by Owen Sheers
―
Moving away from the drinks table where he’d been serving, Michael began edging through the crowd towards Josh. He’d barely seen him since the night they’d spoken over the hedge. After moving out, Josh had remained on the periphery of Samantha and Rachel’s lives. He saw his daughter regularly, and he kept in touch with Samantha. But it was one of Michael’s most persistent regrets that Josh had chosen to keep him at a greater distance. Twice now, Michael had seen him on the Heath as he’d walked back from his fencing lesson. Too far away to call, but close enough to make each other out. Neither time had Josh made any attempt to approach him. And somehow Michael had known Josh hadn’t wanted him to go towards him, either. So he’d walked on instead, along his usual route, aware of Josh’s eyes following him.
Samantha, when Michael asked her, couldn’t say why Josh had retreated from him. “Who knows?” she’d said, when he pressed her on it one night. “It’s his way, I guess, of coping.” She was stacking plates into a cupboard, reaching on tiptoe to complete the pile. “But it isn’t just you, you know? He’s become more solitary in general. He hardly ever sees anyone.” She turned round to rest against the counter. “I don’t know,” she said and sighed. “He’ll come round. He just needs time, I suppose.” She picked up another stack of plates. “We all do.”
If Samantha had surprised Michael with the keeping of her promises, with her growth after Lucy’s death, then she, in turn, had been wrong-footed by Josh’s reaction to losing his job. At first, he’d done nothing; rarely leaving his flat as if he’d given himself completely to inertia. The only times Samantha had seen him was when he’d come to take Rachel for the day. Michael would occasionally glimpse him coming up the street for these appointments, unshaven, wearing tracksuit bottoms or creased jeans, like the forgotten father of the man Michael had first met when he’d moved in. Samantha became worried about his state of mind. She began to wonder if she should let Rachel go with him alone.
But then, within a few weeks, he’d changed. He’d asked to meet Samantha for a coffee. When they did, he’d told her he’d decided not to reenter banking for a while, but to take a break and do something different. “The whole thing’s going downhill fast, anyway,” he’d said. “And it’s only going to carry on, too, before it ever picks up. There’s enough money, for a while, at least. So don’t worry, nothing will change on that front. But, yeah, I thought I’d stay out of it for a bit. Get some space.” He’d looked down at his cup, then spread his hands, palms up. “I just wanted you to know,” he’d said, as if admitting a new relationship.
Before they left the café, he’d asked Samantha not to file for a divorce. The subject had crossed her mind, but only in the abstract. It was all too soon. She was still processing so much of what had happened. She was still grieving. “Of course not, Josh,” she’d said. “What makes you think I would?”
“I don’t know. Moving out. Everything that’s…”
She’d taken his hand. “You know what we said. Let’s give it time. All of it.”
He’d looked her in the eye, and she’d seen he was scared. Either of what she might do or of what he might say. “Just get yourself together,” she’d said, squeezing his fingers. “For Rachel, at least.”
Josh had seen the advert in the local newsagents, between the rooms for rent and the mother and baby yoga sessions. Three mornings a week, volunteering with a National Trust gardener at two of their properties in Hampstead: Number Two Willow Road, a 1930s modernist home, and Fenton House, a seventeenth-century merchant’s house crowning the hill above Hampstead Village.
For a couple of months, as autumn gave way to winter, those three mornings came to define Josh’s weeks. Clearing bamboo, weeds, and rubble at Willow Road, or pruning the apple trees, their branches furred with frost, at Fenton House. He was unskilled but took to the work well. His mind, he realised, had been looking for this: hours outdoors in which it could wander beyond the repetition of his jobs. Nathan, the National Trust gardener, was a quiet man and was content, once he knew Josh could be trusted, to set him going, then leave him alone. The other volunteers tended to come and go frequently. They were actors between jobs, gap-year students, or just people fulfilling the hours demanded by another organisation—the Duke of Edinburgh Award, community service. Once these were completed, Nathan never saw them again. But Josh proved to be constant, a regular. Often, on finishing a shift he’d stay on, especially in Fenton House, sitting on one of the benches in the walled garden, breathing in the iron scent of freshly turned soil, or listening to the birdsong. Which was why, when Josh applied for a vacancy with one of the conservation teams on the Heath, Nathan had supported him so enthusiastically. Because in all his years of gardening, never before had he met a man who so clearly needed to feel the earth again, in whom the exertion of physical work had so plainly brought peace, and with it, pleasure.
