The Other Hand (3 page)

But the girl in the sari, she just narrowed her eyes at me, and pulled her see-through bag of lemon yellow a little closer to her, like maybe I was going to take that away from her the way the other girl had taken the telephone receiver. The girl in the purple dress, she sighed and turned to me.
It ain’t no good, darlin
, she said.
De Lord gonna call his chillen home fore dis one calls for a taxi
. And she passed the telephone receiver to me.
Here
, she said.
Yu betta try one time
.

I pointed to the third girl in the queue, the one with the bag of documents and the blue T-shirt and the Dunlop Green Flash trainers.
What about her?
I said.
This girl is before me in the queue. Yeh
, said the girl in the purple dress,
but dis ooman ain’t got no mo-tee-VAY-shun. Ain’t dat right, darlin?
And she stared at the girl with the documents, but the girl with the documents just shrugged and looked down at her Dunlop Green Flash shoes.
Ain’t dat de truth
, said the girl in the purple dress, and she turned back to me.
It’s up to yu, darlin. Yu got to talk us out a here, fore dey change dey mind an lock us all back up
.

I looked down at the telephone receiver and it was grey and dirty and I was afraid. I looked back at the girl in the purple dress.
Where do you want to go? I
said. And she said,
Any ends
. Excuse me?
Anywhere, darlin
.

I dialled the taxi number that was written on the phone. A man’s voice came on. He sounded tired.
Cab service
, he said. The way he said it, it was like he was doing me a big favour just by saying those words.

“Good morning, I would like a taxi please.”

“You want a cab?”

“Yes. Please. A taxi-cab. For four passengers.”

“Where from?”

“From the Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre, please. In High Easter. It is near Chelmsford.”

“I know where it is. Now you listen to
me&mdash
;”

“Please, it is okay. I know, you do not pick up refugees. We are not refugees. We are cleaners. We work in this place.”

“You’re cleaners?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s the truth, is it? Because if I had a pound for every bloody immigrant that got in the back of one of my cabs and didn’t know where they wanted to go and started prattling on to my driver in Swahili and tried to pay him in cigarettes, I’d be playing golf at this very moment instead of talking to you.”

“We are cleaners.”

“All right. It’s true you don’t talk like one of them. Where do you want to go?”

I had memorised the address on the United Kingdom driver’s licence in my gee-through plastic bag. Andrew O’Rourke, the white man I met on the beach: he lived in Kingston-upon-Thames in the English county of Surrey. I spoke into the telephone.

“Kingston, please.”

The girl in the purple dress grabbed my arm and hissed at me. No,
darlin!
she said.
Anywhere but Jamaica. Dey mens be killin me de minnit I ketch dere, kill me dead
. I did not understand why she was scared, but I know now. There is a Kingston in England but there is also a Kingston in Jamaica, where the climate is different. This is another great work you sorcerers have done—even your cities have two tails.

“Kingston?” said the man on the telephone.

“Kingston-upon-Thames,” I said.

“That’s bloody miles away, isn’t it? That’s over in, what?”

“Surrey,” I said.

“Surrey. You are four cleaners from leafy Surrey, is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“No. We are cleaners from near by. But they are sending us on a cleaning job in Surrey.”

“Cash or account, then?”

The man sounded so tired.

“What?”

“Will you pay in cash, or is it going on the detention centre’s bill?”

“We will pay in cash, mister. We will pay when we get there.”

“You’d better.”

I listened for a minute and then I pressed my hand down on the cradle of the telephone receiver. I dialled another number. This was the telephone number from the business card I carried in my see-through plastic bag. The business card was damaged by water. I could not tell if the last number was an 8 or a 3. I tried an 8, because in my country odd numbers bring bad luck, and that is one thing I had already had enough of.

A man answered the call. He was angry.

“Who is this? It’s bloody six in the morning.”

“Is this Mr Andrew O’Rourke?”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“Can I come to see you, mister?”

“Who the hell is this?”

