by Chris Cleave
“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 resignation 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 unhesitating, 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?”
“Yes. I can’t relax. I can’t stop running it over and over in my head.”
Lawrence sighed. “So what about us?” he said. “Do you think you’re going to find time for us again, one of these days?”
“Oh, of course I will. You and me, we’ve got plenty of time, haven’t we? We’ll still be here in six weeks, six months, six years. We’ve got time to work this out. We’ve got time to work out how to be together, now that Andrew’s gone. But Little Bee doesn’t have that time. You said it yourself. If I can’t fix things for her, they’ll find her and they’ll deport her. And she’ll be gone, and that will be that. And what sort of a future would we have then? I wouldn’t be able to look at you without thinking I should have done more to save her. Is that the future you want us to have?”
“Oh god. Why can’t you be like other people and just not give a shit?”
“Leggy blonde, likes music and movies, seeks solvent man for friendship and maybe more?”
“All right. I’m glad you’re not one of them. But I don’t want to lose you to a refugee girl who’s really got no hope of staying here
anyway.”
“Oh, Lawrence. You’re not going to lose me. But you might have to share me with her for a while.”
Lawrence laughed.
“What?” I said.
“Well it’s just typical, isn’t it? These immigrants, they come over here, they take our women …”
Lawrence was smiling but there was a guardedness is his eyes, an opaqueness that made me wonder how funny he found his own joke. It was strange, to feel uncertain like this with him. Truly, he had never seemed at all complicated before. Then again, I realized, I had never invested anything complicated in him until now. Perhaps it was me. I made myself relax, and I smiled back. I kissed him on the forehead.
“Thank you. Thank you for not making this harder than it is.”
Lawrence stared at me, and his face was thin and sad in the orange glow of the streetlamps filtering in through the yellow silk blinds. The flutter in my stomach surprised me, and I realized that the hairs on my arms were up.
“Sarah,” he said, “I honestly don’t think you know how hard this is.”
VERY EARLY THE NEXT morning, Sarah looked into my room.
“I’m glad you’re awake,” she said. “We’ve run out of milk for Charlie’s breakfast, so I’m popping down to the shop before he wakes up. Two minutes. Do you want to come?”
It was raining, so we went in Sarah’s car. The windscreen wipers squeaked across the glass. Sarah chewed her lip between her teeth.
“Look,” she said. “Lawrence staying overnight. I realize it must look a bit sudden. So I wanted to have this chat with you. I just wanted you to understand.”
I laughed. Sarah was surprised and she looked across at me.
“It is not hard to understand,” I said. “We are all trying to be happy in this world. I am happy because I do not think the men will come to kill me today. You are happy because you can make your own choices. And Lawrence is your choice, right?”
Sarah laughed and shook her head while she steered through the rain.
“Well,” she said. “That was a lot easier than I thought it would be.”
I smiled. It was good to see her laughing like this.
I said to her, “I do not think you are wrong for living the life you were born in. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf, that is the proverb in my country.”
“That’s beautiful,” said Sarah.
“Actually that is not the proverb in my country.”
“No?”
“No! Why would we have a proverb with wolves in it? We have two hundred proverbs about monkeys, three hundred about cassava. We talk about what we know. But I have noticed, in your country, I can say anything so long as I say that is the proverb in my country. Then people will nod their heads and look very serious.”
Sarah laughed again.
“That is a good trick,” she said. “Isn’t that what you say, Bee?”
I smiled. Happiness for Sarah was a long future where she could live the life of her choice. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf and a bee must be a bee. And when they run out of milk, all God’s creatures must go to the shop.
Sarah looked across at me from the driving seat.
“Bless you for understanding,” she said.
I understood, but Sarah’s happiness and Sarah’s future are more things I would have to explain to the girls from back home.
A country’s future is found in its natural resources. It is my country’s biggest export. It leaves so quickly through our seaports, the girls from my village could never even see it and they could not know what it looked like. Actually the future looks like gasoline. I discovered this when I was reading the newspapers in the detention center, and finally I made sense of what had happened to me back home. What had happened was, the oil companies had discovered a huge reserve of the future underneath my village. To be precise what they discovered was crude oil, which is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.
The men came while we were preparing the evening meal, while the blue wood smoke mixed with the thick steam of the cassava pots in the golden evening sun. It happened so quickly that the women had to grab us children and run with us into the jungle. We hid there while we listened to the screams of the men who stayed behind to fight.
On the dashboard of Sarah’s car, a light went on.
