2008 - The Other Hand

by Chris Cleave

  The future is another thing I would have to explain to the girls from back home. The future is my country’s biggest export. It leaves so quickly through our sea ports, most of my people have never even seen it and they do not know what it looks like. In my country the future exists in gold nuggets hidden in the rock, or it collects in dark reservoirs far underneath the earth. Our future hides itself from the light, but your people come along with a talent for divining it. In this way, fraction by fraction, our future becomes your own. I admire your sorcery because of its subtlety and its variety. In every generation the-extraction process is different. It is true that we are naive. In my village, for example, it took us by surprise that the future could be pumped into 42-gallon barrels and shipped off to a refinery. It happened while we were preparing the evening meal, while the blue woodsmoke mixed with the thick steam of the cassava pots in the golden evening sun. It happened so quickly that the women had to grab us children and run with us into the jungle. “We hid there while we listened to the screams of the men who stayed behind to fight—and meanwhile, at the refinery, by a process of distillation, my village’s future was separated into its fractions. The heaviest fraction, the wisdom of our grandparents, was used to tar your roads. The middle fractions, the careful savings of our mothers from the small coins they put aside after the harvest time, these were used to power your cars. And the lightest fraction of all—the fantastical dreams of us children in the stillest hours of full-moon nights—well, that came off as a gas that you bottled and stored for winter. In this way our dreams will keep you warm. Now that they are part of your future, I do not blame you for using them. You probably do not even see where they came from.

  You are not bad people. You are blind to the present and we are blind to the future. In the immigration detention centre I used to smile when the detention officers explained to me, The reason you have to come over here, you Africans, is that you just aren’t capable of good government over there. I used to tell them that near my village there was a wide, deep river with dark caves under the banks where the fish were pale and blind. There was no light in their caves, so after a thousand generations the trick of seeing had been distilled out of their species. Do you see what I mean? I said to the detention officers. Without light, how can you keep the sight of eyes? Without a future, how can you preserve the vision of government? We could try as hard as we liked in my world. We could have a most diligent Home Secretary of Lunchtime. We could have an excellent Prime Minister of the Quietest Part of the Late Afternoon. But when twilight comes—do you see?—our world disappears. It cannot see beyond the day, because you have taken tomorrow. And because you have tomorrow in front of your eyes, you cannot see what is being done today.

  The detention officers used to laugh at me, and shake their heads, and go back to reading their newspapers. Sometimes they would let me read after them. I liked to read your newspapers because it was vital for me to learn to speak your language in this way that you do. When your newspapers write about where I come from, they call it the developing world. You would not say developing unless you believed you had left us a future to be doing that in. This is how I know you are not bad people.

  Actually, what you have left us with is your abandoned objects. When you think of my continent, perhaps you think of the wildlife—of the lions and the hyenas and the monkeys. When I think of it, I think of all the broken machines, of everything worn out and wrecked and shattered and cracked. Yes, we have lions. They are sleeping on the roofs of rusting containers. We also have hyenas. They are cracking the skulls of men who were too slow to run from their own troops. And the monkeys? The monkeys are out at the edge of the village, playing on top of a mountain of old computers that you sent to help in our school -the school that does not have electricity.

  From my country you have taken its future, and to my country you have sent the objects from your past. We do not have the seed, we have the husk. We do not have the spirit, we have the skull. Yes, the skull. That is what I would think about if I had to give a better name to my world. If the Prime Minister of the Quietest Part of the Late Afternoon telephoned me one day and said, Little Bee, to you falls the great honour of giving a name to our ancient and much-beloved continent, then I would say, Sir, our world shall be called Golgotha, the place of the skull.

  That would have been a good name for my village, even before the men came to burn our huts and drill for oil. It would have been a good name for the clearing around the limba tree where we children swung on that bald old car tyre, and bounced on the seats of my father’s broken Peugeot and my uncle’s broken Mercedes, with the springs poking out from them, and chanted church songs from a hymn book with the covers missing and the pages held together with tape. Golgotha was the place I grew up, where even the missionaries had boarded up their mission and left us with the holy books that were not worth the expense of shipping back to your country. In our village, our only Bible had all of its pages missing after the forty-sixth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew, so that the end of our religion, as far as any of us knew, was My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

  That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one. From the rest of the world all we knew was your old, old movies. About men who were in a great hurry, sometimes in jet planes and sometimes on motorbikes and sometimes upside down.

  For news, all we had was a Golgotha TV, the kind where you have to carry the burden of programming yourself. There was just the wooden frame around where the screen used to be, and the frame sat in the red dust underneath the limba tree, and my sister Nkiruka used to put her head inside the frame to do the pictures. This is a good trick. I know now that we should have called this reality television.

