The Other Hand (20 page)

Sarah smiled and leaned over to smell the honeysuckle blossom. Now I saw that she was crying again. “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Sarah. “I can’t seem to stop. Oh, look at me, I’m all over the place.”

Charlie looked up at his mother and I rubbed the top of his head to show him everything was okay. We started to walk again. Sarah blew her nose on a tissue. She said, “How long am I going to be like this, do you suppose?”

“It was one year for me, after they killed my sister.”

“Before you could think straight again?”

“Before I could think at all. At first I was just running, running, running—getting away from where it happened, you know? Then there was the detention centre. It was very bad. It is not possible to think clearly in there. You have not committed a crime, so all you can think of is, When will I be let out? But they tell you nothing. After a month, six months, you start to think, Maybe I will grow old in here. Maybe I will die here. Maybe I am already dead. For the first year all I could think about was killing myself. When everyone else is dead, sometimes you think it would be easier to join them, you know? But you have to move on.
Move on, move on
, they tell you. As if you are stubborn. As if you are chewing on their flowers like a goat.
Move on, move on
. At five
PM
they tell you to move on and at six
PM
they lock you back in your cell.”

“Didn’t they give you any help at all in that place?”

I sighed. “They tried to help us, you know? There were some good people. Psychiatrists, volunteers. But there was only so much they could do for us in there. One of the psychiatrists, she said to me,
Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich
. To be well in your mind you have first to be free, you see?”

Sarah pressed the tissue into the corners of her eyes. “I’m not sure it’s easier out here, Bee.”

“But I will help you.”

Sarah smiled. “You’re sixteen years old. You’re a refugee. You’re an orphan, for God’s sake. I’m the one who ought to be helping you.”

I pulled on Sarah’s shoulder to stop her. I took her left hand and I held it up to her. Charlie stood and looked up at us with big eyes.

“Look, Sarah. You have helped me enough already. You cut off your own finger for me. You saved my life.”

“I should have done more. I should have saved your sister too.”

“How?”

“I should have thought of something.”

I shook my head. “You did everything you could, Sarah.”

“But we should never have been in that situation, Bee. Don’t you see? We went on holiday to a place we had no right to be.”

“And what if you had not been there, Sarah? If you and Andrew had not been there, then Nkiruka and me, we would both be dead.” I turned to Charlie. “Your mummy saved my life, did you know that? She saved me from the baddies.”

Charlie looked up at his mother. “Like Batman?” he said.

Sarah smiled, the way I was used to now, with the tears starting to come to her eyes again. “Like Bat-mum.”

“Is that why you isn’t got your one finger?”

“Why I
haven’t
got one finger. Yes, darling.”

“Did the baddies take it? The Penguin?”

“No, darling.”

“Was it the Puffin?”

Sarah laughed. “Yes, darling, it was that awful Puffin.”

Charlie grinned. “Naughty naughty Puffin,” he said, and he ran ahead of us down the pavement, shooting baddies with a gun that was not visible to my eyes. Sarah turned to me. “Bless you,” she said.

I held tight to her arm and I placed the palm of her left hand on the back of my left hand. I arranged my fingers underneath hers, so that the only one of my fingers you could see was the one that was missing from Sarah’s hand. I saw how it could be. I saw how we could make a life again. I know it was crazy to think it but my heart was pounding, pounding, pounding.

“I will help you,” I said. “If you want me to stay then this is how it will be between us. Maybe I will only be able to stay for one month, maybe only one week. Some day, the men will come. But while I am here I will be like your daughter. I will love you as if you were my mother and I will love Charlie as if he was my brother.”

Sarah stared at me. “Goodness,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s just that on the way home from the nursery, with the other mothers, we usually talk about potty training and cakes.”

I dropped Sarah’s hand and I looked down at the ground.

“Oh, Bee, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all just a little bit sudden and a little bit serious, that’s all. I’m so confused. I need a bit more time to think.”

