Little Bee (30 page)

Lawrence
did not look in my eyes.

“Sonia,”
he said.
“And Stephen.
And Simon’s the, um, the baby.”

“Hmm.”

I
weighed the stone and I turned it around and around between my fingers and then
I dropped it on the sand.

“You
should go back to them,” I said.

Lawrence
looked at me then, and I felt a great sadness because there was nothing in his
eyes. I looked away over the water. I looked and I saw the blue reflection of
the sky. I stared for a long time now, because I understood that I was looking
into the eyes of death again, and death was still not looking away and neither
could I.

Then
there was the barking of dogs. I jumped, and my eyes followed the sound and I
felt relief, because I saw the dogs up on the walkway above us, and they were
only fat yellow family dogs, out for a walk with their master. Then I saw
Sarah, coming down the steps toward us. Her arms were hanging by her sides, and
in one of her hands she held her mobile phone. She walked up to us, took a deep
breath, and smiled.

“I
called work,” she said. “I’ve got something to tell you both.”

She
held out her hands to both of us, but then she hesitated. She looked all around
the place where we were standing.

“Um,
where’s Charlie?” she said.

She
said it very quietly,
then
she said it again, louder,
looking at us this time.

I
looked all along the thin strip of sand. Children were still making their sand
castles beside the river, although the level of the water was rising and the
beach was getting narrower. None of the children was Charlie.

“Charlie?”
Sarah shouted. “Charlie? Oh my god. CHARLIE!”

I
spun around under the hot sun. We ran up and down. We called his name. We
called again and again.

Charlie
was gone.

“Oh
my god!” said Sarah. “Someone’s taken him! Oh my god! CHARLIE!”

Horror
filled me completely, so that I could not even move. While Sarah screamed for
her child I widened my eyes into the blackness of the drainage tunnels in the
embankment wall, and I stared into them. I looked for a long time. I saw that
the night horrors of all our worlds had found one another, so that there was no
telling where the one ended and the other began—whether the jungle grew out of
the jeep or the jeep grew out of the jungle.

I HELD LITTLE BEE
for a long time. Then I asked her:
Will you go down
and play with Charlie and Lawrence? I have to make a phone call.

After
she walked down the stone steps, I held on to the iron railing of the
embankment and I held on to my memories of Andrew and I held on to my mobile
phone. The phone was shaking in my hand, showing five bars of signal. The
reception was so strong in the center of
London,
one
hardly needed the handset at all. The air positively crackled with
connectivity, as if one might simply direct a thought at someone and be
received loud and clear. My tummy lurched and I decided,
Right,
I’ll do it now, before I calm down and change my mind.
I called the
publisher and told him I didn’t want to edit his magazine anymore.

What
the publisher said was,
Fine.

I
said
,
I’m not sure you heard me. Something
extraordinary has happened in my life, and I really need to run with it. So I
need to quit the job.
And he said,
Yeah, I heard
you,
that’s
fine, I’ll get someone else.
And he
hung up.

And
I said,
Oh.

I
stood there for a minute, shocked, and then I just had to smile.

The
sun was lovely. I closed my eyes and let the breeze air-brush away the traces
of the last few years. One phone call: I realized it was as simple as that. People
wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is
frighteningly easy.

I
was already thinking about how I might carry on with Andrew’s book. The trick,
of course, would be to keep it impersonal. I wondered if that had been a
problem for Andrew. He never liked to put himself in the story.

But
what if the story is that we
are
in the story? I
started to understand how Andrew must have agonized over it. I wondered if that
was why he had kept so quiet.

Dear
Andrew, I thought. How is it that I feel closer to you now than I did on the
day we were married? And after I just told Little Bee I didn’t want to hear
what she had to say because I know I need to stick with Lawrence. This is the
forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear:
return
to what you once loved best,
and in the other ear it whispers,
move on.

My
phone went, and my eyes snapped open. It was Clarissa.

“Sarah?
They just told me you resigned. Are you
crazy
?”

“I
told you I was thinking about it.”

“Sarah,
I spend a lot of time
thinking
about bedding
Premiership footballers.”

“Maybe
you should try it.”

“Or
maybe you should come in to the office, right now, and tell the publishers
you’re very sorry, and that you’re going through
a
bereavement
at the moment, and please—pretty please—could you have your
nice job back.”

