared lies into one.

  Samantha looked at her watch. “I should go,” she said. She extended the handle of her case. “I’ll give you a ring when we’re back,” she said, flashing him another smile, warmer than before. “Bye, Michael,” she said, walking away. “And thanks again.”

  “Bye,” he said as she went, raising a hand to wave her off. Samantha waved back, calling over the heads of the crowded pavement between them. “I’ll bring Rachel round,” she said, standing on tiptoe. “I’m sure she’d like to see you.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ON THE MORNING of September 16, 2008, news channels across the world showed footage of Lehman Brothers employees leaving their offices in Canary Wharf, carrying boxes of files and belongings. The crisis had been building for weeks, and Josh had known they wouldn’t escape it. His team, and the whole London office, had always remained profitable. But he knew the country of finance wouldn’t be sensitive to such details, or to any concepts of national borders. The bonds bets in the U.S. had failed. Construction work across thousands of hectares of developments on the fringes of Las Vegas and Miami had come to a halt. A few days later Josh had stood on the trading floor along with hundreds of other Lehman’s employees, all of them going silent as they’d watched their stock plummet. From then on the building in Canary Wharf had been coursing with the chatter of exit: heads of teams leaving rooms to make phone calls, younger traders calculating with whom they should align.

  When the end came, it came swiftly. Within a week of a meeting with the U.S. Federal Reserve in New York, the bank no longer existed. Josh heard the news on the radio as he was making himself breakfast. He’d expected it to be bad, but not this bad. He hadn’t thought the bank would die altogether. By the time he got in to the office he’d found his colleagues were already vacating the building, walking to cabs or the underground station carrying Iron Mountain data boxes, bin liners, shopping bags, desk plants.

  From his office on the thirtieth floor, Josh watched as a crescent of camera crews covered his colleagues’ departures, tracking them like flowers following the sun. If he was going to find another position, he knew he should already be making phone calls, setting up lunches. It wouldn’t be difficult. He was good at what he did, and people knew he was good. It was the bank that had failed, not him. But instead he remained by the window, the phone on his desk unplugged and his mobile turned off.

  Eventually Josh turned from the scene below. Checking his drawers one last time, he picked up his briefcase and left his office, asking his secretary, who was clearing her own desk, to courier the box of his personal items to his new flat in Hampstead. Taking a service elevator, he descended through the floors, which just a few days ago had hummed with activity, and left by a side entrance of the building. He didn’t want to give the cameras, or anyone else, the satisfaction. But more important, beyond any professional pride, Josh didn’t want Rachel to turn on the TV and see her father losing his job in the same way she’d already seen him lose her sister, his wife, and his home.

  Stepping out into the light, Josh walked west, along Middle Dock. The sun was catching the higher windows of the towers and flexing in brilliant flashes on the water beside him. He thought of the view from Parliament Hill, how from up there these towers, the facets of their pinnacles, sparked from the city like small explosions. Maybe he would go there today. He hadn’t been on the Heath in months. But perhaps today he would. Suddenly he had the time, the space. He loosened his tie as he walked, then took it off altogether. Yes, he’d like to feel the wind up there again. To see it shuffle the trees like a card dealer, to hear it bring the oceans to the branches of an oak.

  But first he’d go for a drink. Not here, but somewhere farther north. A pub up towards Mile End or Bow. A quiet, midday boozer, dark with close walls. Or perhaps one of the old all-day strip joints, its windows boarded over and its drinkers, from company director to delivery driver, levelled by the clink of their coins in the pint glass. Or maybe he’d just buy a bottle of Teacher’s and take it to a bench by the canal. Somewhere he wouldn’t have to look at the faces of others. Somewhere where nobody knew him; where he could forget, for an hour or so, who he was and who he’d been.

  ―

  The flat to which a courier drove Josh’s boxes later that day was in a Victorian terraced house on the east side of the Heath, set back two streets from its edge. An attic conversion of a bedroom, living room, bathroom, and kitchen with Velux skylights in its sloping roof through which Josh smoked at night, looking over the chimneys and eaves of his neighbours. It was the kind of flat one of his more affluent juniors might have rented, fresh from university. A first-timer’s flat. Neat, minimal. A starting place. But for Josh, on moving in, it had felt like an end. A contraction of his hopes and everything for which he’d ever worked and loved to three cramped rooms with predictable furnishings and an air of bland expense.