“I know, ironic, isn’t it?” Samantha had said when she’d told Michael. They’d been in her garden, weeding and dividing clumps of perennials. “He’s working for the City again. It’s like he can’t bloody escape them.”
“The City?” Michael said. “How do you mean?”
“Well, they own it, don’t they?” Samantha cleared a strand of hair from her face and sat back on her heels. “The Heath,” she’d said, wiping her forehead with the top of her wrist. “Or at least the Corporation of London does, which in my book is pretty much the same thing.” She threw a handful of weeds onto the pile between them. “So, yeah,” she’d said, returning to her work. “He’s on the payroll again.”
For a moment neither of them had spoken. There was just the tearing sound of the weeds being uprooted, the barking of dogs from the Heath.
“But it’s working for him,” Samantha had said after a while. Michael’s mind had drifted and at first he didn’t know what she was talking about. He’d looked over at her, but she was focused on her work, pulling at the weeds with short, steady tugs. “I even think it makes him happy,” she said, throwing another clump onto the pile.
―
As Michael parted the bodies in the gallery before him, gently touching backs and shoulders as he pressed forward, Josh, looking up from his conversation, saw him approaching. Michael managed to free a hand and raise it, nodding over the expansive hair of a blonde woman between them. Josh didn’t acknowledge the greeting, but just looked back at him, a disturbance in his eyes. His expression stopped Michael in the middle of the crowd. Not because it had been so unexpected, but because it was a look of such long-held animosity, not a sudden aversion. A look of knowledge, not question.
Michael was about to continue towards him when a whine of feedback punctuated Emmanuel’s stepping up to a microphone to ask the crowd for quiet. The heads around Michael all turned in the direction of his amplified voice. As Michael did the same, he glanced over at Josh again. He, too, was looking towards the microphone now. He looked calm, smiling at Emmanuel’s opening jokes. So perhaps Michael had been wrong. Perhaps his guilt was making him see things and fear things that weren’t to be seen or to be feared. He took a drink from his glass and, as Samantha stepped up to speak, tried to focus on what she had to say.
The speeches were short. Samantha thanked her course tutors, Sebastian, the owner of the gallery. And she thanked Michael, too, for his help, and Rachel as well, for hers, raising her glass to each of them in the crowd. She spoke briefly about how the photos on these walls had been found as the result of a loss. But she said nothing else about Lucy or the specifics of her own journey towards those early minutes of the day, waiting to discover what its light would deliver. When she finished speaking and backed away from the microphone there was applause, a few whoops from her fellow students, and then Emmanuel stepped up again to encourage everyone to drink and, if they could, buy one of Samantha’s prints.
Over a final smattering of applause, the crowd began to move again, towards the drinks or to view the work. Michael looked for Josh where he’d last seen him. But he wa
sn’t there. He glanced over the rest of the room, then pushed his way through to the second space. Josh was nowhere to be seen in there, either. Michael was aware of his heart racing. He realised he had to talk to him. He had to know why he’d been keeping his distance. Why he’d looked at him that way across the gallery.
Squeezing himself back through the crowd, he made his way outside into the cool of the night. There were three smokers on the pavement, but none of them was Josh. He looked up the lamp-lit street, a spring mist gathering about the rooftops. It was empty. Josh had gone.
Michael thought about walking up Flask Walk, trying to catch up with him. But it was no good. He could just have easily turned the other way and could already be walking across the Heath, or along any one of the surrounding streets.
