EARLY ON THE MORNING of Andrew’s funeral, before Little Bee arrived, I remember looking down from the bedroom window of our house in Kingston-upon-Thames. Out by the pond, Batman was poking at baddies with a plastic junior golf club, looking skinny and forlorn. I wondered if I should warm up some milk and make him a cup of something. I remember wondering if there was anything that could be put into a cup that would actually be of practical help. My mind was set in that crystalline, self-conscious state that comes with lack of sleep.

Beyond our garden I could see the whole street’s back gardens, curving away like a bent green spine, with barbecues and faded plastic swings for vertebrae. Through the double glazing came the braying of a car alarm and the drone of planes climbing out of Heathrow. I pressed my nose against the glass and I thought: these bloody suburbs are purgatory. How did we all wash up here? How did so many of us end up so very far downwind?

In the garden next door, on that morning of the funeral, my neighbor was hanging out his blue Y-fronts to dry. His cat was curling around his legs. In my bedroom the Today Programme was on the radio. John Humphrys said the FTSE was rather badly down.

Yes, but I have lost my husband. I said it out loud, while a trapped fly flew feebly at the windowpane. I said: My husband is dead, I’m afraid. My husband, Andrew O’Rourke, the celebrated columnist, has taken his own life. And I feel…

Actually I didn’t know how I felt. We don’t have a grown-up language for grief. Daytime shows do it much better. I knew I ought to feel devastated, of course. My life had fallen apart. Isn’t that the phrase? But Andrew had been dead nearly a whole week now and here I still was, dry-eyed, with the whole house reeking of gin and lilies. Still trying to feel appropriately sad. Still drilling down through the memories of my short, mixed life with poor Andrew. Searching for the capstone, the memory which when cracked would release some symptom of anguish. Tears, perhaps, under unbelievable pressure. All of this would have been easier on daytime TV: My life entered a vicious downhill spiral, Trisha. I couldn’t imagine getting through the day without him.

It was exhausting, prospecting for grief like this, unsure if grief was even there to be found. Perhaps it was just too soon. For the moment I felt more pity for a trapped fly that buzzed against the window. I opened the latch and out it flew, vulnerable and weak, back in the game.

On the other side of the glass, the day smelled of summer. My neighbor had shuffled along his washing line, three feet to the left. He’d finished pegging Y-fronts. Now he was on to socks. His washing hung like prayer flags, petitioning daytime gods: I seem to have moved to the suburbs, I’m afraid. Can anything be done?

A thought of escape presented itself, rascalish and unannounced. I could simply leave, right now, couldn’t I? I could take Charlie, my credit card and my favorite pink shoes and we could all get on a plane together. The house and the job and the grief would all shrink to a point behind me. I remember realizing, with a guilty thrill, that there was no longer one single reason for me to be here—far from the center of my heart, cast away here in its suburbs.

But life is not inclined to let any of us escape. That was the moment I heard a knock at the door. I opened the door to Little Bee, and for the longest time I simply stared at her. Neither of us spoke. After a few moments I let her in and I sat her down on the sofa. Black girl in a red-and-white Hawaiian shirt, stained by the Surrey clay. Sofa from Habitat. Memories from hell.

—I don’t know what to say. I thought you must be dead.

—I am not dead, Sarah. Maybe it would be better if I was.

—Don’t say that. You look very tired. You need some rest, I should think.

There was a silence that went on too long.

—Yes. You are right. I need some rest.

—How on earth did you…I mean, how did you survive? How did you get here?

—I walked.

—From Nigeria?

—Please. I am very tired.

—Oh. Yes. Of course. Yes. Would you like a cup of, you know…

I didn’t wait for the answer. I fled. I left Little Bee sitting on the sofa, propped up on the John Lewis cushions, and I ran upstairs. I closed my eyes and rolled my forehead against the cool glass of the bedroom window. I dialed someone. A friend. More than a friend, actually. That’s what Lawrence was.

“What is it?” said Lawrence.

“You sound cross.”

“Oh. Sarah. It’s you. God I’m sorry. I thought you were the nanny. She’s late. And the baby’s just been sick on my tie. Shit.”

“Something’s happened, Lawrence.”

“What?”

“Someone’s turned up I really wasn’t expecting.”

“Funerals are always like that. All the old skeletons come theatrically out of their closets. You can’t keep the bastards away.”

“Yes of course, but this is more than that. It’s, it’s…”

I stammered away and fell silent.

“Sorry Sarah, I know this sounds awful, but I’m in a terrible rush here. Is it something I can actually help with?”

I pressed my flushed face against the cold glass. “Sorry. I’m a bit confused.”

“It’s the funeral. You’re going to feel a bit scatty, aren’t you? I’m sorry, but there’s no way around that. I wish you’d let me come. How are you feeling about it all?”

“About the funeral?”

“About the whole situation.”

I sighed.

“I don’t feel anything. I feel numb.”

“Oh Sarah.”

“I’m just waiting for the undertaker now. I’m slightly nervous, maybe. That’s all. Like waiting at the dentist’s.”

“Right,” said Lawrence, carefully.

A pause. In the background, the sound of Lawrence’s children squabbling at the breakfast table. I realized I couldn’t tell Lawrence about Little Bee turning up. Not now. It suddenly didn’t seem fair, to add it to his list of problems. Late for work, baby sick on tie, tardy nanny…oh, and now a presumed-dead Nigerian girl, resurrected on his mistress’s sofa. I didn’t think I could do that to him. Because this is the thing, with being lovers. It isn’t like being married. To remain in the game, one has to be considerate. One has to acknowledge a certain right-to-life of the other. So I stayed silent. I listened to Lawrence taking a deep breath, on the edge of exasperation.

“So what’s confusing you? Is it that you’re not feeling anything much and you think you should be?”

“It’s my husband’s funeral. I should be sad, at least.”

“You’re in control of yourself. You’re not a gusher. Celebrate that.”

“I can’t cry for Andrew. I keep thinking about that day in Africa. On the beach.”

“Sarah?”

“Yes?”

“I thought we agreed it was best that you forget all that. What happened, happened. We agreed that you were just going to move on, didn’t we. Hmm?”

I pressed my left hand flat against the windowpane and stared at the stump of my lost finger.

“I don’t think moving on is going to work anymore, Lawrence. I don’t think I can just continue to deny what happened. I don’t think I’ll be able to. I…”

My voice trailed off.

“Sarah? Deep breaths.”

I opened my eyes. Outside, Batman was still poking fiercely at the pond. The Today Programme scolded away on the radio. Next door the neighbor had finished pegging his washing and now he simply stood there, eyes half-closed. Soon he would move on to a new task: the percolation of coffee, perhaps, or the application of replacement twine to the spool of a string trimmer. Small problems. Neat problems.

“Now that Andrew’s, well, gone, Lawrence. Do you think you and I will be…”

A pause on the other end of the phone. Then Lawrence—careful Lawrence—noncommittal.

“Andrew didn’t stop us while he was alive,” he said. “Do you see any reason to change things now?”

I sighed again.

“Sarah?”

“Yes?”

“Just focus on today for now, will you? Focus on the funeral, hold it together, get through today. Stop smearing that fucking toast on the computer!”

“Lawrence?”

“Sorry. That was the baby. He’s got a piece of buttered toast and he’s wiping it all over…sorry, have to go.”

