Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

  Sarah looked up at me.

  “Oh god,” she said. “Poor Charlie, I don’t know what to do.”

  “What do you normally do when he is like this?”

  “I cope. I always cope. Oh god, Bee, I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’ve forgotten how to cope.”

  Sarah covered her face with her hands. The play leader took her away and sat her down.

  I went into the corner with Charlie. I stood next to him and I turned my face into the corner too. I did not look at him, I looked at the bricks and I did not say anything. I am good at looking at bricks and not saying anything. In the immigration detention center I did it for two years, and that is my record.

  I was thinking what I would do in that nursery room, if the men came suddenly. It was not an easy room, I am telling you. For example, there was nothing to cut yourself with. All the scissors were made of plastic and their ends were round and soft. If I suddenly needed to kill myself in that room, I did not know how I was going to do it.

  After a long time Charlie looked up at me. “What is you doing?” he said.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I am thinking how to escape from this place.”

  Silence. Charlie sighed. “They tooked mine Batman costume.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “Because of why I done a wee in my Batman costume.”

  I knelt down and looked into Charlie’s eyes. “We are the same, you and me. I spent two years in a place like this. They make us do the things we do not want. Does it make you cross?”

  Charlie nodded.

  I said, “It makes me cross too.”

  From behind us I could hear that the rest of the nursery was going back to its own business. Children were talking and shouting again, and the women were helping and laughing and scolding. In our corner, Charlie looked at the ground.

  “I want mine daddy,” he said.

  “Your daddy is dead, Charlie. Do you know what this means?”

  “Yes. In heaven.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s heaven?”

  “It is a place like this. Like a nursery, or a detention center, or a strange country far away. He wants to come home to you, but he can’t. Your daddy is like my daddy.”

  “Oh. Is yours daddy dead too?”

  “Yes Charlie. My daddy is dead and my mummy is dead and my sister is dead too. All of them are dead.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “The baddies got them, Charlie.”

  Charlie twisted his hands together and bent down to pick up a small scrap of red paper from the floor. He tore at it, and he put it on his tongue to see how it tasted, and then it got stuck on his fingers because of the dampness. He held his tongue between his teeth so he could concentrate on peeling the paper off his fingers. Then he looked up.

  “Is you sad like me?”

  I made my face go into a smile. “Do I look sad, Charlie?”

  Charlie looked at me. I tickled him under his arms and he started to laugh.

  “Do we look sad, Charlie? Hey? You and me? Are we sad now?”

  Charlie was laughing and wriggling finally, so I pulled him close to me and I looked in his eyes. “We are not going to be sad, Charlie. Not you and me. Especially not you, Charlie, because you are the luckiest boy in the world. You know why this is?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have a mama, Charlie, and she loves you, and that is something, no?”

  I gave Charlie a little push toward his mother and he ran to her. He buried his face against her dress and they hugged each other. Sarah was crying and smiling at the same time. She was speaking into Charlie’s ear, saying Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Then Charlie’s voice came, and it was muffled against his mother’s dress. He said, I’m NOT Charlie, Mummy, I’m Batman.

  Sarah looked at me over Charlie’s shoulder and she just said, Thank you, not making any sound but just moving her lips.

  We walked home from the nursery with Charlie swinging between us. The day was beautiful. The sun was hot and the air was buzzing with bees and the scent of flowers was everywhere. Beside the pavement there were the front gardens of the houses, full of soft colors. It was hard not to be full of hope.

  “I think I shall teach you the names of all of the English flowers,” said Sarah. “This is fuchsia, and this is a rose, and this is honeysuckle. What? What are you smiling about?”

  “There are no goats. That is why you have all these beautiful flowers.”

  “There were goats, in your village?”

  “Yes, and they ate all the flowers.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do not be sorry. We ate all the goats.”

  Sarah frowned. “Still,” she said. “I think I’d rather have honeysuckle.”

  “One day I will take you where I come from and you will eat only cassava for a week and then you will tell me if you would rather have honeysuckle or goat.”

  Sarah smiled and leaned over to smell the honeysuckle blossom. Now I saw that she was crying again.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Sarah. “I can’t seem to stop. Oh look at me, I’m all over the place.”

  Charlie looked up at his mother and I rubbed the top of his head to show him everything was okay. We started to walk again. Sarah blew her nose on a tissue. She said, “How long am I going to be like this, do you suppose?”

  “It was one year for me, after they killed my sister.”

  “Before you could think straight again?”

  “Before I could think at all. At first I was just running, running, running—getting away from where it happened, you know? Then there was the detention center. It was very bad. It is not possible to think clearly in there. You have not committed a crime, so all you can think of is, When will I be let out? But they tell you nothing. After a month, six months, you start to think, Maybe I will grow old in here. Maybe I will die here. Maybe I am already dead. For the first year all I could think about was killing myself. When everyone else is dead, sometimes you think it would be easier to join them, you know? But you have to move on. Move on, move on, they tell you. As if you are stubborn. As if you are chewing on their flowers like a goat. Move on, move on. At five P.M. they tell you to move on and at six P.M. they lock you back in your cell.”

