by Chris Cleave
“Oh shit, the police,” he said.
“What?”
He shook his head.
“Never mind.”
Lawrence ran off. I began shouting again for Charlie. I called and called, while the tourists stared, and the breeze left me shivering in my wet jeans. At first I called out Charlie’s name as a sound for him to home in on, but as my voice began to go I realized that another line had been crossed and I was shouting the name just to hear it, to ensure its continuing existence. I realized that the name was all I had in the world.
Then a voice came from behind me. It was Lawrence.
“Sarah?” he said. “It’s okay. I found him.”
Lawrence held Charlie in his arms. My son was filthy, and his bat cape hung straight down, heavy with water. I ran to him, took him into my arms and held him. I pressed my face into his neck and I breathed in his smell, the sharp salt of his sweat and the sewer tang of the dirt. The tears streamed down my face.
“Charlie,” I whispered. “Oh my world, my whole world.”
“Get off, Mummy! You’re squashing me!”
“Where were you?”
Charlie held out his hands to the sides, palms upward, and answered me as if I was simple.
“In mine bat cave.”
Lawrence grinned and pointed at the wall of the embankment.
“He was right inside one of those drainage pipes.”
“Oh Charlie. Didn’t you hear us all shouting? Didn’t you see us all looking for you?”
Charlie grinned beneath his bat mask.
“I was hiding,” he said.
“Why? Why didn’t you come out? Couldn’t you see how worried we all were?”
My son looked forlornly at the ground. “Lawrence and Bee was all cross and they wasn’t playing with me. So I went into mine bat cave.”
“Oh Charlie. Mummy’s been so confused. So terribly silly and selfish. I promise you, Charlie, I’ll never be so silly again. You’re my whole world, you know that? I’ll never forget that again. Do you know how much you mean to me?”
Charlie blinked at me, sensing an opportunity.
“Can I have an ice cream?” he said.
I hugged my son. I felt his warm, sleepy breath on my neck, and through the thin gray fabric of his costume I felt the gentle, insistent pressure of the bones beneath his skin.
I looked up at Lawrence and I said, Thank you.
eleven
THE POLICEMEN CAME AFTER five minutes. There were three of them. They came slowly, in a silver car with bright blue and orange stripes along the sides and a long bar of lights on the roof. They pushed through the crowds on the walkway and they stopped beside the steps that led down to the sand. They got out of the car and they put on their hats. They were wearing white short-sleeved shirts and thick black vests with a black-and-white checkered stripe. The vests had many pockets, and in them there were batons and radios and handcuffs and other things I could not guess the names of. I was thinking, Charlie would like this. These policemen have more gadgets than Batman.
If I was telling this story to the girls from back home, I would have to explain to them that the policemen of the United Kingdom did not carry guns.
—Weh! No pistol?
—No pistol.
—Weh! That is one topsy-turvy kingdom, where the girls can show their bobbis but the police cannot show their guns.
And I would have to nod and tell them again, Much of my life in that country was lived in such confusion.
The policemen slammed the police-car doors behind them: thunk. I shivered. When you are a refugee, you learn to pay attention to doors. When they are open; when they are closed; the particular sound they make; the side of them that you are on. I wanted to run. Instead I held my hands out to the policemen. I said, Here is the place.
One of the policemen came close while the other two ran down the steps. The policeman who came, he was not much older than me I think. He was tall, with orange hair under his hat. I tried to smile at him, but I couldn’t. My heart was beating, beating. I was scared that my Queen’s English would fail me. Then the most wonderful thing happened. The policeman’s radio buzzed and crackled and a voice came from it, and the voice said: THE CHILD HAS BEEN FOUND. I gave a smile like the sun, but the policeman did not. My smile faded.
If this policeman began to suspect me, he could call the immigration people. Then one of them would click a button on their computer and mark a check box on my file and I would be deported. I would be dead, but no one would have fired any bullets. I realized, this is why the police do not carry guns. In a civilized country, they kill you with a click. The killing is done far away, at the heart of the kingdom in a building full of computers and coffee cups.
I stared at the policeman. He did not have a cruel face. He did not have a kind face either. He was young and he was pale and there were no lines on his face. He was nothing yet. He looked like an egg. This policeman, if he opened the door of the police car and made me get inside, then to him it was only the inside of a car he was showing me. But I would see things he could not see in it. I would see the bright red dust on the seats. I would see the old dried cassava tops that had blown into the foot wells. I would see the white skull on the dashboard and the jungle plants growing through the rusted cracks in the floor and bursting through the broken windscreen. For me, that car door would swing open and I would step out of England and straight back into the troubles of my country. This is what they mean when they say, It is a small world these days.
The policeman looked at me with no expression.
“What is your relationship to the person who was reported as missing?”
“It is not important.”
“It’s procedure, madam.”
He took a step toward me and I stepped back, I could not help myself.
“You seem unusually nervous of me, madam.”
He said this very calmly, looking into my eyes all the time.
