Little Bee (20 page)

Sarah
pressed the tissue into the corners of her eyes. “I’m not sure it’s easier out
here, Bee.”

“But
I will help you.”

Sarah
smiled. “You’re sixteen years old, Bee. You’re a refugee. You’re an orphan, for
god’s sake. I’m the one who ought to be helping you.”

I
pulled on Sarah’s shoulder to stop her. I took her left hand and I held it up
to her. Charlie stood and looked up at us with big eyes.

“Look,
Sarah. You have helped me enough already. You cut off your own finger for me. You
saved my life.”

“I
should have done more. I should have saved your sister too.”

“How?”

“I
should have thought of something.”

I
shook my head. “You did everything you could, Sarah.”

“But
we should never have been in that situation, Bee. Don’t you see? We went on
holiday to a place we had no right to be.”

“And
what if you had not been there, Sarah? If you and Andrew had not been there,
then Nkiruka and me, we would both be dead.” I turned to Charlie. “Your mummy
saved my life, did you know that? She saved me from the baddies.”

Charlie
looked up at his mother. “Like Batman?” he said.

Sarah
smiled, the way I was used to now, with the tears starting to come to her eyes
again. “Like Batmum.”

“Is
that why you
isn’t
got your one finger?”

“Why
I
haven’t
got one finger.
Yes,
darling.”

“Did
the baddies take it?
The Penguin?”

“No, darling.”

“Was
it the Puffin?”

Sarah
laughed.

“Yes
darling, it was that awful Puffin.”

Charlie
grinned.
Naughty naughty Puffin,
he said, and he ran
ahead of us down the pavement, shooting baddies with a gun that was not visible
to my eyes. Sarah turned to me.

“Bless
you,” she said.

I
held tight to her arm and I placed the palm of her left hand on the back of my
left hand. I arranged my fingers underneath hers so that the only one of my
fingers you could see was the one that was missing from Sarah’s hand. I saw how
it could be. I saw how we could make a life again. I know it was crazy to think
it but my heart was pounding, pounding, pounding.

“I
will help you,” I said. “If you want me to stay then this is how it will be
between us. Maybe I will only be able to stay for one month, maybe only one
week. Someday, the men will come. But while I am here I will be like your
daughter. I will love you as if you were my mother and I will love Charlie as
if he was my brother.”

Sarah
stared at me. “Goodness,” she said.

“What
is it?”

“Well,
it’s just that on the way home from the nursery, with the other mothers, we
usually talk about potty training and cakes.”

I
dropped Sarah’s hand and I looked down at the ground.

“Oh
Bee, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all just a little bit sudden and a little
bit serious, that’s all. I’m so confused. I need a bit more time to think.”

I
looked up at Sarah again. In her eyes I saw that it was new for her, this
feeling of not knowing straightaway what to do. Her eyes were the eyes of a
creature
who
has only just been born. Before it is
familiar with its world, there is only terror. I knew this expression very well.
Once you have seen as many people as I have being pushed in through the doors
of the immigration detention center, it is easy to recognize this look. It made
me want to remove that pain from Sarah’s life as quickly as I could.

“I
am sorry, Sarah. Please forget about it. I will leave. You see? The
psychiatrist at the detention center was
right,
she
could not do anything for me. I am still crazy.”

Sarah
did not say anything. She just held on to my arm and we followed Charlie down
the street. Charlie was racing along and knocking the heads off the roses in
the front gardens. He knocked them off with karate chops. They fell, each one
with a sudden fall and a silent explosion of petals. Like my story with
Nkiruka, like my story with Yevette. My feet crushed the petals as we passed
over them, and I realized that my story was only made of endings.

Back
at the house, we sat in Sarah’s kitchen. We drank tea again and I wondered if
it would be the last time. I closed my eyes.
My village, my
family, that disappearing taste.
Everything vanishes and drains away
into sand or mist. That is a good trick.