  “Didn’t they give you any help at all in that place?”

  I sighed.

  “They tried to help us, you know? There were some good people. Psychiatrists, volunteers. But there was only so much they could do for us in there. One of the psychiatrists, she said to me, Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich. To be well in your mind you have first to be free, you see?”

  Sarah pressed the tissue into the corners of her eyes. “I’m not sure it’s easier out here, Bee.”

  “But I will help you.”

  Sarah smiled. “You’re sixteen years old, Bee. You’re a refugee. You’re an orphan, for god’s sake. I’m the one who ought to be helping you.”

  I pulled on Sarah’s shoulder to stop her. I took her left hand and I held it up to her. Charlie stood and looked up at us with big eyes.

  “Look, Sarah. You have helped me enough already. You cut off your own finger for me. You saved my life.”

  “I should have done more. I should have saved your sister too.”

  “How?”

  “I should have thought of something.”

  I shook my head. “You did everything you could, Sarah.”

  “But we should never have been in that situation, Bee. Don’t you see? We went on holiday to a place we had no right to be.”

  “And what if you had not been there, Sarah? If you and Andrew had not been there, then Nkiruka and me, we would both be dead.” I turned to Charlie. “Your mummy saved my life, did you know that? She saved me from the baddies.”

  Charlie looked up at his mother. “Lik
e Batman?” he said.

  Sarah smiled, the way I was used to now, with the tears starting to come to her eyes again. “Like Batmum.”

  “Is that why you isn’t got your one finger?”

  “Why I haven’t got one finger. Yes, darling.”

  “Did the baddies take it? The Penguin?”

  “No, darling.”

  “Was it the Puffin?”

  Sarah laughed.

  “Yes darling, it was that awful Puffin.”

  Charlie grinned. Naughty naughty Puffin, he said, and he ran ahead of us down the pavement, shooting baddies with a gun that was not visible to my eyes. Sarah turned to me.

  “Bless you,” she said.

  I held tight to her arm and I placed the palm of her left hand on the back of my left hand. I arranged my fingers underneath hers so that the only one of my fingers you could see was the one that was missing from Sarah’s hand. I saw how it could be. I saw how we could make a life again. I know it was crazy to think it but my heart was pounding, pounding, pounding.

  “I will help you,” I said. “If you want me to stay then this is how it will be between us. Maybe I will only be able to stay for one month, maybe only one week. Someday, the men will come. But while I am here I will be like your daughter. I will love you as if you were my mother and I will love Charlie as if he was my brother.”

  Sarah stared at me. “Goodness,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, it’s just that on the way home from the nursery, with the other mothers, we usually talk about potty training and cakes.”

  I dropped Sarah’s hand and I looked down at the ground.

  “Oh Bee, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all just a little bit sudden and a little bit serious, that’s all. I’m so confused. I need a bit more time to think.”

  I looked up at Sarah again. In her eyes I saw that it was new for her, this feeling of not knowing straightaway what to do. Her eyes were the eyes of a creature who has only just been born. Before it is familiar with its world, there is only terror. I knew this expression very well. Once you have seen as many people as I have being pushed in through the doors of the immigration detention center, it is easy to recognize this look. It made me want to remove that pain from Sarah’s life as quickly as I could.

  “I am sorry, Sarah. Please forget about it. I will leave. You see? The psychiatrist at the detention center was right, she could not do anything for me. I am still crazy.”

  Sarah did not say anything. She just held on to my arm and we followed Charlie down the street. Charlie was racing along and knocking the heads off the roses in the front gardens. He knocked them off with karate chops. They fell, each one with a sudden fall and a silent explosion of petals. Like my story with Nkiruka, like my story with Yevette. My feet crushed the petals as we passed over them, and I realized that my story was only made of endings.

  Back at the house, we sat in Sarah’s kitchen. We drank tea again and I wondered if it would be the last time. I closed my eyes. My village, my family, that disappearing taste. Everything vanishes and drains away into sand or mist. That is a good trick.

  When I opened my eyes again, Sarah was watching me.

  “You know, Bee, I was thinking about what you said, about you staying. About us helping each other. I think you’re right. Maybe it is time to be serious. Maybe these are serious times.”

  SERIOUS TIMES BEGAN ON a gray, ominous day in London. I wasn’t looking for serious. If I’m honest, I suppose I was looking for a bit of the other. Charlie was nearly two years old and I was emerging from the introverted, chrysalid stage of early motherhood. I fitted back into my favorite skirts. I felt like showing off my wings.

  I’d decided to spend a day in the field. The idea was to remind my editorial girls that it was possible to write a feature article all on one’s own. I hoped that by inspiring the staff to indulge in a little reportage, my commissioning budget would be spared. It was simply a question, I had told the office airily, of applying one’s pithy remarks sequentially to paper rather than scrawling them individually on sample boxes.

