by Chris Cleave
“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.
“Oh. This? I lost it on holiday. On a beach, actually.”
The two policemen looked at each other. They turned back to me. The older one spoke. His voice was suddenly hoarse.
“We’re very sorry, Mrs. O’Rourke.”
“Oh, please, don’t be. It’s fine, really. I’m fine now. It’s just a finger.”
“That’s not what I meant, Mrs. O’Rourke. I’m afraid we’ve been instructed to tell you that—”
“See, honestly, you get used to doing without the finger. At first you think it’s a big deal and then you learn to use the other hand.”
I looked up and saw the two of them watching me, gray-faced and serious. Neon crackled. On the w
all clock, a fresh minute snapped over the old one.
“The really funny thing is, I still feel it, you know? My finger, I mean. This missing one. Sometimes it actually itches. And I go to scratch it and there’s nothing there, of course. And in my dreams my finger grows back, and I’m so happy to have it back, even though I’ve learned to do without it. Isn’t that silly? I miss it, do you see? It itches.”
The young officer took a deep breath and looked down at his notebook.
“Your husband was found unconscious at your property shortly after nine this morning, Mrs. O’Rourke. Your neighbor heard cries and placed a 999 call to the effect that a male was apparently in distress. Police attended the address and forced entry to an upstairs room at nine-fifteen A.M., when Andrew O’Rourke was found unconscious. Our officers did everything they could and an ambulance attended and removed the casualty, but I am very sorry to tell you, Mrs. O’Rourke, that your husband was pronounced dead at the scene at—here we are—nine thirty-three A.M.”
The policeman closed his pad.
“We’re very sorry, madam.”
I picked up my phone. The new text was indeed from Andrew. SO SORRY, it said.
He was sorry.
I switched the phone, and myself, onto silent mode. The silence lasted all week. It rumbled in the taxi home. It howled when I picked up Charlie from nursery. It crackled on the phone call with my parents. It roared in my ears while the undertaker explained the relative merits of oak and pine caskets. It cleared its throat apologetically when the obituaries editor of The Times telephoned to check some last details. Now the silence had followed me into the cold, echoing church.
How to explain death to a four-year-old superhero? How to announce the precipitous arrival of grief? I hadn’t even accepted it myself. When the policemen told me that Andrew was dead, my mind refused to contain the information. I am a very ordinary woman, I think, and I am quite well equipped to deal with everyday evil. Interrupted sex, tough editorial decisions and malfunctioning coffee machines—these my mind could readily accept. But my Andrew, dead? It still seemed physically impossible. At one point he had covered more than seven tenths of the earth’s surface.
And yet here I was, staring at Andrew’s plain oak coffin (A classic choice, madam), and it seemed rather small in the wide nave of the church. A silent, sickening dream.
Mummy, where’s Daddy?
I sat in the front pew of the church with my arms around my son, and realized I had begun to tremble. The vicar was delivering the eulogy. He was talking about my husband in the past tense. He made it sound very neat. It occurred to me that he had never had to deal with Andrew in the present tense, or proofread his columns, or feel him running down inside like a piece of broken clockwork.
Charlie squirmed in my arms and asked his question again, the same one he’d asked ten times a day since Andrew died. Mummy, where’s mine daddy exactly now? I leaned down to his ear and whispered, He’s in a really nice bit of heaven this morning, Charlie. There’s a lovely long room where they all go after breakfast, with lots of interesting books and things to do.
—Oh. Is there painting-and-drawing?
—Yes, there’s painting-and-drawing.
—Is mine daddy doing drawing?
—No Charlie, Daddy is opening the window and looking at the sky.
I shivered, and wondered how long I would have to go on narrating my husband’s afterlife.
More words, then hymns. Hands took my elbows and led me outside. I observed myself standing in a graveyard beside a deep hole in the ground. Six suited undertakers were lowering a coffin on thick green silky ropes with tasseled ends. I recognized it as the coffin that had been standing on trestles at the front of the church. The coffin came to rest. The undertakers retrieved the ropes, each with a deft flick of the wrist. I remember thinking, I bet they do this all the time, as if it was some brilliant insight. Someone thrust a lump of clay into my hand. I realized I was being invited—urged, even—to throw it into the hole. I stepped up to the edge. Neat, clean greengrocer’s grass had been laid around the border of the grave. I looked down and saw the coffin glowing palely in the depths. Batman held tight to my leg and peered down into the gloom with me.
“Mummy, why did the Bruce Wayne men putted that box down in the hole?”
“Let’s not think about that now, darling.”
I’d spent so many hours explaining heaven to Charlie that week—every room and bookshelf and sandpit of it—that I’d never really dealt with the issue of Andrew’s physical body at all. I thought it would be too much to ask of my son, at four, to understand the separation between body and soul. Looking back on it now, I think I underestimated a boy who could live simultaneously in Kingston-upon-Thames and Gotham City. I think if I’d managed to sit him down and explain it to him gently, he would have been perfectly happy with the duality.
