Little Bee (12 page)

“Thank
you. I’ll just get my son and my…well.
My friend.”

I
watched the undertaker ignoring the smell of gin on my breath. He looked back
at me. There was a small scar on his forehead. His nose was flattened and
skewed. His face registered nothing. It was as blank as my mind.

“Take
all the time you need, madam.”

I
went out into the back garden. Batman was digging away at something under the
roses. I went over to him. He had a trowel and he was lifting a dandelion,
pulling its root to the tip. Our resident robin was hungry and he watched from
six yards away. Batman raised the dandelion from the soil and brought it close
to examine its root. Kneeling, he looked up at me.

“Is
this a weed, Mummy?” he said.

“Yes
darling. Next time, if you’re not sure, ask before you dig it up.”

Batman
shrugged.

“Shall
I put it in the wild patch?” he said.

I
nodded, and Batman carried the dandelion over to a small part of the garden
where Andrew had given a home to such rascals, in the hope that they would
attract butterflies and bees.
In our small garden I have
made a wild place to remind me of chaos,
Andrew once wrote in his column.
Our modern lives are too ordered, too antiseptic.

That
had been before Africa.

Batman
bedded in the dandelion among the nettles.

“Mummy,
is weeds baddies?”

I
said that it depended if you were a boy or a butterfly. Batman rolled his eyes,
like a newsman interviewing an equivocating politician. I couldn’t help
smiling.

“Who
is that woman on the sofa, Mummy?”

“Her
name is Little Bee.”

“That’s
a funny name.”

“Not
if you’re a bee.”

“But
she isn’t a bee.”

“No.
She’s a person. She’s from a country called Nigeria.”

“Mmm.
Is she a goody?”

I
stood up straight.

“We
have to go now darling,” I said. “The undertaker is here to collect us.”

“Bruce
Wayne?”

“Yes.”

“
Is
we going to the bat cave?”

“
Are we
going to the bat
cave.
”

“Are
we?”

“Sort of.”

“Hmm.
I
is
coming in a
minute.”

I
felt the perspiration starting on my back. I had on a gray woolen suit and a
hat that was not black but a late-evening nod to it. It didn’t scorn tradition,
but nor had it entirely submitted to darkness. Folded up over the hat was a
black veil, ready to bring down when the right moment came. I hoped someone
would tell me when that was.

I
wore navy-blue gloves, which were borderline dark enough for a funeral. The
middle finger of the left hand glove was truncated and stitched. I’d done it
two nights earlier, as soon as I was drunk enough to bear it, in a merciful
hour between insobriety and incapacity. The glove’s severed finger was still
lying on my sewing table. It was hard to throw away.

In
my suit pocket was my phone, set to quiet mode in case I forgot to do it later.
I also had a ten-pound note ready for the collection, in case there was a
collection. It seemed unlikely at a funeral, but I wasn’t sure. (And if there
was a collection, was ten pounds about right? Five seemed ridiculously mean; twenty
obscenely flashy.)

There
was nobody left to ask about ordinary things. Little Bee was no use. I couldn’t
ask her: are these blue gloves okay? She’d only stare at them, as if they were
the first pair of gloves she had ever seen, which was quite possibly the case. (Yes,
but are they
dark enough,
Little Bee? Between you
and me—you as the refugee from horror and me as the editor of an edgy monthly
magazine—would we call that shade blue,
courageous,
or blue,
irreverent
?)

Ordinary
things were going to be the hardest, I realized. There was nobody to ask about
them. This was something undeniable, now that Andrew was gone: there was nobody
left with a strong opinion about life in a civilized country.

Our
robin hopped out from the foxgloves with a worm in its beak. The worm skin was
puce, the color of bruising.

“Come
on, Batman, we have to go.”

“In a
minute,
Mummy.”

In
the quiet of the garden then the robin shook his worm, and swallowed its life
from the light into darkness with the quick indifference of a god. I felt
nothing at all. I looked at my son, pale and bemused in the neatly planted
garden, and I looked past him at Little Bee, tired and mud-stained, waiting for
us to go through into the house.

So,
I realized—life had finally broken through. How silly it looked now, my careful
set of defenses against nature: my brazen magazine, my handsome husband, my
Maginot Line of motherhood and affairs. The world, the real world, had found a
way through. It had sat down on my sofa and it would not be denied any longer.

I
went through the house to the front door to tell the undertaker we would be
with him in a minute. He nodded. I looked behind the undertaker at his men,
pale and hungover in their coattails. I have drunk gin myself in my time and I
recognized that solemn expression they wore. One part pity, three parts I’ll-
never
-drink-again. The men nodded at me. It is a peculiar
sensation, as a woman with a very good job, to be pitied by men with tattoos
and headaches. It’s the way people will always look at me now, I suppose, as a
foreigner in this country of my heart I should never have come to.

On
the street in front of our house, the hearse and the limo stood waiting. I went
out into the driveway to look through the green glass of the hearse. Andrew’s
coffin was there, lying on bright chrome rollers.
Andrew, my
husband of eight years.
I thought:
I should feel
something now.
I thought:
Rollers. How practical.

On
our street the semidetached houses stretched to infinity in both directions. The
clouds scrolled across the sky, blandly oppressive, each one resembling the
next, all threatening rain. I looked back at Andrew’s coffin and I thought
about his face. I thought about it dead. How slowly he had died, over those
last two years. How imperceptible it had been, that transition in his facial
expression, from deadly serious to seriously dead. Already those two faces were
blurring together for me. My husband alive and my husband dead—they now seemed
only semidetached, as if under the coffin lid I would find the two of them
fused like Siamese twins, eyes agape, looking to infinity in both directions.

