Little Bee (17 page)

It
never faded. But I went back to the magazine. Starting
Nixie
had been the third real decision of my life, and I refused ever to regret it. Nor
was I going to give up on decision four—Charlie, my best decision of all—or
decision five, Lawrence, who I had truly meant to renounce until the horror of
Nigeria made me realize that was unnecessary. I threw myself into making my
life work, and I forced myself to let the beach seem distant and impersonal. There
was trouble in Africa, of course there was.
But there was no
sense getting hung up about one particular incident and missing the big
picture.
Lawrence insisted on that, and for once I took his advice. I
set up direct debits from my bank account to a couple of African charities. When
people asked what had happened to my finger, I said that Andrew and I had hired
a scooter out there and been involved in a minor accident. My soul entered a
kind of suspended animation. At home I was calm. At work I was the boss. At
night I did not sleep, but I thought I could probably make the days work
indefinitely.

But
now I stood up from the floor of Charlie’s room. I went to look at myself again
in the mirror. There were bags under my eyes now, and sharp new lines across my
forehead. The mask was finally cracking. I thought,
This
isn’t about the decisions
you made anymore. Because the biggest thing in your life, the thing that killed
Andrew and the thing that means you can’t sleep, is something that happened
without you.

I
realized
,
more than anything, that I needed to know
now. I needed to know what had happened after the killers took those girls away
down the beach. I needed to know what had happened next.

I WOKE UP ON
Sarah’s sofa. At first I did not know where I was. I had to open my
eyes and look all around me. There were cushions on the sofa and they were made
of orange silk. The cushions had birds and flowers embroidered on them. The sun
was coming in through the windows, and these windows had curtains that reached
all the way down to the floor. They were made of orange velvet. There was a
coffee table with a glass top, so thick that it looked green from the side. On
the shelf underneath the tabletop there were magazines. One was about fashion
and one was concerned with how to make the home more beautiful. I sat up and
put my feet on the floor. The floor was covered with wood.

If
I was telling this story to the girls back home they would be asking me,
How can a table be made of coffee and what is this thing called
velvet and how come that woman you were staying with did not keep her wood in a
pile at the side of the house like everybody else? How come she left it lying
all over her floor, was she very lazy?
And I would have to tell them: a
coffee table is not made out of coffee, and velvet is a fabric as soft as the
underside of infant clouds, and the wood on Sarah’s floor was not firewood, it
was a SWEDISH-ENGINEERED FLOOR WITH THREE-STRIP ANTIQUE LACQUER AND MINIMUM 3MM
REAL WOOD VENEER CERTIFIED BY THE FOREST STEWARDSHIP COUNCIL (FSC) AS BEING
MANUFACTURED USING ETHICAL FORESTRY PRACTICES, and I know this because I saw a
floor just like it advertised in the magazine that was underneath the coffee
table and which concerned beautiful homes. And the girls from back home, their
eyes would go wide and they would say,
Weh,
because
now they would understand that I had finally arrived in a place beyond the end
of the world—a place where wood was made by machines—and they would be
wondering what sorcery I survived next.

Imagine
how tired I would become, telling my story to the girls from back home. This is
the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone
wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to
sit down and explain the first world from first principles. Or maybe you would
like to, but you can’t. Your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer,
or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain
how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the
side of the house.

If
I mention to you, casually, that Sarah’s house was close to a large park full
of deer that were very tame, you do not jump up out of your seat and shout,
My
god! Fetch
me my gun and I will go to hunt one of those foolish animals!
No,
instead you stay seated and you rub your chin wisely and you say to yourself,
Hmm, I suppose that must be Richmond Park, just outside London.

This
is a story for sophisticated people, like you.

I
do not have to describe to you the taste of the tea that Sarah made for me when
she came down into the living room of her house that morning. We never tasted
tea in my village, even though they grow it in the east of my country, where
the land rises up into the clouds and the trees grow long soft beards of moss
from the wet air. There in the east, the plantations stretch up the green
hillsides and vanish into the mist. The tea they grow, that vanishes too. I
think all of it is exported. Myself I never tasted tea until I was exported
with it. The boat I traveled in to your country, it was loaded with tea. It was
piled up in the cargo hold in thick brown paper sacks. I dug into the sacks to
hide. After two days I was too weak to hide anymore, so I came up out of the
hold. The captain of the ship, he locked me in a cabin. He said it would not be
safe to put me with the crew. So for three weeks and five thousand miles I
looked at the ocean through a small round window of glass and I read a book
that the captain gave me. The book was called
Great
Expectations
and it was about a boy called Pip but I do not know how it
ended because the boat arrived in the UK and the captain handed me over to the
immigration authorities.

