Little Bee (13 page)

I
still wonder why it came into my head to accept a holiday in Nigeria. I wish I
could claim it was the only tourist-board freebie that arrived at the magazine
that spring, but we had boxes full of them—crates of unopened envelopes
hemorrhaging sunscreen from ruptured sample sachets. I could have chosen
Tuscany, or Belize. The former Soviet states were big that season.
But no.
The cussed streak in me—the one that made me launch
Nixie
instead of joining some tamer glossy; the one that
made me start an affair with Lawrence instead of mending my fences with
Andrew—that enduring outward-bound streak gave me an adolescent thrill when a
package landed on my desk emblazoned with the question FOR YOUR HOLIDAY THIS YEAR,
WHY NOT TRY NIGERIA? Some wag on my editorial staff had scrawled under this, in
black chunky marker, the obvious response. But I was intrigued, and I opened
the package. Out fell two open-ended airline tickets and a hotel reservation. It
was as simple as turning up at the airport with a bikini.

Andrew
came with me, against his better judgment. The Foreign Office
were
advising against travel to some parts of Nigeria, but
we didn’t think that included ours. He took some convincing, but I reminded him
that we’d taken our honeymoon in Cuba, and parts of that place were horrific. Andrew
gave in. Looking back on it now, I suppose he thought he had no choice if he
wanted to keep me.

The
tourist board that sent the freebies noted that Ibeno Beach was an “adventurous
destination.” Actually, at the time we went, it was a cataclysm with borders. To
the north there was a malarial jungle and to the west a wide brown river delta.
The river was iridescent with oil. It was, I now know, bloated with the corpses
of oil workers. To the south was the Atlantic Ocean. On that southern edge I
met a girl who was not my magazine’s target reader. Little Bee had fled
southeast on bleeding feet from what had once been her village and was shortly
to become an oil field. She fled from the men who would kill her because they
were paid to, and the children who would kill her because they were told to. I
sat at my kitchen table and I imagined her fleeing through the fields and the
jungle, as fast as she could, until she arrived at the beach where Andrew and I
were being unconventional. That beach was as far as she got.

My
missing finger itched, just thinking about it.

When
they came in from the garden, I sent Batman to play in his bat cave and I
showed Little Bee where the shower was. I found some clothes for her. Later,
when Batman was in bed, I made two G&Ts. Little Bee sat and held hers,
rattling the ice cubes. I drank mine down like medicine.

“All
right,” I said. “I’m ready. I’m ready for you to tell me what happened.”

“You
want to know how I
survived?
”

“Start
from the beginning, will you? Tell me how it was when you first reached the
sea.”

So
she told me how she hid, on the day she arrived at the beach. She had been
running for six days, traveling through the fields by night and hiding in
jungles and swamps when daybreak came. I turned off the radio in the kitchen,
and I sat very quietly while she told me how she holed up in a salient of
jungle that grew right down to the sand. She lay there all through the hottest
part of the day, watching the waves. She told me she hadn’t seen the sea
before, and she didn’t quite believe in it.

In
the late afternoon Little Bee’s sister, Nkiruka, came down out of the jungle
and found her hiding place. She sat down next to her. They hugged for a long
time. They were happy that Nkiruka had managed to follow Little Bee’s trail,
but they were scared because it meant that others could do it too. Nkiruka
looked into her sister’s eyes and said that they must make up new names for
themselves. It was not safe to use their true names, which spoke so loudly of
their tribe and of their region. Nkiruka said her name was “Kindness” now. Her
younger sister wanted to reply to Kindness, but she could not think of a name
for herself.

The
two sisters waited. The shadows were deepening. A pair of hornbills came to
crack seeds in the trees above their heads. And then—sitting at my kitchen
table she said she remembered this so clearly that she could almost reach out
and stroke the fuzzy black back of the thing—a bee blew in on the sea breeze
and it landed between the two sisters. The bee was small and it touched down on
a pale flower—frangipani, she told me, although she said she wasn’t sure about
the European name—and then the bee flew off again, without any fuss. She hadn’t
noticed the flower before the bee came, but now she saw that the flower was
beautiful. She turned to Kindness.

“My
name is Little Bee,” she said.

When
she heard this name, Kindness smiled. Little Bee told me that her big sister
was a very pretty girl. She was the kind of girl the men said could make them
forget their troubles. She was the kind of girl the women said
was
trouble. Little Bee wondered which it was going to be.

The
two sisters lay still and quiet till sunset. Then they crept down the sand to
wash their feet in the surf. The salt stung in their cuts but they did not cry
out. It was sensible of them to keep quiet. The men chasing them might have
given up, or they might not. The trouble was
,
the
sisters had seen what had been done to their village. There weren’t supposed to
be any survivors to tell the story. The men were hunting down the fleeing women
and children and burying their bodies under branches and rocks.

Back
undercover, the girls bound each other’s feet in fresh green leaves and they
waited for the dawn. It was not cold, but they hadn’t eaten for two days. They
shivered. Monkeys screamed under the moon.

I
still think about the two sisters there, shivering through the night. While I
watch them in my mind, again and again, small pink crabs follow the thin smell
of blood to the place where their feet recently stood in the shore break, but
they do not find anything dead there yet. The soft pink crabs make hard little
clicking noises under the bright white stars. One by one, they dig themselves
back into the sand to wait.

I
wish my brain did not fill in the frightful details like this. I wish I was a
woman who cared deeply about shoes and concealer. I wish I was not the sort of
woman who ended up sitting at her kitchen table listening to a refugee girl
talking about her awful fear of the dawn.

