The Other Hand (26 page)

Lawrence held on to the kitchen worktop.

“
Shit
,” he said.

“I tried to help him but he was too heavy. I could not lift up his body. I tried until I was exhausted and I was crying but I could not take the weight off the cord. I pushed the chair under his legs but he kicked it away. After a long time he stopped struggling but he was still alive. I could see his eyes watching me. He was spinning round on the cord. He was turning very slowly, and each time his body turned to face me, his eyes followed me until he spun around too far. His eyes were bulging out and his face was purple, but he was watching me. I thought, I have to help him. I thought, I must call for the neighbours or I must call an ambulance. I started running down the stairs to get help. But then I thought, If I call for help, the authorities will know that I am here. And if the authorities know that I am here, they will deport me, or maybe even worse. Because here is something, Lawrence: after they let us out of the immigration detention centre, one of the other girls I was with, she hanged herself too. I ran away from that place but the police must know I was there. Two hangings, you see? The police would be suspicious. They would think I had something to do with it. I could not let them find me like that. So I ran out of Andrew’s study and I held my head in my hands and I tried to think what to do, whether I should give up my life to save Andrew’s life. And first I thought, Of course I must save him, whatever it costs me, because he is a human being. And then I thought, Of course I must save myself, because I am a human being too. And then after I had been standing there for five minutes thinking these things, I realised it was too late and I had saved myself. And then I went to the refrigerator and ate, because I was very hungry. After that I went back down the far end of the garden to hide, and J did not come out until the funeral.”

My hands were shaking. Lawrence took a deep breath. His hands were shaking too.

“Oh, God, this is serious,” he said. “This is very, very serious.”

“Do you see now? Do you see why I want to help Sarah so much? Do you see why I want to help Charlie? I made the wrong choice, Lawrence. I let Andrew die. Now I must do everything I can to make things right.”

Lawrence was walking up and down the kitchen. He was holding, the dressing-gown closed around him, and his fingers were twisting on the cloth. He stopped and looked at me.

“Does Sarah know any of this?”

I shook my head.

“I am scared to tell her. I think if I tell her then she will make me go away from here, and then I will not be able to help her, and then there will be no way for me to make up for the bad thing I did. And if I can not make up for it, then I do not know what I will do. I cannot run away again. There is nowhere to go. I have discovered the person I am and I do not like her. I am the same as Andrew. I am the same as you. I tried to save myself. Tell me, please, where is the refuge from that?”

Lawrence stared at me.

“What you did is a crime,” he said. “Now I don’t have a choice. I have to go to the police.”

I started to cry. “Please, don’t go to the police. They will take me away. I just want to help Sarah. Don’t you want to help Sarah?”

“I love Sarah, so don’t fucking well talk to me about helping her. Do you really think it was helpful to come here?”

I was sobbing now. “Please,” I said. “Please.”

There were tears running down my face. Lawrence slammed his hand down on the table.

“Shit!” he said.

“I’m sorry, Lawrence, I’m sorry.”

Lawrence slapped the palm of his hand against his forehead.

“Oh, you fucking bitch,” he said. “I
can’t
go to the police, can I? I can’t let Sarah find out. Her head is fucked up enough about all this. If she knows you were there when Andrew died, she’ll lose it. And it would be the end of me and her, of course it would. I couldn’t go to the police without Linda finding out. This would be all over the newspapers. But I don’t even want to think what this is going to be like, being with Sarah when I know this and she doesn’t. And the police! Fuck! If I don’t tell the police I’m as culpable as you are. What if it gets out and they realise I knew all along? I’m the one who’s been sleeping with the dead man’s wife, for fuck’s sake. I’ve got motive. I could go to prison. If I don’t pick up the phone and call the police, right now, then I could go to prison for you, Little Bee. Do you understand that? I could go to prison for you when I don’t even know your real name.”

I folded my two hands over Lawrence’s hand and I looked up into his face. I could not see him at all, just a pale shape against the light, blurry with tears.

“Please. I have to stay here. I have to make up for what I did. Please, Lawrence. I will tell nobody about you and Sarah, and you must tell nobody about me. I am asking you to save me. I am asking you to save my life.”

Lawrence tried to pull his hand away but I held on to it. I put my forehead against his arm.

“Please,” I said. “We can be friends. We can save each other.”

