Little Bee (31 page)

“Oh
shit, the
police,
” he said.

“What?”

He
shook his head.

“Never mind.”

Lawrence
ran off. I began shouting again for Charlie. I called and called, while the tourists
stared, and the breeze left me shivering in my wet jeans. At first I called out
Charlie’s name as a sound for him to home in on, but as my voice began to go I
realized that another line had been crossed and I was shouting the name just to
hear it, to ensure its continuing existence. I realized that the name was all I
had in the world.

Then
a voice came from behind me. It was Lawrence.

“Sarah?”
he said. “It’s okay. I found him.”

Lawrence
held Charlie in his arms. My son was filthy, and his bat cape hung straight
down, heavy with water. I ran to him, took him into my arms and held him. I
pressed my face into his neck and I breathed in his smell, the sharp salt of
his sweat and the sewer tang of the dirt. The tears streamed down my face.

“Charlie,”
I whispered.
“Oh my world, my whole world.”

“Get
off, Mummy! You’re squashing me!”

“Where
were you?”

Charlie
held out his hands to the sides, palms upward, and answered me as if I was
simple.

“In mine bat cave.”

Lawrence
grinned and pointed at the wall of the embankment.

“He
was right inside one of those drainage pipes.”

“Oh
Charlie.
Didn’t you hear us all shouting? Didn’t
you see us all looking for you?”

Charlie
grinned beneath his bat mask.

“I
was hiding,” he said.

“Why?
Why didn’t you come out? Couldn’t you see how worried we all were?”

My
son looked forlornly at the ground. “Lawrence and Bee was all cross and they
wasn’t
playing with me. So I went into mine bat cave.”

“Oh Charlie.
Mummy’s been so confused.
So
terribly silly and selfish.
I promise you, Charlie, I’ll never be so
silly again. You’re my whole world, you know that? I’ll never forget that
again. Do you know how much you mean to me?”

Charlie
blinked at me, sensing an opportunity.

“Can
I have an ice cream?” he said.

I
hugged my son. I felt his warm, sleepy breath on my neck, and through the thin
gray fabric of his costume I felt the gentle, insistent pressure of the bones
beneath his skin.

I
looked up at Lawrence and I said,
Thank you.

THE POLICEMEN CAME AFTER
five minutes. There were three of them. They came slowly, in a silver
car with bright blue and orange stripes along the sides and a long bar of
lights on the roof. They pushed through the crowds on the walkway and they
stopped beside the steps that led down to the sand. They got out of the car and
they put on their hats. They were wearing white short-sleeved shirts and thick
black vests with a black-and-white checkered stripe. The vests had many
pockets, and in them there were batons and radios and handcuffs and other
things I could not guess the names of.
I was thinking,
Charlie would like this.
These policemen have more gadgets than Batman.

If
I was telling this story to the girls from back home, I would have to explain
to them that the policemen of the United Kingdom did not carry guns.

—Weh! No pistol?

—No pistol.

—Weh! That is one topsy-turvy kingdom, where
the girls can show their
bobbis
but the police cannot
show their guns.

And
I would have to nod and tell them again,
Much
of my life in that country was lived in such confusion.

The
policemen slammed the police-car doors behind them:
thunk.
I shivered. When you are a refugee, you learn to pay attention to doors. When
they are open; when they are closed; the particular sound they make; the side
of them that you are on. I wanted to run. Instead I held my hands out to the
policemen. I said,
Here
is the place.

One
of the policemen came close while the other two ran down the steps. The
policeman who came, he was not much older than me I think. He was tall, with
orange hair under his hat. I tried to smile at him, but I couldn’t. My heart
was beating, beating. I was scared that my Queen’s English would fail me. Then
the most wonderful thing happened. The policeman’s radio buzzed and crackled
and a voice came from it, and the voice said: THE CHILD HAS BEEN FOUND. I gave
a smile like the sun, but the policeman did not. My smile faded.

If
this policeman began to suspect me, he could call the immigration people. Then
one of them would click a button on their computer and mark a check box on my file
and I would be deported. I would be dead, but no one would have fired any
bullets. I realized
,
this is why the police do not
carry guns. In a civilized country, they kill you with a click. The killing is
done far away, at the heart of the kingdom in a building full of computers and
coffee cups.

