The Other Hand Read Online Free PDF

deep breaths. I remember thinking, How strange, that it should be you who is keeping me on my feet.
    In the church I sat in the front pew, with Little Bee on my left and Batman on my right. The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work -I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate—but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one’s address book dressed in black and exported into pews in non-alphabetical order. They had classified themselves according to some unwritten protocol of grief, blood relatives ghoulishly close to the coffin, old girlfriends in a reluctant cluster near’ the baptismal font. I couldn’t bear to look behind me and see this new natural order of things. It was all very much too sudden. A week ago I had been a successful working mother. Now I was sitting at my husband’s, funeral, flanked by a superhero and a Nigerian refugee. It seemed like a dream that might be awoken from with relatively little effort. I stared at my husband’s coffin, strewn with white lilies. Batman stared at the vicar. He cast an approving eye over the vicar’s stole and surplice. He gave the vicar a solemn thumbs up, one caped crusader to another. The vicar returned the salute, then his thumb returned to the faded gilt edging of his Bible.
    The church was falling quiet; expectant. My son looked all around, then back at me. Where’s Daddy? he said.
    I squeezed my son’s hot, sweaty hand, and listened to the coughs and sniffles echoing round the church. I wondered how I could possibly explain my husband’s death to his son. It was depression that killed Andrew, of course—depression and guilt. But my son didn’t believe in death, let alone in the capacity of mere emotions to cause it. Mister Freeze’s ice rays, perhaps. The Puffin’s lethal wingspan, at a stretch. But an ordinary phone call, from a skinny African girl? It was impossible to explain.
    I realised I would have to tell my son the whole story, some day. I wondered where I would begin. It was two years before, in the summer of 2005, that Andrew had begun his long, slow slide into the depression that finally claimed him. It started on the day we first met Little Bee, on a lonely beach in Nigeria. The only souvenir I have of that first meeting is an absence where the middle finger of my left hand used to be. The amputation is quite clean. In place of my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D and C keys on my laptop. I can’t rely on E, D, and C any more. They go missing when I need them most. ‘Pleased’ becomes ‘please’. ‘Ecstasies’ becomes ‘stasis’.
    I miss my finger most on deadline days, when the copy-checkers have all gone home and I’m typing up the last-minute additions to my magazine. We published an editorial once where I said I was ‘wary of sensitive men’. I meant to say ‘weary’, of course, and after a hundred outraged letters from the earnest boyfriends who’d happened to glance at my piece on their partner’s coffee table (presumably in between giving a back rub and washing the dishes), I began to realise just how weary I was. It was a typographical accident, I told them. I didn’t add, it was the kind of typographical accident that is caused by a steel machete on a Nigerian beach. I mean, what does one call the type of meeting where one gains an African girl and loses E, D and C? 7 do not think you have a word for it in your language . That’s what Little Bee would say.
    I sat in my pew, massaged the stump of my finger, and found myself acknowledging for the first time that my husband had been doomed since the day we met Little Bee. The intervening two years had brought a series of worsening premonitions, culminating in the horrible morning ten days earlier when I had woken up to the sound of the telephone ringing. My whole body had crawled with dread. It had been an ordinary weekday morning. The