I Saw a Man (12 page)

When the girl answered, her voice was quiet. “Yes,” she said. Then, her composure breaking, “I’m so sorry.”

But Samantha had already hung up. Three hours later a Lincoln Town Car was taking her to the airport, her bags in its trunk and her
Mirage
print with its distant, lost skyline, angled between her legs.

―

“I got that bit right, anyway,” Samantha said.

“What do you mean?” Michael asked her. “Right?”

“The leaving. I did it like in a film. Cut up some of his suits, soil on the carpets.” She said this without emotion, looking away. There was no suggestion of anger in her telling. She took another sip of her Baileys. It was another woman’s story now. From another life.

“And then what did you do?” Michael asked her.

She turned back to him, as if he’d disturbed her. “Oh,” she said. “Came back here. To London. Had to earn some cash, so started temping.”

“And the photography?”

Josh appeared at the door. He looked irritated. “Honey?” He held a hand towards Michael. “Sorry, Mike,” he said, before turning to Samantha again. “Lucy wants you.”

Samantha raised her eyebrows, as if to say This—this is what happened.

She put her glass on a side table and rose from the sofa. “Okay,” she said. “Tell her I’m coming.”

“I should be going,” Michael said, also getting up from the sofa.

Josh leant into the hallway. “Mummy’s coming, honey!” he shouted up the stairs. “You know how it is,” he said to Michael as Samantha passed him, laying a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Have to get the kids down.”

Out in the hallway, as he was going to the door, Samantha turned and came back down the stairs. She waited until she was close to Michael before she spoke. “Josh told me about your wife,” she said, looking up at him. Without her heels, she wasn’t much taller than Caroline. She took his hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her eyes searching his, as if looking for the debris of Caroline’s death.

“Thank you,” Michael replied.

She gave him another smile, a tired acknowledgement, and Michael recognised again that she was far from sober. How much, he wondered, had she meant to tell him? Letting go of his hand, she returned to the stairway, Lucy’s cry drifting down from above, “Mummy!”

“Coming, sweetheart,” Samantha called up to her daughter. “Coming.”

―

As Michael had climbed his own stairs next door he couldn’t help seeing, in his mind’s eye, the Nelsons’ staircase tracing his ascent on the other side of the wall. Unlike theirs, his was communal, shared with the other occupants of his building. On each landing he passed two numbered red doors, each leading to the homes and lives of others. Through the bare wall beside him the Nelsons’ stairway, with its dark wood banister and red carpet runner, rose through their lives only. The girls’ bedrooms, Samantha and Josh’s bedroom, a playroom, the bathrooms, a spare room. On the top floor, Josh had mentioned, a study.

They were the same generation, Michael and the Nelsons. Samantha was a year younger, Josh a few years older. And yet to Michael their lives might as well have been decades apart. Everything he’d lost in the shipwreck of Caroline’s death had washed against the shore of Josh and Samantha’s thirties with ease. The house, the children. Their grounded life, solid and settled in comparison to his own, newly cut loose as he was, living in a set of rented rooms four stories up in the air.

Reaching his door, Michael turned the key in the lock and opened it. His flat was dark, the scent of its air still not his own. He went into the kitchen without turning on the lights. A TV in the flat below played a Saturday-night talent show. His head was fuzzy with the long afternoon of drinking. He ran himself a glass of water from the tap, drank it down, then ran himself another. Taking the glass to the long windows at the end of the room, he looked out over the Heath. The lamps lining the path had come on, the branches of the trees lit along their undersides. This was the view he’d looked out on every day since first moving in. The dark waters of the ponds, the suggestion of a swan drifting along one of their banks. The concrete path, the foot-worn tracks, the wind-stripped trees. In the distance, more of London’s streets, edging in on the Heath’s green. The same view, and yet that night, as Michael looked over it again, drinking his water, somehow different, shared as he now knew it was, with the Nelsons next door.

