by Chris Cleave
“Please, Andrew. Maybe we need a change of scenery. A fresh start.”
A pause. He cleared his throat. “Yes. All right.”
“We need to get away from things. We need to get away from London and our jobs and even Charlie—we can leave him with my parents for a few days. We need a holiday.”
Andrew groaned.
“Oh, Jesus. A holiday?”
“Yes. Andrew. Please.”
“Jesus. All right. Where?”
The next day, I called him back.
“I’ve got a freebie, Andrew—Ibeno Beach in Nigeria, open-ended tickets. We can leave on Friday.”
“This Friday?”
“You can file your column before we leave, and you’ll be back in time for the next one.”
“But Africa?”
“There’s a beach, Andrew. It’s raining here and it’s dry season there. Come on, let’s get some sun.”
“Nigeria, though? Why not Ibiza, or the Canaries?”
“Don’t be boring, Andrew. Anyway it’s just a beach holiday. Come on, how bad can it be?”
Serious times. Once they have rolled in, they hang over you like low cumulus. That’s how it was with me and Andrew, after we came back from Africa. Shock, then recrimination, then the two awful years of Andrew’s deepening depression, and the continuing affair with Lawrence that I never could quite seem to stop.
I think I must have been depressed too, the whole time. You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realize you’ve been carrying the weather around with you. That’s what I was explaining to Little Bee on the afternoon she came with me to pick up Batman from nursery. I sat with her, drinking tea at the kitchen table.
“You know, Bee, I was thinking about what you said, about staying. About us helping each other. I think you’re right. I think we both need to move on.”
Little Bee nodded. Under the table, Batman was playing with a Batman action figure. It seemed the smaller Batman was engaged in a desperate battle with an unfinished bowl of cornflakes. I started explaining to Little Bee how I was going to help her.
“What I’m going to do first is track down your caseworker—oh Charlie, food is not a toy—track down your caseworker and find out where your documents are held. Then we can—please Charlie, don’t get those flakes everywhere, don’t make me tell you again—then we can challenge your legal status, find out whether we can make an appeal, and so on. I looked this up on the web and apparently—Charlie! Please! If I have to pick up that spoon one more time I will take away your Batman figure—apparently if we can get you temporary resident status, I can arrange for you to take a British Citizenship Exam, which is just simple stuff, really—Charlie! For god’s sake! Right, that’s it. Get out. Now! Out of the kitchen and come back when you’ve decided to be good—just simple stuff about the kings and queens and the English civil war and so on, and I’ll help you with the revision, and then—oh Charlie, oh goodness, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry. I’m sorry, Batman. I’m so sorry. Come here.”
Batman flinched away from my arms. His lip wobbled and his face went red and he howled, abandoning himself utterly to grief in that way only infants and superheroes have—that way that knows misery is bottomless and insatiable—that honest way. Little Bee rubbed Batman’s head, and he buried his masked face in her leg. I watched his little bat cape shaking as he sobbed.
“Oh god, Bee,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m just a mess at the moment.”
Little Bee smiled. “It’s okay, Sarah, it’s okay.”
The kitchen tap dripped. For something to do I got up and tightened it, but the drips kept coming. I couldn’t understand why that upset me so much.
“Oh Bee,” I said. “We’ve got to get a grip, both of us. We can’t let ourselves be the people things happen to.”
Later, there was a knock at the front door. I pulled myself together and went in through the house. I opened the door to Lawrence, suited, travel bag slung over his shoulder. I saw his relief, his involuntary smile when he saw me.
“I didn’t know if I’d got the right address,” he said.
“I’m not sure you have.”
His smile disappeared. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
“I’ve only just put my husband in the ground. We can’t do this. What about your wife?”
Lawrence shrugged.
“I told Linda I was going on a management course,” he said. “Birmingham. Three days. Leadership.”
“You think she believed you?”
“I just thought you might need some support.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got some.”
He looked over my shoulder at Little Bee, standing in the hallway. “That’s her, is it?”
“She’s staying for as long as she wants.”
Lawrence lowered his voice. “Is she legal?”
“I don’t think I give a shit. Do you?”
“I work for the Home Office, Sarah. I could lose my job if I knew you were harboring an illegal and I didn’t do anything about it. Technically, if I have the slightest doubt, I could be sacked if I even stepped through this door.”
“So…um…don’t.”
Lawrence blushed, took a step back, and ran his hand through his hair.
“This isn’t comfortable for me either, Sarah. I don’t like the way I feel about you. It’d be nice if I loved my wife and it’d be super if I didn’t work for the forces of darkness. I wish I could be idealistic like you. But that’s not me, Sarah. I can’t afford to act as if I’m someone. I’m nothing. Even my cover story is nothing. Three days in Birmingham—Birmingham, fuck! On a course to learn something everyone accepts I’m hopeless at. It’s so plausible it’s tragic, don’t you think? That’s what I was thinking, even while I was making it up. I’m not ashamed of my adultery, Sarah. I’m ashamed of my fucking cover story.”
I smiled.
“I sort of remember why I like you. No one could ever accuse you of being full of yourself, could they?”
