2008 - The Other Hand

by Chris Cleave

  I went over to the bed that the girl with no name had been sleeping on, and I picked up her T-shirt. I was going to go back and use the T-shirt to wipe up the urine, but then I saw the see-through plastic bag of documents on the end of the bed. I opened it and I started to read the story of the girl with no name.

  The-men-came-and-they…I was still crying, and it was difficult to read in the dim light from the moon.

  I put the girl’s documents back down on the bed and I closed the bag carefully. I held it tightly in my hands. I was thinking, I could take this girl’s story for my own. I could take these documents and I could take this story with its official red stamp at the end of it that tells everyone it is TRUE. Maybe I can win my asylum case with these papers. I thought about it for one minute, but while I held the girl’s story in my hands the squeaking of her chain seemed to get louder, and I had to drop her story back down on the bed because I knew how it ended. A story is a powerful thing in my country, and God help the girl who takes one that is not her own. So I left it on the girl’s bed, every word of it, including the paper-clips and all the photographs of the scar tissue and the names of the missing daughters, and all of the red ink that said this was CONFIRMED.

  Me, I put one small kiss on the cheek of Yevette, who was still sleeping, and I walked off quietly across the fields.

  Leaving Yevette, that was the hardest thing I had to do since I left my village. But if you are a refugee, when death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death -sadness, questions, and policemen—and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order.

  Truly, there is no flag for us floating people. We are millions, but we are not a nation. We cannot stay together. Maybe we get together in ones and twos, for a day or a month or even a year, but then the wind changes and carries the hope away. Death came and I left in fear. Now all I have is my shame and the memory of bright colours and the echo of Yevette’s laugh. Sometimes I feel as lonely as the Queen of England.

  It was not difficult to know which way to go. London lit up the sky. The clouds glowed orange, as if the city that awaited me was burning. I walked uphill, through fields with some kind of grain and into a high wood of some kind of trees, and when I looked back down towards the farm for the last time I saw a floodlight come on outside the barn they put us in. I think it was an automatic light, and standing in the middle of the beam there was the single bright lemon yellow dot of the sari girl. It was too far away to see her face, but I imagined her blinking in surprise when the light came on. Like an actress who has walked onto the stage by mistake. Like a girl who does not have a speaking part, who is thinking, Why have they turned this great light upon me now?

  I was very scared but I did not feel alone. All through that night it seemed to me as if my big sister Nkiruka walked beside me. I could almost see her face, glowing in the pale orange light. We walked all night, across fields and through woods. We steered around the lights of villages. Whenever we saw a farmhouse we went around that too. Once, the farm dogs heard us and barked, but there was no trouble. We kept on walking. My legs were tired. Two years I had been in that detention centre, going nowhere, and I was weak. But although my ankles hurt and the backs of my legs ached, it felt very good to be moving, and to be free, and to feel the night air on my face and the grass on my legs, wet from the dew. I know my sister was happy too. She was whistling under her breath. Once when we stopped to rest, she dug her toes into the earth at the edge of a field and smiled. When I saw her smile, I felt strong enough to carry on.

  The orange glow of the night faded, and I started to see the fields and the hedges around us. Everything was grey at first, but then the colours began to come into the land—blue and green, but very soft, as if the colours did not have any happiness in them. Then the sun rose, and the whole world turned to gold. The gold was all around me and I was walking through clouds of it. The sun was blazing on the white mist that hung over the fields, and the mist swirled around my legs. I looked over at my sister, but she had disappeared with the, night. I smiled though, because I realised that she had left me with her strength. I looked around me at the beautiful sunrise and I was thinking, Yes, yes, everything will be beautiful like this now. I will never be afraid again. I will never spend another day trapped in the colour grey.

  There was a low roaring, rumbling sound ahead of me. The noise rose and fell in the mist. It is a waterfall, I thought. I must be careful not to fall into the river in this mist.

  I walked on, more carefully now, and the noise got louder. Now it did not sound like a river any more. There were individual sounds in the middle of the roaring. Each sound got louder, rumbling and shaking and then fading away. There was a dirty, sharp smell in the air. Now I could hear the sound of cars and trucks. I went closer. I came to the top of a green grass slope and there it was in front of me. The road was incredible. On my side of it there were three lines of traffic going from right to left. Then there was a low metal barrier, and another three lines of traffic going from left to right. The cars and the trucks were moving very fast. I walked down to the edge of the road and put out my hand to stop the traffic, so I could cross, but the traffic did not stop. A truck blew its horn at me, and I had to step back.

  I waited for a gap in the traffic and then I ran across to the centre of the road. I climbed over the metal barrier. This time a great many car horns were blown at me. I ran across, and up the green grass bank at the other side of the road. I sat down. I was out of breath. I watched the traffic racing past below me, three lines in one direction and three lines in the other. If I was telling this story to the girls from back home they would be saying, Okay, it was the morning so the people were travelling to work in the fields. But why do the people who are driving from right to left not exchange their fields with the people who are driving from left to right? That way everyone could work in the fields near to their homes. And then I would just shrug because there are no answers that would not lead to more foolish questions, like: What is an office and what crops can you grow in it?

