I Saw a Man

by Owen Sheers

  The first time Josh and Samantha met after he’d moved out she told him she’d started seeing a bereavement counsellor. She asked him to do the same. So he’d registered, but then missed the appointments. He was gaining weight, his secret heavy within him. He was often angry, always tired. Some mornings he didn’t get out of bed but remained curled under the duvet, wishing himself a child again. The only commitments he ever kept were those to Rachel. Whether collecting her from school or taking her out on the weekends, he was always sure to be on time for her and sober. He was always, as much as he could be, the father she’d known before.

  Samantha told him she’d explained everything to her: why her father was living in another house, why they weren’t together at this time. But whenever Josh sat opposite her, at a café in Hampstead or riding the Tube into town, her hurt expression, the slow bruise of her being, told him Rachel understood nothing. And why should she? She was just eight years old. The world, which had always seemed so benevolent, had been proved malign. He wanted to tell her different, to reassure her there was so much to come that would give her pleasure, that she would love the world again one day. But it was an effort beyond his spirits, and so they’d end their time together in silence instead, the two of them in a park, a museum, a restaurant, joined and apart in the still presence of Lucy’s going.

  With Sam it was even harder. She needed him to be away from her. Her love for her dead daughter was fierce, and overrode any empathy she might have felt for her husband. And there was, too, the weight of all she did not know. All Josh had done which only now, too late, he wished undone. He was weak against her, depleted. She, however, although drained by Lucy’s death, was not. Josh saw again, as he had done in the early years of their relationship, her strength. It wasn’t obvious, or displayed as Maddy’s was. And neither was it aggressive, competitive, as his own had always been. It was purer than that. Constant, sustained, like a slow wave building far out at sea, travelling its power towards an ever-receding shore. He felt distant from her, and not just because of his moving out or the unspoken blame that hung between them. But also because he saw that she was rising, with a mother’s ancient will of survival, to meet the sad suddenness of her situation. She was rising and would take Rachel with her. Their strength would be in their solitude. He could see it happening. With Lucy’s falling, Samantha’s need of him had fallen away too.

  He had hoped, in time, that Michael might be the person to bridge their distance. That just as his presence had once made their family motion smoother, so he might ease the journey of their grief. Josh liked Michael: his quiet talk, the way he listened to the girls, his interest, without any intention or demand, in his work at Lehman’s. But Samantha had always liked him on another level. Josh had always known this. That for her, his arrival in their lives had introduced a thread into the fabric of her days she could follow back to her youth before marriage, to her student life of ideas and art, before Ryan McGinnis, money, and a shoe falling from a train had disturbed her trajectory. Because of this it was Josh’s hope that with Michael alongside them, as a friend to them both, but a kindred spirit for Sam, they might draw closer again. That with him as a listener, as a reminder of their family, a sounding board for their grief, Samantha might be slowed on her course. That she might, once she felt secure in Rachel and herself, need him again.

  But then, one evening before he’d moved out, Josh had spoken with Michael over the hedge dividing their garden from his building’s next door. He’d left the house for a smoke. He’d wanted to be alone, so he hadn’t talked to him when he’d first seen him. But by the time he’d finished his cigarette he’d been calmer. A week or so earlier, after their jog, he’d walked away from Michael on the Heath. He hadn’t been able to abide company. He’d mentioned Caroline, aggressively. He’d been angry and hurt and had taken it out on Michael. So on his way back up to the house he’d gone over to apologise, to try and start again.

  As Michael stood to meet him he’d cleaned some dirt from his hands, wiping his palms together to brush them free of soil. Which is when, with a sudden chill, the idea passed across Josh like a shadow. When Lucy had fallen he hadn’t been in the house himself, but that didn’t necessarily mean his daughter had died alone.

  Within weeks of moving in next door, Michael had taken on the communal garden of his building. It was something, he told them over one of those early dinners, he’d inherited from Caroline. He’d never been green-fingered himself, but when they’d moved to Wales she’d introduced him to the pleasures of spending time with plants, of having his hands in the earth, being close to bark and leaf. Samantha and Josh had been grateful. For many years the garden of Michael’s building had been left to no more than the occasional mowing by a contractor hired by the managing agent. Under Michael’s hands it began to come alive again. He pruned back the trees by the pond. He cleared the beds of weeds and fed the acid soil with nutrients. And when the heat wave had come in June, he’d kept it watered, too.

  In comparison, Josh had neglected their own garden over those same summer months. He’d wanted to hire someone in to take care of it, but Sam kept saying she’d prefer to do it herself one day. It was the same when Michael offered to help. She had a vision of her and the girls setting out with trowels and packets of seeds. But it never happened. So over that heat wave their flowerbeds and herbaceous borders suffered. The lawn yellowed, and its earth, whenever Josh picked it up, crumbled dry in his hands.