“Your name,” he said. “Now.”
I stood up as straight and tall as I could, and I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them again I looked at the policeman very coldly and I spoke with the voice of Queen Elizabeth the Second.
“How dare you?” I said.
It almost, almost worked. The policeman took half a step back, as if I had hit him. He looked down at the ground and he blushed, just for one second. But then I saw the strength come back into his face.
That is when I ran.
My story is not like the movie I told you about, The Man Who Was in a Great Hurry. I did not have a motorbike to escape on, or a plane that I could fly upside down. In my mind I saw how I would escape through the crowds, with the policeman chasing after me and shouting, Stop that girl! I would run across the road and the brakes of the cars would scream and their horns would hoot and a fat man would shout, Whaddayathinkyadoin?, and then I would be running, running, and of course there would be a seller of brightly colored fruits, and his apples and his oranges would spill all over the road, and there would be two men carrying a big sheet of glass, and I would roll under it and the policemen would crash through it and then I would get away and think to myself, Phew! That was a close one.
That is how the story went in my head. But in my life, the chase was not so good. My legs started to run and the policeman reached out his hand and grabbed hold of my arm, and that was it. If my life was a movie, it did not have a good chase scene. The audience would grumble, and throw popcorn, and say to one another, That foolish African girl did not even make it to the edge of the screen.
The policeman opened the back door of the police car and he made me sit down. He left the door open while he talked into his radio. He was thin, with pale slim wrists and a little potbelly, like the detention officer who was on duty on the morning they released us. The police car smelled of nylon and cigarettes.
“If we could just start with your name.”
I felt very sad. I knew it was all over for me now. I could not give the po
liceman my real name, because then they would find out what I was. But I did not have a false name to give him either. Jennifer Smith, Alison Jones—none of these names are real when you have no documents to go with them. Nothing is true unless there is a screen that says it is, somewhere in that building full of computers and coffee cups, right at the exact center of the United Kingdom. I sat up very straight in the backseat of the police car, and I took a breath and I looked the policeman straight in the eye.
“My name is Little Bee.”
“Spell that for me please?”
“L-I-T-T-L-E-B-E-E.”
“And is that a first name or a surname, madam?”
“It is my whole name. That is who I am.”
The policeman sighed, then he turned away and spoke into his radio.
“Sierra Four to control,” he said, “send out a unit, will you? I’ve got one to bring in for fingerprints. Probably a nutter.”
He turned back to me, and he was not smiling anymore.
“Wait here,” he said.
He closed the car door. I sat for a long time. Without the breeze it was very hot in the back of the police car. I waited there until another set of policemen came and took me away. They put me into a van. I watched Sarah and Lawrence and Charlie disappearing in the back window, through a metal grille. Lawrence had his arm around Sarah, and she was leaning against him.
Sarah and Lawrence came to visit me that night. I was in a holding cell at the police station in Vauxhall. The police guard, he banged open the door without knocking and Sarah walked in. Sarah was carrying Charlie. He was asleep in her arms with his head resting on her shoulder. I was so happy to see Charlie safe, I cried. I kissed Charlie on the cheek. He twitched in his sleep, and he sighed. Through the holes in his bat mask, I could see that he was smiling in his sleep. That made me smile too.
Outside the cell, Lawrence was arguing with a police officer.
“This is a bit excessive, isn’t it? They shouldn’t deport her. She has a home to go to. She has a sponsor.”
“They’re not my rules, sir. The immigration people are a law unto themselves.”
“But surely you can give us a bit of time to make a case. I work for the Home Office, I can get an appeal together.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, if I worked for the Home Office and I knew all along this lady was illegal, I’d keep my mouth shut.”
And this, exactly, is what Lawrence did. I did not hear his voice after that.
The guard looked into the cell. “You’ve got five minutes, that’s all,” he said.
Sarah was crying. “I won’t let them do it,” she whispered. “I’ll find a way. I won’t let them send you back.”
I tried very hard to smile.
“Maybe you should not make a fuss. It would not be good for Lawrence, I think.”
Sarah pressed her face down to the top of Charlie’s head, and she breathed in his smell.
“Maybe Lawrence is going to have to look after himself,” she whispered.
I shook my head. “Sarah,” I said. “I do not deserve your help. You do not know everything about me.”
“I think I know enough.”
“Please listen, Sarah. I was there when Andrew killed himself.”
“What?”
“Yes. And, if I tried harder, I think I could have saved him.”
There was a long silence between us. The only sound was Charlie breathing in and out in his sleep.
The guard came into the cell. “Time’s up,” he said. “Come on please madam, we need to lock up for the night.”
On the concrete floor of the cell I saw a tear splash, and I looked up into Sarah’s face.
“You know what the worst thing is?” she said. “If I had tried harder, I suppose I could have saved Andrew too.”
When she went, the cell door closed behind her with a noise like the boom of thunder on the first day of the rainy season.
