The Other Hand (6 page)

“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 parting.

“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, coloured 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 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 practised 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, grey 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 neighbour 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, 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, on to 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 realised 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
.

&mdash
;Oh. Is there painting-and-drawing?

—Yes, there’s painting-and-drawing.

—Is mine Daddy doing drawing?

—No, Charlie, Daddy is opening the window and looking at the sky.

I shivered, and wondered how long I would have to go on narrating my husband’s afterlife.

More words, then hymns. Hands took my elbows and led me outside. I observed myself standing in a graveyard beside a deep hole in the ground. Six suited undertakers were lowering a coffin on thick green silky ropes with tasselled ends. I recognised it as the coffin that had been standing on trestles at the front of the church. The coffin came to rest. The undertakers retrieved the ropes, each with a deft flick of his wrist. I remember thinking, I bet they do this all the time, as if it was some brilliant insight. Someone thrust a lump of clay into my hand. I realised I was being invited -urged, even—to throw it into the hole. I stepped up to the edge. Neat, clean greengrocer’s grass had been laid around the border of the grave. I looked down and saw the coffin glowing palely in the depths. Batman held tight to my leg and peered down into the gloom with me.

“Mummy, why did the Bruce Wayne men putted that box down in the hole?”

“Let’s not think about that now, darling.”

I’d spent so many hours explaining heaven to Charlie that week—every room and book shelf and sandpit of it—that I’d never really dealt with the issue of Andrew’s physical body at all. I thought it would be too much to ask of my son, at four, to understand the separation between body and soul. Looking back on it now I think I underestimated a boy who could live simultaneously in Kingston-upon-Thames and Gotham City. I think if I’d managed to sit him down and explain it to him gently, he would have been perfectly happy with the duality.

I knelt and put my arm around my son’s shoulders. I did it to be tender, but my head was swimming and I realised that perhaps it was only Charlie who was stopping me from falling down the hole. I held on tighter. Charlie put his mouth to my ear and whispered, “Where’s mine daddy right now?”

I whispered back, “Your daddy is in the heaven hills, Charlie. Very popular at this time of year. I think he’s very happy there.”

“Mmm. Is mine daddy coming back soon?”

“No, Charlie. People don’t come back from heaven. We talked about that.”

Charlie pursed his lips. “Mummy,” he said again, “why did they put that box down there?”

“I suppose they want to keep it safe.”

“Oh. Is they going to come and get it later?”

“No, Charlie, I don’t think so.”

Charlie blinked. Under his bat mask he screwed up his face with the effort of trying to understand.

“Where is heaven, Mummy?”

“Please, Charlie. Not now.”

“What’s in that box?”

“Let’s talk about this later, darling, all right? Mummy is feeling rather dizzy.”

Charlie stared at me. “Is mine daddy in that box?”

“Your daddy is in heaven, Charlie.”

“
IS THAT BOX HEAVEN?
” said Charlie, loudly.

Everyone was watching us. I couldn’t speak. My son stared into the hole. Then he looked up at me in absolute alarm.

“Mummy! Get him
OUT
! Get mine daddy out of heaven!”

I held tightly onto his shoulders. “Oh, Charlie, please, you don’t understand!”

“
GET HIM OUT! GET HIM OUT!
”

My son squirmed in my grip and broke free;—It happened very quickly. He stood at the very edge of the hole. He looked back at me and then he turned and inched forward, but the greengrocer’s grass overlapped the edge of the hole and it yielded under his feet and he fell, with his bat cape flying behind him, down into the grave. He landed with a thump on top of Andrew’s coffin. There was a single, urgent scream from one of the other mourners. I think it was the first sound, since Andrew died, that really broke the silence.

The scream ran on and on in my mind. I felt nauseous, and the horizon lurched insanely. Still kneeling, I leaned out over the edge of the pit. Down below, in the dark shadow, my son was banging on the coffin and screaming,
Daddy, Daddy, get
OUT
!
He clung to the coffin lid, and planted his bat shoes against the side wall of the grave, and heaved against the screws that held the lid closed. I hung my arms down over the edge of the hole. I implored Charlie to take my hands so I could pull him back up, I don’t think he heard me at all.

At first, my son moved with a breathless confidence. Batman was undefeated, after all, that spring. He had overcome the Penguin, the Puffin, and Mister Freeze. It was simply not a possibility in my son’s mind that he might not overcome this new challenge. He screamed in rage and fury. He wouldn’t give up, but if I am strict and force myself now to decide upon the precise moment in this whole story when my heart irreparably broke, it was the moment when I saw the weariness and the doubt creep into my son’s small muscles as his fingers slipped, for the tenth time, from the pale oak lid.

The mourners clustered around the edge of the grave, paralysed by the horror of this thing, this first discovery of death that was worse than death itself. I tried to go forward but the hands on my elbows were holding me back. I strained against their grip and looked at all the horror-struck faces around the grave and I was thinking, Why doesn’t someone do something?

But is hard, very hard,
to
be the first.

Finally it was Little Bee who went down into the grave and held up my son for other hands to haul out. Charlie was kicking and biting and struggling furiously in his muddied mask and cape. He wanted to go back down. And it was Little Bee, once she herself had been extricated, who hugged him and held him back as he screamed, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, while each of the principal mourners stepped onto the thin strip of greengrocer’s grass and dropped in their small hand-fuls of clay. My son’s screaming seemed to go on for a cruelly long time. I remember wondering if my mind would shatter with the noise, like a wine glass broken by a sopjrano’s voice. In fact, a former colleague of Andrew’s, a war reporter who had been in Iraq and Darfur, did call me a few days later with the name of a combat fatigue counsellor he used.
That’s kind of you
, I told him,
but I haven’t been at war
.

At the graveside, when the screaming was over, I picked up Charlie and held him on my front, with his head resting on my shoulder. He was exhausted. Through the eyeholes of his bat mask, I could see his eyelids drooping. I watched the other mourners filing away in a slow line towards the car park. Brightly coloured umbrellas broke out above the sombre suits. It was starting to rain.

Little Bee stayed behind with me. We stood by the side of the grave and we stared at one another.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It is nothing,” said Little Bee. “I just did what any one, would do.”

“Yes,” I said. “Except that everyone else didn’t.”

Little Bee shrugged. “It is easier when you are from outside.”

I shivered. The rain came down harder.

“This is never going to end,” I said. “Is it, Little Bee?”

“
However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again
. That is what we used to say in my village.”