by Chris Cleave
My hands were shaking. Lawrence took a deep breath. His hands were shaking too.
“Oh god, this is serious,” he said. “This is very, very serious.”
“Do you see now? Do you see why I want to help Sarah so much? Do you see why I want to help Charlie? I made the wrong choice, Lawrence. I let Andrew die. Now I must do everything I can to make things right.”
Lawrence was walking up and down the kitchen. He was holding the dressing gown closed around him, and his fingers were twisting on the cloth. He stopped and looked at me.
“Does Sarah know any of this?”
I shook my head.
“I am scared to tell her. I think if I tell her then she will make me go away from here, and then I will not be able to help her, and then there will be no way for me to make up for the bad thing I did. And if I cannot make up for it, then I do not know what I will do. I cannot run away again. There is nowhere to go. I have discovered the person I am and I do not like her. I am the same as Andrew. I am the same as you. I tried to save myself. Tell me, please, where is the refuge from that?”
Lawrence stared at me.
“What you did is a crime,” he said. “Now I don’t have a choice. I have to go to the police.”
I started to cry. “Please, don’t go to the police. They will take me away. I just want to help Sarah. Don’t you want to help Sarah?”
“I love Sarah, so don’t fucking well talk to me about helping her. Do you really think it was helpful to come here?”
I was sobbing now. “Please,” I said. “Please.”
There were tears running down my face. Lawrence slammed his hand down on the table.
“Shit!” he said.
“I’m sorry, Lawrence, I’m sorry.”
Lawrence slapped the palm of his hand against his forehead.
“Oh you fucking bitch,” he said. “I can’t go to the police, can I? I can’t let Sarah find out. Her head is fucked up enough about all this. If she knows you were there when Andrew died, she’ll lose it. And it would be the end of me and her, of course it would. I couldn’t go to the police without Linda finding out. This would be all over the newspapers. But I don’t even want to think what this is going to be like, being with Sarah when I know this and she doesn’t. And the police! Fuck! If I don’t tell the police I’m as culpable as you are. What if it gets out and they realize I knew all along? I’m the one who’s been sleeping with the dead man’s wife, for fuck’s sake. I’ve got motive. I could go to prison. If I don’t pick up the phone and call the police, right now, then I could go to prison for you, Little Bee. Do you understand that? I could go to prison for you when I don’t even know your real name.”
I folded my two hands over Lawrence’s hand and I looked up into his face. I could not see him at all, just a pale shape against the light, blurry with tears.
“Please. I have to stay here. I have to make up for what I did. Please, Lawrence. I will tell nobody about you and Sarah, and you must tell nobody about me. I am asking you to save me. I am asking you to save my life.”
Lawrence tried to pull his hand away but I held on to it. I put my forehead against his arm.
“Please,” I said. “We can be friends. We can save each other.”
“Oh god,” he said quietly, “I wish you hadn’t told me any of this.”
“You made me tell you, Lawrence. I am sorry. I know what I am asking you. I know it will hurt you to keep the truth from Sarah. It is like asking you to cut off a finger for me.”
Lawrence pulled his hand out from under my hands. Then he took his hand away completely. I sat at the table with my eyes closed and I felt the skin of my forehead itching where it had rested on his arm. It was quiet in the kitchen, and I waited. I do not know how long I waited for. I waited till my tears were dry and the terror inside me was all gone and the only thing left was a quiet, dull misery that made my head and my eyeballs ache. There was no thought in my head, then. I was just waiting.
And then I felt Lawrence’s hands on my cheeks. He cupped my face in his hands. I did not know if I was supposed to push his hands away or to place my hands upon his. We stayed like that for a little while and Lawrence’s hands trembled on my cheeks. He turned my face up toward his, so I had to look into his eyes.
“I wish I could just make you disappear,” he said. “But I’m nobody. I’m just a civil servant. I won’t tell the police about you. Not if you keep quiet. But if you tell anyone, ever, about Sarah and me, or if you tell anyone, ever, about what happened with Andrew, I will have you on a plane to Nigeria, I swear. It will be the last thing I do before my life falls apart.”
I breathed out one long, deep breath.
“I understand,” I whispered.
Sarah’s voice came from upstairs. “Who said you could watch TV, Batman?”
Lawrence took his hands away from my face and he went to make more tea. Sarah came into the kitchen. She was yawning, and her eyes were screwed up against the sunlight. Charlie came with her, holding her hand.
“I might as well tell you two grown-ups the rules,” said Sarah, “since you’re both new around here. Superheroes, especially Dark Knights, are not allowed to watch television before they’ve eaten their breakfast. Are they, Batman?”
Charlie grinned at her and shook his head.
“Right,” said Sarah. “Bat flakes or bat toast?”
“Bat toast,” said Charlie.
Sarah went to the toaster and put two slices of bread into it. Lawrence and I, we both just watched her. Sarah turned around.
“Is everything all right in here?” she said. She looked at me. “Have you been crying?”
