Little Bee (24 page)

“What’s
wrong, Sarah?”

I
realized I was lying absolutely rigid.

“Oh
god, I’m sorry.”

Lawrence
stopped, and rolled onto his back. I took hold of his penis, but already I
could feel the softness returning to it.

“Please,”
he said. “Don’t.”

I
let go and took hold of his hand instead, but he pulled it free.

“I
don’t understand you, Sarah, I really don’t.”

“I’m
sorry Lawrence. It’s Andrew. It’s just too soon.”

“He
never stopped us while he was alive.”

I
thought about that. In the darkness outside, a low jet was climbing out of
Heathrow and
a pair of owls were
calling to each other
desperately above the roar, their shrieks shrilling against the whining of the
turbines.

“You’re
right. It isn’t Andrew.”

“What
is it, then?”

“I
don’t know. I love you, Lawrence, I really do. It’s just that I’ve got so much
to do.”

“For Little Bee?”

“Yes.
I can’t relax. I can’t stop running it over and over in my head.”

Lawrence
sighed. “So what about
us
?” he said. “Do you think
you’re going to find time for us again, one of these days?”

“Oh,
of course I will. You and me, we’ve got plenty of time, haven’t we? We’ll still
be here in six weeks, six months,
six
years. We’ve got
time to work this out. We’ve got time to work out how to be together, now that
Andrew’s gone. But Little Bee doesn’t have that time. You said it yourself. If
I can’t fix things for her, they’ll find her and they’ll deport her. And she’ll
be
gone,
and that will be that. And what sort of a
future would we have then? I wouldn’t be able to look at you without thinking I
should have done more to save her. Is that the future you want us to have?”

“Oh god.
Why can’t you be like other people and just
not give a shit?”

“Leggy
blonde, likes music and movies, seeks solvent man for friendship and maybe
more?”

“All right.
I’m glad you’re not one of them. But I don’t
want to lose you to a refugee girl who’s really got no hope of staying here
anyway.”

“Oh, Lawrence.
You’re not going to lose me. But you might
have to share me with her for a while.”

Lawrence
laughed.

“What?”
I said.

“Well
it’s just typical, isn’t it? These immigrants, they come over here, they take
our women…”

Lawrence
was smiling but there was
a guardedness
is his eyes,
an opaqueness that made me wonder how funny he found his own joke. It was
strange, to feel uncertain like this with him. Truly, he had never seemed at
all complicated before. Then again, I realized, I had never invested anything
complicated in him until now. Perhaps it was me. I made myself relax, and I
smiled back. I kissed him on the forehead.

“Thank
you. Thank you for not making this harder than it is.”

Lawrence
stared at me, and his face was thin and sad in the orange glow of the
streetlamps filtering in through the yellow silk blinds. The flutter in my
stomach surprised me, and I realized that the hairs on my arms were up.

“Sarah,”
he said, “I honestly don’t think you know how hard this is.”

VERY EARLY THE NEXT
morning, Sarah looked into my room.

“I’m
glad you’re awake,” she said. “We’ve run out of milk for Charlie’s breakfast,
so I’m popping down to the shop before he wakes up. Two minutes. Do you want to
come?”

It
was raining, so we went in Sarah’s car. The windscreen wipers squeaked across
the glass. Sarah chewed her lip between her teeth.

“Look,”
she said.
“Lawrence staying overnight.
I realize it
must look a bit sudden. So I wanted to have this chat with you. I just wanted
you to understand.”

I
laughed. Sarah was surprised and she looked across at me.

“It
is not hard to understand,” I said. “We are all trying to be happy in this
world. I am happy because I do not think the men will come to kill me today. You
are happy because you can make your own choices. And Lawrence is your choice,
right?”

Sarah
laughed and shook her head while she steered through the rain.

“Well,”
she said. “That was a lot easier than I thought it would be.”

I
smiled. It was good to see her laughing like this.

I
said to her, “I do not think you are wrong for living the life you were born
in. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a
wolf, that
is the proverb in my country.”

“That’s
beautiful,” said Sarah.

“Actually
that is not the proverb in my country.”

“No?”

“No!
Why would we have a proverb with wolves in it? We have two hundred proverbs
about monkeys, three hundred about cassava. We talk about what we know. But I
have noticed, in your country, I can say anything so long as I say
that is the proverb in my country.
Then people will nod
their heads and look very serious.”

Sarah
laughed again.

