by Chris Cleave
Batman shook his head. His bat ears quivered. Beneath the mask an expression of great cunning settled upon the visible part of his face.
“It wasn’t me that done the poo. It was the Puffin.”
(The italics were his.)
“Are you telling me that the Puffin came in the night and did a poo in your bat suit?”
Batman nodded, solemnly. I noticed he had kept his bat mask on but taken off his bat suit. He stood naked except for the mask and cape. He held up the bat suit for me to inspect. A lump of something fell from it and thumped on the carpet. The smell was indescribable. I sat up in bed and saw a trail of lumps leading across the carpet from the bedroom door. Somewhere inside me the girl who had done science A-levels noted, with empirical fascination, that feces had also found their way into locations which included—but were not limited to—Batman’s hands, the door frame, the bedroom wall, my alarm-clock radio and, of course, the bat suit. My son’s shit was everywhere. There was shit on his hands. Shit on his face. Even on the black-and-yellow bat symbol of his bat suit there was shit. I tried, but I couldn’t make myself believe that these were Puffin droppings. This was bat shit.
Distantly, I remembered something I’d read on the parenting page.
“It’s all right, Batman. Mummy’s not cross.”
“Mummy clean the poo up.”
“Um. Er. Jesus.”
Gravely, Batman shook his head.
“No, not Jesus. Mummy.”
Resentfulness was starting to overcome the embarrassment and guilt. I looked across to where Andrew lay with his eyes tight closed and his hands twisted at the exquisite awfulness of his clinical depression, our unhappy sex interrupted, and this very thick stink of shit.
“Batman, why don’t you ask Daddy to clean you up?”
My son looked across at his father for a long time, then turned back to me. Patiently, as if explaining something to an imbecile, he shook his little head again.
“But why not?” (I was pleading now.) “Why not ask Daddy?”
Batman looked solemn. Daddy is fighting baddies, he said. The grammar was irreproachable. I looked across at his father with him, and I sighed. Yes, I said, I suppose you’re right.
Five days later, on the last morning I saw my husband alive, I finished dressing my caped crusader, I breakfasted him, and I ran him down to his nursery’s Early Birds Club. Back at the house, I showered. Andrew watched me as I pulled on my tights. I always dressed up for deadline days. Heels, skirt, smart green jacket. Magazine publishing has its rhythms and if the editor won’t dance to them, she can’t expect her staff to. I don’t float feature ideas in Fendi heels, and I don’t close an issue in Pumas. So I dressed against the clock while Andrew lay naked on the bed and watched me. He didn’t say a word. The last glimpse I had of him, before I closed the bedroom door, he was still watching. How to describe, to my son, his father’s last seen expression? I decided I would tell my son that his father had looked very peaceful. I decided I wouldn’t tell him that my husband opened his mouth to say something, but that I was running late and turned away.
I arrived at the office around 9:30. The magazine was based in Spitalfields, on Commercial Street, ninety minutes by public transport from Kingston-upon-Thames. The worst moment comes when you leave the overland network and descend into the heat of the Underground. There were two hundred of us packed into each tube carriage. We listened to the screech of the metal wheels on the track, with our bodies pinned and immobile. For three stops I stood pressed against a thin man in a corduroy jacket who was quietly weeping. One would normally avert one’s eyes, but my head was pinioned in such a position that I could only look. I should have liked to put an arm around the man. But my arms were jammed by the commuters on each side of me. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was up to administering tenderness like that, on a crowded train, under the silent gaze of others. I was torn between two kinds of shame. On the one hand, the disgrace of not discharging a human obligation. On the other hand, the madness of being the first in the crowd to move.
I smiled helplessly at the weeping man and I couldn’t stop thinking about Andrew.
