by Chris Cleave
I shrugged. “What if the authorities are not afraid of the media?”
Sarah nodded, slowly. “That’s a possibility,” she said. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
I looked out across the towers of Abuja. The great buildings shimmered in the heat, as if they were insubstantial, as if they could be awoken from and forgotten with a splash of cold water to the face.
“I do not know,” I said. “I do not know how things are in my country. Until I was fourteen years old my country was three cassava fields and a limba tree. And after that, I was in yours. So do not ask me how my country works.”
“Hmm,” said Sarah. She waited for a minute, and then she said, “So what do you want us to do?”
I looked again at the city we saw from that balcony. I saw for the first time how much space there was in it. There were wide gaps between the city blocks. I thought these dark green squares were parks and gardens, but now I saw that they were just empty spaces, waiting for something to be built. Abuja was a city that was not finished. This was very interesting for me, to see that my capital city had these green squares of hope built into it. To see how my country carried its dreams in a see-through bag.
I smiled at Sarah. “Let us go and collect the stories.”
“You’re sure?”
“I want to be part of my country’s story.” I pointed out into the heat. “See? They have left space for me.”
Sarah held on to my hand, very tight.
“All right,” she said.
“But Sarah?”
“Yes?”
“There is one story I must tell you first.”
I told Sarah what happened when Andrew died. The story was hard to hear and it was hard to tell. Afterwards I went back inside the hotel room and she stayed out on the balcony on her own. I sat down on the bed with Charlie and he watched cartoons while I watched Sarah’s shoulders shaking.
The next day we started our work. Early in the morning Sarah walked out into the street and she gave a very large amount of money to the military policemen waiting outside the hotel. After this, their eyes were the eyes of the faces on the banknotes that Sarah gave them. They saw nothing but the inside of the military police car’s glove box and the lining of the policemen’s uniform pockets. The policemen’s only rule was, we had to be back at the hotel before sunset each evening.
My job was to find people who would normally be scared to talk to a foreign journalist, but who talked to Sarah because I promised them that she was a good person. These were people who believed what I told them, because my story was the same as theirs. I discovered there were a lot of us in my country, people who had seen things the oil companies wished we had not seen. People the government would prefer to be silent. We went all around the south-east of my country in an old white Peugeot, just like the one that my father used to have.
I sat in the passenger seat and Sarah drove, with Charlie smiling and laughing in the back. We listened to the music on the local radio stations, turned up very loud. The red dust from the road blew everywhere, even inside the car, and when we took off Charlie’s Batman suit to wash him at the end of each day, his white skin had two bright red diamonds on it, where the eyeholes of his mask had been.
Sometimes I got scared. Sometimes when we arrived in a village, I saw the way some of the men looked at me and I remembered how me and my sister were hunted. I wondered if there was still money from the oil companies, for anyone who would shut my mouth for once and all. I was scared of the village men, but Sarah just smiled. Relax, she said. Remember what happened at the airport. Nothing’s going to happen to you so long as I’m here.
And I did begin to relax. In each village I found people with stories, and Sarah wrote them down. It was easy. We started to be happy. We thought we had done enough to save ourselves. We thought, This is a good trick.
One night when we had been in my country for two weeks, I dreamed of my sister Nkiruka. She walked up out of the sea. First the surface of the water swirled from the movement of something unseen and then, in the hollow between two waves, I saw the top of her head with white foam dancing around it. Then my sister’s face rose above the water and slowly she walked up the beach towards me and she stood there smiling and wearing the Hawaiian shirt that I was wearing when they released me from detention. It was soaked with salt water. My sister spoke my name once, and then she waited.
When Sarah woke up, I went to her. Please, I said, we have to go to the sea. I must say goodbye to my sister. Sarah looked at me for a long time, and then she nodded. We did not say anything. That morning Sarah gave the policemen much more money than before. We drove south to Benin City and we got there in the late afternoon. We stayed overnight in another hotel that was just the same, and the next morning we drove south again, to the coast. We left early, when the sun was still low in the sky and the light shining into the car windows was warm and golden. Charlie sighed and banged his heels on the back seat.
“Is we nearly there yet?” he said;
Sarah smiled at him in the rear-view mirror.
“Nearly, darling,” she said.
The road ran out at one of the fishing villages they have in that place, and we stepped down onto the sand. Charlie laughed and ran down the beach to make sand castles. I sat on the beach next to Sarah and we looked out over the ocean. There was no sound except for the waves breaking on the beach. After a long time, Sarah turned to me.
She said, “I’m proud we’ve come this far.”
I took her hand. “You know, Sarah, since I left my country, often I think to myself, How would I explain these things to the girls back home?”
Sarah laughed and stretched her hands along the beach in both directions.
“Well?” said Sarah. “How would you explain this to the girls back home? I mean, this would take some explaining, wouldn’t you say?”
I shook my head. “I would not explain this to the girls back home.”
“No?”
“No, Sarah. Because today I am saying goodbye to all that. We are the girls back home now. You and me. There is nothing else for me to go back to. I do not need to tell this story to anyone else. Thank you for saving me, Sarah.”
