by Chris Cleave
What? I said. I realized he was going to tell us there had been a mistake. I wondered if we should run. I did not want to go back in detention. I wondered how far we would get if we ran. I wondered if they would come after us with dogs.
The detention officer stood up. I heard his chair scrape on the linoleum floor. He stood there with his hands at his sides.
“Ladies?” he said.
“Yes?”
He looked down at the ground, and then up again.
“Best of luck,” he said.
And we girls turned around and walked toward the light.
I pushed open the double doors, and then I froze. It was the sunlight that stopped me. I felt so fragile from the detention center, I was afraid those bright rays of sunshine could snap me in half. I couldn’t take that first step outside.
“What is de holdup, Lil Bee?”
Yevette was standing behind me. I was blocking the door for everyone.
“One moment, please.”
Outside, the fresh air smelled of wet grass. It blew in my face. The smell made me panic. For two years I had smelled only bleach, and my nail varnish, and the other detainees’ cigarettes. Nothing natural. Nothing like this. I felt that if I took one step forward, the earth itself would rise up and reject me. There was nothing natural about me now. I stood there in my heavy boots with my breasts strapped down, neither a woman nor a girl, a creature who had forgotten her language and learned yours, whose past had crumbled to dust.
“What de hell yu waitin fo, darlin?”
“I am scared, Yevette.”
Yevette shook her head and she smiled.
“Maybe yu’s right to be scared, Lil Bee, cos yu a smart girl. Maybe me jus too dumb to be fraid. But me spend eighteen month locked up in dat place, an if yu tink me dumb enough to wait one second longer on account of your tremblin an your quakin, yu better tink two times.”
I turned round to face her and I gripped on to the door frame.
“I can’t move,” I said.
That is when Yevette gave me a great push in the chest and I flew backward. And that is how it was, the first time I touched the soil of England as a free woman, it was not with the soles of my boots but with the seat of my trousers.
“WU-ha-ha-ha!” said Yevette. “Welcome in de U-nited Kindom, int dat glorious?”
When I got my breath back I started laughing too. I sat on the ground, with the warm sun shining on my back, and I realized that the earth had not rejected me and the sunlight had not snapped me in two.
I stood up and I smiled at Yevette. We all took a few steps away from the detention center buildings. As we walked, when the other girls were not looking, I reached under my Hawaiian shirt and I undid the band of cotton that held my breasts strapped down. I unwound it and threw it on the ground and ground it into the dirt with the heel of my boot. I breathed deeply in the fresh, clean air.
When we came to the main gate, the four of us girls stopped for a moment. We looked out through the high razor-wire fence and down the slopes of Black Hill. The English countryside stretched away to the horizon. Soft mist was hanging in the valleys, and the tops of the low hills were gold in the morning sun, and I smiled because the whole world was fresh and new and bright.
two
FROM THE SPRING OF 2007 until the end of that long summer when Little Bee came to live with us, my son removed his Batman costume only at bath times. I ordered a twin costume that I substituted while he splashed in the suds, so that at least I could wash the boy sweat and the grass stains out of the first. It was a dirty, green-kneed job, fighting master criminals. If it wasn’t Mr. Freeze with his dastardly ice ray, then it was the Penguin—Batman’s deadly foe—or the even more sinister Puffin, whose absolute wickedness the original creators of the Batman franchise had inexplicably failed to chronicle. My son and I lived with the consequences—a houseful of acolytes, henchmen and stooges, ogling us from behind the sofa, cackling darkly in the thin gap beside the bookcase, and generally bursting out at us willy-nilly. It was one shock after another, in fact. At four years old, asleep and awake, my son lived at constant readiness. There was no question of separating him from the demonic bat mask, the Lycra suit, the glossy yellow utility belt and the jet-black cape. And there was no use addressing my son by his Christian name. He would only look behind him, cock his head, and shrug—as if to say, My bat senses can detect no boy of that name here, madam. The only name my son answered to, that summer, was Batman. Nor was there any point explaining to him that his father had died. My son didn’t believe in the physical possibility of death. Death was something that could only occur if the evil schemes of the baddies were not constantly foiled—and that, of course, was unthinkable.
That summer—the summer my husband died—we all had identities we were loath to let go of. My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s surname, and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality, that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
To flee from cruelty is the most natural thing in the world, of course. And the timing that brought us together that summer was so very cruel. Little Bee telephoned us on the morning they released her from the detention center. My husband picked up her call. I only found out much later that it was her—Andrew never told me. Apparently she let him know she was coming, but I don’t suppose he felt up to seeing her face again. Five days later he killed himself by hanging. They found my husband with his feet treading empty air, touching the soil of no country. Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.
Little Bee knocked on my front door five days after my husband died, which was ten days after they released her from detention. After a journey of five thousand miles and two years, she arrived just too late to find Andrew alive, but just in time for his funeral. Hello Sarah, she said.
