by Chris Cleave
Sarah nodded. “Good,” she said. “Because we really have to make this work. You both know that, don’t you?”
She looked at each of us and then she yawned again, and she stretched her arms. “Fresh start,” she said.
I looked at Lawrence and Lawrence looked at me.
“Now,” said Sarah. “I’m going to take Charlie to nursery and then we can start to track down Little Bee’s papers. We’ll find you a solicitor first. I know a good one that we sometimes use on the magazine.”
Sarah smiled, and she went over to Lawrence.
“And as for you,” she said, “I’m going to find a little time to thank you for coming all the way to Birmingham.”
She put her hand up to Lawrence’s face, but then I think she remembered that Charlie was in the room and so she just brushed her hand against his shoulder instead. I went into the next room to watch the television news with the sound turned off.
The news announcer looked so much like my sister. My heart was overflowing with things to say. But in your country, you cannot talk back to the news.
eight
I REMEMBER THE EXACT day when England became me, when its contours cleaved to the curves of my own body, when its inclinations became my own. As a girl, on a bike ride through the Surrey lanes, pedaling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum where a stream ran beneath the flint-and-brick bridge. Coming to a stop, the brakes squealing from the work of plucking one still moment out of time. Throwing my bicycle down into a pungent cushion of cow parsley and wild mint, and sliding down the plunging bank into the clear cold water, my sandals kicking up a quick brown bloom of mud from the streambed, the minnows darting away into the black pool of shade beneath the bridge. Pressing my face into the water, with time utterly suspended, drinking in the cool shock. And then, looking up and seeing a fox. He was sunning himself on the far bank, watching me through a feathery screen of barley. I looked back at him, and his amber eyes held mine. The moment, the country: I realized it was me. I found a soft patch of wild grass and cornflower by the side of the barley field, and I lay down with my face close to the damp earthen smell of the grass roots, listening to the buzzing of the summer flies. I cried, but I didn’t know why.
The morning after Lawrence stayed overnight, I dropped off Charlie at nursery and I went home to see what I could do to help Little Bee. I found her upstairs, watching television with the sound turned off. She looked so sad.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
Little Bee shrugged.
“Is everything okay with Lawrence?”
She looked away.
“What is it, then?”
Nothing.
“Maybe you’re homesick. I know I would be. Do you miss your country?”
She turned to look at me and her eyes were very solemn.
“Sarah,” she said, “I do not think I have left my country. I think it has traveled with me.”
She turned back to the television. That’s all right, I thought. There’ll be plenty of time to get through to her.
I tidied the kitchen while Lawrence was showering. I made myself a coffee and I realized, for the first time since Andrew died, that I had taken only one cup down from the cupboard instead of my instinctual two. I stirred in the milk, the spoon clinked against the china, and I realized I was losing the habit of being Andrew’s wife. How strange, I thought. I smiled, and realized I felt strong enough to put in an appearance at the magazine.
At my usual time the commuter train was crowded with pin-stripes and laptop bags, but now it was ten thirty in the morning and the train ran nearly empty. The boy opposite me stared at the carriage’s ceiling. He wore an England shirt and blue jeans, white with plaster dust. Tattooed on the inside of his forearm, in a Gothic typeface, were the words: THIS IS A TIME FOR HERO’S. I stared at the tattoo—at the fixity of its pride and its broken grammar. When I looked up the boy was watching me back, his amber eyes calm and unblinking. I blushed, and stared out of the window at the flickering back gardens of the semis.
The train braked as we neared Waterloo. There was a sensation of being between worlds. The brake shoes squealed against the train’s metal wheels and I felt eight years old again. Here I was, converging with my magazine on unflinching rails. Soon I would arrive at a terminus and have to prove that I could step off this carriage and back into my grown-up job. When the train stopped I turned to say something to the boy with amber eyes, but he had already stood from his seat and disappeared back into the cover of the barley field beneath the shade of the sheltering woods.
I arrived on the editorial floor at eleven thirty. The place went quiet. All the girls stared at me. I smiled and clapped my hands.
“Come on, back to work!” I said. “When a hundred thousand ABC-1 urban professional women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five lose focus then so will we, but not until.”
At the far end of the open plan, Clarissa was sitting behind my desk. She stood when I walked over, and came around to the front. Her lip gloss was iridescent plum. She held her hands around mine.
“Oh Sarah,” she said. “You poor old thing. How are you coping?”
She was wearing an aubergine shirt dress with a smooth black fish-skin belt and glossy black knee-high boots. I realized I was wearing the jeans I had taken Batman to nursery in.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Clarissa looked me up and down, and furrowed her brow.
“Really?” she said.
“Really.”
“Oh. Well, that’s great.”
I looked over my desk. Clarissa’s laptop sat in the center, next to her Kelly bag. My papers had been shunted to the far end.
