Little Bee (16 page)

“You
want the honest answer?”

“Apparently not.”

“I
have talked honestly and you haven’t listened.”

Around
me the house was dark and silent. The only sound was the rattle of the ice
cubes in my drink. When I spoke, my voice had a break in it.

“I’m
listening now, Lawrence. God knows I’m listening now.”

A brief silence.
Then another voice carried over the line. It
was Lawrence’s wife Linda, shouting in the background:
Who’s
on the phone?
And Lawrence shouted back:
Just
someone from work.

Oh,
Lawrence. As if one would throw in that “just,” if it really was someone from
work. You would simply say,
It’s
work,
wouldn’t you? I thought about Linda then, and how
it must feel to have to share Lawrence with me.
Her cold
fury—not at the necessity of sharing, but at Lawrence’s naïveté in imagining
that Linda didn’t absolutely
know.
I thought
about how the deceit must have acquired a certain uneven symmetry in their
couple. I imagined the drab and ordinary lover that Linda would have taken in
revenge—in spite and in haste. Oh, it was too awful. Out of respect for Linda,
I hung up.

I
steadied the hand that gripped my G&T and I looked over at Little Bee,
sleeping. The memories from the beach swirled in my mind, inchoate, senseless,
awful
. I called Lawrence again.

“Can
you come over?”

“I’d
love to but I can’t tonight. Linda’s going out with a friend and I’ve got the
kids.”

“Can
you get a babysitter?”

I
realized I sounded plaintive, and I cursed myself for it. Lawrence had picked
up my tone too.

“Darling?”
he said. “You know I’d come if I could, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Will
you cope okay without me?”

“Of course.”

“How?”

“Oh,
I daresay I’ll cope the way British women always used to cope, before the
invention of weakness.”

Lawrence
laughed.
“Fine.
Look, you said you wanted advice. Can
we talk about it on the phone?”

“Yes.
Of course.
I. Look. I need to tell you something. It’s
all got a little bit complicated. Little Bee turned up here this morning.”

“Who?”

“One of the Nigerian girls.
From that day on
the beach.”

“Jesus!
I thought you said the men killed her.”

“I
was sure they had. I saw the men drag her off.
Her and the
other one.
I watched them being dragged kicking and screaming up the
beach. I watched them till they were tiny dots and something in me just died.”

“But now, what?
She just turned up on your doorstep?”

“This morning.
Two hours before the funeral.”

“And
you let her
in
?”

“Wouldn’t
anyone?”

“No,
Sarah. Most people would not.”

“It
was as if she’d returned from the dead, Lawrence. I could hardly just slam the
door on her.”

“But
where was she, then, if she wasn’t dead?”

“On a boat, apparently.
She got out of the country and came
here. Then she was two years in an immigration detention center in Essex.”

“A detention center?
Christ, what did she do?”

“Nothing.
Asylum seekers, apparently they just lock them
up when they arrive here.”

“For
two
years
?”

“You
don’t believe me?”

“I
don’t believe
her.
Two
years
in detention? She must have done something.”

“She
was African and she didn’t have any money. I suppose they gave her a year for
each.”

“Don’t
be facetious. How did she find you?”

“Apparently
she had Andrew’s driving license. He dropped his wallet in the sand.”

“Oh my god.
And she’s still
there
?”

“She’s
asleep on my sofa.”

“You
must be completely freaked out.”

“This
morning I thought I was losing my mind. It didn’t seem real.”

“Why
didn’t you
call
me?”

“I
did, remember? Your nanny was late. You were in a rush.”

“Is
she threatening you? Tell me you’ve called the police.”

“No,
it’s not like that. She played really nicely with Charlie, all afternoon. He
was Batman, she was Robin. They made quite a team.”

“And
that doesn’t freak you
out
?”

“If
I start freaking out now, I won’t ever know how to stop.”

“But
what’s she
doing
there? What does she want?”

“I
suppose she wants to stay here for a while. She says she doesn’t know anyone
else.”

“Are
you serious?
Can
she stay? Legally, I mean?”

“I’m
not sure. I haven’t asked. She’s exhausted. I think she walked here all the way
from the detention center.”

“She’s
insane.”

“She
didn’t have any money. She could hardly take a bus.”

“Look,
I don’t like it. I’m worried about you being all alone with her.”

“So
what do you think I should do?”

“I
think you should wake her up and ask her to leave. I’m serious.”

“Leave
for where? What if she refuses?”

“Then
I want you to call the police and have her removed.” I said nothing.

“Do
you hear me, Sarah? I want you to call the police.”

“I
heard you. I wish you wouldn’t say
I want.
”

“It’s
you I’m thinking about. What if she turns nasty?”

“Little
Bee? I don’t think she’s got a nasty bone in her.”

“How
do you
know
? You know nothing about the woman. What
if she comes into your room in the night with a kitchen knife? What if she’s
crazy?”

I
shook my head. “My son would
know,
Lawrence. His bat
senses would tell him.”

“
Fuck,
Sarah! This isn’t funny! Call the police.”

I
looked at Little Bee, fast asleep on my sofa with her mouth slightly open and
her knees drawn up to her chest. I fell silent.

“Sarah?”

“I’m
not going to call the police. I’m going to let her stay.”

“But why?
What possible good can come of this?”

