by Chris Cleave
Imagine how tired I would become, telling my story to the girls from back home. This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles. Or maybe you would like to, but you can’t. Your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house.
If I mention to you, casually, that Sarah’s house was close to a large park full of deer that were very tame, you do not jump up out of your seat and shout, My god! Fetch me my gun and I will go to hunt one of those foolish animals! No, instead you stay seated and you rub your chin wisely and you say to yourself, Hmm, I suppose that must be Richmond Park, just outside London.
This is a story for sophisticated people, like you.
I do not have to describe to you the taste of the tea that Sarah made for me when she came down into the living room of her house that morning. We never tasted tea in my village, even though they grow it in the east of my country, where the land rises up into the clouds and the trees grow long soft beards of moss from the wet air. There in the east, the plantations stretch up the green hillsides and vanish into the mist. The tea they grow, that vanishes too. I think all of it is exported. Myself I never tasted tea until I was exported with it. The boat I traveled in to your country, it was loaded with tea. It was piled up in the cargo hold in thick brown paper sacks. I dug into the sacks to hide. After two days I was too weak to hide anymore, so I came up out of the hold. The captain of the ship, he locked me in a cabin. He said it would not be safe to put me with the crew. So for three weeks and five thousand miles I looked at the ocean through a small round window of glass and I read a book that the captain gave me. The book was called Great Expectations and it was about a boy called Pip but I do not know how it ended because the boat arrived in the UK and the captain handed me over to the immigration authorities.
Three weeks and five thousand miles on a tea ship—maybe if you scratched me you would still find that my skin smells of it. When they put me in the immigration detention center, they gave me a brown blanket and a white plastic cup of tea. And when I tasted it, all I wanted to do was to get back into the boat and go home again, to my country. Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from. Also it vanishes—the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup. It disappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist. I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other. How sad that must make you—like children who long for absent mothers. I am sorry.
So, we drank tea in Sarah’s kitchen. Charlie was still asleep in his bedroom at the top of the stairs. Sarah put her hand on mine.
“We need to talk about what happened,” she said. “Are you ready to talk about that? About what happened after the men took you away down the beach?”
I did not reply straightaway. I sat at the table, with my eyes looking all around the kitchen, taking in all the new and wonderful sights. For example there was a refrigerator in Sarah’s kitchen, a huge silver box with an icemaker machine built into it. The front of the icemaker machine was clear glass and you could see what it was doing inside there. It was making a small, bright cube of ice. It was nearly ready. You will laugh at me—silly village girl—for staring at an ice cube like this. You will laugh, but this was the first time I had seen water made solid. It was beautiful—because if this could be done, then perhaps it could be done to everything else that was always escaping and running away and vanishing into sand or mist. Everything could be made solid again, yes, even the time when I played with Nkiruka in the red dust under the rope swing. In those days I believed such things were possible in your country. I knew there were large miracles just waiting for me to discover them, if only I could find the center, the source of all these small wonders.
Behind the cold glass, the ice cube trembled on its little metal arm. It glistened, like a human soul. Sarah looked at me. Her eyes were shining.
“Bee?” she said. “I really need to know. Are you ready to talk about it?”
The ice cube was finished. THUNK, it went, down into the collecting tray. Sarah blinked. The icemaker started making a new cube.
“Sarah,” I said, “you do not need to know what happened. It was not your fault.”
Sarah held my hands between hers.
“Please, Bee,” she said. “I need to know.”
I sighed. I was angry. I did not want to talk about it, but if this woman was going to make me do it then I would do it quickly and I would not spare her.
“Okay Sarah,” I said. “After you left, the men took us away down the beach. We walked for a short time, maybe one hour. We came to a boat on the sand. It was upside down. Some of its planks were broken. It looked like it had been broken by a storm and thrown up onto the beach and left there. The underside of the boat was white from the sun. All the paint had cracked and peeled off it. Even the barnacles on the boat were crumbling off it. The hunters pushed me under the boat and they told me to listen. They said they would let me go, once it was over. It was dark under the boat, and there were crabs moving around under there. They raped my sister. They pushed her up against the side of the boat and they raped her. I heard her moaning. I could not hear everything, through the planks of the boat. It was muffled, the sound. I heard my sister choking, like she was being strangled. I heard the sound of her body beating against the planks. It went on for a very long time. It went on into the hot part of the day, but it was dark and cool under the boat. At first my sister shouted out verses from the scriptures but later her mind began to go, and then she started to shout out the songs we sang when we were children. In the end there were just screams. At first they were screams of pain but finally they changed and they were like the screams of a newborn baby. There was no grief in them. They were automatic. They went on and on. Each scream was exactly the same, like a machine was making them.”
