by Chris Cleave
Sarah stared at me. “Goodness,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Well, it’s just that on the way home from the nursery, with the other mothers, we usually talk about potty training and cakes.”
I dropped Sarah’s hand and I looked down at the ground.
“Oh, Bee, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all just a little bit sudden and a little bit serious, that’s all. I’m so confused. I need a bit more time to think.”
I looked up at Sarah again. In her eyes I saw that it was new for her, this feeling of not knowing straight away what to do. Her eyes were the eyes of a creature who has only just been born. Before it is familiar with its world, there is only terror. I knew this expression very well. Once you have seen as many people as I have being pushed in through the doors of the immigration detention centre, it is easy to recognise this look. It made me want to remove that pain from Sarah’s life as quickly as I could.
“I am sorry, Sarah. Please forget about it. I will leave. You see? The psychiatrist at the detention centre was right, she could not do anything for me. I am still crazy.”
Sarah-did not say anything. She just held on to my arm and we followed Charlie down the street. Charlie was racing along and knocking the heads off the roses in the front gardens. He knocked them off with karate chops. They fell, each one with a sudden fall and a silent explosion of petals. Like my story with Nkiruka, like my story with Yevette. My feet crushed the petals as we passed over them, and I realised that my story was only made of endings.
Back at the house, we sat in Sarah’s kitchen. We drank tea again and I wondered if it would be, the last time. I closed my eyes. My village, my family, that disappearing taste. Everything vanishes and drains away into sand or mist. That is a good trick.
When I opened my eyes again, Sarah was watching me.
“You know, Bee, I was thinking about what you said, about you staying. About us helping each other. I think you’re right. Maybe it is time to be serious. Maybe these are serious times.”
Six
Serious times began on a grey, ominous day in London. I wasn’t looking for serious. If I’m honest, I suppose I was looking for a bit of the other. Charlie was nearly two years old and I was emerging from the introverted, chrysalid stage of early motherhood. I fitted back into my favourite skirts. I felt like showing off my wings.
I’d decided to spend a day in the field. The idea was to remind my editorial girls that it was possible to write a feature article all on one’s own. I hoped that by inspiring the staff to indulge in a little reportage, my commissioning budget would be spared. It was simply a question, I had told the office airily, of applying one’s pithy remarks sequentially to paper rather than scrawling them individually on sample boxes.
Really, I just wanted my staff to be happy. At their age I’d been fresh out of my journalism degree and intoxicated with the job. Exposing corruption, brandishing truth. How well it had suited me, that absolute licence to march up to evildoers and demand who, what, where, when, and whyt But now, standing in the lobby of the Home Office building in Marsham Street, waiting for a ten o’clock interview, I realised I wasn’t looking forward to it. Perhaps at twenty, one is naturally curious about life but at thirty, simply suspicious of anyone who still has one. I clutched my brand-new notepad and Dictaphone in the hope that some of their youthful predis-illusionment would rub off on me.
I was angry with Andrew. I couldn’t focus. I didn’t even look the part of a reporter—my spiral notepad was virginal white. While I waited, I besmirched it with notes from a fictitious interview. Through the lobby of the Home Office building, the public sector shuffled past in its scuffed shoes, balancing its morning coffee on cardboard carry trays. The women bulged out of M&S trouser suits, wattles wobbling and bangles clacking. The men seemed limp and hypoxic—half garrotted by their ties. Everyone stooped, or scuttled, or nervously ticked. They carried themselves like weather presenters preparing to lower expectations for the bank-holiday weekend.
I tried to concentrate on the article I wanted to write. An optimistic piece was what I needed; something bright and positive. Something absolutely unlike anything Andrew would write in his Times column, in other words. Andrew and I had been arguing. His copy was getting gloomier and gloomier. I think he had truly started to believe that Britain was sinking into the sea. Crime was spreading, schools were failing, immigration was creeping and public morals were slipping. It seemed as if everything was seeping and sprawling and oozing, and I hated it. Now that Charlie was almost two I suppose I was looking into the future my child would have to inhabit, and realising that bitching about it might possibly not be the most constructive strategy. Why do you always have to be so bloody negative? I asked Andrew. If the country really is on the slide, then why not write about the people who are doing something about it?
—Oh yeah? Like whom?
—Well, like the Home Office, for example. They’re the ones on the front line, after all.
—Oh, that’s genius, Sarah, that really is. Because people really trust the Home Office, don’t they? And what will you call your fine uplifting piece?
—You mean what’s my title? Well, how about The Battle For Britain?
I know, I know. Andrew exploded with laughter. We had a blazing row. I told him I was finally doing something constructive with my magazine. He told me I was finally growing out of my magazine’s demographic. Not only was I getting old, in other words, but everything I had worked on for the last decade was puerile. How almost surgically hurtful.
I was still furious when I arrived at the Home Office building. Always the Surrey girl, aren’t you? That had been Andrew’s parting shot. What exactly do you require the Home Office to do about this bloody country, Sarah? Strafe the chavs with Spitfires? Andrew had a gift for deepening the incisions he began. It wasn’t our first row since Charlie was born, and he always did this at the end—brought the argument back to my upbringing, which infuriated me as it was the one thing I couldn’t help.