  It was one of the first questions DS Slater had asked Josh the afternoon of Lucy’s death. “The soil on the landing,” she’d said, as they’d sat in that windowless room in the police station. “And on the floor in the bathroom. Had you been in the garden?”

  He’d said no. Because he already had his story. He could already see, in his mind’s eye, where he’d been. He’d already rehearsed it so that now, for him, it was real. He’d been reading the paper in the conservatory. He’d had the radio on. But not so loud that he didn’t hear, when…

  “Had anyone else been in the garden?” Slater asked. Her pursuit of the question frightened him. So he’d lied again. Rachel, maybe, he said. Yes, now that he thought of it, Rachel had been playing in the garden that morning. And he’d been out there himself, too, just the evening before. That, at least was true. So that’s where it had probably come from. From him or from Rachel. DS Slater had nodded, written in her notebook, and then moved on to her next inquiry.

  After he and Samantha returned to the house that evening Josh had gone into the bathroom to shower. As he did he’d examined the carpet on the landing to see what Slater had been talking about. He had to get down on his knees to see it; it was barely soil at all, just a few motes of earth. Brushing them away, he’d stood up and forgotten about it. Any of them could have brought it into the house, at any time over the last few days. The same was true of the marks on the bathroom floor. And right then, with Rachel still oblivious to her younger sister’s death, with Samantha crying into her hands in the kitchen downstairs, and with Maddy bearing a knowledge that could sink him, Josh had put it out of his mind.

  But on that evening when he’d spoken to Michael over the hedge, as he’d watched his neighbour stand from his freshly watered beds and brush his hands clean, Josh had remembered that soil again. Not just because it had been there, but because whenever it had fallen to the carpet it had been damp, not dry. By the time he’d returned from the police station it was like dust. But the marks it had made when first deposited—tiny smears across individual strands of fabric—suggested it hadn’t always been. The earth in his own garden hadn’t been watered for days. Which could mean only one thing. The soil on the landing had come from someone else’s.

  So this was the other reason Josh had asked the letting agent to find him a flat close to South Hill Drive. Because although he couldn’t alert anyone, having claimed to have been in the house himself, and although he had no other proof than those crumbs of once-damp soil, he no longer trusted Michael. The man, Josh came to
realise, as he smoked each night at his open Velux windows, as he looked over the rooftops, aerials, and satellite dishes of his neighbours, was a storyteller. By trade and by inclination. A loner when they’d first met him. A loner who, from what he could tell, had gathered few other friends since. A loner they’d welcomed into their home. But who was he, really? Beyond his books and his tales of other people’s lives? Josh didn’t know. After all the hours of their walks and their jogs on the Heath. After all their conversations sitting on that bench on Parliament Hill. He still didn’t know. He’d been a chattering fool, he told himself. While he’d talked and talked, Michael had listened. It was what he did, he’d said so himself many times. An “immersion journalist,” that’s what he’d called himself, and it was what Tony had called him, too. “One of the best immersion journalists I’ve read.” At the time, despite his nodding and agreeing, Josh hadn’t understood what Tony was talking about. He’d been too wrapped up in his own life to notice, or to care. Tony seemed impressed by it, and Samantha excited by it. That had been enough. But now, unemployed, estranged from his wife, and grieving for his youngest daughter, Josh thought he did understand, and in a way that neither Tony nor Samantha ever had. Now he was living away from Rachel and Sam. Now that they were so vulnerable, and Michael, who’d arrived as their neighbour from nowhere, was still there, living beside them, Josh thought he understood all too well.

  The idea of it, the wild possibilities spiralling in his mind, wouldn’t let go of him. Yes, he was to blame for leaving the house. But was someone else to blame for his daughter’s death? And was that someone Michael, their quiet, listening, watching neighbour? Because of these suspicions, Josh knew that for as long as Michael lived next door to his wife and daughter, then he must keep them close, too, also watching, also listening, waiting for when he might learn more about Michael’s intentions and where he’d really been on that hot Saturday in June.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “IT WAS JUST experimenting at first,” Samantha said, leafing through the prints in their box. “But after a while it became something else. A kind of meditation, I suppose. Certainly a routine.” She paused at one of them. It was taken in autumn, the pond skinned with fallen leaves. A single child, a boy in red Wellingtons, apparently alone, was looking at his reflection in the water. “And then they became something else again,” she said. “A kind of story.”

  “It’s the accumulation,” Michael said, picking up the print and looking at it more closely. “It builds a narrative, whether we want to or not.”

  It was an evening in January. Rachel had only just come home from school, but already the Heath beyond the kitchen windows was dark. A clear sky was discovering its stars, the lights of aeroplanes blinking above the city. The year was young, but London had already been covered by snow once since Christmas and, according to forecasts, would be again that night.

  “I like that,” Samantha said, picking up her wine. “A narrative of accumulation. I might steal that.”