I looked up at Sarah again. In her eyes I saw that it was new for her, this feeling of not knowing straight away what to do. Her eyes were the eyes of a creature who has only just been born. Before it is familiar with its world, there is only terror. I knew this expression very well. Once you have seen as many people as I have being pushed in through the doors of the immigration detention centre, it is easy to recognise this look. It made me want to remove that pain from Sarah’s life as quickly as I could.

“I am sorry, Sarah. Please forget about it. I will leave. You see? The psychiatrist at the detention centre was right, she could not do anything for me. I am still crazy.”

Sarah-did not say anything. She just held on to my arm and we followed Charlie down the street. Charlie was racing along and knocking the heads off the roses in the front gardens. He knocked them off with karate chops. They fell, each one with a sudden fall and a silent explosion of petals. Like my story with Nkiruka, like my story with Yevette. My feet crushed the petals as we passed over them, and I realised that my story was only made of endings.

Back at the house, we sat in Sarah’s kitchen. We drank tea again and I wondered if it would be, the last time. I closed my eyes. My village, my family, that disappearing taste. Everything vanishes and drains away into sand or mist. That is a good trick.

When I opened my eyes again, Sarah was watching me.

“You know, Bee, I was thinking about what you said, about you staying. About us helping each other. I think you’re right. Maybe it is time to be serious. Maybe these are serious times.”

S
erious times began on a grey, ominous day in London. I wasn’t looking for serious. If I’m honest, I suppose I was looking for a bit of the other. Charlie was nearly two years old and I was emerging from the introverted, chrysalid stage of early motherhood. I fitted back into my favourite skirts. I felt like showing off my wings.

I’d decided to spend a day in the field. The idea was to remind my editorial girls that it was possible to write a feature article all on one’s own. I hoped that by inspiring the staff to indulge in a little reportage, my commissioning budget would be spared. It was simply a question, I had told the office airily, of applying one’s pithy remarks sequentially to paper rather than scrawling them individually on sample boxes.

Really, I just wanted my staff to be happy. At their age I’d been fresh out of my journalism degree and intoxicated with the job. Exposing corruption, brandishing truth. How well it had suited me, that absolute licence to march up to evildoers and demand
who, what, where, when
, and
whyt
But now, standing in the lobby of the Home Office building in Marsham Street, waiting for a ten o’clock interview, I realised I wasn’t looking forward to it. Perhaps at twenty, one is naturally curious about life but at thirty, simply suspicious of anyone who still has one. I clutched my brand-new notepad and Dictaphone in the hope that some of their youthful predis-illusionment would rub off on me.

I was angry with Andrew. I couldn’t focus. I didn’t even look the part of a reporter—my spiral notepad was virginal white. While I waited, I besmirched it with notes from a fictitious interview. Through the lobby of the Home Office building, the public sector shuffled past in its scuffed shoes, balancing its morning coffee on cardboard carry trays. The women bulged out of M&S trouser suits, wattles wobbling and bangles clacking. The men seemed limp and hypoxic—half garrotted by their ties. Everyone stooped, or scuttled, or nervously ticked. They carried themselves like weather presenters preparing to lower expectations for the bank-holiday weekend.

I tried to concentrate on the article I wanted to write. An optimistic piece was what I needed; something bright and positive. Something absolutely unlike anything Andrew would write in his
Times
column, in other words. Andrew and I had been arguing. His copy was getting gloomier and gloomier. I think he had truly started to believe that Britain was sinking into the sea. Crime was spreading, schools were failing, immigration was creeping and public morals were slipping. It seemed as if everything was seeping and sprawling and oozing, and I
hated
it. Now that Charlie was almost two I suppose I was looking into the future my child would have to inhabit, and realising that bitching about it might possibly not be the most constructive strategy.
Why do you always have to be so bloody negative?
I asked Andrew.
If the country really is on the slide, then why not write about the people who are doing something about it?

—
Oh yeah? Like whom?

—Well, like the Home Office, for example. They’re the ones on the front line, after all
.

—Oh, that’s genius, Sarah, that really is. Because people really trust the Home Office, don’t they? And what will you call your fine uplifting piece?

