The State of Michael - Softcover

Merle Esson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1904529003 ISBN 13: 9781904529002

Publisher: Solidus, 2002

Synopsis

Things can turn in an instant; some apparently random event occurs that has the potential to alter everything... Michael Vitch's life is secretive and repetitious. He prefers it that way, no challenge, no change. Then he catches a glimpse of something that appears at first to be insignificant, yet enduringly unforgettable: an old man appeared briefly at a window before stepping back into the shadow of his lonely room. Some time later he hanged himself. A stranger's suicide and then the arrival of May, a young Bosnian refugee who becomes infatuated with him, stir up uncomfortable emotions Michael thought he had buried long ago.

About this title

Review

Michael's slow but steady implosion is measured out compellingly in this cunningly wrought densely textured narrative of personal and political disintegration. -- Michael Kerrigan, The Scotsman

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I remember I shuddered when they mentioned the woman, the nanny, alias refugee from Bosnia. Bernard cast a glance in my direction at that moment and had the wisdom not to draw me in. He resisted a previously misjudged urge to tell people about me, my past. "Michael, you're half Yugoslavian or something, aren't you?" he had once blurted out at a dinner party and I had replied that I have no history I like to discuss. I’m not half anything; I’m wholly nothing. He liked that, but he had no idea what kind of sorry truth was in it.
I remember that we sat around for hours in the garden. The sun was so persistent under that unreal, blue sky. The creak of the hammock, the clinking of wine glasses, the occasional semi-drunken hysteria over an averagely funny story. Bernard’s anecdotes. The fat baby burbling and spitting out runny food, and what it had just sucked out of Anita’s breasts. Dapples of light and shade through the motionless leaves. A bee that came and went, taking a sniff of white wine, and some small bird sang out from its perch on the wall at the bottom of the garden.
Envy drowned along with energy or purpose. You know when your have reached the glass that should be the last one. I had passed that one by. I dangled a leg over the side of the hammock and watched a tiny sliver of white cloud dissolving as it spread across the sky. Idyllic. Peaceful. Even the fat baby sounded better out of doors. Even the company of James and Stella with all of their perfection and belonging was tolerable quite suddenly.
It was then. It was then I heard a window opening. I might not have looked up at all had the reflection of the glass not caught my eyes and made them squint. It was the upstairs flat, the old man’s flat, and he had opened the window very slowly. I saw him standing there and then he leaned slightly forward and looked straight down at me. His face, something about his face I can’t forget. It all happened in such a narrow slice of time, so fleeting and unfinished that I cannot forget it. Then he vanished, took a step back into the shadow of the room and was gone.
I told no one. It is locked away carefully and it’s part of me now, part of the me that is present. It is incorporated into those images that make up my consciousness, myself. I don’t know how long after that the old man climbed up onto a chair, put the rope around his neck and kicked his life away. I don’t know if he wrote his note while our voices drifted up, our jokes and laughter, the baby spluttering, the birdsong. I don’t know if he looked out through the open window one last time and saw the same English sky with those strands of vanishing pale cloud. I heard a sound though at some point and thought it was the window closing. A sound like the slam of a door. The window remained open and there was no light up there long after we had all moved into the conservatory and lit the candles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Solidus
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1904529003
• ISBN 13: 9781904529002
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248