Chris Cleave - Little Bee

“No. Maybe you shouldn’t.”

I sat at the kitchen table and listened to Lawrence taking his coat from the peg in the hall and picking up his travel bag. When I heard the front door opening, I stood up. Lawrence was halfway down the path by the time I got to the door.

“Lawrence?”

He turned.

“Where are you going to go? You can’t go home.”

“Oh. I didn’t really think about it.”

“You’re meant to be in Birmingham.”

He shrugged. “I’ll get a hotel. It’ll be good for me. I’ll read a book on leadership. Might actually learn something.”

“Oh Lawrence, come here.”

I held out my arms to him. I pressed my face into his neck and hugged him while he stood motionless. I breathed in the smell of him, and remembered all those hotel afternoons, high as kites on each other.

“You really are a loser,” I said.

“I just feel so bloody silly. I had it all worked out. I got the time off work, I made up the story for Linda. I even bought toys for the kids, in case I forgot on the way home. I had it all worked out. I thought it was going to be a nice surprise for you and…well. It was a surprise, at least, wasn’t it?”

I stroked his face.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I snapped at you. Thank you for coming to see me. Please don’t go to a hotel room and sit there all on your own, I can’t bear it. Please stay.”

“What? Now?”

“Yes. Please.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Sarah. Maybe I need to take a step back and think about what we mean to each other. What you said just now, about cutting me off…”

“Stop it, you cunning bastard. Stop it before I change my mind.”

Lawrence almost smiled. I linked my fingers around the back of his neck.

“What I didn’t say was that if I had to cut you off, it would hurt more than cutting off my finger.”

He stared at me for a long time and then he said, Oh Sarah. We went upstairs and it wasn’t until we’d started that I realized we were having sex on the bed I used to share with Andrew. I was concentrating on Lawrence, burying my face in the soft hair on his chest, peeling the clothes off him, and then something happened-my bra strap snagged, Lawrence’s belt buckle jammed for a second-I don’t recall but it stopped the flow, anyway, and I realized that Lawrence was lying on Andrew’s side of the bed, that his skin was pressing down where Andrew’s had pressed, that the concave of Lawrence’s back, smooth and hot with sweat, was arching proud of the depression that Andrew had made in the mattress. I hesitated-I froze up. Lawrence sensed it, I suppose, and he kept the momentum going. He rolled over onto me. I just felt so grateful to him, I think, for getting us through that moment without thinking. I let myself dissolve into the slickness of his skin, the delicacy of his movement, the lightness of him. Lawrence was tall but he was slight. There was none of the bruising compression of my pelvis, the crushing of the breath from my lungs, the overpowering gravity of sex with Andrew that left me groaning as much in resignation as in pleasure. That was what I loved about sex with Lawrence-the glorious, giddying lightness of it. But there was something wrong, tonight. Maybe it was the presence of Andrew, so strong in the room. His books and papers were everywhere still-jamming the bookshelves, scattered in the corners of the floor-and when I thought of Andrew, I thought of Little Bee. Lawrence was making love to me and part of me was thinking, Uh, while another part was thinking, In the morning I must phone the Border and Immigration Agency and start to track down her papers, and then I’ll need to find her a solicitor, and start an appeal procedure, and…and…

I found I couldn’t give myself up to Lawrence-not in that un-hesitating, abandoned way I once had. Suddenly Lawrence seemed too light. His fingers barely brushed my skin, as if they were not engaging with my body but merely tracing lines in some fine and invisible dust that Africa had cloaked me in. And when his weight came onto me it was like being made love to by a summer cloud, or a winter butterfly-by some creature in any case that lacked the authority to bend gravity around itself and become the moment’s center.

“What’s wrong, Sarah?”

I realized I was lying absolutely rigid.

“Oh god, I’m sorry.”

Lawrence stopped, and rolled onto his back. I took hold of his penis, but already I could feel the softness returning to it.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t.”

I let go and took hold of his hand instead, but he pulled it free.

“I don’t understand you, Sarah, I really don’t.”

“I’m sorry Lawrence. It’s Andrew. It’s just too soon.”

“He never stopped us while he was alive.”

I thought about that. In the darkness outside, a low jet was climbing out of Heathrow and a pair of owls were calling to each other desperately above the roar, their shrieks shrilling against the whining of the turbines.

“You’re right. It isn’t Andrew.”

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know. I love you, Lawrence, I really do. It’s just that I’ve got so much to do.”

“For Little Bee?”

“Yes. I can’t relax. I can’t stop running it over and over in my head.”

Lawrence sighed. “So what about us ?” he said. “Do you think you’re going to find time for us again, one of these days?”

“Oh, of course I will. You and me, we’ve got plenty of time, haven’t we? We’ll still be here in six weeks, six months, six years. We’ve got time to work this out. We’ve got time to work out how to be together, now that Andrew’s gone. But Little Bee doesn’t have that time. You said it yourself. If I can’t fix things for her, they’ll find her and they’ll deport her. And she’ll be gone, and that will be that. And what sort of a future would we have then? I wouldn’t be able to look at you without thinking I should have done more to save her. Is that the future you want us to have?”

“Oh god. Why can’t you be like other people and just not give a shit?”

“Leggy blonde, likes music and movies, seeks solvent man for friendship and maybe more?”

“All right. I’m glad you’re not one of them. But I don’t want to lose you to a refugee girl who’s really got no hope of staying here anyway.”

“Oh, Lawrence. You’re not going to lose me. But you might have to share me with her for a while.”

Lawrence laughed.

“What?” I said.

“Well it’s just typical, isn’t it? These immigrants, they come over here, they take our women…”

Lawrence was smiling but there was a guardedness is his eyes, an opaqueness that made me wonder how funny he found his own joke. It was strange, to feel uncertain like this with him. Truly, he had never seemed at all complicated before. Then again, I realized, I had never invested anything complicated in him until now. Perhaps it was me. I made myself relax, and I smiled back. I kissed him on the forehead.

“Thank you. Thank you for not making this harder than it is.”

Lawrence stared at me, and his face was thin and sad in the orange glow of the streetlamps filtering in through the yellow silk blinds. The flutter in my stomach surprised me, and I realized that the hairs on my arms were up.

“Sarah,” he said, “I honestly don’t think you know how hard this is.”

VERY EARLY THE NEXT morning, Sarah looked into my room.

“I’m glad you’re awake,” she said. “We’ve run out of milk for Charlie’s breakfast, so I’m popping down to the shop before he wakes up. Two minutes. Do you want to come?”

It was raining, so we went in Sarah’s car. The windscreen wipers squeaked across the glass. Sarah chewed her lip between her teeth.