Little Bee (4 page)

“It’s
a forbidden-fruit thing, isn’t it? You get an extra frisson from breaking the
office taboo.
From hormones and neurotransmitters and so
forth.
You know.
Science.”

“Um.
Have scientists actually proved this?”

“Don’t
get empirical with me, Sarah. We’re talking about a whole new realm of sexual
pleasure. We’re calling it the B-spot.
B,
as in boss.
See what we did there?”

“Ingenious.”

“Thank
you darling. We do try.”

I
wept inwardly at the thought of women up and down the country being pleasured
by middle managers in shiny-bottomed suits. On the flatscreen, News 24 had panned
from the Middle East to Africa.
Different landscape, same
column of thick black smoke.
A pair of jaundiced eyes looking out with
the same impassivity Andrew had shown, just before I turned away to leave for
work. The hairs on my arms went up again. I looked away, and took the three
steps to the window that gave out onto Commercial Street. I put my forehead
against the glass, which is something I do when I’m trying to think.

“Are
you all right, Sarah?”

“I’m
fine. Listen, be a doll and go and grab us a couple of coffees, would you?”

Clarissa
went off to our idiosyncratic coffee machine, the one that would have been an
in-house
salon de thé
in
Vogue
’s
offices. Down on Commercial Street, a police patrol car pulled up and parked at
the curb in front of our building. A uniformed officer got out on each side.
They looked at each other over the patrol-car roof. One of them had blond,
cropped hair and the other had a bald patch as round and neat as a monk’s. I
watched him tilt his head to listen to the radio on his lapel. I smiled,
thinking absently about a project Charlie was doing at his nursery.
The Police: People Who Help
Us
,
it was called. My son—it goes without saying—was magnificently unconvinced. At
constant high alert in his bat cape and mask, Charlie believed a proud
citizenry should be ready to help itself.

Clarissa
came back with two plasticky lattes. In one of them the coffee machine had
deposited a clear acrylic stirrer. In the other, it had elected not to do so. Clarissa
hesitated over which to give me.

“First
big editorial decision of the day,” she said.

“Easy.
I’m the boss. Give me the one with the stirrer.”

“What
if I don’t?”

“Then
we may never get around to locating your B-spot, Clarissa. I’m warning you.”

Clarissa
blanched, and passed me the coffee with the stirrer.

I
said, “I like the Baghdad piece.”

Clarissa
sighed, and
slumped
her shoulders.

“So
do
I
, Sarah, of course I do. It’s a great article.”

“Five
years ago, that’s the one we’d have run with. No question.”

“Five
years ago our circulation was so low we had to take those risks.”

“And
that’s how we got big—by being different. That’s
us.
”

Clarissa
shook her head. “Getting big’s different from staying big. You know as well as
I do, we can’t be serving up morality tales while the other majors are selling
sex.”

“But
why do you think our readers got dumber?”

“It’s
not that. I think our original readers aren’t reading magazines anymore, that’s
all. They moved on to greater things, the same way you could if you’d just play
the bloody game. Maybe you don’t realize just how big you are now, Sarah. Your
next job could be editing a national newspaper.”

I
sighed.
“How thrilling.
I could put topless girls on
every page.”

My
missing finger itched. I looked back down at the police patrol car. The two
officers were putting on their uniform caps. I tapped my mobile against my
front teeth.

“Let’s
go for a drink after work, Clarissa. Bring your new man if you like. I’m
bringing Andrew.”

“Seriously?
Out in public?
With your
husband
?
Isn’t that terribly last season?”

“It’s
terribly five years ago.”

Clarissa
tilted her head at me.

“What
are you telling me, Sarah?”

“I’m
not telling you anything, Clar. I like you too much to
tell.
I’m just asking myself, really. I’m asking if maybe the kind of choices I made
five years ago weren’t so bad after all.”

Clarissa
smiled resignedly.

“Fine.
But don’t expect me to keep my hands off his
hunky thighs under the table, just because he’s your husband.”

“You
do that, Clarissa, and I’ll make you junior horoscopes editor for the rest of
your natural life.”

My
desk phone rang. I looked at the time on its screen: 10:25 A.M. It’s funny how
these details stay with you. I picked up the phone and it was reception,
sounding bored to distraction. At
Nixie
we used
reception as a sin bin—if a girl got too bitchy on the editorial floor, we sent
her down to do a week on the shiniest desk.

“There are two policemen here.”

“Oh.
They came in here? What do they want?”

“Okay, let’s think about why I might have
dialed your number.”

“They
want to talk to me?”

“They did
good
when
they made you the boss, Sarah.”

“Fuck
off. Why do they want to talk to me?”

A pause.

“I could ask them, I suppose.”

“If it isn’t too much trouble.”

A longer pause.

“They say they want to shoot a porny film in
the office. They say they’re not real policemen and their willies are simply
enormous.”

“Oh for god’s sake.
Tell them I’ll be down.”

I
hung up the phone and looked at Clarissa. The hairs on my arms were up again.

“The
police,” I said.

“Relax,”
said Clarissa. “They can’t bust you for conspiracy to run a serious feature
piece.”

Behind
her the flatscreen was showing Jon Stewart. He was laughing. His guest was
laughing too. I felt better. You had to find something to laugh about, that
summer, the number of places that were going up in smoke. You laughed, or you
put on a superhero costume, or you tried for some kind of orgasm that science
had somehow missed.

I
took the stairs down to the lobby, speeding up as I went. The two police
officers were standing rather too close together, with their caps in their
hands and their big, sensible leather shoes on my black marble. The young one
was blushing horribly.