“That
is a good trick,” she said. “Isn’t that what you say, Bee?”

I
smiled. Happiness for Sarah was a long future where she could live the life of
her choice. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf and a bee must be a
bee. And when they run out of milk, all God’s creatures must go to the shop.

Sarah
looked across at me from the driving seat.

“Bless
you for understanding,” she said.

I
understood, but Sarah’s happiness and Sarah’s future are more things I would
have to explain to the girls from back home.

A
country’s future is found in its natural resources. It is my country’s biggest
export. It leaves so quickly through our
seaports,
the
girls from my village could never even see it and they could not know what it
looked like. Actually the future looks like gasoline. I discovered this when I
was reading the newspapers in the detention center, and finally I made sense of
what had happened to me back home. What had happened was
,
the oil companies had discovered a huge reserve of the future underneath my
village. To be precise what they discovered was crude oil, which is the future
before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like
any dream it ends with a rude awakening.

The
men came while we were preparing the evening meal, while the blue wood smoke
mixed with the thick steam of the cassava pots in the golden evening sun. It
happened so quickly that the women had to grab us children and run with us into
the jungle. We hid there while we listened to the screams of the men who stayed
behind to fight.

On
the dashboard of Sarah’s car, a light went on.

“Oh,”
she said. “We need petrol.”

Water
sprayed up off the rainy road. Sarah turned the car into a service station. We
got out. There were no other cars. I listened to the rain beating down on the
canopy above the gasoline pumps. Sarah looked at me as she held the gasoline
hose.

“Do
you still want to stay?” she said.

I
nodded.

The
gasoline flowing through the pump made a high-pitched sound, as if the
screaming of my family was still dissolved in it. The nozzle of the gasoline
hose went right inside the fuel tank of Sarah’s car, so that the transfer of
the fluid was hidden. I still do not know what gasoline truly looks like. If it
looks the way it smells on a rainy morning, then I suppose it must flash like
the most brilliant happiness, so intense that you would go blind or crazy if
you even looked at it. Maybe that is why they do not let us see gasoline.

When
the filling was finished, Sarah went inside the service-station shop to pay. She
came out with a large plastic bottle of milk, and we drove back to the house. It
was still only six thirty in the morning.

Sarah
closed the front door behind us and she yawned.

“Charlie
won’t be up for an hour at least,” she said. “I think I might go back to bed.”

I
nodded. Sarah smiled. On her face was a look of relief. I realized: this is
what you can do for her, Little Bee. You can
understand.

I
went into the kitchen and I filled the kettle to make myself a drink of tea.

Understanding.
That would have been a good name for my
village, even before the men came to burn our huts and drill for oil. It would
have been a good name for the clearing around the limba tree where we children
swung on that bald old car tire, and bounced on the seats of my father’s broken
Peugeot and my uncle’s broken Mercedes, with the springs poking out from them,
and where we chanted church songs from a hymnbook with the covers missing and
the pages held together with tape. We knew what we had: we had nothing. Your
world and our world had come to this understanding. Even the missionaries had
boarded up their mission. They left us with the holy books that were not worth
the expense of shipping back to your country. In our village our only Bible had
all of its pages missing after the forty-sixth verse of the twenty-seventh
chapter of Matthew, so that the end of our religion, as far as any of us knew,
was
My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?
We
understood that this was the end of the story.

That
is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not
miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one. From the
rest of the world all we knew was from that one old movie. About a man who was
in a great hurry, sometimes in jet planes and sometimes on motorbikes and
sometimes upside down.

From
the windup radios we had a little news, but mostly music. We also had a TV, but
in Understanding there was no reception and you had to make the programs
yourself. Our TV was just a wooden frame around where the screen used to be,
and the frame sat in the red dust underneath the limba tree, and my sister
Nkiruka used to put her head inside the frame to do the pictures. This is a
good trick. I know now that we should have called this,
reality
television.

My
sister used to adjust the bow on her dress, and put a flower in her hair just
so, and smile through the screen and say:
Hello, this is
the news from the British BBC, today ice cream will snow down from the sky and
no one will have to walk to the river for water because the engineers will come
from the city and put a stand pipe in the middle of the village.
And the
rest of us children, we would all sit in a half circle around the television
set and we would watch Nkiruka announcing the news. We loved these dreams of
hers. In the pleasant afternoon shade we would gasp with delight and all of us
would say,
Weh!

