Little Bee fled Nigeria at age 14 after men came and shot
her people and burned her village. She
spent two years in a United Kingdom detention Center
before being released albeit without papers. She learned
to speak English from reading newspapers. Unlike the girls
with whom she leaves the facility, she had the driver's
license of a man she met on a Nigerian beach two years ago
during her flight from the men.
Her call to alert Andrew O'Rourke of her impending arrival
sent him into a tailspin that ended in his suicide,
leaving behind his wife, Sarah (also on the beach two
years ago) and his son, Charlie. Little Bee arrived on
Sarah's doorstep two hours before the funeral which she
attends along with Sarah and serves as a strong support
for her.
The story moves forward from this point as the two women
forge a bond but also looks back to the incident in
Nigeria from both perspectives and farther back to give
readers an idea of where their lives began. Chris Cleave
has written a story that shows how the lives of two women
with very different backgrounds intertwine and
interconnect. In many places his writing is brilliant, and
I like the premise of the story. Cleave sheds light on the
important issue of refugees and their treatment, and he
uses people to tell his tale rather than politics and
policies.
That said, my problem with the novel is with the three
adult characters: Sarah; her husband, Andrew; and her
lover, Lawrence. Sarah runs a posh women's magazine in
London but naively believes she can help Little Bee to
stay in England when she can't manage the details of her
own life and taking care of her child. In fact, she
depends often times more on Little Bee for support than
the other way around. Andrew, too, may want to make a
difference, but he appears even weaker than Sarah. And,
Lawrence spends far too much time focused on his own self-
interest although he claims he cares for Sarah. Little
Bee, who seemed the most realistic of the bunch, shows
some naiveté in her belief that she will actually be able
to stay.
I liked Little Bee and rooted for her. Perhaps, it's just
that I wished she had help from stronger people. Many have
loved this story and had strong, emotional reactions to
it. I'm open to the possibility that my ability to put the
book down more easily than pick it up lies with me and not
with the book. I make a point not to judge an author by
one story alone and plan to read Cleave's previous novel,
Incendiary.
WE DON'T WANT TO TELL YOU TOO MUCH ABOUT THIS
BOOK.
It is a truly special story and we don't want to
spoil it.
Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we
will just say this:
It is extremely funny, but the African
beach scene is horrific.
The story starts there, but the
book doesn't.
And it's what happens afterward that is most
important.
Once you have read it, you'll want to tell
everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what
happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Most days I wish I was a British
pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be
pleased to
see me coming. Maybe I would visit with you for the weekend
and then
suddenly, because I am fickle like that, I would visit with
the man
from the corner shop instead—but you would not be sad
because you
would be eating a cinnamon bun, or drinking a cold Coca-
Cola from the
can, and you would never think of me again. We would be
happy, like
lovers who met on holiday and forgot each other’s names.
A pound coin can go wherever
it thinks it will be safest. It can cross deserts and
oceans and leave
the sound of gunfire and the bitter smell of burning thatch
behind.
When it feels warm and secure it will turn around and smile
at you,
the way my big sister Nkiruka used to smile at the men in
our village
in the short summer after she was a girl but before she was
really a
woman, and certainly before the evening my mother took her
to a quiet
place for a serious talk.
Of course a pound coin can
be serious too. It can disguise itself as power, or
property, and there
is nothing more serious when you are a girl who has
neither. You must
try to catch the pound, and trap it in your pocket, so that
it cannot
reach a safe country unless it takes you with it. But a
pound has all
the tricks of a sorcerer. When pursued I have seen it shed
its tail
like a lizard so that you are left holding only pence. And
when you
finally go to seize it, the British pound can perform the
greatest magic
of all, and this is to
transform itself into not one,
but two, identical green American dollar bills. Your
fingers will close
on empty air, I am telling you.
How I would love to be a British
pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free
to watch
it go. This is the human triumph. This is called,
globalization.
A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can
leap the
turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with
their uniform
caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi.
Where to, sir?
Western Civilization, my good man, and make it snappy.