  Michael had been wrong about Samantha. Her promises had been for the keeping, not just the making. And in their keeping she’d grown, become more herself. They hadn’t, after all, been a vehicle of transition, but rather had become that transition, a change in her and her life.

  “Why didn’t you show me these before?” Michael said, placing the print of the boy in red Wellingtons back in the box.

  Samantha took it out again, slipping it back in its chronological order. “I don’t know,” she said, looking at the photographs as if for the first time. “I suppose I wanted to keep them mine. To discover what it was. Get some distance.” She looked up at him. “Isn’t that what you’re always saying? You need distance to see anything clearly? To become your own editor.”

  She’d recently cut her hair shorter. She wore jeans now, more than dresses. Michael remembered something his bereavement counsellor once said—about how after a death men tend to change their place, women their appearance.

  “And now you’ve got that distance?” Michael asked.

  “I want to share them,” Samantha said proudly, with the assertiveness of a child. “I thought, fuck it, even if they aren’t any good, I want them to be out there. I want them to be looked at, otherwise there’s no point, is there? They’d only be half cooked.”

  “Not necessarily,” Michael said, picking up another print. It was of the same pond as before, at the same time of day. Only this time it was winter, the trees bare above the water. A low mist clung to the ground.

  He offered her more wine. She declined, putting a hand over her glass, so he filled his own instead. “Is a story half cooked,” he asked her, “if it’s only been written but not read?”

  “Absolutely!”

  He laughed, thinking she was joking, but then saw that she wasn’t.

  “Without the reader, it’s just thoughts on a page,” she said. “Imagination in ink. A printed tautology.”

  “Tautology? How?”

  “Well, a repetition then. Of what was in the writer’s mind when they wrote it. But when it’s read…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, then the words gather new imagery, don’t they? The meaning gathers new association. It’s like a chemical reaction. It all depends on how they react with the reader, their life, their mind.”

  “Let me guess,” Michael said, narrowing his eyes in mock estimation. “Susan?”

  Samantha laughed. “Yes, okay, but with some of me thrown in, too.”

  Susan was a member of Samantha’s book club. When the group had learnt that Samantha knew Michael, they’d asked her to invite him to speak to them about BrotherHoods. The session had been far from an easy ride, but Susan, an ex–English professor, had been particularly dissective of his writing, and of what she’d called “creative nonfiction” as a whole.

  “But she’s right, isn’t she?” Samantha said. “Surely you must have seen it with BrotherHoods? How it becomes other books in other people?”

  “Yes, but as a book in itself, it was done,” Michael replied. “Or at least done to the best of my ability. I’d probably change it now—actually, I’d certainly change it now, but at the time I finished it, it was finished. It wasn’t the book itself that was half cooked,” Michael said, warming to his theme. “So much as the experience.”

  Samantha shook her head. “Now you’re just getting into semantics.”

  “No, no, I’m not.” Michael put down his glass and picked up the top photograph, the pond beneath bare branches, the mist like cannon smoke. “All I’m saying is that these are far from half cooked. They’re quite the opposite. They’re bloody good, and they’d be that good, that true, whether people saw them or not.”

  He handed the print to Samantha. “The communication was made when you took this, when you printed it. From then on it exists in the world, seen or not.”

  He took another drink of his wine, looking for the right phrase.

  “Its weight has been added,” he said eventually.

  “Its weight?” Samantha looked doubtful, but she could tell Michael was being serious.

  “Yes.” He picked up another print, the same pond, at the same time of day again, a swan and her cygnets drifting across the foreground. “Its telling has happened. That’s how I see it, anyway. The vision, your intention, your motivation, whatever you want to call it, is no longer purely internal. So regardless if I or anyone else looks at it, its story has still been told. Its purpose served.”

  ―

  Samantha started taking photos of the pond shortly after Josh moved out. It had begun as a way to get to know the new camera she’d bought for her MA. She still wasn’t sleeping, so early one morning, a few hours after dawn, she’d set up a tripod next to the fence at the bottom of the garden. She stayed there for an hour, experimenting with exposures and timings as the Heath altered under the rising light. The next day she’d found herself awake at the same time. On coming into the kitchen, she’d noticed how different the Heath looked from the day before.
It had rained overnight. The light, it seemed, had been washed, cleaned. The water of the pond, dark the previous morning, was metallic, polished. She took her camera to the fence again and, setting the tripod legs in the holes it had made the day before, began taking photos.

  On the third morning, despite having fallen asleep in the small hours, she’d woken at the same time once more. She knew why. Those quiet, focused minutes. The slow reveal of the day, its light and weight, its texture and scent. Her body was expecting it, and her mind was asking for it. The exact same scene she’d stood before the previous mornings, but changed, altered. Never the same. Capturing it stirred in her a sense both of movement and of continuity. Of seeing afresh. How many times had she looked out her back door and seen that view? But never, not one of those times, as she’d seen it on those mornings, a unique recipe of light, weather, and season, framed in the lens of her camera.