The Other Hand by Chris Cleave Read Free Book Online Page A

tilted her head at me.
    “What are you telling me, Sarah?”
    “I’m not telling you anything, Clar. I like you too much to tell. I’m just asking myself, really. I’m asking if maybe the kind of choices I made five years ago weren’t so bad after all.”
    Clarissa smiled resignedly.
    “Fine. But don’t expect me to keep my hands off his hunky thighs under the table, just because he’s your husband.”
    “You do that, Clarissa, and I’ll make you junior horoscopes editor for the rest of your natural life.”
    My desk phone rang. I looked at the time on its screen: 10:25 A.M. It’s funny how these details stay with you. I picked up the phone and it was reception, sounding bored to distraction. At Nixie we used reception as a sin bin—if a girl got too bitchy on the editorial floor, we sent her down to do a week on the shiniest desk.
    “There are two policemen here.”
    “Oh. They came in here? What do they want?”
    “Okay, let’s think about why I might have dialed your number.”
    “They want to talk to me?”
    “They did good when they made you the boss, Sarah.”
    “Fuck off. Why do they want to talk to me?”
    A pause.
    “I could ask them, I suppose.”
    “If it isn’t too much trouble.”
    A longer pause.
    “They say they want to shoot a porny film in the office. They say they’re not real policemen and their willies are simply enormous.”
    “Oh for god’s sake. Tell them I’ll be down.”
    I hung up the phone and looked at Clarissa. The hairs on my arms were up again.
    “The police,” I said.
    “Relax,” said Clarissa. “They can’t bust you for conspiracy to run a serious feature piece.”
    Behind her the flatscreen was showing Jon Stewart. He was laughing. His guest was laughing too. I felt better. You had to find something to laugh about, that summer, the number of places that were going up in smoke. You laughed, or you put on a superhero costume, or you tried for some kind of orgasm that science had somehow missed.
    I took the stairs down to the lobby, speeding up as I went. The two police officers were standing rather too close together, with their caps in their hands and their big, sensible leather shoes on my black marble. The young one was blushing horribly.
    “I’m so sorry,” I said.
    I glared at the receptionist and she grinned back at me from beneath her perfect blond side part.
    “Sarah O’Rourke?”
    “Summers.”
    “Excuse me madam?”
    “Sarah Summers is my professional name.”
    The older policeman looked at me with no expression.
    “This is a personal matter, Mrs. O’Rourke. Is there somewhere we can go?”
    I walked them up to the boardroom on the first floor. Tones of pink and violet, long glass table, more neon.
    “Can I get you a coffee? Or tea? I mean, I can’t absolutely guarantee it’ll come out as coffee or tea. Our machine is a bit—”
    “Perhaps you’d better sit down, Mrs. O’Rourke.”
    The officers’ faces glowed unnaturally in the pinkish light. They looked like black-and-white-movie men, colored in by a computer. One older, the one with the bald patch. Maybe forty-five. The younger one, with the blond cropped hair, maybe twenty-two or twenty-four. Nice lips. Quite full, and rather juicy-looking. He wasn’t beautiful, but I was transfixed by the way he stood and cast his eyes down deferentially when he spoke. And of course there’s always something about a uniform. You wonder if the protocol will peel off with the jacket, I suppose.
    The two of them placed their uniform caps on the purple smoked glass. They rotated the caps with their clean white fingers. Both of them stopped at exactly the same moment, as if some critical angle they had practiced in basic training had precisely been attained.
    They stared at me. My mobile chimed brashly on the glass desktop—a text message arriving. I smiled. That would be Andrew.
    “I’ve got some bad news for you, Mrs. O’Rourke,” said the older officer.
    “What do you mean?”
    It came out