They came for me at four o’clock in the morning. There were three uniformed immigration officers, one woman and two men. I heard their shoes banging on the linoleum of the corridor. I had been awake all night, waiting for them. I was still wearing the summer dress that Sarah had given me, with the pretty lace around the neck. I stood up, so I was waiting for them when they banged open the door. We walked out of the cell. The door closed behind me. Boom, went the door, and that was it. Out in the street it was raining. They put me in the back of a van. The road was wet and the headlights pushed streaks of light along it. One of the back windows was half open. The back of the van had a smell of vomit, but the air that blew in smelled of London. All along the streets the windows of the apartments were silent and blind, with their curtains closed. I disappeared without anyone to see me go. The female officer handcuffed me to the back of the seat in front.
“It is not necessary to handcuff me,” I said. “How could I run away?”
The female officer looked back at me. She was surprised.
“You speak pretty good English,” she said. “Most of the people we bring in don’t speak a word.”
“I thought if I learned to speak like you people do, I would be able to stay.”
The officer smiled.
“It doesn’t matter how you talk, does it?” she said. “You’re a drain on resources. The point is you don’t belong here.”
The van turned the corner at the end of the street. I looked through the metal grille on the back window of the van and I watched two long rows of semidetached houses disappear. I thought about Charlie, fast asleep under his duvet, and I thought of his brave smile, and my heart ached that I would never see him again. There were tears in my eyes.
“But please, what does it mean?” I said. “What does it mean, to belong here?”
The female officer turned to look at me again.
“Well, you’ve got to be British, haven’t you? You’ve got to share our values.”
I turned away from the woman and looked out at the rain.
Three days later a different group of officers took me from another holding cell and they put me in a minibus with one other girl. They took us to Heathrow Airport. They took us straight through the queue at the airport terminal and they put us in a small room. We were all wearing handcuffs. They told us to sit down on the floor—there were no chairs there. There were twenty others in the room, men and women, and it was very hot in there. There was no fresh air and it was difficult to breathe. A guard was standing at the front of the room. She had a truncheon and a can of pepper spray in her belt. I asked her, What is happening here? The guard smiled. She said, What is happening here is that a large number of flying machines that we call AEROPLANES are taking off and landing on a long stretch of tarmac that we call a RUNWAY, because this is a place that we call an AIRPORT, and soon one of those aeroplanes is going to set off for UM-BONGO LAND, where you come from, and you’re going to be on it. Yeah? Whether you like it or bloody not. Now, has anyone else got any questions?
We waited for a long time. Some of the others were taken out of the room. One of them cried. Another, a thin man, he was angry. He tried to resist the guard, and she hit him twice in the stomach with her truncheon. After that he was quiet.
I fell asleep sitting down. When I woke up, I saw a purple dress and long brown legs in front of me.
“Yevette!” I said.
The woman turned around to look at me, but it was not Yevette. At first I was sad not to see my friend, and then I understood that I was happy. If this was not Yevette, then there was a chance that Yevette was still free. I thought of her walking down the street in London, in her purple flip-flops with her eyebrows painted in pencil, buying a pound of salt fish and laughing, WU-ha-ha-ha! into the bright blue sky. And I smiled.
The woman who was not Yevette, she made an angry face at me. What is wrong with you? she said. You think they are sending us on holiday?
I smiled. Yes, I said. I think it will be the holiday of a lifetime.
You should not joke about th
ese things. She turned around and she would not talk to me anymore, and when they called her to stand up for her flight, she walked away without making any trouble and she did not once look back at me.
When I saw her go, my situation became real for me and I was scared now, for the first time. I was scared of going back. I cried and I watched my own tears soaking away into the dirty brown carpet.
They gave us no food or water, and I became faint. After a few more hours they came for me. They walked me straight onto the aeroplane. The other passengers, the paying passengers, they made them stand back while I went first up the aeroplane steps. Everybody was staring at me. They took me to the back of the aeroplane, to the last row of seats before the toilets. They put me in the seat next to the window and a guard sat down beside me, a big man with a shaved head and a gold earring. He wore a blue Nike T-shirt and black Adidas trousers. He took off my handcuffs, and I rubbed my wrists to bring the blood back into my hands.
“Sorry,” said the man. “I don’t like this shit any more than you do.”
“Then why do you do it?”
The man shrugged and did up his seat belt.
“It’s a job, isn’t it?” he said.
He pulled a magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him, and opened it up. There were men’s wristwatches there for sale, and also a fluffy model of the aeroplane that could be given to children.
“You should do a different job, if you do not like this one.”
“No one chooses this job, love. I don’t have qualifications, do I? I used to do laboring, casual, but you can’t compete with the Polskis now. The Poles will do a full day’s work for a kind word and a packet of fags. So here I am, chaperoning girls like you on the holiday of a lifetime. Waste, really, isn’t it? I bet you’re more employable than I am. You should be escorting me, really, shouldn’t you? Back to this place we’re going, whatever the name of it is again.”
“Nigeria.”
“Yeah, that was it. Hot there, is it?”
