Little Bee (3 page)

I
pulled my husband away from the phone. I pulled him into the bedroom by the
tasseled cord of his dressing
gown,
because I had read
somewhere that this sort of behavior would excite him. I pulled him down onto
our bed.

I
remember the way he moved inside me, like a clock with its mainspring running
down. I pulled his face close to mine and
I
whispered,
Oh god Andrew, are you
all right
? My husband didn’t
reply. He just closed his eyes against the tears and we began to move faster
while small, involuntary moans came from our mouths and fled into the other’s
moaning in wordless desperation.

In
on this small tragedy walked my son, who was more at home fighting evil on a
larger, more knockabout scale. I opened my eyes and saw him standing in the
bedroom doorway, watching us through the small, diamond-shaped eyeholes of his
bat mask. From the expression on the part of his face that could be seen, he
seemed to be wondering which (if any) of the gadgets on his utility belt might
help in this situation.

When
I saw my son, I pushed Andrew off me and scrabbled frantically for the duvet to
cover us. I said,
Oh god Charlie, I’m so sorry.

My
son looked behind him, then back at me.

“Charlie
isn’t here. I’m Batman.”

I
nodded, and bit my lip.

“Good
morning, Batman.”

“What
is you and Daddy doing, Mummy?”

“Er…”

“
Is
you getting baddies?”

“
Are we
getting baddies,
Charlie.
Not
is
we.
”

“Are
you?”

“Yes, Batman.
Yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

I
smiled at my son, and waited. I wondered what Batman would say. What he said
was,
Someone
done a poo in my costume, Mummy.

“
Did
a poo,
Charlie.”

“Yes.
A big big poo.”

“Oh Batman.
Have you really done a poo in your suit?”

Batman
shook his head. His bat ears quivered. Beneath the mask an expression of great
cunning settled upon the visible part of his face.

“It
wasn’t me that done the poo. It was the
Puffin.
”

(The
italics were his.)

“Are
you telling me that the Puffin came in the night and did a poo in your bat
suit?”

Batman
nodded, solemnly. I noticed he had kept his bat mask on but taken off his bat
suit. He stood naked except for the mask and cape. He held up the bat suit for
me to inspect. A lump of something fell from it and thumped on the carpet. The
smell was indescribable. I sat up in bed and saw a trail of lumps leading
across the carpet from the bedroom door. Somewhere inside me the girl who had
done science A-levels noted, with empirical fascination, that feces had also
found their way into locations which included—but were not limited to—Batman’s
hands, the door frame, the bedroom wall, my alarm-clock radio and, of course,
the bat suit. My son’s shit was
everywhere.
There was
shit on his hands. Shit on his face. Even on the black-and-yellow bat symbol of
his bat suit there was shit. I tried, but I couldn’t make myself believe that
these were Puffin droppings. This was bat shit.

Distantly,
I remembered something I’d read on the parenting page.

“It’s
all right, Batman. Mummy’s not cross.”

“Mummy
clean
the poo up.”

“Um.
Er. Jesus.”

Gravely,
Batman shook his head.

“No, not Jesus.
Mummy.
”

Resentfulness
was starting to overcome the embarrassment and guilt. I looked across to where
Andrew lay with his eyes tight closed and his hands twisted at the exquisite
awfulness of his clinical depression, our unhappy sex interrupted, and this
very thick stink of shit.

“Batman, why don’t you ask
Daddy
to clean you up?”

My
son looked across at his father for a long time,
then
turned back to me. Patiently, as if explaining something to an imbecile, he
shook his little head again.

“But why not?”
(I was pleading now.) “Why not ask Daddy?”

Batman
looked solemn.
Daddy is fighting baddies,
he said. The
grammar was irreproachable. I looked across at his father with him, and I
sighed.
Yes,
I said,
I suppose
you’re right.

Five
days later, on the last morning I saw my husband alive, I finished dressing my
caped crusader, I
breakfasted
him, and I ran him down
to his nursery’s Early Birds Club. Back at the house, I showered. Andrew
watched me as I pulled on my tights. I always dressed up for deadline days.
Heels, skirt, smart green jacket. Magazine publishing has its rhythms and if
the editor won’t dance to them, she can’t expect her staff to. I don’t float
feature ideas in Fendi heels, and I don’t close an issue in Pumas. So I dressed
against the clock while Andrew lay naked on the bed and watched me. He didn’t
say a word. The last glimpse I had of him, before I closed the bedroom door, he
was still watching. How to describe, to my son, his father’s last seen
expression? I decided I would tell my son that his father had looked very
peaceful. I decided I wouldn’t tell him that my husband opened his mouth to say
something, but that I was running late and turned away.

I
arrived at the office around 9:30. The magazine was based in Spitalfields, on
Commercial Street, ninety minutes by public transport from
Kingston-upon-Thames. The worst moment comes when you leave the overland
network and descend into the heat of the Underground. There were two hundred of
us packed into each tube carriage. We listened to the screech of the metal
wheels on the track, with our bodies pinned and immobile. For three stops I
stood pressed against a thin man in a corduroy jacket who was quietly weeping. One
would normally avert one’s eyes, but my head was pinioned in such a position
that I could only look. I should have liked to put an arm around the man. But
my arms were jammed by the commuters on each side of me. Besides, I wasn’t sure
I was up to administering tenderness like that, on a crowded train, under the
silent gaze of others. I was torn between two kinds of shame.
On the one hand, the disgrace of not discharging a human
obligation.
On the other hand, the madness of being
the first in the crowd to move.