“It is nothing,” I said. “I always cry in the morning.”
Sarah frowned at Lawrence. “I hope you’ve been looking after her.”
“Of course,” said Lawrence. “Little Bee and I have been getting to know one another.”
Sarah nodded. “Good,” she said. “Because we really have to make this work. You both know that, don’t you?”
She looked at each of us and then she yawned again, and she stretched her arms. “Fresh start,” she said.
I looked at Lawrence and Lawrence looked at me.
“Now,” said Sarah. “I’m going to take Charlie to nursery and then we can start to track down Little Bee’s papers. We’ll find you a solicitor first. I know a good one that we sometimes use on the magazine.”
Sarah smiled, and she went over to Lawrence.
“And as for you,” she said, “I’m going to find a little time to thank you for coming all the way to Birmingham.”
She put her hand up to Lawrence’s face, but then I think she remembered that Charlie was in the room and so she just brushed her hand against his shoulder instead. I went into the next room to watch the television news with the sound turned off.
The news announcer looked so much like my sister. My heart was overflowing with things to say. But in your country, you cannot talk back to the news.
I REMEMBER THE EXACT day when England became me, when its contours cleaved to the curves of my own body, when its inclinations became my own. As a girl, on a bike ride through the Surrey lanes, pedaling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum where a stream ran beneath the flint-and-brick bridge. Coming to a stop, the brakes squealing from the work of plucking one still moment out of time. Throwing my bicycle down into a pungent cushion of cow parsley and wild mint, and sliding down the plunging bank into the clear cold water, my sandals kicking up a quick brown bloom of mud from the streambed, the minnows darting away into the black pool of shade beneath the bridge. Pressing my face into the water, with time utterly suspended, drinking in the cool shock. And then, looking up and seeing a fox. He was sunning himself on the far bank, watching me through a feathery screen of barley. I looked back at him, and his amber eyes held mine. The moment, the country: I realized it was me. I found a soft patch of wild grass and cornflower by the si
de of the barley field, and I lay down with my face close to the damp earthen smell of the grass roots, listening to the buzzing of the summer flies. I cried, but I didn’t know why.
The morning after Lawrence stayed overnight, I dropped off Charlie at nursery and I went home to see what I could do to help Little Bee. I found her upstairs, watching television with the sound turned off. She looked so sad.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
Little Bee shrugged.
“Is everything okay with Lawrence?”
She looked away.
“What is it, then?”
Nothing.
“Maybe you’re homesick. I know I would be. Do you miss your country?”
She turned to look at me and her eyes were very solemn.
“Sarah,” she said, “I do not think I have left my country. I think it has traveled with me.”
She turned back to the television. That’s all right, I thought. There’ll be plenty of time to get through to her.
I tidied the kitchen while Lawrence was showering. I made myself a coffee and I realized, for the first time since Andrew died, that I had taken only one cup down from the cupboard instead of my instinctual two. I stirred in the milk, the spoon clinked against the china, and I realized I was losing the habit of being Andrew’s wife. How strange, I thought. I smiled, and realized I felt strong enough to put in an appearance at the magazine.
At my usual time the commuter train was crowded with pinstripes and laptop bags, but now it was ten thirty in the morning and the train ran nearly empty. The boy opposite me stared at the carriage’s ceiling. He wore an England shirt and blue jeans, white with plaster dust. Tattooed on the inside of his forearm, in a Gothic typeface, were the words: THIS IS A TIME FOR HERO’S. I stared at the tattoo—at the fixity of its pride and its broken grammar. When I looked up the boy was watching me back, his amber eyes calm and unblinking. I blushed, and stared out of the window at the flickering back gardens of the semis.
The train braked as we neared Waterloo. There was a sensation of being between worlds. The brake shoes squealed against the train’s metal wheels and I felt eight years old again. Here I was, converging with my magazine on unflinching rails. Soon I would arrive at a terminus and have to prove that I could step off this carriage and back into my grown-up job. When the train stopped I turned to say something to the boy with amber eyes, but he had already stood from his seat and disappeared back into the cover of the barley field beneath the shade of the sheltering woods.
I arrived on the editorial floor at eleven thirty. The place went quiet. All the girls stared at me. I smiled and clapped my hands.
“Come on, back to work!” I said. “When a hundred thousand ABC-1 urban professional women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five lose focus then so will we, but not until.”
At the far end of the open plan, Clarissa was sitting behind my desk. She stood when I walked over, and came around to the front. Her lip gloss was iridescent plum. She held her hands around mine.
“Oh Sarah,” she said. “You poor old thing. How are you coping?”
She was wearing an aubergine shirt dress with a smooth black fish-skin belt and glossy black knee-high boots. I realized I was wearing the jeans I had taken Batman to nursery in.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Clarissa looked me up and down, and furrowed her brow.
“Really?” she said.
“Really.”
“Oh. Well, that’s great.”
