Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

  “At what point did we forget that marriage is a commitment for life?”

  “I just felt so unfulfilled, so downtrodden.”

  “Happiness isn’t something one can pick up off the shelf, it’s something one has to work at.”

  “You bullied me. I just never felt loved or supported.”

  “Trust between adults is a hard-won thing, a fragile thing, so difficult to rebuild.”

  It was less like a discussion and more like a terrible mix-up at the printers. It didn’t stop till I threw a flowerpot at him. It glanced off his shoulder and smashed on the concrete base and Andrew flinched and walked away. He took the car and drove off and he didn’t come home for six days. Later I found out he’d flown over to Ireland to get properly drunk with his brother.

  Charlie started nursery that week, and Andrew missed it. I made a cake to mark the occasion for Charlie, alone in the kitchen one night. I wasn’t used to being alone in the house. With Charlie asleep it was quiet. I could hear the blackbirds singing in the twilight. It was pleasant, without Andrew’s constant bass line of gripes and political commentary. Like the drone note of bagpipes, one doesn’t really realize it’s been playing until it stops, and then the silence emerges into being as a tangible thing in its own right: a supersilence.

  I remember scattering yellow Smarties over the wet icing while I listened to Book of the Week on Radio 4, and suddenly feeling so confused I burst into tears. I stared at my cake: three banana layers, with dried banana chips and banana icing. This was still two years before Charlie’s Batman summer. At two years old, what Charlie loved most in the world was bananas. I remember looking at that cake and thinking: I love being Charlie’s mother. Whatever happens now, that is the one thing I can be proud of.

  I stared at the cake on its wire tray on the work surface. The phone rang.

  Lawrence said, “Shall I come over?”

  “What, now? To my house?”

  “You said Andrew was away.”

  I shivered. “Oh, goodness. I mean … you don’t even know where I live.”

  “Well, where do you live?”

  “I’m in Kingston.”

  “I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

  “No, Lawrence … no.”

  “But why? No one will know, Sarah.”

  “I know but … wait a minute, please, let me think.”

  He waited. On the radio, the continuity announcer was promising great things for the next program. Apparently there were many misconceptions about the tax credit system, and their program was going to clear up a good few of them. I dug my nails into the palm of my free hand and fought desperately against the part of me that was pointing out that an evening in bed with Lawrence and a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé might be more exciting than Radio 4.

  “No. I’m sorry. I won’t let you come to my house.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because my house is me, Lawrence. Your house is your family and my house is my family and the day you come to my house is the day our lives get more tangled up than I’m ready for.”

  I put the phone down. I stood quietly for a few minutes, looking at it. I was doing this to protect Charlie, keeping the distance between me and Lawrence. It was the right thing to do. Things were complicated enough. It’s something I could never have explained to my mother, I suppose: that there are circumstances in which we will allow men to enter our bodies but not our homes. My body still ached from the sound of Lawrence’s voice, and the frustration rose inside me until I picked up the phone and smashed it, again and again, into my perfectly iced cake. When the cake was quite destroyed I took a deep breath, switched the oven back on, and started making another.

  The next day—Charlie’s first day at nursery—my train was canceled so I was late back from work. Charlie was crying when I picked him up. He was the last child there, howling in the middle of the beeswaxed floor, smashing his little fists into the play leader’s legs. When I went to Charlie, he wouldn’t look at me. I pushed him home in the buggy, sat him down at the table, dimmed the lights, and brought in the banana cake with twenty burning candles. Charlie forgot he was sulking and started to smile. I kissed him, and helped to blow out the candles.

  “Make a wish!” I said.

  Charlie’s face clouded over again. “Want Daddy,” he said.

  “Do you, Charlie? Do you really?”

  Charlie nodded. His lower lip wobbled, and my heart wobbled with it. After the cake he got down from his high chair and toddled off to play with cars. A peculiar gait, toddling. A sort of teetering, really—my son at two—each step a hasty improvisation, a fall avoided by luck as much as by judgment. A sort of life on short legs.

  Later, with Charlie tucked up in bed, I phoned my husband. “Charlie wants you back, Andrew.”

  Silence.

  “Andrew?”

  “Charlie does, does he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what about you? Do you want me back?”

  “I want what Charlie wants.”

  Andrew’s laugh down the phone—bitter, derisory.

  “You really know how to make a man feel special.”

  “Please. I know how badly I’ve hurt you. But it’ll be different now.”

  “You’re bloody right it’ll be different.”

  “I can’t raise our son alone, Andrew.”

  “Well, I can’t raise my son with a slut for his mother.”

  I gripped the phone, feeling a wave of terror rise through me. Andrew hadn’t even raised his voice. A slut for his mother. Cold, technical, as if he had also weighed up adulteress, cuckolder, and narcissist before selecting precisely the most apposite noun. I tried to control my voice but I heard the shake in it.

  “Please, Andrew. This is you and me and Charlie we’re talking about. I care so much about both of you, you can’t imagine. What I did with Lawrence … I’m so sorry.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “It was never meant to mean anything. It was just sex.” The lie came out of my mouth so easily that I realized why it was so popular.

  “Just sex? That’s the convention, isn’t it, these days? Sex has become one of those words you can put just in front of. Anything else you’d like to minimize at this time, Sarah? Just unfaithfulness? Just betrayal? Just breaking my fucking heart?”

  “Stop it, please, stop it! What can I do? What can I do to make it right again?”

  Andrew said he didn’t know. Andrew cried down the phone. These were two things he had never done. The not knowing, and the crying. Hearing Andrew weeping over the crackling phone line, I began to cry too. When we both dried up, there was silence. And this silence had a new quality in it: the knowledge that there had been something left to cry over, after all. The realization hung on the phone line. Tentative, like a life waiting to be written.

  “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. Tha
t’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?”

  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.”