The Other Hand/Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

  “Oh, of course I will. You and me, we’ve got plenty of time, haven’t we? We’ll still be here in six weeks, six months, six years. We’ve got time to work this out. We’ve got time to work out how to be together, now that Andrew’s gone. But Little Bee doesn’t have that time. You said it yourself. If I can’t fix things for her, they’ll find her and they’ll deport her. And she’ll be gone, and that will be that. And what sort of a future would we have then? I wouldn’t be able to look at you without thinking I should have done more to save her. Is that the future you want us to have?”

  “Oh god. Why can’t you be like other people and just not give a shit?”

  “Leggy blonde, likes music and movies, seeks solvent man for friendship and maybe more?”

  “All right. I’m glad you’re not one of them. But I don’t want to lose you to a refugee girl who’s really got no hope of staying here anyway.”

  “Oh, Lawrence. You’re not going to lose me. But you might have to share me with her for a while.”

  Lawrence laughed.

  “What?” I said.

  “Well it’s just typical, isn’t it? These immigrants, they come over here, they take our women…”

  Lawrence was smiling but there was a guardedness is his eyes, an opaqueness that made me wonder how funny he found his own joke. It was strange, to feel uncertain like this with him. Truly, he had never seemed at all complicated before. Then again, I realized, I had never invested anything complicated in him until now. Perhaps it was me. I made myself relax, and I smiled back. I kissed him on the forehead.

  “Thank you. Thank you for not making this harder than it is.”

  Lawrence stared at me, and his face was thin and sad in the orange glow of the streetlamps filtering in through the yellow silk blinds. The flutter in my stomach surprised me, and I realized that the hairs on my arms were up.

  “Sarah,” he said, “I honestly don’t think you know how hard this is.”

  seven

  VERY EARLY THE NEXT morning, Sarah looked into my room.

  “I’m glad you’re awake,” she said. “We’ve run out of milk for Charlie’s breakfast, so I’m popping down to the shop before he wakes up. Two minutes. Do you want to come?”

  It was raining, so we went in Sarah’s car. The windscreen wipers squeaked across the glass. Sarah chewed her lip between her teeth.

  “Look,” she said. “Lawrence staying overnight. I realize it must look a bit sudden. So I wanted to have this chat with you. I just wanted you to understand.”

  I laughed. Sarah was surprised and she looked across at me.

  “It is not hard to understand,” I said. “We are all trying to be happy in this world. I am happy because I do not think the men will come to kill me today. You are happy because you can make your own choices. And Lawrence is your choice, right?”

  Sarah laughed and shook her head while she steered through the rain.

  “Well,” she said. “That was a lot easier than I thought it would be.”

  I smiled. It was good to see her laughing like this.

  I said to her, “I do not think you are wrong for living the life you were born in. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf, that is the proverb in my country.”

  “That’s beautiful,” said Sarah.

  “Actually that is not the proverb in my country.”

  “No?”

  “No! Why would we have a proverb with wolves in it? We have two hundred proverbs about monkeys, three hundred about cassava. We talk about what we know. But I have noticed, in your country, I can say anything so long as I say that is the proverb in my country. Then people will nod their heads and look very serious.”

  Sarah laughed again.

  “That is a good trick,” she said. “Isn’t that what you say, Bee?”

  I smiled. Happiness for Sarah was a long future where she could live the life of her choice. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf and a bee must be a bee. And when they run out of milk, all God’s creatures must go to the shop.

  Sarah looked across at me from the driving seat.

  “Bless you for understanding,” she said.

  I understood, but Sarah’s happiness and Sarah’s future are more things I would have to explain to the girls from back home.

  A country’s future is found in its natural resources. It is my country’s biggest export. It leaves so quickly through our seaports, the girls from my village could never even see it and they could not know what it looked like. Actually the future looks like gasoline. I discovered this when I was reading the newspapers in the detention center, and finally I made sense of what had happened to me back home. What had happened was, the oil companies had discovered a huge reserve of the future underneath my village. To be precise what they discovered was crude oil, which is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.

  The men came while we were preparing the evening meal, while the blue wood smoke 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.

  On the dashboard of Sarah’s car, a light went on.

  “Oh,” she said. “We need petrol.”

  Water sprayed up off the rainy road. Sarah turned the car into a service station. We got out. There were no other cars. I listened to the rain beating down on the canopy above the gasoline pumps. Sarah looked at me as she held the gasoline hose.

  “Do you still want to stay?” she said.

  I nodded.

  The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high-pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it. The nozzle of the gasoline hose went right inside the fuel tank of Sarah’s car, so that the transfer of the fluid was hidden. I still do not know what gasoline truly looks like. If it looks the way it smells on a rainy morning, then I suppose it must flash like the most brilliant happiness, so intense that you would go blind or crazy if you even looked at it. Maybe that is why they do not let us see gasoline.

  When the filling was finished, Sarah went inside the service-station shop to pay. She came out with a large plastic bottle of milk, and we drove back to the house. It was still only six thirty in the morning.

  Sarah closed the front door behind us and she yawned.

  “Charlie won’t be up for an hour at least,” she said. “I think I might go back to bed.”

  I nodded. Sarah smiled. On her face was a look of relief. I realized: this is what you can do for her, Little Bee. You can understand.

  I went into the kitchen and I filled the kettle to make myself a drink of tea.

  Understanding. 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 tire, 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 where we chanted church songs from a hymnbook with the covers missing and the pages held together with tape. We knew what we had: we had nothing. Your world and our world had come to this understanding. Even the missionaries had boarded up their mission. They 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? We understood that this was the end of the story.

  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 from that one old movie. About a man who was in a great hurry, sometimes in jet planes and sometimes on motorbikes and sometimes upside do
wn.

  From the windup radios we had a little news, but mostly music. We also had a TV, but in Understanding there was no reception and you had to make the programs yourself. Our TV was just a 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 dreams of hers. In the pleasant afternoon shade we would gasp with delight and all of us would say, Weh!

  One of the good things about Understanding was that you could 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 ice cream 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. Early in the morning, after Sarah had gone back to bed when we came home from the service station, it was Charlie who wanted to turn the television on. He appeared in the kitchen in his bat costume and bare feet. I said, Good morning, little bat, 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 went into the next room and 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 around and Lawrence was there. He was wearing a bathrobe, 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 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 toward my hand. He sat down on the other side of the table, and smiled. The sun was lighting 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 harboring you.”

  I smiled. I thought about Sarah harboring me, as if I was a boat.

  Lawrence said, “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 offense 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. “If you understood how serious your situation is, I don’t think you’d 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 center. 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 t
oo. 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 frightening me, Lawrence.”

  “I’m reacting to the situation, that’s all. That’s what Andrew didn’t do. He was like a stuck record. He stuck to his principles and he let this thing with you overwhelm him and Sarah. That’s why he lost her.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t you have principles too?”

  Lawrence sat forward in his chair.

  “My principle is that I love Sarah. You can’t imagine what she means to me. Apart from her, my life is utterly mundane. I’ll do anything to keep Sarah. Anything, do you understand?”

  “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 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 center. 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 long time. Bad things happen in a Nigerian prison. If people ever get out, they do not feel like talking.”