I Saw a Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

it wasn’t mine. I just wrote it down.”
    She cast a glance at the rest of the bar. “Join the club,” she said. “Think anyone here’s ever told their own story? And anyway, isn’t that the important bit?”

    Michael looked over to his friend. “Think that’s true, Bill?” But Bill had already turned away and was talking to someone else.
    “Caroline,” she said, holding out her hand.
    “Michael,” he replied. Her grip was small but firm. As she pushed herself onto the stool Bill had vacated, Michael noticed the slimness of her thighs. She wore jeans, biker boots, and an oversized jumper. Its neckline was broad and fell loose from one shoulder. There was, Michael could tell, a heat to her tanned skin. When she looked at him again he saw her brown eyes were flecked with gold. A few weeks later, lying in bed together, he’d call those eyes her “fool’s gold,” bait for men like him. But for now he just returned the forthrightness of their gaze.
    “I really did like it,” Caroline said. “That line. And the rest of the book, too.”
    “Are you a writer?” he asked her.
    “No,” she said. She looked out at the bar again, as if weighing the crowd. Michael waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t.
    “Do you want to get something to eat?” she said, turning back to him. “There’s too many swinging dicks in here to hear yourself think.”
    He couldn’t place her accent. Her words began in Europe but then migrated, like a swallow, mid-sentence to Africa.
    Michael laughed, and as he did Caroline thought she might want to sleep with this man whose book she’d once half-read on a plane, and who she’d now discovered in a bar in London.
    A woman behind them raised her voice, shouting over a balding man shaking his head.
    “But that’s nothing!” the woman said, gesticulating with a half-full glass of wine. “I mean, were you in Somalia?”
    “Jesus!” Caroline said, wincing away from her. As she did, she heard Michael in her ear.
    “Even those who haven’t got one,” he said, “are at it.” Which is when, she told him one morning over breakfast a month after they were married, she’d been sure.

―
    They found shelter from the rain in a Lebanese restaurant near the Tube, where they ordered food but left much of it untouched. Instead they got drunk on two bottles of rosé from the Beqaa Valley, where, Caroline told Michael, she’d once spent a week trying to film hashish growers during the civil war.
    By the time they left, the kitchen was clattering with the sounds of cleaning, the waiters turning chairs over the tables. Outside, the rain had stopped. As they walked to the Tube, the wet pavement reflected the street’s neon signs. Slipping her arm around Michael’s waist, Caroline tucked the tips of her fingers into his jeans. He put his arm about her shoulder and in reply she rested her head against his chest. For a few paces they walked like this in silence. But then Caroline felt Michael take a deep breath under her cheek, and she knew what was coming. He had a girlfriend, he told her. She was still in New York, staying there for her job. But they’d decided to try and make it work. To try and stay together.
    As soon as Michael heard himself say it he knew the situation sounded hopeless. Caroline, too, recognised the familiar notes of a dying relationship. But she still listened to him as he apologised and qualified, only ducking from under his arm as they reached the entrance to the station and he stopped talking. She backed away from him, her hands held up in mock surrender.
    “In that case, Mr. Writer,” she said, “I’ll get a cab.” Turning on her heel, she walked towards the kerb, already raising her arm to hail a taxi. “Thanks for dinner, though,” she called over her shoulder. “It was fun.”
    “Yeah, it was,” Michael replied. “Look—” he started, but she was already out of earshot, on tiptoe, flagging down a cab.
    Michael watched as Caroline climbed