The Other Hand

was walking past on my way to the newsroom. Andrew grinning at me, unhesitatingly, and saying, Fancy buying a former colleague a spot of dinner? It was one in a billion. It was like catching lightning in a bottle.
    The marriage cooled when Charlie was born. As if that one lightning strike was all we got, and most of the heat from it had to go into our child. Nigeria had accelerated the cooling and now death had finished it, but my disaffection and my affair with Lawrence had come first. That was what my mind was stuck on, I realized. There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.
    This, then, was when real sorrow arrived. This was the shock that set me trembling, as if something seismic had been released deep inside me and was blindly inching toward the surface. I trembled, but there was no release of tears.
    I went back inside the house, and collected my son and Little Bee. Mismatched, dazed, semidetached, we walked to my husband’s funeral. Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn’t the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn’t deserve my own pity.
    After it was all over, someone or other drove us home. I clung on to Charlie in the backseat of a car. I remember the car smelled of stale cigarettes. I stroked Charlie’s head and pointed out the everyday things that we passed, invoking the comfort of houses andshops and cars by the hopeful magic of whispering their names. Ordinary nouns were what we needed, I decided. Everyday things would get us through. Never mind that Charlie’s Batman costume was covered in grave mud. When we got home I put it in the wash and I gave him the clean one. When it hurt too much to prize open the box of washing powder, I used the other hand.
    I remember sitting with Charlie while we watched the water flood into the machine, rising behind the round glass door. The machine lurched into its familiar grinding preamble, and Charlie and I had a perfectly ordinary conversation. That was the worst moment for me. We talked about what he wanted for lunch. Charlie said he wanted crisps. I demurred. He insisted. I acquiesced. I was a pushover at that moment and my son knew it. I conceded on tomato ketchup and ice cream too, and there was triumph in Charlie’s face and horror in his eyes. There was extraordinary pain behind the ordinary nouns.
    We ate, and then Little Bee took Charlie out into the garden to play. I had been so focused on my son that I had forgotten all about her and it actually surprised me that she was still there.
    I sat very still at my kitchen table. My mother and my sister had come back with us from the church and they orbited me in a blur of fussing and tidying, so that if a photograph had been taken of us all with a very long exposure it would have shown only me, in sharp focus, surrounded by a ghostly halo that took its azure color from my sister’s cardigan and its eccentricity from my mother’s tendency to close in on me at one end of her orbit, and ask if I was all right. I hardly heard her, I think. They carried on around me for an hour, respectful of my silence, washing the teacups without unnecessary clink, alphabetizing condolence cards whilst minimizing rustle, until I begged them, if they loved me, to go home.
    After they left, with tender, drawn-out hugs that made me regret banishing them, I sat back down at the kitchen table and watched Little Bee playing in the garden with Batman. I suppose it had been reckless of us to abandon our home and spend the wholemorning at a funeral. In our absence some baddies of the worst stripe had occupied the laurel bush, and now had to be flushed out with water pistols and bamboo canes. It seemed to be dangerous and painstaking work. First Little Bee would creep up to the laurel on her hands and knees, with the hem of her oversize Hawaiian shirt dragging in the dirt. When she spotted a lurking baddy she would jab at him with a yell, causing him to break out into the open. There my son was ready with the water pistol to deliver the coup de grâce. I marveled at how quickly they had become a team. I wasn’t sure I wanted them to be. But what was I to do? To stride out into the garden and say, Little Bee, could you please stop making friends with my son? My son would loudly demand an explanation and it would be no use telling him that Little Bee wasn’t on our side. Not now that she and he had killed so