Little Bee (33 page)

I
shrugged. “What if the authorities are not afraid of the media?”

Sarah
nodded, slowly. “That’s a possibility,” she said. “I don’t know. What do you
think?”

I
looked out across the towers of Abuja. The great buildings shimmered in the
heat, as if they were insubstantial, as if they could be awoken from and
forgotten with a splash of cold water to the face.

“I
do not know,” I said. “I do not know how things are in my country. Until I was
fourteen years old my country was three cassava fields and a limba tree. And
after that, I was in yours. So do not ask me how my country works.”

“Hmm,”
said Sarah. She waited for a minute, and then she said, “So what do you want us
to do?”

I
looked again at the city we saw from that balcony. I saw for the first time how
much space there was in it. There were wide gaps between the city blocks. I
thought these dark green squares were parks and gardens, but now I saw that
they were just empty spaces, waiting for something to be built. Abuja was a
city that was not finished. This was very interesting for me, to see that my
capital city had these green squares of hope built into it. To see how my
country carried its dreams in a see-through bag.

I
smiled at Sarah. “Let us go and collect the stories.”

“You’re
sure?”

“I
want to be part of my country’s story.” I pointed out into the heat. “See? They
have left space for me.”

Sarah
held on to my hand, very tight.

“All
right,” she said.

“But,
Sarah?”

“Yes?”

“There
is one story I must tell you first.”

I
told Sarah what happened when Andrew died. The story was hard to hear and it
was hard to tell. Afterward I went back inside the hotel room and she stayed
out on the balcony on her own. I sat down on the bed with Charlie and he
watched cartoons while I watched Sarah’s shoulders shaking.

The
next day we started our work. Early in the morning Sarah walked out into the
street and she gave a very large amount of money to the military policemen
waiting outside the hotel. After this, their eyes were the eyes of the faces on
the banknotes that Sarah gave them. They saw nothing but the inside of the
military police car’s glove box and the lining of the policemen’s uniform
pockets. The policemen’s only rule was
,
we had to be
back at the hotel before sunset each evening.

My
job was to find people who would normally be scared to talk to a foreign
journalist, but who talked to Sarah because I promised them that she was a good
person. These were people who believed what I told them, because my story was
the same as theirs. I discovered there were a lot of us in my country, people
who had seen things the oil companies wished we had not seen. People the
government would prefer to be silent. We went all around the southeast of my
country in an old white Peugeot, just like the one that my father used to have.

I
sat in the passenger seat and Sarah drove, with Charlie smiling and laughing in
the back. We listened to the music on the local radio stations, turned up very
loud. The red dust from the road blew everywhere, even inside the car, and when
we took off Charlie’s Batman suit to wash him at the end of each day, his white
skin had two bright red diamonds on it, where the eyeholes of his mask had been.

Sometimes
I got scared. Sometimes when we arrived in a village, I saw the way some of the
men looked at me and I remembered how
me
and my sister
were hunted. I wondered if there was still money from the oil companies, for
anyone who would shut my mouth for once and all. I was scared of the village
men, but Sarah just smiled.
Relax,
she said.
Remember what happened at the airport. Nothing’s going to happen
to you so long as I’m here.

And
I did begin to relax. In each village I found people with stories, and Sarah
wrote them down. It was easy. We started to be happy. We thought we had done
enough to save ourselves. We thought
,
this is a good trick.

One
night when we had been in my country for two weeks, I dreamed of my sister
Nkiruka. She walked up out of the sea. First the surface of the water swirled
from the movement of something unseen and then, in the hollow between two
waves, I saw the top of her head with white foam dancing around it. Then my
sister’s face rose above the water and slowly she walked up the beach toward me
and she stood there smiling and wearing the Hawaiian shirt that I was wearing
when they released me from detention. It was soaked with salt water. My sister
spoke my name once, and then she waited.

When
Sarah woke up, I went to her.
Please,
I said,
we have to go to the sea. I must say good-bye to my sister.
Sarah looked at me for a long time, and then she nodded. We did not say
anything. That morning Sarah gave the policemen much more money than before. We
drove south to Benin City and we got there in the late afternoon. We stayed
overnight in another hotel that was just the same, and the next morning we
drove south again, to the coast. We left early, when the sun was still low in
the sky and the light shining into the car windows was warm and golden. Charlie
sighed and banged his heels on the backseat.

“Is
we nearly there yet?” he said.

Sarah
smiled at him in the rearview mirror.

“Nearly,
darling,” she said.

The
road ran out at one of the fishing villages they have in that place, and we stepped
down onto the sand. Charlie laughed and ran down the beach to make sand
castles. I sat on the beach next to Sarah and we looked out over the ocean. There
was no sound except for the waves breaking on the beach. After a long time,
Sarah turned to me.

She
said, “I’m proud we’ve come this far.”

I
took her hand. “You know, Sarah, since I left my country, often I think to
myself,
how would I explain these things to the girls back
home?
”

Sarah
laughed and stretched her hands along the beach in both directions.

“Well?”
said Sarah. “How would you explain this to the girls back home? I mean, this
would take some explaining, wouldn’t you say?”

I
shook my head. “I would not explain this to the girls back home.”

“No?”

“No,
Sarah. Because today I am saying good-bye to all that. We are the girls back
home now.
You and me.
There is nothing else for me to
go back to. I do not need to tell this story to anyone else. Thank you for
saving me, Sarah.”

When
I said this I saw that Sarah was crying, and then I was crying too.

When
the day became hotter, the beach filled up with people. There were fishermen
who walked out into the waves and sent wide bright nets spinning out before
them, and there were old men who came to sit and look at the sea, and mothers
who brought their children to splash in the water.