One
of the good things about Understanding was that you could talk back to
television. The rest of us children, we used to shout at Nkiruka:

—This ice-cream snow, exactly what time will it
occur?

—In the early evening, of course, when the day
is cooler.

—How do you know this, Madam Television
Announcer?

—Because the day must be cool enough or the ice
cream would melt, of course. Do you children know nothing?

And
we children would sit back and nod at one another—evidently the day would need
to be cool enough first. We were very satisfied with the television news.

You
can play the same trick with television in your country, but it is harder
because the television sets do not listen. Early in the morning, after Sarah
had gone back to bed when we came home from the service station, it was Charlie
who wanted to turn the television on. He appeared in the kitchen in his bat
costume and bare feet. I said,
Good morning, little bat, do
you want breakfast?
He said,
No, I
doesn’t
want breakfast, I does want TELEVISION.
So I
said,
Does
your mummy say it is okay for you to watch television before
breakfast?
Charlie looked at me and his eyes were very patient, like a
teacher who has told you the answer three times already but you have forgotten
it.
Mummy is asleep, actually,
he said.

So
we went into the next room and we switched on the television. We looked at the
pictures without the sound. It was the BBC morning news, and they were showing
pictures of the prime minister making a speech. Charlie put his head on one
side to watch. The ears of his Batman hood flopped over.

He
said, “That is the Joker, isn’t it?”

“No
Charlie. That is the prime minister.”

“Is
he a goody or a baddy?”

I
thought to myself.

“Half
the people think he is a goody and the other
half think
he is a baddy.”

Charlie
giggled. “That’s silly,” he said.

“That
is democracy,” I said. “If you did not have it, you would want it.”

We
sat and watched the prime minister’s lips moving.

“What’s
he saying?” said Charlie.

“He
is saying that he will make ice-cream snow.”

Charlie
spun round to look at me.
“WHEN?” he said.

“About
three o’clock in the afternoon, if the weather is cool enough. He is also
saying that young people who are running away from trouble in other countries
will be allowed to stay in this country so long as they work hard and do not
make any fuss.”

Charlie
nodded. “I think the prime minisser is a goody.”

“Because he will be kind to refugees?”

Charlie
shook his head. “Because of the ice-cream snow,” he said.

There
was a laugh from the door. I turned around and Lawrence was there. He was
wearing a bathrobe, and he stood there in his bare feet. I do not know how long
he had been listening to us.

“Well,”
he said, “we know how to buy that boy’s vote.”

I
looked at the floor. I was embarrassed that Lawrence had been standing there.

“Oh
don’t be shy,” he said. “You’re great with Charlie. Come and have some
breakfast.”

“Okay,”
I said. “Batman, do you want some breakfast?”

Charlie
stared at Lawrence and then he shook his head, so I switched through the TV
channels until we found the one that Charlie liked, and then I went into the
kitchen.

“Sarah’s
sleeping,” said Lawrence. “I suppose she needs the rest.
Tea
or coffee?”

“Tea, thank you.”

Lawrence
boiled the kettle and he made tea for both of us. He put my tea down on the
table in front of me, carefully, and he turned the handle of the mug toward my
hand. He sat down on the other side of the table, and smiled. The sun was
lighting up the kitchen. It was thick yellow—a warm light, but not a show-off
light. It did not want the glory for the illumination of the room. It made each
object look as if it was glowing with a light from deep inside itself. Lawrence,
the table with its clean blue cotton tablecloth, his orange tea mug and my
yellow one—all of it glowing from within. The light made me feel very cheerful.
I thought to myself,
that is a good trick.

But
Lawrence was serious. “Look,” he said, “I think you and I need to make a plan
for your welfare. I’m going to be very clear about this. I think you should go
to the local police and report yourself. I don’t think
it’s
right for you to expose Sarah to the stress of harboring you.”

I
smiled. I thought about Sarah
harboring
me, as if I
was a boat.

Lawrence
said, “This isn’t funny.”

“But
no one is looking for me. Why should I go to the police?”

“I
don’t think
it’s
right, your being here. I don’t think
it’s good for Sarah at the moment.”

I
blew on my tea. The steam from it rose up into the still air of the kitchen,
and it glowed. “Do you think you are good for Sarah at the moment, Lawrence?”

“Yes.
Yes I do.”

“She
is a good person. She saved my life.”

Lawrence
smiled. “I know Sarah very well,” he said. “She told me the whole story.”