Little Bee (5 page)

—Oh.
Is there painting-and-drawing?

—Yes,
there’s painting-and-drawing.

—Is
mine daddy doing drawing?

—No
Charlie, Daddy is opening the window and looking at the sky.

I
shivered, and wondered how long I would have to go on narrating my husband’s
afterlife.

More words, then hymns.
Hands took my elbows and led me
outside. I observed myself standing in a graveyard beside a deep hole in the
ground. Six suited undertakers were lowering a coffin on thick green silky
ropes with tasseled ends. I recognized it as the coffin that had been standing
on trestles at the front of the church. The coffin came to rest. The
undertakers retrieved the ropes, each with a deft flick of the wrist. I
remember
thinking,
I bet they do
this all the time,
as if it was some brilliant insight. Someone thrust a
lump of clay into my hand. I realized I was being invited—urged, even—to throw
it into the hole. I stepped up to the edge. Neat, clean greengrocer’s grass had
been laid around the border of the grave. I looked down and saw the coffin
glowing palely in the depths. Batman held tight to my leg and peered down into
the gloom with me.

“Mummy,
why did the Bruce Wayne men
putted
that box down in
the hole?”

“Let’s
not think about that now, darling.”

I’d
spent so many hours explaining heaven to Charlie that week—every room and
bookshelf and sandpit of it—that I’d never really dealt with the issue of
Andrew’s physical body at all. I thought it would be too much to ask of my son,
at four, to understand the separation between body and soul. Looking back on it
now, I think I underestimated a boy who could live simultaneously in
Kingston-upon-Thames and Gotham City. I think if I’d managed to sit him down
and explain it to him gently, he would have been perfectly happy with the
duality.

I
knelt and put my arm around my son’s shoulders. I did it to be tender, but my
head was swimming and I realized that perhaps it was only Charlie who was
stopping me from falling down the hole. I held on tighter. Charlie put his
mouth to my ear and whispered.

“Where’s
mine daddy right now?”

I
whispered back.

“Your
daddy is in the heaven hills, Charlie.
Very popular at this
time of year.
I think he’s very happy there.”

“Mmm.
Is mine daddy coming back soon?”

“No,
Charlie. People don’t come back from heaven. We talked about that.”

Charlie
pursed his lips.

“Mummy,”
he said again, “why did they put that box down there?”

“I
suppose they want to keep it safe.”

“Oh.
Is
they going to come and get it later?”

“No
Charlie, I don’t think so.”

Charlie
blinked. Under his bat mask he screwed up his face with the effort of trying to
understand.

“Where
is heaven, Mummy?”

“Please,
Charlie. Not now.”

“What’s
in that box?”

“Let’s
talk about this later, darling, all right? Mummy is feeling rather dizzy.”

Charlie
stared at me.

“Is
mine daddy in that box?”

“Your
daddy is in heaven, Charlie.”

“IS
THAT BOX HEAVEN?” said Charlie, loudly.

Everyone
was watching us. I couldn’t speak. My son stared into the hole. Then he looked
up at me in absolute alarm.

“Mummy!
Get him OUT!
Get mine daddy
out of heaven!”

I
held tightly on to his shoulders.

“Oh
Charlie, please, you don’t understand!”

“GET
HIM OUT! GET HIM OUT!”

My
son squirmed in my grip and broke free. It happened very quickly. He stood at
the very edge of the hole. He looked back at me and then he turned and inched
forward, but the greengrocer’s grass overlapped the edge of the hole and it
yielded under his feet and he fell, with his bat cape flying behind him, down
into the grave. He landed with a thump on top of Andrew’s coffin. There was a
single, urgent scream from one of the other mourners. I think it was the first
sound, since Andrew died, that really broke the silence.

The
scream ran on and on in my mind. I felt nauseous, and the horizon lurched
insanely. Still kneeling, I leaned out over the edge of the pit. Down below, in
the dark shadow, my son was banging on the coffin and screaming
Daddy, Daddy, get OUT!
He clung to the coffin lid, and
planted his bat shoes against the sidewall of the grave, and heaved against the
screws that held the lid closed. I hung my arms down over the edge of the hole.
I implored Charlie to take my hands so I could pull him back up. I don’t think
he heard me at all.