CHAPTER SEVEN

TURNING FROM THE
desk, Michael took another glance over the side tables in the front room. The screwdriver was nowhere to be seen. He thought about where else Josh might have put it. In his study? In a drawer in his bedside table? But he couldn’t very well go searching the house. It was one thing for him to be there, another again to start rifling through bedside tables. He would just have to do without his French grip. He could ask to borrow one of Istvan’s, but he already knew what he’d say.

“It’s a relationship.” That’s what Istvan had told him as they’d zipped up their jackets at the beginning of their second lesson, his Hungarian accent eliding into his English. “Do you use other men’s wives?” he’d said, pulling on his glove. “No. Or if you do, you get into trouble, yes? So don’t use another man’s blade. It will only end up hurting you, not your opponent.”

Coming back out into the hallway, Michael paused at the foot of the staircase. The stairs were wooden, painted white, with a red carpet running down their middle secured by silver rods in the crook of each step. In all the months he’d known the Nelsons, Michael had never been up these stairs. All the dinners, conversations, drinks they’d ever shared had been confined to the kitchen and the conservatory. Only when other people had also come round had they ever moved into the front room. The ground floor had been the extent of his jurisdiction within their home.

Another car passed down the street. In its wake, Michael heard a pushchair trundling down the pavement. Standing in the hallway, he listened as its wheels grew louder, kicking over the edge of a paving slab prised up by a sycamore’s root. As the pushchair faded down the street he saw that root clearly in his mind’s eye, its bark polished to worn leather by the thousands of shoes that had stepped on it. Farther off, the ice-cream van started up again, a tinkling rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Closer, somewhere in the front room behind him, a fly was needling at a window.

Michael looked back down the hallway towards the open back door. He knew the front door beside him was secure, the tongue of its deadbolt buried in the mortise. Despite the heat of the day, he’d seen no open windows in the house. Would Josh really have left without locking the back door, too? What if he had, and it wasn’t just a mistake after all? Michael’s mind began working on this conjecture, making any number of scenarios suddenly seem all too possible. The Heath had been full of people ever since the heat wave began. From across the other side of the ponds the houses on this part of the street presented an attractive and vulnerable prospect. Over the decades, successions of owners had set more and more windows in their back walls, as if the houses were thirsty and could never quite get enough of their view of the water, the Heath. Looked at from the other way, however, these windows made a gallery of the houses, especially in the long evenings of summer. It wouldn’t be difficult, from far away even, to track the movements inside one of them.

A little farther up the street there was a tangle of hidden paths between the ponds and the gardens. Michael and Samantha had taken the girls looking for late conkers along them just a couple of weeks after they’d all met. Now, in summer, the foliage over those paths was overgrown. Someone could easily sit there out of sight for hours, watching a house for when its owners left.

Michael felt a chill at the back of his neck. He thought about calling out again, but if there was an intruder in the house he didn’t want to alert them to his presence. They’d have already heard him shout for Samantha and Josh from the door, but how much sound had he made since? Would they think he’d left when he got no answer? Or were they still waiting for him to leave now? Waiting to hear the back door close, so they might make their own escape?

He looked up the stairway towards where it turned, curving behind the wall. His pulse was beating in his temples. It was only right he should check the other floors of the house. To make sure.

As quietly as he could, Michael walked towards the stairs. As he climbed the first few steps, the carpet runner softening his tread, he stared intently at the turn above him, half expecting someone to appear around its corner. Which is when it happened.

A stab of recognition, so immediate Michael couldn’t say from where it had emanated. Whether it had been a taste, a scent, a touch, or a sound. All he knew, with a painful clarity, was that it was her, Caroline. As if, just for an instant, he’d woken beside her again and she was alive once more, as fully alive as he was.

Michael froze, stilling himself. He was breathing rapidly, his heart thumping in his ribs. All thoughts of an intruder flooded from him. He looked up towards the turn in the stairs again, his mind trying to gain a purchase on what had just happened. The strength of the sensation had been such that now the only person he expected to come down the stairs was no longer a burglar, but Caroline, miraculously brought back from the dead. First her feet, then her shins, her thighs, her waist, her hands, her arms, her breasts, her neck, and, at last, her face, all revealed in the tantalising fractions of her descent.

