Little Bee (2 page)

FROM THE SPRING OF
2007 until the end of that long summer when Little Bee came to live
with us, my son removed his Batman costume only at bath times. I ordered a twin
costume that I substituted while he splashed in the suds, so that at least I
could wash the boy sweat and the grass stains out of the first. It was a dirty,
green-kneed job, fighting master criminals. If it wasn’t Mr. Freeze with his
dastardly ice ray, then it was the Penguin—Batman’s deadly foe—or the even more
sinister Puffin, whose absolute wickedness the original creators of the Batman
franchise had inexplicably failed to chronicle. My son and I lived with the consequences—a
houseful of acolytes, henchmen and stooges, ogling us from behind the sofa,
cackling darkly in the thin gap beside the bookcase, and generally bursting out
at us willy-nilly. It was one shock after another, in fact. At four years old,
asleep and awake, my son lived at constant readiness. There was no question of
separating him from the demonic bat mask, the Lycra suit, the glossy yellow
utility belt and the jet-black cape. And there was no use addressing my son by
his Christian name. He would only look behind him, cock his head, and shrug—as
if to say,
My
bat senses can detect no boy of that name here, madam.
The
only name my son answered to, that
summer,
was
Batman.
Nor was there any point explaining to him that his
father had died. My son didn’t believe in the physical possibility of death. Death
was something that could only occur if the evil schemes of the baddies were not
constantly foiled—and that, of course, was unthinkable.

That
summer—the summer my husband died—we all had identities we were loath to let go
of. My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s
surname,
and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name
she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality, that summer. We
were refugees from ourselves.

To
flee from cruelty is the most natural thing in the world, of course. And the
timing that brought us together that summer was so very cruel. Little Bee
telephoned us on the morning they released her from the detention center. My
husband picked up her call. I only found out much later that it was her—Andrew
never told me. Apparently she let him know she was coming, but I don’t suppose
he felt up to seeing her face again. Five days later he killed himself by
hanging. They found my husband with his feet treading empty air, touching the
soil of no country. Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new
name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you
run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you
asylum.

Little
Bee knocked on my front door five days after my husband died, which was ten
days after they released her from detention. After a journey of five thousand
miles and two years, she arrived just too late to find Andrew alive, but just
in time for his funeral.
Hello Sarah,
she said.

Little
Bee arrived at eight A.M. and the undertaker knocked at ten. Not one second to,
or one second past. I imagine the undertaker had been silently standing outside
our front door for several minutes, looking at his watch, waiting for our lives
to converge onto the precise fault line at which our past could be cleaved from
our future with three soft strikes of the bright brass knocker.

My
son opened the door, and took in the undertaker’s height, his impeccable
tailoring, and his sober demeanor. I suppose the undertaker looked for
all the
world like Batman’s workaday alter ego. My son
shouted along the hallway to me:
Mummy,
it’s
Bruce Wayne!

That
morning I walked out onto the street and I stood there, looking at Andrew’s
coffin through the thick, slightly greenish glass of the hearse window. When
Little Bee came out to join me, bringing Batman by the hand, the undertaker
ushered us to a long, black limousine and nodded us in. I told him we’d rather
walk.

We
looked as if we’d been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking
to my husband’s funeral.
One white middle-class mother, one
skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City.
It
seemed as if we’d been cut-and-pasted. My thoughts raced, nightmarish and
disconnected.

It
was only a few hundred yards to the church, and the three of us walked in the
road ahead of the hearse while an angry queue of traffic built up behind. I
felt awful about that.

I
was wearing a dark gray skirt and jacket with gloves and charcoal stockings. Little
Bee was wearing my smart black raincoat over the clothes they let her out of
the detention center in—a mortifyingly unfunereal Hawaiian shirt and blue
jeans. My son was wearing an expression of absolute joy. He, Batman, had
stopped the traffic. His cape swirled in his tiny slipstream as he strode
proudly ahead, his grin stretching from bat ear to bat ear beneath the darkness
of his mask. Occasionally his superior vision would detect an enemy that needed
smiting, and when this occurred my son would simply stop, smite, and continue. He
was worried that the Puffin’s invisible hordes might attack me. I was worried
that my son hadn’t done a wee before we left the house, and might therefore do
it in his bat pants. I was also worried about being a widow for the rest of my
life.

At
first I’d thought it was quite brave of me to insist on walking to the church,
but now I felt dizzy and foolish. I thought I might faint. Little Bee held on
to my elbow and whispered to me to take deep breaths. I remember thinking,
How
strange, that it should be
you
who is keeping
me
on my feet.

In
the church I sat in the front pew, with Little Bee on my left and Batman on my
right. The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work—I
tried to keep my life and my magazine separate—but otherwise everybody Andrew
and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of
one’s address book dressed in black and exported into pews in nonalphabetical
order. They had classified themselves according to some unwritten protocol of
grief, blood relatives ghoulishly close to the coffin,
old
girlfriends in a reluctant cluster near the baptismal font. I couldn’t bear to
look behind me and see this new natural order of things. It was all very much
too sudden. A week ago I had been a successful working mother. Now I was
sitting at my husband’s funeral, flanked by a superhero and a Nigerian refugee.
It seemed like a dream that might be awoken from with relatively little effort.
I stared at my husband’s coffin, strewn with white lilies. Batman stared at the
vicar. He cast an approving eye over the vicar’s stole and surplice. He gave
the vicar a solemn thumbs-up, one caped crusader to another. The vicar returned
the salute,
then
his thumb returned to the faded gilt
edging of his Bible.

