I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers Page B

was working on now, Michael told him about Oliver Blackwood. The older blazer-wearing guest said he’d known Oliver at university. “He was,” he said, “an annoying little shit, even then.”
    Perhaps it was the drink, or just the relief of having been asked the question he’d feared for so long, but as the talk opened up—to Oliver, neuroscience, other books and writers—Michael, held in a cat’s cradle of voices, and with an end-of-day light washing the room, felt something give within him. It was a subtle slippage, no more than a flake dislodging from a cliff. But it was movement nevertheless, a falling away. He was still far from at ease in these surroundings. In New York, at this type of gathering, it had always felt as if the occasion’s energy was fuelled by questions. The people around him had been on quests, searching. The effervescence of their enquiries had always settled him, made him less anxious about his own unanswered horizons. At the Nelsons’ that day, however, the party appeared to comprise those who’d found their answers. Whatever they’d set out to discover was now theirs. Their search was over, and as such, despite their praise for him, Michael, as he had in Maddy’s gaze, felt juvenile in their presence.

    He continued to field their questions, answering Tony, Josh, Janera as fully as he could. He hadn’t talked this much for months. As he did, his imaginings of what Caroline would have said, too, had she been there, shadowed his words. And then what she’d have said later too, as they walked home together, or got into bed, what she’d have said about the people they’d met. How she’d have described them, judged them, done impressions of them: Maddy’s imperial stance, Josh’s eager hosting.
    Whenever Michael thought of Caroline like this, projecting their past into an impossible present, although he had trouble seeing her he could always hear her voice clearly. Even now, beneath the crowded talk in the Nelsons’ front room, he could hear her, like a subterranean stream running under a city. Her laugh. Her migrating swallow of an accent, her low whisper in his ear, telling him it was time to go.
―
    The morning she’d left for Pakistan, Michael hadn’t seen her leave, only heard her. The taxi had come at four in the morning. He’d wanted to be up with her, to kiss her good-bye at the door. But Caroline had got ready without waking him, so the first he’d known of her going was a kiss on his forehead, followed by her hushed voice, telling him simply, “See you in a couple of weeks, love.” And then she was gone.

    The front door of Coed y Bryn closing, the taxi turning on the gravel drive. Then, as Michael turned too, under the duvet, the cab’s engine thick in the dawn, before thinning away between the hedges. That is how she’d left him. With words and sounds. So maybe that was why, as he half listened to Tony telling another anecdote, Michael could still hear her voice so clearly. Because it was the last he’d known of her, and so was the last he held of her.
    But although her voice was with Michael in that room, Caroline herself was not. For the first time since her death, as he stood there in the middle of the party, he’d felt alone. Not because he was without her, but just simply alone. As a single man might be, or an only child. Alone and surviving. And this, Michael realised, as he got ready for bed later that night, is what he’d felt give. A loosening in his memory of her, in his dependency. Which was why, as he’d stood in their front room, talking with their friends, he’d felt such a flood of gratitude towards the Nelsons. Towards Lucy and her dolls, towards Rachel and her drawings, and towards their parents, Josh and Samantha, for inviting him into their home.

CHAPTER SIX
    MICHAEL APPROACHED A desk in the corner of the front room. A pile of art books was topped with a paperweight, a blue butterfly suspended in its glass. A green-shaded library lamp