Lawrence hung up. I turned from the window and sat on the bed. I waited. I was putting off having to go downstairs and deal with Little Bee. Instead of moving I watched myself, in the mirror, as a widow. I tried to find some physical sign of Andrew’s passing. No extra line on the forehead? No darkening of the skin under the eyes? Really? Nothing?

How calm my eyes were, since that day on the beach in Africa. When there has been a loss so fundamental I suppose that to lose just one more thing—a finger, perhaps, or a husband—is of absolutely no consequence at all. In the mirror my green eyes were placid—as still as a body of water that is either very deep, or very shallow.

Why couldn’t I cry? Soon I would have to go and face a church full of mourners. I rubbed my eyes, harder than our beauty experts advise. I needed to show red eyes to the mourners, at least. I needed to show them that I had cared for Andrew, truly cared for him. Even if, since Africa, I hadn’t really bought the idea of love as a permanent thing, measurable in self-administered surveys, present if you answered mostly B. So I gouged my thumbs into the skin beneath my lashes. If I couldn’t show the world grief, at least I would show the world what it did to your eyes.

Finally I went downstairs and stared at Little Bee. She was still sitting there on the sofa, her eyes closed, her head propped on the cushions. I coughed, and she snapped awake. Brown eyes, orange patterned silk cushions. She blinked at me and I stared at her, with the mud still caking her trainers. I felt nothing.

“Why did you come here?” I said.

“I did not have any other place to go. The only people I know in this country are you and Andrew.”

“You hardly know us. We met, that’s all.”

Little Bee shrugged.

“You and Andrew are the only ones I met,” she said.

“Andrew is dead. We are going to bury him this morning.”

Little Bee just blinked at me, glazedly.

“Do you understand?” I said. “My husband died. We are going to have a funeral. It’s a kind of ceremony. In a church. It’s what we do in this country.”

Little Bee nodded.

“I know what you do in this country,” she said.

There was something in her voice—so old, so tired—that terrified me. That was when the door knocker sounded again and Charlie answered the door to the undertaker and called down the hallway, Mummy, it’s Bruce Wayne!

“Run out and play in the garden, darling.”

“But Mummy! I want to see Bruce Wayne.”

“Please, darling. Just go.”

When I came to the door, the undertaker glanced at the stump of my finger. People generally do, but rarely with that professional gaze that notes: Left hand, second finger, first and second phalanx, yes, we could fix that with a wax prosthetic, a slender one, with a light Caucasian flesh tone, and we could use Kryolan foundation to cover the join, and we could fold the right hand over the left in the coffin, and Bob would be your mother’s brother, madam.

I was thinking, Clever undertaker. If only I was dead, you could make a whole woman out of me.

“My deepest condolences, madam. We are ready for you whenever you feel ready to come.”

“Thank you. I’ll just get my son and my…well. My friend.”

I watched the undertaker ignoring the smell of gin on my breath. He looked back at me. There was a small scar on his forehead. His nose was flattened and skewed. His face registered nothing. It was as blank as my mind.

“Take all the time you need, madam.”

I went out into the back garden. Batman was digging away at something under the roses. I went over to him. He had a trowel and he was lifting a dandelion, pulling its root to the tip. Our resident robin was hungry and he watched from six yards away. Batman raised the dandelion from the soil and brought it close to examine its root. Kneeling, he looked up at me.

“Is this a weed, Mummy?” he said.

“Yes darling. Next time, if you’re not sure, ask before you dig it up.”

Batman shrugged.

“Shall I put it in the wild patch?” he said.

I nodded, and Batman carried the dandelion over to a small part of the garden where Andrew had given a home to such rascals, in the hope that they would attract butterflies and bees. In our small garden I have made a wild place to remind me of chaos, Andrew once wrote in his column. Our modern lives are too ordered, too antiseptic.

That had been before Africa.

Batman bedded in the dandelion among the nettles.

“Mummy, is weeds baddies?”

I said that it depended if you were a boy or a butterfly. Batman rolled his eyes, like a newsman interviewing an equivocating politician. I couldn’t help smiling.

“Who is that woman on the sofa, Mummy?”

“Her name is Little Bee.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“Not if you’re a bee.”

“But she isn’t a bee.”

“No. She’s a person. She’s from a country called Nigeria.”

“Mmm. Is she a goody?”

I stood up straight.

“We have to go now darling,” I said. “The undertaker is here to collect us.”

“Bruce Wayne?”

“Yes.”

“Is we going to the bat cave?”

“Are we going to the bat cave.”

“Are we?”

“Sort of.”

“Hmm. I is coming in a minute.”

I felt the perspiration starting on my back. I had on a gray woolen suit and a hat that was not black but a late-evening nod to it. It didn’t scorn tradition, but nor had it entirely submitted to darkness. Folded up over the hat was a black veil, ready to bring down when the right moment came. I hoped someone would tell me when that was.

I wore navy-blue gloves, which were borderline dark enough for a funeral. The middle finger of the left hand glove was truncated and stitched. I’d done it two nights earlier, as soon as I was drunk enough to bear it, in a merciful hour between insobriety and incapacity. The glove’s severed finger was still lying on my sewing table. It was hard to throw away.

In my suit pocket was my phone, set to quiet mode in case I forgot to do it later. I also had a ten-pound note ready for the collection, in case there was a collection. It seemed unlikely at a funeral, but I wasn’t sure. (And if there was a collection, was ten pounds about right? Five seemed ridiculously mean; twenty obscenely flashy.)

There was nobody left to ask about ordinary things. Little Bee was no use. I couldn’t ask her: are these blue gloves okay? She’d only stare at them, as if they were the first pair of gloves she had ever seen, which was quite possibly the case. (Yes, but are they dark enough, Little Bee? Between you and me—you as the refugee from horror and me as the editor of an edgy monthly magazine—would we call that shade blue, courageous, or blue, irreverent?)

Ordinary things were going to be the hardest, I realized. There was nobody to ask about them. This was something undeniable, now that Andrew was gone: there was nobody left with a strong opinion about life in a civilized country.

Our robin hopped out from the foxgloves with a worm in its beak. The worm skin was puce, the color of bruising.

“Come on, Batman, we have to go.”

“In a minute, Mummy.”

In the quiet of the garden then the robin shook his worm, and swallowed its life from the light into darkness with the quick indifference of a god. I felt nothing at all. I looked at my son, pale and bemused in the neatly planted garden, and I looked past him at Little Bee, tired and mud-stained, waiting for us to go through into the house.

So, I realized—life had finally broken through. How silly it looked now, my careful set of defenses against nature: my brazen magazine, my handsome husband, my Maginot Line of motherhood and affairs. The world, the real world, had found a way through. It had sat down on my sofa and it would not be denied any longer.

I went through the house to the front door to tell the undertaker we would be with him in a minute. He nodded. I looked behind the undertaker at his men, pale and hungover in their coattails. I have drunk gin myself in my time and I recognized that solemn expression they wore. One part pity, three parts I’ll-never-drink-again. The men nodded at me. It is a peculiar sensation, as a woman with a very good job, to be pitied by men with tattoos and headaches. It’s the way people will always look at me now, I suppose, as a foreigner in this country of my heart I should never have come to.

On the street in front of our house, the hearse and the limo stood waiting. I went out into the driveway to look through the green glass of the hearse. Andrew’s coffin was there, lying on bright chrome rollers. Andrew, my husband of eight years. I thought: I should feel something now. I thought: Rollers. How practical.