The
church was falling quiet; expectant. My son looked all around, then back at me.
Where’s Daddy?
he
said.

I
squeezed my son’s hot, sweaty hand, and listened to the coughs and sniffles
echoing round the church. I wondered how I could possibly explain my husband’s
death to his son. It was depression that killed Andrew, of course—depression
and guilt. But my son didn’t believe in death, let alone in the capacity of mere
emotions to cause it. Mr. Freeze’s ice rays, perhaps.
The
Puffin’s lethal wingspan, at a stretch.
But
an
ordinary phone call
, from a skinny African girl? It was impossible to
explain.

I
realized I would have to tell my son the whole story, someday. I wondered where
I would begin. It was two years before, in the summer of 2005, that Andrew had
begun his long, slow slide into the depression that finally claimed him. It
started on the day we first met Little Bee, on a lonely beach in Nigeria. The
only souvenir I have of that first meeting is an absence where the middle
finger of my left hand used to be. The amputation is quite clean. In place of
my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the
E, D,
and
C
keys on my laptop. I
can’t rely on
E, D,
and
C
anymore. They go missing when I need them most.
Pleased
becomes
please.
Ecstasies
becomes
stasis.

I
miss my finger most on deadline days, when the copy checkers have all gone home
and I’m typing up the last-minute additions to my magazine. We published an
editorial once where I said I was “wary of sensitive men.” I meant to say
“weary,” of course, and after a hundred outraged letters from the earnest
boyfriends who’d happened to glance at my piece on their partner’s coffee table
(presumably in between giving a back rub and washing the dishes), I began to
realize just how weary I was. It was a typographical accident, I told them. I
didn’t add
,
it was the kind of typographical accident
that is caused by a steel machete on a Nigerian beach. I mean, what does one
call the type of meeting where one gains an African girl and loses
E, D,
and
C
?
I do not think you have a word for it in your language
—that’s
what Little Bee would say.

I
sat in my pew, massaged the stump of my finger, and found myself acknowledging
for the first time that my husband had been doomed since the day we met Little
Bee. The intervening two years had brought a series of worsening premonitions,
culminating in the horrible morning ten days earlier when I had woken up to the
sound of the telephone ringing. My whole body had crawled with dread. It had
been an ordinary weekday morning. The June issue of my magazine was almost
ready to go to the printers, and Andrew’s column for
The
Times
was due in too. Just a normal morning, but the soft hairs on the
backs of my arms were up.

I
have never been one of those happy women who insist that disaster strikes from
a clear blue sky. For me there were countless foretellings, innumerable small
breaks with normalcy. Andrew’s chin unshaved, a second bottle uncorked on a
weekday night, the use of the passive voice on deadline Friday.
Certain attitudes which have been adopted by this society have
left this commentator a little lost.
That was the very last sentence my
husband wrote. In his
Times
column, he was always so
precise with the written word. From a layperson,
lost
would be a synonym for
bewildered.
From my husband,
it was a measured good-bye.

It
was cold in the church. I listened to the vicar saying
where,
o death, is thy sting?
I stared at the lilies and smelled the sweet
accusation of them. God, how I wish I had paid more attention to Andrew.

How
to explain to my son that the warning signs were so
slight
?
That disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself
by hardly moving its lips? They say that in the hour before an earthquake the
clouds hang leaden in the sky, the wind slows to a hot breath, and the birds
fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes, but these are the same
portents that precede lunchtime, frankly. If we overreacted every time the wind
eased up, we would forever be laying down under the dining-room table when we
really should be laying the plates on top of it.

Would
my son accept that this is how it was with his father?
The
hairs on my arms went up, Batman, but I had a household to run. I never
understood that he was actually going to do it.
All I would honestly be
able to say is that I woke up with the phone ringing and my body predicting
some event that had yet to happen, although I never imagined it would be so
serious.

Charlie
had still been asleep. Andrew picked up the phone in his study, quickly, before
the noise of the ringing could wake our son. Andrew’s voice became agitated. I
heard it quite clearly from the bedroom.
Just leave me alone,
he said.
All that stuff happened a long time ago and it
wasn’t my fault.

The
trouble was
,
my husband didn’t really believe that.

I
found him in tears. I asked him who it had been on the phone, but he wouldn’t
say. And then, since we were both awake and Charlie was still asleep, we made
love. I used to do that with Andrew sometimes.
More for him
than for me, really.
By that stage of our marriage it had become a
maintenance thing, like bleeding the air out of the radiators—just another part
of running a household. I didn’t know—in fact I still don’t know—what awful
consequences are supposed to ensue if one fails to bleed the radiators. It’s
not something a cautious woman would ever allow herself to discover.

We
didn’t speak a word. I took Andrew into the bedroom and we lay on the bed
beneath the tall Georgian windows with the yellow silk blinds. The blinds were
embroidered with pale foliage. Silk birds hid there in a kind of silent
apprehension. It was a bright May morning in Kingston-upon-Thames, but the sunlight
through the blinds was
a dark
and florid saffron. It
was feverish, almost malarial. The bedroom walls were yellow and ocher. Across
the creaking landing, Andrew’s study was white—the color, I suppose, of blank
pages. That’s where I retrieved him, after the awful phone call. I read a few
words of his column, over his shoulder. He’d been awake all night writing an
opinion piece about the Middle East, which was a region he had never visited
and had no specialist knowledge of. It was the summer of 2007, and my son was
fighting the Penguin and the Puffin, and my country was fighting Iraq and
Afghanistan, and my husband was forming public opinion. It was the kind of
summer where no one took their costume off.