Michael turned back to the windows of the gallery, fogged by the crowded bodies inside. Someone wiped a sleeve across a pane, swiping an arc of clear glass. Michael peered through it, just in case he’d missed him in there. But there was only the drinking and talking crowd, and at its centre Samantha, flushed with her success, her images of the pond hung around her, its stilled waters a silent witness to everything Michael had done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“I SOLD SIX! Can you believe it? Six!”
The private view had rolled on to a nearby pub, and then again for a nightcap at Sebastian’s house. Now Michael and Samantha were back in her kitchen in South Hill Drive. Samantha was drunk. But she was also elated. The exhibition had opened well. There had been praise, attention. She looked years younger.
“Sebastian said that hardly ever happens,” she said, pouring another shot of whisky into her glass. “Not on the first night.”
“It’s great,” Michael said. “But I’m not surprised. Of course people want them. They’re…” He picked up one of the unselected prints, still on the dining table. “Well, they’re calming, aren’t they?” he said. “And they reveal more with each looking.”
“Oh, shut up!” Samantha said, dropping into one of the armchairs in the conservatory. “You’re always so bloody nice to me. Last drop?” She held the whisky bottle towards him.
“You’re right,” Michael said, sitting down opposite and holding out his glass. “They’re pretty ordinary, really, and most people there couldn’t tell the difference between a decent image and crap, anyway.”
“Steady,” Samantha said, mocking a hurt expression as she poured out the last of the whisky. “Don’t go too far.”
Michael raised his glass. “Congratulations,” he said. “You deserve it.”
They both drank, Samantha releasing a deep breath on swallowing. Tipping her head back against the chair, she closed her eyes.
Michael wanted to ask her about Josh. Had she spoken with him? What had he said? Why had he left? But now wasn’t the time. She was infused with her present and her future. She didn’t want to talk of the past. Not now, when this was all so fragile, so passing.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, her eyes still closed. Her speech was slow, liquid. “This house. It’s way too big for just Rachel and me. We rattle around in here. We don’t even ever go up to the top floor.” She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling for a moment, then brought her head forward to look at him. Her expression was serious, but then a slow smile spread across her lips, followed by a girlish shake of her head. She looked down, away from him.
“I don’t know, you might not want to,” she said. “But it’s crazy. I mean, you renting that place next door and us with all this space. I just wanted you to know.” She got up, suddenly more businesslike, nervous. “If you wanted to,” she said, taking their glasses over to the sink, “you could rent here instead.” She turned and leant against the counter, looking back at him. “The top floor. There’s a study, a bedroom.”
Michael stood and went over to her. “Thank you,” he said, taking her by both shoulders. She looked vulnerable, exposed. “That’s such a kind offer. But…”
She broke away from him, turning to the sink and running a tap to wash the glasses. “Christ, Michael,” she said, sounding cross. “I didn’t mean like that. I just thought it would make sense, that’s all.”
“I know,” he said. “And I mean it. It is a kind offer. And good to know, too. Really, thank you.”
“Well, it’s there if you want it. That’s all.” As she took off her watch, Samantha looked at its face. “Jesus,” she said. “Is that the time?”
Michael looked at his own. It was nearly two o’clock. “Sign of a good night, I guess,” he said.
Samantha turned from the sink to face him again. She was frowning, as if trying to work out how they’d got here, to this late hour, this position. Michael could see she was coming down from the night’s excitement. A brief cloud of longing passed through her expression. For what? he wondered. For before all this? For her previous life, however imperfect, before she’d had to create this one in the wake of her daughter’s death?
“I should get to bed,” she said eventually, crossing the kitchen to turn off the lamps in the conservatory. “Rachel’s got a hockey match tomorrow. Christ, no, today. All the way over in bloody Ealing.”
“Well,” Michael said, picking his jacket off the back of a chair. “Congratulations again. You did really well tonight.”