Lawrence puffed up his cheeks and blew air through his mouth, sadly. “Not in the full light of the evidence,” he said.
I hesitated. He reached up and held my hand. I closed my eyes and felt the resolve draining out of me into the cold smoothness of his skin. I took a step back into the house. I almost staggered, really.
“Are you letting me in then?”
“Don’t get used to it,” I said.
Lawrence grinned, but then he hesitated on the threshold. He looked at Little Bee. She came up and stood just behind my shoulder.
“Do not worry about me,” she said. “Officially you cannot even see me. You are in Birmingham and I am in Nigeria.”
Lawrence gave a quick little smile. “I wonder which of us will get found out first,” he said.
We went in through the hall and into the living room. Batman was T-boning his red fire engine into the side of a defenseless family saloon. (In Charlie’s world, I think, the emergency services are staffed by rogue elements.) He looked up when we came in.
“Batman, this is Lawrence. Lawrence is Mummy’s friend.”
Batman stood and walked up to Lawrence. He stared at him. His bat senses must have told him something. “Is you mine new daddy?” he said.
“No, no, no,” I said.
Charlie looked confused. Lawrence knelt so that his face was at Charlie’s level. “No, Batman, I’m just your mummy’s friend.”
Batman tilted his head to one side. The ears on his bat hood flopped over. “Is you a goody or a baddy?” he said slowly.
Lawrence grinned and stood up.
“Honestly, Batman? I think I’m one of those innocent bystanders you see in the background in the comics. I’m just a man from a crowd scene.”
“But is you a goody or a baddy?”
“He’s a goody of course,” I said. “Come on, Charlie. Do you really think I’d let someone into our house who wasn’t?”
&nb
sp; Batman folded his arms and set his lips in a grim line. No one spoke. From outside came the evening sounds of mothers calling normal children in from gardens for tea.
Later, after I’d got Charlie to bed, I made supper while Lawrence and Little Bee sat at the kitchen table. Digging at the back of the cupboard for a refill of pepper, I found a half-full packet of the Amaretto biscuits that Andrew used to love. I smelled them, secretly, holding the packet up to my nose, with my back to Lawrence and Little Bee. That sickly, sharp smell of apricot and almond—it made me think of the way Andrew used to wander around the house on his insomniac nights. He would return to bed in the small hours with that smell on his breath. Toward the end, the only thing keeping my husband going was six Amaretto biscuits and one tablet of Cipralex a day.
I held Andrew’s biscuits in my hand. I thought about throwing them away, and I found that I couldn’t. How duplicitous grief is, I thought. Here I am, too sentimental to throw away something that gave Andrew slight comfort, even as I cook supper for Lawrence. I felt horribly traitorous, suddenly. This is exactly why one shouldn’t let one’s lover into one’s home, I thought.
When the supper was ready—a mushroom omelet, slightly burned while I was thinking of Andrew—I sat down to eat with Lawrence and Little Bee. It was dreadful—they wouldn’t talk to each other, and I realized that they hadn’t spoken the whole time I’d been making supper. We ate in silence, with just the sound of the cutlery. Finally Little Bee sighed, and rubbed her eyes, and went upstairs to the bed I’d made up for her in the guest room.
I crashed the plates into the dishwasher and dumped the frying pan into the sink.
“What?” said Lawrence. “What did I do?”
“You might have made an effort,” I said.
“Yes, well. I thought I’d be alone with you tonight. It’s not an easy situation to adjust to.”
“She’s my guest, Lawrence. The least you can do is be polite.”
“I just don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into, Sarah. I don’t think it’s healthy for you to have that girl staying here. Every time you see her, you’re going to be reminded of what happened.”
“I’ve spent two years denying what happened on that beach. Ignoring it, letting it fester. That’s what Andrew did too, and it killed him in the end. I’m not going to let it kill me and Charlie. I’m going to help Little Bee, and make everything right, and then I can get on with my life.”
“Yes, but what if you can’t make it right? You know the most likely outcome for that girl, don’t you? They’ll deport her.”
“I’m sure it won’t come to that.”
“Sarah, we have an entire department consecrated to ensuring that it will come to that. Officially Nigeria’s pretty safe, and she’s got no family here, by her own admission. There’s bugger all reason for them to let her stay.”
“I can’t not try.”
“You’ll get dragged down by the bureaucracy, and then they’ll send her home anyway. You’ll get hurt. It will damage you. And that’s the last thing you need at the moment. You need positive influences in your life. You’ve got a son that you have to bring up on your own now. You need people that are going to give you energy, not drain it away.”
“And that’s you, is it?”
Lawrence looked back at me, and shifted his weight forward.
“I want to be important to you, Sarah. I’ve wanted it from the moment you walked into my life with your reporter’s notepad that you never wrote down a single word on and your Dictaphone that you didn’t even switch on. And I haven’t let you down, Sarah, have I? Despite everything. Despite my wife and despite your husband and despite bloody well everyone. We have fun together, Sarah. Isn’t that what you want?”
I sighed. “I really don’t think this is about having fun anymore.”
“And do you see me running away? This is about us doing what’s best for you. I’m not going to stop just because it’s gone all serious. But you have to choose. I can’t help you if all your focus is on that girl.”