I
stared at the policeman. He did not have a cruel face. He did not have a kind
face either. He was young and he was pale and there were no lines on his face. He
was nothing yet. He looked like an egg.
This policeman, if he
opened the door of the police car and made me get
inside, then to him it
was only the inside of a car he was showing me. But I would see things he could
not see in it. I would see the bright red dust on the seats. I would see the
old dried cassava tops that had blown into the foot wells. I would see the
white skull on the dashboard and the jungle plants growing through the rusted
cracks in the floor and bursting through the broken windscreen. For me, that
car door would swing open and I would step out of England and straight back
into the troubles of my country. This is what they mean when they
say,
It is a small world these days.

The
policeman looked at me with no expression.

“What
is your relationship to the person who was reported as missing?”

“It
is not important.”

“It’s
procedure, madam.”

He
took a step toward me and I stepped back, I could not help myself.

“You
seem unusually nervous of me, madam.”

He
said this very calmly, looking into my eyes all the time.

“Your
name,” he said.
“Now.”

I
stood up as straight and tall as I could, and I closed my eyes for a moment,
and when I opened them again I looked at the policeman very coldly and I spoke
with the voice of Queen Elizabeth the Second.

“How
dare you?” I said.

It
almost, almost worked. The policeman took half a step back, as if I had hit
him. He looked down at the ground and he blushed, just for one second. But then
I saw the strength come back into his face.

That
is when I ran.

My
story is not like the movie I told you about,
The Man Who
Was
in a Great Hurry.
I did not have a motorbike to
escape on, or a plane that I could fly upside down. In my mind I saw how I
would escape through the crowds, with the policeman chasing after me and
shouting,
Stop
that girl!
I would run across the road and the brakes of
the cars would scream and their horns would hoot and a fat man would shout,
Whaddayathinkyadoin?,
and then I would be running,
running, and of course there would be a seller of brightly colored fruits, and
his apples and his oranges would spill all over the road, and there would be
two men carrying a big sheet of glass, and I would roll under it and the
policemen would crash through it and then I would get away and think to myself,
Phew! That was a close one.

That
is how the story went in my head. But in my life, the chase was not so good. My
legs started to run and the policeman reached out his hand and grabbed hold of
my arm, and that was it. If my life was a movie, it did not have a good chase
scene. The audience would grumble, and throw popcorn, and say to one another,
That
foolish
African girl did not even make it to the edge of the screen.

The
policeman opened the back door of the police car and he made me sit down. He
left the door open while he talked into his radio. He was thin, with pale slim
wrists and a little potbelly, like the detention officer who was on duty on the
morning they released us. The police car smelled of nylon and cigarettes.

“If we could just start with your name.”

I
felt very sad. I knew it was all over for me now. I could not give the
policeman my real name, because then they would find out what I was. But I did
not have a false name to give him either. Jennifer Smith, Alison Jones—none of
these names are real when you have no documents to go with them. Nothing is
true unless there is a screen that says it is, somewhere in that building full
of computers and coffee cups, right at the exact center of the United Kingdom. I
sat up very straight in the backseat of the police car, and I took a breath and
I looked the policeman straight in the eye.

“My
name is Little Bee.”

“Spell
that for me please?”

“L-I-T-T-L-E-B-E-E.”

“And
is that a first name or a surname, madam?”

“It
is my whole name. That is who I am.”

The
policeman sighed,
then
he turned away and spoke into
his radio.

“Sierra
Four to control,” he said, “send out a unit, will you? I’ve got one to bring in
for fingerprints.
Probably a nutter.”

He
turned back to me, and he was not smiling anymore.

“Wait
here,” he said.

He
closed the car door. I sat for a long time. Without the breeze it was very hot
in the back of the police car. I waited there until another set of policemen
came and took me away. They put me into a van. I watched Sarah and Lawrence and
Charlie disappearing in the back window, through a metal grille. Lawrence had
his arm around Sarah, and she was leaning against him.

Sarah
and Lawrence came to visit me that night. I was in a holding cell at the police
station in Vauxhall. The police guard, he banged open the door without knocking
and Sarah walked in. Sarah was carrying Charlie. He was asleep in her arms with
his head resting on her shoulder. I was so happy to see Charlie safe, I cried. I
kissed Charlie on the cheek. He twitched in his sleep, and he sighed. Through
the holes in his bat mask, I could see that he was smiling in his sleep. That
made me smile too.

Outside
the cell, Lawrence was arguing with a police officer.

