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This was bat shit.
    Distantly, I remembered something I’d read on the parenting page.
    “It’s all right, Batman. Mummy’s not cross.”
    “Mummy clean the poo up.”
    “Um. Er. Jesus.”
    Gravely, Batman shook his head.
    “No, not Jesus.
Mummy.
”
    Resentfulness was starting to overcome the embarrassment and guilt. I looked across to where Andrew lay with his eyes tight closed and his hands twisted at the exquisite awfulness of his clinical depression, our unhappy sex interrupted, and this very thick stink of shit.
    “Batman, why don’t you ask
Daddy
to clean you up?”
    My son looked across at his father for a long time, then turned back to me. Patiently, as if explaining something to an imbecile, he shook his little head again.
    “But why not?” (I was pleading now.) “Why not ask Daddy?”
    Batman looked solemn.
Daddy is fighting baddies,
he said. The grammar was irreproachable. I looked across at his father with him, and I sighed.
Yes,
I said,
I suppose you’re right.
    Five days later, on the last morning I saw my husband alive, I finished dressing my caped crusader, I breakfasted him, and I ranhim down to his nursery’s Early Birds Club. Back at the house, I showered. Andrew watched me as I pulled on my tights. I always dressed up for deadline days. Heels, skirt, smart green jacket. Magazine publishing has its rhythms and if the editor won’t dance to them, she can’t expect her staff to. I don’t float feature ideas in Fendi heels, and I don’t close an issue in Pumas. So I dressed against the clock while Andrew lay naked on the bed and watched me. He didn’t say a word. The last glimpse I had of him, before I closed the bedroom door, he was still watching. How to describe, to my son, his father’s last seen expression? I decided I would tell my son that his father had looked very peaceful. I decided I wouldn’t tell him that my husband opened his mouth to say something, but that I was running late and turned away.
    I arrived at the office around 9:30. The magazine was based in Spitalfields, on Commercial Street, ninety minutes by public transport from Kingston-upon-Thames. The worst moment comes when you leave the overland network and descend into the heat of the Underground. There were two hundred of us packed into each tube carriage. We listened to the screech of the metal wheels on the track, with our bodies pinned and immobile. For three stops I stood pressed against a thin man in a corduroy jacket who was quietly weeping. One would normally avert one’s eyes, but my head was pinioned in such a position that I could only look. I should have liked to put an arm around the man. But my arms were jammed by the commuters on each side of me. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was up to administering tenderness like that, on a crowded train, under the silent gaze of others. I was torn between two kinds of shame. On the one hand, the disgrace of not discharging a human obligation. On the other hand, the madness of being the first in the crowd to move.
    I smiled helplessly at the weeping man and I couldn’t stop thinking about Andrew.
    As soon as one emerges aboveground, of course, one can quickly forget our human obligations. London is a beautiful machine fordoing that. The city was bright, fresh and inviting that morning. I was excited about closing the June issue, and I practically ran the last two minutes to the office. On the outside of our building was the magazine’s name,
nixie,
in three-foot-high pink neon letters. I stood outside for a moment, taking a few deep breaths. The air was still, and you could hear the neon crackling over the rumble of the traffic. I stood with my hand on the door and wondered what Andrew had been about to say, just before I left home.
    My husband hadn’t always been lost for words. The long silences only began on the day we met Little Bee. Before that, he wouldn’t pipe down for a minute. On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we