As soon as one emerges aboveground, of course, one can quickly forget our human obligations. London is a beautiful machine for doing that. The city was bright, fresh and inviting that morning. I was excited about closing the June issue, and I practically ran the last two minutes to the office. On the outside of our building was the magazine’s name, NIXIE, in three-foot-high pink neon letters. I stood outside for a moment, taking a few deep breaths. The air was still, and you could hear the neon crackling over the rumble of the traffic. I stood with my hand on the door and wondered what Andrew had been about to say, just before I left home.
My husband hadn’t always been lost for words. The long silences only began on the day we met Little Bee. Before that, he wouldn’t pipe down for a minute. On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth’s surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it. That is how big he was for me. When we got back to our new married house in Kingston, I asked Andrew about the color of that honeymoon sea. He said, Yeah, was it blue? I said, come on Andrew, you’re a pro, you can do better than that. And Andrew said, Okay then, the awesome ocean fastness was a splendor of ultramarine crested with crimson and gold where the burnished sun blazed on the wave tops and sent them crashing into the gloomy troughs deepening to a dark malevolent indigo.
He hung on the penultimate syllable, deepening his voice in comic pomposity even as he raised his eyebrows. INN-digo, he boomed.
Of course you know why I didn’t notice the sea? It was because I spent two weeks with my head—
Well, where my husband’s head was is between me and him.
We both giggled helplessly and rolled around on the bed and Charlie, dear Charlie, was conceived.
I pushed open the street door and stepped up into the lobby of the magazine. The black Italian marble floor was the only grace note that had survived our tenancy of the offices. The rest of the lobby was pure us. Boxes of sample frocks from wannabe fashion houses were stacked up along one wall. Some intern had triaged them with a chunky blue marker: YES KEEP FOR SHOOT, or OH I THINK NOT, or the triumphantly absolutist THIS IS NOT FASHION. A dead Japanese juniper tree stood in a cracked gold Otagiri vase. Three glittering Christmas baubles still hung from it. The walls were done up in fuchsia and fairy lights, and even in the dim sunshine from the tinted windows that gave onto Commercial Street, the paint-work looked marked and tatty. I cultivated this unkempt look. Nixie wasn’t supposed to be like the other women’s magazines. Let them keep their spotless lobbies and their smug Eames chairs. When it comes right down to editorial choices, I would rather have a bright staff and a dim lobby.
Clarissa, my features editor, came through the doors just after me. We kissed once, twice, three times—we’d been friends since school—and she hooked her arm around mine as we took the stairs together. The editorial floor was right at the top of the building. We were halfway up before I realized what was wrong with Clarissa.
“Clarissa, you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes.”
She smirked.
“So would you be, if you’d met yesterday’s man.”
“Oh Clarissa. What am I going to do with you?”
“Pay rise, strong coffee, paracetamol.”
She beamed as she ticked off the points on her fingers. I reminded myself that Clarissa did not have some of the wonderful things I had in my life, such as my beautiful son Batman, and that she was therefore almost certainly less fulfilled than I was.
It was a 10:30 A.M. start for my junior staff, bless them, and none of them were in yet. Up on the editorial floor, the cleaners were still in. They were hoovering, and dusting desktops, an
d turning upside down all the framed photos of my staff’s awful boyfriends, to prove they’d dusted under them. This was the grin-and-bear-it part of editing Nixie. At Vogue or Marie Claire, one’s editorial staff would be at their desks by eight, dressed in Chloé and sipping green tea. On the other hand, they wouldn’t still be there at midnight scrawling CECI N’EST PAS PRÊT-À-PORTER on a sample box they were returning to a venerable Paris fashion house.
Clarissa sat on the corner of my desk and I sat behind it, and we looked out over the open plan at the gang of black faces spiriting away yesterday’s fabric swatches and Starbucks cups.
We talked about the issue we were closing. The ad-sales people had done unusually well that month—perhaps the spiraling cost of street drugs had forced them to spend more time in the office—and we realized we had more editorial material than space. I had a “Real Life” feature I really thought should go in—a profile of a woman who was trying to get out of Baghdad—and Clarissa had a piece on a new kind of orgasm you could apparently only get with the boss. We talked about which of them we would run with. I was only half concentrating. I texted Andrew, to see how he was doing.