—You mean what’s my title? Well, how about
The Battle For Britain?

I know, I know. Andrew exploded with laughter. We had a blazing row. I told him I was finally doing something constructive with my magazine. He told me I was finally growing out of my magazine’s demographic. Not only was I getting old, in other words, but everything I had worked on for the last decade was puerile. How almost surgically hurtful.

I was still furious when I arrived at the Home Office building.
Always the Surrey girl, aren’t you?
That had been Andrew’s parting shot.
What exactly do you require the Home Office to do about this bloody country, Sarah? Strafe the chavs with Spitfires?
Andrew had a gift for deepening the incisions he began. It wasn’t our first row since Charlie was born, and he always did this at the end—brought the argument back to my upbringing, which infuriated me as it was the one thing I couldn’t help.

I stood in the lobby as the dowdy clerks flowed all around me. I blinked, looked down at my shoes, and had my first sensible thought for days. I realised I hadn’t come out into the world today to make a point to rriy editorial staff. Senior editors didn’t really go back to reporting to shave a few pounds from their, commissioning budgets. I was there, I realised, entirely to make a point to Andrew.

And when Lawrence Osborn came down and introduced himself on the dot of ten o’clock—tall, grinning, not conspicuously handsome—I understood that the point I was making to Andrew was not necessarily going to be an editorial one.

Lawrence looked down at his clipboard. “That’s odd,” he said, “they’ve marked down this interview as ‘non-hostile’.”

I realised I was looking at him fiercely. I blushed. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Bad morning.”

“Don’t mention it. Just tell me you’ll try to be nice to me. All you journalists seem to have it in for us these days.”

I smiled. “I am going to be nice to you. I think you people do a terrific job.”

“Ah, that’s because you haven’t seen the statistics we’ve seen.”

I laughed, and Lawrence raised his eyebrows.

“You think I’m joking,” he said.

His voice was flat and unremarkable. He didn’t sound public school. There was a touch of roughness in his vowels, or a sense of some wildness reined in, as if he was making an effort. It was hard to place his voice. He took me on a tour of the building. We looked in on the Assets Recovery Agency and the Criminal Records Bureau. The mood was businesslike, but relaxed. Discourage a little crime, drink a little coffee—that seemed to be the tone. We walked along unnatural galleries floored with natural materials and bathed in natural light.

“So, Lawrence,” I said, “what do you think is going wrong with Britain?”

Lawrence stopped and turned. His face glowed in a soft yellow ray, filtered through coloured glass.

“You’re asking the wrong man,” he said. “If I knew the answer to that, I’d fix it.”

“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do at the Home Office? Fix it?”

“I don’t actually work in any of the departments. They tried me out here and there for a while, but I don’t think my heart was in it. So here I am in the Press Office.”

“But surely you must have an opinion?”

Lawrence sighed. “Everyone has an opinion, don’t they? Maybe that’s what’s wrong with this country. What? Why are you smiling?”

“I wish you’d tell that to my husband.”

“Ah. He has opinions, does he?”

“On a variety of subjects.”

“Well, maybe he should work here. They love a policy debate around these parts, they really do. Your first interview, for example…” Lawrence looked at his clipboard, searching for a name.

“I’m sorry?” I said. “I though
you
were my interview.”

Lawrence looked up. “Ah, no, I’m just the warm-up guy. I’m sorry, I should have explained.”

“Oh.”

“Well, don’t look so disappointed. I’ve fixed up a good day for you, I really have. You’ve got three heads of department lined up, and a real live Permanent Under-Secretary. I’m sure they’ll give you more than you need for your piece.”

“But I was enjoying talking to you.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“You think?”

Lawrence smiled. He had curly black hair, quite glossy but cut disconcertingly short around the back and sides. His suit, too—it was a good one, Kenzo, I think—and it fitted him well, but there was something arresting about the way he wore it. He held his arms a little away from his body—as if the suit was the pelt of some suaver animal, recently slain and imperfectly cured so that the bloody rawness of it made his skin crawl.