Little Bee - Chris Cleave [74]
I put the phone down. I stood quietly for a few minutes, looking at it. I was doing this to protect Charlie, keeping the distance between me and Lawrence. It was the right thing to do. Things were complicated enough. It’s something I could never have explained to my mother, I suppose: that there are circumstances in which we will allow men to enter our bodies but not our homes. My body still ached from the sound of Lawrence’s voice, and the frustration rose inside me until I picked up the phone and smashed it, again and again, into my perfectly iced cake. When the cake was quite destroyed I took a deep breath, switched the oven back on, and started making another.
The next day—Charlie’s first day at nursery—my train was canceled so I was late back from work. Charlie was crying when I picked him up. He was the last child there, howling in the middle of the beeswaxed floor, smashing his little fists into the play leader’s legs. When I went to Charlie, he wouldn’t look at me. I pushed him home in the buggy, sat him down at the table, dimmed the lights, and brought in the banana cake with twenty burning candles. Charlie forgot he was sulking and started to smile. I kissed him, and helped to blow out the candles.
“Make a wish!” I said.
Charlie’s face clouded over again. “Want Daddy,” he said.
“Do you, Charlie? Do you really?”
Charlie nodded. His lower lip wobbled, and my heart wobbled with it. After the cake he got down from his high chair and toddled off to play with cars. A peculiar gait, toddling. A sort of teetering, really—my son at two—each step a hasty improvisation, a fall avoided by luck as much as by judgment. A sort of life on short legs.
Later, with Charlie tucked up in bed, I phoned my husband. “Charlie wants you back, Andrew.”
Silence.
“Andrew?”
“Charlie does, does he?”
“Yes.”
“And what about you? Do you want me back?”
“I want what Charlie wants.”
Andrew’s laugh down the phone—bitter, derisory.
“You really know how to make a man feel special.”
“Please. I know how badly I’ve hurt you. But it’ll be different now.”
“You’re bloody right it’ll be different.”
“I can’t raise our son alone, Andrew.”
“Well, I can’t raise my son with a slut for his mother.”
I gripped the phone, feeling a wave of terror rise through me. Andrew hadn’t even raised his voice. A slut for his mother. Cold, technical, as if he had also weighed up adulteress, cuckolder, and narcissist before selecting precisely the most apposite noun. I tried to control my voice but I heard the shake in it.
“Please, Andrew. This is you and me and Charlie we’re talking about. I care so much about both of you, you can’t imagine. What I did with Lawrence…I’m so sorry.”
“Why did you do it?”
“It was never meant to mean anything. It was just sex.” The lie came out of my mouth so easily that I realized why it was so popular.
“Just sex? That’s the convention, isn’t it, these days? Sex has become one of those words you can put just in front of. Anything else you’d like to minimize at this time, Sarah? Just unfaithfulness? Just betrayal? Just breaking my fucking heart?”
“Stop it, please, stop it! What can I do? What can I do to make it right again?”
Andrew said he didn’t know. Andrew cried down the phone. These were two things he had never done. The not knowing, and the crying. Hearing Andrew weeping over the crackling phone line, I began to cry too. When we both dried up, there was silence. And this silence had a new quality in it: the knowledge that there had been something left to cry over, after all. The realization hung on the phone line. Tentative, like a life waiting to be written.
“Please, Andrew. Maybe we need a change of scenery. A fresh start.”
A pause. He cleared his throat. “Yes. All right.”
“We need to get away from things. We need to get away from London and our jobs and even Charlie—we can leave him with my parents for a few days. We need a holiday.”
Andrew groaned.
“Oh, Jesus.A holiday?”
“Yes. Andrew. Please.”
“Jesus. All right. Where?”
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