―
Sitting on that same bench, months later, Michael folded Daniel’s letter back into the pocket of his shorts. As he did, a couple of girls jogged past on the path behind them. They wore hats, fluorescent bibs, and Lycra leggings. Josh followed them with his eyes for a moment, then, as if taking his cue from their dropping below the hill, put his hands on his knees, took a deep breath, and stood up. “I’d better get home,” he said. “I gotta be in the office at ten.”
Together they’d walked down the path in the direction of the jogging girls. Neither of them spoke. From thousands of miles away, Daniel and his letter had silenced them both. Turning off the path, they’d passed through a copse of young ash and a huddle of blackberry bushes and onto a track that met the nearest street, its tarmac starting abruptly at the Heath’s edge.
As they’d walked on between the terraced houses, morning lives stirring within them, Josh had begun to talk again. Michael heard little of what he said. The letter in his pocket was rubbing at his mind as it had against his leg during their run. A white noise behind his temples. He felt isolated by its words. Underwater in a vast and darkening ocean. And yet at the same time he felt strangely connected by them, in the most intimate of ways, to the man who’d written them. As if they’d eaten from the same plate, or shared the same woman.
Turning into a narrow alleyway, they came out into South Hill Drive and walked down its incline, past the gardens and gates of the houses higher up the street. Michael tried to catch the drift of what Josh was saying. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, Josh was angry with the Lehman’s Manhattan office. Something about real estate, sub-prime and toxic derivatives, college boys making bonds bets that had left him “fucking exposed with my balls on the wire.”
At times, when Josh talked about his bank like this, Michael wanted to stop him, there and then in the street, and tell him about the missile that had killed Caroline. Its name, he wanted to tell him, was the AGM-114 Hellfire, a “fire and forget” weapon manufactured by Lockheed Martin. Since 1999, he’d explain, the Hellfire has been the Predator’s missile of choice. In 1997, two years before the first pair were fitted to a Predator’s wings, a limited partnership led by his employers, Lehman Brothers Holdings, bought a 50 percent stake in a new company called L-3 Communications. L-3, in turn, had been formed from ten high-tech Lockheed Martin units. L-3 became the manufacturers of the Predator’s sensor and optic equipment, the same equipment that had, in all likelihood, filmed Caroline from 20,000 feet as she’d sat in the back of that white minivan. And it was L-3 equipment, too, that would have fired a targeting laser at that minivan’s hood.
This is what Michael wanted to tell Josh. How with every drone flown, L-3’s profits had soared. How his wages and bonuses, along with the wages and bonuses of banks and companies across the world, were fuelled by deaths in faraway places, out of any conventional camera’s focus. How Caroline, in doing her job, had also been “fucking exposed,” sitting as she had been at the brilliant centre of that Hellfire’s 5,000-degree thermobaric blast. How, at that heat, flesh melts instantly, bone is vaporised, and the person you love goes, in less than a second, from being to not. How, despite its “fire and forget” name tag, once a Hellfire had been released there would always be someone who never would.
But Michael didn’t stop Josh, and he didn’t say anything. Daniel’s letter had pulled his world tight, drawn in its threads so that once again, like a man gifted with X-ray vision, he could see the full array of the causal web spiralling towards Caroline’s death. But he no longer wanted to see. He no longer wanted to be sensitive to how lives rubbed against lives, and greed rubbed against death, across the distances of oceans and continents. So instead of exposing Josh to his thoughts, he’d just carried on listening to him as they’d walked on down South Hill Drive, its sycamores budding above them. When they reached their homes, side by side in the street, Michael had turned towards his front door, pulling out his keys from a string round his neck.
“So what you going to do?” Josh said, as he’d approached his house next door.
Michael slid his key into the lock. “About the letter?”
“Yeah,” Josh said. “You should inform the inquiry.”
Michael looked down at his feet.
“You can’t let him get away with this.”
Michael looked back up at him, realising how in some ways his neighbour was a child in this world. “He’s already got away with it, Josh. They all have.”
Josh nodded in appeasement. “Sure, I know,” he said, giving Michael one of his older-brother looks. “But this is specific. You can do something about this.”
Michael said nothing. He shouldn’t have shown Josh the letter.
“So you’re going to, right?” Josh said.
“Maybe,” Michael replied. “I don’t know.”
“Well, just let me know if I can help.” Josh looked down at his watch. “Shit,” he said, opening his front door. “I’ve gotta run. See you later.”
“Yeah,” Michael replied, stepping into his own communal hallway. “See you later.”
―
But Michael did know what he was going to do. He’d already decided on the Heath, as they were running through the bare woods beyond Kenwood. He would write back. He would write to Daniel and ask him for more. He would ask him to live that day again, to tell him what it had been like. What had he dreamt? How had he woken? What was the weather? What did he eat and drink? And what, afterwards, did he do in those few hours when he still didn’t know that he’d killed her, and Michael didn’t yet know she was dead? How, in that caesura of distance and time zones, as Michael had worked in the garden, his grief coming for him from the other side of the world, had Daniel occupied himself? What had he done and what had he thought? As 8,000 miles away a mud-walled compound had slipped into shadow and a thinning plume of smoke had blown through the leaves of a fig tree, a scattering of chickens stabbing at the earth at its roots.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MICHAEL WAS COMING back out onto the landing when he sensed her again — a change in the air’s texture, a fleeting intuition. He stopped and turned towards the door opposite the stairs. A seam of light ran the length of its frame, and he realised it wasn’t fully closed. A scooter’s engine, high and insistent, rose and fell on the street outside. Michael listened to the house in its wake, but again there was nothing. Just the sound of his own breathing and this penumbra of Caroline, refusing to let him go.
He pushed the door open with his foot. It swung easily, revealing a bathroom. A broad window, its blind half drawn, looked out over the pear tree in the garden and the crowns of the trees around the ponds. A cushioned seat inlaid in its sill was piled with women’s magazines, their pages warped by moist air. In front of him was a toilet and a wooden cabinet above its cistern. To his right, a sink with a collection of toothbrushes in a mug and a rolled tube of toothpaste beside it. Above the sink a mirror reflected the window’s light, while beyond it, along the far wall, was a deep enamel bath, a showerhead resting in its cradle, its steel hose curling into the tub. In a corner of the bath were Lucy’s water toys. A purple floating octopus, a My Little Pony sponge, and, beached on its side, a plastic goldfish with which, just a few days earlier, she’d squirted Michael from her paddling pool.
―
Ever since that first party, Lucy and Rachel had often been the conduit to Michael’s spending time with their parents. When Sam took them for walks on the Heath, or shopping in Hampstead, she frequently called Michael to ask if he’d like to join them. Similarly, when Josh had the girls for the day he’d begun to ask Michael along too, to fly a kite on Parliament Hill or visit a museum in the centre of town. Like Sam, he’d noticed how the girls tended to be better behaved with Michael present, their attentions to each other diffused to accommodate his as well.