Authors: Chris Cleave
Little Bee
Incendiary
Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Chris Cleave
Originally published in Great Britain in 2008
by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
All rights reserved, including the right to
reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information
address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the
Americas, New York, NY 10020
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are
registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
Cleave, Chris.
Little Bee / Chris Cleave.—1st Simon &
Schuster hardcover
ed
.
p
. cm.
“Originally published in Great
Britain in 2008 by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton.”
1. Young women—Fiction. 2.
Nigerians—England—Fiction. 3. Identity (Psychology)—
Fiction.
4. Emigration and
immigration—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6103.L43L58 2009 2008030689
823'.92—dc22
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9383-6
ISBN-10: 1-4165-9383-7
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
For Joseph
Britain is proud of its tradition of providing
a safe haven for people fleeting [
sic
] persecution and
conflict.—from
Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to
Citizenship
(UK Home Office, 2005)
bee
one
MOST DAYS I WISH
I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would
be pleased to see me coming. Maybe I would visit with you for the weekend and
then suddenly, because I am fickle like that, I would visit with the man from
the corner shop instead—but you would not be sad because you would be eating a
cinnamon bun, or drinking a cold Coca-Cola from the can, and you would never
think of me again. We would be happy, like lovers who met on holiday and forgot
each other’s names.
A
pound coin can go wherever it thinks it will be safest. It can cross deserts
and oceans and leave the sound of gunfire and the bitter smell of burning
thatch behind. When it feels warm and secure it will turn around and smile at
you, the way my big sister Nkiruka used to smile at the men in our village in
the short summer after she was a girl but before she was really a woman, and
certainly before the evening my mother took her to a quiet place for a serious
talk.
Of
course a pound coin can be serious too. It can disguise itself as power, or
property, and there is nothing more serious when you are a girl who has
neither. You must try to catch the pound, and trap it in your pocket, so that
it cannot reach a safe country unless it takes you with it. But a pound has all
the tricks of a sorcerer. When pursued I have seen it shed its tail like a
lizard so that you are left holding only pence. And when you finally go to
seize it, the British pound can perform the greatest magic of all, and this is
to transform itself into not one, but two, identical green American dollar
bills. Your fingers will close on empty air, I am telling you.
How
I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we
are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called,
globalization.
A girl like me gets stopped at immigration,
but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men
with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi.
Where to, sir?
Western Civilization, my good man, and make
it snappy.
See
how nicely a British pound coin talks? It speaks with the voice of Queen
Elizabeth the Second of England. Her face is stamped upon it, and sometimes
when I look very closely I can see her lips moving. I hold her up to my ear.
What is she saying?
Put me down this minute, young lady, or
I shall call my guards.
If
the Queen spoke to you in such a voice, do you suppose it would be possible to
disobey? I have read that the people around her—even kings and prime
ministers—they find their bodies responding to her orders before their brains
can even think why not. Let me tell you, it is not the crown and the scepter
that have this effect. Me, I could pin a tiara on my short fuzzy hair, and I
could hold up a scepter in one hand, like this, and police officers would still
walk up to me in their big shoes and say,
Love the
ensemble, madam, now let’s have a quick look at your ID, shall we?
No,
it is not the Queen’s crown and scepter that rule in your land. It is her
grammar and her voice. That is why it is desirable to speak the way she does. That
way you can say to police officers, in a voice as clear as the Cullinan
diamond,
My
goodness, how dare you?
I
am only alive at all because I learned the Queen’s English.
Maybe
you are thinking, that isn’t so hard.
After all, English is the official
language of my country, Nigeria. Yes, but the trouble is that back home we
speak it so much better than you. To talk the Queen’s English, I had to forget
all the best tricks of my mother tongue. For example, the Queen could never
say,
There was plenty wahala, that girl done use her bottom
power to engage my number one son and anyone could see she would end in the bad
bush.
Instead the Queen must say,
My
late daughter-in-law used her feminine charms to become engaged
to my heir, and one might have foreseen that it wouldn’t end well.
It is
all a little sad, don’t you think? Learning the Queen’s English is like
scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toenails, the morning after a
dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a
stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had. So,
you can see that learning came slowly to me. On the other hand, I had plenty of
time. I learned your language in an immigration detention center, in Essex, in
the southeastern part of the United Kingdom. Two years, they locked me in
there. Time was all I had.
But
why did I go to all the trouble? It is because of what some of the older girls
explained to me: to survive, you must look good or talk even better. The plain
ones and the silent ones, it seems their paperwork is never in order.
You say, they get repatriated.
We say,
sent
home early.