I knelt and put my arm around my son’s shoulders. I did it to be tender, but my head was swimming and I realized that perhaps it was only Charlie who was stopping me from falling down the hole. I held on tighter. Charlie put his mouth to my ear and whispered.
“Where’s mine daddy right now?”
I whispered back.
“Your daddy is in the heaven hills, Charlie. Very popular at this time of year. I think he’s very happy there.”
“Mmm. Is mine daddy coming back soon?”
“No, Charlie. People don’t come back from heaven. We talked about that.”
Charlie pursed his lips.
“Mummy,” he said again, “why did they put that box down there?”
“I suppose they want to keep it safe.”
“Oh. Is they going to come and get it later?”
“No Charlie, I don’t think so.”
Charlie blinked. Under his bat mask he screwed up his face with the effort of trying to understand.
“Where is heaven, Mummy?”
“Please, Charlie. Not now.”
“What’s in that box?”
“Let’s talk about this later, darling, all right? Mummy is feeling rather dizzy.”
Charlie stared at me.
“Is mine daddy in that box?”
“Your daddy is in heaven, Charlie.”
“IS THAT BOX HEAVEN?” said Charlie, loudly.
Everyone was watching us. I couldn’t speak. My son stared into the hole. Then he looked up at me in absolute alarm.
“Mummy! Get him OUT! Get mine daddy out of heaven!”
I held tightly on to his shoulders.
“Oh Charlie, please, you don’t understand!”
“GET HIM OUT! GET HIM OUT!”
My son squirmed in my grip and broke free. It happened very quickly. He stood at the very edge of the hole. He looked back at me and then he turned and inched forward, but the greengrocer’s grass overlapped the edge of the hole and it yielded under his feet and he fell, with his bat cape flying behind him, down into the grave. He landed with a thump on top of Andrew’s coffin. There was a single, urgent scream from one of the other mourners. I think it was the first sound, since Andrew died, that really broke the silence.
The scream ran on and on in my mind. I felt nauseous, and the horizon lurched insanely. Still kneeling, I leaned out over the edge of the pit. Down below, in the dark shadow, my son was banging on the coffin and screaming Daddy, Daddy, get OUT! He clung to the coffin lid, and planted his bat shoes against the sidewall of the grave, and heaved against the screws that held the lid closed. I hung my arms down over the edge of the hole. I implored Charlie to take my hands so I could pull him back up. I don’t think he heard me at all.
At first, my son moved with a breathless confidence. Batman was undefeated, after all, that spring. He had overcome the Penguin, the Puffin, and Mr. Freeze. It was simply not a possibility in my son’s mind that he might not overcome this new challenge. He screamed in rage and fury. He wouldn’t give up, but if I am strict and force myself now to decide upon the precise moment in this whole story when my heart irreparab
ly broke, it was the moment when I saw the weariness and the doubt creep into my son’s small muscles as his fingers slipped, for the tenth time, from the pale oak lid.
The mourners clustered around the edge of the grave, paralyzed by the horror of this thing, this first discovery of death that was worse than death itself. I tried to go forward but the hands on my elbows were holding me back. I strained against their grip and looked at all the horror-struck faces around the grave and I was thinking, Why doesn’t someone do something?
But it is hard, very hard, to be the first.
Finally it was Little Bee who went down into the grave and held up my son for other hands to haul out. Charlie was kicking and biting and struggling furiously in his muddied mask and cape. He wanted to go back down. And it was Little Bee, once she herself had been extricated, who hugged him and held him back as he screamed, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, while each of the principal mourners stepped onto the thin strip of greengrocer’s grass and dropped in their small handfuls of clay. My son’s screaming seemed to go on for a cruelly long time. I remember wondering if my mind would shatter with the noise, like a wineglass broken by a soprano. In fact a former colleague of Andrew’s, a war reporter who had been in Iraq and Darfur, did call me a few days later with the name of a combat-fatigue counselor he used. That’s kind of you, I told him, but I haven’t been at war.
At the graveside, when the screaming was over, I picked up Charlie and held him on my front, with his head resting on my shoulder. He was exhausted. Through the eyeholes of his bat mask, I could see his eyelids drooping. I watched the other mourners filing away in a slow line toward the car park. Brightly colored umbrellas broke out above the somber suits. It was starting to rain.
Little Bee stayed behind with me. We stood by the side of the grave and we stared at each other.
“Thank you,” I said.
“It is nothing,” said Little Bee. “I just did what anyone would do.”
“Yes,” I said. “Except that everyone else didn’t.”
Little Bee shrugged.
“It is easier when you are from outside.”
I shivered. The rain came down harder.
“This is never going to end,” I said. “Is it, Little Bee?”
“However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again. That is what we used to say in my village.”