When I said this I saw that Sarah was crying, and then I was crying too.
When the day became hotter, the beach filled up with people. There were fishermen who walked out into the waves and sent wide bright nets spinning out before them, and there were old men who came to sit and look at the sea, and mothers who brought their children to splash in the water.
“We should go and ask these people if anyone has a story,” I said.
Sarah smiled and pointed at Charlie. “Yes, but it can wait,” she said. “Look, he’s having such fun.”
Charlie was running and laughing and I can tell you that a dozen of the local children were running with him, and laughing and shouting because if there is one thing you do not see very often on the beach in my country it is a white superhero less than one metre in height, with sand and salt water on his cape. Charlie was laughing with the other children, running and playing and chasing.
It was hot, and I dug my toes down into the cooler sand.
“Sarah,” I said. “How long do you think you will stay?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to try coming with me to England? We could try to get you papers this time.”
I shrugged. “They do not want people like me.”
Sarah smiled. “I’m English and I want people like you. Surely I’m not the only one.”
“People will say you are naive.”
Sarah smiled. “Let them,” she said. “Let them say whatever gives them comfort.”
We sat for a long time and watched the sea.
In the afternoon the sea breeze blew and I fell asleep for a little while, half in and half out of the shade of the trees at the top of the beach. The sun warmed my blood until I could not keep my eyes open, and the sea roared in and out, in and out, and my breathing slipped into time wi
th the waves as I began to dream. I dreamed we all stayed together in my country. I was happy. I dreamed I was a journalist, telling the stories of my country, and we all lived in the same house—me and Charlie and Sarah—in a tall, cool three-storey house in Abuja. It was a very beautiful home. It was the sort of place I never even dreamed of, back in the days when our Bible ended at the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew. I was happy in this house that I dreamed of, and the cook and the housekeeper smiled at me and called me ‘princess’. Early each morning the garden boy brought me a scented yellow rose for my hair, trembling on its fine green stem with the dew of the night still on it. There was a carved wood veranda, painted white, and a long curved garden with bright flowers and dark shade. I travelled through my country and I listened to stories of all kinds. Not all of them were sad. There were many beautiful stories that I found. There was horror, yes, but there was joy in them too. The dreams of my country are no different from yours—they are as big as the human heart.
In my dream Lawrence telephoned Sarah to ask when she was coming home. Sarah looked across the veranda at Charlie, playing with his building blocks, and she smiled and she said, What do you mean? We are home.
It was the sound of the surf pounding on the beach that woke me. Crash, like the drawer of a cash register springing open and all the coins inside it smashing against the edge of their compartments. The surf pounded and ebbed, the cash drawer opened and closed.
There is a moment when you wake up from dreaming in the hot sun, a moment outside time when you do not know what you are. At first, because you feel absolutely free, as if you could transform yourself into anything at all, it seems that you must be money. But then you feel the hot breath of something on your face and it seems that no, you are not money, you must be that hot breeze blowing in from the sea. It seems that the heaviness you feel in your limbs is the weight of the salt in the wind, and the sweet sleepiness that bewitches you is simply the weariness that comes from the day-and-night pushing of waves across the ocean. But next you realise that no, you are not the breeze. In fact you can feel sand drifting up against your bare skin. And for an instant you are the sand that the breeze blows up the beach, just one grain of sand among the billions of blown grains. How nice to be inconsequential. How pleasant to know that there is nothing to be done. How sweet simply to go back to sleep, as the sand does, until the wind thinks to awaken it again. But then you understand that no, you are not the sand, because this skin that the sand drifts up against, this skin is your own. Well, then, you are a creature with skin—and what of it? It is not as if you are the first creature that fell asleep under the sun, listening to the sound of waves pounding. A billion fishes have slipped away like this, flapping on the blinding white sand, and what difference will one more make? But the moment carries on, and you are not a fish dying—in fact you are not even truly sleeping—and so you open your eyes and look down on yourself and you say, Ah, so I am a girl then, an African girl. This is what I am and this is how I will stay, as the shape-changing magic of dreams whispers back into the roar of the ocean.
I sat up and blinked and looked around. A white woman was sitting next to me on the beach, in the thing called shade, and I remembered that the white woman’s name was. Sarah. I saw her face, with her wide eyes staring away down the beach. She looked—I searched for the name of her expression in your language—she looked frightened.
“Oh my God,” Sarah was saying. “I think we need to get away from here.”
I smiled sleepily. Yes yes, I was thinking. We always need to get away from here. Wherever here is, there is always a good reason to get away from it. That is the story of my life. Always running, running, running, without one single moment of peace. Sometimes, when I remember my mother and my father and my big sister Nkiruka, I think I will always be running until the day I am reunited with the dead.
Sarah grabbed my hand and tried to pull me up.
“Get up, Bee,” she said. “There are soldiers coming. Up the beach.”
