call. I read a few words of his column, over his shoulder. He’d been awake all night writing an opinion piece about the Middle East, which was a region he had never visited and had no specialist knowledge of. It was the summer of 2007, and my son was fighting the Penguin and the Puffin, and my country was fighting Iraq and Afghanistan, and my husband was forming public opinion. It was the kind of summer where no one took their costume off.
I pulled my husband away from the phone. I pulled him into the bedroom by the tasseled cord of his dressing gown, because I had read somewhere that this sort of behavior would excite him. I pulled him down onto our bed.
I remember the way he moved inside me, like a clock with its mainspring running down. I pulled his face close to mine and I whispered, Oh god Andrew, are you all right? My husband didn’t reply. He just closed his eyes against the tears and we began to move faster while small, involuntary moans came from our mouths and fled into the other’s moaning in wordless desperation.
In on this small tragedy walked my son, who was more at home fighting evil on a larger, more knockabout scale. I opened my eyes and saw him standing in the bedroom doorway, watching us through the small, diamond-shaped eyeholes of his bat mask. From the expression on the part of his face that could be seen, he seemed to be wondering which (if any) of the gadgets on his utility belt might help in this situation.
When I saw my son, I pushed Andrew off me and scrabbled frantically for the duvet to cover us. I said,
My son looked behind him, then back at me.
“Charlie isn’t here. I’m Batman.”
I nodded, and bit my lip.
“Good morning, Batman.”
“What is you and Daddy doing, Mummy?”
“Er…”
“Is you getting baddies?”
“Are we getting baddies, Charlie. Not is we.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, Batman. Yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
I smiled at my son, and waited. I wondered what Batman would say. What he said was,
“Did a poo, Charlie.”
“Yes. A big big poo.”
“Oh Batman. Have you really done a poo in your suit?”
Batman shook his head. His bat ears quivered. Beneath the mask an expression of great cunning settled upon the visible part of his face.
“It wasn’t me that done the poo. It was the
(The italics were his.)
“Are you telling me that the Puffin came in the night and did a poo in your bat suit?”
Batman nodded, solemnly. I noticed he had kept his bat mask on but taken off his bat suit. He stood naked except for the mask and cape. He held up the bat suit for me to inspect. A lump of something fell from it and thumped on the carpet. The smell was indescribable. I sat up in bed and saw a trail of lumps leading across the carpet from the bedroom door. Somewhere inside me the girl who had done science A-levels noted, with empirical fascination, that feces had also found their way into locations which included-but were not limited to-Batman’s hands, the door frame, the bedroom wall, my alarm-clock radio and, of course, the bat suit. My son’s shit was everywhere. There was shit on his hands. Shit on his face. Even on the black-and-yellow bat symbol of his bat suit there was shit. I tried, but I couldn’t make myself believe that these were Puffin droppings. This was bat shit.
Distantly, I remembered something I’d read on the parenting page.
“It’s all right, Batman. Mummy’s not cross.”
“Mummy clean the poo up.”
“Um. Er. Jesus.”
Gravely, Batman shook his head.
“No, not Jesus.
Resentfulness was starting to overcome the embarrassment and guilt. I looked across to where Andrew lay with his eyes tight closed and his hands twisted at the exquisite awfulness of his clinical depression, our unhappy sex interrupted, and this very thick stink of shit.
“Batman, why don’t you ask
My son looked across at his father for a long time, then turned back to me. Patiently, as if explaining something to an imbecile, he shook his little head again.
“But why not?” (I was pleading now.) “Why not ask Daddy?”
Batman looked solemn.
Five days later, on the last morning I saw my husband alive, I finished dressing my caped crusader, I breakfasted him, and I ran him down to his nursery’s Early Birds Club. Back at the house, I showered. Andrew watched me as I pulled on my tights. I always dressed up for deadline days. Heels, skirt, smart green jacket. Magazine publishing has its rhythms and if the editor won’t dance to them, she can’t expect her staff to. I don’t float feature ideas in Fendi heels, and I don’t close an issue in Pumas. So I dressed against the clock while Andrew lay naked on the bed and watched me. He didn’t say a word. The last glimpse I had of him, before I closed the bedroom door, he was still watching. How to describe, to my son, his father’s last seen expression? I decided I would tell my son that his father had looked very peaceful. I decided I wouldn’t tell him that my husband opened his mouth to say something, but that I was running late and turned away.
