by Chris Cleave
The policeman closed his pad. “We’re very sorry, madam.—”
I picked up my phone. The new text was indeed from Andrew. SO SORRY, it said.
He was sorry.
I switched the phone, and myself, on to silent mode. The silence lasted all week. It rumbled in the taxi home. It howled when I picked up Charlie from nursery. It crackled on the phone call with my parents. It roared in my ears while the undertaker explained the relative merits of oak and pine caskets. It cleared its throat apologetically when the obituaries editor of The Times telephoned to check some last details. Now the silence had followed me into the cold, echoing church.
How to explain death to a four-year-old superhero? How to announce the precipitous arrival of grief? I hadn’t even accepted it myself. When the policemen told me that Andrew was dead, my mind refused to contain the information. I am a very ordinary woman, I think, and I am quite well equipped to deal with everyday evil. Interrupted sex, tough editorial decisions and malfunctioning coffee machines—these my mind could readily accept. But my Andrew, dead? It still seemed physically impossible. At one point he had covered more than seven tenths of the earth’s surface.
And yet here I was, staring at Andrew’s plain oak coffin (A classic choice, madam ), and it seemed rather small in the wide nave of the church. A silent, sickening dream.
Mummy, where’s Daddy?
I sat in the front pew of the church with my arms around my son, and realised I had begun to tremble. The vicar was delivering the eulogy. He was talking about my husband in the past tense. He made it sound very neat. It occurred to me that he had never had to deal with Andrew in the present tense, or proofread his columns, or feel him running down inside like a piece of broken clockwork.
Charlie squirmed in my arms and asked his question again, the same one he’d asked ten times a day since Andrew died. Mummy, where’s mine daddy exactly now? I leaned down to his ear and whispered, He’s in a really nice bit of heaven this morning, Charlie. There’s a lovely long room where they all go after breakfast, with lots of interesting books and things to do.
—Oh. Is there painting-and-drawing?
—Yes, there’s painting-and-drawing.
—Is mine Daddy doing drawing?
—No, Charlie, Daddy is opening the window and looking at the sky.
I shivered, and wondered how long I would have to go on narrating my husband’s afterlife.
More words, then hymns. Hands took my elbows and led me outside. I observed myself standing in a graveyard beside a deep hole in the ground. Six suited undertakers were lowering a coffin on thick green silky ropes with tasselled ends. I recognised it as the coffin that had been standing on trestles at the front of the church. The coffin came to rest. The undertakers retrieved the ropes, each with a deft flick of his wrist. I remember thinking, I bet they do this all the time, as if it was some brilliant insight. Someone thrust a lump of clay into my hand. I realised I was being invited -urged, even—to throw it into the hole. I stepped up to the edge. Neat, clean greengrocer’s grass had been laid around the border of the grave. I looked down and saw the coffin glowing palely in the depths. Batman held tight to my leg and peered down into the gloom with me.
“Mummy, why did the Bruce Wayne men putted that box down in the hole?”
“Let’s not think about that now, darling.”
I’d spent so many hours explaining heaven to Charlie that week—every room and book shelf and sandpit of it—that I’d never really dealt with the issue of Andrew’s physical body at all. I thought it would be too much to ask of my son, at four, to understand the separation between body and soul. Looking back on it now I think I underestimated a boy who could live simultaneously in Kingston-upon-Thames and Gotham City. I think if I’d managed to sit him down and explain it to him gently, he would have been perfectly happy with the duality.
I knelt and put my arm around my son’s shoulders. I did it to be tender, but my head was swimming and I realised that perhaps it was only Charlie who was stopping me from falling down the hole. I held on tighter. Charlie put his mouth to my ear and whispered, “Where’s mine daddy right now?”
I whispered back, “Your daddy is in the heaven hills, Charlie. Very popular at this time of year. I think he’s very happy there.”
“Mmm. Is mine daddy coming back soon?”
“No, Charlie. People don’t come back from heaven. We talked about that.”
Charlie pursed his lips. “Mummy,” he said again, “why did they put that box down there?”
“I suppose they want to keep it safe.”
“Oh. Is they going to come and get it later?”
“No, Charlie, I don’t think so.”
Charlie blinked. Under his bat mask he screwed up his face with the effort of trying to understand.
“Where is heaven, Mummy?”
“Please, Charlie. Not now.”
“What’s in that box?”
“Let’s talk about this later, darling, all right? Mummy is feeling rather dizzy.”
Charlie stared at me. “Is mine daddy in that box?”
“Your daddy is in heaven, Charlie.”
“IS THAT BOX HEAVEN?” said Charlie, loudly.
Everyone was watching us. I couldn’t speak. My son stared into the hole. Then he looked up at me in absolute alarm.
“Mummy! Get him OUT! Get mine daddy out of heaven!”
I held tightly onto his shoulders. “Oh, Charlie, please, you don’t understand!”
“GET HIM OUT! GET HIM OUT!”