I stood in the lobby as the dowdy clerks flowed all around me. I blinked, looked down at my shoes, and had my first sensible thought for days. I realised I hadn’t come out into the world today to make a point to rriy editorial staff. Senior editors didn’t really go back to reporting to shave a few pounds from their, commissioning budgets. I was there, I realised, entirely to make a point to Andrew.
And when Lawrence Osborn came down and introduced himself on the dot of ten o’clock—tall, grinning, not conspicuously handsome—I understood that the point I was making to Andrew was not necessarily going to be an editorial one.
Lawrence looked down at his clipboard. “That’s odd,” he said, “they’ve marked down this interview as ‘non-hostile’.”
I realised I was looking at him fiercely. I blushed. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Bad morning.”
“Don’t mention it. Just tell me you’ll try to be nice to me. All you journalists seem to have it in for us these days.”
I smiled. “I am going to be nice to you. I think you people do a terrific job.”
“Ah, that’s because you haven’t seen the statistics we’ve seen.”
I laughed, and Lawrence raised his eyebrows.
“You think I’m joking,” he said.
His voice was flat and unremarkable. He didn’t sound public school. There was a touch of roughness in his vowels, or a sense of some wildness reined in, as if he was making an effort. It was hard to place his voice. He took me on a tour of the building. We looked in on the Assets Recovery Agency and the Criminal Records Bureau. The mood was businesslike, but relaxed. Discourage a little crime, drink a little coffee—that seemed to be the tone. We walked along unnatural galleries floored with natural materials and bathed in natural light.
“So, Lawrence,” I said, “what do you think is going wrong with Britain?”
Lawrence stopped and turned. His face glowed in a soft yellow ray, filtered through coloured glass.
“You’re aski
ng the wrong man,” he said. “If I knew the answer to that, I’d fix it.”
“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do at the Home Office? Fix it?”
“I don’t actually work in any of the departments. They tried me out here and there for a while, but I don’t think my heart was in it. So here I am in the Press Office.”
“But surely you must have an opinion?”
Lawrence sighed. “Everyone has an opinion, don’t they? Maybe that’s what’s wrong with this country. What? Why are you smiling?”
“I wish you’d tell that to my husband.”
“Ah. He has opinions, does he?”
“On a variety of subjects.”
“Well, maybe he should work here. They love a policy debate around these parts, they really do. Your first interview, for example…” Lawrence looked at his clipboard, searching for a name.
“I’m sorry?” I said. “I though you were my interview.”
Lawrence looked up. “Ah, no, I’m just the warm-up guy. I’m sorry, I should have explained.”
“Oh.”
“Well, don’t look so disappointed. I’ve fixed up a good day for you, I really have. You’ve got three heads of department lined up, and a real live Permanent Under-Secretary. I’m sure they’ll give you more than you need for your piece.”
“But I was enjoying talking to you.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“You think?”
Lawrence smiled. He had curly black hair, quite glossy but cut disconcertingly short around the back and sides. His suit, too—it was a good one, Kenzo, I think—and it fitted him well, but there was something arresting about the way he wore it. He held his arms a little away from his body—as if the suit was the pelt of some suaver animal, recently slain and imperfectly cured so that the bloody rawness of it made his skin crawl.
“They don’t really like me talking to the visitors,” said Lawrence. “I don’t think I’ve quite perfected the Home Office voice.”
I was surprised to find myself laughing. We walked on down the corridor. Somewhere in between the Criminal Records Bureau and the Forensic Science Service, the mood changed. People ran past us down the corridor. A crowd clustered around a television monitor. I noticed the way Lawrence put a protective hand on the small of my back as he steered me though the sudden press of people. It didn’t feel inappropriate. I realised I was slowing down to feel the pressure of his hand on my back.
BREAKING NEWS, said the TV monitor. HOME SECRETARY RESIGNS. There was footage of the man looking haggard and climbing with his guide dog into the back seat of a torment that for the moment still resembled a ministerial car.
Lawrence inclined his head towards the others, who were staring raptly at the monitor. He spoke close to my ear.
“Look at these bastards,” he whispered. “The man’s being crucified and these people are already excited about what it means for their jobs.”
“What about you? Don’t you care?”
Lawrence grinned. “Oh, it’s bad news for me,” he whispered. “With my brilliant track record, I was next in line to be the man’s guide dog.”
Lawrence took me to his office. He said he had to check his messages. I was nervous, I don’t know why. There wasn’t anything of Lawrence on the walls—just a generic framed photo of Waterloo Bridge, and a laminated card showing the mustering points in the event of fire. I caught myself checking my reflection in the window and then thinking, Oh, don’t be so silly. I let my eyes change their focus until they rested on the flat grey wall of the neighbouring office building. I waited while Lawrence scrolled through his emails.
He looked up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re going to have to re-schedule your interviews. It’ll be chaos around here for the next few days.”
The phone went and Lawrence listened for a moment. He said, “What? Shouldn’t someone more senior be doing that? Really? Oh, great. How long do I have?”