  My sister used to adjust the bow on her dress, and put a flower in her hair just so, and smile through the screen and say: Hello, this is the news from the British BBC, today ice-cream will snow down from the sky and no one will have to walk to the river for water because the engineers will come from the city and put a stand pipe in the middle of the village. And the rest of us children, we would all sit in a half-circle around the television set and we would watch Nkiruka announcing the news. We loved these lightest fractions of her dreams. In the pleasant afternoon shade we would gasp with delight and all of us would say, Weh!

  One of the good things about the forsaken world is that you can talk back to television. The rest of us children, we used to shout at Nkiruka:

  —This ice-cream snow, exactly what time will it occur?

  —In the early evening, of course, when the day is cooler.

  —How do you know this, Madam Television Announcer?

  —Because the day must be cool enough or the icecream would melt, of course. Do you children know nothing?

  And we children would sit back and nod at one another—evidently the day would need to be cool enough first. We were very satisfied with the television news.

  You can play the same trick with television in your country, but it is harder because the television sets do not listen. The morning after Lawrence first stayed the night at Sarah’s house, it was Charlie who wanted to turn the television on. I heard him wake up while Sarah and Lawrence were still sleeping, so I went to his room. I said, Good morning, little brother, do you want breakfast? He said, No, I doesn’t want breakfast, I does want TELEVISION. So I said, Does your mummy say it is okay for you to watch television before breakfast? Charlie looked at me and his eyes were very patient, like a teacher who has told you the answer three times already but you have forgotten it. Mummy is asleep, actually, he said.

  So we switched on the television. We looked at the pictures without the sound. It was the BBC morning news, and they were showing pictures of the Prime Minister making a speech. Charlie put his head on one side to watch. The ears of his Batman hood flopped over.

  He said, “That is the Joker, isn’t it?”

  “No,
Charlie. That is the Prime Minister.”

  “Is he a goody or a baddy?”

  I thought to myself.

  “Half the people think he is a goody and the other half think he is a baddy.”

  Charlie giggled. “That’s silly,” he said.

  “That is democracy,” I said. “If you did not have it, you would want it.”

  We sat and watched the Prime Minister’s lips moving.

  “What’s he saying?” said Charlie.

  “He is saying that he will make ice-cream snow.”

  Charlie spun round to look at me. “WHEN?” he said.

  “About three o’clock in the afternoon, if the weather is cool enough. He is also saying that young people who are running away from trouble in other countries will be allowed to stay in this country so long as they work hard and do not make any fuss.”

  Charlie nodded. “I think the Prime Minisser is a goody.”

  “Because he will be kind to refugees?”

  Charlie shook his head. “Because of the ice-cream snow,” he said.

  There Was a laugh from the door. I turned round and Lawrence was there. He was wearing a dressing-gown, and he stood there in his bare feet. I do not know how long he had been listening to us.

  “Well,” he said, “we know how to buy that boy’s vote.”

  I looked at the floor. I was embarrassed that Lawrence had been standing there.

  “Oh, don’t be shy,” he said. “You’re, great with Charlie. Come and have some breakfast.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Batman, do you want some breakfast?”

  Charlie stared at Lawrence and then he shook his head, so I switched through the TV channels until we found the one that Charlie liked, and then I went into the kitchen.

  “Sarah’s still sleeping,” said Lawrence. “I suppose she needs the rest. Tea or coffee?”

  “Tea, thank you.”

  Lawrence boiled the kettle and he made tea for both of us. He put my tea down on the table in front of me, carefully, and he turned the handle of the mug towards my hand. He sat down on the other side of the table, and smiled. The sun was fighting up the kitchen. It was thick yellow—a warm light, but not a show-off light. It did not want the glory for the illumination of the room, It made each object look as if it was glowing with a light from deep inside itself. Lawrence, the table with its clean blue cotton tablecloth, his orange tea mug and my yellow one—all of it glowing from within. The light made me feel very cheerful. I thought to myself, That is a good trick.

  But Lawrence was serious. “Look,” he said, “I think you and I need to make a plan for your welfare. I’m going to be very clear about this. I think you should go to the local police and report yourself. I don’t think it’s right for you to expose Sarah to the stress of harbouring you.”

  I smiled. “She is not harbouring me. I am not a boat.”

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “But no one is looking for me. Why should I go to the police?”

  “I don’t think it’s right, your being here. I don’t think it’s good for Sarah at the moment.”

  I blew on my tea. The steam from it rose up into the still air of the kitchen, and it glowed. “Do you think you are good for Sarah at the moment, Lawrence?”

  “Yes. Yes I do.”

  “She is a good person. She saved my life.”

  Lawrence smiled. “I know Sarah very well,” he said. “She told me the whole story.”

  “So you must believe I am only staying here to help her.”

  “I’m not convinced you’re the kind of help she needs.”

  “I am the kind of help that will look after her child like he was my own brother. I am the kind of help that will clean her house and wash her clothes and sing to her when she is sad. What kind of help are you, Lawrence? Maybe you are the kind of help that only arrives when it wants sexual intercourse.”