Little Bee arrived at eight A.M. and the undertaker knocked at ten. Not one second to, or one second past. I imagine the undertaker had been silently standing outside our front door for several minutes, looking at his watch, waiting for our lives to converge onto the precise fault line at which our past could be cleaved from our future with three soft strikes of the bright brass knocker.
My son opened the door, and took in the undertaker’s height, his impeccable tailoring, and his sober demeanor. I suppose the undertaker looked for all the world like Batman’s workaday alter ego. My son shouted along the hallway to me: Mummy, it’s Bruce Wayne!
That morning I walked out onto the street and I stood there, looking at Andrew’s coffin through the thick, slightly greenish glass of the hearse window. When Little Bee came out to join me, bringing Batman by the hand, the undertaker ushered us to a long, black limousine and nodded us in. I told him we’d rather walk.
We looked as if we’d been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband’s funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City. It seemed as if we’d been cut-and-pasted. My thoughts raced, nightmarish and disconnected.
It was only a few hundred yards to the church, and the three of us walked in the road ahead of the hearse while an angry queue of traffic built up behind. I felt awful about that.
I was wearing a dark gray skirt and jacket with gloves and charcoal stockings. Little Bee was wearing my smart black raincoat over the clothes they let her out of the detention center in—a mortifyingly unfunereal Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans. My son was wearing an expression of absolute joy. He, Batman, had stopped the traffic. His cape swirled in his tiny slipstream as he strode proudly ahead, his grin stretching from bat ear to bat ear beneath the darkness of his mask. Occasionally his superior vision would detect an enemy that needed smiting, and when this occurred my son would simply stop, smite, and continue.
He was worried that the Puffin’s invisible hordes might attack me. I was worried that my son hadn’t done a wee before we left the house, and might therefore do it in his bat pants. I was also worried about being a widow for the rest of my life.
At first I’d thought it was quite brave of me to insist on walking to the church, but now I felt dizzy and foolish. I thought I might faint. Little Bee held on to my elbow and whispered to me to take deep breaths. I remember thinking, How strange, that it should be you who is keeping me on my feet.
In the church I sat in the front pew, with Little Bee on my left and Batman on my right. The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work—I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate—but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one’s address book dressed in black and exported into pews in nonalphabetical order. They had classified themselves according to some unwritten protocol of grief, blood relatives ghoulishly close to the coffin, old girlfriends in a reluctant cluster near the baptismal font. I couldn’t bear to look behind me and see this new natural order of things. It was all very much too sudden. A week ago I had been a successful working mother. Now I was sitting at my husband’s funeral, flanked by a superhero and a Nigerian refugee. It seemed like a dream that might be awoken from with relatively little effort. I stared at my husband’s coffin, strewn with white lilies. Batman stared at the vicar. He cast an approving eye over the vicar’s stole and surplice. He gave the vicar a solemn thumbs-up, one caped crusader to another. The vicar returned the salute, then his thumb returned to the faded gilt edging of his Bible.
The church was falling quiet; expectant. My son looked all around, then back at me. Where’s Daddy? he said.
I squeezed my son’s hot, sweaty hand, and listened to the coughs and sniffles echoing round the church. I wondered how I could possibly explain my husband’s death to his son. It was depression that killed Andrew, of course—depression and guilt. But my son didn’t believe in death, let alone in the capacity of mere emotions to cause it. Mr. Freeze’s ice rays, perhaps. The Puffin’s lethal wingspan, at a stretch. But an ordinary phone call, from a skinny African girl? It was impossible to explain.
I realized I would have to tell my son the whole story, someday. I wondered where I would begin. It was two years before, in the summer of 2005, that Andrew had begun his long, slow slide into the depression that finally claimed him. It started on the day we first met Little Bee, on a lonely beach in Nigeria. The only souvenir I have of that first meeting is an absence where the middle finger of my left hand used to be. The amputation is quite clean. In place of my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D, and C keys on my laptop. I can’t rely on E, D, and C anymore. They go missing when I need them most. Pleased becomes please. Ecstasies becomes stasis.
I miss my finger most on deadline days, when the copy checkers have all gone home and I’m typing up the last-minute additions to my magazine. We published an editorial once where I said I was “wary of sensitive men.” I meant to say “weary,” of course, and after a hundred outraged letters from the earnest boyfriends who’d happened to glance at my piece on their partner’s coffee table (presumably in between giving a back rub and washing the dishes), I began to realize just how weary I was. It was a typographical accident, I told them. I didn’t add, it was the kind of typographical accident that is caused by a steel machete on a Nigerian beach. I mean, what does one call the type of meeting where one gains an African girl and loses E, D, and C? I do not think you have a word for it in your language—that’s what Little Bee would say.
