Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (34 page)

“My name is Little Bee.”

“Spell that for me please?”

“L-I-T-T-L-E-B-E-E.”

“And is that a first name or a surname, madam?”

“It is my whole name. That is who I am.”

The policeman sighed, then he turned away and spoke into his radio.

“Sierra Four to control,” he said, “send out a unit, will you? I’ve got one to bring in for fingerprints. Probably a nutter.”

He turned back to me, and he was not smiling anymore.

“Wait here,” he said.

He closed the car door. I sat for a long time. Without the breeze it was very hot in the back of the police car. I waited there until another set of policemen came and took me away. They put me into a
van. I watched Sarah and Lawrence and Charlie disappearing in the back window, through a metal grille. Lawrence had his arm around Sarah, and she was leaning against him.

Sarah and Lawrence came to visit me that night. I was in a holding cell at the police station in Vauxhall. The police guard, he banged open the door without knocking and Sarah walked in. Sarah was carrying Charlie. He was asleep in her arms with his head resting on her shoulder. I was so happy to see Charlie safe, I cried. I kissed Charlie on the cheek. He twitched in his sleep, and he sighed. Through the holes in his bat mask, I could see that he was smiling in his sleep. That made me smile too.

Outside the cell, Lawrence was arguing with a police officer.

“This is a bit excessive, isn’t it? They shouldn’t deport her. She has a home to go to. She has a sponsor.”

“They’re not my rules, sir. The immigration people are a law unto themselves.”

“But surely you can give us a bit of time to make a case. I work for the Home Office, I can get an appeal together.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, if I worked for the Home Office and I knew all along this lady was illegal, I’d keep my mouth shut.”

And this, exactly, is what Lawrence did. I did not hear his voice after that.

The guard looked into the cell. “You’ve got five minutes, that’s all,” he said.

Sarah was crying. “I
won’t
let them do it,” she whispered. “I’ll find a way. I won’t let them send you back.”

I tried very hard to smile.

“Maybe you should not make a fuss. It would not be good for Lawrence, I think.”

Sarah pressed her face down to the top of Charlie’s head, and she breathed in his smell.

“Maybe Lawrence is going to have to look after himself,” she whispered.

I shook my head. “Sarah,” I said. “I do not deserve your help. You do not know everything about me.”

“I think I know enough.”

“Please listen, Sarah. I was there when Andrew killed himself.”

“What?”

“Yes. And, if I tried harder, I think I could have saved him.”

There was a long silence between us. The only sound was Charlie breathing in and out in his sleep.

The guard came into the cell. “Time’s up,” he said. “Come on please madam, we need to lock up for the night.”

On the concrete floor of the cell I saw a tear splash, and I looked up into Sarah’s face.

“You know what the worst thing is?” she said. “If I had tried harder, I suppose I could have saved Andrew too.”

When she went, the cell door closed behind her with a noise like the boom of thunder on the first day of the rainy season.

They came for me at four o’clock in the morning. There were three uniformed immigration officers, one woman and two men. I heard their shoes banging on the linoleum of the corridor. I had been awake all night, waiting for them. I was still wearing the summer dress that Sarah had given me, with the pretty lace around the neck. I stood up, so I was waiting for them when they banged open the door. We walked out of the cell. The door closed behind me.
Boom,
went the door, and that was it. Out in the street it was raining. They put me in the back of a van. The road was wet and the headlights pushed streaks of light along it. One of the back windows was half open. The back of the van had a smell of vomit, but the air that blew in smelled of London. All along the streets the windows of the apartments were silent and blind, with their curtains closed. I disappeared without anyone to see me go. The female officer handcuffed me to the back of the seat in front.

“It is not necessary to handcuff me,” I said. “How could I run away?”

The female officer looked back at me. She was surprised.

“You speak pretty good English,” she said. “Most of the people we bring in don’t speak a word.”

“I thought if I learned to speak like you people do, I would be able to stay.”

The officer smiled.

