by Chris Cleave
“And they won’t get you either, will they?”
I sighed. “Charlie, there are no baddies here in the park. We are on holiday here. Maybe you can take one day off from being Batman.”
Charlie pointed his stick at me and he frowned, as if this was a trick of his enemies.
“Batman is always Batman,” he said.
I laughed, and we went back to building houses out of sticks. I put a long, bone-white one on top of a pile that Charlie said was a multistorey Batmobile park.
“Sometimes I wish I could take one day off from being Little Bee,” I said.
Charlie looked up at me. A drop of sweat fell from inside his bat mask. “Why?”
“Well, you see, it was hard to become Little Bee. I had to go through a lot of things. They kept me in detention and I had to train myself to think in a certain way, and to be strong, and to speak your language the way you people speak it. It is even an effort now just to keep it going. Because inside, you know, I am only a village girl. I would like to be a village girl again and do the things that village girls do. I would like to laugh and smile at the older boys. I would like to do foolish things when the moon is full. And most of all, you know, I would like to use my real name.”
Charlie paused with his spade in the air.
“But Little Bee is yours real name,” he said.
I shook my head. “Mmm-mmm. Little Bee is only my superhero name. I have a real name too, like you have Charlie.”
Charlie nodded.
“What is yours real name?” he said.
“I will tell you my real name if you will take off your Batman costume.”
Charlie frowned. “Actually, I have to keep mine Batman costume on forever,” he said.
I smiled. “Okay, Batman. Maybe another time.”
Charlie started to build a wall between the jungle and the suburbs of Gotham City.
“Mmm,” he said.
After a while, Lawrence came over to us.
“I’ll take over here,” he said. “Go and see if you can talk some sense into Sarah, will you?”
“Why, what is wrong?”
Lawrence held his hands out with the palms upwards, and he sent air upwards out of his mouth so that his hair blew. “Just go and see her, will you?” he said.
I walked back to the blanket in the shade. Sarah was sitting there with her arms around her knees.
“Honestly,” she said when she saw me, “that bloody man.”
“Lawrence?” .
“Sometimes I’m not so sure I wouldn’t be better off without him. Oh, I don’t mean that, of course I don’t. But honestly. Don’t I have the right to talk about Andrew?”
“You were arguing?”
Sarah sighed.
“I suppose Lawrence still isn’t happy about you being around. It’s putting him on edge.”
“What did you say, about Andrew?”
“I told him I was sorting out Andrew’s office last night. You know, looking through his files. I just wanted to see what bills I’m meant to pay now, check we don’t owe money on any of our cards, that sort of thing.”
She looked at me. “The thing is, it turns out Andrew didn’t stop thinking about what happened on the beach. I thought he’d put it out of his mind, but he hadn’t. He was researching it. There must have been two dozen folders in his office. Stuff about Nigeria. About the oil wars, and the atrocities. And…well, I had no idea how many people like you ended up in the UK after what happened to your villages. Andrew had a whole binder full of documents about asylum and detention.”
“Did you read it?”
Sarah chewed her lip. “Not much of it. He had enough in there to read for a month. And he had his own notes attached to each document. It was very meticulous. Very Andrew. It was too late at night to really sit down and start reading through it. How long did you say they kept you in that place, Bee?”
“Two years.”
“Can you tell me what it was like?”
“It is best that you do not know. It is not your fault that I was there.”
“Tell me. Please?”
I sighed, because the memory of that place made my heart heavy again.
“The first thing was that you had to write down your story. They gave you a pink form to write down what had happened to you. This was the grounds for your asylum application. Your whole life, you had to fit it onto one sheet of paper. There was a black line around the edge of the sheet, a border, and if you wrote outside the line then your application would not be valid. They only gave you enough space to write down the very saddest things that had happened to you. That was the worst part. Because if you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone’s life, why should you care about their sadness? Do you see? That is why people do not like us refugees. It is because they only know the tragic parts of our life, so they think we are tragic people. I was one of the only ones who could write in English, so I wrote the applications for all the others. You have to listen to their story and then fit their whole life inside the line, even for the women who are bigger than one sheet of paper, you know? And after that, everyone was waiting for their appeal. We did not have any information. That was the worst thing. No one there had committed a crime, but you did not know if you would be released tomorrow, or next week, or never. There were even children in there, and they could not remember their life before detention. There were bars on the windows. They let us exercise outdoors for thirty minutes a day, unless it was raining at exercise time. If you got a headache you could ask for one paracetamol, but you had to apply for it twenty-four hours in advance. There was a special form to fill in. And there was another form if you wanted a sanitary towel. Once there was an inspection of the detention centre. Four months later we saw the inspectors’ report. It was pinned to a board that said STATUTORY NOTICES, at the end of a corridor that nobody used, because it led to the exit and the exit was locked. One of the other girls found the notice board when she was trying to find a window to look out of. The report said, We find the humiliating procedures excessive. We do not see how anybody can abuse an excess of sanitary towels.”