“I’m
so sorry,” I said.

I
glared at the receptionist and she grinned back at me from beneath her perfect
blond side part.

“Sarah
O’Rourke?”

“Summers.”

“Excuse
me madam?”

“Sarah
Summers is my professional name.”

The
older policeman looked at me with no expression.

“This
is a personal matter, Mrs. O’Rourke. Is there somewhere we can go?”

I
walked them up to the boardroom on the first floor.
Tones of
pink and violet, long glass table, more neon.

“Can
I get you a coffee?
Or tea?
I mean, I can’t absolutely
guarantee
it’ll come out as coffee or tea. Our
machine is a bit—”

“Perhaps
you’d better sit down, Mrs. O’Rourke.”

The
officers’ faces glowed unnaturally in the pinkish light. They looked like
black-and-white-movie men, colored in by a computer.
One
older, the one with the bald patch.
Maybe forty-five.
The younger one, with the blond cropped hair, maybe
twenty-two or twenty-four.
Nice lips.
Quite full, and
rather juicy-looking.
He wasn’t beautiful, but I was transfixed by the
way he stood and cast his eyes down deferentially when he spoke. And of course
there’s always something about a uniform. You wonder if the protocol will peel
off with the jacket, I suppose.

The
two of them placed their uniform caps on the purple smoked glass. They rotated
the caps with their clean white fingers. Both of them stopped at exactly the same
moment, as if some critical angle they had practiced in basic training had
precisely been attained.

They
stared at me. My mobile chimed brashly on the glass desktop—a text message
arriving. I smiled. That would be Andrew.

“I’ve
got some bad news for you, Mrs. O’Rourke,” said the older officer.

“What
do you mean?”

It
came out more aggressive than I intended. The policemen stared at their caps on
the table. I needed to look at the text message that had just arrived. As I
reached out my hand to pick up my phone, I saw the two of them staring at the
stump of my missing finger.

“Oh.
This?
I lost it on holiday.
On a
beach, actually.”

The
two policemen looked at each other. They turned back to me. The older one
spoke. His voice was suddenly hoarse.

“We’re
very sorry, Mrs. O’Rourke.”

“Oh,
please, don’t be. It’s fine, really. I’m fine now. It’s just a finger.”

“That’s
not what I meant, Mrs. O’Rourke. I’m afraid we’ve been instructed to tell you
that—”

“See,
honestly, you get used to doing without the finger. At first you think it’s a
big deal and then you learn to use the other hand.”

I
looked up and saw the two of them watching me, gray-faced and serious. Neon
crackled. On the wall clock, a fresh minute snapped over the old one.

“The
really funny thing is, I still feel it, you know? My finger, I mean.
This missing one.
Sometimes it actually itches. And I go to
scratch it and there’s nothing there, of course. And in my dreams my finger
grows back, and I’m so
happy
to have it back, even
though I’ve learned to do without it. Isn’t that silly? I miss it, do you see?
It
itches.
”

The
young officer took a deep breath and looked down at his notebook.

“Your
husband was found unconscious at your property shortly after nine this morning,
Mrs. O’Rourke. Your neighbor heard cries and placed a 999 call to the effect
that a male was apparently in distress. Police attended the address and forced
entry to an upstairs room at nine-fifteen A.M., when Andrew O’Rourke was found
unconscious. Our officers did everything they could and an ambulance attended
and removed the casualty, but I am very sorry to tell you, Mrs. O’Rourke, that
your husband was pronounced dead at the scene at—here we are—nine thirty-three
A.M.”

The
policeman closed his pad.

“We’re
very sorry, madam.”

I
picked up my phone. The new text was indeed from Andrew. SO SORRY, it said.

He
was sorry.

I
switched the phone, and myself, onto silent mode. The silence lasted all week. It
rumbled in the taxi home. It howled when I picked up Charlie from nursery. It
crackled on the phone call with my parents. It roared in my ears while the
undertaker explained the relative merits of oak and pine caskets. It cleared
its throat apologetically when the obituaries editor of
The
Times
telephoned to check some last details. Now the silence had
followed me into the cold, echoing church.

How
to explain death to a four-year-old superhero? How to announce the precipitous
arrival of grief? I hadn’t even accepted it myself. When the policemen told me
that Andrew was dead, my mind refused to contain the information. I am a very
ordinary woman, I think, and I am quite well equipped to deal with everyday
evil. Interrupted sex, tough editorial decisions and malfunctioning coffee
machines—these my mind could readily accept.
But my Andrew,
dead?
It still seemed physically impossible. At one point he had covered
more than seven tenths of the earth’s surface.

And
yet here I was, staring at Andrew’s plain oak coffin
(A
classic
choice, madam), and it seemed rather small in the wide nave of the church.
A silent, sickening dream.

Mummy, where’s Daddy?

I
sat in the front pew of the church with my arms around my son, and realized I
had begun to tremble. The vicar was delivering the eulogy. He was talking about
my husband in the past tense. He made it sound very neat. It occurred to me
that he had never had to deal with Andrew in the present tense, or proofread
his columns, or feel him running down inside like a piece of broken clockwork.

Charlie
squirmed in my arms and asked his question again, the same one he’d asked ten
times a day since Andrew died.
Mummy, where’s mine daddy
exactly now?
I leaned down to his ear and whispered
,
He’s in a really nice bit of heaven this morning, Charlie. There’s
a lovely long room where they all go after breakfast, with lots of interesting
books and things to do.