2008 - The Other Hand

by Chris Cleave

  Lawrence spun me round to look at him. There was something in his eyes that looked almost like panic, and at that moment it troubled me for reasons I could not fathom.

  “No,” he said. “Absolutely not. You keep her and you look after her. But please, please don’t throw your own life away. I care about you too much for that. I care about us too much.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I really don’t.” I sighed. “I miss Andrew,” I said.

  Lawrence took his hands from my waist, and took a step back.

  “Oh, please,” I said. “That came out all wrong. I just mean, he was so good with the ordinary things. He was no nonsense, you know? He would just say to me, Don’t be so bloody foolish, Sarah. Of course you shall keep your job. And I would feel awful because of the way he would talk to me, but I would keep my job and then of course he’d turn out to be right, which was even worse in a way. But I miss him, Lawrence. It’s funny how you can miss someone like that.”

  Lawrence stood against the opposite counter, watching me.

  “So what do you want from me?” he said. “You want me to start getting on my high horse like Andrew did?”

  I smiled. “Oh, come here,” I said.

  I hugged him, and breathed in the soft, clean smell of his skin.

  “I’m being impossible again, aren’t I?”

  “You’re being bereaved. It’s going to take a while for all the pieces to fall into place. It’s good that you’re taking a look at your life, really it is, but I don’t think you should rush into anything, you know? If you still feel like quitting your job in six months’ time, then do it by all means. But right now your job is paying for you to do something worthwhile. It is possible to do good things with an imperfect situation. God knows, I should know.”

  I blinked back tears. “Compromise, eh? Isn’t it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee’s age, and you realise that some of the world’s badness is inside you, that maybe you’re a part of it. And then you get a little bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you’ve seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten per cent.”

  “Maybe that’s just developing as a person, Sarah.”

  I sighed, and looked out at Little Bee.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe this is a developing world.”

  Nine

  Sarah had this very big decision to make at work, so she took a day off. She said to me and Lawrence and Charlie in the morning, Come on, we are going on an adventure. I was happy because Sarah was smiling. Also I was glad because it was many years since the last time I went on an adventure.

  What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green,snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.

  When we were children, me and Nkiruka, there was a place we went in the jungle near our village, a secret place, and that was where we played houses. The last time we went on that adventure my big sister was ten years old and I was eight. We were already too old for the game and both of us knew it, but we agreed to dream our dream one last time so that we could fix it into our memories, before we awoke from it forever.

  We crept out of our village in the quietest part of the night. It was the year before the trouble first began with the oil, and four years before my sister started smiling at the older boys, so you can see that it was a peaceful time for our village. There were no sentries guarding the road where the houses ended, and we walked out with no one to ask us where we were going. We did not walk out straight away, though. First we had to wait until the rest of the village was asleep. It took longer than usual because the moon was full, and so bright that it gleamed on the metal roofs and sparkled on the bowl of water that me and my sister kept in our room to wash our faces with. The moon made the dogs and the old people restless, and there were long hours of barking and grumbling before silence came to the last of the houses.

  Me and Nkiruka, we watched through the window until the moon grew to an extraordinary size, so big that it filled the window-frame. We could see the face of the man in the moon, so close that we could see the madness in his eyes. The moon made everything glow so brightly it felt like day, and not an ordinary day at all but a baffling day, an extra day, like the sixth toe of a cat or like a secret message that you find hidden between the pages of a book you have read many times before and found nothing. The moon shone on the limba tree and it gleamed on the old broken Peugeot and it sparkled on the ghost of the Mercedes. Everything glowed with this pale dark brightness. That is when Nkiruka and I walked out into the night.

  The animals and the birds were acting strangely. The monkeys were not howling and the night birds were quiet. We walked out through such a silence, I am not joking, it was as if the little silver clouds that drifted across the face of the moon were leaning down to the earth and whispering, Shhh. Nkiruka’s eyes when she looked over at me, they were scared and excited at the same time. We held hands and we walked the mile through the cassava fields to the place where the jungle started. The paths of red earth between the rows of cassava, they gleamed in the moonlight like the rib bones of giants. When we reached the jungle, it was silent and dark.

  We did not speak, we just walked in before we got too scared. We walked for a long time, and the path got narrower, and the leaves and the branches closed in’ on us tighter and tighter until we had to walk one behind the other. Branches began closing in on the path so that we had to crouch down. Soon we could not carry on at all. So Nkiruka said, This is not the right path, now we must turn around, and we turned around. But that is when we realised that we were not on a path at all, because the branches and the plants were still very tight all around us. We carried on for a little way, weaving around the plants, but very soon we realised we had missed the path and we were lost.