See how nicely a British pound
coin talks? It speaks with the voice of Queen Elizabeth the
Second of
England. Her face is stamped upon it, and sometimes when I
look very
closely I can see her lips
moving. I hold her up to my
ear. What is she saying ? Put me down
this minute, young lady, or I shall call my guards.
If the Queen spoke to you in
such a voice, do you suppose it would be possible to
disobey? I have
read that the people around her—even kings and prime
ministers—they
find their bodies responding to her orders before their
brains can even
think why not. Let me tell you, it is not the crown and the
scepter
that have this effect. Me, I could pin a tiara on my short
fuzzy hair,
and I could hold up a scepter in one hand, like this, and
police officers
would still walk up to me in their big shoes and say,
Love the ensemble,
madam, now let’s have a quick look at your ID, shall we?
No, it is not the Queen’s crown and scepter that rule in
your land.
It is her grammar and her voice. That is why it is
desirable to speak
the way she does.
That way you can say to police
officers, in a voice as clear as the Cullinan diamond,
My goodness,
how dare you?
I am only alive at all because
I learned the Queen’s English. Maybe you are thinking, that
isn’t
so hard. After all, English is the official language of my
country,
Nigeria. Yes, but the trouble is that back home we speak it
so much
better than you. To talk the Queen’s English, I had to
forget all
the best tricks of my mother tongue. For example, the Queen
could never
say, There was plenty wahala, that
girl done use her bottom power to engage my number one son
and anyone
could see she would end in the bad bush.
Instead the Queen must say, My late daughter-in-law
used her feminine charms to become engaged
to my heir, and one might have foreseen that it wouldn’t
end
well. It is all a little sad, don’t you think? Learning
the Queen’s
English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from
your toenails,
the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there
is always
a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the
growing edges
to
remind you of the good time
you had. So, you can see that learning came slowly to me.
On the other
hand, I had plenty of time. I learned your language in an
immigration
detention center, in Essex, in the
southeastern part of the United
Kingdom. Two years, they locked me in there. Time was all I
had.
But why did I go to all the
trouble? It is because of what some of the older girls
explained to
me: to survive, you must look good or talk even better. The
plain ones
and the silent ones, it seems their
paperwork is never in order.
You say, they get repatriated. We say, sent home early.
Like your country is a children’s party—something too
wonderful
to last forever. But the pretty ones and the talkative
ones, we are
allowed to stay. In this way your country becomes lively
and more beautiful.
I will tell you what happened
when they let me out of the immigration detention center.
The detention
officer put a voucher in my hand, a transport voucher, and
he said I
could telephone for a cab. I said, Thank you sir, may
God move with
grace in your life and bring joy into
your heart and prosperity upon your loved ones.
The officer pointed his eyes at the ceiling, like there was
something
very interesting up there, and he said, Jesus.
Then he pointed his finger down the corridor and he said,
There is
the telephone.
So, I stood in the queue for
the telephone. I was thinking, I went over the top
with thanking that detention officer. The Queen would
merely have said,
Thank you, and left it like that. Actually, the Queen
would have
told the detention officer to call for the damn taxi
himself, or she
would have him shot and his head separated from his body
and displayed
on the railings in front of the Tower of London. I was
realizing, right
there, that it was one thing to learn the Queen’s English
from books
and newspapers in my detention
cell, and quite another thing
to actually speak the language with the English. I was
angry with myself.
I was thinking, You cannot afford
to go around making mistakes like that, girl. If you talk
like a savage
who learned her English
on the boat, the men are going to find you
out and send you straight back home.
That’s what I was thinking.
There were three girls in the
queue in front of me. They let all us girls out on the same
day. It
was Friday. It was a bright sunny morning in May. The
corridor was dirty
but it smelled clean. That is a good trick. Bleach, is how
they do that.
The detention officer sat behind
his desk. He was not watching us girls. He was reading a
newspaper.
It was spread out on his desk. It was not one of the
newspapers I learned
to speak your language from—The Times
or the Telegraph or The Guardian.
No, this newspaper was not for people like you and me.
There was a white
girl in the newspaper photo and she was topless. You know
what I mean
when I say this, because it is your language we are
speaking. But if
I was telling this story to my big sister Nkiruka and the
other girls
from my village back home then I would have to stop, right
here,
and explain to them: topless
does not mean, the lady in the newspaper did not have an
upper body.
