by Chris Cleave
“Oh Sarah,” said Clarissa. “We go too far back to let one another down. You’re the boss. Of course I’ll get you a feature on refugees, if you really want it. But I really don’t think you understand how quickly people’s eyes will glaze over. It isn’t an issue that affects anyone’s own life, that’s the problem.”
I felt a lurching vertigo and I took a step back from the glass.
“You’ll just have to find an angle,” I said shakily.
Clarissa stared at me. “You’re bereaved, Sarah. You’re not thinking straight. You’re not ready to be back at work yet.”
“You want my job, is that it Clar?”
She reddened. “You didn’t say that,” she said.
I sat down on the edge of the desk and massaged my temples with my thumbs.
“No, I didn’t. God. I’m so sorry. Anyway, maybe you should have my job. I’m losing the plot, I really am. I don’t see the point in it anymore.”
Clarissa sighed. “I don’t want your job, Sarah.”
She waved her long nails in the direction of the editorial floor.
“They’re still hungry for it, Sarah. Maybe you should move on and let one of them have the job.”
“Do you think they really deserve it?”
“Did we deserve it, at their age?”
“I don’t know, Clarissa. All I remember is how badly I wanted it. Didn’t it seem so thrilling, back then? I thought I could take on the world, I really did. Make real-life issues sexy. Be challenging, remember? The bloody name of our magazine, Clar. Remember why we chose it? Nixie, for heaven’s sake. We were going to bring them in with sex and then immerse them in the issues. We weren’t going to let anyone teach us how to run a magazine. We were going to teach them, remember? Whatever happened to us wanting that?”
“What happened to wanting, Sarah, was getting a few of the things we wanted.”
I smiled, and sat down at my desk. I scrolled through the mocked-up pages on Clarissa’s screen.
“These are actually pretty good,” I said.
“Of course they’re good, darling, I’ve been doing the exact same story every single month for ten years. Cosmetic surgery and sex toys I can do with my eyes closed.”
I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. Clarissa put her hand on my shoulder.
“But seriously, Sarah?”
“Mmm?”
“Please just give yourself a day to think about it, will you? The refugee piece, I mean. You’re in a state at the moment, with everything that’s happened. Why don’t you take tomorrow off, just to make sure you’re sure, and if you are sure then of course I’ll make it happen for you. But if you’re not sure, then let’s not throw away our careers over it right now, okay darling?”
I opened my eyes. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll take a day.”
Clarissa sagged with relief. “Thank you, doll. Because it’s not so bad, what we do. Really. No one dies when we write about fashion.”
I looked out over the editorial floor and saw the girls watching me back: speculative, excited, predatory.
I took another half-empty train back to Kingston and arrived home at two in the afternoon. It was hot and hazy, with a stillness and a heaviness to the day. We needed some rain to break it.
Lawrence was in the kitchen when I got back home. I put the kettle on.
“Where’s Bee?”
“She’s in the garden.”
I looked out and saw her, lying on the grass, at the far end of the garden beside the laurel bush.
“She seem okay to you?”
He just shrugged.
“What is it? You two really haven’t hit it off, have you?”
“It’s not that,” said Lawrence.
“There’s a tension though, isn’t there? I can feel it.”
I realized I had stirred one of the tea bags until it burst. I drained the mug into the sink and started again.
Lawrence stood behind me and put his arms around my waist.
“It’s you who seems tense,” he said. “Is it work?”
I leaned my head backward onto his shoulder and sighed.
“Work was hideous,” I said. “I lasted forty minutes. I’m wondering if I should quit.”
He sighed into the back of my neck.
“I knew it,” he said. “I knew something like this was coming.”
I looked out at Little Bee, lying on her back, watching the hazy sky filling in with gray.
“Do you remember what it felt like to be her age? Or Charlie’s age? Do you remember back when you felt you could actually do something to make the world better?”
“You’re talking to the wrong man. I work for central government, remember? Actually doing something is the mistake we’re trained to avoid.”
“Stop it, Lawrence, I’m being serious.”
“Did I ever think I could change the world? Is that your question?”
“Yes.”
“A bit, maybe. When I first joined the civil service, I suppose I was quite idealistic.”
“When did it change?”
“When I realized we weren’t going to change the world. Certainly not if that involved implementing any computer systems. Round about lunchtime on the first day.”
I smiled and put my mouth close to Lawrence’s ear.
“Well you’ve changed my world,” I said.
Lawrence swallowed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes I suppose I have.”
Behind us the icemaker dropped another cube. We stood for a while and looked out at Little Bee.
“Look at her,” I said. “I’m so scared. Do you really think I can save her?”
Lawrence shrugged. “Maybe you can. And don’t take this the wrong way, but so what? Save her and there’s a whole world of them behind her. A whole swarm of Little Bees, coming here to feed.”
“Or to pollinate,” I said.
“I think that’s naive,” said Lawrence.
“I think my features editor would agree with you.”
