Little Bee

“Oh Jesus,” said Sarah. “Oh no.”

“What? What is it?”

Sarah took a deep breath. Her whole body shuddered.

“I called Andrew. I don’t know why. It was completely automatic, I didn’t even think. You know…if there’s a problem with Charlie, I always call Andrew. I just forgot he was…you know. Oh god. I’m really losing it. I thought I was ready, you know, to hear what happened to you…and your sister. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t ready for it. Oh god.”

We sat there and I held her hand while she cried. Afterward, she passed her telephone to me. She pointed at the screen.

“He’s still in my address book. Do you see?”

The screen of her telephone said ANDREW, and then a number. Just ANDREW-there was no surname.

“Will you delete him for me, Bee? I can’t do it.”

I held her telephone in my hands. I had seen people speaking on mobile phones, but I always thought they would be very complicated. You will laugh at me-there she goes again, that silly little girl with the smell of tea in her skin and the stains of cassava tops still on her fingers-but I always thought there would be a frequency to find. I thought you would have to turn some dial until you found the signal of your friend, very small and faint, like tuning in to the BBC World Service on a windup radio. I supposed that mobile telephones were difficult like this. You would turn the dial through all the hissing and the squeaking sounds, and first you would hear your friend’s voice very strange and thin and nearly drowned out by howling-like your friend had been squashed as flat as a biscuit and dropped into a metal box full of monkeys-but then you would turn the dial just one tiny fraction more and suddenly your friend would say something like, God save the Queen!, and tell you all about the weather in the shipping areas around the offshore waters of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. After that, you could talk.

But actually I discovered that it was much easier than this to use a mobile telephone. Everything is so easy in your country. Next to the name, ANDREW, there was a thing that said OPTIONS, and I pressed it. Option three was DELETE, so I pressed that, and Andrew O’Rourke was gone.

“Thank you,” said Sarah. “I just couldn’t do it myself.”

She looked down at her phone for a long time.

“I feel so bloody frightened, Bee. There’s no one to call. Andrew was absolutely unbearable sometimes but he was always so sensible. I suppose it was crazy of me, to send Charlie straight back to the nursery, after yesterday. But I thought it would be good for him, to get back into the routine. There’s no one to ask anymore, Bee. Do you understand? I don’t know if I can do this on my own. Make all the right decisions for Charlie on my own. Years of it, do you see? The right behavior, the right schools, the right friends, the right university, the right wife. Oh god, poor old Charlie.”

I put my hand on her hand.

“If you want, I can come to the nursery with you,” I said.

Sarah tilted her head and looked at me for a long time. Then she smiled.

“Not dressed like that,” she said.

Ten minutes later I left the house with Sarah. I was wearing a pink summer dress she lent me. It was the prettiest thing I had ever worn. Around the neck it had fine white flowers stitched in, very delicate and fancy. I felt like the Queen of England. It was a sunny morning and there was a cool breeze and I skipped along the pavement behind Sarah and every time we passed a cat or a postman or a woman pushing a pram I smiled and I said, How do you do? All of them looked at me like I was a crazy girl, I do not know why. I was thinking, That is no way to greet your monarch.

I did not like the nursery. It was in a big house with tall windows, but the windows were not open even though it was a fine day. Inside, the air was stuffy. It smelled of toilets and poster paint, and this was exactly the smell of the therapy room in the immigration detention center, so I was feeling sad from the memory. In the detention center they did not open the windows because the windows did not open. In the therapy room they gave us poster paints and brushes and they told us we must express ourselves. I used a lot of red paint. When the therapeutic assistant looked at what I painted, she said it would be good for me to try to move on. I said, yes madam, it will be my pleasure. If you will just open a little window for me, or even better a door, I will be happy to move on right away. I smiled, but the therapeutic assistant did not think it was a good joke.