by Chris Cleave
I looked down at the telephone receiver and it was gray and dirty and I was afraid. I looked back at the girl in the purple dress. Where do you want to go? I said. And she said, Any ends. Excuse me? Anywhere, darlin.
I dialed the taxi number that was written on the phone. A man’s voice came on. He sounded tired. Cab service, he said. The way he said it, it was like he was doing me a big favor just by saying those words.
“Good morning, I would like a taxi please.”
“You want a cab?”
“Yes. Please. A taxicab. For four passengers.”
“Where from?”
“From the Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre, please. In High Easter. It is near Chelmsford.”
“I know where it is. Now you listen to me—”
“Please, it is okay. I know you do not pick up refugees. We are not refugees. We are cleaners. We work in this place.”
“You’re cleaners.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s the truth is it? Because if I had a pound for every bloody immigrant that got in the back of one of my cabs and didn’t know where they wanted to go and started prattling on to my driver in Swahili and tried to pay him in cigarettes, I’d be playing golf at this very moment instead of talking to you.”
“We are cleaners.”
“All right. It’s true you don’t talk like one of them. Where do you want to go?”
I had memorized the address on the United Kingdom Driver’s License in my see-through plastic bag. Andrew O’Rourke, the white man I met on the beach: he lived in Kingston-upon-Thames in the English county of Surrey. I spoke into the telephone.
“Kingston, please.”
The girl in the purple dress grabbed my arm and hissed at me. No darlin! she said. Anywhere but Jamaica. Dey mens be killin me de minnit I ketch dere, kill me dead. I did not understand why she was scared, but I know now. There is a Kingston in England but there is also a Kingston in Jamaica, where the climate is different. This is another great work you sorcerers have done—even your cities have two tails.
“Kingston?” said the man on the telephone.
“Kingston-upon-Thames,” I said.
“That’s bloody miles away isn’t it? That’s over in, what?”
“Surrey,” I said.
“Surrey. You are four cleaners from leafy Surrey, is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“No. We are cleaners from nearby. But they are sending us on a cleaning job in Surrey.”
“Cash or account then?”
The man sounded so tired.
“What?”
“Will you pay in cash, or is it going on the detention center’s bill?”
“We will pay in cash, mister. We will pay when we get there.”
“You’d better.”
I listened for a minute and then I pressed my hand down on the cradle of the telephone receiver. I dialed another number. This was the telephone number from the business card I carried in my see-through plastic bag. The business card was damaged by water. I could not tell if the last number was an 8 or a 3. I tried an 8, because in my country odd numbers bring bad luck, and that is one thing I had already had enough of.
A man answered the call. He was angry.
“Who is this? It’s bloody six in the morning.”
“Is this Mister Andrew O’Rourke?”
“Yeah. Who are you?”
“Can I come to see you, Mister?”
“Who the hell is this?”
“We met on the beach in Nigeria. I remember you very well, Mister O’Rourke. I am in England now. Can I come to see you and Sarah? I do not have anywhere else to go.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then the man coughed, and started to laugh.
“This is a windup, right? Who is this? I’m warning you, I get nutters like you on my case all the time. Leave me alone, or you won’t get away with it. My paper always prosecutes. They’ll have this call traced and find out who you are and have you arrested. You wouldn’t be the first.”
“You don’t believe it is me?”
“Just leave me alone. Understand? I don’t want to hear about it. All that stuff happened a long time ago and it wasn’t my fault.”
“I will come to your house. That way you will believe it is me.”
“No.”
“I do not know anyone else in this country, Mister O’Rourke. I am sorry. I am just telling you, so that you can be ready.”
The man did not sound angry anymore. He made a small sound, like a child when it is nervous about what will happen. I hung up the phone and turned around to the other girls. My heart was pounding so fast, I thought I would vomit right there on the linoleum floor. The other girls were staring at me, nervous and expectant.
Well? said the girl in the purple dress.
Hmm? I said.
De taxi, darlin! What is happenin about de taxi?
Oh yes, the taxi. The taxi man said a cab will pick us up in ten minutes. He said we are to wait outside.
The girl in the purple dress, she smiled.
“Mi name is Yevette. From Jamaica, zeen. You useful, darlin. What dey call yu?”
“My name is Little Bee.”
“What kinda name yu call dat?”
“It is my name.”
“What kind of place yu come from, dey go roun callin little gals de names of insects?”
“Nigeria.”
