Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

  “Charlie,” I said. “You think your daddy died because you were not Batman?”

  Charlie looked up. Through the dark eye holes of his bat mask, I could see the tears in his eyes.

  “I was at mine nursery,” he said. “That’s when the baddies got mine Daddy.”

  His lip trembled. I pulled him toward me and I held him while he cried. I stared over his shoulder at the cold black drainage tunnels that disappeared into the tall stone wall of the river embankment. I stared into the black mouth of one of them, as wide as my shoulders across, but all I could see was Andrew spinning slowly round on the electrical cord with his eyes watching me each time he revolved. The look in his eyes was the look of those black tunnels: there was no end to them.

  “Listen Charlie,” I said. “Your daddy did not die because you were not there. It is not your fault. Do you understand? You are a good boy, Charlie. It is not your fault at all.”

  Charlie pulled himself out of my arms and looked at me.

  “Why did mine Daddy die?”

  I thought about it.

  “The baddies got him, Charlie. But they are not the sort of baddies Batman can fight. They are the sort of baddies that your daddy had to fight in his heart and I have to fight in my heart. They are baddies from inside.”

  Charlie nodded. “Is there lots?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of baddies from inside?”

  I looked at the dark tunnels, and I shivered.

  “Everyone has them,” I said.

  “Will we beat them?”

  I nodded. “Of course we will.”

  “And they won’t get me, will they?”

  I smiled. “No, Charlie, I don’t think those baddies will ever get you.”

  “And they won’t get you either, will they?”

  I sighed.

  “Charlie, there are no baddies here by the river. We are on an adventure, okay? Maybe you can take one day off from being Batman.”

  Charlie frowned, as if this was another trick of his enemies.

  “Batman is always Batman,” he said.

  I laughed, and we went back to building the city out of sand. I put a big handful on top of a pile that Charlie said was a multistory 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 prison 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 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 stared.

  “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 sand wall between the wilderness and the suburbs of his city.

  “Mmm,” he said.

  After a while Lawrence came down the green steps and walked up to us.

  “I’ll take over here,” he said. “Go up and see if you can talk some sense into Sarah, will you?”

  “Why, what is wrong? Why didn’t she come down here with you?”

  Lawrence held his hands out with the palms upward, and he sent air upward out of his mouth so that his hair blew. “Just go and see her, will you?” he said.

  I walked up the steps. Sarah was still standing by the railings.

  “That bloody man,” she said when she saw me.

  “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.

  “Lawrence still isn’t happy about you being around. It’s putting him on edge.”

  “What did you say, about Andrew?”

  Sarah looked out across the river.

  “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 of 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 all 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. There was so much detail in there. I only read a couple of papers, but it was enough to see where he was going with it all. I read an inspectors’ report about the immigration detention centers. How long did you say they kept you in that place, Bee?”

  “Two years.”

  “Oh Bee. I had no idea how hellish they are. I was imagining, I don’t know, a sort of high-security hotel, I suppose. Is it true they keep it deliberately cold in there? Is it true you have to apply in writing if you just need a paracetamol?”

  I smiled. “If you are planning to have a headache, you need to apply twenty-four hours in advance.”

  Sarah sighed. “So it is true, then. Andrew highlighted this one passage that said, We find the humiliating procedures excessive. We do not see how anyone could abuse an excess of sanitary towels. Did you really have to apply for them too?”

  I nodded. “They would only give them to us one at a time. You had to fill in a form.”

  Sarah twisted her hands together on the top bar of the iron railings. “The thing is,” she said, “I think I know why Andrew highlighted that passage. I mean, people would skim-read the barred windows and the perimeter fence. But if you really wanted to bring it home, you’d show how a girl has to apply in writing for Kotex Ultra. Right?”

  She stopped, and she looked down to where Lawrence and Charlie were laughing and kicking sand at each other. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet. “I think Andrew was planning a book,” she said. “That’s what I told Lawrence.”

  I looked up at Sarah.

  “That is why he was angry?”

  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 centers. Maybe even, I don’t know, write the book myself.”

  “You said all that to Lawrence?”

  “That’s when he went ballistic.” Sarah sighed. “I think he’s jealous of Andrew.”

  We stood and looked out over the river for a long time. A breeze had started to blow. It was not much, but enough to darken the smooth surface of the river. Now, I thought. I gripped my hands onto the railings and tried to make the courage of the city flow into my bones again.

  “Sarah,” I said. “I want to tell you my feelings about Lawrence.”

