The Other Hand (11 page)

If I was telling this story to the girls from back home, then one of the new words I would have to explain to them is ‘efficiency’. We refugees are very efficient. We do not have the things we need—our children, for example—and so we are clever at making things stretch a little further. Just see what that girl with no name could make out of one little patch of sunlight. Or look how the sari girl could fit the entire colour of yellow into one empty see-through plastic bag.

I lay back on the bed and looked up at the chains. I was thinking, That sunshine, that colour yellow, maybe I will not see very much of these now. Maybe the new colour of my life was grey. Two years in the grey detention centre, and now I was an illegal immigrant. That means, you are free until they catch you. That means, you live in a grey area. I thought about how I was going to live. I thought about the years, living as quiet as could be. Hiding my colours and living in the twilight and the shadows. I sighed, and I tried to breathe deeply. I wanted to cry when I looked up at those chains and thought about the colour grey. I was thinking, if the head of the United Nations telephoned one morning and said,
Greetings, Little Bee, to you falls the great honour of designing a national flag for all the world’s refugees
, then the flag I would make would be grey. You would not need any particular fabric to make it. I would say that the flag could be any shape and it could be made with anything you had. A worn-out old brassiere, for example, that has been washed so many times it has become grey. You could fly it on the end of a broom handle, if you did not have a flag-pole. Although if you did have a spare flag-pole, for example, in that line of tall white flag-poles outside the United Nations building in New York City, then I think that old grey brassiere would make a fine spectacle, flying in the long colourful line of flags. I would fly it between the Stars and Stripes and the big red Chinese flag. That would be a good trick. Thinking about this, I made myself laugh. “What de hell you laughin at, Bug?”

“I was thinking about the colour grey.” Yevette frowned. “Don’t you go crazy too please, Bug,” she said.

I lay back on the bed again and I looked up to the ceiling, but all that was there were those long chains dangling down. I thought, I could hang myself by the neck from (hose, no problem.

In the afternoon the farmer’s wife came. She brought food. There was bread and cheese in a basket, and a sharp knife to cut the bread with. I thought, I can cut open my veins with that knife, if the men come. The farmer’s wife was a kind woman. I asked her why was she doing this good thing for us. She said it was because we were all human beings. I said,
Excuse me, miss, but I do not think Yevette is a human being. I think she is another species with a louder mouth
. Yevette and the farmer’s wife started laughing then, and we talked for a little while about where we had all come from and where we were going to. She told me the direction to go to Kingston-upon-Thames, but she also told me that I shouldn’t.
You don’t want to go to the suburbs, dear
, she said.
Neither fish nor flesh, the suburbs. Unnatural places, full of unnatural people
. I laughed. I told her,
Maybe I will fit right in
.

The farmer’s wife was surprised when we asked for five plates instead of four, but she brought them anyway. We divided the food into five portions, and we gave the biggest helping to the daughter of the woman with no name, because she was still growing.

That night I dreamed about my village before the men came. There was a swing that the boys had made. It was the old tyre of a car, and the boys had tied ropes around it and suspended it from the high branch of a no tree. This was a big old limba tree and it grew a little way apart from our homes, near to the schoolhouse. Even before I was big enough to go on the swing, my mother would sit me down in the dark red dust by the trunk of the limba, so I could watch the big children swinging. I loved to listen to them laughing and singing. Two, three, four children at once, all ways up, with legs and arms and heads all tangled up and dragging in the red scrape of dust at the lowest point of the swing.
Aie! Ouch! Get off me in the name of God! Do not push!
There was always a lot of chatter and joking around the swing, and up above my head in the branches of the limba tree there were grumpy hornbills that shouted back at us. Nkiruka would get down from the swing sometimes and pick me up in her arms and give me little pieces of soft uncooked dough’to squeeze between my chubby fingers.

Everything was happiness and singing when I was a little girl. There was plenty of time for it. We did not have to hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or sadness either, because none of these had been connected to our village yet. I sat in between the roots of my limba tree and I laughed while I watched Nkiruka swinging back and fro, back and fro. The tether of the swing was very long, so it took a long time for her to travel from one end of its swing to the other. It never looked as though it was in a rush, that swing. I used to watch it all day long and I never realised I was in watching a pendulum counting down the last seasons of peace in my village.