But Caroline did not appear. She did not come to him. There was just the stairway’s red runner disappearing around the corner, the dark banister tracing the same curve, and the blank whiteness of the wall.

Michael listened. The ice-cream van in the other street had stopped its tune. The fly in the front room buzzed, paused, then buzzed again. But from beyond the turn in the stairs there was no sound. He shook his head, as if to wake himself. He did not believe in ghosts. In all the months since her death, never once had he thought Caroline was still with him. Her absence had been the most certain thing he’d ever known.

But she had been. Just now. He’d felt her, with absolute experience. And he still could. It was fading, the resonance cooling, but it was there, as if he were slowly walking backwards from a fire, retreating into a cold night. But he did not want to walk away. He didn’t want to grow cold. For all its painfulness, he wanted to feel that warmth again. Like touching a bruise or a half-healed wound, he wanted the pain of feeling her again.

He took another step up the stairs, but then stopped. He wasn’t thinking clearly. He was in his neighbour’s house. He was late. He should go. If there had been an intruder, then they must have heard him already. Had he made a sound? Just now, when he’d caught that sense of Caroline? He didn’t know. It had been so sudden, like being hit from behind. Whatever, it no longer mattered. He should go. He should leave by the back door through which he’d entered and close it behind him.

But he could not. He could not walk backwards, not while the warmth of what he’d felt was still on him. Not when it might be felt again. He had to know where it had come from, that sensation. When it had happened it felt as if he’d walked into it, as if its source lay above him. So he must go forward, not back. That was the only way. He had to carry on.

Placing a foot on the next step, Michael began ascending the stairs once more. As he did he listened to the house. It was silent, still. As if he were moving through a photograph. As if he were alone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ON THE DAY
Caroline was killed, Major Daniel McCullen woke early in his second-floor bedroom in Centennial Hills, a suburb in northwest Las Vegas. As he had every morning for weeks, he woke with his body damp, his heart racing. It had been the same dream again. Of the motorcyclist. Of the children playing soccer; that celebration after the goal. Except, as always, it had been worse than a dream, because it was a memory too, more real for him each time it returned.

He turned over. His wife, Cathy, was still asleep beside him, one bare shoulder showing from under the duvet. She was facing away from him and for a moment he just watched her breathe, trying to match the shallow rise and fall of his ribs to the steadier tempo of hers.

Daniel was still in love with his wife. From what he could tell, compared to a number of his colleagues in the air force, this was something of an achievement. For many, their marriages had been the first casualties of their service. Men who’d kept their heads under fire collapsing in the face of a relationship gone sour. Women flight officers volunteering for another tour, rather than slugging it out back home with a husband who no longer recognised them. But Daniel had always been determined. Cathy and the girls would come first. That’s what he’d promised Cathy when they’d married, and he’d tried to stay true to that promise ever since.

In the world in which they’d met it hadn’t seemed like such a difficult vow to keep. But back then, twelve years ago, everything had seemed possible. On the afternoon he’d first approached her, strolling across the lawn at his younger brother’s graduation, the years ahead of Daniel had looked like the skies into which he flew when he broke through a bank of cloud—open, rare. His. Just the year before, within months of his own graduation, Daniel had flown his first combat missions in Bosnia. Somewhere below him, in the wake of his jet’s roar, he’d taken his first lives. But—as their commanding officers had told them, and the newspapers, too—they’d saved many more. They’d done good with their might, and Daniel had returned a hero. So as he’d introduced himself to Cathy on the lawn that afternoon, as he’d made her laugh, and later, as he’d led her to the dance floor, he’d never suspected that one day the certainty of his life would become so fragile. That one day his sense that these years—even their wars—had been created for him might be turned on its head, until he’d feel like a plaything of the world, and not the other way round.