Like your country is a children’s party—something too
wonderful to last forever. But the pretty ones and the talkative ones, we are
allowed to stay. In this way your country becomes lively and more beautiful.
I
will tell you what happened when they let me out of the immigration detention
center. The detention officer put a voucher in my hand, a transport voucher,
and he said I could telephone for a cab. I said,
Thank you
sir, may God move with grace in your life and bring joy into your heart and
prosperity upon your loved ones.
The officer pointed his eyes at the
ceiling, like there was something very interesting up there, and he said,
Jesus.
Then he pointed his finger down the corridor and he
said,
There
is the telephone.
So,
I stood in the queue for the telephone. I was thinking
,
I went
over the top
with thanking that detention
officer. The Queen would merely have said,
Thank you,
and left it like that. Actually, the Queen would have told the detention
officer to call for the damn taxi himself, or she would have him shot and his
head separated from his body and displayed on the railings in front of the Tower
of London. I was realizing, right there, that it was one thing to learn the
Queen’s English from books and newspapers in my detention cell, and quite
another thing to actually speak the language with the English. I was angry with
myself. I was thinking,
You
cannot afford to go around making mistakes like that, girl. If
you talk like a savage who learned her English on the boat, the men are going
to find you out and send you straight back home.
That’s what I was
thinking.
There
were three girls in the queue in front of me. They let all us girls out on the
same day. It was Friday. It was a bright sunny morning in May. The corridor was
dirty but it smelled clean. That is a good trick. Bleach, is how they do that.
The
detention officer sat behind his desk. He was not watching us girls. He was
reading a newspaper. It was spread out on his desk. It was not one of the
newspapers I learned to speak your language from—
The Times
or the
Telegraph
or
The
Guardian.
No, this
newspaper was not for people like you and me. There was a white girl in the
newspaper photo and she was topless. You know what I mean when I say
this,
because it is your language we are speaking. But if I
was telling this story to my big sister Nkiruka and the other girls from my
village back home then I would have to stop, right here, and explain to them:
topless
does not mean, the lady in the newspaper did not
have an upper body. It means
,
she was not wearing any
garments
on her upper body. You see the difference?
—Wait. Not even a brassiere?
—Not even a brassiere.
—Weh!
And
then I would start my story again, but those girls back home, they would
whisper between them. They would giggle behind their hands. Then, just as I was
getting back to my story about the morning they let me out of the immigration
detention center, those girls would interrupt me again. Nkiruka would say,
Listen, okay? Listen. Just so we are clear.
This
girl in the newspaper photo.
She was a prostitute, yes?
A night fighter?
Did she look down at the ground from shame?
—No, she did not look down at the ground from
shame. She looked right in the camera and smiled.
—What, in the newspaper?
—Yes.
—Then is it not shameful in Great Britain, to
show your
bobbis
in the newspaper?
—No. It is not shameful. The boys like it and
there is no shame. Otherwise the topless girls would not smile like that, do
you see?
—So do all the girls over there show them off
like that? Walk around with their
bobbis
bouncing?
In the church and in the shop and in the street?
—No, only in the newspapers.
—Why do they not all show their breasts, if the
men like it and there is no shame?
—I do not know.
—You lived there more than two years, little
miss been-to. How come you not know?
—It is like that over there. Much of my life in
that country was lived in such confusion. Sometimes I think that even the
British do not know the answers to such questions.
—Weh!
This
is what it would be like, you see
,
if I had to stop
and explain every little thing to the girls back home. I would have to explain
linoleum and bleach and soft-core pornography and the shape-changing magic of
the British one-pound coin, as if all of these everyday things were very
wonderful mysteries. And very quickly my own story would get lost in this great
ocean of wonders because it would seem as if your country was an enchanted
federation of miracles and my own story within it was really very small and
unmagical. But with you it is much easier because I can say to you, look, on
the morning they released us, the duty officer at the immigration detention
center was staring at a photo of a topless girl in the newspaper. And you
understand the situation straightaway. That is the reason I spent two years
learning the Queen’s English, so that you and I could speak like this without
an interruption.
The
detention officer, the one who was looking at the topless photo in the
newspaper—he was a small man and his hair was pale, like the tinned mushroom
soup they served us on Tuesdays. His wrists were thin and white like electrical
cables covered in plastic. His uniform was bigger than he was. The shoulders of
the jacket rose up in two bumps, one on each side of his head, as if he had
little animals hiding in there. I thought of those creatures blinking in the
light when he took off his jacket in the evening. I was thinking,
Yes
sir, if I was your wife I would keep my brassiere
on,
thank you.
And
then I was thinking,
Why
are you staring at that girl
in the newspaper, mister, and not us girls here in the queue for the telephone?