“We met on the beach in Nigeria. I remember you very well, Mr O’Rourke. I am in England now. Can I come to see you and Sarah? I do not have anywhere else to go.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Then the man coughed, and started to laugh.

“This is a wind-up, right? Who is this? I’m warning you, I get nutters like you on my case all the time. Leave me alone, or you won’t get away with it. My paper always prosecutes. They’ll have this call traced and find out who you are and have you arrested. You wouldn’t be the first.”

“You don’t believe it is me?”

“Just leave me alone. Understand? I don’t want to hear about it. All that stuff happened a long time ago and it wasn’t my fault.”

“I will come to your house. That way you will believe it is me.”

“No.”

“I do not know anyone else in this country, Mr O’Rourke. I am sorry. I am just telling you, so that you can be ready.”

The man did not sound angry any more. He made a small sound, like a child when it is nervous about what will happen. I hung up the phone and turned round to the other girls. My heart was pounding so fast, I thought I would vomit right there on the linoleum floor. The other girls were staring at me, nervous and expectant.

“Well?” said the girl in the purple dress.

“Hmm?”I said.

“
De-taxi
, darlin! What is happenin about de taxi?”

“Oh, yes, the taxi. The taxi man said a cab will pick us up in ten minutes. He said we are to wait outside.”

The girl in the purple dress, she smiled.

“Mi name is Yevette. From Jamaica, zeen. You
useful
, darlin. What dey call yu?”

“My name is Little Bee.”

“What kinda name yu call dat?”

“It is my name.”

“What kind of place yu come from, dey go roun callin little gals de names of insects?”

“Nigeria.”

Yevette laughed. It was a big laugh, like the way the chief baddy laughs in the pirate films.
WU-ha-ha-ha-ha!
It made the telephone receiver rattle in its cradle.
Nye-
JIRRYA
!
said Yevette. Then she turned round to the others, the girl in the sari and the girl with the documents.
Come wid us, gals
, she said.
We de United Nations, see it, an today we is all followin Nye-
JIRRYA
. WV-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Yevette was still laughing when the four of us girls walked out past the security desk, towards the door. The detention officer looked up from his newspaper when we went by. The topless girl was gone now—the officer had turned the page. I looked down at his newspaper. The headline on the new page said
ASYLUM SEEKERS EATING OUR SWANS
. I looked back at the detention officer, but he would not look up at me. While I looked, he moved his arm over the page to cover the headline. He made it look as if he needed to scratch his elbow. Or maybe he really
did
need to scratch his elbow. I realised I knew nothing about men apart from the fear. A uniform that is too big for you, a desk that is too small for you, an eight-hour shift that is too long for you, and suddenly here comes a girl with three kilos of documents and no motivation, another one with jelly-green eyes and a yellow sari who is so beautiful you cannot look at her for too long in case your eyeballs go
ploof
, a third girl from Nigeria who is named after a honeybee, and a noisy woman from Jamaica who laughs like the pirate Bluebeard. Perhaps this is exactly the type of circumstance that makes a man’s elbow itch.

I turned to look back at the detention officer just before we went out through the double doors. He was watching us leave. He looked very small and lonely there, with his thin little wrists, under the fluorescent lights. The light made his skin look green, the colour of a baby caterpillar just out of the egg. The early morning sunshine was shining in through the door glass. The officer screwed up his eyes against the daylight. I suppose we were just silhouettes to him. He opened his mouth, as if he was going to say something, but he stopped.

“What?” I said. I realised he was going to tell us there had been a mistake. I wondered if we should run. I did not want to go back in detention. I wondered how far we would get if we ran. I wondered if they would come after us with dogs.

The detention officer stood up. I heard his chair scrape on the linoleum floor. He stood there with his hands at his sides.

“Ladies?” he said.

“Yes?”

He looked down at the ground, and then up again.

“Best of luck,” he said.

And we girls turned round and walked towards the light.

I pushed open the double doors, and then I froze. It was the sunlight that stopped me. I felt so fragile from the detention centre, I was afraid those bright rays of sunshine would snap me in half. I couldn’t take that first step outside.