I arrived at the office around 9:30. The magazine was based in Spitalfields, on Commercial Street, ninety minutes by public transport from Kingston-upon-Thames. The worst moment comes when you leave the overland network and descend into the heat of the Underground. There were two hundred of us packed into each tube carriage. We listened to the screech of the metal wheels on the track, with our bodies pinned and immobile. For three stops I stood pressed against a thin man in a corduroy jacket who was quietly weeping. One would normally avert one’s eyes, but my head was pinioned in such a position that I could only look. I should have liked to put an arm around the man. But my arms were jammed by the commuters on each side of me. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was up to administering tenderness like that, on a crowded train, under the silent gaze of others. I was torn between two kinds of shame. On the one hand, the disgrace of not discharging a human obligation. On the other hand, the madness of being the first in the crowd to move.
I smiled helplessly at the weeping man and I couldn’t stop thinking about Andrew.
As soon as one emerges aboveground, of course, one can quickly forget our human obligations. London is a beautiful machine for doing that. The city was bright, fresh and inviting that morning. I was excited about closing the June issue, and I practically ran the last two minutes to the office. On the outside of our building was the magazine’s name,
My husband hadn’t always been lost for words. The long silences only began on the day we met Little Bee. Before that, he wouldn’t pipe down for a minute. On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth’s surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it. That is how big he was for me. When we got back to our new married house in Kingston, I asked Andrew about the color of that honeymoon sea. He said, Yeah, was it blue? I said, come on Andrew, you’re a pro, you can do better than that. And Andrew said, Okay then, the awesome ocean fastness was a splendor of ultramarine crested with crimson and gold where the burnished sun blazed on the wave tops and sent them crashing into the gloomy troughs deepening to a dark malevolent indigo.
He hung on the penultimate syllable, deepening his voice in comic pomposity even as he raised his eyebrows. INN-digo, he boomed.
Of course you know why I didn’t notice the sea? It was because I spent two weeks with my head-
Well, where my husband’s head was is between me and him.
We both giggled helplessly and rolled around on the bed and Charlie, dear Charlie, was conceived.
I pushed open the street door and stepped up into the lobby of the magazine. The black Italian marble floor was the only grace note that had survived our tenancy of the offices. The rest of the lobby was pure us. Boxes of sample frocks from wannabe fashion houses were stacked up along one wall. Some intern had triaged them with a chunky blue marker: YES KEEP FOR SHOOT, or OH I THINK NOT, or the triumphantly absolutist THIS IS NOT FASHION. A dead Japanese juniper tree stood in a cracked gold Otagiri vase. Three glittering Christmas baubles still hung from it. The walls were done up in fuchsia and fairy lights, and even in the dim sunshine from the tinted windows that gave onto Commercial Street, the paint-work looked marked and tatty. I cultivated this unkempt look.
Clarissa, my features editor, came through the doors just after me. We kissed once, twice, three times-we’d been friends since school-and she hooked her arm around mine as we took the stairs together. The editorial floor was right at the top of the building. We were halfway up before I realized what was wrong with Clarissa.
“Clarissa, you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes.”
She smirked.
“So would you be, if you’d met yesterday’s man.”
“Oh Clarissa. What am I going to do with you?”
“Pay rise, strong coffee, paracetamol.”
She beamed as she ticked off the points on her fingers. I reminded myself that Clarissa did not have some of the wonderful things I had in my life, such as my beautiful son Batman, and that she was therefore almost certainly less fulfilled than I was.
It was a 10:30 A.M. start for my junior staff, bless them, and none of them were in yet. Up on the editorial floor, the cleaners were still in. They were hoovering, and dusting desktops, and turning upside down all the framed photos of my staff’s awful boyfriends, to prove they’d dusted under them. This was the grin-and-bear-it part of editing
Clarissa sat on the corner of my desk and I sat behind it, and we looked out over the open plan at the gang of black faces spiriting away yesterday’s fabric swatches and Starbucks cups.
We talked about the issue we were closing. The ad-sales people had done unusually well that month-perhaps the spiraling cost of street drugs had forced them to spend more time in the office- and we realized we had more editorial material than space. I had a “Real Life” feature I really thought should go in-a profile of a woman who was trying to get out of Baghdad-and Clarissa had a piece on a new kind of orgasm you could apparently only get with the boss. We talked about which of them we would run with. I was only half concentrating. I texted Andrew, to see how he was doing.
The flatscreen at our end of the floor was showing BBC News 24 with the sound down. They were running a segment on the war. Smoke was rising above one of the countries involved. Don’t ask me which-I’d lost track by that stage. The war was four years old. It had started in the same month my son was born, and they’d grown up together. At first both of them were a huge shock and demanded constant attention but as each year went by, they became more autonomous and one could start to take one’s eye off them for extended periods. Sometimes a particular event would cause
