Authors: Owen Sheers
Michael could tell they’d argued. Josh only ever talked about Samantha at this length when they had. Usually he kept his conversation to work politics, current affairs. Sometimes football, although he knew Michael didn’t support a team. But occasionally he’d use their sessions on the Heath to talk about Sam, the girls. Never anything too revealing, but still more, from what Michael could tell, than he perhaps shared with his work colleagues or other male friends.
As the cramp in Michael’s calf eased, they’d broken into a jog along the façade of Kenwood House. Almost immediately Josh’s talk gave way to his now-familiar heavy breathing, his face flushed with the effort, the boyish lick of his fringe bouncing above his brow. They ran like that, in silence other than the sound of their clouding breaths, until the end of their route. Reaching the crest of Parliament Hill, as had become their habit, the two men sat on one of the benches and looked out over London, craned and grey, spread like a sieging army before them.
Michael leant forward, his elbows on his knees. Josh rested against the bench beside him, his legs stretched and his arms spread across its back, as if to invite as much air as possible into his lungs. Their calves and shins were spattered with mud, their shoulders steaming. Michael could feel the sweat pricking at his temples. Removing his gloves, he took the letter from his pocket, unfolded it from its envelope, and handed it to Josh.
“What do you make of this?”
“What is it?” Josh said, as he took it. Michael just nodded at the letter, as if to say Read it and see for yourself.
While Josh read, Michael looked out over the city, keeping his eyes on its skyline as Josh let out a whispered “Fuck.” A plane coming in to land at Heathrow laboured across the sky, its undercarriage a dirty white against the darkening clouds. Somewhere, Michael found himself thinking as he’d watched its descent above the towers and terraces, at this same instant, Daniel McCullen was lying asleep in his bed. Perhaps beside his wife. He’d mentioned in the letter he was married. It was, it seemed, part of his reasoning.
As a husband,
he had written,
I can only imagine I would want to know how my wife came to die.
He disagreed, he also said, with the secrecy of the Pentagon’s internal inquiry. With the limitations imposed upon him. He’d apologised, too, more than once. But not, Michael felt, so much for himself as for the situation. For the movements of the world that had led them all to this. He wrote like a victim. As if Caroline’s death was something that had happened to him, rather than something he’d caused.
“Jesus, Mike,” Josh said, returning the letter. “Have you shown this to anyone else?”
“No,” Michael said, slipping it back in the envelope. “It came this morning. Just before I met you.” He looked down at the original postmark. “From San Francisco.”
Josh looked at him, as if in admiration. “That is insane,” he said, shaking his head. “Insane.” He laid a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “I am so sorry. What a shitty letter to get. What a shit!” Taking his hand away, he turned to the view. “The fucking gall!”
“Maybe,” Michael said.
“Maybe?” Josh looked back at him, his palms up in question. “What do you mean maybe? The guy—” He broke off, unable to finish the sentence. “You should inform the inquiry,” he said, with more authority.
“Why?”
“Why? Because he can’t do this.” He seemed genuinely upset. “It’s fucking manipulative. He doesn’t have the right. Because it’ll jeopardise the process. That’s why.”
Michael nodded. “Yeah. I guess I should.”
Josh looked back out at the city, at Saint Paul’s, the London Eye, the pyramid of Canary Wharf steaming in the east. “How can he do that?” he said, sighing heavily. “It’s all so fucking ridiculous. I mean, I know what Caroline was doing was important. But the war? Afghanistan? Iraq? It’s all a fucking distraction. Meanwhile, China is rubbing its hands, loving it. Doing what they fucking want. I’m tellin’ you, China, that’s where we should be focusing. Not a bunch of countries with a GDP the size of Birmingham.”
―
In any other circumstance Josh and Michael would not have been friends. Their patterns of conversation were divergent, their rhythms at counterpoint. Josh often talked in this way, laying down the law with certainty, as if he had a privileged insight into the matters of the world. When he spoke he rarely left room for a second voice or alternative view. Michael, through character and training, preferred to listen, to probe, parry, and deflect as a way to spiral to the nub of a discussion.
