by Chris Cleave
Sarah shook her head. She was biting her nails.
“Everyone in my village liked U2,” I said. “Everyone in my country, maybe. Wouldn’t that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks. I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music. Do you know what? The first week I was in the detention center, U2 were number one here too. That is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.”
Sarah twisted her hands together on the table. She looked at me. Are you all right to go on? she said. Can you tell me how you got away?
I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “The guards were tapping their boots to the music. They rolled the body onto a sheet. They picked up the sheet by the corners and they lifted it into the truck. I thought I should run out to them and ask them to help me. But I was scared, so I stayed where I was. The soldiers drove back down the beach, and then it was very quiet again. When it was sunset I decided I did not want to go to the hotel compound. I was too scared of the soldiers, so I walked the other way. There were fruit bats flying all around. I waited till it was dark before I went past the place where they killed my sister. There was no moonlight, there was only a blue glow from the small creatures in the sea. Sometimes there was a freshwater stream that ran down the beach where I could drink. I walked all night and when it got light I went back into the jungle. I found a red fruit to eat. I did not know its name but I was hungry. It was bitter and I was very sick. I was very scared the men would come and find me again. When I had to go to the toilet I buried my excrement so that I would not leave any traces. Every noise I heard, I thought it was the men coming back. I said to myself, Little Bee, the men are coming to tear your wings off. It was like this for two more nights and on the last night I came to a port. There were red and green lights flashing out in the sea, and there was a long concrete seawall. I walked all along the top of the wall. There were waves crashing all over me, but there were no guards. Near the end of the seawall, on the land side, there were two ships tied up next to each other. The near one had an Italian flag. The other one was British, so I climbed over the Italian ship to get to it. I went down into the cargo hold. It was easy to find it because there were signs written in English. And English, you know, it is the official language of my country.”
I stopped talking then, and I looked down at the tablecloth. Sarah came around to my side of the table and she sat on the chair beside me and she hugged me for a long time. Then we sat there holding our cold cups of tea. I rested my head on Sarah’s shoulder. Outside, the day grew a little brighter. We did not say anything. After a short time I heard footsteps on the stairs, and then Charlie came into the kitchen. Sarah wiped her eyes and took a deep breath and quickly sat up straight. Charlie was wearing his Batman costume, but without the mask and without the belt that he kept his Batman tools in. It did not look as if he was expecting trouble, that morning. When he saw me he blinked. He was surprised that I was still there, I think. He rubbed his eyes sleepily and pressed the top of his head against his mother’s side.
“Itch till sleep eat I’m,” he said.
“Excuse me Batman?” said Sarah.
“I said, it’s still sleepy time. Why is you awake?”
“Well, Mummy and Little Bee woke up early this morning.”
“Mmm?”
“We had a lot to catch up on.”
“Mmm?”
“Oh god, Batman, is it that you don’t understand, or you don’t agree?”
“Mmm?”
“Oh, I see, darling, you are like a little bat with its sonar. You’ll keep sending out those Mmms until one of them bounces off something solid, won’t you?”
“Mmm?”
Charlie stared at his mother. She looked back at him for a while, and then she turned and smiled at me. Her tears were starting to flow again.
“Charlie has extraordinary eyes, doesn’t he? They’re like ecosystems in aspic.”
“No they isn’t,” said Charlie.
Sarah laughed. “Well darling, what I mean is, anyone can see there’s a lot going on in there.”
She tapped the side of Charlie’s head.
“Hmm,” said Charlie. “Why is you crying, Mummy?”
Sarah gave one big sob and then waved it away. “It’s why are you, Charlie, not why is you,” she said.
“Why are you crying, Mummy?”
Sarah collapsed. It was as if all the strength went out of her bones. She sank down so that her head rested on her arms on the tabletop and she wept.
“Oh, Charlie,” she said. “Mummy is crying because Mummy drank four G and Ts last night. Mummy is crying because of something Mummy has been trying not to think about. I’m so sorry, Charlie. Mummy is too grown up to feel very much anymore, and so when she does, it catches her by surprise.”
“Mmm?” said Charlie.
“Oh Charlie!” said Sarah.
She opened her arms and Charlie climbed up onto her lap and they hugged. It was not right for me to be there with them, so I went out into the garden and I sat down beside the fishpond. I thought about my sister for a long time.
Later, when the sun was higher in the sky and the noise of the traffic on the roads had grown into a constant rumble, Sarah came out into the garden to find me.
“Sorry,” she said. “I had to take Charlie to nursery.”
“It’s okay.”
She sat down next to me and she put her hand on my shoulder. “How are you feeling?”
I shrugged. “Okay,” I said.
Sarah smiled, but it was a sad smile. “I don’t know what to say,” she said.
“I do not know either.”
We sat there and we watched a cat rolling on the grass on the other side of the garden, in a bright patch of sunshine.
“That cat looks happy,” I said.