And
now this thought came into my head with the full clarity of horror:
Andrew was once a passionate, loving, brilliant man.

Staring
at my husband’s coffin, I clung to this thought. I held it up before my own
memory like a tentative flag of truce. I remembered Andrew at the newspaper we
both worked for when we met, having a shouting match with his editor over some
lofty point of principle that got him gloriously fired, on the spot, and sent
him striding fierce and beautiful into the corridor. The first time that I
thought,
This
is a man to be proud of.
And then Andrew practically
tripping over me eavesdropping in the corridor, openmouthed, pretending I was
walking past on my way to the newsroom. Andrew grinning at me, unhesitatingly,
and saying,
Fancy
buying a former colleague a spot of dinner?
It was one in
a billion. It was like catching lightning in a bottle.

The
marriage cooled when Charlie was born. As if that one lightning strike was all
we got, and most of the heat from it had to go into our child. Nigeria had
accelerated the cooling and now death had finished it, but my disaffection and
my affair with Lawrence had come first. That was what my mind was stuck on, I
realized. There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly
lost.
First from my heart, then from my mind, and only
finally from my life.

This,
then, was when real sorrow arrived. This was the shock that set me trembling,
as if something seismic had been released deep inside me and was blindly
inching toward the surface. I trembled, but there was no release of tears.

I
went back inside the house, and collected my son and Little Bee. Mismatched,
dazed, semidetached, we walked to my husband’s funeral. Still shaking, in the
pew, I understood that it isn’t the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and
I didn’t deserve my own pity.

After
it was all over, someone or other drove us home. I clung on to Charlie in the
backseat of a car. I remember the car smelled of stale cigarettes. I stroked
Charlie’s head and pointed out the everyday things that we passed, invoking the
comfort of houses and shops and cars by the hopeful magic of whispering their
names. Ordinary nouns were what we needed, I decided. Everyday things would get
us through. Never mind that Charlie’s Batman costume was covered in grave mud. When
we got home I put it in the wash and I gave him the clean one. When it hurt too
much to prize open the box of washing powder, I used the other hand.

I
remember sitting with Charlie while we watched the water flood into the
machine, rising behind the round glass door. The machine lurched into its
familiar grinding preamble, and Charlie and I had a perfectly ordinary
conversation. That was the worst moment for me. We talked about what he wanted
for lunch. Charlie said he wanted crisps. I demurred. He insisted. I
acquiesced. I was a pushover at that moment and my son knew it. I conceded on
tomato ketchup and ice cream
too,
and there was
triumph in Charlie’s face and horror in his eyes. There was extraordinary pain
behind the ordinary nouns.

We
ate, and then Little Bee took Charlie out into the garden to play. I had been
so focused on my son that I had forgotten all about her and it actually
surprised me that she was still there.

I
sat very still at my kitchen table. My mother and my sister had come back with
us from the church and they orbited me in a blur of fussing and tidying, so
that if a photograph had been taken of us all with a very long exposure it
would have shown only me, in sharp focus, surrounded by a ghostly halo that
took its azure color from my sister’s cardigan and its eccentricity from my
mother’s tendency to close in on me at one end of her orbit, and ask if I was
all right. I hardly heard her, I think. They carried on around me for an hour,
respectful of my silence, washing the teacups without unnecessary clink,
alphabetizing condolence cards whilst minimizing rustle, until I begged them,
if they loved me, to go home.

After
they left, with tender, drawn-out hugs that made me regret banishing them, I
sat back down at the kitchen table and watched Little Bee playing in the garden
with Batman. I suppose it had been reckless of us to abandon our home and spend
the whole morning at a funeral. In our absence some baddies of the worst stripe
had occupied the laurel bush, and now had to be flushed out with water pistols
and bamboo canes. It seemed to be dangerous and painstaking work. First Little
Bee would creep up to the laurel on her hands and knees, with the hem of her
oversize Hawaiian shirt dragging in the dirt. When she spotted a lurking baddy
she would jab at him with a yell, causing him to break out into the open. There
my son was ready with the water pistol to deliver the coup de grâce. I marveled
at how quickly they had become a team. I wasn’t sure I wanted them to be. But
what was I to do? To stride out into the garden and say,
Little
Bee, could you please stop making friends with my son?
My son would
loudly demand an explanation and it would be no use telling him that Little Bee
wasn’t on our side. Not now that she and he had killed so many of those baddies
together.

No,
it wasn’t going to work anymore, denying her, or denying what had happened in
Africa. A memory can be banished, even indefinitely, deported from
consciousness by the relentless everydayness of running a successful magazine,
mothering a son, and burying a husband. A human being, though, is a different
thing entirely. The existence of a Nigerian girl, alive and standing in one’s
own garden—governments may deny such things, or brush them off as statistical
anomalies, but human beings cannot.

I
sat at the kitchen table and stared through suddenly wet eyes at the stump
where my finger used to be. I realized that it was finally time to face up to
what had happened on the beach.

It
should never have happened, of course, in the ordinary run of things. There are
countries of the world, and regions of one’s own mind, where it is unwise to travel.
I have always thought so, and I have always struck myself as a sensible woman.
Independent of mind, but not recklessly so.
I would love to
have the same arm’s-length relationship with foreign places that other sensible
women seem to have.

Clever
me, I went on holiday somewhere different. That season in Nigeria there was an
oil war. Andrew and I hadn’t known. The struggle was brief, confused, and
scarcely reported. The British and Nigerian governments both deny to this day
that it even took place. God knows, they aren’t the only ones who tried denial.