“We didn’t think you’d be in,” said Clarissa. “You don’t mind me usurping your throne, do you darling?”
I saw the way she had plugged her BlackBerry into my charger.
“No,” I said, “of course not.”
“We thought you’d like us to get a head start on the July issue.”
I was conscious of eyes watching us from all around the office. I smiled.
“Yes that’s great,” I said. “Really. So what have we got so far?”
“For this issue? Wouldn’t you like to sit down first? Let me get you a coffee, you must feel terrible.”
“My husband died, Clarissa. I am still alive. I have a son to look after and a mortgage to pay. I’d just like to get straight back to work.”
Clarissa took a step back.
“Fine,” she said. “Well, we’ve got some great stuff. It’s Henley month, of course, so we’re doing an ironic what-not-to-wear for the regatta, which is a cunning pretext for some pics of gorgeous rowers, bien évidemment. For fashion we’re doing something called ‘Fuck Your Boyfriend’—see what we did there? That’s going to be girls with whips snarling at boys in Duckie Brown, basically. And for the ‘Real Life’ slot there’s two choices. Either we go with this piece called ‘Beauty and the Budget’ about a woman with two ugly daughters and only enough money to pay for cosmetic surgery for one of them. Ugh—yes—I know. Or—my preference—we’ve got a piece called ‘Good Vibrations,’ and I’m telling you, it’s an eye opener. I mean, my god, Sarah, some of the sex toys you can buy online these days, they’re solutions to desires I had no idea existed, god save us all.”
I closed my eyes and listened to the hum of the fluorescent lights, the buzzing of fax machines, and the fluid chatter of the editorial girls on their phones to fashion houses. It all seemed suddenly insane, like wearing a little green bikini to an African war. I breathed out slowly, and opened my eyes.
“So which piece do you want to go with?” said Clarissa. “Cosmetic conundrum, or carnal cornucopia?”
I walked over to the window and rolled my forehead against the glass.
“Please don’t do that, Sarah. It makes me nervous when you do that.”
“I’m thinking.”
“I know
, darling. That’s why it makes me nervous, because I know what you’re thinking. We have this argument every month. But we have to run the stories people read. You know we do.”
I shrugged. “My son is convinced he will lose all his powers if he takes off his Batman costume.”
“And your point is?”
“That we can be deluded. That we can be mistaken in our beliefs.”
“You think I am?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore, Clar. About the magazine, I mean. It all seems a bit unreal suddenly.”
“Of course it does, you poor thing. I don’t even know why you came in today. It’s far too early.”
I nodded. “That’s what Lawrence said too.”
“You should listen to him.”
“I do. I’m lucky to have him, I really am. I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.”
Clarissa came and stood next to me at the window.
“Have you spoken with him much, since Andrew died?”
“He’s at my house,” I said. “He showed up last night.”
“He stayed overnight? He’s married, isn’t he?”
“Don’t be like that. He was a married man before Andrew died.”
Clarissa shivered. “I know. It’s just a bit creepy, that’s all.”
“Is it?”
Clarissa blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Sudden, I suppose I mean.”
“Well it wasn’t my idea, if you must know.”
“In which case I revert to my original choice of word. Creepy.”
Now we both stood with our foreheads against the glass, looking down at the traffic.
“I actually came here to talk about work,” I said after a while.
“Fine.”
“I want us to go back to the kind of article we did while we were making our name. Let’s just, for once, put a real-life feature in the ‘Real Life’ slot. That’s all I’m saying. I won’t let you talk me out of it this time.”
“What, then? What kind of a feature?”
“I want us to do a piece on refugees to the UK. Don’t worry, we can do it in the style of the magazine. We can make it about women refugees if you like.”
Clarissa rolled her eyes.
“And yet something in your tone tells me you’re not talking about women refugees with sex toys.”
I smiled.
“What if I said no?” said Clarissa.
“I don’t know. Technically, I suppose, I could sack you.”
Clarissa thought for a moment.
“Why refugees?” she said. “Is this because you’re still cross we didn’t go with the Baghdad woman in the June issue?”
“I just think it’s an issue that isn’t going to go away. May, June, or anytime soon.”
“Fine,” said Clarissa. Then she said, “Would you really sack me, darling?”
“I don’t know. Would you really say no?”
“I don’t know.”
We stood for a long time. In the street below, an Italian-looking boy was cycling past the traffic queue. Mid-twenties, shirtless and tanned, in short white nylon shorts.
“Five,” said Clarissa.
“Out of ten?”
“Out of five, darling.”
I laughed. “There are days when I would cheerfully swap lives with you, Clar.”
Clarissa turned to me. I noticed the very slight mark of foundation left on the windowpane where her forehead had been. It hovered like a light flesh-toned cloud over the bone-white spire of Christ Church Spitalfields.
“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.”