“It doesn’t matter how you talk, does it?” she said. “You’re a drain on resources. The point is you don’t
belong
here.”

The van turned the corner at the end of the street. I looked through the metal grille on the back window of the van and I watched two long rows of semidetached houses disappear. I thought about Charlie, fast asleep under his duvet, and I thought of his brave smile, and my heart ached that I would never see him again. There were tears in my eyes.

“But please, what does it mean?” I said. “What does it mean, to belong here?”

The female officer turned to look at me again.

“Well, you’ve got to be British, haven’t you? You’ve got to share our values.”

I turned away from the woman and looked out at the rain.

Three days later a different group of officers took me from another holding cell and they put me in a minibus with one other girl. They took us to Heathrow Airport. They took us straight through the queue at the airport terminal and they put us in a small room. We were all wearing handcuffs. They told us to sit down on the floor—there were no chairs there. There were twenty others in the room, men and women, and it was very hot in there. There was no fresh air and it was difficult to breathe. A guard was standing at the front of the room. She had a truncheon and a can of pepper spray in her belt. I asked her,
What is happening here?
The guard smiled. She said,
What is happening here is that a large number of flying machines that we call
aeroplanes
are taking off and landing on a long stretch of tarmac that we call a
runway,
because this is a place that we call an
airport,
and soon one of those aeroplanes is going to set off for um-bongo land, where you come from, and you’re going to be on it. Yeah?
Whether you like it or bloody not. Now, has anyone else got any questions?

We waited for a long time. Some of the others were taken out of the room. One of them cried. Another, a thin man, he was angry. He tried to resist the guard, and she hit him twice in the stomach with her truncheon. After that he was quiet.

I fell asleep sitting down. When I woke up, I saw a purple dress and long brown legs in front of me.

“Yevette!” I said.

The woman turned around to look at me, but it was not Yevette. At first I was sad not to see my friend, and then I understood that I was happy. If this was not Yevette, then there was a chance that Yevette was still free. I thought of her walking down the street in London, in her purple flip-flops with her eyebrows painted in pencil, buying a pound of salt fish and laughing, WU-ha-ha-ha! into the bright blue sky. And I smiled.

The woman who was not Yevette, she made an angry face at me.
What is wrong with you?
she said.
You think they are sending us on holiday?

I smiled.
Yes,
I said.
I think it will be the holiday of a lifetime.

You should not joke about these things.
She turned around and she would not talk to me anymore, and when they called her to stand up for her flight, she walked away without making any trouble and she did not once look back at me.

When I saw her go, my situation became real for me and I was scared now, for the first time. I was scared of going back. I cried and I watched my own tears soaking away into the dirty brown carpet.

They gave us no food or water, and I became faint. After a few more hours they came for me. They walked me straight onto the aeroplane. The other passengers, the paying passengers, they made them stand back while I went first up the aeroplane steps. Everybody was staring at me. They took me to the back of the aeroplane, to the last row of seats before the toilets. They put me in the seat next to the window and a guard sat down beside me, a big man with
a shaved head and a gold earring. He wore a blue Nike T-shirt and black Adidas trousers. He took off my handcuffs, and I rubbed my wrists to bring the blood back into my hands.

“Sorry,” said the man. “I don’t like this shit any more than you do.”

“Then why do you do it?”

The man shrugged and did up his seat belt.

“It’s a job, isn’t it?” he said.

He pulled a magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him, and opened it up. There were men’s wristwatches there for sale, and also a fluffy model of the aeroplane that could be given to children.

“You should do a different job, if you do not like this one.”

“No one chooses this job, love. I don’t have qualifications, do I? I used to do laboring, casual, but you can’t compete with the Polskis now. The Poles will do a full day’s work for a kind word and a packet of fags. So here I am, chaperoning girls like you on the holiday of a lifetime. Waste, really, isn’t it? I bet you’re more employable than I am. You should be escorting me, really, shouldn’t you? Back to this place we’re going, whatever the name of it is again.”