On our street the semidetached houses stretched to infinity in both directions. The clouds scrolled across the sky, blandly oppressive, each one resembling the next, all threatening rain. I looked back at Andrew’s coffin and I thought about his face. I thought about it dead. How slowly he had died, over those last two years. How imperceptible it had been, that transition in his facial expression, from deadly serious to seriously dead. Already those two faces were blurring together for me. My husband alive and my husband dead—they now seemed only semidetached, as if under the coffin lid I would find the two of them fused like Siamese twins, eyes agape, looking to infinity in both directions.

And now this thought came into my head with the full clarity of horror: Andrew was once a passionate, loving, brilliant man.

Staring at my husband’s coffin, I clung to this thought. I held it up before my own memory like a tentative flag of truce. I remembered Andrew at the newspaper we both worked for when we met, having a shouting match with his editor over some lofty point of principle that got him gloriously fired, on the spot, and sent him striding fierce and beautiful into the corridor. The first time that I thought, This is a man to be proud of. And then Andrew practically tripping over me eavesdropping in the corridor, openmouthed, pretending I 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 and shops 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 whole morning 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 many of those baddies together.

No, it wasn’t going to work anymore, denying her, or denying what had happened in Africa. A memory can be banished, even indefinitely, deported from consciousness by the relentless everydayness of running a successful magazine, mothering a son, and burying a husband. A human being, though, is a different thing entirely. The existence of a Nigerian girl, alive and standing in one’s own garden—governments may deny such things, or brush them off as statistical anomalies, but human beings cannot.

I sat at the kitchen table and stared through suddenly wet eyes at the stump where my finger used to be. I realized that it was finally time to face up to what had happened on the beach.

It should never have happened, of course, in the ordinary run of things. There are countries of the world, and regions of one’s own mind, where it is unwise to travel. I have always thought so, and I have always struck myself as a sensible woman. Independent of mind, but not recklessly so. I would love to have the same arm’s-length relationship with foreign places that other sensible women seem to have.

Clever me, I went on holiday somewhere different. That season in Nigeria there was an oil war. Andrew and I hadn’t known. The struggle was brief, confused, and scarcely reported. The British and Nigerian governments both deny to this day that it even took place. God knows, they aren’t the only ones who tried denial.

I still wonder why it came into my head to accept a holiday in Nigeria. I wish I could claim it was the only tourist-board freebie that arrived at the magazine that spring, but we had boxes full of them—crates of unopened envelopes hemorrhaging sunscreen from ruptured sample sachets. I could have chosen Tuscany, or Belize. The former Soviet states were big that season. But no. The cussed streak in me—the one that made me launch Nixie instead of joining some tamer glossy; the one that made me start an affair with Lawrence instead of mending my fences with Andrew—that enduring outward-bound streak gave me an adolescent thrill when a package landed on my desk emblazoned with the question FOR YOUR HOLIDAY THIS YEAR, WHY NOT TRY NIGERIA? Some wag on my editorial staff had scrawled under this, in black chunky marker, the obvious response. But I was intrigued, and I opened the package. Out fell two open-ended airline tickets and a hotel reservation. It was as simple as turning up at the airport with a bikini.

Andrew came with me, against his better judgment. The Foreign Office were advising against travel to some parts of Nigeria, but we didn’t think that included ours. He took some convincing, but I reminded him that we’d taken our honeymoon in Cuba, and parts of that place were horrific. Andrew gave in. Looking back on it now, I suppose he thought he had no choice if he wanted to keep me.

The tourist board that sent the freebies noted that Ibeno Beach was an “adventurous destination.” Actually, at the time we went, it was a cataclysm with borders. To the north there was a malarial jungle and to the west a wide brown river delta. The river was iridescent with oil. It was, I now know, bloated with the corpses of oil workers. To the south was the Atlantic Ocean. On that southern edge I met a girl who was not my magazine’s target reader. Little Bee had fled southeast on bleeding feet from what had once been her village and was shortly to become an oil field. She fled from the men who would kill her because they were paid to, and the children who would kill her because they were told to. I sat at my kitchen table and I imagined her fleeing through the fields and the jungle, as fast as she could, until she arrived at the beach where Andrew and I were being unconventional. That beach was as far as she got.

My missing finger itched, just thinking about it.

When they came in from the garden, I sent Batman to play in his bat cave and I showed Little Bee where the shower was. I found some clothes for her. Later, when Batman was in bed, I made two G&Ts. Little Bee sat and held hers, rattling the ice cubes. I drank mine down like medicine.

“All right,” I said. “I’m ready. I’m ready for you to tell me what happened.”

“You want to know how I survived?”

“Start from the beginning, will you? Tell me how it was when you first reached the sea.”

So she told me how she hid, on the day she arrived at the beach. She had been running for six days, traveling through the fields by night and hiding in jungles and swamps when daybreak came. I turned off the radio in the kitchen, and I sat very quietly while she told me how she holed up in a salient of jungle that grew right down to the sand. She lay there all through the hottest part of the day, watching the waves. She told me she hadn’t seen the sea before, and she didn’t quite believe in it.

In the late afternoon Little Bee’s sister, Nkiruka, came down out of the jungle and found her hiding place. She sat down next to her. They hugged for a long time. They were happy that Nkiruka had managed to follow Little Bee’s trail, but they were scared because it meant that others could do it too. Nkiruka looked into her sister’s eyes and said that they must make up new names for themselves. It was not safe to use their true names, which spoke so loudly of their tribe and of their region. Nkiruka said her name was “Kindness” now. Her younger sister wanted to reply to Kindness, but she could not think of a name for herself.

The two sisters waited. The shadows were deepening. A pair of hornbills came to crack seeds in the trees above their heads. And then—sitting at my kitchen table she said she remembered this so clearly that she could almost reach out and stroke the fuzzy black back of the thing—a bee blew in on the sea breeze and it landed between the two sisters. The bee was small and it touched down on a pale flower—frangipani, she told me, although she said she wasn’t sure about the European name—and then the bee flew off again, without any fuss. She hadn’t noticed the flower before the bee came, but now she saw that the flower was beautiful. She turned to Kindness.

“My name is Little Bee,” she said.

When she heard this name, Kindness smiled. Little Bee told me that her big sister was a very pretty girl. She was the kind of girl the men said could make them forget their troubles. She was the kind of girl the women said was trouble. Little Bee wondered which it was going to be.

The two sisters lay still and quiet till sunset. Then they crept down the sand to wash their feet in the surf. The salt stung in their cuts but they did not cry out. It was sensible of them to keep quiet. The men chasing them might have given up, or they might not. The trouble was, the sisters had seen what had been done to their village. There weren’t supposed to be any survivors to tell the story. The men were hunting down the fleeing women and children and burying their bodies under branches and rocks.

Back undercover, the girls bound each other’s feet in fresh green leaves and they waited for the dawn. It was not cold, but they hadn’t eaten for two days. They shivered. Monkeys screamed under the moon.

I still think about the two sisters there, shivering through the night. While I watch them in my mind, again and again, small pink crabs follow the thin smell of blood to the place where their feet recently stood in the shore break, but they do not find anything dead there yet. The soft pink crabs make hard little clicking noises under the bright white stars. One by one, they dig themselves back into the sand to wait.

I wish my brain did not fill in the frightful details like this. I wish I was a woman who cared deeply about shoes and concealer. I wish I was not the sort of woman who ended up sitting at her kitchen table listening to a refugee girl talking about her awful fear of the dawn.

