Little Bee (23 page)

“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.”

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.”

“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.