Lawrence massaged my shoulders and I closed my eyes.
“What’s eating you?” said Lawrence.
“I can’t seem to use the magazine to make a difference,” I said. “But that’s how it was conceived. It was meant to have an edge. It was never meant to be just another fashion rag.”
“So what’s stopping you?”
“Every time we put in something deep and meaningful, the circulation drops.”
“So people’s lives are hard enough. You can see how they might not want to be reminded that everyone else’s lives are shit too.”
“I suppose so. Maybe Andrew was right after all. Maybe I need to grow up and get a grown-up’s job.”
Lawrence held me close.
“Or maybe you should relax for a little while and just enjoy what you’ve got.”
I looked out at the garden. The sky was darker now. It seemed the rain couldn’t be far off.
“Little Bee has changed me, Lawrence. I can’t look at her without thinking how shallow my life is.”
“Sarah, you’re talking absolute shit. We see the world’s problems every day on television. Don’t tell me this is the first time you’ve realized they’re real. Don’t tell me those people wouldn’t swap lives with you if they could. Their lives are fucked up. But fucking up your life too? That isn’t going to help them.”
“Well I’m not helping them now, am I?”
“How could you possibly do more? You cut off a finger to save that girl. And now you’re sheltering her. Food, lodging, solicitor … none of that comes cheap. You’re taking down a good salary and you’re spending it to help.”
“Ten percent. That’s all I’m giving her. One finger in ten. Ten pounds in every hundred. Ten percent is hardly a wholehearted commitment.”
“Reevaluate that. Ten percent is the cost of doing business. Ten percent buys you a stable world to get on with your life in. Here, safe in the West. That’s the way to think of it. If everyone gave ten percent, we wouldn’t need to give
asylum.”
“You still want me to kick her out, don’t you?”
Lawrence spun me round to look at him. There was something in his eyes that looked almost like panic, and at that moment it troubled me for reasons I could not fathom.
“No,” he said. “Absolutely not. You keep her and you look after her. But please, please don’t throw your own life away. I care about you too much for that. I care about us too much.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I really don’t.” I sighed. “I miss Andrew,” I said.
Lawrence took his hands from my waist, and took a step back.
“Oh please,” I said. “That came out all wrong. I just mean, he was so good with the ordinary things. He was no nonsense, you know? He would just say to me, Don’t be so bloody foolish, Sarah. Of course you shall keep your job. And I would feel awful because of the way he would talk to me, but I would keep my job and then of course he’d turn out to be right, which was even worse in a way. But I miss him, Lawrence. It’s funny how you can miss someone like that.”
Lawrence stood against the opposite counter, watching me.
“So what do you want from me?” he said. “You want me to start getting on my high horse like Andrew did?”
I smiled. “Oh, come here,” I said.
I hugged him, and breathed in the soft, clean smell of his skin.
“I’m being impossible again, aren’t I?”
“You’re being bereaved. It’s going to take a while for all the pieces to fall into place. It’s good that you’re taking a look at your life, really it is, but I don’t think you should rush into anything, you know? If you still feel like quitting your job in six months’ time, then do it by all means. But right now your job is paying for you to do something worthwhile. It is possible to do good things with an imperfect situation. God knows, I should know.”
I blinked back tears. “Compromise, eh? Isn’t it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee’s age, and you realize that some of the world’s badness is inside you, that maybe you’re a part of it. And then you get a little bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you’ve seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten percent.”
“Maybe that’s just developing as a person, Sarah.”
I sighed, and looked out at Little Bee.
“Well,” I said. “Maybe this is a developing world.”
I WILL TELL YOU what happened, the day my story changed. It began very early in the morning, after the second night Lawrence stayed at Sarah’s house. It was still just dark. I was lying on the bed in the room Sarah gave me, but I was not sleeping. I was trying to see my future, but I could not see it at all.
Sarah came into the room about the same time as the daylight.
“How did you sleep?” she said.
“I heard the owls calling. Outside the window.”
“That’s nice. That’s one of the good things about living out of town.”
I rubbed my eyes and sat up on the bed.
Sarah said, “I’m taking the day off work. I thought we could go into London.”
I dropped my hands back down onto the blankets. I said, “I like it here.”
Sarah shook her head. “These are the suburbs,” she said. “Nothing ever happens here.”
I said, “That is why I like it.”
“Don’t be silly! Let’s all go to London. It’s a beautiful day, we’ll laze about on the South Bank and just watch the world go by. Charlie loves it there. Come on, it’ll be an adventure for you.”
I stood up and I said, Okay.
What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.
When we were children, me and Nkiruka, there was a place we went in the jungle near our village, a secret place, and that was where we played houses. The last time we went on that adventure my big sister was ten years old and I was eight. We were already too old for the game and both of us knew it, but we agreed to dream our dream one last time so that we could fix it into our memories, before we awoke from it forever.