What if we all ran away? But then I remembered
,
they
were
letting
us out. This was hard to understand
after so much time.
Two years,
I lived in that
detention center. I was fourteen years of age when I came to your country but I
did not have any papers to prove it and so they put me in the same detention
center as the adults. The trouble was, there were men and women locked up
together in that place. At night they kept the men in a different wing of the
detention center. They caged them like wolves when the sun went down, but in
the daytime the men walked among us, and ate the same food we did. I thought
they still looked hungry. I thought they watched me with ravenous eyes. So when
the older girls whispered to me,
To
survive you must look good or talk good,
I decided that
talking would be safer for me.
I
made myself undesirable. I declined to wash, and I let my skin grow oily. Under
my clothes I wound a wide strip of cotton around my chest, to make my breasts
small and flat. When the charity boxes arrived, full of secondhand clothes and
shoes, some of the other girls tried to make themselves pretty but I rummaged
through the cartons to find clothes that hid my shape. I wore loose blue jeans
and a man’s Hawaiian shirt and heavy black boots with the steel toe caps
shining through the torn leather. I went to the detention nurse and I made her
cut my hair very short with medical scissors. For the whole two years I did not
smile or even look in any man’s face. I was terrified. Only at night, after
they locked the men away, I went back to my detention cell and I unwound the
cloth from my breasts and I breathed deeply. Then I took off my heavy boots and
I drew my knees up to my chin. Once a week, I sat on the foam mattress of my
bed and I painted my toenails. I found the little bottle of nail varnish at the
bottom of a charity box. It still had the price ticket on it. If I ever
discover the person who gave it then I will tell them, for the cost of one
British pound and ninety-nine pence, they saved my life. Because this is what I
did in that place, to remind myself I was alive underneath everything: under my
steel toe caps I wore bright red nail varnish. Sometimes when I took my boots
off I screwed up my eyes against the tears and I rocked back and fro, shivering
from the cold.
My
big sister Nkiruka, she became a woman in the growing season, under the African
sun, and who can blame her if the great red heat of it made her giddy and
flirtatious? Who could not lean back against the doorpost of their house and
smile with quiet indulgence when they saw my mother sitting her down to say,
Nkiruka, beloved one, you must not smile at the older boys like
that
?
Me,
I was a woman under white fluorescent strip lights, in an underground room in
an immigration detention center forty miles east of London. There were no seasons
there. It was cold, cold, cold, and I did not have anyone to smile at. Those
cold years are frozen inside me. The African girl they locked up in the
immigration detention center, poor child, she never really escaped. In my soul
she is still locked up in there, forever, under the fluorescent lights, curled
up on the green linoleum floor with her knees tucked up under her chin. And
this woman they released from the immigration detention center, this creature
that I am, she is a new breed of human. There is nothing natural about me. I
was born—no, I was reborn—in captivity. I learned my language from your
newspapers, my clothes are your castoffs, and it is your pound that makes my
pockets ache with its absence. Imagine a young woman cut out from a smiling Save
the Children magazine advertisement,
who
dresses
herself in threadbare pink clothes from the recycling bin in your local
supermarket car park and speaks English like the leader column of
The Times,
if you please. I would cross the street to
avoid me. Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people
from my country agree on. They say,
That
refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong.
That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating,
an
unfamiliar face in the moon.
So,
I am a refugee, and I get very lonely. Is it my fault if I do not look like an
English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl
must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a
Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English, as if English had collided with
Ibo, high in the upper atmosphere, and rained down into her mouth in a shower
that half-drowns her and leaves her choking up sweet tales about the bright
African colors and the taste of fried plantain? Not like a storyteller, but
like a victim rescued from the flood, coughing up the colonial water from her
lungs?
Excuse
me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I
did not come to talk to you about the bright African colors. I am a born-again
citizen of the developing world, and I will prove to you that the color of my
life is
gray.
And if it should be that I secretly
love fried plantain, then that must stay between us and I implore you to tell
no one.
Okay?
The
morning they let us out of the detention center, they gave us all our
possessions. I held mine in a see-through plastic bag. A
Collins
Gem Pocket English Dictionary,
one pair of gray socks, one pair of gray
briefs, and one United Kingdom Driver’s License that was not mine, and one
water-stained business card that was not mine either. If you want to know,
these things belonged to a white man called Andrew O’Rourke. I met him on a
beach.