At
first, my son moved with a breathless confidence. Batman was undefeated, after
all, that spring. He had overcome the Penguin, the Puffin, and Mr. Freeze. It
was simply not a possibility in my son’s mind that he might not overcome this new
challenge. He screamed in rage and fury. He wouldn’t give up, but if I am
strict and force myself now to decide upon the precise moment in this whole
story when my heart irreparably broke, it was the moment when I saw the
weariness and the doubt creep into my son’s small muscles as his fingers
slipped, for the tenth time, from the pale oak lid.

The
mourners clustered around the edge of the grave, paralyzed by the horror of
this thing, this first discovery of death that was worse than death itself. I
tried to go forward but the hands on my elbows were holding me back. I strained
against their grip and looked at all the horror-struck faces around the grave
and I was thinking,
Why
doesn’t someone do something?

But
it is hard, very hard, to be the first.

Finally
it was Little Bee who went down into the grave and held up my son for other
hands to haul out. Charlie was kicking and biting and struggling furiously in
his muddied mask and cape. He wanted to go back down. And it was Little Bee,
once she herself had been extricated, who hugged him and held him back as he
screamed,
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,
while each of the
principal mourners stepped onto the thin strip of greengrocer’s grass and
dropped in their small handfuls of clay. My son’s screaming seemed to go on for
a cruelly long time. I remember wondering if my mind would shatter with the
noise, like a wineglass broken by a soprano. In fact a former colleague of
Andrew’s, a war reporter who had been in Iraq and Darfur, did call me a few
days later with the name of a combat-fatigue counselor he used.
That’s kind of you,
I told him,
but I
haven’t been at war.

At
the graveside, when the screaming was over, I picked up Charlie and held him on
my front, with his head resting on my shoulder. He was exhausted. Through the
eyeholes of his bat mask, I could see his eyelids drooping. I watched the other
mourners filing away in a slow line toward the car park. Brightly colored
umbrellas broke out above the somber suits. It was starting to rain.

Little
Bee stayed behind with me. We stood by the side of the grave and we stared at
each other.

“Thank
you,” I said.

“It
is nothing,” said Little Bee. “I just did what anyone would do.”

“Yes,”
I said. “Except that everyone else didn’t.”

Little
Bee shrugged.

“It
is easier when you are from outside.”

I
shivered. The rain came down harder.

“This
is never going to end,” I said. “Is it, Little Bee?”

“
However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.
That is what we used to say in my village.”

“
April showers bring May flowers.
That’s what we used to
say in mine.”

We
tried to smile at each other.

I
never did drop my own clay into the grave. I couldn’t seem to put it down
either. Two hours later, alone for a moment at the kitchen table of our house,
I realized I was still gripping it. I left it there on the tablecloth, a small
beige lump on top of the clean blue cotton. When I came back a few minutes
later, someone had been past and tidied it.

A
few days later the obituary in
The Times
noted that
there had been poignant scenes at their former columnist’s funeral. Andrew’s
editor sent me the cutting, in a heavy cream envelope, with a crisp white
compliments slip.

ONE OF THE THINGS
I would have to explain to the girls from back home, if I was telling
them this story, is the simple little word
horror.
It
means something different to the people from my village.

In
your country, if you are not scared enough already, you can go to watch a
horror film. Afterward you can go out of the cinema into the night and for a
little while there is horror in everything. Perhaps there are murderers lying
in wait for you at home. You think this because there is a light on in your
house that you are certain you did not leave on. And when you remove your
makeup in the mirror last thing, you see a strange look in your own eyes. It is
not you. For one hour you are haunted, and you do not trust anybody, and then
the feeling fades away. Horror in your country is something you take a dose of
to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.

For
me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It
is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big
red cinema seat fold itself up behind you. That would be a good trick. If I
could do that, please believe me, I would already be standing in the foyer. I
would be laughing with the kiosk boy, and exchanging British one-pound coins
for hot buttered popcorn, and saying,
Phew, thank the Good
Lord all that is
over, that is the most frightening film I ever saw and
I think next time I will go to see a comedy, or maybe a romantic film with
kissing. But the film in your memory, you cannot walk out of it so easily. Wherever
you go it is always playing. So when I say that I am a refugee, you must
understand that there is no refuge.

Some
days I wonder how many there are just like me. Thousands, I think, just
floating on the oceans right now.
In between our world and
yours.
If we cannot pay smugglers to transport us, we stow away on cargo
ships.
In the dark, in freight containers.
Breathing
quietly in the darkness, hungry, hearing the strange clanking sounds of ships,
smelling the diesel oil and the paint, listening to the
bom-bom-bom
of the engines.
Wide-awake at night, hearing the singing of
whales rising up from the deep sea and vibrating through the ship.
All
of us whispering, praying,
thinking
. And what are we
thinking of?
Of physical safety, of peace of mind.
Of
all these imaginary countries that are now being served in the foyer.