“Nigeria.”

“Yeah, that was it. Hot there, is it?”

“Hotter than England.”

“Thought so. These places usually are, where you people come from.”

He went back to his magazine and he turned a few pages. Each time he turned the page, he licked his finger to make it stick. There were tattoos on the knuckles of his fingers, small blue dots. His watch was big and gold but the gold was wearing off. It looked like one of the watches from the aeroplane magazine. He turned a few more pages and then he looked up at me again.

“Don’t say much, do you?”

I shrugged.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind. Rather that than the waterworks.”

“The waterworks?”

“Some of them cry. Some of the people I escort back. The women aren’t the worst, believe it or not. I had this bloke once, Zimbabwe we were going to, sobbed away for six hours straight. Tears and snot everywhere, like a baby, I kid you not. It got embarrassing after a while. Some of the other passengers, you know? Giving it the looks, and all of that. I was like,
cheer up mate, it might never happen,
but it wasn’t no good. He just kept crying and talking to himself in foreign. Some of you people, I’m sorry to see you go, but this one, I tell you, I couldn’t wait to sign him over. Good money though, that job was. There was no flight out for three days, so they put me up at the Sheraton. Watched Sky Sports for three days, scratched my arse, got paid time and a half. Course the people who really make the money are the big contractors. The ones I’m working for now, Dutch firm, they run the whole show. They run the detention centers and they run the repatriations. So they’re earning either way, whether we lock you up or whether we send you back. Nice, eh?”

“Nice,” I said.

The man tapped his finger against the side of his head.

“But that’s how you’ve got to think, these days, isn’t it? It’s the global economy.”

The plane began to roll backward on the tarmac and some television screens came down from the ceiling. They started to show us a safety film. They said what we should do if the cabin filled with smoke, and they also said where our life jackets were kept in case we landed on water. I saw that they did not show us the position to adopt in case we were deported to a country where it was likely that we would be killed because of events we had witnessed. They said there was more information on the safety card in the seat pocket in front of us.

There was a huge and terrifying roar, so loud that I thought,
They have tricked us. I thought we were going on a journey, but actually we are being destroyed.
But then there was a great acceleration, and everything started shaking and rising up to a terrifying angle, and suddenly all the vibration was gone and the sound died down and my stomach went crazy. The man beside me, my guard, he looked at me and laughed.

“Relax, love, we’re in the air.”

After the takeoff, the captain came on the intercom. He said it was a fine, sunny day in Abuja.

I understood that for a few hours I was not in anyone’s country. I said to myself,
Look here, Little Bee—finally, you are flying. Buzz, buzz.
I pressed my nose against the aeroplane window. I watched the forests and the fields and the roads with their tiny cars, all those tiny precious lives. Me, I felt that my own life was already over. From very high up in the sky, all alone, I could see the curve of the world.

And then I heard a voice, a kind and gentle voice that was familiar.

“Bee?” said the voice.

I turned from the window and saw Sarah. She was standing in the aisle and she was smiling. Charlie was holding her hand and he was smiling too. He was wearing his Batman outfit and he was grinning as if he had just killed all the baddies.

“We is in the sky, isn’t we?” he said.

“No darling,” said Sarah. “We
are
in the sky,
aren’t
we.”

I did not understand what I was seeing. Sarah reached over the guard and she put her hand on my hand.

“Lawrence found out what flight they were putting you on,” she said. “He’s not entirely bad, at the end of the day. We couldn’t let you go back alone, Bee. Could we Batman?”

Charlie shook his head. Now he looked very solemn.

“No,” he said. “Because you is our friend.”

The guard, he did not know what to do.

“I’ve seen bloody everything now,” he said.

Finally he stood up and made room for Sarah and Charlie to sit beside me. They hugged me while I cried, and the other passengers turned around in their seats to stare at this miracle, and the aeroplane flew all of us into the future at five hundred and fifty miles per hour.