I looked up and I saw Sarah staring at me. Her face was completely white and her eyes were red and her hands were up to cover her mouth. She was shaking and I was shaking too, because I had never told this to anyone before.
“I could not see what they did to my sister. It was on the other side of the boat that the planks were broken. That is the side I could see through. The killer, the one with the wound in his neck, I could see him. He was far off from his men. He was walking in the shore break. He was smoking cigarettes from a packet he had taken out of the pocket of the guard he killed. He was looking out over the ocean. It looked as if he was waiting for something to come from there. Sometimes he put his hand up to touch the wound in his neck. His shoulders were down. It was as if he was carrying a weight.”
Sarah’s whole body was shaking, so hard that the kitchen table was trembling. She was crying.
“Your sister,” she was saying. “Your beautiful sister, oh my god, oh Jesus, I…”
I did not want to hurt Sarah any more. I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
“Near the end I heard Nkiruka begging to die. I heard the hunters laughing. Then I listened to my sister’s bones being broken one by one. That is how my sister died. Yes she was a beautiful girl, you are right. In my village they said she was the kind of girl that could make a man forget his troubles. But sometimes it does not work out like people say. When the men and the dogs were finished with my sister, the only parts of her that they threw into the sea were the parts that could not be eaten.”
Sarah stopped crying and shaking then. She was very still. She was holding on to her tea, like she would be blown
away if she did not grip on to it.
“And you,” she whispered. “What happened to you?”
I nodded.
“In the afternoon it got very hot, even under the boat. A breeze started blowing from the sea. It blew sand up against the side of the boat. The sand hissed against the planks. I looked out through the gaps to see what was happening. Out past the surf there were seagulls gliding on the wind. They were very calm. Sometimes they dropped into the sea and swam back up with silver fish in their beaks. I looked at them very hard, because I thought that what had happened to my sister was going to happen to me now, and I wanted to fix my thoughts on something beautiful. But the men did not come for me. After they finished with my sister, the hunters and the dogs went up into the jungle to sleep. But the leader, he did not return to his men. He stood in the surf. The waves were breaking around his knees. He was leaning into the wind. Later it got so hot that the seagulls stopped their fishing. They were just floating on the waves with their heads tucked into their breasts, like this. Then the leader, he stepped forward into the waves. When the water came up to his chest he began to swim. He went straight out into the sea. The seagulls flew up out of his way and then they flapped back down. They only wanted to sleep. The man, he swam out, straight out, and soon I could not see him anymore. He disappeared and all I could see was this line, the line between the sea and the sky, and then it got so hot that even the line disappeared. That is when I came out from under the boat, because I knew the men would be sleeping. I looked all around. There was nobody on the beach and there was no shade. It was so hot I thought I might die just from the heat. I went down into the shore break and I made my clothes wet and I ran toward the hotel compound. I ran through the shallow water so that I would not leave marks on the sand for the men to follow. I came to the place where they murdered the guard. There were more seagulls there. They were fighting over the guard’s body. They flew up when I walked up the beach. I could not look at the guard’s face. There were these little crabs crawling in and out of his trouser leg. There was a wallet on the ground and I picked it up. It was Andrew’s wallet, Sarah. I am sorry. I looked inside. There were many plastic cards inside it. There was one that said DRIVING LICENSE and it had a photo of your husband. That is the one that had your address on it. That is the one that I took. There was another card too, his business card, the one with the telephone number, and I took that too. It blew out of my hand into the waves, but I got it back. Then I went to hide in the jungle, but I stayed where I could still see the beach. Then it began to get cooler and a truck drove up from the direction of the hotel compound. It was a canvas-top truck, a military one. Six soldiers jumped down from the back and they stood looking at the guard. They were poking at his body with the toes of their boots. There was a radio in the cab of the truck and it was playing “One” by U2. I knew this song. It was always playing in our home. This is because the men came from the city one day and they gave us clockwork radios, one to each family in the village. We were supposed to wind them up and listen to the World Service from the BBC, but my sister Nkiruka tuned ours in to the Port Harcourt music station instead. We used to fight over the little windup box because I liked to listen to the news and the current affairs. But now that I was hiding in the jungle behind the beach I wished I had never fought with my sister. Nkiruka loved music and now I saw that she was right because life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs. That is when I started to cry. I did not cry when they killed my sister but I did cry when I heard the music coming out of the soldiers’ truck because I was thinking, That is my sister’s favorite song and she will never hear it again. Do you think I am crazy, Sarah?”
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.”