  He’d chosen it simply because it was available, and for its proximity to South Hill Drive. This was the only stipulation he’d given the letting agent. Nowhere more than ten minutes from his home. From Rachel and Sam. He’d agreed to leave the house, but that didn’t have to mean leaving their lives. He understood why he had to go. It was becoming unbearable. The way Samantha looked at him each morning, her face thickened with blame. Having to see those stairs every day, to walk down them and see, in his mind’s eye, Lucy caught in their turn like driftwood between rocks. That’s why he’d stayed away so much, why he’d drunk so much. He wanted to be nowhere other than home, where he could keep Rachel and Samantha close. But when he was there, he couldn’t stand it. Every brick, every chair, every picture, was a part of the canvas of Lucy’s death, and his contribution to it. And not just her death, but her short life, too. These were the rooms in which he had first held her, her newborn eyes still welled with the womb’s darkness. Where he’d watched her infant sleep, hovering his open hand above her stomach to feel it rise and touch his palm with a breath. Where he had witnessed her growing delight in her childhood discovery of being alive. Loaded with these past visions, and more terrible recent ones, too, Josh’s home, once his refuge, had become inhospitable, a wilderness of guilt, grief, and regret. So when Samantha had said she wanted him to leave, that she wanted time apart, he’d offered barely any resistance. It was, beyond the sadness of the action, of carrying those two suitcases out the door, a release. And, he’d thought, as he’d unpacked those cases in his new attic rooms, the only way, in the end, they might stay together.

  But if Josh’s moving out gave Samantha the space she needed, it did nothing by way of helping him find his own. He felt trapped between what he had done and what he hadn’t, between what he’d said and what he hadn’t said. A corrosive cocktail of self-loathing and grief continued to eat at him from within. And within was the only place it could be. There was nowhere else for it to go. No one else to whom he could explain or confess. He had left the house. He had not been there. And why? For his secret conquering of Tony’s assured world. For the thrill of it. And just because he could. Because in letting him do so Maddy had intoxicated him, not with beauty or allure, but with the simple reveal of her ordinary self behind that impossible façade. But none of that mattered now. All that did was that Josh had left Lucy alone. The only other person who knew was Maddy herself, and she’d already gone, distancing herself as fast as she could the moment she heard what had happened.

  She and Tony, like others, had sent them a card with a note expressing their sympathies, offering to help. A week later Tony had taken him for a drink. They still had their place in Vermont, he’d told
Josh. It was empty right now, so if he and Sam wanted to get away for a while? But Maddy Josh hadn’t seen since Lucy’s death. For all of August she and Tony had been away, in Italy on the Amalfi Coast. At the end of the month Tony had come back to work, but Maddy, he’d said, had flown straight to America. To see her sister, spend time with her nephews and nieces. Tony seemed strained when he’d told Josh this, and Josh wondered if he wasn’t the only man from whom Maddy was distancing herself. She was a survivor, and always would be. It was what they’d first seen in each other. The ability to move through, to emerge the other side. But now he hadn’t. Now he was left, and she was gone.

  Josh didn’t care. Maddy’s absence, like Samantha’s request for him to leave, was also a relief. It removed a low-grade anxiety that had haunted him below his grief ever since it had happened. What if, through Maddy, or through Tony via her, or through some confiding friend he didn’t even know about, Samantha were to learn he hadn’t been in the house? What then? No, he never wanted to see Maddy again. Not now that her scent, her touch, her submissiveness which had so surprised him, excited him, were all no more than markers of his guilt, reminders of those seconds in which his daughter had fallen through the air without her father there to catch her.

  In the weeks after he moved out, as Samantha held her grief close within their house on South Hill Drive, so Josh cradled his guilt in those high rooms on the east side of the Heath. He ate badly: late-night pastas in the nearby Italian, take-out curries and pizzas, ready meals from the corner shop, all accompanied by drink. Wine, whisky, vodka. His work suffered, but he knew they were all going to suffer soon enough. He’d seen what was coming, like a rain cloud over a hill. At another time he might have tried to run for cover, to get out while he could. But as it was he was too apathetic to make the attempt, or to care. And in a way it felt apposite—the foreclosures sweeping the Midwest, the collapse of the markets—it all seemed in rhythm with the descent of his own domestic life. There were those who believed it would correct itself, who revered the system like a religion. Somehow, these people thought, it would all be allowed. But if this was a religion, then it was a creed that demanded sacrifice. And not just of individuals and families, the small people in small towns the young men of Wall Street and the City would never meet. They’d spent too much for it to end just there, imagined too much, wanted too much, and gambled too much. The money gods would need a greater sacrifice than that, a public sacrifice. The banks, they’d been told, were too big to fail. But not a single bank, not a lone bank, the collapse of which might just satisfy that ravenous system and trigger the rescue of others.