by Chris Cleave
I miss my finger most on deadline days, when the copy checkers have all gone home and I’m typing up the last-minute additions to my magazine. We published an editorial once where I said I was “wary of sensitive men.” I meant to say “weary,” of course, and after a hundred outraged letters from the earnest boyfriends who’d happened to glance at my piece on their partner’s coffee table (presumably in between giving a back rub and washing the dishes), I began to realize just how weary I was. It was a typographical accident, I told them. I didn’t add, it was the kind of typographical accident that is caused by a steel machete on a Nigerian beach. I mean, what does one call the type of meeting where one gains an African girl and loses E, D, and C? I do not think you have a word for it in your language—that’s what Little Bee would say.
I sat in my pew, massaged the stump of my finger, and found myself acknowledging for the first time that my husband had been doomed since the day we met Little Bee. The intervening two years had brought a series of worsening premonitions, culminating in the horrible morning ten days earlier when I had woken up to the sound of the telephone ringing. My whole body had crawled with dread. It had been an ordinary weekday morning. The June issue of my magazine was almost ready to go to the printers, and Andrew’s column for The Times was due in too. Just a normal morning, but the soft hairs on the backs of my arms were up.
I have never been one of those happy women who insist that disaster strikes from a clear blue sky. For me there were countless foretellings, innumerable small breaks with normalcy. Andrew’s chin unshaved, a second bottle uncorked on a weekday night, the use of the passive voice on deadline Friday. Certain attitudes which have been adopted by this society have left this commentator a little lost. That was the very last sentence my husband wrote. In his Times column, he was always so precise with the written word. From a layperson, lost would be a synonym for bewildered. From my husband, it was a measured good-bye.
It was cold in the church. I listened to the vicar saying where, o death, is thy sting? I stared at the lilies and smelled the sweet accusation of them. God, how I wish I had paid more attention to Andrew.
How to explain to my son that the warning signs were so slight? That disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips? They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the wind slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes, but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly. If we overreacted every time the wind eased up, we would forever be laying down under the dining-room table when we really should be laying the plates on top of it.
Would my son accept that this is how it was with his father? The hairs on my arms went up, Batman, but I had a household to run. I never understood that he was actually going to do it. All I would honestly be able to say is that I woke up with the phone ringing and my body predicting some event that had yet to happen, although I never imagined it would be so serious.
Charlie had still been asleep. Andrew picked up the phone in his study, quickly, before the noise of the ringing could wake our son. Andrew’s voice became agitated. I heard it quite clearly from the bedroom. Just leave me alone, he said. All that stuff happened a long time ago and it wasn’t my fault.
The trouble was, my husband didn’t really believe that.
I found him in tears. I asked him who it had been on the phone, but he wouldn’t say. And then, since we were both awake and Charlie was still asleep, we made love. I used to do that with Andrew sometimes. More for him than for me, really. By that stage of our marriage it had become a maintenance thing, like bleeding the air out of the radiators—just another part of running a household. I didn’t know—in fact I still don’t know—what awful consequences are supposed to ensue if one fails to bleed the radiators. It’s not something a cautious woman would ever allow herself to discover.
We didn’t speak a word. I took Andrew into the bedroom and we lay on the bed beneath the tall Georgian windows with the yellow silk blinds. The blinds were embroidered with pale foliage. Silk birds hid there in a kind of silent apprehension. It was a bright May morning in Kingston-upon-Thames, but the sunlight through the blinds was a dark and florid saffron. It was feverish, almost malarial. The bedroom walls were yellow and ocher. Across the creaking landing, Andrew’s study was white—the color, I suppose, of blank pages. That’s where I retrieved him, after the awful phone call. I read a few words of his column, over his shoulder. He’d been awake all night writing an opinion piece about the Middle East, which was a region he had never visited and had no specialist knowledge of. It was the summer of 2007, and my son was fighting the Penguin and the Puffin, and my country was fighting Iraq and Afghanistan, and my husband was forming public opinion. It was the kind of summer where no one took their costume off.
I pulled my husband away from the phone. I pulled him into the bedroom by the tasseled cord of his dressing gown, because I had read somewhere that this sort of behavior would excite him. I pulled him down onto our bed.
I remember the way he moved inside me, like a clock with its mainspring running down. I pulled his face close to mine and I whispered, Oh god Andrew, are you all right? My husband didn’t reply. He just closed his eyes against the tears and we began to move faster while small, involuntary moans came from our mouths and fled into the other’s moaning in wordless desperation.
In on this small tragedy walked my son, who was more at home fighting evil on a larger, more knockabout scale. I opened my eyes and saw him standing in the bedroom doorway, watching us through the small, diamond-shaped eyeholes of his bat mask. From the expression on the part of his face that could be seen, he seemed to be wondering which (if any) of the gadgets on his utility belt might help in this situation.
When I saw my son, I pushed Andrew off me and scrabbled frantically for the duvet to cover us. I said, Oh god Charlie, I’m so sorry.
My son looked behind him, then back at me.
“Charlie isn’t here. I’m Batman.”
I nodded, and bit my lip.
“Good morning, Batman.”
“What is you and Daddy doing, Mummy?”
“Er . . .”
“Is you getting baddies?”
“Are we getting baddies, Charlie. Not is we.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, Batman. Yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
I smiled at my son, and waited. I wondered what Batman would say. What he said was, Someone done a poo in my costume, Mummy.
“Did a poo, Charlie.”
“Yes. A big big poo.”
“Oh Batman. Have you really done a poo in your suit?”
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.”
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“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 paintwork 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, and 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 cou
ntries 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.