The way Little Bee told it, at sunrise there was a white mist hanging thick in the jungle and spilling out over the sand. The sisters watched a white couple walking up the beach. The language they spoke was the official language of Little Bee’s country, but these were the first whites she had seen. She and Kindness watched them from behind a stand of palms. They drew back when the couple came level with their hiding place. The whites stopped to look out at the sea.

“Listen to that surf, Andrew,” the white woman said. “It’s so unbelievably peaceful here.”

“I’m still a bit scared, frankly. We should go back inside the hotel compound.”

The white woman smiled. “Compounds are made for stepping outside. I was scared of you, the first time I met you.”

“Course you were. Big Irish hunk of love like me. We’re savages, don’t you know.”

“Barbarians.”

“Vagabonds.”

“Cunts.”

“Oh come on now, dear, that’s just your mother talking.”

The white woman laughed, and pulled herself close to the man’s body. She kissed him on the cheek.

“I love you, Andrew. I’m pleased we came away. I’m so sorry I let you down. It won’t happen again.”

“Really?”

“Really. I don’t love Lawrence. How could I? Let’s make a fresh start, hmm?”

On the beach, the white man smiled. In the shadows, Little Bee cupped her hand over Kindness’s ear. She whispered: What is a cunt? Kindness looked back at her, and rolled her eyes. Right down there, girl, right close to your vagabond. Little Bee bit her hand so she wouldn’t giggle.

But then the sisters heard dogs. They could hear everything, because there was a cool morning breeze, a land breeze that carried all sounds. The dogs were still a long way off, but the sisters heard them barking. Kindness grabbed Little Bee’s arm. Down on the beach, the white woman looked up at the jungle.

“Oh listen, Andrew,” she said. “Dogs!”

“Probably the local lads are hunting. Must be plenty to catch in this jungle.”

“Still, I wouldn’t have thought they’d use dogs.”

“So what in the hell did you think they’d use?”

The white woman shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Elephants?”

The white man laughed. “You insufferable English,” he said. “The empire’s still alive for you, isn’t it? You only need to close your eyes.”

Now a soldier came running up the beach from the direction the white couple had come. He was panting. He wore olive-green trousers and a light gray vest dark with sweat. He had military boots on, and they were heavy with damp sand. He had a rifle slung on his back, and the barrel was swinging at the sky.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” the white man said. “Here comes that doofus of a guard again.”

“He’s only doing his job.”

“Yeah, but can’t they let us do our own thing even for one minute?”

“Oh, relax. The holiday was free, remember? We were never going to have it all our own way.”

The guard came level with the white couple and he stopped. He was coughing. He had his hands on his knees.

“Please, mister, missus,” he said. “Sorry please to come back to hotel compound.”

“But why?” the white woman said. “We were just going for a walk along the beach.”

“It is not safe missus,” the guard said. “Not safe for you and mister. Sorry boss.”

“But why?” said the white man. “What is actually the problem?”

“No problem,” said the guard. “Here is very good place. Very good. But all tourist must stay please in hotel compound.”

Unseen in the jungle, the dogs were barking louder now. The sisters could hear the shouts of the men running with them. Kindness was trembling. The two sisters held each other. Now one of the dogs howled and the others joined in. In the hiding place there was a splashing on the dry leaves and a smell of urine—the reality of Kindness’s fear. Little Bee looked into her eyes. It didn’t look as if her sister was even seeing her.

Down on the beach the white man was saying, “Is this about money?”

And the guard was saying, “No mister.”

The guard stood up straight and looked into the jungle where the noise of the dogs was. He unslung his rifle. Little Bee saw the way he held it. He took the safety catch off and he reached down to check the magazine. Two magazines—I remember that myself—bound back-to-back with blue insulation tape.

The white man said, “Oh don’t give us the big performance. Just tell us how much you want. Come on. My wife is sick to the gills of being cooped up in that fuckin compound. What will you take to let us go for a walk on our own? One dollar?”

The guard shook his head. He wasn’t looking at the white man. He was watching a flock of red birds flying up from the jungle, two hundred yards away.

“No dollar,” the guard said.

“Ten dollars, then,” the white woman said.

“Oh for the love of god, Sarah,” the white man said. “That is way too much. That’s a week’s wages here.”

“Don’t be such a tight-arse,” the white woman said. “What’s ten dollars to us? It’s nice to be able to do something for these people. God knows they have little enough.”

“Well, look then, five dollars,” the white man said.

The guard was watching the treetops. One hundred and fifty yards away, up a shallow gully, the tips of the palm ferns were twitching.

“You come back with me now,” the guard said. “Hotel compound is best for you.”

“Listen,” the white man said. “I’m sorry if we offended you by offering money and I respect you for not taking it. But I have my editor telling me what’s best for me fifty-one weeks of the year. I didn’t come here to have anyone edit my holiday.”

The guard lifted the muzzle of his gun. He fired three shots in the air, just above the white man’s head. The barking of the dogs and the yelling of the men stopped for a moment. Then they started up again, louder. The white couple stood very still. Their mouths were open. They were struck, perhaps, by the bullets that had missed them.

“Please, mister and missus,” the guard said. “Trouble is come here. You do not know my country.”

The sisters heard the thwack of machetes clearing a path. Kindness grabbed Little Bee’s hand and pulled her to her feet. The two sisters walked out of the cover of the jungle and onto the sand. Holding hands, they stood there looking up at the white man and the white woman—Andrew, and me—in hope and expectation. I suppose there was nothing else in the developing world they could do.

They stood on the sand, clutching each other, keeping themselves upright on their failing legs. Kindness straining her head to watch for the approaching dogs, but Little Bee looking steadily at me, ignoring Andrew, ignoring the guard.

“Please missus,” she said, “take us to the hotel compound with you.”

The guard looked at her, then he looked back up at the jungle. He shook his head.

“Hotel compound is for tourist,” he said. “Not for you girls.”

“Please,” said Little Bee, looking directly at me. “Bad men are hunting us. They will kill us.”

She spoke to me as a woman, knowing I would understand. But I didn’t understand. Three days earlier, just before we left for Heathrow, I had been standing on a bare concrete slab in our garden, asking Andrew exactly when the hell he planned to build his bloody glasshouse there. That was the biggest issue in my life—that glasshouse, or the lack of it. That absent glasshouse, and all other structures past and future that might helpfully be erected in the larger emotional absence between me and my husband. I was a modern woman and disappointment was something I understood better than fear. The hunters would kill her? My stomach lurched, but my mind still asserted it was just a figure of speech.

“Oh for goodness’ sake,” I said. “You’re a child. Why would anyone want to kill you?”

Little Bee looked back at me and she said, “Because we saw them killing everyone else.”

I opened my mouth but Andrew spoke first. I think he was suffering the same intellectual jet lag. As if our hearts had now arrived on the beach but our minds were still hours behind. Andrew’s eyes were terrified but his voice said, “This is fuckin bullshit. This is a classic Nigeria scam. Come on, we’re going back to the hotel.”

Andrew started to pull me back along the beach. I went with him, twisting my head to look back at the sisters. The guard followed behind us. He walked backward and aimed his gun at the jungle. Little Bee followed with Kindness, ten yards behind.

The guard said, “You girls stop following us.”