  Under the jungle it was so dark we could not see our own hands, and we held on to each other very close so we would not get separated. All around us now we could hear the noises of the jungle animals moving in the undergrowth, and of course they were very small animals, just rats and shrews and jungle pigs, but in the dark they became huge for us, as big as our fear and growing with it. We did not feel like pretending we had a refrigerator or a washing machine. It did not seem like the kind of night where such appliances would help.

  I started to cry because the darkness was complete and I did not think it would ever end. But Nkiruka, she held me close and she rocked me and she whispered to me, Do not be sad, little sister. What is my name? And through my sobs I said, Your name is Nkiruka. And my sister rubbed my head and she said, Yes, that is right. My name means ‘tke future is bright’. See? Would our mother and our father have given me this name if it was not true? As long as you are with me, little sister, the darkness will not last forever. I stopped crying then, and I fell asleep with my head on my sister’s shoulder.

  I woke up before Nkiruka. I was cold, and it was dawn. The jungle birds were waking up and there was a pale light all around us, a thin grey-green light. All around us there were low fern plants and ground creepers, and the leaves were dripping with the dew. I stood up and took a few steps forwards, because it seemed to me that the light was brighter in that direction. I pushed aside a low branch, and that is when I saw it. There was a very old Jeep in the undergrowth. Its tyres had rotted away to nothing and the creepers and the ferns were growing out through the arches of its wheels. The black plastic seats were tattered and the short rusty springs were pok
ing out through them. Fungus was growing on the doors. The Jeep was pointed away from me, and I walked closer.

  I saw that the jungle and the Jeep had grown together, so that there was no telling where the one ended and the other began—whether the jungle grew out of the Jeep or the Jeep grew out of the jungle. The footwells of the Jeep were filled with the rotted leaves of many seasons, and all the Jeep’s metal had become the same dark colour as the fallen leaves and the earth. Lying across the front seats there was the skeleton of a man. At first I did not see it because the skeleton was dressed in clothes the same colour as the leaves, but the clothes were so torn and ragged that the white bones shone through them in the early morning light. It looked as if the skeleton had become tired from driving and he had laid himself down across the two front seats to sleep. His skull lay on the dashboard, a little way apart from the rest of the skeleton. He was looking up at a small bright patch of sky, high above us through a gap in the forest canopy. I know this because the skull was wearing sunglasses and the sky was reflected in one of the lenses. A snail had crawled across this lens and eaten all the green mould and dirt off it, and it was in the glistening trail of this creature that the glass reflected the sky. Now the snail was halfway along one arm of the sunglasses. I went closer to look. The sunglasses had thin gold frames. On the corner of the lens that reflected the sky, the snail had crawled across the place where the glasses said Ray-Ban. I supposed that this had been the man’s name, because I was young and my trpubles had still not found me and I did not yet understand that there could be reasons for wearing a name that was not one’s own. I stood and looked down at Ray Ban’s skull for a long time, watching my own face reflected in his lenses. I saw myself fixed in the landscape of my country: a young girl with tall dark trees and a small patch of sunlight. I stared for a long time, and the skull did not turn away and neither did I, and I understood that this is how it would always be for me.

  After a few minutes, I walked back to my sister. The branches closed behind me. I did not understand why the Jeep was there. I did not know that there had been a war in my country nearly thirty years before. The war, the roads, the orders—everything that had brought the Jeep to that place had been overgrown by the jungle. I was eight years old and I thought that the jeep had grown up out of the ground, like the ferns and the tall trees all around us. I thought it had grown up quite naturally from the red soil of my country, as native as cassava. And I knew that I did not want my sister to see it.

  I followed my steps back to the place where Nkiruka was still sleeping. I stroked her cheek. Wake up, I said. The light is back. We can find the way home now. Nkiruka smiled at me and sat up. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. There, she said. Didn’t I tell you that the darkness would not last forever?

  “Is everything all right?” said Sarah.

  I blinked and I looked around at the kitchen. From the clean white walls and the kitchen table, I saw the jungle creepers shrink back into the darkest corners of the room.

  “You seemed miles off.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I still have not quite woken up.”

  Sarah smiled. “I was just saying, let’s go for an adventure.”

  Charlie looked up at her.

  “Is we going to Gotham City?” he asked.

  Sarah laughed. “Are we going. No, Batman, we’re just going to the park.”

  Charlie slumped down to the floor. “Don’t want to go to the park.”

  I knelt down beside him. “Batman,” I said. “In the park there are trees, and lots of old branches on the ground.”

  “So?”

  “So, we can build Gotham City there, out of branches.”

  Charlie scratched his head, behind one of his bat ears. “With mine bat crane?”

  “And your special powers.”

  Charlie grinned. “I want to go to the park NOW!” he said.

  “Come on then, my little crusader,” said Sarah. “Let’s get into the Batmobile.”

  Lawrence sat in the front of the car with Sarah, and I went in the back with Charlie. We drove through the gate of Richmond Park, and up a steep hill. On both sides of the narrow road, tall green grasses swayed in the breeze and deer held their heads up to look at us. Sarah stopped in a car park, next to an ice-cream van.