I breathed in the hot, salty smell of the sand. I sighed. I looked in the direction Sarah was staring. There were six soldiers. They were still a long way away, along the beach. The air above the sand was so hot that it dissolved the men’s legs into a shimmer, a green confusion of colours, so that the soldiers seemed to be floating towards us on a cloud made of some enchanted substance, free as the thoughts of a girl waking up from dreams on a hot beach. I screwed up my eyes against the glare and I saw the light gleaming on the barrels of the soldiers’ rifles. These rifles were more distinct than the men who carried them. They held their firm, straight lines while the men beneath them shimmered. In this way the weapons rode their men like mules, proud and gleaming in the sun, knowing that when a beast beneath them died, they would simply ride another one. This is how the future rode out to meet me in my country. The sun shone on its rifles and it pounded on my bare head too. I could not think. It was too hot and too late in the afternoon.
“Why would they come for us here, Sarah?”
“I’m sorry, Bee. It’s those policemen in Abuja, isn’t it? I thought I’d paid them enough to close their eyes for a few days. But someone must have put the word out. I suppose they must have seen us in Sapele.”
I knew it was true, but I pretended that it was not. That is a good trick. That is called, Saving one minute of the quietest part of the late afternoon while the whole of time is ending.
“Maybe the soldiers are just going for a walk by the sea, Sarah. Anyway, this is a long beach. They will not know who we are.”
Sarah put her hand on my cheek and she turned my head until I was looking in her eyes.
“Look at me,” she said. “Look how bloody white I am. Do you see any other women on the beach this colour?”
“So?”
“They’ll be looking out for a girl with a white woman and a white boy. Just walk away from us, okay, Bee? Go down to the point down there, where those other women are, and don’t look around till the soldiers have gone. If they take me and Charlie, don’t worry. There’s no way they’ll do anything to us.”
Charlie held on to Sarah’s leg and looked up at her.
“Mummy,” he said, “why is Little Bee got to go?”
“It’s not for long, Batman. Just until the soldiers have gone.”
Charlie put his hands on his hips. “I don’t want Little Bee to go,” he said.
“She has to hide, darling,” said Sarah. “Just for a few minutes.”
“Why?” said Charlie.
Sarah stared out to sea, and the expression on her face was the saddest thing I ever saw. She answered Charlie, but she turned to me when she spoke.
“Because we still haven’t done enough to save her, Charlie. I thought we had, but we need to do more. And we will do more, darling. We will. We won’t ever give up on Little Bee. Because she is part of our family now. And until she is happy and safe, then I don’t think we will be either.”
Charlie held on to my leg.
“I want to go with her,” he said.
Sarah shook her head. “I need you to stay and look after me, Batman.”
Charlie shook his head. He was not happy. I looked away down the beach. The soldiers were half a mile away. They came slowly, looking left and right, checking the faces of the people on the beach. Sometimes they stopped and did not continue on their way until someone showed them papers. I nodded, slowly.
“Thank you, Sarah.”
I walked down the slope of the beach to the hard sand where the waves were breaking. I looked out at the hazy horizon and I followed the deep blue-and-indigo of the ocean from that distant line all the way to the beach where it crashed into waves of white spray and sent its last thin sheets of water foaming and hissing up the sand to sink away to nothing in the place where my feet were standing. I saw how it ended there. The wet sand under my feet made me think of how it was when the men took me and Nkiruka away, and for the first time I began to be fearful. I was fully awake now. I knelt down in the
shorebreak and I splashed the cold salt water over my head and my face until I could think clearly. Then I walked quickly along the beach to the point that Sarah had shown me. The point was two or three minutes away. A tall ridge of dark grey rock came out of the jungle there at the height of the treetops, and it ran across the sand and then out into the sea, getting shorter as it went but still as high as two men at the point of the rock, where it stuck out into the surf. The waves crashed against it and sent explosions of white foam into the silver-blue sky. In the shade of the rock it was suddenly cold, and my skin shivered when it touched the dark stone. There were some local women resting in the shade there, sitting on the hard sand with their backs against the rock while their children played all around them, jumping over their mothers’ legs and running into the shorebreak, laughing and daring each other to go out into the white roaring foam where the great waves crashed against the point of the rock.
I sat down with the other women arid smiled at them. They smiled back and talked in their language, but I did not understand it. The women smelled of sweat and woodsmoke. I looked back along the beach. The soldiers were close now. The women around me, they were watching the soldiers too. When the soldiers were close enough to notice the colour of Sarah’s skin, I saw them start to walk faster. They stopped in front of Sarah and Charlie. Sarah stood very straight and she stared at the soldiers with her hands on her hips. The leader of the soldiers stepped forward. He was tall and relaxed, with his rifle riding high on his shoulder and his hand scratching the top of his head. I could see he was smiling. He said something and I watched Sarah shaking her head. The head soldier stopped smiling then. He shouted at Sarah. I heard the shout but I could not hear what he said. Sarah shook her head again, and she pushed Charlie behind her legs. Around me the local women were staring and saying, Weh, but the children were still playing in the shorebreak and they had not noticed what was occurring further down the beach.