“This
is a bit excessive, isn’t it? They shouldn’t deport her. She has a home to go
to. She has a sponsor.”

“They’re
not my rules, sir. The immigration people are a law unto themselves.”

“But
surely you can give us a bit of time to make a case. I work for the Home
Office,
I can get an appeal together.”

“If
you don’t mind my saying so, sir, if I worked for the Home Office and I knew
all along this lady was illegal, I’d keep my mouth shut.”

And
this, exactly, is what Lawrence did. I did not hear his voice after that.

The
guard looked into the cell. “You’ve got five minutes, that’s all,” he said.

Sarah
was crying. “I
won’t
let them do it,” she whispered.
“I’ll find a way. I won’t let them send you back.”

I
tried very hard to smile.

“Maybe
you should not make a fuss. It would not be good for Lawrence, I think.”

Sarah
pressed her face down to the top of Charlie’s head, and she breathed in his
smell.

“Maybe
Lawrence is going to have to look after himself,” she whispered.

I
shook my head. “Sarah,” I said. “I do not deserve your help. You do not know
everything about me.”

“I
think I know enough.”

“Please
listen, Sarah. I was there when Andrew killed himself.”

“What?”

“Yes.
And, if I tried harder, I think I could have saved him.”

There
was a long silence between us. The only sound was Charlie breathing in and out
in his sleep.

The
guard came into the cell. “Time’s up,” he said. “Come on please madam, we need
to lock up for the night.”

On
the concrete floor of the cell I saw a tear splash, and I looked up into
Sarah’s face.

“You
know what the worst thing is?” she said. “If I had tried harder, I suppose I
could have saved Andrew too.”

When
she went, the cell door closed behind her with a noise like the boom of thunder
on the first day of the rainy season.

They
came for me at four o’clock in the morning. There were three uniformed
immigration officers, one woman and two men. I heard their shoes banging on the
linoleum of the corridor. I had been awake all night, waiting for them. I was
still wearing the summer dress that Sarah had given me, with the pretty lace
around the neck. I stood up, so I was waiting for them when they banged open
the door. We walked out of the cell. The door closed behind me.
Boom,
went the door, and that was it. Out in the street it
was raining. They put me in the back of a van. The road was wet and the
headlights pushed streaks of light along it. One of the back windows was half
open. The back of the van had a smell of vomit, but the air that blew in
smelled of London. All along the streets the windows of the apartments were
silent and blind, with their curtains closed. I disappeared without anyone to
see me go. The female officer handcuffed me to the back of the seat in front.

“It
is not necessary to handcuff me,” I said. “How could I run away?”

The
female officer looked back at me. She was surprised.

“You
speak pretty good English,” she said. “Most of the people we bring in don’t
speak a word.”

“I
thought if I learned to speak like you people do, I would be able to stay.”

The
officer smiled.

“It
doesn’t matter how you talk, does it?” she said. “You’re a drain on resources. The
point is you don’t
belong
here.”

The
van turned the corner at the end of the street. I looked through the metal
grille on the back window of the van and I watched two long rows of
semidetached houses disappear. I thought about Charlie, fast asleep under his
duvet, and I thought of his brave smile, and my heart ached that I would never
see him again. There were tears in my eyes.

“But
please, what does it mean?” I said. “What does it mean
,
to belong here?”

The
female officer turned to look at me again.

“Well,
you’ve got to be British, haven’t you? You’ve got to share our values.”

I
turned away from the woman and looked out at the rain.

Three
days later a different group of officers took me from another holding cell and
they put me in a minibus with one other girl. They took us to Heathrow Airport.
They took us straight through the queue at the airport terminal and they put us
in a small room. We were all wearing handcuffs. They told us to sit down on the
floor—there were no chairs there. There were twenty others in the room, men and
women, and it was very hot in there. There was no fresh air and it was
difficult to breathe. A guard was standing at the front of the room. She had a
truncheon and a can of pepper spray in her belt. I asked her,
What
is
happening here?
The guard smiled. She said,
What is
happening here is that a large number of flying machines that we call
AEROPLANES are taking off and landing on a long stretch of tarmac that we call
a RUNWAY
,
because this is a place that we call an
AIRPORT
,
and soon one of those aeroplanes is going
to set off for UM-BONGO LAND
,
where you come from,
and you’re going to be on it.
Yeah?
Whether you like
it or bloody not.
Now, has anyone else got any questions?