“But
I don’t want that job. I want to be a journalist again. I want to make a
difference in the world.”

“Everyone
wants to make a difference, Sarah, but there’s a time and place. Do you know
what you’re doing, honestly, if you throw your toys out of the pram like this? You’re
just having a midlife crisis. You’re no different from the middle-aged man who
buys a red car and shags the babysitter.”

I
thought about it. The breeze seemed colder now. There were goose bumps on my
arms.

“Sarah?”

“Oh
Clarissa, you’re right, I’m confused. Do you think I’ve just chucked my life
away?”

“I
just want
you
to think about it. Will you, Sarah?”

“All right.”

“And
call me?”

“I
will. Clarissa?”

“Darling?”

“Thank
you.”

I
hung up and looked out over the river. When we first arrived the water had been
flowing downstream toward the wild estuary and the untamed waters of the North
Sea. Now it was nudging back in the direction of Oxford and the crisp white
boathouses of Henley. It is hard, when it comes right down to the actual
choice, to know what you want out of life.

I
went down the stone steps to the little shrinking beach. I said to Lawrence and
Little Bee,
I called work. I’ve got something to tell you
both.
But they looked so forlorn, standing there, standing apart from
each other,
not
speaking. I realized this was never
going to work.

I
thought,
Oh
gosh, how foolish I’ve been.

I
have always struck myself as a very practical woman, capable of adaptation. I
immediately thought,
I’ll phone the publisher and tell him
I made a mistake.
And not just a little mistake but a great, elemental,
whole-life mistake. During one whole week of grace I utterly forgot, you
see,
that I was a sensible girl from Surrey. It was
something about Little Bee’s smile, and her energy, that made me sort of fall
in love with her. And thus love makes fools of us all. For a whole week I
actually thought I was a better person, someone who could make a difference. It
completely slipped my mind that I was a quiet, practical, bereaved woman who
focused very hard on her job. Isn’t that odd? I’m awfully sorry. And now might
I please have my old life back?

I
held out my hands to Little Bee and Lawrence, but then I noticed that Charlie
was no longer with them.

“Um,
where’s Charlie?”

It
is painful to think about this time, even now.

What
did I do? I looked all around, of course. I ran up and down. I began screaming
Charlie’s name. I raced up and down the shrinking beach, staring into the face
of every child playing there in case it should somehow transform into mine. I
shouted myself hoarse. My son was nowhere.

An
aching panic took me over. The sophisticated parts of my mind shut down, the
parts that might be capable of thought. I suppose the blood supply to them had
been summarily turned off, and diverted to the eyes, the legs, the lungs. I
looked, I ran, I screamed. And all the time in my heart it was growing: the
unspeakable certainty that someone had taken Charlie.

At
the other end of the little beach was a second set of steps leading up the
embankment wall, and I ran up them. Camped out on the top step was a picnicking
family. The mother—long auburn hair with rather frazzled ends—sat cross-legged
and barefoot, surrounded by the peelings and the uneaten segments of satsumas. She
was reading
BBC Music Magazine.
She had it spread
out on the rug, pinned down with one foot to stop the pages blowing. There was
a slender silver ring on her second toe. Beside her on the step, two
flame-haired girls in blue gingham dresses were eating Kraft cheese slices
straight from the packet. The husband, blond and stocky, stood a few feet away,
leaning on the railing and talking into his mobile.
Lanzarote’s
just a tourist trap these days,
he was saying.
You
should go somewhere off the beaten track, like Croatia or Marrakech. Your money
goes further there in any case.
I was out of breath. The mother looked
up at me.

“Is
everything alright?” she said.

“I’ve
lost my son.”

She
looked at me blankly. I smiled idiotically. I didn’t know what to do with my
face. My mind and my body were keyed up to fight with pedophiles and wolves. Confronted
with these ordinary people in this absurdly pleasant tableau, ringed all around
by strolling tourists, my distress seemed desperate and vulgar. My social
conditioning fought against my panic. I felt ashamed. Instinctively, I also
knew that I needed to speak to the woman calmly, in her register, if I was to
communicate clearly and get across the information I needed without wasting any
time. I have
struggled
all my life to find the correct
point of balance between nicety and hysteria.

“I’m
very sorry,” I said, “I’ve lost my son.”