Yevette laughed. It was a big laugh, like the way the chief baddy laughs in the pirate films. WU-ha-ha-ha-ha! It made the telephone receiver rattle in its cradle. Nye-JIRRYA! said Yevette. Then she turned round to the others, the girl in the sari and the girl with the documents. Come wid us, gals, she said. We de United Nations, see it, an today we is all followin Nye-JIRRYA. WU-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Yevette was still laughing when the four of us girls walked out past the security desk, toward the door. The detention officer looked up from his newspaper when we went by. The topless girl was gone now—the officer had turned the page. I looked down at his newspaper. The headline on the new page said ASYLUM SEEKERS EATING OUR SWANS. I looked back at the detention officer, but he would not look up at me. While I looked, he moved his arm over the page to cover the headline. He made it look like he needed to scratch his elbow. Or maybe he really did need to scratch his elbow. I realized I knew nothing about men apart from the fear. A uniform that is too big for you, a desk that is too small for you, an eight-hour shift that is too long for you, and suddenly here comes a girl with three kilos of documents and no motivation, another one with jelly-green eyes and a yellow sari who is so beautiful you cannot look at her for too long in case your eyeballs go ploof, a third girl from Nigeria who is named after a honeybee, and a noisy woman from Jamaica who laughs like the pirate Bluebeard. Perhaps this is exactly the type of circumstance that makes a man’s elbow itch.
I turned to look back at the detention officer just before we went out through the double doors. He was watching us leave. He looked very small and lonely there, with his thin little wrists, under the fluorescent lights. The light made his skin look green, the color of a baby caterpillar just out of the egg. The early-morning sunshine was shining in through the door glass. The officer screwed up his eyes against the daylight. I suppose we were just silhouettes to him. He opened his mouth, like he was going to say something, but he stopped.
What? I said. I realized he was going to tell us there had been a mistake. I wondered if we should run. I did not want to go back in detention. I wondered how far we would get if we ran. I wondered if they would come after us with dogs.
The detention officer stood up. I heard his chair scrape on the linoleum floor. He stood there with his hands at his sides.
“Ladies?” he said.
“Yes?”
He looked down at the ground, and then up again.
“Best of luck,” he said.
And we girls turned around and walked toward the light.
I pushed open the double doors, and then I froze.
It was the sunlight that stopped me. I felt so fragile from the detention center, I was afraid those bright rays of sunshine could snap me in half. I couldn’t take that first step outside.
“What is de holdup, Lil Bee?”
Yevette was standing behind me. I was blocking the door for everyone.
“One moment, please.”
Outside, the fresh air smelled of wet grass. It blew in my face. The smell made me panic. For two years I had smelled only bleach, and my nail varnish, and the other detainees’ cigarettes. Nothing natural. Nothing like this. I felt that if I took one step forward, the earth itself would rise up and reject me. There was nothing natural about me now. I stood there in my heavy boots with my breasts strapped down, neither a woman nor a girl, a creature who had forgotten her language and learned yours, whose past had crumbled to dust.
“What de hell yu waitin fo, darlin?”
“I am scared, Yevette.”
Yevette shook her head and she smiled.
“Maybe yu’s right to be scared, Lil Bee, cos yu a smart girl. Maybe me jus too dumb to be fraid. But me spend eighteen month locked up in dat place, an if yu tink me dumb enough to wait one second longer on account of your tremblin an your quakin, yu better tink two times.”
I turned round to face her and I gripped on to the door frame.
“I can’t move,” I said.
That is when Yevette gave me a great push in the chest and I flew backward. And that is how it was, the first time I touched the soil of England as a free woman, it was not with the soles of my boots but with the seat of my trousers.
“WU-ha-ha-ha!” said Yevette. “Welcome in de U-nited Kindom, int dat glorious?”
When I got my breath back I started laughing too. I sat on the ground, with the warm sun shining on my back, and I realized that the earth had not rejected me and the sunlight had not snapped me in two.
I stood up and I smiled at Yevette. We all took a few steps away from the detention center buildings. As we walked, when the other girls were not looking, I reached under my Hawaiian shirt and I undid the band of cotton that held my breasts strapped down. I unwound it and threw it on the ground and ground it into the dirt with the heel of my boot. I breathed deeply in the fresh, clean air.
When we came to the main gate, the four of us girls stopped for a moment. We looked out through the high razor-wire fence and down the slopes of Black Hill. The English countryside stretched away to the horizon. Soft mist was hanging in the valleys, and the tops of the low hills were gold in the morning sun, and I smiled because the whole world was fresh and new and bright.
FROM THE SPRING OF 2007 until the end of that long summer when Little Bee came to live with us, my son removed his Batman costume only at bath times. I ordered a twin costume that I substituted while he splashed in the suds, so that at least I could wash the boy sweat and the grass stains out of the first. It was a dirty, green-kneed job, fighting master criminals. If it wasn’t Mr. Freeze with his dastardly ice ray, then it was the Penguin—Batman’s deadly foe—or the even more sinister Puffin, whose absolute wickedness the original creators of the Batman franchise had inexplicably failed to chronicle. My son and I lived with the consequences—a houseful of acolytes, henchmen and stooges, ogling us from behind the sofa, cackling darkly in the thin gap beside the bookcase, and generally bursting out at us willy-nilly. It was one shock after another, in fact. At four years old, asleep and awake, my son lived at constant readiness. There was no question of separating him from the demonic bat mask, the Lycra suit, the glossy yellow utility belt and the jet-black cape. And there was no use addressing my son by his Christian name. He would only look behind him, cock his head, and shrug—as if to say, My bat senses can detect no boy of that name here, madam. The only name my son answered to, that summer, was Batman. Nor was there any point explaining to him that his father had died. My son didn’t believe in the physical possibility of death. Death was something that could only occur if the evil schemes of the baddies were not constantly foiled—and that, of course, was unthinkable.
