The Other Hand

out all wrong. I just mean, he was so good with the ordinary things. He was no nonsense, you know? He would just say to me, Don’t be so bloody foolish, Sarah. Of course you shall keep your job. And I would feel awful because of the way he would talk to me, but I would keep my job and then of course he’d turn out to be right, which was even worse in a way. But I miss him, Lawrence. It’s funny how you can miss someone like that.”
    Lawrence stood against the opposite counter, watching me.
    “So what do you want from me?” he said. “You want me to start getting on my high horse like Andrew did?”
    I smiled. “Oh, come here,” I said.
    I hugged him, and breathed in the soft, clean smell of his skin.
    “I’m being impossible again, aren’t I?”
    “You’re being bereaved. It’s going to take a while for all the pieces to fall into place. It’s good that you’re taking a look at your life, really it is, but I don’t think you should rush into anything, you know? If you still feel like quitting your job in six months’ time, then do it by all means. But right now your job is paying for you to do something worthwhile. It is possible to do good things with an imperfect situation. God knows, I should know.”
    I blinked back tears. “Compromise, eh? Isn’t it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee’s age, and you realize that some of the world’s badness is inside you, that maybe you’re a part of it. And then you get a little bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you’ve seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten percent.”
    “Maybe that’s just developing as a person, Sarah.”
    I sighed, and looked out at Little Bee.
    “Well,” I said. “Maybe this is a developing world.”

nine

    I WILL TELL YOU what happened, the day my story changed. It began very early in the morning, after the second night Lawrence stayed at Sarah’s house. It was still just dark. I was lying on the bed in the room Sarah gave me, but I was not sleeping. I was trying to see my future, but I could not see it at all.
    Sarah came into the room about the same time as the daylight.
    “How did you sleep?” she said.
    “I heard the owls calling. Outside the window.”
    “That’s nice. That’s one of the good things about living out of town.”
    I rubbed my eyes and sat up on the bed.
    Sarah said, “I’m taking the day off work. I thought we could go into London.”
    I dropped my hands back down onto the blankets. I said, “I like it here.”
    Sarah shook her head. “These are the suburbs,” she said. “Nothing ever happens here.”
    I said, “That is why I like it.”
    “Don’t be silly! Let’s all go to London. It’s a beautiful day, we’ll laze about on the South Bank and just watch the world go by. Charlie loves it there. Come on, it’ll be an adventure for you.”
    I stood up and I said, Okay.
    What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.
    When we were children, me and Nkiruka, there was a place we went in the jungle near our village, a secret place, and that was where we played houses. The last time we went on that adventure my big sister was ten years old and I was eight. We were already too old for the game and both of us knew it, but we agreed to dream our dream one last time so that we could fix it into our memories, before we awoke from it forever.
    We crept out of our village in the quietest part of the night. It was the year before the trouble first began with the oil, and two years before my sister started smiling at the older boys, so you can see that it was a peaceful time for our village of Understanding. There were no sentries guarding the road where the houses ended, and we walked out with no one to ask us where we were going. We did not walk out