“Mmm,” said Sarah. “It’s the neighbor’s.”
I nodded. Sarah took a deep breath.
“Look, do you want to stay here for a while?” she said.
“Here? With you?”
“Yes. With me and Charlie.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I do not know. I am illegal, Sarah. The men can come any minute to send me back to my country.”
“Why did they let you out of the detention center, if you’re not allowed to stay?”
“They made a mistake. If you look good or you talk good, sometimes they make mistakes for you.”
“But you’re free now. They couldn’t just come for you, Bee. This isn’t Nazi Germany. There must be some procedure we can go through. Some appeal. I can tell them what happened to you over there. What will happen to you if you go back.”
I shook my head. “They will tell you Nigeria is a safe country, Sarah. People like me, they can just come and drive us straight to the airport.”
“I’m sure we can work something out, Bee. I edit a magazine. I know people. We could kick up a stink.”
I looked at the ground. Sarah smiled. She put her hand on my hand.
“You’re young, Bee. You don’t know how the world works yet. All you’ve seen is trouble, so you think trouble is all you’re going to get.”
“You have seen trouble too, Sarah. You are making a mistake if you think it is unusual. I am telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.”
Sarah flinched, as if something had struck her face.
“What is it?” I said.
She held her head in her hands. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s silly.”
I could not think of anything to say. I looked all around her garden for something to kill myself with, in case the men suddenly came. There was a shed at the far end of the garden, with a large garden fork leaning against it. That is a fine implement, I thought. If the men suddenly come, I will run with that fork and I will throw myself onto those sharp shining points.
I dug my nails into the soil of the flower bed beside us, and
I squeezed the sticky soil between my fingers.
“What are you thinking, Bee?”
“Mmm?”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Oh. Cassava.”
“Why cassava?”
“In my village we grew cassava. We planted it and watered it and when it was high—like this—we plucked its leaves so that the growing would go into the root, and when it was ready we dug it up and peeled it and grated it and pressed it and fermented it and fried it and mixed it with water and made paste out of it and ate it and ate it and ate it. When I slept at night I dreamed of it.”
“What else did you do?”
“Sometimes we played on a rope swing.”
Sarah smiled. She looked away into the garden.
“There isn’t much cassava round here,” she said. “Tons of clematis. Plenty of camellias.”
I nodded. “Cassava would not grow in this soil.”
Sarah smiled, but she was crying at the same time. I held her hand. There were tears running down her face.
“Oh Bee,” she said. “I feel so bloody guilty.”
“This is not your fault, Sarah. I lost my parents and my sister. You have lost your husband. Both of us have lost.”
“I didn’t lose Andrew, Bee. I destroyed him. I cheated on him with another man. That’s the only reason we were in bloody Nigeria in the first place. We thought we needed a holiday. To patch things up. You see?”
I just shrugged my shoulders. Sarah sighed.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve never taken a holiday.”
I looked down at my hands. “Actually, I have never taken a man.”
Sarah blinked. “Yes. Of course. I forget you’re so young, sometimes.”
We sat still for a minute. Sarah’s mobile telephone rang. She talked. When the call was finished she looked very tired.
“That was the nursery. They want me to go and pick up Charlie. He’s been fighting with the other children. They say he’s out of control.” She bit her lip. “He’s never done that before.”
She picked up her telephone again and pressed some buttons. She held the telephone up to her ear while she looked over my shoulder, over the garden. She was still chewing her lip. After a few seconds, there was the sound of another telephone ringing. It was a small, distant sound, from inside the house. Sarah’s face went still. Then, slowly, she took the telephone down from her ear and pressed one of its buttons. From the house, the sound of the other telephone stopped.
“Oh Jesus,” said Sarah. “Oh no.”
“What? What is it?”
Sarah took a deep breath. Her whole body shuddered.
“I called Andrew. I don’t know why. It was completely automatic, I didn’t even think. You know … if there’s a problem with Charlie, I always call Andrew. I just forgot he was … you know. Oh god. I’m really losing it. I thought I was ready, you know, to hear what happened to you … and your sister. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t ready for it. Oh god.”
We sat there and I held her hand while she cried. Afterward, she passed her telephone to me. She pointed at the screen.
“He’s still in my address book. Do you see?”
The screen of her telephone said ANDREW, and then a number. Just ANDREW—there was no surname.
“Will you delete him for me, Bee? I can’t do it.”
I held her telephone in my hands. I had seen people speaking on mobile phones, but I always thought they would be very complicated. You will laugh at me—there she goes again, that silly little girl with the smell of tea in her skin and the stains of cassava tops still on her fingers—but I always thought there would be a frequency to find. I thought you would have to turn some dial until you found the signal of your friend, very small and faint, like tuning in to the BBC World Service on a windup radio. I supposed that mobile telephones were difficult like this. You would turn the dial through all the hissing and the squeaking sounds, and first you would hear your friend’s voice very strange and thin and nearly drowned out by howling—like your friend had been squashed as flat as a biscuit and dropped into a metal box full of monkeys—but then you would turn the dial just one tiny fraction more and suddenly your friend would say something like, God save the Queen!, and tell you all about the weather in the shipping areas around the offshore waters of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. After that, you could talk.
