The audiences had nodded, applauded, and afterwards asked for Michael’s signature on the title page of the book. When the paperback was published he donated a percentage of his royalties to education projects in Inwood and Washington Heights. But still, every time he said his sentence about neighbourhoods, about living close and far, he knew he himself was moving further away from the brothers who’d first lent him their lives. As he’d moved across the country on his tour, from hotel to airport to university, so Nico and Raoul had moved, too. Nico from cell to refectory to exercise yard and back to his cell again. Raoul from his cousin’s bedsit in Pennsylvania to another in Albany, to the room of a girl he’d met on the street, to the couch of her friend. Within just a few months the years Michael had shared with the brothers had become undone, unravelled by the publication of his story about their time together.
―
The last time Michael had heard Nico’s voice was on a collect call from his correctional facility upstate. Michael was finally moving back to London. His mother, widowed three years previously, was ill. BrotherHoods was due to be published in Britain. It was time for him to leave New York. If he stayed any longer he was worried it would never let him go. Although he’d found his voice in the city, and his story, to remain would have felt like treading water. New York had been about transition. Now that transition had been made, he wanted to move on, which, for a reason he couldn’t quite fathom, meant moving back.
When the phone rang Michael had been on his knees among packing boxes and bubble wrap scattered across the floor of his Sullivan Street apartment. He’d accepted the call, but before Nico came on the line he’d flicked the phone to answering machine. He’d already spoken to Nico twice that week and he couldn’t take another stilted, awkward conversation. Not now, as he was preparing to leave. So instead he’d just listened, standing in his half-empty apartment, a fire truck’s siren insistent on Sixth, as the voice of a man he’d once known as a boy filled his living room.
“Hey, Mikey?” Nico said. He sounded lost in a large space. His voice deep, but somehow shallow, too. “It’s me, Nico. You there? Man, it’s Nico, pick up.”
Michael heard the clang of a door, the crackle and fuzzy speech of a guard’s radio.
For a second or two Nico breathed on the line, deliberate and slow. “Huh, well,” he’d said eventually. “Hasta luego, bro. Take it easy, yeah?”
The line went dead. The message light began to blink. Michael watched it pulse for a moment, then, sliding his keys off the kitchen table, left the apartment. He pushed through the lobby doors downstairs and crossed the street into the spring light of the morning and walked north towards Washington Square. The higher windows of the buildings were catching the sun, making them flash in the corner of his eye. As he crossed over Prince a cooling breeze ushered a scent of cinnamon and bagels down the street. Michael walked faster into it, as if he were trying to outpace the memory of Nico’s voice behind him, or discover some kind of a promise in the sweetness ahead.
CHAPTER THREE
THEY MET JUST three weeks after Caroline moved to London. A mutual friend was screening a film at the Frontline in Paddington, a social club for correspondents, journalists, and filmmakers. As the documentary played in a darkened room on the top floor, the windowpanes crackling with spring rain, images of Harare, Bulawayo, and the Zimbabwean veldt appeared on the screen. The film was about Mugabe’s operation Murambatsvina, “throw out the rubbish,” a forced clearance of urban slum dwellings that had left 700,000 Zimbabweans homeless in winter. Caroline watched as a grandmother in a red bobble hat, overlooked by policemen, heaved a sledgehammer against the crumbling breezeblocks of her home.
Something about the juxtaposition of the rain against the windows and the film on the screen made Caroline nervous. The shower against the glass, the wash of tyres in the street below, the acacia and jacaranda trees silhouetted against a southern sun. She’d lived in Nairobi and Cape Town, and had worked all over Africa. She hated what she was watching on the screen, but she knew she loved it, too. Already, just three weeks after arriving in London, she could feel the pull of those images, an umbilical desire to be a part of it. But then, in immediate response, she felt an equally strong urge to resist. To stay. Whatever had been the catalyst for what she’d felt that morning in Dubai, the residue of it was still a counterweight within her, an instinctive force she didn’t understand but to which she felt compelled to listen.
Caroline first caught sight of Michael sitting a few rows ahead of her, his profile partly lit by the screen. As the film played she studied what she could of him. His fair hair was swept back from his forehead and the collar of his shirt was askew, the label showing. When he turned to say something to the person next to him she saw the suggestion of a break to his nose. It lent him, she thought, an interest beyond good looks. He seemed familiar but it was only later, when she saw his face in the full light of the bar, that she remembered where she’d seen him before: on the back cover of one of the books she’d packed into her hand luggage three weeks earlier.
The only people Caroline knew at the screening had already left, so taking a last swig from her bottle of beer, she approached Michael. He was talking to an older man, a grey-haired reporter with a beaten manner who’d made his name filing stories from the front lines of Vietnam. Caroline didn’t wait for a break in their conversation.
“ ‘All they got is the facts,’ ” she said as she squeezed between them, putting the empty bottle on the bar. She looked up at Michael. “ ‘But what about everything else?’ Good line, that,” she continued, holding his eye. “True, too.”
Michael looked down at the woman who’d interrupted them. At first he had no idea what she was talking about. When he did, he couldn’t tell if she was serious or taking the piss. She was smiling up at him, but her face betrayed nothing.
“Thanks,” he said. “But 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.