Three
weeks and five thousand miles on a tea ship—maybe if you scratched me you would
still find that my skin smells of it. When they put me in the immigration
detention center, they gave me a brown blanket and a white plastic cup of tea. And
when I tasted it, all I wanted to do was to get back into the boat and go home
again, to my country. Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm,
strong, and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance
between where you are and where you come from. Also it vanishes—the taste of it
vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup. It
disappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist. I have heard that
your country drinks more tea than any other. How sad that must make you—like
children who long for absent mothers. I am sorry.

So,
we drank tea in Sarah’s kitchen. Charlie was still asleep in his bedroom at the
top of the stairs. Sarah put her hand on mine.

“We
need to talk about what happened,” she said. “Are you ready to talk about that?
About what happened after the men took you away down the beach?”

I
did not reply straightaway. I sat at the table, with my eyes looking all around
the kitchen, taking in all the new and wonderful sights. For example there was
a refrigerator in Sarah’s kitchen, a huge silver box with an icemaker machine
built into it. The front of the icemaker machine was clear glass and you could
see what it was doing inside there. It was making a small, bright cube of ice.
It was nearly ready. You will laugh at me—silly village girl—for staring at an
ice cube like this. You will laugh, but this was the first time I had seen
water made solid. It was beautiful—because if this could be done, then perhaps
it could be done to everything else that was always escaping and running away
and vanishing into sand or mist. Everything could be made solid again, yes,
even the time when I played with Nkiruka in the red dust under the rope swing. In
those days I believed such things were possible in your country. I knew there
were large miracles just waiting for me to discover them, if only I could find
the center, the source of all these small wonders.

Behind
the cold glass, the ice cube trembled on its little metal arm. It glistened,
like a human soul. Sarah looked at me. Her eyes were shining.

“Bee?”
she said. “I really need to know. Are you ready to talk about it?”

The
ice cube was finished. THUNK, it went, down into the collecting tray. Sarah
blinked. The icemaker started making a new cube.

“Sarah,”
I said, “you do not need to know what happened. It was not your fault.”

Sarah
held my hands between hers.

“Please,
Bee,” she said. “I need to know.”

I
sighed. I was angry. I did not want to talk about it, but if this woman was
going to make me do it then I would do it quickly and I would not spare her.

“Okay
Sarah,” I said. “After you left, the men took us away down the beach. We walked
for a short time, maybe one hour. We came to a boat on the sand. It was upside
down. Some of its planks were broken. It looked like it had been broken by a
storm and thrown up onto the beach and left there. The underside of the boat
was white from the sun. All the paint had cracked and peeled off it. Even the
barnacles on the boat were crumbling off it. The hunters pushed me under the
boat and they told me to listen. They said they would let me go, once it was
over. It was dark under the boat, and there were crabs moving around under
there. They raped my sister. They pushed her up against the side of the boat
and they raped her. I heard her moaning. I could not hear everything, through
the planks of the boat. It was muffled, the sound. I heard my sister choking,
like she was being strangled. I heard the sound of her body beating against the
planks. It went on for a very long time. It went on into the hot part of the
day, but it was dark and cool under the boat. At first my sister shouted out
verses from the scriptures but later her mind began to go, and then she started
to shout out the songs we sang when we were children. In the end there were
just screams. At first they were screams of pain but finally they changed and
they were like the screams of a newborn baby. There was no grief in them. They were
automatic. They went on and on. Each scream was exactly the same, like a
machine was making them.”

I
looked up and I saw Sarah staring at me. Her face was completely white and her
eyes were red and her hands were up to cover her mouth. She was shaking and I
was shaking too, because I had never told this to anyone before.

“I
could not see what they did to my sister. It was on the other side of the boat
that the planks were broken. That is the side I could see through. The killer,
the one with the wound in his neck, I could see him. He was far off from his
men. He was walking in the shore break. He was smoking cigarettes from a packet
he had taken out of the pocket of the guard he killed. He was looking out over
the ocean. It looked as if he was waiting for something to come from there. Sometimes
he put his hand up to touch the wound in his neck. His shoulders were down. It
was as if he was carrying a weight.”

