Little Bee (14 page)

They
stood on the sand, clutching each other, keeping themselves upright on their
failing legs.
Kindness straining her head to watch for the
approaching dogs, but Little Bee looking steadily at me, ignoring Andrew,
ignoring the guard.

“Please
missus,” she said, “
take
us to the hotel compound with
you.”

The
guard looked at her,
then
he looked back up at the
jungle. He shook his head.

“Hotel
compound is for tourist,” he said. “Not for you girls.”

“Please,”
said
Little Bee, looking directly at me. “Bad men are
hunting us. They will kill us.”

She
spoke to me as a woman, knowing I would understand. But I didn’t understand.
Three days earlier, just before we left for Heathrow, I had been standing on a
bare concrete slab in our garden, asking Andrew exactly when the hell he
planned to build his bloody glasshouse there. That was the biggest issue in my
life—that glasshouse, or the lack of it. That absent
glasshouse,
and all other structures past and future that might helpfully be erected in the
larger emotional absence between me and my husband. I was a modern woman and
disappointment was something I understood better than fear. The hunters would
kill
her? My stomach lurched, but my mind still asserted
it was just a figure of speech.

“Oh
for goodness’ sake,” I said. “You’re a child. Why would anyone want to kill
you?”

Little
Bee looked back at me and she said, “Because we saw them killing everyone
else.”

I
opened my mouth but Andrew spoke first. I think he was suffering the same
intellectual jet lag.
As if our hearts had now arrived on the
beach but our minds were still hours behind.
Andrew’s eyes were
terrified but his voice said, “This is fuckin bullshit. This is a classic
Nigeria scam. Come on, we’re going back to the hotel.”

Andrew
started to pull me back along the beach. I went with him, twisting my head to
look back at the sisters. The guard followed behind us. He walked backward and
aimed his gun at the jungle. Little Bee followed with Kindness, ten yards
behind.

The
guard said, “You girls stop following us.”

He
pointed his gun at the sisters. They looked right back at him. The guard was
slightly older than the girls, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and he had a thin
mustache. I suppose he was proud he could grow one. He had a green beret and
there was sweat trickling from under it. I could see the veins in his temples.
The whites of his eyes were yellow.

Little
Bee said, “What is your name, soldier?”

And
he said, “My name is ‘I will shoot if you don’t stop following.’”

Little
Bee shrugged and tapped her chest. “My name is Little Bee,” she said. “Here is
my heart. Shoot here if you want.”

And
Kindness said, “Bullets is okay. Bullets
is
quick.”

They
kept on following us along the beach. The guard’s eyes went wide.

“Who
is chasing you girls?”

“The same men who burned our village.
The oil company’s
men.”

The
rifle began to shake in the guard’s hand.
“Christjesus,”
he said.

There
were men’s shouts and dogs’ barking, very loud now. I couldn’t hear the surf
anymore.

Five
brown dogs came out of the jungle, running. They were mad from howling. Their
sides and their paws were bleeding from the jungle thorns. The sisters screamed
and ran past the guard. The guard stopped and he lifted his gun and he fired. The
lead dog somersaulted over in the sand. His ear was shot off and a piece of his
head too, I think. The pack of dogs skidded and stopped and they tore into the
fallen dog. They were biting out chunks of the neck flesh while the back legs
were still thrashing and twitching. I screamed. The guard was shaking.

From
out of the jungle, six men came running. They wore tracksuit trousers, all
torn, and vests and running shoes, gold chains. They moved quickly up on us.
They ignored the dogs. One was holding a bow, holding it drawn. The others were
waving their machetes, daring the guard to shoot. They came right up to us.

There
was a leader. He had a wound in his neck. It was rotting—I could smell it. I
knew he was going to die soon. Another of the men wore a wire necklace and it
was strung with dried brown things that looked like mushrooms. When he saw
Kindness, this man pointed at her, then he made circles on his nipples with his
fingers and he grinned. I am trying to report this as matter-of-factly as I
know how.

The
guard said, “Keep walking, mister and missus.”

But
the man with the neck wound—the leader—said, “No, you stop.”

“I
will shoot,” the guard said.

But
the man said, “Maybe you will get one of us, maybe two.”

The
man with the bow was aiming at the guard’s neck, and he said, “Maybe you get
none of us. Maybe you should
of
shoot us when we was
far away.”

The
guard stopped walking backward, and we stopped too. Little Bee and Kindness
went around behind us. They put me and my husband between themselves and the
hunters.

The
hunters were passing around a bottle of something I thought was wine. They were
taking turns to drink. The man with the bow and arrows was getting an erection.
I could see it under his tracksuit trousers. But his expression didn’t change
and his eyes never moved from our guard’s neck. He was wearing a black
bandanna. The bandanna said EMPORIO ARMANI. I looked at Andrew. I tried to
speak calmly, but the words were crushed in my throat.

“Andrew,”
I said. “Please give them anything they want.”

Andrew
looked at the man with the neck wound and he said, “What do you want?”

The
hunters looked at one another. The man with the neck wound stepped up to me. His
eyes flickered, rolled up inside his head, then snapped back down and stared
madly at me, the pupils tiny and the irises bullet-hard and gleaming like
copper. His mouth twitched from a smile, to a grimace, to a cruel thin line, to
a bitter and amused disdain. The emotions played across his face like a
television flipped impatiently between channels. I smelled his sweat and his
rot. He made a sound, an involuntary moan which seemed to surprise him—his eyes
went wide—and he tore off my beach wrap. He looked down at the pale lilac
material in his hands, curiously, and seemed to be wondering how it had got
there. I screamed and clasped my arms over my breasts. I cringed away from the
man, from the way he looked at me—now patiently, as if encouraging a slow
learner; now furiously; now with a pregnant, vespertine calm.

