by Chris Cleave
It is painful to think about this time, even now.
What did I do? I looked all around, of course. I ran up and down. I began screaming Charlie’s name. I raced up and down the shrinking beach, staring into the face of every child playing there in case it should somehow transform into mine. I shouted myself hoarse. My son was nowhere.
An aching panic took me over. The sophisticated parts of my mind shut down, the parts that might be capable of thought. I suppose the blood supply to them had been summarily turned off, and diverted to the eyes, the legs, the lungs. I looked, I ran, I screamed. And all the time in my heart it was growing: the unspeakable certainty that someone had taken Charlie.
At the other end of the little beach was a second set of steps leading up the embankment wall, and I ran up them. Camped out on the top step was a picnicking family. The mother—long auburn hair with rather frazzled ends—sat cross-legged and barefoot, surrounded by the peelings and the uneaten segments of satsumas. She was reading BBC Music Magazine. She had it spread out on the rug, pinned down with one foot to stop the pages blowing. There was a slender silver ring on her second toe. Beside her on the step, two flame-haired girls in blue gingham dresses were eating Kraft cheese slices straight from the packet. The husband, blond and stocky, stood a few feet away, leaning on the railing and talking into his mobile. Lanzarote’s just a tourist trap these days, he was saying. You should go somewhere off the beaten track, like Croatia or Marrakech. Your money goes further there in any case. I was out of breath. The mother looked up at me.
“Is everything alright?” she said.
“I’ve lost my son.”
She looked at me blankly. I smiled idiotically. I didn’t know what to do with my face. My mind and my body were keyed up to fight with pedophiles and wolves. Confronted with these ordinary people in this absurdly pleasant tableau, ringed all around by strolling tourists, my distress seemed desperate and vulgar. My social conditioning fought against my panic. I felt ashamed. Instinctively, I also knew that I needed to speak to the woman calmly, in her register, if I was to communicate clearly and get across the information I needed without wasting any time. I have struggled all my life to find the correct point of balance between nicety and hysteria.
“I’m very sorry,” I said, “I’ve lost my son.”
The woman stood up and looked around at the crowd. I couldn’t understand why her movements were so slow. It seemed that I was operating in air, while she occupied some more viscous medium.
“He’s about this high,” I said. “You’d have noticed him, he’s dressed as Batman. Did he come up these steps?”
“I’m sorry,” she said in slow motion. “I haven’t seen anything.”
Each word took forever to form. It felt like waiting for the woman to engrave the sentence in stone. I was already halfway back down the steps before she finished speaking. Behind me I heard the husband saying, You could always go for the cheapest package tour and just use the flights. Then you can find some nicer accommodation once you’re out there.
I ran back down the steps, shouting Charlie’s name. Somehow I arrived back at the place where Charlie had built his sand castles. I kicked the structures apart, shouting his name. While parents and children looked on aghast, I looked for my son under piles of sand as little as six inches high. Of course I knew Charlie wasn’t underneath. I knew, even as I was scrabbling away at anything that protruded. I found an old crisp packet. The broken wheel of a pushchair. My nails bled into a barely submerged history of tides.
Little Bee and Lawrence stared at me, wide-eyed, and I remember the last rational thought that went through my mind: He isn’t on the sand, and he didn’t go up the steps, so he must be in the river. Even as I thought it, I could feel the second stage of my mind shutting down. The panic simply rose up out of my chest to engulf me. I splashed out into the Thames, knee-high, then waist-high, staring down into the muddy brown water, screaming Charlie’s name at the floating plastic bags and the startled gulls.
I saw something under the water, lying on the muddy sludge. Underwater, distorted by ripples, it looked like a bone-white face. I reached down and grabbed for it. I lifted it up into the bright day. It was a cracked plastic mask from a tourist stand, with its snapped elastic showing how it had blown into the river. As I held it up, dripping muddy water, I realized that my phone had been in the hand I held the mask in. My phone was gone, somewhere—my life was gone—lost in the sand or the river. I stood in the water, holding a mask. I didn’t know what to do now. I heard a whistling sound and I looked down sharply. I understood that the breeze was whistling through the empty eyeholes of the mask, and that is when I truly began to scream.
Charlie O’Rourke. Four years old. Batman. What went through my mind? His perfect little white teeth. His look of fierce concentration when he was dispatching baddies. The way he hugged me, once, when I was sad. The way, since Africa, that I had been running between worlds—between Andrew and Lawrence, between Little Bee and my job—running everywhere except to the world where I belonged. Why had I never run to Charlie? I screamed at myself. My son, my beautiful boy. Gone, gone. He had disappeared as he had lived, while I was looking the other way. I looked at the empty days before me, and there was no end to them.
My voice sank to a whisper. I breathed Charlie’s name.
Then I felt hands on my shoulders. It was Lawrence.
“We need to be systematic about this now,” he said. “Sarah, you stay here and keep calling for him, so he knows where to come back to if he’s wandering. I’ll go and ask people to start looking, and I’ll keep looking myself. And Bee, you take my phone and you go up on the embankment and you call the police. Then you wait for them, so you can show them where we are when they arrive.”
Lawrence handed his phone to Little Bee, and turned back to me. I stared at him dumbly.
“I know it sounds extreme,” he said, “but the police are good at this. I’m sure we’ll find Charlie before they get here, but just on the off chance that we don’t, it makes sense for us to bring them in sooner rather than later.”
“Okay, do it,” I said. “Do it now.”
Little Bee was still standing there, holding Lawrence’s phone in her hand, staring at Lawrence and me with large and frightened eyes. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t already running.
“Go!” I said.
She still stared at me. “The police … ,” she said.
Understanding buzzed dully in my mind. The number. Of course! She didn’t know the emergency number.
“The number is 999,” I said.
She just stood there. I couldn’t work out what the problem was.
“The police, Sarah,” she said.
I stared at her. Her eyes were pleading. She looked terrified. And then, very slowly, her face changed. It became firm, resolved. She took a deep breath, and she nodded at me. She turned, slowly at first and then very fast, and she ran up the steps to the embankment. When she was halfway up, Lawrence raised a hand to his mouth.
“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 w
hispered. “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.
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 policeman 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 sa
id.
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.”