He put the phone down on the table and then he put his head down on the desk. In the corridor outside the office there were sounds of laughing, shouting, doors slamming shut.
“Bastards,” said Lawrence.
“What is it?”
“That phone call? Off the record?”
“Of course.”
“I have to write a letter to the outgoing Home Secretary, expressing our department’s deep regret at his leaving.”
“They don’t sound particularly regretful.”
“And to think that but for your journalistic sensitivity to detail, we’d never have noticed.”
Lawrence rubbed his eyes and turned to his computer screen. He laid his fingers on the keyboard, then hesitated.
“God!” he said. “I mean, what do you write?”
“Don’t ask me. Did you know the man?”
Lawrence shook his head. “I’ve been in rooms he was in, that’s all. He was a twat, really, only you couldn’t say that because he was blind. I suppose that’s how he got so far. He used to lean slightly forward, with his hand on his guide dog’s harness. He used to lean, like this, and his hand would sort of tremble. I think it was an act. He didn’t tremble when he was reading Braille.”
“You don’t sound as if you’ll miss him much either.”
Lawrence shrugged. “I quite admired him. He was weak and he turned that into a strength. A role model for losers like me.”
“Oh,” I said. “You’re doing self-deprecation.”
“So?”
“So, it doesn’t work. Studies have shown. Women only pretend they like it in surveys.”
“Maybe I’m only pretending to do self-deprecation. Maybe I’m a winner. Maybe becoming the Home Office’s press bitch was my own personal Everest.”
He said all this without facial inflection. He stared into my eyes. I didn’t know where to look.
“Let’s bring this back to my article,” I said.
“Yes, let’s,” said Lawrence. “Because otherwise this is going somewhere else, isn’t it?”
I felt adrenaline aching in my chest. This thing that was happening, then, it had apparently slipped quite subtly over some line. It had become something acknowledged, albeit in a relatively controlled form that both of us could still step back from. Here it was, if we wanted it, hanging from a taut umbilicus between us: an affair between adults, minute yet fully formed, with all its forbidden trysts and muffled paroxysms and shattering betrayals already present, like the buds of fingers and toes.
I remember looking down at the carpet tiles in Lawrence’s office. I can still see them now, with hyper-real clarity, every minute grey acrylic fibre of them, gleaming in the fluorescent light, coarse and glossy and tightly curled, lascivious, obscene, the grey pubic fuzz of an ageing administrative body. I stared at them as if I had never seen carpet tiles before. I didn’t want to meet Lawrence’s eyes.
“Please,” I said. “Stop it.”
Lawrence blinked and inclined his head, innocently. “Stop what?” he said.
And, just like that, for the moment, it was gone.
I breathed again. Above us, one of the fluorescent tubes was buzzing loudly.
“Why did the Home Secretary have to resign?” I said.
Lawrence raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you don’t know. I thought you were a journalist.”
“Not a serious one. Nixie does current affairs the way The Economist does shoes. On a need-to-know basis.”
“The Home Secretary had to resign because he fast-tracked a visa for his lover’s nanny.”
“You believe that?”
“I don’t really care one way or the other. But he never seemed that stupid to me. Oh, listen to them.”
Outside Lawrence’s door there was still laughing and shouting. I heard the sound of paper being scrunched into a ball. Feet scuffed on the carpet. A paper ball clanged into a metal waste-paper basket.
“They’re playing corridor football,” said Lawrence. “They’re actually celebrating.”
“You think they
set him up?”
He sighed. “I’ll never know what they did to him, Sarah. I didn’t go to the right schools for that. My job is just to write a goodbye letter to the man. What would you put?”
“It’s hard if you didn’t really know him. I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities.”
Lawrence groaned. “But I’m terrible at this,” he said. “I’m the sort of person who needs to know what I’m talking about. I can’t just write some spiel.”
I looked around his office.
“I’m in the same position,” I said. “And like it or not, you seem to have become my interview.”
“So?”
“So, you’re not making it easy for me.”
“In what way?”
“Well, you haven’t exactly personalised this place, have you? No golf trophies, no family photos, nothing that gives me the slightest clue who you are.”
Lawrence looked up at me. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities,” he said.
I smiled. “Nice,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I felt the ache of adrenaline again.
“You really don’t fit in here, do you?”
“Listen, I very much doubt I’ll still be working here tomorrow if I can’t think of something suitably noncommittal to write to the old boss in the next twenty minutes.”
“So write something.”
“But seriously, I can’t think of anything.”
I sighed. “Shame. You seemed too nice to be such a loser.”
Lawrence grinned. “Well,” he said, “you seemed quite beautiful enough to be so mistaken.”
I realised I was smiling back at him. “A little blonde of me, you think?”
“Hmm. I think your roots are showing.”
“Well, I don’t think you’re a loser, if you must know. I think you’re just unhappy.”
“Oh, do you? With your gimlet eye for emotional cues?”
“Yes, I do.”
Lawrence blinked and looked down at his keyboard. I realised he was blushing.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, “God, I shouldn’t have said that. I got carried away, I don’t even know you, I’m so sorry. You look really hurt.”