This
small plastic bag is what I was holding in my hand when the detention officer
told me to go and stand in the queue for the telephone. The first girl in the
queue, she was tall and she was pretty. Her thing was beauty, not talking. I
wondered which of us had made the best choice to survive. This girl, she had
plucked her eyebrows out and then she had drawn them back on again with a
pencil. This is what she had done to save her life. She was wearing a purple
dress, an A-line dress with pink stars and moons in the pattern. She had a nice
pink scarf wrapped around her hair, and purple flip-flops on her feet. I was
thinking she must have been locked up a very long time in our detention center.
One has to go through a very great number of the charity boxes, you will
understand, to put together an outfit that is truly an
ensemble.
On
the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking,
Do
those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and
the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you
right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the
scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy
them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because
take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying.
A scar
means,
I survived.
In
a few breaths’ time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them
the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another
beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is
alive.
The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something
marvelous,
and then she will turn around and smile.
The
girl with the purple A-line dress and the scars on her legs, she was already
talking into the telephone receiver. She was saying,
Hello
,
taxi? Yu come pick me up, yeh? Good. Oh, where
me
come? Me come from Jamaica, darlin, you better believe that. Huh? What? Oh,
where
me
come
right now
?
Okay wait please.
She
put her hand to cover the telephone receiver. She turned around to the second
girl in the queue and she said, Listen darlin, what name is dis place, where we
at right now? But the second girl just looked up at her and shrugged her
shoulders. The second girl was thin and her skin was dark brown and her eyes
were green like a jelly sweet when you suck the outside sugar off and hold it
up against the moon. She was so pretty, I cannot even explain. She was wearing
a yellow sari dress. She was holding a see-through plastic bag like mine, but
there was nothing in it. At first I thought it was empty but then I thought,
Why
do you
carry that bag, girl, if there is nothing in it?
I could see her sari
through it, so I decided she was holding a bag full of lemon yellow. That is
everything she owned when they let us girls out.
I
knew that second girl a bit. I was in the same room as her for two weeks one
time, but I never talked with her. She did not speak one word of anyone’s
English. That is why she just shrugged and held on tight to her bag of lemon
yellow. So the girl on the phone, she pointed her eyes up at the ceiling, the same
way the detention officer at his desk did.
Then
the girl on the phone turned to the third girl in the queue and she said to
her, Do
yu
know the name of dis place where we is
at? But the third girl did not know either. She just stood there, and she was wearing
a blue T-shirt and blue denim jeans and white Dunlop Green Flash trainers, and
she just looked down at her own see-through bag, and her bag was full of
letters and documents. There was so much paper in that bag, all crumpled and
creased, she had to hold one hand under the bag to stop it all bursting out. Now,
this third girl, I knew her a little bit too. She was not pretty and she was
not a good talker either, but there is one more thing that can save you from
being
sent home early.
This girl’s thing was
,
she had her story all written down and made official. There
were rubber stamps at the end of her story that said in red ink this is TRUE. I
remember she told me her story once and it went something like,
the-men-came-and-they
-
burned-
my-village
-tied-
my-girls
-raped-
my-girls
-took-
my-girls
-whipped-
my-husband
-cut-
my-breast
-I-ran-away
-through-
the-bush
-found-
a-ship
-crossed-the-sea
and-then-they-put-me-in-here
.
Or some such story like that. I got
confused with all the stories in that detention center. All the girls’ stories
started out,
the-men-came-and-they.
And all of the
stories finished,
and-then-they-put-me-in-here.
All
the stories were sad, but you and I have made our agreement concerning sad
words. With this girl—girl three in the queue—her story had made her so sad
that she did not know the name of the place where she was at and she did not
want to know. The girl was not even curious.
So
the girl with the telephone receiver, she asked her again.
What?
she
said.
Yu no talk neither? How
come yu not know the name dis place we at?
Then
the third girl in the queue, she just pointed
her
eyes up at the ceiling, and so the girl with the telephone receiver pointed her
own eyes up at the ceiling for a second time. I was thinking, Okay, now the
detention officer has looked at the ceiling one time and girl three has looked
at the ceiling one time and girl one has looked at the ceiling
two times,
so maybe there are some answers up on that
ceiling after all. Maybe there is something very cheerful up there. Maybe there
are stories written on the ceiling that go something like
the-men-came-and-they
-
brought-
us-colorful-dresses-fetched-wood-for-the-fire
-told-
some-crazy-jokes
-drank-
beer-with-us
-chased-
us-till-we-giggled
-stopped-
the-mosquitoes-from-biting
-told-
us-the-trick-for-catching-the-British-one-pound-coin
-turned-
the-moon-into-cheese
-
Oh,
and then they put me in here.
I
looked at the ceiling, but it was only white paint and fluorescent light tubes
up there.
The
girl on the telephone, she finally looked at me. So I said to her,
The
name of
this place is the Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre.