But the manner of their first meeting, together with Michael keeping a territory close to his flat—a square mile comprising the Heath, the streets of South End Green and Belsize Park—meant they had, almost by accident, become close. From early on Josh had adopted something of an older-brother attitude towards Michael. In the week following their party in November he and Samantha had invited him over again, to have dinner with Maddy and Tony. And he’d joined them again soon after that too, when they’d all dined at Tony and Maddy’s new house a few streets away.
At both these dinners Michael had felt like the younger sibling of the other two men, not so much through years, which he was, as through the lesser volume he appeared to displace in the world. His grief had made him light, and Josh had picked up on this. Whenever he laid a hand on Michael, as he often did—on his shoulder, his back, his arm—it was as if he were attempting to evoke solidity back into his being, to draw the focus of him to a physical level.
With Tony it was more subtle. As a publisher and reader he held Michael in high regard. But still, Michael’s lack of institution, his lone existence in the world, meant Tony too had detected a lightness in Michael he’d also felt a need to bolster. Not with fraternal ease, like Josh, but with attention to his topics of conversation when in his presence, with asking, too often, for his opinion, as a teacher might of a shy but promising pupil.
Tony’s interest in Michael never outlasted their shared company. As far as Michael knew Tony liked him, was pleased he’d met him, but invested little more in his recovery than the usual good wishes of one human to another. With Josh, however, as his neighbour, Michael had become more of a long-term project. In the last month alone Josh had twice invited a female work colleague to dinner on the same night they’d asked Michael round. Although he’d been under strict instructions from Samantha not to press the point, his intentions were clear enough. After the second time this happened, Michael had called him on it at the end of the night. They’d been clearing the table in the kitchen, Michael bringing the bowls and dishes to Josh at the dishwasher.
“Are you trying to set me up?” he asked him, as he put a stack of plates on the counter. Emily, another broker at Lehman’s, had ordered a cab and just left. Samantha was upstairs, sorting through a basket of washing. Josh looked at Michael with mock surprise, followed quickly by a juvenile grin. “A man’s gotta eat, Mike” he’d said, shrugging. “That’s all I’ll say. A man’s gotta eat.”
“Got to eat?” Michael said.
“Hey, c’mon,” Josh countered. “Emily is great, isn’t she? She’s funny, clever. Great tits,” he said, with a connoisseur’s nod. As usual by this time of the evening, Josh was drunk.
“She’s very attractive,” Michael said. “And she seems lovely. But—”
“I know,” Josh cut across him, the smile slipping from his face. “I know,” he repeated, bending to drop knives and forks into the plastic grid. He straightened up and turned to lean against the counter. “But you’ve got to start living at some point,” he said, as if suggesting the inevitable. “At some time you gotta get back on the horse.”
“I
am
living!” Michael said. He spread his arms in illustration of the room, the dining table, them. And it was true. He wasn’t ready for an Emily yet. It was still less than a year since Caroline had died. But after the last two months in London, he was, slowly, beginning to feel as if he was living again. Caroline’s death had numbed him, like an arm deadened in sleep. But now the blood was returning to his emotional capillaries, as if he was waking. He’d recently rediscovered an enthusiasm for
The Man Who Broke the Mirror,
for carving a shape to his years with Oliver and threading his theories into the weft of the story. The fencing lessons, meanwhile, although reawakening his sciatica, had also reinvigorated him physically. When he showered each morning now he could taste, just, the hint of a future that didn’t have to be an echo of his past.
Josh took Michael at his word and hadn’t attempted any more introductions since. But their conversation at the end of that night had marked the genesis of another shade to their friendship. A conspiratorial tinge in relation to women, which, on two separate occasions since, had been strengthened further. The first of these had been planned by Josh. The second was not.
Josh’s boss had tasked him with entertaining a delegation of Mexican hedge-fund owners and investors over in London from Guadalajara for the week. They were, he told Michael, cultured men who’d relish the opportunity of having dinner with a successful author. Would he do him a favour and join them for the evening? It would be at the bank’s expense.
A few evenings later, over dinner at a restaurant in Mayfair, Michael found Josh’s estimation of his clients to be accurate. Many of them, as well as being businessmen and investors, were also professors at the university, some of the leading Mexican thinkers in their fields, fluent not just in English and Spanish, but also French, German, and, in the case of one engineer, Chinese.