When
I opened my eyes again, Sarah was watching me.

“You
know, Bee, I was thinking about what you said, about you staying.
About us helping each other.
I think you’re right. Maybe it
is time to be serious. Maybe these are serious times.”

SERIOUS TIMES BEGAN ON
a gray, ominous day in London. I wasn’t looking for serious. If I’m
honest, I suppose I was looking for a bit of the other. Charlie was nearly two
years old and I was emerging from the introverted, chrysalid stage of early
motherhood. I fitted back into my favorite skirts. I felt like showing off my
wings.

I’d
decided to spend a day in the field. The idea was to remind my editorial girls
that it was possible to write a feature article all on one’s own. I hoped that
by inspiring the staff to indulge in a little reportage, my commissioning
budget would be spared. It was simply a question, I had told the office airily,
of applying one’s pithy remarks sequentially to paper rather than scrawling
them individually on sample boxes.

Really
I just wanted my staff to be happy. At their age I’d been fresh out of my
journalism degree and intoxicated with the job.
Exposing
corruption, brandishing truth.
How well it had suited me, that absolute
license to march up to evildoers and demand
who, what,
where, when,
and
why?
But now, standing in
the lobby of the Home Office building in Marsham Street, waiting for a ten
o’clock interview, I realized I wasn’t looking forward to it. Perhaps at
twenty, one is naturally curious about life, but at thirty, simply suspicious
of anyone who still has one. I clutched my brand-new notepad and Dictaphone in
the hope that some of their youthful predisillusionment would rub off on me.

I
was angry with Andrew. I couldn’t focus. I didn’t even look the part of a
reporter—my spiral notepad was virginal white. While I waited, I besmirched it
with notes from a fictitious interview. Through the lobby of the Home Office
building, the public sector shuffled past in its scuffed shoes, balancing its
morning coffee on cardboard carry trays. The women bulged out of M&S
trouser suits, wattles wobbling and bangles clacking. The men seemed limp and
hypoxic—half-garroted by their ties. Everyone stooped, or scuttled, or
nervously ticked. They carried themselves like weather presenters preparing to
lower expectations for the bank-holiday weekend.

I
tried to concentrate on the article I wanted to write. An optimistic piece was
what I needed; something bright and positive. Something absolutely unlike
anything Andrew would write in his
Times
column, in
other words. Andrew and I had been arguing. His copy was getting gloomier and
gloomier. I think he had truly started to believe that Britain was sinking into
the sea. Crime was spreading, schools were failing, immigration was creeping,
and public morals were slipping. It seemed as if everything was seeping and
sprawling and oozing, and I
hated
it. Now that
Charlie was
almost two I
suppose I was looking into
the future my child would have to inhabit, and realizing that bitching about it
might possibly not be the most constructive strategy.
Why
do you always have to be so bloody negative?
I asked Andrew.
If the country really is on the slide, then why not write about
the people who are doing something about it?

—Oh
yeah? Like whom?

—Well,
like the Home Office, for example. They’re the ones on the front line, after
all.

—Oh
that’s genius
Sarah, that
really is. Because people
really trust the Home Office, don’t they? And what will you call your fine
uplifting piece?

—You
mean what’s my title? Well how about “The Battle for Britain”?

I
know, I know. Andrew exploded with laughter. We had a blazing row. I told him I
was finally doing something constructive with my magazine. He told me I was
finally growing out of my
magazine’s
demographic. Not
only was I getting old, in other words, but everything I had worked on for the
last decade was puerile.
How almost surgically hurtful.

I
was still furious when I arrived at the Home Office building.
Always the Surrey girl, aren’t you?
That had been Andrew’s
parting shot.
What exactly do you require the Home Office
to do about this bloody country, Sarah? Strafe the lowlifes with Spitfires?
Andrew had a gift for deepening the incisions he began. It wasn’t our first row
since Charlie was born, and he always did this at the end—brought the argument
back to my upbringing, which infuriated me as it was the one thing I couldn’t
help.