I
stowed away in a great steel boat, but the horror stowed away inside me. When I
left my homeland I thought I had escaped—but out on the open sea, I started to
have nightmares. I was naive to suppose I had left my country with nothing. It
was a heavy cargo that I carried.

They
unloaded my cargo in a port on the estuary of the Thames
river
.
I did not walk across the gangplank, I was carried off the ship by your
immigration officials and they put me into detention. It was no joke inside the
detention center. What will I say about this? Your system is cruel, but many of
you were kind to me. You sent charity boxes. You dressed my horror in boots and
a colorful shirt. You sent it something to paint its nails with. You posted it
books and newspapers. Now the horror can speak the Queen’s English. This is how
we can speak now of sanctuary and refuge. This is how I can tell you—
soon-soon
as we say in my country—a little about the thing
I was running from.

There
are things the men can do to you in this life, I promise you, it would be much
better to kill yourself first. Once you have this knowledge, your eyes are
always flickering from this place to that, watching for the moment when the men
will come.

In
the immigration detention center, they told us we must be disciplined to
overcome our fears. This is the discipline I learned: whenever I go into a new
place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly,
I make sure I am ready. The first time I went into Sarah’s bathroom I was
thinking,
Yes Little Bee, in here you would break the
mirror of that medicine cabinet and cut your wrists with the splinters.
When
Sarah took me for a ride in her car I was thinking,
Here,
Little Bee, you would roll down the window and unbuckle your seat belt and tip
yourself out of the window, no fuss, in front of the very next lorry that comes
the other way.
And when Sarah took me for a day in Richmond Park, she
was looking at the scenery but I was looking for a hollow in the ground where I
could hide and lie very still until all that you would find of me was a small
white skull that the foxes and the rabbits would fuss over with their soft, wet
noses.

If
the men come suddenly, I will be ready to kill myself. Do you feel sorry for
me, for thinking always in this way? If the men come and they find you not
ready, then it will be me who is feeling sorry for you.

For
the first six months in the detention center, I screamed every night and in the
day I imagined a thousand ways to kill myself. I worked out how to kill myself
in every single one of the situations a girl like me might get into in the
detention center.
In the medical wing, morphine.
In the cleaners’ room, bleach.
In the
kitchens, boiling fat.
You think I am exaggerating? Some of the others
that were detained with me, they really did these things. The detention
officers sent the bodies away in the night, because it was not good for the
local people to see the slow ambulances leaving that place.

Or
what if they released me? And I went to a movie and I had to kill myself there?
I would throw myself down from the projection gallery.
Or a
restaurant?
I would hide in the biggest refrigerator and go into a long,
cool sleep.
Or the seaside?
Ah, at the seaside, I
would steal an ice-cream van and drive it into the sea. You would never see me
again. The only thing to show that a frightened African girl had ever existed
would be two thousand melting ice creams, bobbing in their packets on the cool
blue waves.

After
a hundred sleepless nights I had finished working out how to kill myself in
every single corner of the detention center and the country outside, but I
still carried on imagining. I was weak from horror and they put me in the
medical wing. Away from the other prisoners I lay between the scratchy sheets
and I spent each day all alone in my mind. I knew they planned to deport me so
I started to imagine killing myself back home in Nigeria. It was just like
killing
myself
in the detention center but the scenery
was nicer. This was a small and unexpected happiness. In forests, in quiet
villages, on the sides of mountains I took my own life again and again.

In
the most beautiful places I secretly lingered over the act. Once, in a deep and
hot jungle that smelled of wet moss and the excrement of monkeys, I took nearly
one whole day to chop down trees and build a tall tower to hang myself from by
the neck. I had a machete. I imagined the sticky sap on my hands and the sweet
honey smell of it, the good tired feeling in my arms from the chopping, and the
screeches of the monkeys who were angry when I cut their trees down. I worked
hard in my imagination and I tied the tree trunks together with vines and
creepers and I used a special knot that my sister Nkiruka showed me. It was a
big day’s work for a small girl. I was proud. At the end of that whole day
alone in my sickbed working on my suicide tower, I realized I could just have
climbed a jungle tree and jumped with my silly head first onto a rock.

This
was the first time that I smiled.