It was the first time Michael had been out in the centre of London since he’d returned to the city. As they’d walked from the restaurant to a private club, along Curzon Street and up into Queen Street, the capital seemed impossibly grand to him, its classical architecture underlit, a hinterland of solid centuries fortifying the narrow streets north of Green Park. The Mexicans seemed at home in their surroundings, and even more so at the club. They were well acquainted with power, familiar with its global language. As Michael drank with them, watching them flirt with the waitresses, slipping business cards from their breast pockets, they reminded him more of gangsters than professors. As if a faculty had been passed through the prism of Grand Theft Auto, emerging with a hint of danger to their tailoring, a threatening air to their polish.
After the club Michael wanted to go home. He’d drunk more than he had for years. But Josh, who seemed to have become more himself as the night edged towards morning, insisted. The director of the delegation, a venture capitalist and professor of sociology called Ramón, had loved talking to Michael about
BrotherHoods.
“You’re a hit!” Josh told him, laying an arm around his neck and clasping his shoulder. “He wants you to give a lecture over there and everything. C’mon, you’re my guest tonight. A couple of hours more, then we’ll grab a cab together. I promise.”
The next venue, to which they were driven in one of the Mexicans’ chauffeured cars, was a lap-dancing club entered through a plain door beneath an awning in a square south of Piccadilly. The same square, Michael realised, as they filed between the bouncers, that backed onto the London Library. This discovery, in a location he knew so well, deepened his sense of being a stranger in a city he thought he knew. As they’d passed down a narrow corridor and on into a low-lit lounge, the host had greeted Josh with a hug. Josh seemed to grow again in the man’s embrace. Handing him his Lehman’s account card, he ushered his guests through, pointing them towards a set of booths at the far end of the club.
The rest of the night was hazy for Michael, with just certain details pushing through to clarity the following day. The club, although apparently plush, had the air of a cross-channel ferry. Its low ceilings betrayed grey stains of damp about the air vents. The arms of the chairs were faded and frayed. From their booth the group had a clear view of the main stage, onto which a succession of women appeared, each heralded by the bars of a new song, to strip and perform on a polished steel pole. Michael couldn’t help staring at them. It had been almost a year since he’d last gone to bed with Caroline, since he’d last been close to a naked body. Not that the women onstage were naked as Caroline had been that night. Their bodies, corded with muscle and spray-tanned, were sheened under the stage lights. Caroline’s skin, despite her year-round tan, had always been matt. Her breasts, too, had been natural, small, but with the shape of a younger woman’s. The breasts of the women onstage were often hardened by implants, strangely immobile across their straining chests as they held themselves in slow, descending positions on the pole. Whenever they bent over, or spread their legs, the pink of their labias blinked suddenly honest amid the show, biology briefly disturbing the fantasy of their dance.
In comparison to Michael, the others in the booth appeared disinterested in the women onstage, familiarity defusing the potency of their display. The dynamics of the group, it seemed, were more powerful than any performance beyond it. But then the women had begun to join them, and everything had changed. Some had just been on the stage, from where they’d sensed the weight of the group’s wealth in the room. The Mexicans ordered bottles of champagne as the women introduced themselves with false names and foreign accents—Croatian, Romanian, Nigerian. As they did, the group’s focus quickly fragmented. Each man, within the radius of a woman’s attention, became individual again. Within minutes the group was breaking up, the Mexicans being led away, sometimes by one woman, sometimes by two, through a velvet curtain and into the private rooms beyond.
When they’d returned, Josh and his colleagues began pairing off with the women too. As Josh took the extended hand of Bianca, a tall Serbian brunette wearing a parody of a green evening dress, he’d called across the table to Michael.
“Hey, Mike! You wanna dance?”
Michael raised a hand and shook his head to show he was fine. Crystal, a petite blonde sitting beside him, leant in to whisper to him, a Russian childhood shadowing her voice. “No, come on,” she’d said. “You must have fun, too. Please.” As she spoke she’d tapped the stem of her glass with her flat-cut nails, chequer-painted.