I
stood in the lobby as the dowdy clerks flowed all around me. I blinked, looked
down at my shoes, and had my first sensible thought for days. I realized I
hadn’t come out into the world today to make a point to my editorial staff. Senior
editors didn’t really go back to reporting to shave a few pounds from their
commissioning budgets. I was there, I realized, entirely to make a point to
Andrew.

And
when Lawrence Osborn came down and introduced himself on the dot of ten
o’clock—tall, grinning, not conspicuously handsome—I understood that the point
I was making to Andrew was not necessarily going to be an editorial one.

Lawrence
looked down at his clipboard.

“That’s
odd,” he said. “They’ve marked down this interview as ‘nonhostile.’”

I
realized I was looking at him fiercely. I blushed.

“Oh
god, I’m sorry.
Bad morning.”

“Don’t
mention it. Just tell me you’ll try to be nice to me. All you journalists seem
to have it in for us these days.”

I
smiled.

“I
am going to be nice to you. I think you people do a terrific job.”

“Ah,
that’s because you haven’t seen the statistics we’ve seen.”

I
laughed, and Lawrence raised his eyebrows.

“You
think I’m joking,” he said.

His
voice was flat and unremarkable. He didn’t sound public school. There was a
touch of roughness in his vowels, or a sense of some wildness reined in, as if
he was making an effort. It was hard to place his voice. He took me on a tour
of the building. We looked in on the Assets Recovery Agency and the Criminal
Records Bureau. The mood was businesslike, but relaxed. Discourage a little
crime,
drink a little coffee—that seemed to be the tone. We
walked along unnatural galleries floored with natural materials and bathed in
natural light.

“So
Lawrence,” I said, “what do you think is going wrong with Britain?”

Lawrence
stopped and turned. His face glowed in a soft yellow ray, filtered through
colored glass.

“You’re
asking the wrong man,” he said. “If I knew the answer to that, I’d fix it.”

“Isn’t
that what you’re supposed to do at the Home Office? Fix it?”

“I
don’t actually work in any of the departments. They tried me out here and there
for a while, but I don’t think my heart was in it. So here I am in the press
office.”

“But
surely you must have an opinion?”

Lawrence
sighed. “Everyone has an opinion, don’t they? Maybe that’s what’s wrong with
this country. What? Why are you smiling?”

“I
wish you’d tell that to my husband.”

“Ah.
He has opinions, does he?”

“On a variety of subjects.”

“Well,
maybe he should work here. They love a policy debate around these parts, they
really do. Your first interview, for example…” Lawrence looked at his
clipboard, searching for a name.

“I’m
sorry?” I said. “I thought
you
were my interview.”

Lawrence
looked up. “Ah,” he said. “No, I’m just the warm-up guy. I’m sorry, I should
have explained.”

“Oh.”

“Well
don’t look so disappointed. I’ve fixed up a good day for you, I really have. You’ve
got three heads of department lined up, and a real live permanent
undersecretary. I’m sure they’ll give you more than you need for your piece.”

“But
I was enjoying talking to you.”

“You’ll
get over it.”

“You
think?”

Lawrence
smiled. He had curly black hair, quite glossy but cut disconcertingly short
around the back and sides. His suit, too—it was a good one; Kenzo, I think—and
it fitted him well, but there was something arresting about the way he wore it.
He held his arms a little away from his body—as if the suit was the pelt of
some suaver animal, recently slain and imperfectly cured, so that the bloody
rawness of it made his skin crawl.

“They
don’t really like me talking to the visitors,” said Lawrence. “I don’t think
I’ve quite perfected the Home Office voice.”