“Oh, God,” he said quietly, “I wish you hadn’t told me any of this.”

“You made me tell you, Lawrence. I am sorry. I know what I am asking you. I know it will hurt you to keep the truth from Sarah. It is like asking you to cut off a finger for me.”

Lawrence pulled his hand out from under my hands. Then he took his hand away completely. I sat at the table with my eyes closed and I fejt the skin of my forehead itching where it had rested on his arm. It was quiet in the kitchen, and I waited. I do not know how long I waited for. I waited till my tears were dry and the terror inside me was all gone and the only thing left was a quiet, dull misery that made my head and my eyeballs ache. There was no thought in my head, then. I was just waiting.

And then I felt Lawrence’s hands on my cheeks. He cupped my face in his hands. I did not know if I was supposed to push his hands away or to place my hands upon his. We stayed like that for a little while and Lawrence’s hands trembled on my cheeks. He turned my face up towards his, so I had to look into his eyes.

“I wish I could just make you disappear,” he said. “But I’m nobody. I’m just a civil servant. I won’t tell the police about you. Not if you keep quiet. But if you tell anyone,
ever
, about Sarah and me, or if you tell anyone,
ever
, about what happened with Andrew, I will have you on a plane to Nigeria, I swear.”

I breathed one long, deep breath.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

Sarah’s voice came from upstairs. “Who said you could watch TV, Batman?”

Lawrence took his hands away from my face and he went to make more tea. Sarah came into the kitchen. She was yawning, and her eyes were screwed up against the sunlight. Charlie came with her, holding her hand.

“I mighf as well tell you the rules,” said Sarah, “since you’re both new around here. Superheroes, especially dark knights, are not allowed to watch television before they’ve eaten their breakfast. Are they, Batman?”

Charlie grinned at her and shook his head.

“Right,” said Sarah. “Bat flakes or bat toast?”

“Bat toast,” said Charlie.

Sarah went to the toaster and put two slices of bread into it. Lawrence and I, we both just watched her. Sarah turned around.

“Is everything all right in here?” she said. She looked at me. “Have you been crying?”

“It is nothing,” I said. “I always cry in the morning.”

Sarah frowned at Lawrence. “I hope you’ve been looking after her.”

“Of course,” said Lawrence. “Little Bee and I have been getting to know one another.”

Sarah nodded. “Good,” she said. “Because we really have to make this work. You both know that, don’t you?”

She looked at each of us and then she yawned
again
, and she stretched her arms. “Fresh start,” she said.

I looked at Lawrence and Lawrence looked at me.

“Now,” said Sarah. “I’m going to take Charlie to nursery and then we can start to track down Little. Bee’s papers. We’ll find you a solicitor first. I know a good one that we sometimes use on the magazine.”

Sarah smiled, and she went over to Lawrence.

“And as for you,” she said, “I’m going to find a little time to thank you for coming all the way to Birmingham.”

She put her hand up to Lawrence’s face, but then I think she remembered that Charlie was in the room and so she just brushed her hand against his shoulder instead. I went into the next room to watch the television news with the sound turned off.

The news announcer looked so much like my sister. My heart was overflowing with things to say. But in your country, you cannot talk back to the news.

I
remember the exact day when England became me, when its contours cleaved to the curves of my own body, when its inclinations became my own. As a girl, on a bike ride through the Surrey lanes, pedalling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum where a stream ran beneath the flint and brick bridge. Coming to a stop, the brakes squealing from the work of plucking one still moment out of time. Throwing my bicycle down into a pungent cushion of cow parsley and wild mint, and sliding down the plunging bank into the clear cold water, my sandals kicking up a quick brown bloom of mud from the stream bed, the minnows darting away into the black pool of shade beneath the bridge. Pressing my face into the water, with time utterly suspended, drinking in the cool shock. And then, looking up and seeing a fox. He was sunning himself on the far bank, watching me through a feathery screen of barley. I looked back at him, and his amber eyes held mine. The moment, the country: I realised it had become me. I found a soft patch of wild grass and cornflower by the side of the barley field, and I lay down with my face close to the damp earthen smell of the grass roots, listening to the buzzing of the summer flies. I cried, but I didn’t know why.

The morning after Lawrence stayed overnight, I dropped off Charlie at nursery and I went home to see what I could do to help Little Bee. I found her upstairs, watching television with the sound turned off. She looked so sad.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

Little Bee shrugged.

