Chris Cleave - Little Bee

“Make a wish!” I said.

Charlie’s face clouded over again. “Want Daddy,” he said.

“Do you, Charlie? Do you really?”

Charlie nodded. His lower lip wobbled, and my heart wobbled with it. After the cake he got down from his high chair and toddled off to play with cars. A peculiar gait, toddling. A sort of teetering, really-my son at two-each step a hasty improvisation, a fall avoided by luck as much as by judgment. A sort of life on short legs.

Later, with Charlie tucked up in bed, I phoned my husband. “Charlie wants you back, Andrew.”

Silence.

“Andrew?”

“Charlie does, does he?”

“Yes.”

“And what about you? Do you want me back?”

“I want what Charlie wants.”

Andrew’s laugh down the phone-bitter, derisory.

“You really know how to make a man feel special.”

“Please. I know how badly I’ve hurt you. But it’ll be different now.”

“You’re bloody right it’ll be different.”

“I can’t raise our son alone, Andrew.”

“Well, I can’t raise my son with a slut for his mother.”

I gripped the phone, feeling a wave of terror rise through me. Andrew hadn’t even raised his voice. A slut for his mother. Cold, technical, as if he had also weighed up adulteress, cuckolder, and narcissist before selecting precisely the most apposite noun. I tried to control my voice but I heard the shake in it.

“Please, Andrew. This is you and me and Charlie we’re talking about. I care so much about both of you, you can’t imagine. What I did with Lawrence…I’m so sorry.”

“Why did you do it?”

“It was never meant to mean anything. It was just sex.” The lie came out of my mouth so easily that I realized why it was so popular.

“Just sex? That’s the convention, isn’t it, these days? Sex has become one of those words you can put just in front of. Anything else you’d like to minimize at this time, Sarah? Just unfaithfulness? Just betrayal? Just breaking my fucking heart?”

“Stop it, please, stop it! What can I do? What can I do to make it right again?”

Andrew said he didn’t know. Andrew cried down the phone. These were two things he had never done. The not knowing, and the crying. Hearing Andrew weeping over the crackling phone line, I began to cry too. When we both dried up, there was silence. And this silence had a new quality in it: the knowledge that there had been something left to cry over, after all. The realization hung on the phone line. Tentative, like a life waiting to be written.

“Please, Andrew. Maybe we need a change of scenery. A fresh start.”

A pause. He cleared his throat. “Yes. All right.”

“We need to get away from things. We need to get away from London and our jobs and even Charlie-we can leave him with my parents for a few days. We need a holiday.”

Andrew groaned.

“Oh, Jesus. A holiday?”

“Yes. Andrew. Please.”

“Jesus. All right. Where?”

The next day, I called him back.

“I’ve got a freebie, Andrew-Ibeno Beach in Nigeria, open-ended tickets. We can leave on Friday.”

“This Friday?”

“You can file your column before we leave, and you’ll be back in time for the next one.”

“But Africa?”

“There’s a beach, Andrew. It’s raining here and it’s dry season there. Come on, let’s get some sun.”

“Nigeria, though? Why not Ibiza, or the Canaries?”

“Don’t be boring, Andrew. Anyway it’s just a beach holiday. Come on, how bad can it be?”

Serious times. Once they have rolled in, they hang over you like low cumulus. That’s how it was with me and Andrew, after we came back from Africa. Shock, then recrimination, then the two awful years of Andrew’s deepening depression, and the continuing affair with Lawrence that I never could quite seem to stop.

I think I must have been depressed too, the whole time. You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realize you’ve been carrying the weather around with you. That’s what I was explaining to Little Bee on the afternoon she came with me to pick up Batman from nursery. I sat with her, drinking tea at the kitchen table.

“You know, Bee, I was thinking about what you said, about staying. About us helping each other. I think you’re right. I think we both need to move on.”

Little Bee nodded. Under the table, Batman was playing with a Batman action figure. It seemed the smaller Batman was engaged in a desperate battle with an unfinished bowl of cornflakes. I started explaining to Little Bee how I was going to help her.

“What I’m going to do first is track down your caseworker-oh Charlie, food is not a toy-track down your caseworker and find out where your documents are held. Then we can-please Charlie, don’t get those flakes everywhere, don’t make me tell you again-then we can challenge your legal status, find out whether we can make an appeal, and so on. I looked this up on the web and apparently-Charlie! Please! If I have to pick up that spoon one more time I will take away your Batman figure-apparently if we can get you temporary resident status, I can arrange for you to take a British Citizenship Exam, which is just simple stuff, really-Charlie! For god’s sake! Right, that’s it. Get out. Now! Out of the kitchen and come back when you’ve decided to be good-just simple stuff about the kings and queens and the English civil war and so on, and I’ll help you with the revision, and then-oh Charlie, oh goodness, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry. I’m sorry, Batman. I’m so sorry. Come here.”

Batman flinched away from my arms. His lip wobbled and his face went red and he howled, abandoning himself utterly to grief in that way only infants and superheroes have-that way that knows misery is bottomless and insatiable-that honest way. Little Bee rubbed Batman’s head, and he buried his masked face in her leg. I watched his little bat cape shaking as he sobbed.

“Oh god, Bee,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m just a mess at the moment.”

Little Bee smiled. “It’s okay, Sarah, it’s okay.”

The kitchen tap dripped. For something to do I got up and tightened it, but the drips kept coming. I couldn’t understand why that upset me so much.

“Oh Bee,” I said. “We’ve got to get a grip, both of us. We can’t let ourselves be the people things happen to.”

Later, there was a knock at the front door. I pulled myself together and went in through the house. I opened the door to Lawrence, suited, travel bag slung over his shoulder. I saw his relief, his involuntary smile when he saw me.

“I didn’t know if I’d got the right address,” he said.

“I’m not sure you have.”

His smile disappeared. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

“I’ve only just put my husband in the ground. We can’t do this. What about your wife?”

Lawrence shrugged.

“I told Linda I was going on a management course,” he said. “Birmingham. Three days. Leadership.”

“You think she believed you?”

“I just thought you might need some support.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got some.”

He looked over my shoulder at Little Bee, standing in the hallway. “That’s her, is it?”

“She’s staying for as long as she wants.”

Lawrence lowered his voice. “Is she legal?”

“I don’t think I give a shit. Do you?”

“I work for the Home Office, Sarah. I could lose my job if I knew you were harboring an illegal and I didn’t do anything about it. Technically, if I have the slightest doubt, I could be sacked if I even stepped through this door.”

“So…um…don’t.”