Sarah looked over to where Lawrence and Charlie were laughing and kicking sticks at each other. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet. “I suppose Andrew was planning a book,” she said. “I think that’s why he was collecting all that material. It was too much research to do if he was only going to write an article or something.”
“And you told this to Lawrence?”
Sarah nodded. “I said I thought maybe I should carry on Andrew’s work. You know, read through his notes. Find out a bit more about the detention centres. Maybe even, I don’t know, write the book myself.”
“That is why he got angry?”
“He went ballistic.” Sarah sighed. “I think he’s jealous of Andrew.”
I nodded slowly and I said, “Are you certain it is Lawrence you want to be with?”
She looked at me with sharp eyes.
“I know what you’re going to tell me. You’ll tell me he cares more about himself than he cares about me. You’ll tell me to watch out for him. And I’ll tell you that’s just what men are like, but you’re too young to know it yet, and so you and I will argue too, and then I really will be utterly miserable. So don’t say it, okay?”
I shook my head. “It is more than that, Sarah.”
“I don’t want to hear it. I’ve chosen Lawrence. I’m thirty-two, Bee. If I want to make a stable life for Charlie, I have to start sticking with my choices. I didn’t stick with Andrew, and now I know I should have. He was a good man—you know that and I know that—and I should have worked at it, even though it wasn’t perfect. But now there’s Lawrence. And he isn’t perfect either, you see? But I can’t just keep walking away.” Sarah took a deep and shaking breath. “At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest and I watched Lawrence playing with Charlie. They were walking through the streets of Gotham
City like giants, stomping along between the tall towers, and Charlie was laughing and shouting. I sighed. “Lawrence is good with Charlie,” I said.
“There,” said Sarah. “Thank you, for making an effort. You’re a good girl, Bee.”
“If you knew everything I have done, you would not think I am good.”
Sarah smiled. “I’ll get to know you better, I suppose, if I write this book of Andrew’s.”
I put my hands on the top of my head. I looked at the dark tunnels underneath the rhododendron forest. I thought about running away and hiding. In the bushes of the park. In the full-moon night in the jungle. Under the planks of an upside-down boat. Forever. I closed my eyes tight shut and I wanted to scream, but no sound came out.
“Are you all right?” said Sarah.
“Yes. I am fine. I am tired, that is all.”
“Right,” said Sarah. “Look, I’m going to go back to the car and call work. I can’t get a signal here.”
I walked back to where Charlie and Lawrence were playing. They were throwing sticks into the bushes. When I got close, Charlie carried on with his sticks but Lawrence stopped and turned to me.
“Well?” he said. “Did you talk her out of it?”
“Out of what?”
“Her book. She had some idea she was going to finish a book Andrew was writing. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Yes. She told me. I did not talk her out of the book but I did not talk her out of you either.”
Lawrence grinned. “Good girl. See? We’re going to get along after all. Is she still upset? Why hasn’t she come down here with you?”
“She is making a phone call.”
“Fair enough.”
We stood there for a long time, looking at one another.
“You still think I’m a bastard, don’t you?”
I shrugged. “It does not matter what I think. Sarah likes you. But I wish you would stop telling me I am a good girl. Both of you. That is something to say to a dog when it brings back a stick,”
Lawrence looked at me, and I felt a great sadness because there was such an emptiness in his eyes. I looked away over the water of the lake where the ducks swam. I looked and I saw the blue reflection of the sky. I stared for a long time now, because I understood that I was looking into the eyes of death again, and death was still not looking away and neither could I.
Then there was the barking of dogs. I jumped, and my eyes followed the sound and for one second I felt relief, because I saw the dogs at the other end of the lawn that we were on, and they were only fat yellow family dogs, out for a walk with their master. Then I saw Sarah, hurrying back along the path towards us. Her arms were hanging by her sides, and in one of her hands she held her mobile phone. She stopped next to us, took a deep breath, and smiled. She held out her hands to both of us, but then she hesitated. She looked all around the place where we were standing.
“Um, where’s Charlie?” she said.
She said it very quietly, then she said it again, louder, looking at us this time.
I looked all across the wide grass lawn. In one direction there were the two yellow dogs, the ones who had barked. Their master was throwing sticks into the lake for them. In the other direction, there was the thick rhododendron jungle. The dark tunnels through the branches looked empty.
“Charlie?” Sarah shouted. “Charlie? Oh, my God. CHARLIE!”
I span around under the hot sun. We ran up and down. We called his name. We called again and again. Charlie was gone.
“Oh my God!” said Sarah. “Someone’s taken him! Oh my God! CHARLIE!”