The
way Little Bee told it, at sunrise there was a white mist hanging thick in the
jungle and spilling out over the sand. The sisters watched a white couple
walking up the beach. The language they spoke was the official language of
Little Bee’s country, but these were the first whites she had seen. She and
Kindness watched them from behind a stand of palms. They drew back when the
couple came level with their hiding place. The whites stopped to look out at
the sea.

“Listen
to that surf, Andrew,” the white woman said. “It’s so unbelievably peaceful
here.”

“I’m
still a bit scared, frankly. We should go back inside the hotel compound.”

The
white woman smiled. “Compounds are made for stepping outside. I was scared of
you, the first time I met you.”

“Course
you were.
Big Irish hunk of love like me.
We’re
savages, don’t you know.”

“Barbarians.”

“Vagabonds.”

“Cunts.”

“Oh
come on now, dear, that’s just your mother talking.”

The
white woman laughed, and pulled herself close to the man’s body. She kissed him
on the cheek.

“I
love you, Andrew. I’m pleased we came away. I’m so sorry I let you down. It
won’t happen again.”

“Really?”

“Really.
I don’t love Lawrence. How could I? Let’s make
a fresh start, hmm?”

On
the beach, the white man smiled. In the shadows, Little Bee cupped her hand
over Kindness’s ear. She whispered:
What is a cunt?
Kindness looked back at her, and rolled her eyes.
Right
down there, girl, right close to your vagabond.
Little Bee bit her hand
so she wouldn’t giggle.

But
then the sisters heard dogs. They could hear everything, because there was a
cool morning breeze, a land breeze that carried all sounds. The dogs were still
a long way off, but the sisters heard them barking. Kindness grabbed Little Bee’s
arm. Down on the beach, the white woman looked up at the jungle.

“Oh
listen, Andrew,” she said.
“Dogs!”

“Probably
the local lads are hunting.
Must be plenty to catch in this
jungle.”

“Still,
I wouldn’t have thought they’d use dogs.”

“So
what in the hell did you think they’d use?”

The
white woman shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Elephants?”

The
white man laughed. “You insufferable English,” he said. “The empire’s still
alive for you, isn’t it? You only need to close your eyes.”

Now
a soldier came running up the beach from the direction the white couple had
come. He was panting. He wore olive-green trousers and a light gray vest dark
with sweat. He had military boots on, and they were heavy with damp sand. He
had a rifle slung on his back, and the barrel was swinging at the sky.

“Oh
for fuck’s sake,” the white man said. “Here comes that doofus of a guard
again.”

“He’s
only doing his job.”

“Yeah,
but can’t they let us do our own thing even for one minute?”

“Oh,
relax. The holiday was free, remember? We were never going to have it all our
own way.”

The
guard came level with the white couple and he stopped. He was coughing. He had
his hands on his knees.

“Please,
mister, missus,” he said. “Sorry please to come back to hotel compound.”

“But
why?” the white woman said. “We were just going for a walk along the beach.”

“It
is not safe missus,” the guard said. “Not safe for you and mister. Sorry boss.”

“But
why?” said the white man. “What is actually the problem?”

“No
problem,” said the guard. “Here is very good place.
Very
good.
But all
tourist
must stay please in hotel
compound.”

Unseen
in the jungle, the dogs were barking louder now. The sisters could hear the
shouts of the men running with them. Kindness was trembling. The two sisters
held each other. Now one of the dogs howled and the others joined in. In the
hiding place there was a splashing on the dry leaves and a smell of urine—the
reality of Kindness’s fear. Little Bee looked into her eyes. It didn’t look as
if her sister was even seeing her.

Down
on the beach the white man was saying, “Is this about money?”

And
the guard was saying, “No mister.”

The
guard stood up straight and looked into the jungle where the noise of the dogs
was. He unslung his rifle. Little Bee saw the way he held it. He took the safety
catch off and he reached down to check the magazine. Two magazines—I remember
that
myself—
bound back-to-back with blue insulation
tape.

The
white man said, “Oh don’t give us the big performance. Just tell us how much
you want. Come on. My wife is sick to the gills of being cooped up in that
fuckin compound. What will you take to let us go for a walk on our own?
One dollar?”

The
guard shook his head. He wasn’t looking at the white man. He was watching a
flock of red birds flying up from the jungle, two hundred yards away.

“No
dollar,” the guard said.

“Ten
dollars, then,” the white woman said.

“Oh
for the love of god, Sarah,” the white man said. “That is
way
too much. That’s a week’s wages here.”

“Don’t
be such a tight-arse,” the white woman said. “What’s ten dollars to us? It’s
nice to be able to do something for these people. God knows they have little
enough.”

“Well,
look then, five dollars,” the white man said.

The
guard was watching the treetops. One hundred and fifty yards away, up a shallow
gully, the tips of the palm ferns were twitching.

“You
come back with me now,” the guard said. “Hotel compound is best for you.”

“Listen,”
the white man said. “I’m sorry if we offended you by offering money and I
respect you for not taking it. But I have my editor telling me what’s best for
me fifty-one weeks of the year. I didn’t come here to have anyone edit my
holiday.”

The
guard lifted the muzzle of his gun. He fired three shots in the air, just above
the white man’s head. The barking of the dogs and the yelling of the men
stopped for a moment. Then they started up again, louder. The white couple
stood very still. Their mouths were open. They were struck, perhaps, by the
bullets that had missed them.

“Please,
mister and missus,” the guard said. “Trouble is come here. You do not know my
country.”

The
sisters heard the thwack of machetes clearing a path. Kindness grabbed Little
Bee’s hand and pulled her to her feet. The two sisters walked out of the cover
of the jungle and onto the sand. Holding hands, they stood there looking up at
the white man and the white woman—Andrew, and me—in hope and expectation. I
suppose there was nothing else in the developing world they could do.