Little Bee

“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.

ten

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.