The
woman stood up and looked around at the crowd. I couldn’t understand why her
movements were so slow. It seemed that I was operating in air, while she
occupied some more viscous medium.

“He’s
about this high,” I said. “You’d have noticed him, he’s dressed as Batman. Did
he come up these steps?”

“I’m
sorry,” she said in slow motion. “I haven’t seen anything.”

Each
word took forever to form. It felt like waiting for the woman to engrave the
sentence in stone. I was already halfway back down the steps before she
finished speaking. Behind me I heard the husband saying,
You
could always go for the
cheapest package tour and just use the flights. Then you can find some nicer
accommodation once you’re out there.

I
ran back down the steps, shouting Charlie’s name. Somehow I arrived back at the
place where Charlie had built his sand castles. I kicked the structures apart,
shouting his name. While parents and children looked on aghast, I looked for my
son under piles of sand as little as six inches high. Of course I knew Charlie
wasn’t underneath. I knew, even as I was scrabbling away at anything that
protruded. I found an old crisp packet.
The broken wheel of a
pushchair.
My nails bled into a barely submerged history of tides.

Little
Bee and Lawrence stared at me, wide-eyed, and I remember the last rational
thought that went through my mind:
He isn’t on the sand,
and he didn’t go up the steps, so he must be in the river.
Even as I
thought it, I could feel the second stage of my mind shutting down. The panic
simply rose up out of my chest to engulf me. I splashed out into the Thames,
knee-high, then waist-high, staring down into the muddy brown water, screaming
Charlie’s name at the floating plastic bags and the startled gulls.

I
saw something under the water, lying on the muddy sludge. Underwater, distorted
by ripples, it looked like a bone-white face. I reached down and grabbed for
it. I lifted it up into the bright day. It was a cracked plastic mask from a
tourist stand, with its snapped elastic showing how it had blown into the
river. As I held it up, dripping muddy water, I realized that my phone had been
in the hand I held the mask in. My phone was gone, somewhere—my life was
gone—lost in the sand or the river. I stood in the water, holding a mask. I
didn’t know what to do now. I heard a whistling sound and I looked down sharply.
I understood that the breeze was whistling through the empty eyeholes of the
mask, and that is when I truly began to scream.

Charlie
O’Rourke. Four years old.
Batman.
What went through my
mind?
His perfect little white teeth.
His look of fierce concentration when he was dispatching baddies.
The way he hugged me, once, when I was sad. The way, since Africa, that I had
been running between worlds—between Andrew and Lawrence, between Little Bee and
my job—running everywhere except to the world where I belonged. Why had I never
run to Charlie? I screamed at myself.
My son, my beautiful
boy.
Gone,
gone.
He
had disappeared as he had lived, while I was looking the other way. I looked at
the empty days before me, and there was no end to them.

My
voice sank to a whisper. I breathed Charlie’s name.

Then
I felt hands on my shoulders. It was Lawrence.

“We
need to be systematic about this now,” he said. “Sarah, you stay here and keep
calling for him, so he knows where to come back to if he’s wandering. I’ll go
and ask people to start looking, and I’ll keep looking myself. And Bee, you
take my phone and you go up on the embankment and you call the police. Then you
wait for them, so you can show them where we are when they arrive.”

Lawrence
handed his phone to Little Bee, and turned back to me. I stared at him dumbly.

“I
know it sounds extreme,” he said, “but the police are good at this. I’m sure
we’ll find Charlie before they get here, but just on the off chance that we
don’t, it makes sense for us to bring them in sooner rather than later.”

“Okay,
do
it,” I said. “Do it now.”

Little
Bee was still standing there, holding Lawrence’s phone in her hand, staring at
Lawrence and me with large and frightened eyes. I couldn’t understand why she
wasn’t already running.

“Go!”
I said.

She
still stared at me. “The police…,” she said.

Understanding
buzzed dully in my mind.
The number.
Of course! She didn’t know the emergency number.

“The
number is 999,” I said.

She
just stood there. I couldn’t work out what the problem was.

“The
police,
Sarah,” she said.

I
stared at her. Her eyes were pleading. She looked
terrified.
And then, very slowly, her face changed. It became firm, resolved. She took a
deep breath, and she nodded at me. She turned, slowly at first and then very
fast, and she ran up the steps to the embankment. When she was halfway up,
Lawrence raised a hand to his mouth.