My son squirmed in my grip and broke free;—It happened very quickly. He stood at the very edge of the hole. He looked back at me and then he turned and inched forward, but the greengrocer’s grass overlapped the edge of the hole and it yielded under his feet and he fell, with his bat cape flying behind him, down into the grave. He landed with a thump on top of Andrew’s coffin. There was a single, urgent scream from one of the other mourners. I think it was the first sound, since Andrew died, that really broke the silence.
The scream ran on and on in my mind. I felt nauseous, and the horizon lurched insanely. Still kneeling, I leaned out over the edge of the pit. Down below, in the dark shadow, my son was banging on the coffin and screaming, Daddy, Daddy, get OUT! He clung to the coffin lid, and planted his bat shoes against the side wall of the grave, and heaved against the screws that held the lid closed. I hung my arms down over the edge of the hole. I implored Charlie to take my hands so I could pull him back up, I don’t think he heard me at all.
At first, my son moved with a breathless confidence. Batman was undefeated, after all, that spring. He had overcome the Penguin, the Puffin, and Mister Freeze. It was simply not a possibility in my son’s mind that he might not overcome this new challenge. He screamed in rage and fury. He wouldn’t give up, but if I am strict and force myself now to decide upon the precise moment in this whole story when my heart irreparably broke, it was the moment when I saw the weariness and the doubt creep into my son’s small muscles as his fingers slipped, for the tenth time, from the pale oak lid.
The mourners clustered around the edge of the grave, paralysed by the horror of this thing, this first discovery of death that was worse than death itself. I tried to go forward but the hands on my elbows were holding me back. I strained against their grip and looked at all the horror-struck faces around the grave and I was thinking, Why doesn’t someone do something?
But is hard, very hard, to be the first.
Finally it was Little Bee who went down into the grave and held up my son for other hands to haul out. Charlie was kicking and biting and struggling furiously in his muddied mask and cape. He wanted to go back down. And it was Little Bee, once she herself had been extricated, who hugged him and held him back as he screamed, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, while each of the principal mourners stepped onto the thin strip of greengrocer’s grass and dropped in their small hand-fuls of clay. My son’s screaming seemed to go on for a cruelly long time. I remember wondering if my mind
would shatter with the noise, like a wine glass broken by a sopjrano’s voice. In fact, a former colleague of Andrew’s, a war reporter who had been in Iraq and Darfur, did call me a few days later with the name of a combat fatigue counsellor he used. That’s kind of you, I told him, but I haven’t been at war.
At the graveside, when the screaming was over, I picked up Charlie and held him on my front, with his head resting on my shoulder. He was exhausted. Through the eyeholes of his bat mask, I could see his eyelids drooping. I watched the other mourners filing away in a slow line towards the car park. Brightly coloured umbrellas broke out above the sombre suits. It was starting to rain.
Little Bee stayed behind with me. We stood by the side of the grave and we stared at one another.
“Thank you,” I said.
“It is nothing,” said Little Bee. “I just did what any one, would do.”
“Yes,” I said. “Except that everyone else didn’t.”
Little Bee shrugged. “It is easier when you are from outside.”
I shivered. The rain came down harder.
“This is never going to end,” I said. “Is it, Little Bee?”
“However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again. That is what we used to say in my village.”
“April showers bring May flowers. That’s what we used to say in mine.”
We tried to smile at one another.
I never did drop my own clay into the grave. I couldn’t seem to put it down either. Two hours later, alone for a moment at the kitchen table of our house, I realised I was still gripping it. I left it there on the tablecloth, a small beige lump on top of the clean blue cotton. When I came back a few minutes later, someone had been past and tidied it away.
A few days later the obituary in The Times noted that there had been poignant scenes at their former columnist’s funeral. Andrew’s editor sent me the cutting, in a heavy cream envelope, with a crisp white compliment slip.
Three
One of the things I would have to explain to the girls from back home, if I was telling them this story, is the simple little word ‘horror’. It means something different to the people from my village.
In your country, if you are not scared enough already, you can go to watch a horror film. Afterwards you can go out of the cinema into the night and for a little while there is horror in everything. Perhaps there are murderers lying in wait for you at home. You think this because there is a light on in your house that you are certain you did not leave on. And when you remove your make-up in the mirror last thing, you see a strange look in your own eyes. It is not you. For one hour you are haunted, and you do not trust anybody, and then the feeling fades away. Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you. That would be a good trick. If I could do that, please believe me, I would already be standing in the foyer. I would be laughing with the kiosk boy, and exchanging British one-pound coins for hot buttered popcorn, and saying, Phew, thank the good Lord all that is over, that is the most frightening film I ever saw and I think next time I will go to see a comedy, or maybe a romantic film with kissing. But the film in your memory, you cannot walk out of it so easily. Wherever you go it is always playing. So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.
Some days I wonder how many there are just like me. Thousands, I think, just floating on the oceans right now. In between our world and yours. If we cannot pay smugglers to transport us, we stow away on cargo ships. In the dark, in freight containers. Breathing quietly in the darkness, hungry, hearing the strange clanking sounds of ships, smelling the diesel oil and the paint, listening to the bom-bom-bom of the engines. Wide awake at night, hearing the singing of whales rising up from the deep sea and vibrating through the ship. All of us whispering, praying, thinking. And what are we thinking of? Of physical safety, of peace of mind. Of all these imaginary countries that are now being served in the foyer.