He pointed his gun at the sisters. They looked right back at him. The guard was slightly older than the girls, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and he had a thin mustache. I suppose he was proud he could grow one. He had a green beret and there was sweat trickling from under it. I could see the veins in his temples. The whites of his eyes were yellow.

Little Bee said, “What is your name, soldier?”

And he said, “My name is ‘I will shoot if you don’t stop following.’”

Little Bee shrugged and tapped her chest. “My name is Little Bee,” she said. “Here is my heart. Shoot here if you want.”

And Kindness said, “Bullets is okay. Bullets is quick.”

They kept on following us along the beach. The guard’s eyes went wide.

“Who is chasing you girls?”

“The same men who burned our village. The oil company’s men.”

The rifle began to shake in the guard’s hand. “Christjesus,” he said.

There were men’s shouts and dogs’ barking, very loud now. I couldn’t hear the surf anymore.

Five brown dogs came out of the jungle, running. They were mad from howling. Their sides and their paws were bleeding from the jungle thorns. The sisters screamed and ran past the guard. The guard stopped and he lifted his gun and he fired. The lead dog somersaulted over in the sand. His ear was shot off and a piece of his head too, I think. The pack of dogs skidded and stopped and they tore into the fallen dog. They were biting out chunks of the neck flesh while the back legs were still thrashing and twitching. I screamed. The guard was shaking.

From out of the jungle, six men came running. They wore tracksuit trousers, all torn, and vests and running shoes, gold chains. They moved quickly up on us. They ignored the dogs. One was holding a bow, holding it drawn. The others were waving their machetes, daring the guard to shoot. They came right up to us.

There was a leader. He had a wound in his neck. It was rotting—I could smell it. I knew he was going to die soon. Another of the men wore a wire necklace and it was strung with dried brown things that looked like mushrooms. When he saw Kindness, this man pointed at her, then he made circles on his nipples with his fingers and he grinned. I am trying to report this as matter-of-factly as I know how.

The guard said, “Keep walking, mister and missus.”

But the man with the neck wound—the leader—said, “No, you stop.”

“I will shoot,” the guard said.

But the man said, “Maybe you will get one of us, maybe two.”

The man with the bow was aiming at the guard’s neck, and he said, “Maybe you get none of us. Maybe you should of shoot us when we was far away.”

The guard stopped walking backward, and we stopped too. Little Bee and Kindness went around behind us. They put me and my husband between themselves and the hunters.

The hunters were passing around a bottle of something I thought was wine. They were taking turns to drink. The man with the bow and arrows was getting an erection. I could see it under his tracksuit trousers. But his expression didn’t change and his eyes never moved from our guard’s neck. He was wearing a black bandanna. The bandanna said EMPORIO ARMANI. I looked at Andrew. I tried to speak calmly, but the words were crushed in my throat.

“Andrew,” I said. “Please give them anything they want.”

Andrew looked at the man with the neck wound and he said, “What do you want?”

The hunters looked at one another. The man with the neck wound stepped up to me. His eyes flickered, rolled up inside his head, then snapped back down and stared madly at me, the pupils tiny and the irises bullet-hard and gleaming like copper. His mouth twitched from a smile, to a grimace, to a cruel thin line, to a bitter and amused disdain. The emotions played across his face like a television flipped impatiently between channels. I smelled his sweat and his rot. He made a sound, an involuntary moan which seemed to surprise him—his eyes went wide—and he tore off my beach wrap. He looked down at the pale lilac material in his hands, curiously, and seemed to be wondering how it had got there. I screamed and clasped my arms over my breasts. I cringed away from the man, from the way he looked at me—now patiently, as if encouraging a slow learner; now furiously; now with a pregnant, vespertine calm.

I was wearing a very small green bikini. I will say that again, and maybe I will begin to understand it myself. In the contested delta area of an African country in the middle of a three-way oil war, because there was a beach next to the war, because the state tourist board had mail-merged tickets for that beach to every magazine listed in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, because it was that year’s cut, and because as editor I was first in the queue when distributors sent their own freebies to my magazine’s office, I was wearing a very small green bandeau bikini from Hermès. It occurred to me, as I stood there with my arms crossed over my tits, that I had freeloaded myself to annihilation.

The wounded man stepped so close to me that I felt the sand sink under my feet from his weight. He ran his finger over my shoulder, over my bare skin, and he said, “What do we want? We want…to practice…our English.”

The hunters exploded into laughter. They passed around the bottle again. For a moment, when one of them raised the bottle, I saw something with a pupil staring out of it. It was pressed up against the glass. Then the man put the bottle down, and the thing disappeared back into the liquid. I say liquid because I didn’t think it was wine anymore.

Andrew said, “We have money, and we can get more later.”

The wounded man giggled and made a noise like a pig, which made him giggle more. Then his face set suddenly into an expression of complete seriousness. He said, “You give me what you got now. There is no later.”

Andrew took his wallet from his pocket. He passed it to the wounded man. The man took it—his hand was shaking—and he pulled out the banknotes and threw the wallet down on the sand. He passed the money behind him to the men, without looking or counting. He was breathing very heavily and there was sweat running down his face. His neck wound was wide open. It was green blue. It was obscene.

I said, “You need medical attention. We could get help for you at the hotel.”

The man said, “Medicine not fix what these girls have seen. These girls got to pay for what they seen. Give me the girls.”

I said, “No.”

The wounded man looked at me, astonished. “What you say?”

“I said no. These girls are coming with us to the compound. If you try to stop them, our guard will shoot you.”

The wounded man widened his eyes in an indulgent simulacrum of fear. He put both his hands on the top of his head and turned himself through two shuffling circles on the sand. When he faced me again he grinned and said, “Where are you from, missus?”

“We live in Kingston,” I said.

The man cocked his head and looked interestedly at me.

“Kingston-upon-Thames,” I said. “It’s in London.”

The man nodded. “I know where Kingston is,” he said. “I studied mechanical engineering there.”

He looked down at the sand. He stood in silence for a moment. Then he moved, and it was very quick. I saw his machete go up, I saw the blade flash in the rising sun, I saw a tiny flinch—that was all the guard had time for. The blade went into the guard’s throat and it rang. It rang when it struck the bones of the neck. The metal was still ringing when the man yanked it out and the guard dropped into the sand. The blade rang, I remember, as if the machete was a bell and the guard’s life was the clapper.

The killer said, “You ever hear a noise like that in Kingston-upon-Thames?”

There seemed to be more blood than one skinny African boy could possibly have had inside him. It went on and on. That guard lying there with sand covering his eyeballs and his neck gaping, as if it was hanging on a hinge, wide open. It looked like a mouth. This very calm, middle-class voice in my head said: Pac-Man. Pac-Man. Oh gosh, he looks just like Pac-Man. We all stood in silence as we watched the guard bleed to death. It took the longest time. I remember thinking, Thank god we left Charlie with my parents.

When I lifted my head, the killer was watching me. It wasn’t a mean expression. I have seen checkout girls look at me like that when I forget my reward card. I have seen Lawrence look at me that way when I tell him I have my period. The killer was watching me with an expression, really, of mild annoyance.

“This guard died because of you,” he said.

I must have felt things, back in those days, because tears were running down my face.

“You’re crazy,” I said.

The killer shook his head. He made a steeple of his fingers around the handle of the machete, held it up so that the point aligned with my throat, and eyed me sorrowfully along the trembling axis of the blade.

“I live here,” he said. “You were crazy to come.”