I
began to eat the meals they brought me. I thought to myself, you must keep up
your strength, Little Bee, or you will be too weak to kill your foolish self
when the time arrives, and then you will be sorry. I started to walk from the
medical wing to the canteen at mealtimes, so that I could choose my food
instead of having it brought to me. I started asking myself questions like:
Which will make me stronger for the act of suicide?
The carrots or the peas?

In
the canteen there was a television that was always on. I began to learn more
about life in your country. I watched programs called
Love
Island
and
Hell’s Kitchen
and
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
and
I worked out how I would kill myself on all of those shows. Drowning, knives,
and ask the audience.

One
day the detention officers gave all of us a copy of a book called
LIFE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
It explains the history of
your country and how to fit in. I planned how I would kill myself in the time
of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and
Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth). I worked out how to kill myself
under Labour and Conservative governments, and why it was not important to have
a plan for suicide under the Liberal Democrats. I began to understand how your
country worked.

They
moved me out of the medical wing. I still screamed in the night, but not every
night. I realized that I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror,
but the other one was hope. I realized I had killed myself back to life.

I
read your novels. I read the newspapers you sent. In the opinion columns I
underlined the grand sentences and I looked up every word in my
Collins Gem.
I practiced for hours in front of the mirror
until I could make the big words look natural in my mouth.

I
read a lot about your Royal Family. I like your Queen more than I like her
English. Do you know how you would kill yourself during a garden party with
Queen Elizabeth the Second on the great lawn of Buckingham Palace in London,
just in case you were invited? I do. Me, I would kill myself with a broken
champagne glass, or maybe a sharp lobster claw, or even a small piece of
cucumber that I could suck down into my windpipe, if the men suddenly came.

I
often wonder what the Queen would do, if the men suddenly came. You cannot tell
me she does not think about it a lot. When I read in
LIFE
IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
about some of the things that have happened to the
women in the Queen’s job, I understood that she must think about it all of the
time. I think that if the Queen and I met then we would have many things in
common.

The
Queen smiles sometimes but if you look at her eyes in her portrait on the back
of the five-pound note, you will see she is carrying a heavy cargo too. The
Queen and me, we are ready for the worst. In public you will see both of us
smiling and sometimes even laughing, but if you were a man who looked at us in
a certain way we would both of us make sure we were dead before you could lay a
single finger on our bodies. Me and the Queen of England, we would not give you
the satisfaction.

It
is good to live like this. Once you are ready to die, you do not suffer so
badly from the horror. So I was nervous but I was smiling, because I was ready
to die, that morning they let us girls out of detention.

I
will tell you what happened when the taxi driver came. The four of us girls, we
were waiting outside the Immigration Detention Centre. We were keeping our
backs to it, because this is what you do to a big gray monster who has kept you
in his belly for two years, when he suddenly spits you out. You keep your back
to him and you talk in whispers, in case he remembers you and the clever idea
comes into his mind to swallow you all up again.

I
looked across to Yevette, the tall pretty girl from Jamaica. Every time I
looked at her before, she was laughing and smiling. But now her smile looked as
nervous as mine.

“What
is wrong?” I whispered.

Yevette
moved her mouth close to my ear.

“It
ain’t safe out ere.”

“But
they have released us, haven’t they? We are free to go. What is the problem?”

Yevette
shook her head and whispered again.

“Ain’t dat simple, darlin.
Dere’s freedom as in,
yu girls is free to go,
and den dere’s freedom as in,
yu girls is free to go till we catches yu.
Sorry, but
it’s
dat second kind of freedom we got right now, Lil Bee.
Truth.
Dey
call
it bein a
illegal immigrant.
”

“I
don’t understand, Yevette.”

“Yeh,
an
I can’t explain it to yu here.”

Yevette
looked across at the other two
girls,
and behind her
at the detention center. When she turned back to me, she leaned close in to my
ear again.

“I
played a trick to get us let out of dere.”

“What
sort of trick?”

“Shh, darlin.
Dey is too many lisseners in dis place, Bee. Trus
me, we got to find someplace we can hide up. Den I can explain de situation to
yu at
leisure.
”

Now
the other two girls were staring at us. I smiled at them and I tried not to
think about what Yevette said. We were sitting on our heels at the main gate of
the detention center. The fences stretched away from us on both sides. The
fences were as high as four men and they had razor wire on the tops, in nasty
black rolls. I looked at the other three girls and I started giggling. Yevette
stood up and she put her hands on her hips and made big eyes at me.