I ran across to the rhododendron jungle and I crawled into its cool shade and I remembered the darkness under the forest canopy on the night I walked out to the jungle with Nkiruka. While Sarah screamed for her son I widened my eyes into the blackness of those tunnels and I stared into them. I looked for a long time. I saw that the nightmares of all our worlds had somehow mingled together, so that there was no telling where the one ended and the other began -whether the jungle grew out of the Jeep or the Jeep grew out of the jungle.
Ten
I left Charlie playing happily with Lawrence and Little Bee. I was halfway back to the car park before I could get my phone to find a network. I climbed to a high point on the dirt path and I looked down from a hazy sky and saw two bars of signal. My tummy lurched and I thought, Right, I’ll do it now, before I calm down and change my mind. I called the publisher and told him I didn’t want to edit his magazine any more.
What the publisher said was, Fine.
I said, I’m not sure you heard me. Something extraordinary has happened in my life, and I really need to run with it. So I need to quit the job. And he said, Yeah, I heard you, that’s fine, I’ll get someone else. And he hung up.
And I said, Oh.
I stood there for a minute, shocked, and then I just had to smile.
The sun was lovely. I closed my eyes and let the breeze airbrush away the traces of the last few years. One phone call: I realised it was as simple as that. People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.
I was already thinking about how I might carry on with Andrew’s book. The trick, of course, would be to keep it impersonal. I wondered if that had been a problem for Andrew. The first thing they teach us in journalism school is, don’t put yourself in the story.
But what if the story is that we are in the story? I started to understand how Andrew must have agonised over it. I wondered if that was why he had kept so quiet.
Dear Andrew, I thought. How is it that I feel closer to you now than I did on the day we were married? I just told Little Bee I didn’t want to hear what she had to say because I know I need to stick with Lawrence, but at the same time here I am talking to you in my head. This is the forked tongue of grief again, Andrew. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.
My phone went, and my eyes snapped open. It was Clarissa.
“Sarah? They told me you resigned. Are you crazy?”
“I told you I was thinking about it.”
“Sarah, I spend a lot of time thinking about bedding Premiership footballers.”
“Maybe you should try it.”
“Or maybe you should come in to the office, right now, and tell the publishers you’re very sorry, and that you’re going through a bereavement at the moment, and please—pretty please—could you have your nice job back.”
“But I don’t want that job. I want to be a journalist again. I want to make a difference in the world.”
“Everyone wants to make a difference, Sarah, but there’s a time and place. Do you know what you’re doing, honestly, if you throw your toys out of the pram like this? You’re just having a mid-life crisis. You’re no different from the middle-aged man who buys a red car and shags the babysitter.”
I thought about it. The breeze seemed colder now. There were goosebumps on my arms.
—“Sarah?”
“Oh, Clarissa, you’re right, I’m confused. Do you think I’ve just chucked my life away?”
“I just want you to think about it. Will you, Sarah?”
“All right.”
“And call me?”
“I will. Clarissa?”
“Darling?”
“Thank you.”
I hung up and walked slowly back along the path. Behind me the wild grasses rose to a stand of oaks, feral and lightning blasted, and in front of me the Isabella Plantation stood within its wrought-iron palisades, docile, lush and circumscribed. It is hard, when it conies right down to the actual choice, to know what you want out of life.
It seemed like a long walk. When I saw Lawrence and Little Bee, I rushed to be with them. They looked so forlorn, standing there, looking away from each other, not speaking. I thought, Oh gosh, how foolish I’ve been. I have always struck myself as a very practical woman, capable of adaptation. I immediately thought, If I turn around now, and walk b
ack to where I can get a signal, I can phone the publisher and tell him I made a mistake. And not just a little mistake but a great, elemental, whole-life mistake. During one whole week of grace I utterly forgot, you see, that I was a sensible girl from Surrey. It was something about Little Bee’s smile, and her energy, that made me sort of fall in love with her. And thus love makes fools of us all. For a whole week I actually thought I was a better person, someone who could make a difference. It completely slipped my mind that I was a quiet, practical, bereaved woman who focused very hard on her job. I unaccountably forgot that nobody is a hero, that everyone is so bloody tainted. Isn’t that odd? And now might I please have my old life back?
From further along the grass lawn, carried up by the breeze, came the sound of barking dogs. Little Bee looked across and saw me. I went right up to her and Lawrence.
I held out my hands to both of them, but then I noticed that Charlie was no longer with them.
“Um, where’s Charlie?”
It is painful to think about this, even now. I looked all around, of course I did. I ran up and down. I began screaming Charlie’s name. I raced around the perimeter of the lawn, looking into the gloom under the edge of the rhododendrons, scanning the reed beds at the side of the lake. 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.
I ran along one of the paths and came across a picnicking family, installed in a clearing. The mother -long auburn hair with rather frazzled ends—sat cross-legged and barefoot on a tartan rug, 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 rug, 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 and talked 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 ran deeper into the clearing, looking all around. The mother looked up at me.