I began to cry then, out of fear. Andrew was shaking. Kindness began to pray in her tribal language.

“Ekenem-i Maria,” she said, “gratia ju-i obi Dinweni nonyel-i, I nwe ngozi kali ikporo nine na ngozi dili nwa afo-i bu Jesu.”

The killer looked up at Kindness and he said, “You will die next.”

Kindness looked back at him. “Nso Maria Nne Ciuku,” she said, “yo nyel’anyi bu ndi njo, kita, n’ubosi nke onwu anyi. Amen.”

The killer nodded. He breathed. I heard the cold surf in ebb and resurgent. The brown dogs left off the carcass of the killed dog and they came closer. They stood with their legs trembling and their hackles up, the blood stiff on their fur. The killer took one step toward Kindness but I did not think my mind could survive seeing the machete cut into her.

I said, “No. Please…please, leave her alone.”

The killer stopped and he turned to me and he said, “You again?”

He was smiling.

Andrew said, “Sarah, please, I think the best thing we can do here is to…”

“To what, Andrew? To shut up and hope they won’t get round to killing us too?”

“I just think this is not our affair and so…”

“Ah,” the killer said. “Not your affair.”

He turned to the other hunters and spread his arms.

“Not his affair, him say. Him say, this is black-man business. Ha ha ha ha!”

The hunters laughed. They slapped one another on the back and the dogs started to circle us. When the killer turned back, his face was serious.

“First time I hear white man say my business not his business. You got our gold. You got our oil. What is wrong with our girls?”

“Nothing,” said poor Andrew. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Are you a racist?”

Rassist, was how he pronounced the word.

“No, of course not.”

The killer stared at Andrew. “Well?” he said. “You want to save these girls, mister?”

Andrew coughed. I watched him. My husband’s hands twitched—his strong, fine hands I had often watched, gripping coffees, clicking across keyboards, making deadlines. My husband, who had filed his Sunday column from the departure lounge of the airport the previous day, down to the wire as usual. I’d been scanning it for typos when they called our flight. The last paragraph went: We are a self-interested society. How will our children learn to put others before themselves if we do not?

“Well?” said the killer. “You want to save them?”

Andrew looked down at his hands. He stood like that for a long time. Above us, seabirds circled and called to one another in that agonized way they have. I tried to stop my legs from shaking.

“Please,” I said. “If you will let us take the girls with us, then we will do whatever you want. Let us all go back to the compound, please, and we will give you anything. Money, medicine, anything.”

The killer made a high, shrill yelp and a shiver shook his whole body. He giggled, and a dribble of blood escaped through his neat white teeth to splash down onto the dirty green nylon of his tracksuit top.

“You think I care bout that stuff?” he said. “You don’t see this hole in my neck? I am dead in two days. You think I care bout money and medicine?”

“So what do you want?” Andrew said.

The killer moved his machete from his right hand to his left. He raised his right hand with the middle finger extended. He held it, shaking, one inch from Andrew’s face and he said, “White man been giving me this finger all my life. Today you can give it me to keep. Now cut off your middle finger, mister, and give it me.”

Andrew flinched and he shook his head and he curled his hands into balls. He folded the thumbs over the fingers. The killer took his machete by the blade and he held the handle out to my husband.

“Do it,” he said. “Chop chop. Give me your finger and I will give you the girls.”

A long pause.

“What if I don’t?”

“Then you are free to go. But first you will hear the noises these children make dying. You ever hear a girl dying slow?”

“No.”

The killer closed his eyes and shook his head, unhurriedly.

“It is nasty music,” he said. “You will not forget. Maybe one day you will wake up in Kingston-upon-Thames and you will understand you lost more than your finger.”

Little Bee was crying now. Kindness held her hand.

“Do not be afraid,” she said. “If they kill us today we will eat bread tonight with Jesus.”

The killer snapped open his eyes and he stared at Andrew and he said, “Please, mister. I am not a savage. I do not want to kill these girls.”

Andrew reached out his hand and he took the killer’s machete. There was blood on the handle, the guard’s blood. Andrew looked across at me. I stepped over to him and I put my hand on his chest, gently. I was crying.

“Oh Andrew. I think you have to do it.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s just a finger.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong. We were just walking down the beach.”

“Just a finger, Andrew, and then we’ll walk back again.”

Andrew sank to his knees in the sand. He said, “I can’t believe this is happening.” He looked at the machete blade and he scraped it on the sand to clean it. He put his left hand on the sand, palm up, and he folded all the fingers except the middle one. Then he held up the machete in his right hand, but he didn’t bring it down. He said, “How do we know he won’t kill the girls anyway, Sarah, after I’ve done it?”

“You’ll know you did what you could.”

“I could get AIDS from this blade. I could die.”

“I’ll be with you. I’m so proud of you.”

It was quiet on the beach. Seabirds hung low in the hot blue sky, without flapping their wings, upheld on the sea breeze. The rhythm of the surf was unchanged, although the interval between one wave and the next seemed infinite. I watched with the girls and the men and the bloodied dogs to see what my husband would do, and it seemed in that moment that we were all the same, just creatures in nature hanging without any great effort upon the vast warm wind of events that were greater than us.

Andrew screamed, then, and he chopped down with the machete. The blade made a whipping sound in the hot air. Then it sliced down into the sand. It was really quite far from his hand.

“I won’t do it,” he said. “This is just fuckin bullshit. I don’t believe he’ll let the girls go. Look at him. He’s just going to kill them whatever.”

Andrew stood, and he left the machete in the sand. I looked at him, and that is when I stopped feeling. I realized I was no longer scared. And I wasn’t angry with Andrew. When I looked at him I hardly saw a man anymore. I thought we would all be killed now, and it worried me much less than I would have expected. It troubled me that we had never got around to building the glasshouse at the end of our garden. A sensible thought occurred to me: How lucky I am to have two healthy parents who will take good care of Charlie.

The killer sighed and he shrugged and he said, “Okay, mister made his choice. Now, mister, run back home to England. You can tell them you came to Africa and you met a real savage.”

When the killer turned away, I dropped to my knees. I looked straight at Little Bee. She saw what the killer did not see. She saw the white woman put her own left hand down on the hard sand, and she saw her pick up the machete, and she saw her chop off her middle finger with one simple chop, like a girl topping a carrot, neatly, on a quiet Surrey Saturday, between gymkhana and lunch. She saw her drop the machete and rock back on her heels, holding her hand. I suppose the white woman looked just amazed.

“Oh,” I think I said. “Oh, oh, oh.”

The killer spun round and he saw me with the blood welling through my closed fist. On the sand in front of me, there was my finger lying. The finger looked silly and naked. I was embarrassed for it. The killer’s eyes went wide.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” Andrew said. “Oh what the fuck have you done, Sarah? What the fuck have you done?”

He knelt down and he hugged me to him but I pushed him away with my good hand. There was mucus streaming from my mouth and nose.

“It hurts, Andrew. It hurts, you shit.”

The killer nodded. He reached down and he picked up my dead finger. He pointed it at Little Bee.

“You will live,” he said. “The missus has paid for your life.”

Then he pointed my finger at Kindness.

“But you will die, little one,” he said. “The mister would not pay for you. And my boys, you know, they must have their taste of blood.”

Kindness gripped Little Bee’s hand. She held her head up.

“I am not afraid,” she said. “The Lord is my shepherd.”

The killer sighed.