  Really I just wanted my staff to be happy. At their age I’d been fresh out of my journalism degree and intoxicated with the job. Exposing corruption, brandishing truth. How well it had suited me, that absolute license to march up to evildoers and demand who, what, where, when, and why? But now, standing in the lobby of the Home Office building in Marsham Street, waiting for a ten o’clock interview, I realized I wasn’t looking forward to it. Perhaps at twenty, one is naturally curious about life, but at thirty, simply suspicious of anyone who still has one. I clutched my brand-new notepad and Dictaphone in the hope that some of their youthful predisillusionment would rub off on me.

  I was angry with Andrew. I couldn’t focus. I didn’t even look the part of a reporter—my spiral notepad was virginal white. While I waited, I besmirched it with notes from a fictitious interview. Through the lobby of the Home Office building, the public sector shuffled past in its scuffed shoes, balancing its morning coffee on cardboard carry trays. The women bulged out of M&S trouser suits, wattles wobbling and bangles clacking. The men seemed limp and hypoxic—half-garroted by their ties. Everyone stooped, or scuttled, or nervously ticked. They carried themselves like weather presenters preparing to lower expectations for the bank-holiday weekend.

  I tried to concentrate on the article I wanted to write. An optimistic piece was what I needed; something bright and positive. Something absolutely unlike anything Andrew would write in his Times column, in other words. Andrew and I had been arguing. His copy was getting gloomier and gloomier. I think he had truly started to believe that Britain was sinking into the sea. Crime was spreading, schools were failing, immigration was creeping, and public morals were slipping. It seemed as if everything was seeping and sprawling and oozing, and I hated it. Now that Charlie was almost two I suppose I was looking into the future my child would have to inhabit, and realizing that bitching about it might possibly not be the most constructive strategy. Why do you always have to be so bloody negative? I asked Andrew. If the country really is on the slide, then why not write about the people who are doing something about it?

  —Oh yeah? Like whom?

  —Well, like the Home Office, for example. They’re the ones on the front line, after all.

  —Oh that’s genius Sarah, that really is. Because people really trust the Home Office, don’t they? And what will you call your fine uplifting piece?

  —You mean what’s my title? Well how about “The Battle for Britain”?

  I know, I know. Andrew exploded with laughter. We had a blazing row. I told him I was finally doing something constructive with my magazine. He told me I was finally growing out of my magazine’s demographic. Not only was I getting old, in other words, but everything I had worked on for the last decade was puerile. How almost surgically hurtful.

  I was still furious when I arrived at the Home Office building. Always the Surrey girl, aren’t you? That had been Andrew’s parting shot. What exactly do you require the Home Office to do about this bloody country, Sarah? Strafe the lowlifes with Spitfires? Andrew had a gift for deepening the incisions he began. It wasn’t our first row since Charlie was born, and he always did this at the end—brought the argument back to my upbringing, which infuriated me as it was the one thing I couldn’t help.

  I stood in the lobby as the dowdy clerks flowed all around me. I blinked, looked down at my shoes, and had my first sensible thought for days. I realized I hadn’t come out into the world today to make a point to my editorial staff. Senior editors didn’t really go back to reporting to shave a few pounds from their commissioning budgets. I was there, I realized, entirely to make a point to Andrew.

  And when Lawrence Osborn came down and introduced himself on the dot of ten o’clock—tall, grinning, not conspicuously handsome—I understood that the point I was making to Andrew was not necessarily going to be an editorial one.

  Lawrence looked down at his clipboard.<
br />
  “That’s odd,” he said. “They’ve marked down this interview as ‘nonhostile.’”

  I realized I was looking at him fiercely. I blushed.

  “Oh god, I’m sorry. Bad morning.”

  “Don’t mention it. Just tell me you’ll try to be nice to me. All you journalists seem to have it in for us these days.”

  I smiled.

  “I am going to be nice to you. I think you people do a terrific job.”

  “Ah, that’s because you haven’t seen the statistics we’ve seen.”

  I laughed, and Lawrence raised his eyebrows.

  “You think I’m joking,” he said.

  His voice was flat and unremarkable. He didn’t sound public school. There was a touch of roughness in his vowels, or a sense of some wildness reined in, as if he was making an effort. It was hard to place his voice. He took me on a tour of the building. We looked in on the Assets Recovery Agency and the Criminal Records Bureau. The mood was businesslike, but relaxed. Discourage a little crime, drink a little coffee—that seemed to be the tone. We walked along unnatural galleries floored with natural materials and bathed in natural light.

  “So Lawrence,” I said, “what do you think is going wrong with Britain?”

  Lawrence stopped and turned. His face glowed in a soft yellow ray, filtered through colored glass.

  “You’re asking the wrong man,” he said. “If I knew the answer to that, I’d fix it.”

  “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do at the Home Office? Fix it?”

  “I don’t actually work in any of the departments. They tried me out here and there for a while, but I don’t think my heart was in it. So here I am in the press office.”

  “But surely you must have an opinion?”

  Lawrence sighed. “Everyone has an opinion, don’t they? Maybe that’s what’s wrong with this country. What? Why are you smiling?”

  “I wish you’d tell that to my husband.”

  “Ah. He has opinions, does he?”