“Is everything okay with Lawrence?”

She looked away.

“What is it, then?”

Nothing.

“Maybe you’re homesick. I know I would be. Do you miss your country?”

She turned to look at me and her eyes were very solemn.

“Sarah,” she said, “I do not think I have left my country. I think it has travelled with me.”

She turned back to the television. That’s all right, I thought. There’ll be plenty of time to get through to her.

I tidied the kitchen while Lawrence was showering. I made myself a coffee and I realised, for the first time since Andrew died, that I had taken only one cup down from the cupboard instead of my instinctual two. I stirred in the milk, the spoon clinked against the china, and I realised I was losing the habit of being Andrew’s wife. How strange, I thought. I smiled, and realised I felt strong enough to put in an appearance at the magazine.

At my usual time the commuter train was crowded with pinstripes and laptop bags, but now it was ten thirty in the morning and the train ran nearly empty. The boy opposite me stared at the carriage’s ceiling. He wore an England shirt and blue jeans, white with plaster dust. Tattooed on the inside of his forearm, in a gothic typeface, were the words:
THIS IS A TIME FOR HERO
’S. I stared at the tattoo—at the fixity of its pride and its broken grammar. When I looked up the boy was watching me back, his amber eyes calm and unblinking. I blushed, and stared out of the window at the flickering back gardens of the semis.

The train braked as we neared Waterloo. There was a sensation of being between worlds. The brake shoes squealed against the train’s metal wheels and I felt eight years old again. Here I was, converging with my magazine on unflinching rails. Soon I would arrive at a terminus and have to prove that I could step off this carriage and back into my grown-up job. When the train stopped I turned to say something to the boy with amber eyes, but he had already stood from his seat and disappeared back into the cover of the barley field beneath the shade of the sheltering woods.

I arrived on the editorial floor at eleven thirty. The place went quiet. All the girls stared at me. I smiled and clapped my hands.

“Come on, back to work!” I said. “When a hundred thousand ABC1 urban professional women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five lose focus then so will we, but not until.”

At the far end of the open-plan, Clarissa was sitting behind my desk. She stood when I walked over, and came round to the front. Her lip gloss was iridescent plum. She held her hands around mine.

“Oh, Sarah,” she said. “You poor old thing. How are you coping?”

She was wearing an aubergine shirt-dress with a smooth black fishskin belt and glossy black knee-high boots. I realised I was wearing the jeans I had taken Batman to nursery in.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Clarissa looked me up and down, and furrowed her brow.

“Really?” she said.

“Really.”

“Oh. Well, that’s great.”

I looked over my desk. Clarissa’s laptop sat in the centre, next to her Kelly bag. My papers had been shunted to the far end.

“We didn’t think you’d be in,” said Clarissa. “You don’t mind me usurping your throne, do you, darling?”

I saw the way she had plugged her Blackberry into my charger.

“No,” I said, “of course not.”

“We thought you’d like us to get a head start on the July issue.”

I was conscious of eyes watching us from all around the office. I smiled.

“Yes, that’s great,” I said. “Really. So what have we got so far?”

“For this issue? Wouldn’t you like to sit down first? Let me get you a coffee, you must feel terrible.”

“My husband died, Clarissa. I am still alive. I have a son to look after and a mortgage to pay. I’d just like to get straight back to work.”

Clarissa took a step back.

“Fine,” she said. “Well, we’ve got some great stuff. It’s Henley month of course so we’re doing an ironic what-not-to-wear for the regatta, which is a cunning pretext for some pics of gorgeous rowers,
bien evidemment
. For fashion we’re doing something called ‘Fuck Your Boyfriend’—see what we did there? That’s going to be girls with whips snarling at boys in Duckie Brown, basically. And for the ‘Real Life’ slot there’s two choices. Either we go with this piece called ‘Beauty and the Budget’ about a woman with two ugly daughters and only enough money to pay for cosmetic surgery for one of them. Ugh—yes—I know.
Or&mdash
;my preference—we’ve got a piece called ‘Good Vibrations’ and I’m telling you, it’s an eye-opener. I mean, my
God
, Sarah, some of the sex toys you can buy online these days, they’re solutions to desires I had no idea
existed
, God save us all.”