Little Bee

me momentarily to look at one or the other of them-my son, or the war-with my full attention, and at times like these I would always think, Gosh, haven’t you grown?

I was interested in how this new kind of orgasm was meant to work. I looked up from texting.

“How come you can only have it with your boss?”

“It’s a forbidden-fruit thing, isn’t it? You get an extra frisson from breaking the office taboo. From hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth. You know. Science.”

“Um. Have scientists actually proved this?”

“Don’t get empirical with me, Sarah. We’re talking about a whole new realm of sexual pleasure. We’re calling it the B-spot. B, as in boss. See what we did there?”

“Ingenious.”

“Thank you darling. We do try.”

I wept inwardly at the thought of women up and down the country being pleasured by middle managers in shiny-bottomed suits. On the flatscreen, News 24 had panned from the Middle East to Africa. Different landscape, same column of thick black smoke. A pair of jaundiced eyes looking out with the same impassivity Andrew had shown, just before I turned away to leave for work. The hairs on my arms went up again. I looked away, and took the three steps to the window that gave out onto Commercial Street. I put my forehead against the glass, which is something I do when I’m trying to think.

“Are you all right, Sarah?”

“I’m fine. Listen, be a doll and go and grab us a couple of coffees, would you?”

Clarissa went off to our idiosyncratic coffee machine, the one that would have been an in-house salon de the in Vogue’s offices. Down on Commercial Street, a police patrol car pulled up and parked at the curb in front of our building. A uniformed officer got out on each side. They looked at each other over the patrol-car roof. One of them had blond, cropped hair and the other had a bald patch as round and neat as a monk’s. I watched him tilt his head to listen to the radio on his lapel. I smiled, thinking absently about a project Charlie was doing at his nursery. The Police: People Who Help Us, it was called. My son-it goes without saying-was magnificently unconvinced. At constant high alert in his bat cape and mask, Charlie believed a proud citizenry should be ready to help itself.

Clarissa came back with two plasticky lattes. In one of them the coffee machine had deposited a clear acrylic stirrer. In the other, it had elected not to do so. Clarissa hesitated over which to give me.

“First big editorial decision of the day,” she said.

“Easy. I’m the boss. Give me the one with the stirrer.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Then we may never get around to locating your B-spot, Clarissa. I’m warning you.”

Clarissa blanched, and passed me the coffee with the stirrer.

I said, “I like the Baghdad piece.”

Clarissa sighed, and slumped her shoulders.

“So do I, Sarah, of course I do. It’s a great article.”

“Five years ago, that’s the one we’d have run with. No question.”

“Five years ago our circulation was so low we had to take those risks.”

“And that’s how we got big-by being different. That’s us.”

Clarissa shook her head. “Getting big’s different from staying big. You know as well as I do, we can’t be serving up morality tales while the other majors are selling sex.”

“But why do you think our readers got dumber?”

“It’s not that. I think our original readers aren’t reading magazines anymore, that’s all. They moved on to greater things, the same way you could if you’d just play the bloody game. Maybe you don’t realize just how big you are now, Sarah. Your next job could be editing a national newspaper.”

I sighed. “How thrilling. I could put topless girls on every page.”

My missing finger itched. I looked back down at the police patrol car. The two officers were putting on their uniform caps. I tapped my mobile against my front teeth.

“Let’s go for a drink after work, Clarissa. Bring your new man if you like. I’m bringing Andrew.”

“Seriously? Out in public? With your husband? Isn’t that terribly last season?”

“It’s terribly five years ago.”

Clarissa tilted her head at me.

“What are you telling me, Sarah?”

“I’m not telling you anything, Clar. I like you too much to tell. I’m just asking myself, really. I’m asking if maybe the kind of choices I made five years ago weren’t so bad after all.”

Clarissa smiled resignedly.

“Fine. But don’t expect me to keep my hands off his hunky thighs under the table, just because he’s your husband.”

“You do that, Clarissa, and I’ll make you junior horoscopes editor for the rest of your natural life.”

