Little Bee (28 page)

“I
do not think I can just pretend it is okay.”

“Well
if you can’t pretend in London, where can you pretend?” He sniffed, and put on
a pair of sunglasses, and waved his hand at the street. “I mean look,” he said.
“
There’s
eight million people here pretending the
others aren’t getting on their nerves. I believe
it’s
called civilization.”

I
pressed my nails into the palms of my hands until I felt them sharper than my
anger. We walked along for a while in silence. I looked at all the faces as we
passed them by. Once I saw my mother, but when I looked more closely she was
somebody else’s.

I
did not know how I could feel so cold on such a hot and sunny day.

We
were walking more quickly now because Charlie was very excited and he kept
running ahead, pulling on Sarah’s arm to make her go faster. We came out from a
dark passageway between two huge square concrete buildings, and there it was:
the River Thames, with all the buildings of London spread out in a line of
great power on the far bank. We pushed through the crowds across the wide stone
walkway and we leaned on the iron railings to look out over the river. There
was no wind, and the waves on the water were small and silky. The light was
very bright and there were passengers sunning themselves on the open tops of
the pleasure boats that sailed between the bridges.

“Isn’t
this nice?” said Sarah.

Charlie
climbed up on the iron railing and he stood next to his mother, firing some
unseen gun at the passengers on the boats. The noise that this weapon made was
choom-choom-choom
and the effect that it had was to make
the boat passengers relax in their bright white seats and lean their smiling
faces up into the blue sky and drink cool clear water from bottles. Lawrence
stood beside Sarah and he put a hand on her shoulder. Charlie, Sarah, and
Lawrence stood looking over the river but I turned my back to it in anger.

The
people here by the river were not like the ghosts from the train station. They
were walking slowly. They were enjoying themselves, and smiling, and eating hot
dogs and ice creams. Near to where we were standing, a man was selling silver
balloons, and souvenir postcards, and plastic masks of the British Royal
Family. The tourists wore these masks to have their photographs taken with the
Houses of Parliament behind them on the far side of the river, which made
everybody laugh very much. With their fingers some of them made the
V-for-victory sign in their photographs, and this made them laugh even more.

The
walkway was very wide, and the people stopped in big groups to watch the street
artists who were performing in that place. There was a woman dressed all in
gold, with a gold crown and gold paint on her face, and she stood on a gold box
as still as a statue and only moved when money was dropped into a hat in front
of her. Next to her there was a man who had disguised himself to look like a
lizard. He hid in a big black box and when money was dropped into the top of
the box he would pop out of it, whistling and snapping his hands to make the
children laugh and squeal. I watched a little boy go to put a coin into the top
of the box. He moved forward very slowly and suspiciously, with the coin held
out in front of him. This is exactly how you would approach a giant
money-eating lizard in a box, in case the clever idea came into his head to eat
you up at the same time as the coin, and go home early with a belly full of boy
instead of working all day for small change. The boy kept looking backward at
his mother and his father, and they were smiling and urging him forward with an
encouraging magic that they were pushing through the air to him with their
hands, and they were saying to their boy,
Go on, you can do
it, go on.

And
I was looking very hard at these people, because this is how it was with them:
the boy’s father had dark skin, darker even than my own, and the boy’s mother
was a white woman. They were holding hands and smiling at their boy, whose skin
was light brown. It was the color of the man and the woman joined in happiness.
It was such a good color that tears came into my eyes. I would not even try to
explain this to the girls from back home because they would not believe it. If
I told them that there were in this city children that were born of black and
white parents, holding hands in the street and smiling with pride, they would
only shake their heads and say,
Little
miss been-to is making up her tales again.

But
I saw it with my eyes. I saw the boy finally reach the big black box where the
lizard man was hiding, and I saw him stretching up on his toes to release the
coin he was holding in his fist, and I saw the coin tumbling through the bright
blue sky with the sunshine flashing upon it and the Queen of England’s face
upon the coin—with her lips moving and saying
Good Lord, we
appear to be falling
—and I saw the lizard man spring up out of his box
and the boy run away giggling and screaming, and I saw his mother and his
father lift him up, and I saw the three of them hugging one another tight and
laughing while the crowd looked and laughed with them. This I saw with my own
eyes, and when I looked around the crowd I saw that there was more of it. There
were people in that crowd, and strolling along the walkway, from all of the
different colors and nationalities of the earth. There were more races even
than I recognized from the detention center. I stood with my back against the
railings and my mouth open and I watched them walking past, more and more of
them. And then I realized it. I said to myself, Little Bee, there
is
no
them.
This
endless procession of people, walking along beside this great river, these
people are
you.

All
that time in the detention center I was trapped by walls, and all those days
living at Sarah’s house in a street full of white faces, I was trapped because
I knew I could never go unnoticed. But now I understood that at last I could
disappear into the human race, like Yevette chose to do, as simply as a bee
vanishes into the hive. I did not even tell my feet to do it: they were full of
joy and they took the first step all on their own.

And
then they stopped. I thought,
Little
Bee, you have tried this before. You ran away, but your troubles
traveled with you. How will you stop them from finding you this time? How will
you stop them from shrieking in the night?

So
I took a step back and I leaned against the railings again, to think. The sun
was pleasant on the back of my neck. Lawrence was pointing out something to
Charlie.
Those columns on the bridge,
he was saying.
See how the water swirls around them?

