Chris Cleave - Little Bee

“I wish I could just make you disappear,” he said. “But I’m nobody. I’m just a civil servant. I won’t tell the police about you. Not if you keep quiet. But if you tell anyone, ever, about Sarah and me, or if you tell anyone, ever, about what happened with Andrew, I will have you on a plane to Nigeria, I swear. It will be the last thing I do before my life falls apart.”

I breathed out one long, deep breath.

“I understand,” I whispered.

Sarah’s voice came from upstairs. “Who said you could watch TV, Batman?”

Lawrence took his hands away from my face and he went to make more tea. Sarah came into the kitchen. She was yawning, and her eyes were screwed up against the sunlight. Charlie came with her, holding her hand.

“I might as well tell you two grown-ups the rules,” said Sarah, “since you’re both new around here. Superheroes, especially Dark Knights, are not allowed to watch television before they’ve eaten their breakfast. Are they, Batman?”

Charlie grinned at her and shook his head.

“Right,” said Sarah. “Bat flakes or bat toast?”

“Bat toast,” said Charlie.

Sarah went to the toaster and put two slices of bread into it. Lawrence and I, we both just watched her. Sarah turned around.

“Is everything all right in here?” she said. She looked at me. “Have you been crying?”

“It is nothing,” I said. “I always cry in the morning.”

Sarah frowned at Lawrence. “I hope you’ve been looking after her.”

“Of course,” said Lawrence. “Little Bee and I have been getting to know one another.”

Sarah nodded. “Good,” she said. “Because we really have to make this work. You both know that, don’t you?”

She looked at each of us and then she yawned again, and she stretched her arms. “Fresh start,” she said.

I looked at Lawrence and Lawrence looked at me.

“Now,” said Sarah. “I’m going to take Charlie to nursery and then we can start to track down Little Bee’s papers. We’ll find you a solicitor first. I know a good one that we sometimes use on the magazine.”

Sarah smiled, and she went over to Lawrence.

“And as for you,” she said, “I’m going to find a little time to thank you for coming all the way to Birmingham.”

She put her hand up to Lawrence ’s face, but then I think she remembered that Charlie was in the room and so she just brushed her hand against his shoulder instead. I went into the next room to watch the television news with the sound turned off.

The news announcer looked so much like my sister. My heart was overflowing with things to say. But in your country, you cannot talk back to the news.

I REMEMBER THE EXACT day when England became me, when its contours cleaved to the curves of my own body, when its inclinations became my own. As a girl, on a bike ride through the Surrey lanes, pedaling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum where a stream ran beneath the flint-and-brick bridge. Coming to a stop, the brakes squealing from the work of plucking one still moment out of time. Throwing my bicycle down into a pungent cushion of cow parsley and wild mint, and sliding down the plunging bank into the clear cold water, my sandals kicking up a quick brown bloom of mud from the streambed, the minnows darting away into the black pool of shade beneath the bridge. Pressing my face into the water, with time utterly suspended, drinking in the cool shock. And then, looking up and seeing a fox. He was sunning himself on the far bank, watching me through a feathery screen of barley. I looked back at him, and his amber eyes held mine. The moment, the country: I realized it was me. I found a soft patch of wild grass and cornflower by the side of the barley field, and I lay down with my face close to the damp earthen smell of the grass roots, listening to the buzzing of the summer flies. I cried, but I didn’t know why.

The morning after Lawrence stayed overnight, I dropped off Charlie at nursery and I went home to see what I could do to help Little Bee. I found her upstairs, watching television with the sound turned off. She looked so sad.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

Little Bee shrugged.

“Is everything okay with Lawrence?”

She looked away.

“What is it, then?”

Nothing.

“Maybe you’re homesick. I know I would be. Do you miss your country?”

She turned to look at me and her eyes were very solemn.

“Sarah,” she said, “I do not think I have left my country. I think it has traveled with me.”

She turned back to the television. That’s all right, I thought. There’ll be plenty of time to get through to her.

I tidied the kitchen while Lawrence was showering. I made myself a coffee and I realized, for the first time since Andrew died, that I had taken only one cup down from the cupboard instead of my instinctual two. I stirred in the milk, the spoon clinked against the china, and I realized I was losing the habit of being Andrew’s wife. How strange, I thought. I smiled, and realized I felt strong enough to put in an appearance at the magazine.

At my usual time the commuter train was crowded with pin-stripes and laptop bags, but now it was ten thirty in the morning and the train ran nearly empty. The boy opposite me stared at the carriage’s ceiling. He wore an England shirt and blue jeans, white with plaster dust. Tattooed on the inside of his forearm, in a Gothic typeface, were the words: THIS IS A TIME FOR HERO’S. I stared at the tattoo-at the fixity of its pride and its broken grammar. When I looked up the boy was watching me back, his amber eyes calm and unblinking. I blushed, and stared out of the window at the flickering back gardens of the semis.

The train braked as we neared Waterloo. There was a sensation of being between worlds. The brake shoes squealed against the train’s metal wheels and I felt eight years old again. Here I was, converging with my magazine on unflinching rails. Soon I would arrive at a terminus and have to prove that I could step off this carriage and back into my grown-up job. When the train stopped I turned to say something to the boy with amber eyes, but he had already stood from his seat and disappeared back into the cover of the barley field beneath the shade of the sheltering woods.

I arrived on the editorial floor at eleven thirty. The place went quiet. All the girls stared at me. I smiled and clapped my hands.

“Come on, back to work!” I said. “When a hundred thousand ABC-1 urban professional women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five lose focus then so will we, but not until.”

At the far end of the open plan, Clarissa was sitting behind my desk. She stood when I walked over, and came around to the front. Her lip gloss was iridescent plum. She held her hands around mine.

“Oh Sarah,” she said. “You poor old thing. How are you coping?”

She was wearing an aubergine shirt dress with a smooth black fish-skin belt and glossy black knee-high boots. I realized I was wearing the jeans I had taken Batman to nursery in.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Clarissa looked me up and down, and furrowed her brow.

“Really?” she said.

“Really.”

“Oh. Well, that’s great.”

I looked over my desk. Clarissa’s laptop sat in the center, next to her Kelly bag. My papers had been shunted to the far end.

“We didn’t think you’d be in,” said Clarissa. “You don’t mind me usurping your throne, do you darling?”

I saw the way she had plugged her BlackBerry into my charger.

“No,” I said, “of course not.”

“We thought you’d like us to get a head start on the July issue.”