I felt the blood draining out of my face. I spoke as quietly and calmly as I could.
“Tell me you’re not asking me to choose between you and her.”
“I am absolutely not asking you to do that. But what I am saying is that you’re going to have to choose between your life and her life. At some point you have to start thinking about a future for you and Charlie. Charity is lovely, Sarah, but there has to be some logical point where it stops.”
I banged my damaged hand down on the table, fingers splayed out. “I cut off my finger for that girl. Will you tell me when is the logical point to stop something that started like that? Do you really want me to make a choice like that? I cut off my own bloody finger. Do you think I wouldn’t cut you off too?”
Silence. Lawrence stood up. His chair scraped.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“No. Maybe you shouldn’t.”
I sat at the kitchen table and listened to Lawrence taking his coat from the peg in the hall and picking up his travel bag. When I heard the front door opening, I stood up. Lawrence was halfway down the path by the time I got to the door.
“Lawrence?”
He turned.
“Where are you going to go? You can’t go home.”
“Oh. I didn’t really think about it.”
“You’re meant to be in Birmingham.”
He shrugged. “I’ll get a hotel. It’ll be good for me. I’ll read a book on leadership. Might actually learn something.”
“Oh Lawrence, come here.”
I held out my arms to him. I pressed my face into his neck and hugged him while he stood motionless. I breathed in the smell of him, and remembered all those hotel afternoons, high as kites on each other.
“You really are a loser,” I said.
“I just feel so bloody silly. I had it all worked out. I got the time off work, I made up the story for Linda. I even bought toys for the kids, in case I forgot on the way home. I had it all worked out. I thought it was going to be a nice surprise for you and…well. It was a surprise, at least, wasn’t it?”
I stroked his face.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I snapped at you. Thank you for coming to see me. Please don’t go to a hotel room and sit there all on your own, I can’t bear it. Please stay.”
“What? Now?”
“Yes. Please.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Sarah. Maybe I need to take a step back and think about what we mean to each other. What you said just now, about cutting me off…”
“Stop it, you cunning bastard. Stop it before I change my mind.”
Lawrence almost smiled. I linked my fingers around the back of his neck.
“What I didn’t say was that if I had to cut you off, it would hurt more than cutting off my finger.”
He stared at me for a long time and then he said, Oh Sarah. We went upstairs and it wasn’t until we’d started that I realized we were having sex on the bed I used to share with Andrew. I was concentrating on Lawrence, burying my face in the soft hair on his chest, peeling the clothes off him, and then something happened—my bra strap snagged, Lawrence’s belt buckle jammed for a second—I don’t recall but it stopped the flow, anyway, and I realized that Lawrence was lying on Andrew’s side of the bed, that his skin was pressing down where Andrew’s had pressed, that the concave of Lawrence’s back, smooth and hot with sweat, was arching proud of the depression that Andrew had made in the mattress. I hesitated—I froze up. Lawrence sensed it, I suppose, and he kept the momentum going. He rolled over onto me. I just felt so grateful to him, I think, for getting us through that moment without thinking. I let myself dissolve into the slickness of his skin, the delicacy of his movement, the lightness of him. Lawrence was tall but he was slight. There was none of the bruising compression of my pelvis, the crushing of the breath from my lungs, the overpowering gravity of sex with Andrew that left me groaning as much in res
ignation as in pleasure. That was what I loved about sex with Lawrence—the glorious, giddying lightness of it. But there was something wrong, tonight. Maybe it was the presence of Andrew, so strong in the room. His books and papers were everywhere still—jamming the bookshelves, scattered in the corners of the floor—and when I thought of Andrew, I thought of Little Bee. Lawrence was making love to me and part of me was thinking, Uh, while another part was thinking, In the morning I must phone the Border and Immigration Agency and start to track down her papers, and then I’ll need to find her a solicitor, and start an appeal procedure, and…and…
I found I couldn’t give myself up to Lawrence—not in that un-hesitating, abandoned way I once had. Suddenly Lawrence seemed too light. His fingers barely brushed my skin, as if they were not engaging with my body but merely tracing lines in some fine and invisible dust that Africa had cloaked me in. And when his weight came onto me it was like being made love to by a summer cloud, or a winter butterfly—by some creature in any case that lacked the authority to bend gravity around itself and become the moment’s center.
“What’s wrong, Sarah?”
I realized I was lying absolutely rigid.
“Oh god, I’m sorry.”
Lawrence stopped, and rolled onto his back. I took hold of his penis, but already I could feel the softness returning to it.
“Please,” he said. “Don’t.”
I let go and took hold of his hand instead, but he pulled it free.
“I don’t understand you, Sarah, I really don’t.”
“I’m sorry Lawrence. It’s Andrew. It’s just too soon.”
“He never stopped us while he was alive.”
I thought about that. In the darkness outside, a low jet was climbing out of Heathrow and a pair of owls were calling to each other desperately above the roar, their shrieks shrilling against the whining of the turbines.
“You’re right. It isn’t Andrew.”
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know. I love you, Lawrence, I really do. It’s just that I’ve got so much to do.”
“For Little Bee?”