I sat in my pew, massaged the stump of my finger, and found myself acknowledging for the first time that my husband had been doomed since the day we met Little Bee. The intervening two years had brought a series of worsening premonitions, culminating in the horrible morning ten days earlier when I had woken up to the sound of the telephone ringing. My whole body had crawled with dread. It had been an ordinary weekday morning. The June issue of my magazine was almost ready to go to the printers, and Andrew’s column for The Times was due in too. Just a normal morning, but the soft hairs on the backs of my arms were up.
I have never been one of those happy women who insist that disaster strikes from a clear blue sky. For me there were countless foretellings, innumerable small breaks with normalcy. Andrew’s chin unshaved, a second bottle uncorked on a weekday night, the use of the passive voice on deadline Friday. Certain attitudes which have been adopted by this society have left this commentator a little lost. That was the very last sentence my husband wrote. In his Times column, he was always so precise with the written word. From a layperson, lost would be a synonym for bewildered. From my husband, it was a measured good-bye.
It was cold in the church. I listened to the vicar saying where, o death, is thy sting? I stared at the lilies and smelled the sweet accusation of them. God, how I wish I had paid more attention to Andrew.
How to explain to my son that the warning signs were so slight? That disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips? They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the wind slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes, but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly. If we overreacted every time the wind eased up, we would forever be laying down under the dining-room table when we really should be laying the plates on top of it.
Would my son accept that this is how it was with his father? The hairs on my arms went up, Batman, but I had a household to run. I never understood that he was actually going to do it. All I would honestly be able to say is that I woke up with the phone ringing and my body predicting some event that had yet to happen, although I never imagined it would be so serious.
Charlie had still been asleep. Andrew picked up the phone in his study, quickly, before the noise of the ringing could wake our son. Andrew’s voice became agitated. I heard it quite clearly from the bedroom. Just leave me alone, he said. All that stuff happened a long time ago and it wasn’t my fault.
The trouble was, my husband didn’t really believe that.
I found him in tears. I asked him who it had been on the phone, but he wouldn’t say. And then, since we were both awake and Charlie was still asleep, we made love. I used to do that with Andrew sometimes. More for him than for me, really. By that stage of our marriage it had become a maintenance thing, like bleeding the air out of the radiators—just another part of running a household. I didn’t know—in fact I still don’t know—what awful consequences are supposed to ensue if one fails to bleed the radiators. It’s not something a cautious woman would ever allow herself to discover.
We didn’t speak a word. I took Andrew into the bedroom and we lay on the bed beneath the tall Georgian windows with the yellow silk blinds. The blinds were embroidered with pale foliage. Silk birds hid there in a kind of silent apprehension. It was a bright May morning in Kingston-upon-Thames, but the sunlight through the blinds was a dark and florid saffron. It was feverish, almost malarial. The bedroom walls were yellow and ocher. Across the creaking landing, Andrew’s study was white—the color, I suppose, of blank pages. That’s where I retrieved him, after the awful phone call. I read a few words of his column, over his shoulder. He’d been awake all night writing an opinion piece about the Middle East, which was a region he had never visited and had no specialist knowledge of. It was the summer of 2007, and my son was fighting the Penguin and the Puffin, and my country was fighting Iraq and Afghanistan, and my husband was forming public opinion. It was the kind of summer where no one took their costume off.
I pulled my husband away from the phone. I pulled him into the bedroom by the tasseled cord of his dressing gown, because I had read somewhere that this sort of behavior would excite him. I pulled him down onto our bed.
I remember the way he moved inside me, like a clock with its mainspring run
ning down. I pulled his face close to mine and I whispered, Oh god Andrew, are you all right? My husband didn’t reply. He just closed his eyes against the tears and we began to move faster while small, involuntary moans came from our mouths and fled into the other’s moaning in wordless desperation.
In on this small tragedy walked my son, who was more at home fighting evil on a larger, more knockabout scale. I opened my eyes and saw him standing in the bedroom doorway, watching us through the small, diamond-shaped eyeholes of his bat mask. From the expression on the part of his face that could be seen, he seemed to be wondering which (if any) of the gadgets on his utility belt might help in this situation.
When I saw my son, I pushed Andrew off me and scrabbled frantically for the duvet to cover us. I said, Oh god Charlie, I’m so sorry.
My son looked behind him, then back at me.
“Charlie isn’t here. I’m Batman.”
I nodded, and bit my lip.
“Good morning, Batman.”
“What is you and Daddy doing, Mummy?”
“Er…”
“Is you getting baddies?”
“Are we getting baddies, Charlie. Not is we.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, Batman. Yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
I smiled at my son, and waited. I wondered what Batman would say. What he said was, Someone done a poo in my costume, Mummy.
“Did a poo, Charlie.”
“Yes. A big big poo.”
“Oh Batman. Have you really done a poo in your suit?”
Batman shook his head. His bat ears quivered. Beneath the mask an expression of great cunning settled upon the visible part of his face.