We crept out of our village in the quietest part of the night. It was the year before the trouble first began with the oil, and two years before my sister started smiling at the older boys, so you can see that it was a peaceful time for our village of Understanding. There were no sentries guarding the road where the houses ended, and we walked out with no one to ask us where we were going. We did not walk out straightaway, though. First we had to wait until the rest of the village was asleep. It took longer than usual because the moon was full, and so bright that it gleamed on the metal roofs and sparkled on the bowl of water that me and my sister kept in our room to wash our faces with. The moon made the dogs and the old people restless, and there were long hours of barking and grumbling before silence came to the last of the houses.
Me and Nkiruka, we watched through the window until the moon grew to an extraordinary size, so big that it filled the window frame. We could see the face of the man in the moon, so close that we could see the madness in his eyes. The moon made everything glow so brightly it felt like day, and not an ordinary day at all but a baffling day, an extra day, like the sixth toe of a cat or like a secret message that you find hidden between the pages of a book you have read many times before and found nothing. The moon shone on the limba tree and it gleamed on the old broken Peugeot and it sparkled on the ghost of the Mercedes. Everything glowed with this pale dark brightness. That is when Nkiruka and I walked out into the night.
The animals and the birds were acting strangely. The monkeys were not howling and the night birds were quiet. We walked out through such a silence, I am not joking, it was as if the little silver clouds that drifted across the face of the moon were leaning down to the earth and whispering, shhh. Nkiruka’s eyes when she looked over at me, they were scared and excited at the same time. We held hands and we walked the mile through the cassava fields to the place where the jungle started. The paths of red earth between the rows of cassava, they gleamed in the moonlight like the rib bones of giants. When we reached the jungle it was silent and dark.
We did not speak, we just walked in before we got too scared. We walked for a long time, and the path got narrower, and the leaves and the branches closed in on us tighter and tighter until we had to walk one behind the other. The branches began closing in on the path so that we had to crouch down. Soon we could not carry on at all. So Nkiruka said, this is not the right path, now we must turn around, and we turned around. But that is when we realized that we were not on a path at all, because the branches and the plants were still very tight all around us. We carried on for a little way, weaving around the plants, but very soon we realized we had missed the path and we were lost.
Under the jungle it was so dark we could not see our own hands, and we held on to each other very close so we would not get separated. All around us now we could hear the noises of the jungle animals moving in the undergrowth, and of course they were very small animals, just rats and shrews and jungle pigs, but in the dark they became huge for us, as big as our fear and growing with it. We did not feel like pretending we had a refrigerator or a washing machine. It did not seem like the kind of night where such appliances would help.
I started to cry because the darkness was complete and I did not think it would ever end. But Nkiruka, she held me close and she rocked me and she whispered to me, Do not be sad, little sister.
What is my name? And through my sobs I said, Your name is Nkiruka. And my sister rubbed my head and she said, Yes, that is right. My name means “the future is bright.” See? Would our mother and our father have given me this name if it was not true? As long as you are with me, little sister, the darkness will not last forever. I stopped crying then, and I fell asleep with my head on my sister’s shoulder.
I woke up before Nkiruka. I was cold, and it was dawn. The jungle birds were waking up and there was a pale light all around us, a thin gray-green light. All around us there were low fern plants and ground creepers, and the leaves were dripping with the dew. I stood up and took a few steps forward, because it seemed to me that the light was brighter in that direction. I pushed aside a low branch, and that is when I saw it. There was a very old jeep in the undergrowth. Its tires had rotted away to nothing and the creepers and the ferns were growing out through the arches of its wheels. The black plastic seats were tattered and the short rusty springs were poking out through them. Fungus was growing on the doors. The jeep was pointed away from me, and I walked closer.
I saw that the jungle and the jeep had grown together, so that there was no telling where the one ended and the other began—whether the jungle grew out of the jeep or the jeep grew out of the jungle. The foot wells of the jeep were filled with the rotted leaves of many seasons, and all the jeep’s metal had become the same dark color as the fallen leaves and the earth. Lying across the front seats there was the skeleton of a man. At first I did not see it because the skeleton was dressed in clothes the same color as the leaves, but the clothes were so torn and ragged that the white bones shone through them in the early-morning light. It looked as if the skeleton had become tired from driving and he had laid himself down across the two front seats to sleep. His skull lay on the dashboard, a little way apart from the rest of the skeleton. He was looking up at a small bright patch of sky, high above us through a gap in the forest canopy. I know this because the skull was wearing sunglasses and the sky was reflected in one of the lenses. A snail had crawled across this lens and eaten all the green mold and dirt off it, and it was in the glistening trail of this creature that the glass reflected the sky. Now the snail was halfway along one arm of the sunglasses. I went closer to look. The sunglasses had thin gold frames. On the corner of the lens that reflected the sky, the snail had crawled across the place where the glasses said Ray-Ban. I supposed that this had been the man’s name, because I was young and my troubles had still not found me and I did not yet understand that there could be reasons for wearing a name that was not one’s own.