by Chris Cleave
The leader of the soldiers, he took the gun down from his shoulder and he pointed it at Sarah. The other soldiers gathered in close and they unslung their weapons too. The leader shouted again. Sarah just shook her head. The leader pulled back the barrel of his gun then and I thought he was going to push it into Sarah’s face, but just then Charlie broke away and he started to run down the beach towards the rocky point where we were sitting. He ran with his head down and his Batman cape fluttering behind him, and at first the soldiers just laughed and watched him go. But the leader of the soldiers, he was not laughing. He shouted something at his men, and one of them raised his rifle and swung it round to point at Charlie. The women around me, they gasped. One of them screamed. It was a crazy, shocking sound. At first I thought it was a seabird right beside me and my head snapped round to look, and when I turned back towards where Charlie was running, I saw a jet of sand flying up from the hard beach beside him. At first I did not know what it was, but then I heard the rifle shot that had made it. Then I screamed too. The soldier was swinging the barrel of his rifle, taking aim again. That was when I stood up and I started to run towards Charlie. I ran so hard my breath was burning and I screamed at the soldiers, Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, I AM THE ONE THAT YOU WANT, and I ran with my eyes half closed and one hand spread out in front of my face as if that would protect me from the bullet that would come for me. I ran, cringing like a dog from the whip, but the bullet did not come. The leader of the soldiers, he shouted out an order and his man put down his rifle. All of the soldiers stood there then, with their hands at their sides, watching.
Charlie and me, we came together halfway between the rocky point and the soldiers. I knelt and I held out my arms to him. His face was twisted with terror and I held him while he cried against my chest. I waited for the soldiers to come and get me, but they did not. The leader stood there and he watched, and I saw the way he slung his rifle back on his shoulder and lifted his hand to scratch his head again. I saw Sarah, with her hands behind her head, pulling at her hair and screaming to be let go while one of the soldiers restrained her.
After a long time Charlie stopped sobbing and he turned his face up towards mine. I peeled back his Batman mask a little, so I could see his face, and he smiled at me. I smiled back at him, in that moment that the soldiers’ leader gave me, that one minute of dignity he offered me as one human being to another before he sent his men across the hard sand to fetch me. Here it was, then, finally: the quietest part of the late afternoon. I smiled down at Charlie, and I understood that he would be free now even if I would not. In this way the life that was in me would find its home in him now. It was not a sad feeling. I felt my heart take off lightly like a butterfly and I thought, Yes, this is it, something has survived in me, something that does not need to run any more, because it is worth more than all the money in the world and its currency, its true home, is the living. And not just the living in this particular country or in that particular country, but the secret, irresistible heart of the living. I smiled back at Charlie and I knew that the hopes of this whole human world could fit inside one soul. This is a good trick. This is called, globalisation.
“Everything will be all right for you, Charlie,” I said.
But Charlie was not listening—already he was giggling and ‘kicking and struggling to be put down. He stared over my shoulder at the local children, still playing in the shorebreak around the rocky point.
“Let me go! Let me go!”
I shook my head. “No, Charlie. It is a very hot day. You cannot run around in your costume like that or you will boil, I am telling you, and then you will be no good to us at all to fight the baddies. Take off your Batman costume, right now, and then you will just be yourself and you can go to cool off in the sea.”
“No!”
“Please, Charlie, you must. It is for your health.”
Charlie shook his head. I stood him in the sand and I knelt down beside him and I whispered in his ear.
“Charlie,” I said, “do you remember when I promised you, if you took off your costume, that I would tell you my real name?”
Charlie nodded.
“So do you still want to know my real name?”
Charlie tilted his head to one side so that both of the ears of his mask flopped over. Then he tilted it to the other side. Then finally he looked straight at me.
“What is yours real name?” he whispered.
I smiled. “My name is Udo.”
“Ooh-doh?”
“That is it. Udo means peace. Do you know what peace is, Charlie?”
Charlie shook his head.
“Peace is a time when people can tell each other their real names.”
Charlie grinned. I looked over his shoulder. The soldiers were walking across the sand towards us now. They were walking slowly, with their rifles in their hands pointing down at the sand, and while the soldiers walked, the waves rolled in to the beach and crashed upon the sand one by one at this final end of their journey. The waves rolled and rolled and there was no end to the power of them, cold enough to wake a young girl from dreams, loud enough to tell and retell the future. I bent my head and I kissed Charlie on the forehead. He stared at me.
“Udo?” he said.
“Yes, Charlie?”
“I is going to take off mine Batman costume now.”
The soldiers were almost on us.