“I
couldn’t help her last time. Maybe now I can.”

“And
that would prove what, exactly?”

I
sighed.

“I
suppose it would prove your point, Lawrence, about me not being good at taking
advice.”

“You
know that’s not what I meant.”

“Yes.
Which brings us back to my original point.
”

“Which
was what?”

“That
I’m difficult sometimes.”

Lawrence
laughed, but I think he was forcing himself.

I
put down the phone and stared for a long time at the long, smooth white planks
of the kitchen floor. Then I went upstairs to sleep on the floor of my son’s
room. I wanted to be there with him. I admitted to myself that Lawrence had a
point: I didn’t know what Little Bee might do in the night.

Sitting
with my back against the cold radiator of Charlie’s bedroom, with my knees
bunched up under a duvet, I tried to remember what I saw in Lawrence. I finished
my G&T and winced at the taste of the ersatz lemon. It was a small problem
to have: a lack of real lemons. It was almost a comfort. I come from a family
whose problems were always small and surmountable.

We
didn’t have extramarital affairs in my family. Mummy and Daddy loved each other
very much, or else they had hired failed actors to play the role of affable
lovebirds in our family home, for twenty-five years, and then kept those actors
on a retainer so that they could be summoned back at the drop of a hat whenever
one of their clients’ offspring threatened a weekend visit home from
university, or a Sunday-lunch-with-parents-and-boyfriend. In my family we took
our holidays in Devon and our partners for life. I wondered how it was that I
had broken the mold.

I
looked over at my son, asleep under his duvet, motionless and pale in his
Batman costume. I listened to the sound of his breathing, regular and solid and
utterly asleep. I couldn’t remember sleeping like that, not since I married
Andrew. Within the first month, I’d known he wasn’t the right man. After that,
it’s the growing sense of dissatisfaction that keeps one awake at night.
The brain refusing to let go of those alternative lives that
might have been.
It isn’t the strong sleepers who
sleep around.

But
I was a happy child, at least, and my name was Sarah Summers. I still use
Summers
as my professional name, but personally it is lost. As
a girl I liked what all girls like: pink plastic bracelets and later silver
ones; a few practice boyfriends and then, in no particular hurry, men. England
was made of dawn mists that rose to the horse’s shoulder, of cakes cooled on
wire trays for the cutting, of soft awakenings. My first real choice was what
to take at university. My teachers all said I should study law, so naturally I
chose journalism. I met Andrew O’Rourke when we were both working on a London
evening paper. Ours seemed to perfectly express the spirit of the city. Thirty-one
pages of celebrity goings-on about town, and one page of news from the world
which existed beyond London’s orbital motorway—the paper offered it up as a
sort of memento mori.

London
was fun. Men blew through like tall ships, some of them already wrecked. I
liked Andrew because he wasn’t like the rest. Maybe it was his Irish blood, but
he wouldn’t let himself be carried along. Andrew was the foreign-news editor at
the paper, which was a bit like being the wheels on a boat. He was fired for
sheer obstinacy and I took him home to meet my parents. Then I took his name so
that no one else could have it.

O’Rourke
is a sharp name and I imagined my happiness would soften it. But as Sarah
O’Rourke I lost the habit of happiness. In its place came a sense of amazed
separation. The marriage was all so sudden. I suppose if I’d stopped to think
about it, I would have realized that Andrew was too like me—that we were as
stubborn as each other; that our admiration would inevitably become attrition. The
only reason we were married in such haste was that my mother begged me not to
marry Andrew at all. One of you in a marriage has to be
soft,
she said. One of you has to know how to say,
Have it your
way.
That’s not going to be you, dear, so it might as well be the man.

Taking
Andrew O’Rourke’s name was the second real decision of my life, and it was
wrong. I suppose Little Bee would understand me. As soon as we let go of our
real names, she and I, we were lost.

Ask her to leave,
Lawrence had said. But no, no, I
couldn’t. We were joined by what had happened on the beach. Getting rid of her
would be like losing a part of me. It would be like shedding a finger, or a
name. I wasn’t going to let that happen again. I sat on the floor and watched
my son sleeping peacefully. I did envy him for being able to sleep like that.

I
didn’t sleep at all, not for an entire week, after Africa. The killers just
walked away down the beach, and Andrew and I walked back to the hotel compound,
in silence, and set about packing up our things after an agonizing half hour
with the compound doctor, who packed the stump of my finger with gauze and
wrapped it up tightly. I was in a daze. I remember on the flight home to London
that it vaguely surprised me, just as it had at the end of my
childhood, that
such a big story could simply continue
without me. But that is the way it is with killers, I suppose. What is the end
of all innocence for you is just another Tuesday morning for them, and they
walk off back to their planet of death giving no more thought to the world of
the living than we would give to any other tourist destination: a place to be
briefly visited and returned from with souvenirs and a haunting sensation that
we could have paid less for them.

On
the plane home I held my injured hand high, where it throbbed less painfully. Through
the fog of painkillers, its approach unseen and unexpected, the thought
presented itself to me that it would be sensible not to let Andrew touch my
injury, then or ever again. In my mind I watched the killers taking Little Bee
and Kindness along the beach. I watched them disappear. I watched them pass
over the horizon of my world into that dangerous country in my mind where I lay
awake at night, thinking of the things those men might have done to them.