The Other Hand (29 page)

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

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

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

His lip trembled. I pulled him towards me and I held him while he cried. I stared over his shoulder at the cold black tunnels that loomed between the tangled rhododendron roots. I stared into the black but all I could see was Andrew spinning slowly round on the electrical cable, 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.

“I think everyone has them,” I said.

“Will we beat them?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“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 in the park. We are on holiday here. Maybe you can take one day off from being Batman.”

Charlie pointed his stick at me and he frowned, as if this was a trick of his enemies.

“Batman is
always
Batman,” he said.

I laughed, and we went back to building houses out of sticks. I put a long, bone-white one on top of a pile that Charlie said was a multistorey 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 detention 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 older 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 nodded.

“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 wall between the jungle and the suburbs of Gotham City.

“Mmm,” he said.

After a while, Lawrence came over to us.

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

“Why, what is wrong?”

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

I walked back to the blanket in the shade. Sarah was sitting there with her arms around her knees.

“Honestly,” she said when she saw me, “that
bloody
man.”

“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.

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

“What did you say, about Andrew?”

“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 people like 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 much 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. It was too late at night to really sit down and start reading through it. How long did you say they kept you in that place, Bee?”

“Two years.”

“Can you tell me what it was like?”

“It is best that you do not know. It is not your fault that I was there.”

“Tell me. Please?”

I sighed, because the memory of that place made my heart heavy again.

“The first thing was that you had to write down your story. They gave you a pink form to write down what had happened to you. This was the grounds for your asylum application. Your whole life, you had to fit it onto one sheet of paper. There was a black line around the edge of the sheet, a border, and if you wrote outside the line then your application would not be valid. They only gave you enough space to write down the very saddest things that had happened to you. That was the worst part. Because if you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone’s life, why should you care about their sadness? Do you see? That is why people do not like us refugees. It is because they only know the tragic parts of our life, so they think we are tragic people. I was one of the only ones who could write in English, so I wrote the applications for all the others. You have to listen to their story and then fit their whole life inside the line, even for the women who are bigger than one sheet of paper, you know? And after that, everyone was waiting for their appeal. We did not have any information. That was the worst thing. No one there had committed a crime, but you did not know if you would be released tomorrow, or next week, or never. There were even children in there, and they could not remember their life before detention. There were bars on the windows. They let us exercise outdoors for thirty minutes a day, unless it was raining at exercise time. If you got a headache you could ask for one paracetamol, but you had to apply for it twenty-four hours in advance. There was a special form to fill in. And there was another form if you wanted a sanitary towel. Once there was an inspection of the detention centre. Four months later we saw the inspectors’ report. It was pinned to a board that said
STATUTORY NOTICES
, at the end of a corridor that nobody used, because it led to the exit and the exit was locked. One of the other girls found the notice board when she was trying to find a window to look out of. The report said,
We find the humiliating procedures excessive. We do not see how anybody can abuse an excess of sanitary towels
.”

Sarah looked over to where Lawrence and Charlie were laughing and kicking sticks at each other. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet. “I suppose Andrew was planning a book,” she said. “I think that’s why he was collecting all that material. It was too much research to do if he was only going to write an article or something.”

“And you told this to Lawrence?”

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

“That is why he got angry?”

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

I nodded slowly and I said, “Are you certain it is Lawrence you want to be with?”

She looked at me with sharp eyes.

“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. “It is more than that, 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. He was a good man—you know that and I know that—and I should have worked at it, even though it wasn’t perfect. But now there’s Lawrence. And he isn’t perfect either, you see? But I can’t just keep walking away.” Sarah took a deep and shaking breath. “At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest and I watched Lawrence playing with Charlie. They were walking through the streets of Gotham City like giants, stomping along between the tall towers, and Charlie was laughing and shouting. I sighed. “Lawrence is good with Charlie,” I said.

“There,” said Sarah. “Thank you, for making an effort. You’re a good girl, Bee.”

“If you knew everything I have done, you would not think I am good.”

Sarah smiled. “I’ll get to know you better, I suppose, if I write this book of Andrew’s.”

I put my hands on the top of my head. I looked at the dark tunnels underneath the rhododendron forest. I thought about running away and hiding. In the bushes of the park. In the full-moon night in the jungle. Under the planks of an upside-down boat.
Forever
. I closed my eyes tight shut and I wanted to scream, but no sound came out.

“Are you all right?” said Sarah.

“Yes. I am fine. I am tired, that is all.”

“Right,” said Sarah. “Look, I’m going to go back to the car and call work. I can’t get a signal here.”

I walked back to where Charlie and Lawrence were playing. They were throwing sticks into the bushes. When I got close, Charlie carried on with his sticks but Lawrence stopped and turned to me.

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

“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 long time, looking at one another.

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

I shrugged. “It does not matter what I think. Sarah likes you. But I wish you would stop telling me I am a
good girl
. Both of you. That is something to say to a dog when it brings back a stick,”

Lawrence looked at me, and I felt a great sadness because there was such an emptiness in his eyes. I looked away over the water of the lake where the ducks swam. 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 for one second I felt relief, because I saw the dogs at the other end of the lawn that we were on, and they were only fat yellow family dogs, out for a walk with their master. Then I saw Sarah, hurrying back along the path towards us. Her arms were hanging by her sides, and in one of her hands she held her mobile phone. She stopped next to us, took a deep breath, and smiled. 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 across the wide grass lawn. In one direction there were the two yellow dogs, the ones who had barked. Their master was throwing sticks into the lake for them. In the other direction, there was the thick rhododendron jungle. The dark tunnels through the branches looked empty.

“Charlie?” Sarah shouted. “Charlie? Oh, my God.
CHARLIE
!”

I span 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
!”

I ran across to the rhododendron jungle and I crawled into its cool shade and I remembered the darkness under the forest canopy on the night I walked out to the jungle with Nkiruka. While Sarah screamed for her son I widened my eyes into the blackness of those tunnels and I stared into them. I looked for a long time. I saw that the nightmares of all our worlds had somehow mingled together, 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
left Charlie playing happily with Lawrence and Little Bee. I was halfway back to the car park before I could get my phone to find a network. I climbed to a high point on the dirt path and I looked down from a hazy sky and saw two bars of signal. My tummy lurched and I thought, 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 any more.

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.