That summer—the summer my husband died—we all had identities we were loath to let go of. My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s surname, and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality, that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
To flee from cruelty is the most natural thing in the world, of course. And the timing that brought us together that summer was so very cruel. Little Bee telephoned us on the morning they released her from the detention center. My husband picked up her call. I only found out much later that it was her—Andrew never told me. Apparently she let him know she was coming, but I don’t suppose he felt up to seeing her face again. Five days later he killed himself by hanging. They found my husband with his feet treading empty air, touching the soil of no country. Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.
Little Bee knocked on my front door five days after my husband died, which was ten days after they released her from detention. After a journey of five thousand miles and two years, she arrived just too late to find Andrew alive, but just in time for his funeral. Hello Sarah, she said.
Little Bee arrived at eight A.M. and the undertaker knocked at ten. Not one second to, or one second past. I imagine the undertaker had been silently standing outside our front door for several minutes, looking at his watch, waiting for our lives to converge onto the precise fault line at which our past could be cleaved from our future with three soft strikes of the bright brass knocker.
My son opened the door, and took in the undertaker’s height, his impeccable tailoring, and his sober demeanor. I suppose the undertaker looked for all the world like Batman’s workaday alter ego. My son shouted along the hallway to me: Mummy, it’s Bruce Wayne!
That morning I walked out onto the street and I stood there, looking at Andrew’s coffin through the thick, slightly greenish glass of the hearse window. When Little Bee came out to join me, bringing Batman by the hand, the undertaker ushered us to a long, black limousine and nodded us in. I told him we’d rather walk.
We looked as if we’d been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband’s funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City. It seemed as if we’d been cut-and-pasted. My thoughts raced, nightmarish and disconnected.
It was only a few hundred yards to the church, and the three of us walked in the road ahead of the hearse while an angry queue of traffic built up behind. I felt awful about that.
I was wearing a dark gray skirt and jacket with gloves and charcoal stockings. Little Bee was wearing my smart black raincoat over the clothes they let her out of the detention center in—a mortifyingly unfunereal Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans. My son was wearing an expression of absolute joy. He, Batman, had stopped the traffic. His cape swirled in his tiny slipstream as he strode proudly ahead, his grin stretching from bat ear to bat ear beneath the darkness of his mask. Occasionally his superior vision would detect an enemy that needed smiting, and when this occurred my son would simply stop, smite, and continue. He was worried that the Puffin’s invisible hordes might attack me. I was worried that my son hadn’t done a wee before we left the house, and might therefore do it in his bat pants. I was also worried about being a widow for the rest of my life.
At first I’d thought it was quite brave of me to insist on walking to the church, but now I felt dizzy and foolish. I thought I might faint. Little Bee held on to my elbow and whispered to me to take deep breaths. I remember thinking, How strange, that it should be you who is keeping me on my feet.
In the church I sat in the front pew, with Little Bee on my left and Batman on my right. The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work—I tried t
o keep my life and my magazine separate—but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one’s address book dressed in black and exported into pews in nonalphabetical order. They had classified themselves according to some unwritten protocol of grief, blood relatives ghoulishly close to the coffin, old girlfriends in a reluctant cluster near the baptismal font. I couldn’t bear to look behind me and see this new natural order of things. It was all very much too sudden. A week ago I had been a successful working mother. Now I was sitting at my husband’s funeral, flanked by a superhero and a Nigerian refugee. It seemed like a dream that might be awoken from with relatively little effort. I stared at my husband’s coffin, strewn with white lilies. Batman stared at the vicar. He cast an approving eye over the vicar’s stole and surplice. He gave the vicar a solemn thumbs-up, one caped crusader to another. The vicar returned the salute, then his thumb returned to the faded gilt edging of his Bible.
The church was falling quiet; expectant. My son looked all around, then back at me. Where’s Daddy? he said.
I squeezed my son’s hot, sweaty hand, and listened to the coughs and sniffles echoing round the church. I wondered how I could possibly explain my husband’s death to his son. It was depression that killed Andrew, of course—depression and guilt. But my son didn’t believe in death, let alone in the capacity of mere emotions to cause it. Mr. Freeze’s ice rays, perhaps. The Puffin’s lethal wingspan, at a stretch. But an ordinary phone call, from a skinny African girl? It was impossible to explain.
I realized I would have to tell my son the whole story, someday. I wondered where I would begin. It was two years before, in the summer of 2005, that Andrew had begun his long, slow slide into the depression that finally claimed him. It started on the day we first met Little Bee, on a lonely beach in Nigeria. The only souvenir I have of that first meeting is an absence where the middle finger of my left hand used to be. The amputation is quite clean. In place of my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D, and C keys on my laptop. I can’t rely on E, D, and C anymore. They go missing when I need them most. Pleased becomes please. Ecstasies becomes stasis.