“We
should go and ask these people if anyone has a story,” I said.

Sarah
smiled and pointed at Charlie. “Yes, but it can wait,” she said. “Look, he’s
having such fun.”

Charlie
was running and laughing and I can tell you that a dozen of the local children
were running with him, and laughing and shouting because if there is one thing
you do not see very often on the beach in my country, it is a white superhero
less than one meter in height, with sand and salt water on his cape. Charlie
was laughing with the other children, running and playing and chasing.

It
was hot, and I dug my toes down into the cooler sand.

“Sarah,”
I said. “How long do you think you will stay?”

“I
don’t know. Do you want to try coming with me to England? We could try to get
you papers this time.”

I
shrugged. “They do not want people like me.”

Sarah
smiled. “I’m English and I want people like you. Surely I’m not the only one.”

“People
will say you are naive.”

Sarah
smiled.

“Let
them,” she said. “Let them say whatever gives them comfort.”

We
sat for a long time and watched the sea.

In
the afternoon the sea breeze blew and I fell asleep for a little while, half in
and half out of the shade of the trees at the top of the beach. The sun warmed
my blood until I could not keep my eyes open, and the sea roared in and out, in
and out, and my breathing slipped into time with the waves as I began to dream.
I dreamed we all stayed together in my country. I was happy. I dreamed I was a
journalist, telling the stories of my country, and we all lived in the same
house—
me and Charlie and Sarah—in
a tall, cool
three-story house in Abuja. It was a very beautiful home. It was the sort of
place I never even dreamed of, back in the days when our Bible ended at the
twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew. I was happy in this house that I dreamed of,
and the cook and the housekeeper smiled at me and called me
princess.
Early each morning the garden boy brought me a
scented yellow rose for my hair, trembling on its fine green stem with the dew
of the night still on it. There was a carved wood veranda, painted white, and a
long curved garden with bright flowers and dark shade. I traveled through my
country and I listened to stories of all kinds. Not all of them were sad. There
were many beautiful stories that I found. There was horror, yes, but there was
joy in them too. The dreams of my country are no different from yours—they are
as big as the human heart.

In
my dream Lawrence telephoned Sarah to ask when she was coming home. Sarah
looked across the veranda at Charlie, playing with his building blocks, and she
smiled and she said,
What
do you mean? We
are
home.

It
was the sound of the surf pounding on the beach that woke me.
Crash, like the drawer of a cash register springing open and all
the coins inside it smashing against the edge of their compartments.
The
surf pounded and ebbed, the cash drawer opened and closed.

There
is a moment when you wake up from dreaming in the hot sun, a moment outside time
when you do not know what you are. At first, because you feel absolutely free,
as if you could transform yourself into anything at all, it seems that you must
be money. But then you feel the hot breath of something on your face and it
seems that no, you are not
money,
you must be that hot
breeze blowing in from the sea. It seems that the heaviness you feel in your
limbs is the weight of the salt in the wind, and the sweet sleepiness that
bewitches you is simply the weariness that comes from the day-and-night pushing
of waves across the ocean. But next you realize that no, you are not the
breeze. In fact you can feel sand drifting up against your bare skin. And for
an instant you are the sand that the breeze blows up the beach, just one grain
of sand among the billions of blown grains. How nice to be inconsequential. How
pleasant to know that there is nothing to be done. How sweet simply to go back
to sleep, as the sand does, until the wind thinks to awaken it again. But then
you understand that no, you are not the sand, because this skin that the sand
drifts up against, this skin is your own. Well then, you are a creature with
skin—and what of it? It is not as if you are the first creature that fell
asleep under the sun, listening to the sound of waves pounding. A billion
fishes have slipped away like this, flapping on the blinding white sand, and
what difference will one more make? But the moment carries on, and you are not
a fish dying—in fact you are not even truly sleeping—and so you open your eyes
and look down on yourself and you say
Ah,
so I am a
girl, then, an African girl. This is what I am and this is how I will stay, as
the shape-changing magic of dreams whispers back into the roar of the ocean.

I
sat up and blinked and looked around. A white woman was sitting next to me on
the beach, in the thing called
shade,
and I
remembered that the white woman’s name was Sarah. I saw her face, with her wide
eyes staring away down the beach. She looked—I searched for the name of her
expression in your language—she looked
frightened.

“Oh
my god,” Sarah was saying. “I think we need to get away from here.”

I
smiled sleepily.
Yes yes,
I was thinking.
We always need to get away from here. Wherever here is, there is
always a good reason to get away from it. That is the story of my life.
Always running, running, running, without one single moment of
peace.
Sometimes, when I re
member my mother and my father and my
big sister Nkiruka, I think I will always be running until the day I am
reunited with the dead.

Sarah
grabbed my hand and tried to pull me up.

“Get
up, Bee,” she said. “There are soldiers coming.
Up the
beach.”

I
breathed in the hot, salty smell of the sand. I sighed. I looked in the
direction Sarah was staring. There were six soldiers. They were still a long
way away, along the beach. The air above the sand was so hot that it dissolved
the men’s legs into a shimmer, a green confusion of colors, so that the
soldiers seemed to be floating toward us on a cloud made of some enchanted
substance, free as the thoughts of a girl waking up from dreams on a hot beach.
I screwed up my eyes against the glare and I saw the light gleaming on the
barrels of the soldiers’ rifles. These rifles were more distinct than the men
who carried them. They held their firm, straight lines while the men beneath
them shimmered. In this way the weapons rode their men like mules, proud and
gleaming in the sun, knowing that when a beast beneath them died, they would
simply ride another one. This is how the future rode out to meet me in my
country. The sun shone on its rifles and it pounded on my bare head too. I
could not think. It was too hot and too late in the afternoon.