The girl stared
at me.
Yu kiddin wid me,
she said.
What kine of a name
is
dat?
So I
pointed at the little metal plate that was screwed on the wall above the
telephone. The girl looked at it and then she looked back to me and she said,
Sorry darlin, I can not
ridd
it. So I read it out to
her, and I pointed to the words one at a time. BLACK HILL IMMIGRATION REMOVAL
CENTRE, HIGH EASTER, CHELMSFORD, ESSEX. Thank you precious, the first girl
said, and she lifted up the telephone receiver.
She
said into the receiver: All right now listen mister, the place I is right now
is called
Black Hill Immigration Removal.
Then she
said, No, please,
wait.
Then she looked sad and she
put the telephone receiver back down on the telephone. I said,
What
is wrong? The first girl sighed and she said, Taxi man
say he no
pick
up from dis place. Then he say,
You
people are
scum.
You know dis
word?
I
said no, because I did not know for sure, so I took my
Collins
Gem Pocket English Dictionary
out of my see-through bag and I looked up
the word. I said to the first girl,
You
are a film of impurities or vegetation that can form on the
surface of a liquid.
She looked at me and I looked at her and we giggled
because we did not understand what to do with the information. This was always
my trouble when I was learning to speak your language. Every word can defend
itself. Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so
the understanding closes on empty air. I admire you people. You are like
sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as your money.
So
me and the first girl in the telephone queue, we were giggling at each other,
and I was holding my see-through bag and she was holding her see-through bag. There
was one black eyebrow pencil and one pair of tweezers and three rings of dried
pineapple in hers. The first girl saw me looking at her bag and she stopped
giggling. What you starin at?
she
said. I said I did
not know. She said
,
I know what you tinking. You
tinking, Now the taxi no come for to pick me up, how far me going to get wid
one eyebrow pencil an one tweezer an three pineapple slice? So I told her,
Maybe you can use the eyebrow pencil to write a message that says HELP ME, and
then you can give the pineapple slices to the first person who does. The girl
looked at me like I was crazy in the head and she said to me: Okay darlin,
one,
I got no paper for to write no message on,
two,
I no know how to write, I only know how to draw on me
eyebrows, an
tree,
me intend to eat that pineapple
meself.
And she made her eyes wide and stared at me.
While
this was happening, the second girl in the queue, the girl with the
lemon-yellow sari and the see-through bag full of yellow, she had become the
first girl in the queue, because now she held the telephone receiver in her own
hand. She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies
drowning in honey. I tapped the girl on her shoulder, and pulled at her sari,
and I said to her: Please, you must try to talk to them in
English.
The sari girl looked at me, and she stopped talking in her butterfly language. Very
slowly and carefully, like she was remembering the words from a dream, she said
into the telephone receiver: ENGLAND, YES PLEASE. YES PLEASE THANK YOU, I WANT
GO TO ENGLAND.
So
the girl in the purple A-line dress, she put her nose right up to the nose of
the girl in the lemon-yellow sari, and she tapped her finger on the girl’s
forehead and made a sound with her mouth like a broom handle hitting an empty
barrel.
Bong! Bong!
she
said to the girl.
You already is in England, get it?
And she pointed both her index fingers down at the linoleum floor. She said:
Dis is England, darlin, ya nuh see it? Right here, yeh? Dis where
we at all-reddy.
The
girl in the yellow sari went quiet. She just stared back with those green eyes
like jelly moons. So the girl in the purple dress, the Jamaican girl, she said,
Here
,
gimme dat,
and she grabbed the telephone receiver out of the sari girl’s
hand. And she lifted the receiver to her mouth and she said
Listen, wait, one minnit please.
But then she went quiet
and she passed the telephone receiver to me and I listened, and it was just the
dial tone. So I turned to the sari girl. You have to dial a number first, I
said. You understand? Dial number first,
then
tell
taxi man where you want to go. Okay?
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 gray 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
dialed 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 favor just by saying those words.
“Good
morning, I would like a taxi please.”
“You
want a cab?”
“Yes.
Please.
A taxicab.
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—”
“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 memorized the address on the United Kingdom Driver’s License in my
see-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 nearby. 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 center’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 dialed 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 Mister 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, Mister 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 windup, 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, Mister O’Rourke. I am sorry. I am just
telling you, so that you can be ready.”
The
man did not sound angry anymore. He made a small sound, like a child when it is
nervous about what will happen. I hung up the phone and turned around 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. WU-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Yevette
was still laughing when the four of us girls walked out past the security desk,
toward 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 like he needed to scratch his elbow. Or maybe he really
did
need to scratch his elbow. I realized 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.