I stowed away in a great steel boat, but the horror stowed away inside me. When I left my homeland I thought I had escaped, but out on the open sea, I started to have nightmares. I was naive to suppose I had left my country with nothing. It was a heavy cargo that I carried.
They unloaded my cargo in a port on the estuary of the Thames river. I did not walk across the gangplank, I was carried off the ship by your immigration officials and they put me into detention. It was no joke inside the detention centre. What will I say about this? Your system is cruel, but many of you were kind to me. You sent charity boxes. You dressed my horror in boots and a colourful shirt. You sent it something to paint its nails with. You posted it books and newspapers. Now the horror can speak the Queen’s English. This is how we can speak now of sanctuary and refuge. This is how I can tell you—soon-soon as we say in my country—a little about the thing I was running from.
There are things the men can do to you in this life, I promise you, it would be much better to kill yourself first. Once you have this knowledge, your eyes are always flickering from this place to that, watching for the moment when the men will come.
In the immigration detention centre, they told us we must be disciplined to overcome our fears. This is the discipline I learned: whenever I go into a new place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly, I make sure I am ready. The first time I went into Sarah’s bathroom I was thinking, Yes, Little Bee, in here you would break the mirror of that medicine cabinet and cut your wrists with the splinters. When Sarah took me for a ride in her car I was thinking, Here, Little Bee, you would roll down the window and unbuckle your seat belt and tip yourself out of the window, no fuss, in front of the very next lorry that conies the other way. And when Sarah took me for a day in Richmond Park, she was looking at the scenery but I was looking for a hollow in the ground where I could hide and lie very still until all that you would find of me was a small white skull that the foxes and the rabbits would fuss over with their soft, wet noses.
If the men come suddenly, I will be ready to kill myself. Do you feel sorry for me, for thinking always in this way? If the men come and they find you not ready, then it will be me who is feeling sorry for you.
For the first six months in the detention centre, I screamed every night and in the day I imagined a thousand ways to kill myself. I worked out how to kill myself in every single one of the situations a girl like me might get into in the detention centre. In the medical wing, morphine. In the cleaners’ room, bleach. In the kitchens, boiling fat. You think I am exaggerating? Some of the others that were detained with me, they really did these things. The detention officers sent the bodies away in the night, because it was not good for the local people to see the slow ambulances leaving that place.
Or what if they released me? And I went to a movie and I had to kill myself there? I would throw myself down from the projection gallery. Or a restaurant? I would hide in the biggest refrigerator and go into a long, cool sleep. Or the seaside? Ah, at the seaside, I would steal an ice-cream van and drive it into the sea. You would never see me again. The only thing to show that a frightened African girl had ever existed would be two thousand melting ice-creams, bobbing in their packets on the cool blue waves.
After a hundred sleepless nights I had finished working out how to kill myself in every single corner of the detention centre and the country outside, but I still carried on imagining. I was weak from horror and they put me in the medical wing. Away from the other prisoners I lay between the scratchy sheets and I spent each day all alone in my mind. I knew they planned to deport me so I started to imagine killing myself back home in Nigeria. It was just like killing myself in the detention centre but the scenery was nicer. This was a small and unexpected happiness. In forests, in quiet villages, on the sides of mountains I
took my own life again and again.
In the most beautiful places I secretly lingered over the act. Once, in a deep and hot jungle that smelled of wet moss and the excrement of monkeys, I took nearly one whole day to chop down trees and build a tall tower to hang myself from by the neck. I had a machete. I imagined the sticky sap on my hands and the sweet honey smell of it, the good tired feeling in my arms from the chopping, and the screeches of the monkeys who were angry when I cut their trees down. I worked hard in my imagination and I tied the tree trunks together with vines and creepers and I used a special knot that my sister Nkiruka showed me. It was a big day’s work for a small girl. I was proud. At the end of that whole day alone in my sick bed working on my suicide tower, I realised I could just have climbed a jungle tree and jumped with my silly head first onto a rock.
This was the first time that I smiled.
I began to eat the meals they brought me. I thought to myself, you must keep up your strength, Little Bee, or you will be too weak to kill your foolish self when the time arrives, and then you will be sorry. I started to walk from the medical wing to the canteen at mealtimes, so that I could choose my food instead of having it brought to me. I started asking myself questions like: Which will make me stronger for the act of suicide? The carrots or the peas?
In the canteen there was a television that was always on. I began to learn more about life in your country. I watched programmes called Love Island and Hell’s Kitchen and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and I worked out how I would kill myself on all of those shows. Drowning, knives, and ask the audience.
One day the detention officers gave all of us a copy of a book called Life in the United Kingdom. It explains the history of your country and how to fit in. I ‘planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth). I worked out how to kill myself under Labour and Conservative governments, and why it was not important to have a plan for suicide under the Liberal Democrats. I began to understand how your country worked.