“Then he is a vain and careless shepherd,” he said.

Then—and it was louder than the surf—there was the sound of my husband sobbing.

Two years later, sitting at my table in Kingston-upon-Thames, I found I could still hear it. I stared down at my damaged hand, spread palm down on the blue tablecloth.

Little Bee had fallen asleep on the sofa, with her G&T untouched by her side. I realized I couldn’t remember the point at which she had stopped telling the story and I had picked up remembering it. I stood up from the kitchen table to fix myself another drink. There were no lemons, so I made do with a little squirt of plasticky juice from the Jif lemon in the fridge. When I picked up my glass, the ice cubes rattled uncontrollably. The G&T tasted vile but it gave me courage. I picked up the phone and dialed the number of the man I suppose I must call my lover, although that word rather makes me squirm.

I realized it was the second time I’d phoned Lawrence that day. I’d been trying not to. I’d lasted almost a whole week, since Andrew died. It was the longest I’d been faithful to my husband in years.

“Sarah? Is that you?”

Lawrence’s voice was a whisper. My throat tightened. I found that I couldn’t reply straightaway.

“Sarah? I’ve been thinking about you all day. Was it horrible? You should have let me come to the funeral.”

I swallowed. “It would have been inappropriate.”

“Oh Sarah, who would have known?”

“I would have known, Lawrence. My conscience is about all I’ve got left.”

Silence. His slow breath over the phone. “It’s okay to still love Andrew, you know. It’s okay with me, anyway.”

“You think I still love him?”

“I’m suggesting it. In case it helps.”

I laughed—an almost inaudible exhalation of air.

“Everybody’s trying to help me today. Even Charlie went to bed without the slightest fuss.”

“It’s normal that people want to help. You’re suffering.”

“Insufferable, is what I am. It amazes me that people like you still care about me.”

“You’re being hard on yourself.”

“Am I? I saw my husband’s coffin today, being shunted about on rollers. When are you going to take a look at yourself, if not on a day like this?”

“Mmm,” said Lawrence.

“Not many men would cut off a finger, would they Lawrence?”

“What? No. I definitely don’t think I would.”

My throat burned.

“I expected too much of Andrew, didn’t I? Not just on the beach. I expected too much of life.”

A long silence.

“What did you expect of me?” said Lawrence.

The question caught me unprepared and there was anger in his voice. My phone hand trembled.

“You’re using the past tense,” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“No?”

“No. Please, no.”

“Oh. I thought that’s what this call was about. I was thinking, That’s why she didn’t ask me to the funeral. Because this is the way you’d do, isn’t it, if you broke up with me? There’d be a preamble where you reminded me what a difficult person you are, and then you’d prove it.”

“Please, Lawrence. That’s horrible.”

“Oh God, I know. I’m sorry.”

“Please don’t be angry with me. I’m phoning to ask your advice.”

A pause. Then a laugh down the phone. Not bitter, but bleak.

“You don’t ask for advice, Sarah.”

“No?”

“No. Not ever. Not about things that matter, anyway. You ask whether your tights look right with your shoes. You ask which bracelet suits your wrist. You’re not asking for input. You’re asking your admirers to prove they’re paying attention.”

“Am I really that bad?”

“Actually you’re worse. Because if I do ever tell you gold looks nice with your skin, you make a special point of wearing silver.”

“Do I? I never even noticed. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I love that you don’t even notice. There are plenty of women who care what one thinks of their jewelry.”

I swirled my G&T and took a careful sip.

“You’re trying to make me feel better about myself, aren’t you?”

“I’m just saying you’re not the kind of woman you meet every day.”

“And that’s praise, is it?”

“It’s relative praise, yes. Now stop fishing.”

I smiled, for the first time in a week I think.

“We’ve never talked like this before, have we?” I said. “Talked honestly, I mean.”

“You want the honest answer?”

“Apparently not.”

“I have talked honestly and you haven’t listened.”

Around me the house was dark and silent. The only sound was the rattle of the ice cubes in my drink. When I spoke, my voice had a break in it.

“I’m listening now, Lawrence. God knows I’m listening now.”

A brief silence. Then another voice carried over the line. It was Lawrence’s wife Linda, shouting in the background: Who’s on the phone? And Lawrence shouted back: Just someone from work.

Oh, Lawrence. As if one would throw in that “just,” if it really was someone from work. You would simply say, It’s work, wouldn’t you? I thought about Linda then, and how it must feel to have to share Lawrence with me. Her cold fury—not at the necessity of sharing, but at Lawrence’s naïveté in imagining that Linda didn’t absolutely know. I thought about how the deceit must have acquired a certain uneven symmetry in their couple. I imagined the drab and ordinary lover that Linda would have taken in revenge—in spite and in haste. Oh, it was too awful. Out of respect for Linda, I hung up.

I steadied the hand that gripped my G&T and I looked over at Little Bee, sleeping. The memories from the beach swirled in my mind, inchoate, senseless, awful. I called Lawrence again.

“Can you come over?”

“I’d love to but I can’t tonight. Linda’s going out with a friend and I’ve got the kids.”

“Can you get a babysitter?”

I realized I sounded plaintive, and I cursed myself for it. Lawrence had picked up my tone too.

“Darling?” he said. “You know I’d come if I could, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Will you cope okay without me?”

“Of course.”

“How?”

“Oh, I daresay I’ll cope the way British women always used to cope, before the invention of weakness.”

Lawrence laughed. “Fine. Look, you said you wanted advice. Can we talk about it on the phone?”

“Yes. Of course. I. Look. I need to tell you something. It’s all got a little bit complicated. Little Bee turned up here this morning.”

“Who?”

“One of the Nigerian girls. From that day on the beach.”

“Jesus! I thought you said the men killed her.”

“I was sure they had. I saw the men drag her off. Her and the other one. I watched them being dragged kicking and screaming up the beach. I watched them till they were tiny dots and something in me just died.”

“But now, what? She just turned up on your doorstep?”

“This morning. Two hours before the funeral.”

“And you let her in?”

“Wouldn’t anyone?”

“No, Sarah. Most people would not.”

“It was as if she’d returned from the dead, Lawrence. I could hardly just slam the door on her.”

“But where was she, then, if she wasn’t dead?”

“On a boat, apparently. She got out of the country and came here. Then she was two years in an immigration detention center in Essex.”

“A detention center? Christ, what did she do?”

“Nothing. Asylum seekers, apparently they just lock them up when they arrive here.”

“For two years?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I don’t believe her. Two years in detention? She must have done something.”

“She was African and she didn’t have any money. I suppose they gave her a year for each.”

“Don’t be facetious. How did she find you?”

“Apparently she had Andrew’s driving license. He dropped his wallet in the sand.”

“Oh my god. And she’s still there?”

“She’s asleep on my sofa.”

“You must be completely freaked out.”

“This morning I thought I was losing my mind. It didn’t seem real.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I did, remember? Your nanny was late. You were in a rush.”

“Is she threatening you? Tell me you’ve called the police.”

“No, it’s not like that. She played really nicely with Charlie, all afternoon. He was Batman, she was Robin. They made quite a team.”

“And that doesn’t freak you out?”

“If I start freaking out now, I won’t ever know how to stop.”

“But what’s she doing there? What does she want?”

“I suppose she wants to stay here for a while. She says she doesn’t know anyone else.”