But actually I discovered that it was much easier than this to use a mobile telephone. Everything is so easy in your country. Next to the name, ANDREW, there was a thing that said OPTIONS, and I pressed it. Option three was DELETE, so I pressed that, and Andrew O’Rourke was gone.
“Thank you,” said Sarah. “I just couldn’t do it myself.”
She looked down at her phone for a long time.
“I feel so bloody frightened, Bee. There’s no one to call. Andrew was absolutely unbearable sometimes but he was always so sensible. I suppose it was crazy of me, to send Charlie straight back to the nursery, after yesterday. But I thought it would be good for him, to get back into the routine. There’s no one to ask anymore, Bee. Do you understand? I don’t know if I can do this on my own. Make all the right decisions for Charlie on my own. Years of it, do you see? The right behavior, the right schools, the right friends, the right university, the right wife. Oh god, poor old Charlie.”
I put my hand on her hand.
“If you want, I can come to the nursery with you,” I said.
Sarah tilted her head and looked at me for a long time. Then she smiled.
“Not dressed like that,” she said.
Ten minutes later I left the house with Sarah. I was wearing a pink summer dress she lent me. It was the prettiest thing I had ever worn. Around the neck it had fine white flowers stitched in, very delicate and fancy. I felt like the Queen of England. It was a sunny morning and there was a cool breeze and I skipped along the pavement behind Sarah and every time we passed a cat or a postman or a woman pushing a pram I smiled and I said, How do you do? All of them looked at me like I was a crazy girl, I do not know why. I was thinking, That is no way to greet your monarch.
I did not like the nursery. It was in a big house with tall windows, but the windows were not open even though it was a fine day. Inside, the air was stuffy. It smelled of toilets and poster paint, and this was exactly the smell of the therapy room in the immigration detention center, so I was feeling sad from the memory. In the detention center they did not open the windows because the windows did not open. In the therapy room they gave us poster paints and brushes and they told us we must express ourselves. I used a lot of red paint. When the therapeutic assistant looked at what I painted, she said it would be good for me to try to move on. I said, yes madam, it will be my pleasure. If you will just open a little window for me, or even better a door, I will be happy to move on right away. I smiled, but the therapeutic assistant did not think it was a good joke.
In Charlie’s nursery, the play leader did not think I was a good joke either. I knew she was the play leader because she had a badge on her green apron that said PLAY LEADER. She stared at me but she did not speak to me, she spoke to Sarah. She said, I’m sorry, we can’t have visitors, it’s policy. Is this the child’s carer? Sarah looked at me and then she turned back to the play leader. She said, Look, it’s complicated, okay? The play leader frowned. Finally she let me stand by the door while Sarah went into the room and tried to calm Charlie.
Poor Charlie. They had made him take off his Batman costume—that was what had started it. They had made him take it off because he had urinated in it. They wanted him to be clean, but Charlie did not want to be clean. He preferred to be stinking in his black mask and cape than to smell fresh in the white cotton overall they had put him in. His face was red and dirty with poster paint and tears. He was howling with rage. When anyone came near him he hit at them, with his small fists banging into their knees. He bit and he scratched and he screamed. He stood with his back pressed into the corner.
He faced out into the room and he screamed, NO NO NO NO NO!
Sarah went up to him. She knelt down so her face was close to his. She said, Oh darling. Charlie stopped shouting. He looked at Sarah. His bottom lip trembled. Then his jaw became firm again. He leaned toward his mother, and he spat. He said, GO AWAY I WANT MY DADDY!
They were making the other children sit cross-legged on the floor, in the far corner of the room. They were having story time. The other children were facing away from Charlie’s corner, but they kept wriggling around to look over their shoulders with pale, scared faces. A woman was reading them the story. She wore blue jeans and white trainers and a turquoise sweatshirt. She was saying, and Max tamed them by the trick of TURN AROUND AND FACE FRONT, CAITLIN by the trick of staring straight into their eyes and saying EMMA, PLEASE CONCENTRATE, JAMES, STOP WHISPERING of staring straight into their eyes and saying WILL YOU FACE FRONT, OLLIE, THERE’S NOTHING GOING ON BEHIND YOU.
Sarah knelt on the floor and she wiped Charlie’s spit off her cheek. She was crying. She was holding her arms out to Charlie. Charlie turned around and hid his face in the corner. The woman reading the story was saying, be still.
I went toward Sarah. The play leader gave me a look which meant, I told you to stay by the door. I gave her a look back which meant, How dare you? It was a very good look. I learned it from Queen Elizabeth the Second, on the back of the British five-pound note. The play leader took one step back and I went up to Sarah. I touched her on the shoulder.