My desk phone rang. I looked at the time on its screen: 10:25 A.M. It’s funny how these details stay with you. I picked up the phone and it was reception, sounding bored to distraction. At Nixie we used reception as a sin bin-if a girl got too bitchy on the editorial floor, we sent her down to do a week on the shiniest desk.

“There are two policemen here.”

“Oh. They came in here? What do they want?”

“Okay, let’s think about why I might have dialed your number.”

“They want to talk to me?”

“They did good when they made you the boss, Sarah.”

“Fuck off. Why do they want to talk to me?”

A pause.

“I could ask them, I suppose.”

“If it isn’t too much trouble.”

A longer pause.

“They say they want to shoot a porny film in the office. They say they’re not real policemen and their willies are simply enormous.”

“Oh for god’s sake. Tell them I’ll be down.”

I hung up the phone and looked at Clarissa. The hairs on my arms were up again.

“The police,” I said.

“Relax,” said Clarissa. “They can’t bust you for conspiracy to run a serious feature piece.”

Behind her the flatscreen was showing Jon Stewart. He was laughing. His guest was laughing too. I felt better. You had to find something to laugh about, that summer, the number of places that were going up in smoke. You laughed, or you put on a superhero costume, or you tried for some kind of orgasm that science had somehow missed.

I took the stairs down to the lobby, speeding up as I went. The two police officers were standing rather too close together, with their caps in their hands and their big, sensible leather shoes on my black marble. The young one was blushing horribly.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

I glared at the receptionist and she grinned back at me from beneath her perfect blond side part.

“Sarah O’Rourke?”

“Summers.”

“Excuse me madam?”

“Sarah Summers is my professional name.”

The older policeman looked at me with no expression.

“This is a personal matter, Mrs. O’Rourke. Is there somewhere we can go?”

I walked them up to the boardroom on the first floor. Tones of pink and violet, long glass table, more neon.

“Can I get you a coffee? Or tea? I mean, I can’t absolutely guarantee it’ll come out as coffee or tea. Our machine is a bit-”

“Perhaps you’d better sit down, Mrs. O’Rourke.”

The officers’ faces glowed unnaturally in the pinkish light. They looked like black-and-white-movie men, colored in by a computer. One older, the one with the bald patch. Maybe forty-five. The younger one, with the blond cropped hair, maybe twenty-two or twenty-four. Nice lips. Quite full, and rather juicy-looking. He wasn’t beautiful, but I was transfixed by the way he stood and cast his eyes down deferentially when he spoke. And of course there’s always something about a uniform. You wonder if the protocol will peel off with the jacket, I suppose.

The two of them placed their uniform caps on the purple smoked glass. They rotated the caps with their clean white fingers. Both of them stopped at exactly the same moment, as if some critical angle they had practiced in basic training had precisely been attained.

They stared at me. My mobile chimed brashly on the glass desktop-a text message arriving. I smiled. That would be Andrew.

“I’ve got some bad news for you, Mrs. O’Rourke,” said the older officer.

“What do you mean?”

It came out more aggressive than I intended. The policemen stared at their caps on the table. I needed to look at the text message that had just arrived. As I reached out my hand to pick up my phone, I saw the two of them staring at the stump of my missing finger.

“Oh. This? I lost it on holiday. On a beach, actually.”

The two policemen looked at each other. They turned back to me. The older one spoke. His voice was suddenly hoarse.

“We’re very sorry, Mrs. O’Rourke.”

“Oh, please, don’t be. It’s fine, really. I’m fine now. It’s just a finger.”

“That’s not what I meant, Mrs. O’Rourke. I’m afraid we’ve been instructed to tell you that-”

“See, honestly, you get used to doing without the finger. At first you think it’s a big deal and then you learn to use the other hand.”

I looked up and saw the two of them watching me, gray-faced and serious. Neon crackled. On the wall clock, a fresh minute snapped over the old one.

“The really funny thing is, I still feel it, you know? My finger, I mean. This missing one. Sometimes it actually itches. And I go to scratch it and there’s nothing there, of course. And in my dreams my finger grows back, and I’m so happy to have it back, even though I’ve learned to do without it. Isn’t that silly? I miss it, do you see? It itches.”