Chris Cleave - Little Bee

Lawrence blushed, took a step back, and ran his hand through his hair.

“This isn’t comfortable for me either, Sarah. I don’t like the way I feel about you. It’d be nice if I loved my wife and it’d be super if I didn’t work for the forces of darkness. I wish I could be idealistic like you. But that’s not me, Sarah. I can’t afford to act as if I’m someone. I’m nothing. Even my cover story is nothing. Three days in Birmingham- Birmingham, fuck! On a course to learn something everyone accepts I’m hopeless at. It’s so plausible it’s tragic, don’t you think? That’s what I was thinking, even while I was making it up. I’m not ashamed of my adultery, Sarah. I’m ashamed of my fucking cover story.”

I smiled.

“I sort of remember why I like you. No one could ever accuse you of being full of yourself, could they?”

Lawrence puffed up his cheeks and blew air through his mouth, sadly. “Not in the full light of the evidence,” he said.

I hesitated. He reached up and held my hand. I closed my eyes and felt the resolve draining out of me into the cold smoothness of his skin. I took a step back into the house. I almost staggered, really.

“Are you letting me in then?”

“Don’t get used to it,” I said.

Lawrence grinned, but then he hesitated on the threshold. He looked at Little Bee. She came up and stood just behind my shoulder.

“Do not worry about me,” she said. “Officially you cannot even see me. You are in Birmingham and I am in Nigeria.”

Lawrence gave a quick little smile. “I wonder which of us will get found out first,” he said.

We went in through the hall and into the living room. Batman was T-boning his red fire engine into the side of a defenseless family saloon. (In Charlie’s world, I think, the emergency services are staffed by rogue elements.) He looked up when we came in.

“Batman, this is Lawrence. Lawrence is Mummy’s friend.”

Batman stood and walked up to Lawrence. He stared at him. His bat senses must have told him something. “Is you mine new daddy?” he said.

“No, no, no,” I said.

Charlie looked confused. Lawrence knelt so that his face was at Charlie’s level. “No, Batman, I’m just your mummy’s friend.”

Batman tilted his head to one side. The ears on his bat hood flopped over. “Is you a goody or a baddy?” he said slowly.

Lawrence grinned and stood up.

“Honestly, Batman? I think I’m one of those innocent bystanders you see in the background in the comics. I’m just a man from a crowd scene.”

“But is you a goody or a baddy?”

“He’s a goody of course,” I said. “Come on, Charlie. Do you really think I’d let someone into our house who wasn’t?”

Batman folded his arms and set his lips in a grim line. No one spoke. From outside came the evening sounds of mothers calling normal children in from gardens for tea.

Later, after I’d got Charlie to bed, I made supper while Lawrence and Little Bee sat at the kitchen table. Digging at the back of the cupboard for a refill of pepper, I found a half-full packet of the Amaretto biscuits that Andrew used to love. I smelled them, secretly, holding the packet up to my nose, with my back to Lawrence and Little Bee. That sickly, sharp smell of apricot and almond-it made me think of the way Andrew used to wander around the house on his insomniac nights. He would return to bed in the small hours with that smell on his breath. Toward the end, the only thing keeping my husband going was six Amaretto biscuits and one tablet of Cipralex a day.

I held Andrew’s biscuits in my hand. I thought about throwing them away, and I found that I couldn’t. How duplicitous grief is, I thought. Here I am, too sentimental to throw away something that gave Andrew slight comfort, even as I cook supper for Lawrence. I felt horribly traitorous, suddenly. This is exactly why one shouldn’t let one’s lover into one’s home, I thought.

When the supper was ready-a mushroom omelet, slightly burned while I was thinking of Andrew-I sat down to eat with Lawrence and Little Bee. It was dreadful-they wouldn’t talk to each other, and I realized that they hadn’t spoken the whole time I’d been making supper. We ate in silence, with just the sound of the cutlery. Finally Little Bee sighed, and rubbed her eyes, and went upstairs to the bed I’d made up for her in the guest room.

I crashed the plates into the dishwasher and dumped the frying pan into the sink.

“What?” said Lawrence. “What did I do?”

“You might have made an effort,” I said.

“Yes, well. I thought I’d be alone with you tonight. It’s not an easy situation to adjust to.”

“She’s my guest, Lawrence. The least you can do is be polite.”

“I just don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into, Sarah. I don’t think it’s healthy for you to have that girl staying here. Every time you see her, you’re going to be reminded of what happened.”

“I’ve spent two years denying what happened on that beach. Ignoring it, letting it fester. That’s what Andrew did too, and it killed him in the end. I’m not going to let it kill me and Charlie. I’m going to help Little Bee, and make everything right, and then I can get on with my life.”

“Yes, but what if you can’t make it right? You know the most likely outcome for that girl, don’t you? They’ll deport her.”

“I’m sure it won’t come to that.”

“Sarah, we have an entire department consecrated to ensuring that it will come to that. Officially Nigeria’s pretty safe, and she’s got no family here, by her own admission. There’s bugger all reason for them to let her stay.”

“I can’t not try.”

“You’ll get dragged down by the bureaucracy, and then they’ll send her home anyway. You’ll get hurt. It will damage you. And that’s the last thing you need at the moment. You need positive influences in your life. You’ve got a son that you have to bring up on your own now. You need people that are going to give you energy, not drain it away.”

“And that’s you, is it?”

Lawrence looked back at me, and shifted his weight forward.

“I want to be important to you, Sarah. I’ve wanted it from the moment you walked into my life with your reporter’s notepad that you never wrote down a single word on and your Dictaphone that you didn’t even switch on. And I haven’t let you down, Sarah, have I? Despite everything. Despite my wife and despite your husband and despite bloody well everyone. We have fun together, Sarah. Isn’t that what you want?”

I sighed. “I really don’t think this is about having fun anymore.”

“And do you see me running away? This is about us doing what’s best for you. I’m not going to stop just because it’s gone all serious. But you have to choose. I can’t help you if all your focus is on that girl.”

I felt the blood draining out of my face. I spoke as quietly and calmly as I could.

“Tell me you’re not asking me to choose between you and her.”

“I am absolutely not asking you to do that. But what I am saying is that you’re going to have to choose between your life and her life. At some point you have to start thinking about a future for you and Charlie. Charity is lovely, Sarah, but there has to be some logical point where it stops.”

I banged my damaged hand down on the table, fingers splayed out. “I cut off my finger for that girl. Will you tell me when is the logical point to stop something that started like that? Do you really want me to make a choice like that? I cut off my own bloody finger. Do you think I wouldn’t cut you off too?”

Silence. Lawrence stood up. His chair scraped.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come.”