I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers Read Free Book Online Page B

Bryn fully furnished. Everything within it was resonant with her. Over the last week Caroline’s family had flown over and passed through its rooms, taking certain personal items and anything else they wanted. Michael, too, had kept a few of the smaller mementos: photographs, a box of ticket stubs and cards, a Dictaphone recording of the answer-phone message she’d left him that night in Hammersmith. But everything else he’d let go. The buyers of the cottage took the furniture. He gave her clothes, which he kept seeing filled with her body, to a local charity shop. He wanted to remember Caroline, but under his own volition, not ambushed by the objects around him.
    He’d arrived late in South Hill Drive, the car’s engine sounding too loud, too clumsy between the curving banks of town houses, their windows lit with autumn domesticity. There was no space outside Peter’s flat, so Michael double-parked to unload his belongings onto the pavement. He wondered for a moment whether he should leave them unguarded as he parked the car farther up the street. But a glance along its tree-lined camber reassured him. The gentle incline was unpeopled and split into a loop that went nowhere but back on itself. In the aerial view Michael had seen online the shape of the street resembled an old-fashioned tennis racket strung with trees, an accidental growth ballooning from London’s mosaic into the green spaces of the Heath.

    Michael was returning to collect the last of his belongings when he first saw Josh. He was walking up the street, a trench coat slung over his shoulder, a briefcase in the other hand. He wore a dark suit and a loosened blue tie. Michael could tell he was drunk. There was a looseness to his body too, a detachment about his gaze.
    Michael bent to pick up a couple of boxes. As he arranged them on top of each other he became aware of Josh nearing, then coming to a stop. He looked up. Josh was rooting for a set of keys in the pockets of his coat. As he pulled them out he returned Michael’s look, then glanced up at the block of flats beside them.
    “Seems we’re neighbours,” he said, raising his eyebrows. His accent was American, tempered by Europe.
    Michael stood, hitching the boxes in his arms. “Almost,” he said.
    Josh looked at him blankly, as if seeing him for the first time. He wasn’t as tall as Michael, but he was broader. His dark hair was stitched with grey, a fringe falling in a tight crest above a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.
    “Well,” Michael said. “Good night.”
    He went to move towards the flat.
    “Lemme give you a hand.” The thought seemed to come to Josh suddenly, stirring him with its arrival.
    “No, really, it’s—”
    But Josh had already pocketed his keys and was swinging Michael’s fencing bag over his shoulder. Hooking his briefcase over his wrist, he bent to the last box on the pavement.
    “Guitar?” he asked, shifting the bag on his back as he stood.
    “No,” Michael replied, leading the way into the flat. “Fencing kit.”

    “Fencing?” Josh said from behind Michael as he pressed the timer switch for the hallway light with his elbow. “Never tried it myself.”
    Something in Josh’s voice suggested he never wanted to, either.
    “Gave mine away,” he continued, as they took the first flight of stairs. “Guitar. Gave it away. Can’t remember why now.”
    As they climbed the stairs up to Peter’s flat Josh carried on talking, telling Michael how much he’d like the street, how the other neighbours were “okay, you know, no trouble,” and how much his two girls loved the Heath.
    “Like having London’s biggest garden on your doorstep. I mean, the Queen, she’s got nothing on this, right?”
    At the turn of the third floor Josh’s conversation gave way to a laboured breathing. Michael was grateful. As they’d ascended he’d felt himself growing tense in anticipation of the question he didn’t want to answer. But it never came, and Josh fell silent with