  She looked at me sharply.

  “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.

  “Please, 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. But now there’s Lawrence. And he isn’t perfect, you’re right. But I can’t just keep walking away.” Sarah took a deep and shaking breath. “At some point you just have to have to turn around and face your life head-on.”

  She looked at me for a long time, and then she held on to me and we hugged each other tight.

  “Oh Bee,” said Sarah.

  We stood and held each other like that, and after we had been quiet for a long time Sarah stood up straight and swept back her hair.

  “Go down and play with Charlie and Lawrence,” she said. “I have to make a phone call.”

  I looked at Sarah and she smiled at me, and I walked back down the steps to the place Lawrence and Charlie were playing. They were picking up the small round stones from the edge of the mud and throwing them into the river. When I came close, Charlie carried on throwing stones and Lawrence turned to me.

  “Did you talk her out of it?” he said.

  “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 moment, looking at each other.

  “You still think I’m a bastard, don’t you?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m not,” said Lawrence. “I’ll even help you, if you help me.”

  “What help do you need from me?”

  “You could just go, Little Bee. Couldn’t you? Quietly and without fuss.”

  “I already thought about that.”

  “So what’s stopping you? Money? I can give you money.”

  I looked down at my shoes and then I looked back up. “You will pay me to go away?”

  “Don’t make it sound like that. It isn’t easy to get started in this country without money for food and rent. I don’t want to put you on the streets, that’s all.”

  He was still holding a stone in his hand and I took it from between his fingers. It was warm and smooth and I turned it around and around in my hands, polishing it with the moisture in my palms.

  I said, “What is your wife’s name?”

  Lawrence looked at his hands. “Linda.”

  “And your children?”

  Lawrence did not look in my eyes.

  “Sonia,” he said. “And Stephen. And Simon’s the, um, the baby.”

  “Hmm.”

  I weighed the stone and I turned it around and around between my fingers and then I dropped it on the sand.

  “You should go back to them,” I said.

  Lawrence looked at me then, and I felt a great sadness because there was nothing in his eyes. I looked away over the water. 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 I felt relief, because I saw the dogs up on the walkway above us, and they were only fat yellow family dogs, out for a walk with their master. Then I saw Sarah, coming down the steps toward us. Her arms were hanging by her sides, and in one of her hands she held her mobile phone. She walked up to us, took a deep breath, and smiled.

  “I called work,” she said. “I’ve got something to tell you both.”

  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 along the thin strip of sand. Children were still making their sand castles beside the river, although the level of the water was rising and the beach was getting narrower. None of the children was Charlie.

  “Charlie?” Sarah shouted. “Charlie? Oh my god. CHARLIE!”

  I spun 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!”

  Horror filled me completely, so that I could not even move. While Sarah screamed for her child I widened my eyes into the blackness of the drainage tunnels in the embankment wall, and I stared into them. I looked for a long time. I saw that the night horrors of all our worlds had found one another, 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.

  I HELD LITTLE BEE for a long time. Then I asked her: Will you go down and play with Charlie and Lawrence? I have to make a phone call.

  After she walked down the stone steps, I held on to the iron railing of the embankment and I held on to my memories of Andrew and I held on to my mobile phone. The phone was shaking in my hand, showing five bars of signal. The reception was so strong in the center of London, one hardly needed the handset at all. The air positively crackled with connectivity, as if one might simply direct a thought at someone and be received loud and clear. My tummy lurched and I decided, 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 anymore.

  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 realized 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. He never liked to put himself in the story.

  But what if the story is that we are in the story? I started to understand how Andrew must have agonized 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? And after 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. This is the forked tongue of grief again. 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 just 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 midlife 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 goose bumps 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 looked out over the river. When we first arrived the water had been flowing downstream toward the wild estuary and the untamed waters of the North Sea. Now it was nudging back in the direction of Oxford and the crisp white boathouses of Henley. It is hard, when it comes right down to the actual choice, to know what you want out of life.

  I went down the stone steps to the little shrinking beach. I said to Lawrence and Little Bee, I called work. I’ve got something to tell you both. But they looked so forlorn, standing there, standing apart from each other, not speaking. I realized this was never going to work.

  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, I’ll 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. Isn’t that odd? I’m awfully sorry. And now might I please have my old life back?

  I held out my hands to Little Bee and Lawrence, but then I noticed that Charlie was no longer with them.

  “Um, where’s Charlie?”