  “No, Batman,” said Sarah. “Before you ask, the answer is not yet.”

  Charlie dragged on her hand as we walked, looking back at the ice-cream van. The park was not crowded and we walked along a dirt path to an enclosure called the Isabella Plantation. Inside there were great jungles of a coiling, tangling bush.

  “Lovely rhododendrons,” said Sarah.

  Underneath their smooth, curling branches, the shade was dark and cool. In the open it was hot. We stopped on a neat grass lawn, beside a small lake with ducks swimming on it. Sarah spread out a blanket in the shade of a tree with red, peeling bark and a brass label to say what it was. In the Isabella Plantation there was no wind. The surface of the lake was oily and smooth. The sky was reflected in it. The water and the sky stretched out to meet one another and the line where they met was hazy and uncertain. Large fish swam in the lake but they did not break the surface. All you could see was the swirls in the water where they had been. I looked at Sarah and she looked back at me and we found that we could not smile.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is reminding you of the beach, isn’t it?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It is only water.”

  We sat on the blanket. In the shade it was cool and peaceful. All over the grass lawn there were families arriving and settling down to enjoy the day. One of those families, they made me look twice. There was a father and a mother and a little girl, and the father was doing tricks with a coin to make his daughter laugh. He flipped the coin high in the air and I saw it tumbling through the bright blue sky with the sunshine flashing upon it and the Queen of England’s face upon the coin—with her lips moving and saying, Good lord, we appear to be falling—and it fell all the way back into the man’s hand, and the man’s hand closed around it, and the colour of his hand was very dark, darker even than my skin. And his daughter was laughing and trying to open up the fingers of his hand, and her skin was much lighter that her father’s—it was the colour of the sticks that Charlie was racing around and collecting. And the mother, she was laughing too, and helping her daughter to get the father’s hand open, and the mother’s skin was as white as Sarah’s.

  I would not even try to explain this to the girls from my village because they would not believe it. If I told them that there were in this place children that were born of black and white parents, holding hands in the park and laughing -together, they would only shake their heads and say, Little miss been-to is making up her tales again.

  But I looked around that place and I realised that there were other families like this. Most were white but some were black, and as many as were black were mixed. I smiled when I saw this. I was thinking to myself, Little Bee, there is no them in this place. These happy people, these mixed-up people who are one thing and also another thing, these people are you. Nobody will miss you and nobody is looking for you. So what is stopping you from just stepping out into this mixed-up country and becoming a part of it? I thought to myself, Little Bee, maybe that is just what you should do.

  Charlie was pulling my hand. He wanted to build Gotham City straight away, so we went together to the edge of the rhododendron jungle. There were many pale, smooth sticks of wood that had fallen there. We worked for a long time. We built towers and bridges. We built roads, railway lines and schools. Then we built a hospital for injured superheroes and a hospital for injured animals, because Charlie said his city needed these things. Charlie was concentrating very hard. I said to him, “Do you want to take off your Batman costume?” But he shook his head.

  “I am worried about you. You will be exhausted by this heat. Come on, aren’t you too hot in your costume?”

  “Yes, but if I is not in mine costume then I is
not Batman.”

  “Do you need to be Batman all the time?”

  Charlie nodded. “Yes, because if I is not Batman all the time then mine daddy dies.”

  Charlie looked down at the ground. In his hands he was holding a stick, so tight that I could see the small white bones of his knuckles through the skin.

  “Charlie,” I said. “You think your daddy died because you were not Batman?”

  Charlie looked up. Through the dark eyeholes of his bat mask, I could see the tears in his eyes.

  “I was at mine nursery,” lie said. “That’s when the baddies got mine daddy.”

  His lip trembled. I pulled him towards me and I held him while he cried. I stared over his shoulder at the cold black tunnels that loomed between the tangled rhododendron roots. I stared into the black but all I could see was Andrew spinning slowly round on the electrical cable, with his eyes watching me each time he revolved. The look in his eyes was the look of those black tunnels: there was no end to them.

  “Listen, Charlie,” I said. “Your daddy did not die because you were not there. It is not your fault. Do you understand? You are a good boy, Charlie. It is not your fault at all.”

  Charlie pulled himself out of my arms and looked at me.

  “Why did mine daddy die?”

  I thought about it.

  “The baddies got him, Charlie. But they are not the sort of baddies Batman can fight. They are the sort of baddies that your daddy had to fight in his heart and I have to fight in my heart. They are baddies from inside.”

  Charlie nodded. “Is there lots?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of baddies from inside?”

  I looked at the dark tunnels, and I shivered.

  “I think everyone has them,” I said.

  “Will we beat them?”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  “And they won’t get me, will they?”

  I smiled. “No, Charlie, I don’t think those baddies will ever get you.”