The Other Hand

you’re so young, sometimes.”
    We sat still for a minute. Sarah’s mobile telephone rang. She talked. When the call was finished she looked very tired.
    “That was the nursery. They want me to go and pick up Charlie. He’s been fighting with the other children. They say he’s out of control.” She bit her lip. “He’s never done that before.”
    She picked up her telephone again and pressed some buttons. She held the telephone up to her ear while she looked over my shoulder, over the garden. She was still chewing her lip. After a few seconds, there was the sound of another telephone ringing. It was a small, distant sound, from inside the house. Sarah’s face went still. Then, slowly, she took the telephone down from her ear and pressed one of its buttons. From the house, the sound of the other telephone stopped.
    “Oh Jesus,” said Sarah. “Oh no.”
    “What? What is it?”
    Sarah took a deep breath. Her whole body shuddered.
    “I called Andrew. I don’t know why. It was completely automatic, I didn’t even think. You know…if there’s a problem with Charlie, I always call Andrew. I just forgot he was…you know. Ohgod. I’m really losing it. I thought I was ready, you know, to hear what happened to you…and your sister. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t ready for it. Oh god.”
    We sat there and I held her hand while she cried. Afterward, she passed her telephone to me. She pointed at the screen.
    “He’s still in my address book. Do you see?”
    The screen of her telephone said ANDREW , and then a number. Just ANDREW —there was no surname.
    “Will you delete him for me, Bee? I can’t do it.”
    I held her telephone in my hands. I had seen people speaking on mobile phones, but I always thought they would be very complicated. You will laugh at me—there she goes again, that silly little girl with the smell of tea in her skin and the stains of cassava tops still on her fingers—but I always thought there would be a frequency to find. I thought you would have to turn some dial until you found the signal of your friend, very small and faint, like tuning in to the BBC World Service on a windup radio. I supposed that mobile telephones were difficult like this. You would turn the dial through all the hissing and the squeaking sounds, and first you would hear your friend’s voice very strange and thin and nearly drowned out by howling—like your friend had been squashed as flat as a biscuit and dropped into a metal box full of monkeys—but then you would turn the dial just one tiny fraction more and suddenly your friend would say something like, God save the Queen!, and tell you all about the weather in the shipping areas around the offshore waters of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. After that, you could talk.
    But actually I discovered that it was much easier than this to use a mobile telephone. Everything is so easy in your country. Next to the name, ANDREW , there was a thing that said OPTIONS , and I pressed it. Option three was DELETE , so I pressed that, and Andrew O’Rourke was gone.
    “Thank you,” said Sarah. “I just couldn’t do it myself.”
    She looked down at her phone for a long time.
    “I feel so bloody frightened, Bee. There’s no one to call. Andrew was absolutely unbearable sometimes but he was always so sensible. I suppose it was crazy of me, to send Charlie straight back to the nursery, after yesterday. But I thought it would be good for him, to get back into the routine. There’s no one to ask anymore, Bee. Do you understand? I don’t know if I can do this on my own. Make all the right decisions for Charlie on my own. Years of it, do you see? The right behavior, the right schools, the right friends, the right university, the right wife. Oh god, poor old Charlie.”
    I put my hand on her hand.
    “If you want, I can come to the nursery with you,” I said.
    Sarah tilted her head and looked at me for a long time. Then she smiled.
    “Not dressed like that,” she said.
    Ten minutes later I left the house with Sarah. I was wearing a pink summer dress she lent me. It was the prettiest thing I had ever worn. Around the neck it had fine white flowers stitched in, very delicate and fancy. I felt like the Queen of England. It was a sunny morning and there was a cool breeze and I skipped along the pavement behind Sarah and every time we passed a cat or a postman or a woman pushing a pram I smiled and I said, How do you do? All of them looked at me