In my dream I watched that tyre swinging back and fro, back and fro, in that village we did not yet know was built on an oilfield and would soon be fought over by men in a crazy hurry to drill down into the oil. This is the trouble with happiness—all of it is built on top of something that men want.

I dreamed of watching Nkiruka swinging back and fro, back and fro, and when I woke up there were tears in my eyes and in the light of the moon I was watching something else swinging back and fro, back and fro. I could not tell what it was. I wiped the tears from my eyes and I opened them fully, and then I saw what it was that was swinging through the air at the end of my bed.

It was a single Dunlop Green Flash trainer. The other one had fallen off the foot of the woman with no name. She had hanged herself from one of the long chains that reached up to the roof. Her body was naked apart from that one shoe. She was very thin. Her ribs and her hip-bones were sharp. Her eyes bulged open and pointed up into thin blue light. They glittered. The chain had crushed her neck as thin as her ankle. I watched the Dunlop Green Flash trainer and the bare dark brown foot with its grey sole swinging back and fro past the end of my bed. The Green Flash trainer glowed in the moonlight, like a slow and shining silver fish, and the bare foot chased it like a shark. They swum circles around one another. The chain squeaked quietly.

I went and touched the bare leg of the girl with no name. It was cold. I looked over at Yevette and the sari girl. They were sleeping. Yevette was muttering in her sleep. I started to walk over to Yevette’s bed to wake her, but my foot slipped on something wet. I knelt down and touched it. It was urine. It was as cold as the painted concrete floor. A puddle of it had collected underneath the girl with no name. I looked up and I saw a single drop of urine hang from the big toe of her bare foot, then sparkle as it fell to the floor. I stood up quickly. I felt so depressed about the urine. I did not want to wake up the other girls because then they would see it too, and then we would all be seeing it, and then none of us could deny it. I do not know why the small puddle of urine made me start to cry. I do not know why the mind chooses these small things to break itself on.

I went over to the bed that the girl with no name had been sleeping on, and I picked up her T-shirt. I was going to go back and use the T-shirt to wipe up the urine, but then I saw the see-through plastic bag of documents on the end of the bed. I opened it and I started to read the story of the girl with no name.

The-men-came-and-they
…I was still crying, and it was difficult to read in the dim light from the moon.

I put the girl’s documents back down on the bed and I closed the bag carefully. I held it tightly in my hands. I was thinking, I could take this girl’s story for my own. I could take these documents and I could take this story with its official red stamp at the end of it that tells everyone it is
TRUE
. Maybe I can win my asylum case with these papers. I thought about it for one minute, but while I held the girl’s story in my hands the squeaking of her chain seemed to get louder, and I had to drop her story back down on the bed because I knew how it ended. A story is a powerful thing in my country, and God help the girl who takes one that is not her own. So I left it on the girl’s bed, every word of it, including the paper-clips and all the photographs of the scar tissue and the names of the missing daughters, and all of the red ink that said this was
CONFIRMED
.

Me, I put one small kiss on the cheek of Yevette, who was still sleeping, and I walked off quietly across the fields.

Leaving Yevette, that was the hardest thing I had to do since I left my village. But if you are a refugee, when death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death -sadness, questions, and policemen—and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order.

Truly, there is no flag for us floating people. We are millions, but we are not a nation. We cannot stay together. Maybe we get together in ones and twos, for a day or a month or even a year, but then the wind changes and carries the hope away. Death came and I left in fear. Now all I have is my shame and the memory of bright colours and the echo of Yevette’s laugh. Sometimes I feel as lonely as the Queen of England.

It was not difficult to know which way to go. London lit up the sky. The clouds glowed orange, as if the city that awaited me was burning. I walked uphill, through fields with some kind of grain and into a high wood of some kind of trees, and when I looked back down towards the farm for the last time I saw a floodlight come on outside the barn they put us in. I think it was an automatic light, and standing in the middle of the beam there was the single bright lemon yellow dot of the sari girl. It was too far away to see her face, but I imagined her blinking in surprise when the light came on. Like an actress who has walked onto the stage by mistake. Like a girl who does not have a speaking part, who is thinking, Why have they turned this great light upon me now?