I looked over my desk. Clarissa’s laptop sat in the center, next to her Kelly bag. My papers had been shunted to the far end.
“We didn’t think you’d be in,” said Clarissa. “You don’t mind me usurping your throne, do you darling?”
I saw the way she had plugged her BlackBerry into my charger.
“No,” I said, “of course not.”
“We thought you’d like us to get a head start on the July issue.”
I was conscious of eyes watching us from all around the office. I smiled.
“Yes that’s great,” I said. “Really. So what have we got so far?”
“For this issue? Wouldn’t you like to sit down first? Let me get you a coffee, you must feel terrible.”
“My husband died, Clarissa. I am still alive. I have a son to look after and a mortgage to pay. I’d just like to get straight back to work.”
Clarissa took a step back.
“Fine,” she said. “Well, we’ve got some great stuff. It’s Henley month, of course, so we’re doing an ironic what-not-to-wear for the regatta, which is a cunning pretext for some pics of gorgeous rowers, bien évidemment. For fashion we’re doing something called ‘Fuck Your Boyfriend’—see what we did there? That’s going to be girls with whips snarling at boys in Duckie Brown, basically. And for the ‘Real Life’ slot there’s two choices. Either we go with this piece called ‘Beauty and the Budget’ about a woman with two ugly daughters and only enough money to pay for cosmetic surgery for one of them. Ugh—yes—I know. Or—my preference—we’ve got a piece called ‘Good Vibrations,’ and I’m telling you, it’s an eye opener. I mean, my god, Sarah, some of the sex toys you can buy online these days, they’re solutions to desires I had no idea existed, god save us all.”
I closed my eyes and listened to the hum of the fluorescent lights, the buzzing of fax machines, and the fluid chatter of the editorial girls on their phones to fashion houses. It all seemed suddenly insane, like wearing a little green bikini to an African war. I breathed out slowly, and opened my eyes.
“So which piece do you want to go with?” said Clarissa. “Cosmetic conundrum, or carnal cornucopia?”
I walked over to the window and rolled my forehead against the glass.
“Please don’t do that, Sarah. It makes me nervous when you do that.”
“I’m thinking.”
“I know, darling. That’s why it makes me nervous, because I know what you’re thinking. We have this argument every month. But we have to run the stories people read. You know we do.”
I shrugged. “My son is convinced he will lose all his powers if he takes off his Batman costume.”
“And your point is?”
“That we can be deluded. That we can be mistaken in our beliefs.”
“You think I am?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore, Clar. About the magazine, I mean. It all seems a bit unreal suddenly.”
“Of course it does, you poor thing. I don’t even know why you came in today. It’s far too early.”
I nodded. “That’s what Lawrence said too.”
“You should listen to him.”
“I do. I’m lucky to have him, I really am. I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.”
Clarissa came and stood next to me at the window.
“Have you spoken with him much, since Andrew died?”
“He’s at my house,” I said. “He showed up last night.”
“He stayed overnight? He’s married, isn’t he?”
“Don’t be like that. He was a married man before Andrew died.”
Clarissa shivered. “I know. It’s just a bit creepy, that’s all.”
“Is it?”
Clarissa blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Sudden, I suppose I mean.”
“Well it wasn’t my idea, if you must know.”
“In which case I revert to my original choice of word. Creepy.”
Now we both stood with our foreheads against the glass, looking down at the traffic.
“I actually came here to talk about work,” I said after a while.
“Fine.”
“I want us to go back to the kind of article we did while we were making our name. Let’s just, for once, put a real-life feature in the ‘Real Life’ slot. That’s all I’m saying. I won’t let you talk me out of it this time.”
“What, then? What kind of a feature?”
“I want us to do a piece on refugees to the UK. Don’t worry, we can do it in the style of the ma
gazine. We can make it about women refugees if you like.”
Clarissa rolled her eyes.
“And yet something in your tone tells me you’re not talking about women refugees with sex toys.”
I smiled.
“What if I said no?” said Clarissa.
“I don’t know. Technically, I suppose, I could sack you.”
Clarissa thought for a moment.
“Why refugees?” she said. “Is this because you’re still cross we didn’t go with the Baghdad woman in the June issue?”
“I just think it’s an issue that isn’t going to go away. May, June, or anytime soon.”
“Fine,” said Clarissa. Then she said, “Would you really sack me, darling?”
“I don’t know. Would you really say no?”
“I don’t know.”
We stood for a long time. In the street below, an Italian-looking boy was cycling past the traffic queue. Mid-twenties, shirtless and tanned, in short white nylon shorts.
“Five,” said Clarissa.
“Out of ten?”
“Out of five, darling.”
I laughed. “There are days when I would cheerfully swap lives with you, Clar.”
Clarissa turned to me. I noticed the very slight mark of foundation left on the windowpane where her forehead had been. It hovered like a light flesh-toned cloud over the bone-white spire of Christ Church Spitalfields.