by Chris Cleave
“Do I? I never even noticed. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I love that you don’t even notice. There are plenty of women who care what one thinks of their jewellery.”
I swirled my G&T and took a careful sip.
“You’re trying to make me feel better about myself, aren’t you?”
“I’m just saying you’re not the kind of woman you meet every day.”
“And that’s praise, is it?”
“It’s relative praise, yes. Now stop fishing.”
I smiled, for the first time in a week, I think.
“We’ve never talked like this before, have we?” I said. “Talked honestly, I mean.”
“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 naivety 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 realised 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 dare say 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 m?”
“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 centre in Essex.”
“A detention centre? 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 licence. 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 centre.”
“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 ext
ra-marital 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 mould.
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 realised 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 agonising 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 I was vaguely surprised, just as I had been 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 visited briefly 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.
It never faded. But I went back to the magazine. Starting Nixie had been the third real decision of my life, and I refused ever to regret it. Nor was I going to give up on decision four—Charlie, my best decision of all—or decision five, Lawrence, who I had truly meant to renounce until the horror of Nigeria made me realise that was unnecessary. I threw myself into making my life work, and I forced myself to let the beach seem distant and impersonal. There was trouble in Africa, of course there was. But there was no sense getting hung up about one particular incident and missing the big picture. Lawrence insisted on that, and for once I took his advice. I set up direct debits from my bank account to a couple of African charities. When people asked what had happened to my finger, I said that Andrew and I had hired a scooter out there and been involved in a minor accident. My soul entered a kind of suspended animation. At home I was calm. At work I was the boss. At night I did not sleep, but I thought I could probably make the days work indefinitely.
But now I stood up from the floor of Charlie’s room. I went to look at myself again in the mirror. There were bags under my eyes now, and sharp new lines across my forehead. The mask was finally cracking. I thought, This isn’t about the decisions you made any more. Because the biggest thing in your life, the thing that killed Andrew and the thing that means you can’t sleep, is something that happened without you.
I realised, more than anything, that I needed to know now. I needed to know what had happened after the killers took those girls away down the beach. I needed to know what had happened next.
Five
I woke up on Sarah’s sofa. At first I did not know where I was. I had to open my eyes and look all around me. There were cushions on the sofa and they were made of orange silk. The cushions had birds and flowers embroidered on them. The sun was coming in through the windows, and these windows had curtains that reached all the way down to the floor. They were made of orange velvet. There was a coffee table with a glass top, so thick that it looked green from the side. On the shelf underneath the tablet op there were magazines. One was about fashion and one was concerned with how to make the home more beautiful. I sat up and put my feet on the floor. The floor was covered with wood.
If I was telling this story to the girls back home they would be asking me, How can a table be made of coffee and what is this thing called velvet and how come that woman you were staying with did not keep her wood in a pile at the side of the house like everybody else? How come she left it lying all over her floor, was she very lazy? And I would have to tell them: a coffee table is not made out of coffee, and velvet is a fabric as soft as the underside of infant clouds, and the wood on Sarah’s floor was not firewood, it was a SWEDISH ENGINEERED FLOOR WITH THREE-STRIP ANTIQUE LACQUER AND MINIMUM 3 MM REAL WOOD VENEER CERTIFIED BY THE FOREST STEWARDSHIP COUNCIL (FSC) AS BEING MANUFACTURED USING ETHICAL FORESTRY PRACTICES, and I know this because I saw a floor just like it advertised in the magazine that was underneath the coffee table and which concerned beautiful homes. And the girls from back home, their eyes would go wide and they would say, Weh, because now they would understand that I had finally arrived in a place beyond the end of the world—a place where wood was made by machines -and they would be wondering what sorcery I survived next.
Imagine how tired I would become, telling my story to the
girls from back home. This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to sit down and explain the First World from first principles. Or maybe you would like to, but you can’t. Your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house.
If I mention to you, casually, that Sarah’s house was close to a large park full of deer that were very tame, you do not jump up out of your seat and shout, My God! Fetch me my gun and I will go to hunt one of those foolish animals! No, instead you stay seated and you rub your chin wisely and you say to yourself, Hmm, I suppose that must be Richmond Park, just outside London.
This is a story for sophisticated people, like you.
I do not have to describe to you the taste of the tea that Sarah made for me when she came down into the living room of her house that morning. We never tasted tea in my village, even though they grow it in the east of my country, where the land rises up into the clouds and the trees grow long soft beards of moss from the wet air. There in the east, the plantations stretch up the green hillsides and vanish into the mist. The tea they grow, that vanishes too. I think all of it is exported. Myself I never tasted tea until I was exported with it. The boat I travelled in to your country, it was loaded with tea. It was piled up in the cargo hold in thick brown paper sacks. I dug into the sacks to hide. After two days I was too weak to hide any more, so I came up out of the hold. The captain of the ship, he locked me in a cabin. He said it would not be safe to put me with the crew. So for three weeks and five thousand miles I looked at the ocean through a small round window of glass and I read a book that the captain gave me. The book was called Great Expectations and it was about a boy called Pip but I do not know how it ended because the boat arrived in the UK and the captain handed me over to the immigration authorities.
Three weeks and five thousand miles on a tea ship -maybe if you scratched me you would still find that my skin smells of it. When they put me in the immigration detention centre, they gave me a brown blanket and a white plastic cup of tea. And when I tasted it, all I wanted to do was to get back into the boat and go home again, to my country. Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from. Also, it vanishes—the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup. It disappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist. I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other. How sad that must make you—like children who long for absent mothers. I am sorry.