I was very scared but I did not feel alone. All through that night it seemed to me as if my big sister Nkiruka walked beside me. I could almost see her face, glowing in the pale orange light. We walked all night, across fields and through woods. We steered around the lights of villages. Whenever we saw a farmhouse we went around that too. Once, the farm dogs heard us and barked, but there was no trouble. We kept on walking. My legs were tired. Two years I had been in that detention centre, going nowhere, and I was weak. But although my ankles hurt and the backs of my legs ached, it felt very good to be moving, and to be free, and to feel the night air on my face and the grass on my legs, wet from the dew. I know my sister was happy too. She was whistling under her breath. Once when we stopped to rest, she dug her toes into the earth at the edge of a field and smiled. When I saw her smile, I felt strong enough to carry on.

The orange glow of the night faded, and I started to see the fields and the hedges around us. Everything was grey at first, but then the colours began to come into the land—blue and green, but very soft, as if the colours did not have any happiness in them. Then the sun rose, and the whole world turned to gold. The gold was all around me and I was walking through clouds of it. The sun was blazing on the white mist that hung over the fields, and the mist swirled around my legs. I looked over at my sister, but she had disappeared with the, night. I smiled though, because I realised that she had left me with her strength. I looked around me at the beautiful sunrise and I was thinking, Yes, yes, everything will be beautiful like this now. I will never be afraid again. I will never spend another day trapped in the colour grey.

There was a low roaring, rumbling sound ahead of me. The noise rose and fell in the mist. It is a waterfall, I thought. I must be careful not to fall into the river in this mist.

I walked on, more carefully now, and the noise got louder. Now it did not sound like a river any more. There were individual sounds in the middle of the roaring. Each sound got louder, rumbling and shaking and then fading away. There was a dirty, sharp smell in the air. Now I could hear the sound of cars and trucks. I went closer. I came to the top of a green grass slope and there it was in front of me. The road was incredible. On my side of it there were three lines of traffic going from right to left. Then there was a low metal barrier, and another three lines of traffic going from left to right. The cars and the trucks were moving very fast. I walked down to the edge of the road and put out my hand to stop the traffic, so I could cross, but the traffic did not stop. A truck blew its horn at me, and I had to step back.

I waited for a gap in the traffic and then I ran across to the centre of the road. I climbed over the metal barrier. This time a great many car horns were blown at me. I ran across, and up the green grass bank at the other side of the road. I sat down. I was out of breath. I watched the traffic racing past below me, three lines in one direction and three lines in the other. If I was telling this story to the girls from back home they would be saying,
Okay, it was the morning so the people were travelling to work in the fields. But why do the people who are driving from right to left not exchange their fields with the people who are driving from left to right? That way everyone could work in the fields near to their homes
. And then I would just shrug because there are no answers that would not lead to more foolish questions, like:
What is an office and what crops can you grow in it?

I just fixed the motorway in my mind as a place I could run back to and kill myself very easily if the men suddenly came, and then I stood up and carried on going. I walked for another hour across fields. Then I came to some small roads, and these roads had houses on them. I was amazed when I saw them. They were two storeys high and made out of strong red bricks. They had sloping roofs with neat rows of tiles on them. They had white windows, and there was glass in all of them. Nothing was broken. All the houses were very smart, and each one looked like the next. In front of nearly every house there was a car. I walked along the street and I stared at the shining rows of them. These were beautiful cars, sleek and shining, not the kind of vehicles we saw where I came from. In my village there were two cars, one Peugeot and one Mercedes. The Peugeot came before I was born. I know this because the driver was my father, and my village was the place where his Peugeot coughed twice and died in the red dust. He went into the first house in the village to ask if they had a mechanic. They did not have a mechanic but what they did have was my mother, and my father realised he needed her more than he needed a mechanic in any case, and so he stayed. The Mercedes arrived when I was five years old. The driver was drunk, and he crashed into my father’s Peugeot, which was still standing exactly how my father had left it except that the boys had taken one of its tyres away to use as the seat of the swing on the limba tree. The driver of the Mercedes got out and he walked over to the first house and met my father there and he said,
Sorry
. And my father smiled at him and said,
We should be thanking you, sir, you have really put our village on the map—this is our very first road traffic accident
. And the driver of that Mercedes, he laughed, and he stayed too, and he became great friends with my father, so much that I called him my uncle. And my father and my uncle lived very happily in that place until the afternoon when the men came and shot them.