I
was surprised to find myself laughing. We walked on down the corridor. Somewhere
in between the Criminal Records Bureau and the Forensic Science Service, the
mood changed. People ran past us down the corridor. A crowd clustered around a
television monitor. I noticed the way Lawrence put a protective hand on the
small of my back as he steered me through the sudden press of people. It didn’t
feel inappropriate. I realized I was slowing down to feel the pressure of his
hand on my back.

BREAKING
NEWS, said the TV monitor: HOME SECRETARY RESIGNS. There was footage of the man
looking haggard and climbing with his guide dog into the backseat of a torment
that for the moment still resembled a ministerial car.

Lawrence
inclined his head toward the others, who were staring raptly at the monitor. He
spoke close to my ear.

“Look
at these bastards,” he whispered. “The man’s being crucified and these people
are already excited about what it means for their jobs.”

“What
about you? Don’t you care?”

Lawrence
grinned.

“Oh,
it’s bad news for me,” he whispered. “With my brilliant track record, I was
next in line to be the man’s guide dog.”

Lawrence
took me to his office. He said he had to check his messages. I was nervous, I
don’t know why. There wasn’t anything of Lawrence on the walls—just a generic
framed photo of Waterloo
Bridge,
and a laminated card
showing the mustering points in the event of fire. I caught myself checking my
reflection in the window glass and then thinking,
Oh don’t
be so silly.
I let my eyes change their focus until they rested on the
flat gray wall of the neighboring office building. I waited while Lawrence
scrolled through his e-mails.

He
looked up.

“I’m
sorry,” he said. “We’re going to have to reschedule your interviews. It’ll be
chaos around here for the next few days.”

The
phone went and Lawrence listened for a moment. He said,
What
? Shouldn’t someone more
senior be doing that?
Really?
Oh, great. How long do I
have?
He put the phone down on the table and then he put his head down
on the desk. In the corridor outside the office there were sounds of laughing,
shouting, doors slamming shut.

“Bastards,”
said Lawrence.

“What
is it?”

“That
phone call?
Off the record?”

“Of course.”

“I
have to write a letter to the outgoing home secretary, expressing our
department’s deep regret at his leaving.”

“They
don’t sound particularly regretful.”

“And
to think that but for your journalistic sensitivity to detail, we’d never have
noticed.”

Lawrence
rubbed his eyes and turned to his computer screen. He laid his fingers on the
keyboard,
then
hesitated.

“God!”
he said. “I mean, what do you write?”

“Don’t
ask me. Did you know the man?”

Lawrence
shook his head. “I’ve been
in rooms he was in, that’s
all. He was a twat, really, only you couldn’t say that because he was blind. I
suppose that’s how he got so far. He used to lean slightly forward, with his
hand on his guide dog’s harness. He used to lean, like this, and his hand would
sort of tremble. I think it was an act. He didn’t tremble when he was reading
Braille.”

“You
don’t sound as if you’ll miss him much either.”

Lawrence
shrugged. “I quite admired him. He was weak and he turned that into
a strength
.
A role model for losers like
me.”

“Oh,”
I said. “You’re doing self-deprecation.”

“So?”

“So,
it doesn’t work. Studies have shown. Women only pretend they like it in
surveys.”

“Maybe
I’m only pretending to do self-deprecation. Maybe I’m a winner. Maybe becoming
the Home Office’s press bitch was my own personal Everest.”

He
said all this without facial inflection. He stared into my eyes. I didn’t know
where to look.

“Let’s
bring this back to my article,” I said.

“Yes,
let’s,” said Lawrence. “Because otherwise this is going somewhere else, isn’t
it?”

I
felt adrenaline aching in my chest. This thing that was happening, then, it had
apparently slipped quite subtly over some line. It had become something
acknowledged, albeit in a relatively controlled form that both of us could
still step back from. Here it was, if we wanted it, hanging from a taut
umbilicus between us: an affair between adults, minute yet fully formed, with
all its forbidden trysts and muffled paroxysms and shattering betrayals already
present, like the buds of fingers and toes.