The flatscreen at our end of the floor was showing BBC News 24 with the sound down. They were running a segment on the war. Smoke was rising above one of the countries involved. Don’t ask me which—I’d lost track by that stage. The war was four years old. It had started in the same month my son was born, and they’d grown up together. At first both of them were a huge shock and demanded constant attention but as each year went by, they became more autonomous and one could start to take one’s eye off them for extended periods. Sometimes a particular event would cause me momentarily to look at one or the other of them—my son, or the war—with my full attention, and at times like these I would always think, Gosh, haven’t you grown?
I was interested in how this new kind of orgasm was meant to work. I looked up from texting.
“How come you can only have it with your boss?”
“It’s a forbidden-fruit thing, isn’t it? You get an extra frisson from breaking the office taboo. From hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth. You know. Science.”
“Um. Have scientists actually proved this?”
“Don’t get empirical with me, Sarah. We’re talking about a whole new realm of sexual pleasure. We’re calling it the B-spot. B, as in boss. See what we did there?”
“Ingenious.”
“Thank you darling. We do try.”
I wept inwardly at the thought of women up and down the country being pleasured by middle managers in shiny-bottomed suits. On the flatscreen, News 24 had panned from the Middle East to Africa. Different landscape, same column of thick black smoke. A pair of jaundiced eyes looking out with the same impassivity Andrew had shown, just before I turned away to leave for work. The hairs on my arms went up again. I looked away, and took the three steps to the window that gave out onto Commercial Street. I put my forehead against the glass, which is something I do when I’m trying to think.
“Are you all right, Sarah?”
“I’m fine. Listen, be a doll and go and grab us a couple of coffees, would you?”
Clarissa went off to our idiosyncratic coffee machine, the one that would have been an in-house salon de thé in Vogue’s offices. Down on Commercial Street, a police patrol car pulled up and parked at the curb in front of our building. A uniformed officer got out on each side. They looked at each other over the patrol-car roof. One of them had blond, cropped hair and the other had a bald patch as round and neat as a monk’s. I watched him tilt his head to listen to the radio on his lapel. I smiled, thinking absently about a project Charlie was doing at his nursery. The Police: People Who Help Us, it was called. My son—it goes without saying—was magnificently unconvinced. At constant high alert in his bat cape and mask, Charlie believed a proud citizenry should be ready to help itself.
Clarissa came back with two plasticky lattes. In one of them the coffee machine had deposited a clear acrylic stirrer. In the other, it had elected not to do so. Clarissa hesitated over which to give me.
“First big editorial decision of the day,” she said.
“Easy. I’m the boss. Give me the one with the stirrer.”
“What if I don’t?”
“Then we may never get around to locating your B-spot, Clarissa. I’m warning you.”
Clarissa blanched, and passed me the coffee with the stirrer.
I said, “I like the Baghdad piece.”
Clarissa sighed, and slumped her shoulders.
“So do I, Sarah, of course I do. It’s a great article.”
“Five years ago, that’s the one we’d have run with. No question.”
“Five years ago our circulation was so low we had to take those risks.”
“And that’s how we got big—by being different. That’s us.”
Clarissa shook her head. “Getting big’s different from staying big. You know as well as I do, we can’t be serving up morality tales while the other majors are selling sex.”
“But why do you think our readers got dumber?”
“It’s not that. I think our original readers aren’t reading magazines anymore, that’s all. They moved on to greater things, the same way you could if you’d just play the bloody game. Maybe you don’t realize just how big you are now, Sarah. Your next job could be editing a national newspaper.”
I sighed. “How thrilling. I could put topless girls on every page.”
My missing finger itched. I looked back down at the police patrol car. The two officers were putting on their uniform caps. I tapped my mobile against my front teeth.