“Are you serious? Can she stay? Legally, I mean?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t asked. She’s exhausted. I think she walked here all the way from the detention center.”

“She’s insane.”

“She didn’t have any money. She could hardly take a bus.”

“Look, I don’t like it. I’m worried about you being all alone with her.”

“So what do you think I should do?”

“I think you should wake her up and ask her to leave. I’m serious.”

“Leave for where? What if she refuses?”

“Then I want you to call the police and have her removed.” I said nothing.

“Do you hear me, Sarah? I want you to call the police.”

“I heard you. I wish you wouldn’t say I want.”

“It’s you I’m thinking about. What if she turns nasty?”

“Little Bee? I don’t think she’s got a nasty bone in her.”

“How do you know? You know nothing about the woman. What if she comes into your room in the night with a kitchen knife? What if she’s crazy?”

I shook my head. “My son would know, Lawrence. His bat senses would tell him.”

“Fuck, Sarah! This isn’t funny! Call the police.”

I looked at Little Bee, fast asleep on my sofa with her mouth slightly open and her knees drawn up to her chest. I fell silent.

“Sarah?”

“I’m not going to call the police. I’m going to let her stay.”

“But why? What possible good can come of this?”

“I couldn’t help her last time. Maybe now I can.”

“And that would prove what, exactly?”

I sighed.

“I suppose it would prove your point, Lawrence, about me not being good at taking advice.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Yes. Which brings us back to my original point.”

“Which was what?”

“That I’m difficult sometimes.”

Lawrence laughed, but I think he was forcing himself.

I put down the phone and stared for a long time at the long, smooth white planks of the kitchen floor. Then I went upstairs to sleep on the floor of my son’s room. I wanted to be there with him. I admitted to myself that Lawrence had a point: I didn’t know what Little Bee might do in the night.

Sitting with my back against the cold radiator of Charlie’s bedroom, with my knees bunched up under a duvet, I tried to remember what I saw in Lawrence. I finished my G&T and winced at the taste of the ersatz lemon. It was a small problem to have: a lack of real lemons. It was almost a comfort. I come from a family whose problems were always small and surmountable.

We didn’t have extramarital affairs in my family. Mummy and Daddy loved each other very much, or else they had hired failed actors to play the role of affable lovebirds in our family home, for twenty-five years, and then kept those actors on a retainer so that they could be summoned back at the drop of a hat whenever one of their clients’ offspring threatened a weekend visit home from university, or a Sunday-lunch-with-parents-and-boyfriend. In my family we took our holidays in Devon and our partners for life. I wondered how it was that I had broken the mold.

I looked over at my son, asleep under his duvet, motionless and pale in his Batman costume. I listened to the sound of his breathing, regular and solid and utterly asleep. I couldn’t remember sleeping like that, not since I married Andrew. Within the first month, I’d known he wasn’t the right man. After that, it’s the growing sense of dissatisfaction that keeps one awake at night. The brain refusing to let go of those alternative lives that might have been. It isn’t the strong sleepers who sleep around.

But I was a happy child, at least, and my name was Sarah Summers. I still use Summers as my professional name, but personally it is lost. As a girl I liked what all girls like: pink plastic bracelets and later silver ones; a few practice boyfriends and then, in no particular hurry, men. England was made of dawn mists that rose to the horse’s shoulder, of cakes cooled on wire trays for the cutting, of soft awakenings. My first real choice was what to take at university. My teachers all said I should study law, so naturally I chose journalism. I met Andrew O’Rourke when we were both working on a London evening paper. Ours seemed to perfectly express the spirit of the city. Thirty-one pages of celebrity goings-on about town, and one page of news from the world which existed beyond London’s orbital motorway—the paper offered it up as a sort of memento mori.

London was fun. Men blew through like tall ships, some of them already wrecked. I liked Andrew because he wasn’t like the rest. Maybe it was his Irish blood, but he wouldn’t let himself be carried along. Andrew was the foreign-news editor at the paper, which was a bit like being the wheels on a boat. He was fired for sheer obstinacy and I took him home to meet my parents. Then I took his name so that no one else could have it.

O’Rourke is a sharp name and I imagined my happiness would soften it. But as Sarah O’Rourke I lost the habit of happiness. In its place came a sense of amazed separation. The marriage was all so sudden. I suppose if I’d stopped to think about it, I would have realized that Andrew was too like me—that we were as stubborn as each other; that our admiration would inevitably become attrition. The only reason we were married in such haste was that my mother begged me not to marry Andrew at all. One of you in a marriage has to be soft, she said. One of you has to know how to say, Have it your way. That’s not going to be you, dear, so it might as well be the man.

Taking Andrew O’Rourke’s name was the second real decision of my life, and it was wrong. I suppose Little Bee would understand me. As soon as we let go of our real names, she and I, we were lost.

Ask her to leave, Lawrence had said. But no, no, I couldn’t. We were joined by what had happened on the beach. Getting rid of her would be like losing a part of me. It would be like shedding a finger, or a name. I wasn’t going to let that happen again. I sat on the floor and watched my son sleeping peacefully. I did envy him for being able to sleep like that.

I didn’t sleep at all, not for an entire week, after Africa. The killers just walked away down the beach, and Andrew and I walked back to the hotel compound, in silence, and set about packing up our things after an agonizing half hour with the compound doctor, who packed the stump of my finger with gauze and wrapped it up tightly. I was in a daze. I remember on the flight home to London that it vaguely surprised me, just as it had at the end of my childhood, that such a big story could simply continue without me. But that is the way it is with killers, I suppose. What is the end of all innocence for you is just another Tuesday morning for them, and they walk off back to their planet of death giving no more thought to the world of the living than we would give to any other tourist destination: a place to be briefly visited and returned from with souvenirs and a haunting sensation that we could have paid less for them.

On the plane home I held my injured hand high, where it throbbed less painfully. Through the fog of painkillers, its approach unseen and unexpected, the thought presented itself to me that it would be sensible not to let Andrew touch my injury, then or ever again. In my mind I watched the killers taking Little Bee and Kindness along the beach. I watched them disappear. I watched them pass over the horizon of my world into that dangerous country in my mind where I lay awake at night, thinking of the things those men might have done to them.

It never faded. But I went back to the magazine. Starting Nixie had been the third real decision of my life, and I refused ever to regret it. Nor was I going to give up on decision four—Charlie, my best decision of all—or decision five, Lawrence, who I had truly meant to renounce until the horror of Nigeria made me realize that was unnecessary. I threw myself into making my life work, and I forced myself to let the beach seem distant and impersonal. There was trouble in Africa, of course there was. But there was no sense getting hung up about one particular incident and missing the big picture. Lawrence insisted on that, and for once I took his advice. I set up direct debits from my bank account to a couple of African charities. When people asked what had happened to my finger, I said that Andrew and I had hired a scooter out there and been involved in a minor accident. My soul entered a kind of suspended animation. At home I was calm. At work I was the boss. At night I did not sleep, but I thought I could probably make the days work indefinitely.

But now I stood up from the floor of Charlie’s room. I went to look at myself again in the mirror. There were bags under my eyes now, and sharp new lines across my forehead. The mask was finally cracking. I thought, This isn’t about the decisions you made anymore. Because the biggest thing in your life, the thing that killed Andrew and the thing that means you can’t sleep, is something that happened without you.

I realized, more than anything, that I needed to know now. I needed to know what had happened after the killers took those girls away down the beach. I needed to know what had happened next.