  I just fixed the motorway in my mind as a place I could run back to and kill myself very easily if the men suddenly came, and then I stood up and carried on going. I walked for another hour across fields. Then I came to some small roads, and these roads had houses on them. I was amazed when I saw them. They were two storeys high and made out of strong red bricks. They had sloping roofs with neat rows of tiles on them. They had white windows, and there was glass in all of them. Nothing was broken. All the houses were very smart, and each one looked like the next. In front of nearly every house there was a car. I walked along the street and I stared at the shining rows of them. These were beautiful cars, sleek and shining, not the kind of vehicles we saw where I came from. In my village there were two cars, one Peugeot and one Mercedes. The Peugeot came before I was born. I know this because the driver was my father, and my village was the place where his Peugeot coughed twice and died in the red dust. He went into the first house in the village to ask if they had a mechanic. They did not have a mechanic but what they did have was my mother, and my father realised he needed her more than he needed a mechanic in any case, and so he stayed. The Mercedes arrived when I was five years old. The driver was drunk, and he crashed into my father’s Peugeot, which was still standing exactly how my father had left it except that the boys had taken one of its tyres away to use as the seat of the swing on the limba tree. The driver of the Mercedes got out and he walked over to the first house and met my father there and he said, Sorry. And my father smiled at him and said, We should be thanking you, sir, you have really put our village on the map—this is our very first road traffic accident. And the driver of that Mercedes, he laughed, and he stayed too, and he became great friends with my father, so much that I called him my uncle. And my father and my uncle lived very happily in that place until the afternoon when the men came and shot them.

  So it was astonishing to see all these new, beaut
iful shining cars parked outside these big, perfect houses. I walked through many streets like this.

  I walked all morning. The buildings got bigger and heavier. The streets got wider and busier. I stared at everything, and I did not mind the hunger in my stomach or the aching in my legs because I was amazed by each new wonder. Each time I saw something for the first time—a nearly naked girl on an advertising billboard, or a red double-decker bus, or a glittering building so tall it made you dizzy—the excitement in my stomach was so fierce it hurt. The noise was too much—the roar of the traffic and the shouting. Soon there were such crowds on the streets that it seemed I was nothing. I was pushed and bumped all over the pavements, and no one took any notice of me. I kept on walking as straight as I could, following one street and then another, and just as the buildings got so big it seemed they could not possibly stand up, and the noise got so loud it seemed as if my body would be shaken to pieces, I turned a corner and I gasped and ran across one last busy road, with car horns blasting and the drivers screaming, and I leaned over a low white stone wall and stared and stared, because there in front of me was the River Thames. Boats were pushing along through the muddy brown water, honking their horns under the bridges. All along the river to the left and the right, there were huge towers that rose high into the blue sky. Some were still being built, with huge yellow cranes moving above them. They even trained the birds of the air to help them build? Weh!

  I stayed there on the bank of the river and I stared and stared at these marvels. The sun shone out of the bright blue sky. It was warm, and a soft breeze blew along the bank of the river. I whispered to my sister Nkiruka, because it seemed to me that she was there in the flowing of the river and the blowing of the breeze.

  “Look at this place, sister. We are going to be all right here. There will be room for two girls like us in a country as fine as this. We are not going to suffer any more.”

  I smiled, and I walked away down the embankment of the river, in the direction of the west. I knew that if I followed along the bank, I would get to Kingston—that is why they call it Kingston-upon-Thames. I wanted to get there as quick as I could, because now the crowds in London were starting to frighten me. In my village we never saw more than fifty people in one place. If you ever saw more than that, it meant that you had died and gone to the city of the spirits. That is where the dead go, to a city, to live together in their thousands because they do not need the space to grow their fields of cassava. When you are dead you are not hungry for cassava, only for company.

  A million people were all around me. Their faces hurried past. I looked and looked. I never saw the faces of my family but when you have lost everyone, you never lose the habit of looking. My sister, my mother, my father and my uncle. Every face I see, I am looking for them in it. If I did meet you then the first thing you would have noticed would have been my eyes staring at your face, as if they were trying to see someone else in you, as if they were desperate to make you into a ghost. If we did meet, I hope you did not take this personally.

  I hurried along the river embankment, through the crowds, through my memories, through this city of the dead. Once, beside a tall stone needle engraved with strange symbols, my legs burned and I needed to rest, so I stood still for a moment and the dead flowed around me, like the muddy brown Thames flowing around the pillar of a bridge.

  If I was telling this story to the girls from’ back home, I would have to explain to them how it was possible to be drowning in a river of people and also to feel so very, very alone. But truly, I do not think I would have the words.

  Four

  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 Hea-throw. 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 neighbour was hanging out his blue Y-fjronts 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 window-pane. 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. 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 neighbour 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 favourite 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 realising, with a guilty thrill, that there was no longer one single reason for me to be here—far from the centre 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 dialled someone. A friend. More than a friend, actually. That’s what Lawrence was.

  “What is it?” said Lawrence.

  “You sound cross.”

&
nbsp; “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 a way 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 realised 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.