“What is de hold-up, Lil Bee?”

Yevette was standing behind me. I was blocking the door for everyone.

“One moment, please.”

Outside, the fresh air smelled of wet grass. It blew in my face. The smell made me panic. For two years I had smelled only bleach, and my nail varnish, and the other detainees’ cigarettes. Nothing natural. Nothing like this. I felt that if I took one step forward, the earth itself would rise up and refect me. There was nothing natural about me now. I stood there in my heavy boots with my breasts strapped down, neither a woman nor a girl, a creature who had forgotten her language and learned yours, whose past had crumbled to dust.

“What de hell yii waitin fo, darlin?”

“I am scared, Yevette.”

Yevette shook her head and she smiled.

“Maybe yu’s right to be scared, Lil Bee, cos yu a smart girl. Maybe me jus too dumb to be fraid. But me spend eighteen month locked up in dat place, an if yu tink me dumb enough to wait one second longer on account of your tremblin an your quakin, yu better tink two times.”

I turned round to face her and I gripped on to the door-frame.

“I can’t move,” I said.

That is when Yevette gave me a great push in the chest and I flew backwards. And that is how it was, the first time I touched the soil of England as a free woman, it was not with the soles of my boots but with the seat of my trousers.

“WU-ha-ha-ha-ha!” said Yevette. “Welcome in de linked Kindom, int dat glorious?”

When I got my breath back, I started laughing too. I sat on the ground, with the warm sun shining on my back, and I realised that the earth had not rejected me and the sunlight had not snapped me in two.

I stood up and I smiled at Yevette. We all took a few steps away from the detention centre buildings. As we walked, when the other girls were not looking, I reached under my Hawaiian shirt and I undid the band of cotton that held my breasts down. I unwound it and threw it on the ground and ground it into the dirt with the heel of my boot. I breathed deeply in the fresh, clean air.

When we came to the main gate, the four of us girls stopped for a moment. We looked out through the high razor wire fence and down the slopes of Black Hill. The English countryside stretched away to the horizon. Soft mist was hanging in the valleys, and the tops of the low hills were gold in the morning sun, and I smiled because the whole world was fresh and new and bright.

F
rom the spring of 2007 until the end of that long summer when Little Bee came to live with us, my son removed his Batman costume only at bathtimes. I ordered a twin costume that I substituted while he splashed in the suds, so that at least I could wash the boy-sweat and the grass stains out of the first. It was a dirty, green-kneed job, fighting master criminals. If it wasn’t Mister Freeze with his dastardly ice ray, then it was the Penguin—Batman’s deadly foe—or the even more sinister Puffin, whose absolute wickedness the original creators of the Batman franchise had inexplicably failed to chronicle. My son and I lived with the consequences—a houseful of acolytes, henchmen and stooges, ogling us from behind the sofa, cackling darkly in the thin gap beside the bookcase, and generally bursting out at us willy-nilly. It was one shock after another, in fact. At four years old, asleep and awake, my son lived at constant readiness. There was no question of separating him from the demonic bat mask, the Lycra suit, the glossy yellow utility belt and the jet-black cape. And there was no use addressing my son by his Christian name. He would only look behind him, cock his head, and shrug—as if to say,
My bat senses can detect no boy of that name here, madam
. The only name my son answered to, that summer, was ‘Batman’. Nor was there any point explaining to him that his father had died. My Son didn’t believe in the physical possibility of death. Death was something that could only occur if the evil schemes of the baddies were not constantly foiled—and that, of course, was unthinkable.

That summer—the summer my husband died—we all had identities we were loath to let go of. My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s surname, and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality, that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

To flee from cruelty is the most natural thing in the world, of course. And the timing that brought us together that summer was so very cruel. Little Bee telephoned us on the morning they released her from the detention centre. My husband picked up her call. I only found out much later that it was her—Andrew never told me. Apparently she let him know she was coming, but I don’t suppose he felt up to seeing her face again. Five days later he killed himself by hanging. They found my husband with his feet treading empty air, touching the soil of no country. Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.