Sarah’s
whole body was shaking, so hard that the kitchen table was trembling. She was
crying.

“Your
sister,” she was saying. “Your beautiful sister, oh my god, oh Jesus, I…”

I
did not want to hurt Sarah any more. I did not want to tell her what happened,
but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story,
it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories
are the tellers of us.

“Near
the end I heard Nkiruka begging to die. I heard the hunters laughing. Then I
listened to my sister’s bones being broken one by one. That is how my sister
died. Yes she was a beautiful girl, you are right. In my village they said she
was the kind of girl that could make a man forget his troubles. But sometimes
it does not work out like people say. When the men and the dogs were finished
with my sister, the only parts of her that they threw into the sea were the
parts that could not be eaten.”

Sarah
stopped crying and shaking then. She was very still. She was holding on to her
tea, like she would be blown away if she did not grip on to it.

“And
you,” she whispered. “What happened to you?”

I
nodded.

“In
the afternoon it got very hot, even under the boat. A breeze started blowing
from the sea. It blew sand up against the side of the boat. The sand hissed
against the planks. I looked out through the gaps to see what was happening. Out
past the surf there were seagulls gliding on the wind. They were very calm.
Sometimes they dropped into the sea and swam back up with silver fish in their
beaks. I looked at them very hard, because I thought that what had happened to
my sister was going to happen to me now, and I wanted to fix my thoughts on
something beautiful. But the men did not come for me. After they finished with
my sister, the hunters and the dogs went up into the jungle to sleep. But the
leader, he did not return to his men. He stood in the surf. The waves were
breaking around his knees. He was leaning into the wind. Later it got so hot
that the seagulls stopped their fishing. They were just floating on the waves
with their heads tucked into their breasts, like this. Then the leader, he
stepped forward into the waves. When the water came up to his chest he began to
swim. He went straight out into the sea. The seagulls flew up out of his way
and then they flapped back down. They only wanted to sleep. The man, he swam
out, straight out, and soon I could not see him anymore. He disappeared and all
I could see was this line, the line between the sea and the sky, and then it
got so hot that even the line disappeared. That is when I came out from under
the boat, because I knew the men would be sleeping. I looked all around. There
was nobody on the beach and there was no shade. It was so hot I thought I might
die just from the heat. I went down into the shore break and I made my clothes
wet and I ran toward the hotel compound. I ran through the shallow water so
that I would not leave marks on the sand for the men to follow. I came to the
place where they murdered the guard. There were more seagulls there. They were
fighting over the guard’s body. They flew up when I walked up the beach. I
could not look at the guard’s face. There were these little crabs crawling in
and out of his trouser leg. There was a wallet on the ground and I picked it
up. It was Andrew’s wallet, Sarah. I am sorry. I looked inside. There were many
plastic cards inside it. There was one that said DRIVING LICENSE and it had a
photo of your husband. That is the one that had your address on it. That is the
one that I took. There was another card too, his business card, the one with
the telephone number, and I took that too. It blew out of my hand into the
waves, but I got it back. Then I went to hide in the jungle, but I stayed where
I could still see the beach. Then it began to get cooler and a truck drove up
from the direction of the hotel compound. It was a canvas-top truck, a military
one. Six soldiers jumped down from the back and they stood looking at the
guard. They were poking at his body with the toes of their boots. There was a
radio in the cab of the truck and it was playing “One” by U2. I knew this song.
It was always playing in our home. This is because the men came from the city
one day and they gave us clockwork radios, one to each family in the village. We
were supposed to wind them up and listen to the World Service from the BBC, but
my sister Nkiruka tuned ours in to the Port Harcourt music station instead. We
used to fight over the little windup box because I liked to listen to the news
and the current affairs. But now that I was hiding in the jungle behind the
beach I wished I had never fought with my sister. Nkiruka loved music and now I
saw that she was right because life is extremely short and you cannot dance to
current affairs. That is when I started to cry. I did not cry when they killed
my sister but I did cry when I heard the music coming out of the soldiers’
truck because I was thinking,
That is my sister’s favorite
song and she will never hear it again.
Do you think I am crazy, Sarah?”