On
the walkway in front of me, the crowd kept coming. The adults were all
walking
but many of the children were gliding. There were
children with scooters, children with bicycles, children with wheels hidden in
their shoes. I smiled at a beautiful woman with brightly colored clothes. Mothers
were calling out their children’s names—strong names like Sophie and Joshua and
Jack—names with protecting magic.

And
I thought to myself:
that is it.
My troubles will
find me very easily in this town of stone and iron if I keep my foolish name
that I chose at the edge of the jungle. So I will take a name that suits this
city instead. I will blend in and I will wear a bright smile and colorful
clothes and I will forget all about Charlie and Sarah and Lawrence and Andrew. With
my new name, I will not even belong in Little Bee’s story anymore. Her story
will end like this:
One hot day in early summer
Little
Bee awoke weary from her troubles and she traveled to
the banks of a great river in the company of three sorcerers—a boy with the
powers of a bat, a good sorceress who once saved her life on purpose, and a bad
sorcerer. And as the three enchanters gazed upon the mighty river, Little Bee
turned away and spoke some magic words to herself, and when the others turned
around Little Bee had flown away, and when they searched for her she had gone,
and there was nothing to tell that the young girl had ever existed in this
world except for a man’s large Hawaiian shirt that the good sorceress would wash
and iron and fold at the back of a drawer because she would never be able to
bear to throw it away.

I
smiled as I looked into the great crowd of people passing by, and my feet
started again to take the first steps to join them. I smiled even brighter when
I felt the strength of those steps. All the power of the city was flowing up
through the warm stones beneath my feet and entering my body.
Yes,
I thought.
This is the moment.
Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and
start living.

To
survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well—here is
the truth—you have to
talk yourself out of it.

After
six steps I was inside the crowd, getting pushed this way and that way. I did
not mind and I did not look back. I let myself be taken along by this river of
human souls that flowed beside the water. I was happy. I smelled the mud on the
banks of the river and the dust of the gray pigeons’ wings and the flat dry
smell of the ancient stone buildings and the hot breath of cigarettes and
chewing gum that floated through the crowd. Everyone was talking and shouting
in all the languages they had carried with them to release in that place, and
the words mingled in the London air which understood them all. I listened very
carefully to the sound of the city and I wondered what name it would whisper me
to call myself.

The
crowd took me up onto a bridge and I started to cross it. It was good to watch
the passenger boats pass out of sight underneath my feet, with the people
relaxing in their chairs, and the bald tops of the old men’s heads turning pink
in the sun, and the children shouting under the bridge to hear the echoes of
their voices, and the tourist guide on the boat’s loudspeakers booming out,
WELCOME WILLKOMMEN BIENVENUE BENVENUTO BIENVENIDO À LONDRES.

Near
the middle of the bridge there was a boy selling magazines. He had a shaved
head and a sliver ring in his nose, like a bull, and a green coat with a fur
hood even though it was so hot, and he had light brown skin and he smiled when
he saw me staring at him.

“What?”
he said.

I
smiled back.
“Nothing.”

“Big Issue?”
he said.

“No,”
I said, “I am going to be fine now, I think.”

The
boy laughed. “No! I mean, do you want to buy one of these?” He spoke slowly and
he held up a magazine. “See? It’s called, the
Big Issue.
”

I
giggled and I bit the side of my hand because I was embarrassed.

“Sorry,”
I said. “I am new in this town.”

The
boy nodded. “Me too,” he said. “What’s your name?”

I
looked behind him at the huge city rising out of the river, mighty and
illuminated. Then I looked back in the boy’s eyes.

“My
name is London Sunshine.”

The
boy grinned. “What kind of a name is that?”

“It
is the kind of name that starts off heavy but ends up light.”

The
boy blinked at me, and the next moment we were both laughing together. This was
a good trick. In this moment I very nearly named myself back to life.

But
while I was laughing I looked back across the river, and my eyes fell on
something they could not look away from. Sarah and Charlie and Lawrence were
still there, standing at the railings, talking and looking out over the river. They
had not seen me, but I could not stop looking at them. The smile disappeared
from my face.

“What’s
wrong?” said the magazine-seller boy.

Sarah
and Lawrence had their arms around each other’s shoulders, but Charlie was
looking very small and sad. He was staring down at the mud on the banks of the
river. He was firing some kind of a weapon at the mud, but the weapon was
having no effect. I put my hand up to my mouth.

“You
all right?” said the magazine-seller boy. “Looks like someone walked on your
grave.”

I
could not answer. How should I start to explain to him that I did not trust
Lawrence? How was I supposed to tell him how all of the bad stories begin:
The men came and they…?

It
would be a long story to explain why I did not like to leave Charlie like that.

“I
have to go,” I said.

I
turned away from the magazine seller and I walked back across the bridge with
heavy steps.

When
I got back to the place where the three of them were standing, Sarah turned and
smiled at me.

“Where
did you disappear to?” she said.

I
shrugged.
“Nowhere.”

I
looked down at the river. Something swam close to the bank but it did not break
the surface. All you could see were the swirls in the water where it passed
beneath. I looked at Sarah and she looked back at me and we found that we could
not smile anymore.

“What’s
wrong?” She lowered her voice. “I’m sorry. Is all this water reminding you of
the beach?”