“Hurry then, Charlie,” I whispered.
Charlie pulled off the mask first, and the local children gasped when they saw his blond hair’. Their curiosity was greater than their fear of the soldiers and they ran with their skinny legs straining towards the place where we were, and then when Charlie took off the rest of his costume and they saw his skinny white body they said, Weh! because such a child had never before been seen in that place. And then Charlie laughed, and he slipped out from my arms and I stood, up and stayed very still. Behind me I felt the soft shocks of the soldiers’ boots in the sand and in front of me all of the local children ran with Charlie down to the crashing water by the rocky point. I felt the hard hand of a soldier on my arm but I did not turn around. I smiled and I watched Charlie running away with the children, with his head down and his happy arms spinning like propellers, and I cried with joy when the children all began to play together in the sparkling foam of the waves that broke between worlds at the point. It was beautiful, and that is a word I would not need to explain to the girls from back home, and I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language. The waves still smashed against the beach, furious and irresistible. But me, I watched all of those children smiling and ‘dancing and splashing each other in salt water and bright sunlight, and I laughed and laughed and laughed until the sound of the sea was drowned.
Notes
Thank you for reading this story. The characters in it are imagined, although the action takes place in a reality which is intended to call to mind our own.
The ‘Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre’ in the text does not exist in the real world, although some of its particulars would seem familiar to the thousands of asylum seekers detained in the ten real immigration removal centres↓ which are operational in the United Kingdom at the time of writing, since they are based on the testimony of former interns of these places.
Source: Home Office UK Border Agency; see http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/managinRborders/immigjationremovalcentres/
Similarly, the beach on which Sarah and Little Bee first meet in the novel is not intended to correspond to any specific location in Nigeria, although the inter-ethnic and oil-related conflicts from which Little Bee is fleeing are real and ongoing in the Delta region of that country, which at the time of writing is the world’s eighth-biggest petroleum-exporting nation↓.
Source: US Energy Information Administration, “Top World Oil Net Exporters 2006”
In the period leading up to the writing of this novel, Nigeria was the second-biggest African exporter of asylum applicants to the U
nited Kingdom↓.
Source: UK Office for National Statistics, “Applications received for asylum in the United Kingdom, excluding dependants, by nationality, 1994 to 2002”
Jamaica is an order of magnitude less significant as a point of origin of asylum seekers, although during the same period between one hundred and one thousand Jamaicans each year sought asylum in the United Kingdom↓.
Source: Ibid
Occasionally in the novel, real-world elements have been introduced into the text which I hereby acknowledge. (If I have unintentionally missed some, I hope I will be forgiven). The novel begins with a quotation, complete with the original typo, from the UK Home Office publication ‘Life in the United Kingdom’, ISBN 0113413025, fifth impression 2005. ‘However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again’ is taken from www.motherlandnigeria.com. The Ave Maria in the Ibo language is taken from the Christus Rex et Redemptor Mundi website at www.christusrex.org.
The rather brilliant line ‘We do not see how anybody can abuse an excess of sanitary towels’ is taken verbatim from the transcript of the Bedfordshire County Council special report of 18th July 2002 into the fire at the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre on 14th February 2002, where it is attributed to Loraine Bayley of the Campaign to Stop Arbitrary Detention at Yarl’s Wood.
I have tried, with whatever success the reader will judge, to make the characters’ speech patterns plausible. For the most part my work is based on close listening, although some Nigerian English idioms are from A Dictionary of Nigerian English [Draft] by Roger Blench and A Dictionary of Nigerian English Usage by Herbert Igboanusi, Enicrownfit Publishers, 1 Jan 2001, some Jamaican English idioms are from A Dictionary of Jamaican English by F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page, University of the West Indies Press, 31 Jan 2002, and some four-year-old English idioms are from my son, Batman.
Details of the UK immigration detention system were provided by Christine Bacon, who was very patient with me. Her direction of Asylum Monologues with the Actors for Refugees groups in the UK and Australia was an inspiration for this project. Christine also kindly read my manuscript and disabused me of some of my misconceptions. For those interested I recommend her eye-opening working paper for the University of Oxford Refugee Studies Centre, The Evolution of Immigration Detention in the UK: The Involvement of Private Prison Companies, at www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/PDFs/RSCworkingpaper27.pdf
(If this or other links stop working, the documents will be available from my website at www.chriscleave.com).
Background on the medical and social aspects of immigration and asylum was provided by Dr Mina Fazel, Bob Hughes and Teresa Hayter—original interviews with them can be found on my website.
The novel’s hits are down to the kind people who helped me; the misses are all mine.
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Notes