  Lawrence smiled again. “I’m not going to take offence at that,” he said. “You’re one of those women who has a funny idea about men.”

  “I am one of those women who has seen men do things that are not funny.”

  “Oh, please. This is Europe. We’re a little more house trained over here.”

  “Different from us, you think?”

  “If you must put it that way.”

  I nodded. “A wolf must be a wolf and a dog must be a dog.”

  “Is that what they say in your country?”

  I smiled.

  Lawrence frowned. “I don’t get you,” he said. “I don’t think you know how serious your situation is. If you did, you wouldn’t smile.”

  I shrugged. “If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.”

  We drank tea and he watched me and I watched him. He had green eyes, green as the eyes of the girl in the yellow sari on the day they let us out of the detention centre. He watched me without blinking.

  “What will you do?” I said. “What will you do if I do not go to the police?”

  “Will I turn you in myself, you mean?”

  I nodded. Lawrence tapped his fingers on the sides of his tea mug.

  “I’ll do what’s best for Sarah,” he said.

  The fear raced right through me, right into my belly. I watched Lawrence’s fingers tapping. His skin was white as a seabird’s egg, and fragile like it too. He held his hands around his mug of tea. He had long, smooth fingers and they were curled around the orange china mug as if it was a baby animal that might do something foolish if it was allowed to escape.

  “You are a careful man, Lawrence.”

  “I try to be.”

  “Why is that?”

  Lawrence laughed down his nose. “Look at me. I’m hardly brilliant. I’m not strikingly good looking. All you can really say about me is I’m six foot one and not completely stupid. Life doesn’t throw a man like me many lifelines, so what I do have I try to hold on to.”

  “Like Sarah?”

  “I love Sarah. You can’t imagine what she means to me. Apart from her, my life is utter shit. I work for the most appalling, heartless bureaucracy, my job is utterly senseless, and my boss makes me want to kill myself, he really does. I get home, and the kids are whining, and Linda is prattling on and on, endlessly, about nothing. The time I have with Sarah is the only time I feel like I’m doing something I’ve chosen. It’s the only time I feel like myself. Even now, talking here with you. I mean, how weird is this, for you and me to be talking together in an ordinary English kitchen? This is incredible. This is a million miles away from anything that would happen in my life, and it’s all because of Sarah.”

  “You are worried I will take Sarah away from you. That is why you do not want me here. It is nothing to do with what is good for her.”

  “I’m worried Sarah’s going to do something silly to try to help you. Change her focus, change her life more than she needs to right at this moment.”

  “And you are worried she will forget all about you in her new life.”

  “Yes, all right, yes. But you can’t imagine what would happen to me if I lost Sarah. I’d fall apart. I’d hit the bottle. Bam. It’d be the end of me. That terrifies me, even if you probably think it sounds pathetic.”

  I took a sip of tea. I tasted it very carefully. I shook my head. “It is not pathetic. In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention centre. Death is death, all of us are scared of it.”

  Lawrence turned his tea mug around and around in his hands.

  “Is it really death that you’re running from? I mean, honestly? A lot of the people who come here, they’re after a comfortable life.”

  “If they deport me to Nigeria, I will be arrested. If they find out who I am, and what I have seen, then the politicians will find a way to have me killed. Or if I am lucky, they will put me in prison. A lot of people who have seen what the oil companies do, they go to prison for a lo
ng time. Bad things happen in a Nigerian prison. If people ever get out, they do not feel like talking.”

  Lawrence shook his head, slowly, and he looked down into his tea. “See, you tell me all that, but it just doesn’t seem very likely to me. You’d be fine, look at you, I’m sure you’d find a way. It wouldn’t be a big deal for me to report you to the police. I could just go down the road and do it. And then I’d have my life back, just like that.”

  “And what about my life?”

  “It isn’t my problem. I can’t be responsible for all the trouble in the world.”

  “Even if your life kills me?”

  “Listen, whatever’s going to happen to you is going to happen eventually, whether I do anything or not. This isn’t your country. They’ll come for you, I promise you they will. They come for all of you in the end.”

  “You could hide me.”

  “Yeah, right, like they hid Anne Frank in the attic. Look how that worked out for her.”

  “Who is Anne Frank?”

  Lawrence closed his eyes and folded his hands behind his neck, and sighed.

  “Another girl who wasn’t my problem,” he said.

  I felt a rage exploding inside me, so fierce that it made my eyeballs hurt. I banged my hand down on the table and his eyes snapped open wide.

  “Sarah would hate you, if you told the police about me!”

  “Sarah wouldn’t know. I’ve seen how the immigration people work. They would come for you in the night. You wouldn’t have time to tell Sarah. You wouldn’t get to say a word.”

  I stood up. “I would find a way. I would find a way to tell her what you had done. And I would find a way to tell Linda too. I would break both of your lives, Lawrence. Your family life and your secret life.”