“Oh,” she said. “We need petrol.”
Water sprayed up off the rainy road. Sarah turned the car into a service station. We got out. There were no other cars. I listened to the rain beating down on the canopy above the gasoline pumps. Sarah looked at me as she held the gasoline hose.
“Do you still want to stay?” she said.
I nodded.
The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high-pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it. The nozzle of the gasoline hose went right inside the fuel tank of Sarah’s car, so that the transfer of the fluid was hidden. I still do not know what gasoline truly looks like. If it looks the way it smells on a rainy morning, then I suppose it must flash like the most brilliant happiness, so intense that you would go blind or crazy if you even looked at it. Maybe that is why they do not let us see gasoline.
When the filling was finished, Sarah went inside the service-station shop to pay. She came out with a large plastic bottle of milk, and we drove back to the house. It was still only six thirty in the morning.
Sarah closed the front door behind us and she yawned.
“Charlie won’t be up for an hour at least,” she said. “I think I might go back to bed.”
I nodded. Sarah smiled. On her face was a look of relief. I realized: this is what you can do for her, Little Bee. You can understand.
I went into the kitchen and I filled the kettle to make myself a drink of tea.
Understanding. That would have been a good name for my village, even before the men came to burn our huts and drill for oil. It would have been a good name for the clearing around the limba tree where we children swung on that bald old car tire, and bounced on the seats of my father’s broken Peugeot and my uncle’s broken Mercedes, with the springs poking out from them, and where we chanted church songs from a hymnbook with the covers missing and the pages held together with tape. We knew what we had: we had nothing. Your world and our world had come to this understanding. Even the missionaries had boarded up their mission. They left us with the holy books that were not worth the expense of shipping back to your country. In our village our only Bible had all of its pages missing after the forty-sixth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew, so that the end of our religion, as far as any of us knew, was My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me? We understood that this was the end of the story.
That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one. From the rest of the world all we knew was from that one old movie. About a man who was in a great hurry, sometimes in jet planes and sometimes on motorbikes and sometimes upside down.
From the windup radios we had a little news, but mostly music. We also had a TV, but in Understanding there was no reception and you had to make the programs yourself. Our TV was just a wooden frame around where the screen used to be, and the frame sat in the red dust underneath the limba tree, and my sister Nkiruka used to put her head inside the frame to do the pictures. This is a good trick. I know now that we should have called this, reality television.
My sister used to adjust the bow on her dress, and put a flower in her hair just so, and smile through the screen and say: Hello, this is the news from the British BBC, today ice cream will snow down from the sky and no one will have to walk to the river for water because the engineers will come from the city and put a stand pipe in the middle of the village. And the rest of us children, we would all sit in a half circle around the television set and we would watch Nkiruka announcing the news. We loved these dreams of
hers. In the pleasant afternoon shade we would gasp with delight and all of us would say, Weh!
One of the good things about Understanding was that you could talk back to television. The rest of us children, we used to shout at Nkiruka:
—This ice-cream snow, exactly what time will it occur?
—In the early evening, of course, when the day is cooler.
—How do you know this, Madam Television Announcer?
—Because the day must be cool enough or the ice cream would melt, of course. Do you children know nothing?
And we children would sit back and nod at one another—evidently the day would need to be cool enough first. We were very satisfied with the television news.
You can play the same trick with television in your country, but it is harder because the television sets do not listen. Early in the morning, after Sarah had gone back to bed when we came home from the service station, it was Charlie who wanted to turn the television on. He appeared in the kitchen in his bat costume and bare feet. I said, Good morning, little bat, do you want breakfast? He said, No, I doesn’t want breakfast, I does want TELEVISION. So I said, Does your mummy say it is okay for you to watch television before breakfast? Charlie looked at me and his eyes were very patient, like a teacher who has told you the answer three times already but you have forgotten it. Mummy is asleep, actually, he said.
So we went into the next room and we switched on the television. We looked at the pictures without the sound. It was the BBC morning news, and they were showing pictures of the prime minister making a speech. Charlie put his head on one side to watch. The ears of his Batman hood flopped over.
He said, “That is the Joker, isn’t it?”
“No Charlie. That is the prime minister.”
“Is he a goody or a baddy?”
I thought to myself.
“Half the people think he is a goody and the other half think he is a baddy.”
Charlie giggled. “That’s silly,” he said.
“That is democracy,” I said. “If you did not have it, you would want it.”
We sat and watched the prime minister’s lips moving.