I
smiled helplessly at the weeping man and I couldn’t stop thinking about Andrew.

As
soon as one emerges aboveground, of course, one can quickly forget our human
obligations. London is a beautiful machine for doing that. The city was bright,
fresh and inviting that morning. I was excited about closing the June issue,
and I practically ran the last two minutes to the office. On the outside of our
building was the magazine’s name,
NIXIE
, in
three-foot-high pink neon letters. I stood outside for a moment, taking a few
deep breaths. The air was still, and you could hear the neon crackling over the
rumble of the traffic. I stood with my hand on the door and wondered what
Andrew had been about to say, just before I left home.

My
husband hadn’t always been lost for words. The long silences only began on the
day we met Little Bee. Before that, he wouldn’t pipe down for a minute. On our
honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank
rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the
sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved
Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of
the earth’s surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it. That is
how big he was for me. When we got back to our new married house in Kingston, I
asked Andrew about the color of that honeymoon sea. He said,
Yeah, was it blue?
I said, come on Andrew, you’re a
pro,
you can do better than that. And Andrew said,
Okay then, the awesome ocean fastness was a splendor of
ultramarine crested with crimson and gold where the burnished sun blazed on the
wave tops and sent them crashing into the gloomy troughs deepening to a dark
malevolent indigo.

He
hung on the penultimate syllable, deepening his voice in comic pomposity even
as he raised his eyebrows. INN-digo, he boomed.

Of course you know why I didn’t notice the sea?
It was because I spent two weeks with my head—

Well,
where my husband’s head was is between me and him.

We
both giggled helplessly and rolled around on the bed and Charlie, dear Charlie,
was conceived.

I
pushed open the street door and stepped up into the lobby of the magazine. The
black Italian marble floor was the only grace note that had survived our
tenancy of the offices. The rest of the lobby was pure us. Boxes of sample
frocks from wannabe fashion houses were stacked up along one wall. Some intern
had triaged them with a chunky blue marker: YES KEEP FOR SHOOT, or OH I THINK
NOT, or the triumphantly absolutist THIS IS NOT FASHION. A dead Japanese
juniper tree stood in a cracked gold Otagiri vase. Three glittering Christmas
baubles still hung from it. The walls were done up in fuchsia and fairy lights,
and even in the dim sunshine from the tinted windows that gave onto Commercial
Street, the paint-work looked marked and tatty. I cultivated this unkempt look.
Nixie
wasn’t supposed to be like the other women’s
magazines. Let them keep their spotless lobbies and their smug Eames chairs. When
it comes right down to editorial choices, I would rather have a bright staff
and a dim lobby.

Clarissa,
my features editor, came through the doors just after me. We kissed once,
twice, three times—we’d been friends since school—and she hooked her arm around
mine as we took the stairs together. The editorial floor was right at the top
of the building. We were halfway up before I realized what was wrong with
Clarissa.

“Clarissa,
you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes.”

She
smirked.

“So
would you be, if you’d met yesterday’s man.”

“Oh Clarissa.
What am I going to do with you?”

“Pay
rise, strong coffee, paracetamol.”

She
beamed as she ticked off the points on her fingers. I reminded myself that
Clarissa did not have some of the wonderful things I had in my life, such as my
beautiful son Batman, and that she was therefore almost certainly less
fulfilled than I was.

It
was a 10:30 A.M. start for my junior staff, bless them, and none of them were
in yet. Up on the editorial floor, the cleaners were still in. They were
hoovering, and dusting desktops, and turning upside down all the framed photos
of my staff’s awful boyfriends, to prove they’d dusted under them. This was the
grin-and-bear-it part of editing
Nixie.
At
Vogue
or
Marie Claire,
one’s
editorial staff would be at their desks by eight, dressed in Chloé and sipping
green tea. On the other hand, they wouldn’t still be there at midnight
scrawling CECI N’EST PAS PRÊT-À-PORTER on a sample box they were returning to a
venerable Paris fashion house.

Clarissa
sat on the corner of my desk and I sat behind it, and we looked out over the
open plan at the gang of black faces spiriting away yesterday’s fabric swatches
and Starbucks cups.

We
talked about the issue we were closing. The ad-sales people had done unusually
well that month—perhaps the spiraling cost of street drugs had forced them to
spend more time in the office—and we realized we had more editorial material
than space. I had a “Real Life” feature I really thought should go in—a profile
of a woman who was trying to get out of Baghdad—and Clarissa had a piece on a
new kind of orgasm you could apparently only get with the boss. We talked about
which of them we would run with. I was only half concentrating.
I texted Andrew, to see how he was doing.

The
flatscreen at our end of the floor was showing BBC News 24 with the sound down.
They were running a segment on the war. Smoke was rising above one of the
countries involved. Don’t ask me which—I’d lost track by that stage. The war
was four years old. It had started in the same month my son was born, and
they’d grown up together. At first both of them were a huge shock and demanded
constant attention but as each year went by, they became more autonomous and
one could start to take one’s eye off them for extended periods. Sometimes a
particular event would cause me momentarily to look at one or the other of
them—my son, or the war—with my full attention, and at times like these I would
always think,
Gosh, haven’t you grown?

I
was interested in how this new kind of orgasm was meant to work. I looked up
from texting.

“How
come you can only have it with your boss?”