“Let’s go for a drink after work, Clarissa. Bring your new man if you like. I’m bringing Andrew.”
“Seriously? Out in public? With your husband? Isn’t that terribly last season?”
“It’s terribly five years ago.”
Clarissa tilted her head at me.
“What are you telling me, Sarah?”
“I’m not telling you anything, Clar. I like you too much to tell. I’m just asking myself, really. I’m asking if maybe the kind of choices I made five years ago weren’t so bad after all.”
Clarissa smiled resignedly.
“Fine. But don’t expect me to keep my hands off his hunky thighs under the table, just because he’s your husband.”
“You do that, Clarissa, and I’ll make you junior horoscopes editor for the rest of your natural life.”
My desk phone rang. I looked at the time on its screen: 10:25 A.M. It’s funny how these details stay with you. I picked up the phone and it was reception, sounding bored to distraction. At Nixie we used reception as a sin bin—if a girl got too bitchy on the editorial floor, we sent her down to do a week on the shiniest desk.
“There are two policemen here.”
“Oh. They came in here? What do they want?”
“Okay, let’s think about why I might have dialed your number.”
“They want to talk to me?”
“They did good when they made you the boss, Sarah.”
“Fuck off. Why do they want to talk to me?”
A pause.
“I could ask them, I suppose.”
“If it isn’t too much trouble.”
A longer pause.
“They say they want to shoot a porny film in the office. They say they’re not real policemen and their willies are simply enormous.”
“Oh for god’s sake. Tell them I’ll be down.”
I hung up the phone and looked at Clarissa. The hairs on my arms were up again.
“The police,” I said.
“Relax,” said Clarissa. “They can’t bust you for conspiracy to run a serious feature piece.”
Behind her the flatscreen was showing Jon Stewart. He was laughing. His guest was laughing too. I felt better. You had to find something to laugh about, that summer, the number of places that were going up in smoke. You laughed, or you put on a superhero costume, or you tried for some
kind of orgasm that science had somehow missed.
I took the stairs down to the lobby, speeding up as I went. The two police officers were standing rather too close together, with their caps in their hands and their big, sensible leather shoes on my black marble. The young one was blushing horribly.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
I glared at the receptionist and she grinned back at me from beneath her perfect blond side part.
“Sarah O’Rourke?”
“Summers.”
“Excuse me madam?”
“Sarah Summers is my professional name.”
The older policeman looked at me with no expression.
“This is a personal matter, Mrs. O’Rourke. Is there somewhere we can go?”
I walked them up to the boardroom on the first floor. Tones of pink and violet, long glass table, more neon.
“Can I get you a coffee? Or tea? I mean, I can’t absolutely guarantee it’ll come out as coffee or tea. Our machine is a bit—”
“Perhaps you’d better sit down, Mrs. O’Rourke.”
The officers’ faces glowed unnaturally in the pinkish light. They looked like black-and-white-movie men, colored in by a computer. One older, the one with the bald patch. Maybe forty-five. The younger one, with the blond cropped hair, maybe twenty-two or twenty-four. Nice lips. Quite full, and rather juicy-looking. He wasn’t beautiful, but I was transfixed by the way he stood and cast his eyes down deferentially when he spoke. And of course there’s always something about a uniform. You wonder if the protocol will peel off with the jacket, I suppose.
The two of them placed their uniform caps on the purple smoked glass. They rotated the caps with their clean white fingers. Both of them stopped at exactly the same moment, as if some critical angle they had practiced in basic training had precisely been attained.
They stared at me. My mobile chimed brashly on the glass desktop—a text message arriving. I smiled. That would be Andrew.
“I’ve got some bad news for you, Mrs. O’Rourke,” said the older officer.
“What do you mean?”
It came out more aggressive than I intended. The policemen stared at their caps on the table. I needed to look at the text message that had just arrived. As I reached out my hand to pick up my phone, I saw the two of them staring at the stump of my missing finger.