I
was wearing a very small green bikini. I will say that
again,
and maybe I will begin to understand it myself. In the contested delta area of
an African country in the middle of a three-way oil war, because there was a
beach next to the war, because the state tourist board had mail-merged tickets
for that beach to every magazine listed in the
Writers’ and
Artists’ Yearbook,
because it was that year’s cut, and because as editor
I was first in the queue when distributors sent their own freebies to my
magazine’s office, I was wearing a very small green bandeau bikini from Hermès.
It occurred to me, as I stood there with my arms crossed over my tits, that I
had freeloaded myself to annihilation.

The
wounded man stepped so close to me that I felt the sand sink under my feet from
his weight. He ran his finger over my shoulder, over my bare skin, and he said,
“What do we
want
? We want…to practice…our English.”

The
hunters exploded into laughter. They passed around the bottle again. For a
moment, when one of them raised the bottle, I saw something with a pupil
staring out of it. It was pressed up against the glass. Then the man put the
bottle down, and the thing disappeared back into the liquid. I say liquid
because I didn’t think it was wine anymore.

Andrew
said, “We have money, and we can get more
later
.”

The
wounded man giggled and made a noise like a pig, which made him giggle more. Then
his face set suddenly into an expression of complete seriousness. He said, “You
give me what you got now. There is no later.”

Andrew
took his wallet from his pocket. He passed it to the wounded man. The man took
it—his hand was shaking—and he pulled out the banknotes and threw the wallet
down on the sand. He passed the money behind him to the men, without looking or
counting. He was breathing very heavily and there was sweat running down his
face. His neck wound was wide open. It was green blue. It was obscene.

I
said, “You need medical attention. We could get help for you at the hotel.”

The
man said, “Medicine not
fix
what these girls have
seen. These girls got to pay for what they seen. Give me the girls.”

I
said, “No.”

The
wounded man looked at me, astonished. “What you say?”

“I
said no. These girls are coming with us to the compound. If you try to stop
them, our guard will shoot you.”

The
wounded man widened his eyes in an indulgent simulacrum of fear. He put both
his hands on the top of his head and turned himself through two shuffling
circles on the sand. When he faced me again he grinned and said, “Where are you
from, missus?”

“We
live in Kingston,” I said.

The
man cocked his head and looked interestedly at me.

“Kingston-upon-Thames,”
I said. “It’s in London.”

The
man nodded. “I know where Kingston is,” he said. “I studied mechanical
engineering there.”

He
looked down at the sand. He stood in silence for a moment. Then he moved, and
it was very quick. I saw his machete go up, I saw the blade flash in the rising
sun, I saw a tiny flinch—that was all the guard had time for. The blade went
into the guard’s throat and it rang. It rang when it struck the bones of the
neck. The metal was still ringing when the man yanked it out and the guard
dropped into the sand. The blade rang, I remember, as if the machete was a bell
and the guard’s life was the clapper.

The
killer said, “You ever hear a noise like that in Kingston-upon-Thames?”

There
seemed to be more blood than one skinny African boy could possibly have had
inside him. It went on and on. That guard lying there with sand covering his
eyeballs and his neck gaping, as if it was hanging on a hinge, wide open. It
looked like a mouth. This very calm, middle-class voice in my head said:
Pac-Man. Pac-Man. Oh gosh, he looks just like Pac-Man.
We
all stood in silence as we watched the guard bleed to death. It took the
longest time. I remember
thinking,
Thank god we left Charlie with my parents.

When
I lifted my head, the killer was watching me. It wasn’t a mean expression. I
have seen checkout girls look at me like that when I forget my reward card. I
have seen Lawrence look at me that way when I tell him I have my period. The
killer was watching me with an expression, really, of mild annoyance.

“This
guard died because of you,” he said.

I
must have felt things, back in those days, because tears were running down my
face.

“You’re
crazy,” I said.

The
killer shook his head. He made a steeple of his fingers around the handle of
the machete, held it up so that the point aligned with my throat, and eyed me
sorrowfully along the trembling axis of the blade.

“I
live here,” he said. “You were crazy to come.”

I
began to cry then, out of fear. Andrew was shaking. Kindness began to pray in
her tribal language.

“Ekenem-i Maria,”
she said,
“gratia
ju-i obi Dinweni nonyel-i, I nwe ngozi kali ikporo nine
na
ngozi dili nwa afo-i bu Jesu.”

The
killer looked up at Kindness and he said, “You will die next.”

Kindness
looked back at him.
“Nso Maria
Nne
Ciuku,”
she said,
“yo nyel’anyi bu ndi njo, kita,
n’ubosi nke onwu anyi.
Amen.”

The
killer nodded. He breathed. I heard the cold surf in ebb and resurgent. The
brown dogs left off the carcass of the killed dog and they came closer. They
stood with their legs trembling and their hackles up, the blood stiff on their
fur. The killer took one step toward Kindness but I did not think my mind could
survive seeing the machete cut into her.

I
said, “No. Please…please, leave her alone.”

The
killer stopped and he turned to me and he said, “You again?”

He
was smiling.

Andrew
said, “Sarah, please, I think the best thing we can do here is to…”

“To
what,
Andrew?
To shut up and hope they won’t get
round to killing us too?”

“I
just think this is not our affair and so…”

“Ah,”
the killer said. “Not your affair.”