“Thanks,” Samantha said, looking out at the darkness beyond the glass. When she turned back to him, her expression had softened. “And for all your help, too,” she said, smiling. “Really. Thank you, Michael.”
―
As Michael got undressed for bed that night, he knew he had to tell Samantha. At some point, she would have to know. It couldn’t be avoided. For her as well as for him. Walking down her hallway to the front door, after her offer, passing Lucy’s portrait of him, it had almost crushed Michael completely. As if he’d been walking, with every step, into a deeper and deeper depth. Whatever the damage it would do, to the opening of her new life, to his, to Rachel, he had to tell Samantha the truth. If he didn’t, his knowledge of those minutes he’d spent in her house before Lucy died would continue to suck the goodness from every second they spent together.
But then, once she knew, there would be no more seconds together. This he also had to acknowledge. Another plank of Samantha’s life would have been swept from under her. Once the true minutes of that Saturday afternoon were exposed, she’d never want to see him again. He would have perverted the course of justice. She would tell the police. He would have to leave. But still, as he got into bed, the lamplight from the Heath thrown faint against the walls of his bedroom, Michael knew it was only a matter of time. He couldn’t keep those minutes to himself much longer. He had to cut them out, like a tumour, and the only way to do that was in their telling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE VIDEOCASSETTE WAS on a high shelf in the groundsman’s office, wedged with a pile of others between a stack of Top Gear magazines and a tool box filled with screws, nuts, and bolts. A manual for a power drill was resting on top of it. With all the other boxes and tools in the room it was unlikely Josh would have found it so easily, had it not been for a date on its spine written in black marker. 07/06/08. Seeing those numbers, in that order, was like hearing his name rise clear above the hum of a bar for Josh, or seeing your child’s face in a crowded station. Even among the clutter of that small office, it was a date that sang out to him. A date he’d never forget, branded as it was within him as the date of Lucy’s death. The date on which, for all of them, everything had changed.
Josh had been working with the Heath conservation and maintenance team since the start of the year. There were usually just three of them, sometimes more on the bigger jobs, coasting their pickup along the Heath’s paths, its hazard lights blinking and its wire cage filled with branches, off-cuts and sacks of leaves. When he could, Josh started as early as possible, and it was often he who’d unlock their storage shed, or who could be seen, an hour before the shift, drinking a coffee on one of the benches on Parliament Hill. The
work had opened him up. He’d come to learn the touch of different winds and breezes, to see oncoming rain in a texture of light. Standing from his bench to start his day, Josh would glance over at the distant city towers as he dropped his empty coffee cup into a bin and feel like he’d escaped. As if he were a survivor who’d been thrown a lifeline on which he was only just now gaining a firmer grip.
During his working week on the Heath, Josh was able to observe his family from afar. And then again at closer quarters when he saw them on the weekends. He’d become more comfortable with the silences he shared with Rachel, and calmer, too, about the woman he was witnessing Samantha become. But hanging over it all was still the question of Michael. The question of who he was and of what he wanted; of the soil on the landing and of where he’d been during those few minutes on the Seventh of June 2008.
More than once Josh had considered telling Samantha the truth, confessing to her that he hadn’t been in the house when Lucy fell. But if he ever hoped to get her and his daughter back, then he knew this was impossible. And, he told himself, that person had been another Josh, anyway, another man, and he couldn’t let him ruin the chances of who he was now, of who he wanted to become.
But Josh couldn’t let Michael ruin his chances either. As long as he was close to Samantha and Rachel, as long as he was there, living next to them, Josh knew there’d never be space to make them his again, and him theirs. Not while there was still so much he didn’t know about Michael and what had happened that day. He’d told Slater he’d been at his fencing lesson. That’s what she’d told Josh when she’d talked him through all his neighbours’ statements. At the time he’d listened with only his own self-interest in mind. Had any of them seen him leave the house? Had any of them seen him return? But none, according to Slater, had. So Josh just felt relief when Michael’s statement had been added to those of the others on the street.