Little Bee

“Is she threatening you? Tell me you’ve called the police.”

“No, it’s not like that. She played really nicely with Charlie, all afternoon. He was Batman, she was Robin. They made quite a team.”

“And that doesn’t freak you out?”

“If I start freaking out now, I won’t ever know how to stop.”

“But what’s she doing there? What does she want?”

“I suppose she wants to stay here for a while. She says she doesn’t know anyone else.”

“Are you serious? Can she stay? Legally, I mean?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t asked. She’s exhausted. I think she walked here all the way from the detention center.”

“She’s insane.”

“She didn’t have any money. She could hardly take a bus.”

“Look, I don’t like it. I’m worried about you being all alone with her.”

“So what do you think I should do?”

“I think you should wake her up and ask her to leave. I’m serious.”

“Leave for where? What if she refuses?”

“Then I want you to call the police and have her removed.” I said nothing.

“Do you hear me, Sarah? I want you to call the police.”

“I heard you. I wish you wouldn’t say I want.”

“It’s you I’m thinking about. What if she turns nasty?”

“Little Bee? I don’t think she’s got a nasty bone in her.”

“How do you know? You know nothing about the woman. What if she comes into your room in the night with a kitchen knife? What if she’s crazy?”

I shook my head. “My son would know, Lawrence. His bat senses would tell him.”

“Fuck, Sarah! This isn’t funny! Call the police.”

I looked at Little Bee, fast asleep on my sofa with her mouth slightly open and her knees drawn up to her chest. I fell silent.

“Sarah?”

“I’m not going to call the police. I’m going to let her stay.”

“But why? What possible good can come of this?”

“I couldn’t help her last time. Maybe now I can.”

“And that would prove what, exactly?”

I sighed.

“I suppose it would prove your point, Lawrence, about me not being good at taking advice.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Yes. Which brings us back to my original point.”

“Which was what?”

“That I’m difficult sometimes.”

Lawrence laughed, but I think he was forcing himself.

I put down the phone and stared for a long time at the long, smooth white planks of the kitchen floor. Then I went upstairs to sleep on the floor of my son’s room. I wanted to be there with him. I admitted to myself that Lawrence had a point: I didn’t know what Little Bee might do in the night.

Sitting with my back against the cold radiator of Charlie’s bedroom, with my knees bunched up under a duvet, I tried to remember what I saw in Lawrence. I finished my G&T and winced at the taste of the ersatz lemon. It was a small problem to have: a lack of real lemons. It was almost a comfort. I come from a family whose problems were always small and surmountable.

We didn’t have extramarital affairs in my family. Mummy and Daddy loved each other very much, or else they had hired failed actors to play the role of affable lovebirds in our family home, for twenty-five years, and then kept those actors on a retainer so that they could be summoned back at the drop of a hat whenever one of their clients’ offspring threatened a weekend visit home from university, or a Sunday-lunch-with-parents-and-boyfriend. In my family we took our holidays in Devon and our partners for life. I wondered how it was that I had broken the mold.

I looked over at my son, asleep under his duvet, motionless and pale in his Batman costume. I listened to the sound of his breathing, regular and solid and utterly asleep. I couldn’t remember sleeping like that, not since I married Andrew. Within the first month, I’d known he wasn’t the right man. After that, it’s the growing sense of dissatisfaction that keeps one awake at night. The brain refusing to let go of those alternative lives that might have been. It isn’t the strong sleepers who sleep around.

But I was a happy child, at least, and my name was Sarah Summers. I still use Summers as my professional name, but personally it is lost. As a girl I liked what all girls like: pink plastic bracelets and later silver ones; a few practice boyfriends and then, in no particular hurry, men. England was made of dawn mists that rose to the horse’s shoulder, of cakes cooled on wire trays for the cutting, of soft awakenings. My first real choice was what to take at university. My teachers all said I should study law, so naturally I chose journalism. I met Andrew O’Rourke when we were both working on a London evening paper. Ours seemed to perfectly express the spirit of the city. Thirty-one pages of celebrity goings-on about town, and one page of news from the world which existed beyond London’s orbital motorway—the paper offered it up as a sort of memento mori.