It means, she was not wearing any garments
on her upper body. You see the difference?
—Wait.
Not even a brassiere?
—Not
even a brassiere.
—Weh!
And then I would start my story
again, but those girls back home, they would whisper
between them. They
would giggle behind their hands. Then, just as I was
getting back to
my story about the morning they let me out of the
immigration detention
center, those girls would interrupt me again. Nkiruka would
say,
Listen, okay? Listen. Just so we are clear. This girl in
the newspaper
photo. She was a prostitute, yes? A night fighter? Did she
look down
at the ground from shame?
—No,
she did not look down at the ground from shame. She looked
right in the camera and smiled.
—What, in the newspaper?
—Yes.
—Then
is it not shameful in Great Britain, to show your bobbis in
the newspaper?
—No.
It is not shameful. The boys like it and there is no shame.
Otherwise the topless girls would not smile like that, do
you see?
—So
do all the girls over there show them off like
that? Walk around with their bobbis bouncing? In the church
and in the
shop and in the street?
—No,
only in the newspapers.
—Why
do they not all show their breasts, if the men like it and
there is no shame?
—I
do not know.
—You
lived there more than two years, little miss been-to.
How come you not know?
—It
is like that over there. Much of my life in that country
was
lived in such confusion. Sometimes I think that even the
British do
not know the answers to such questions.
—Weh!
This is what it would be like,
you see, if I had to stop and explain every little thing to
the girls
back home. I would have to explain linoleum and bleach and
soft-core
pornography and the shape-changing magic of the British one-
pound coin,
as if all of these everyday things were very wonderful
mysteries. And
very
quickly my own story would
get lost in this great ocean of wonders because it would
seem as if
your country was an enchanted federation of miracles and my
own story
within it was really very small
and unmagical. But with you
it is much easier because I can say to you, look, on the
morning they
released us, the duty officer at the immigration detention
center was
staring at a photo of a topless girl
in the newspaper. And you understand
the situation straightaway. That is the reason I spent two
years learning
the Queen’s English, so that you and I could speak like
this without
an interruption.
The detention officer, the
one who was looking at the topless photo in the newspaper—
he was a
small man and his hair was pale, like the tinned mushroom
soup they
served us on Tuesdays. His wrists were thin and white like
electrical
cables covered in plastic. His uniform was bigger than he
was. The shoulders
of the jacket rose up in two bumps, one on each side of his
head, as
if he had little animals hiding in there. I thought of
those creatures
blinking in the light when he took off his jacket in the
evening. I
was thinking, Yes sir, if I was your wife I would keep my
brassiere
on, thank you.
And then I was thinking, Why
are you staring at that girl in the newspaper, mister, and
not us girls
here in the queue for the telephone? What if we all ran
away? But then
I remembered, they were letting
us out. This was hard to understand after so much time.
Two years,
I lived in that detention center. I was fourteen
years of age when I came to
your country but I did not have any papers to prove it and
so they put
me in the same detention center as the adults. The trouble
was, there
were men and women locked up together in that place. At
night they kept
the men in a different wing of the detention center. They
caged them
like wolves when the sun went down, but in the daytime the
men walked
among us, and ate the same food we did. I thought they
still looked
hungry. I thought they watched me with ravenous eyes. So
when the older
girls whispered to me, To
survive you must look good or talk good,
I decided that talking would be safer for me.
I made myself undesirable.
I declined to wash, and I let my skin grow oily. Under my
clothes I
wound a wide strip of cotton around my chest, to make my
breasts small
and flat. When the charity boxes arrived, full of
secondhand clothes
and shoes, some of the other girls tried to make themselves
pretty but
I rummaged through the cartons to find clothes that hid my
shape. I
wore loose blue jeans and a man’s Hawaiian shirt and heavy
black boots
with the steel toe caps shining through the torn leather. I
went to
the detention nurse and I made her cut my hair very short
with medical
scissors. For the whole two years I did not smile or even
look in any
man’s face. I was terrified. Only at night, after they
locked the
men away,
I went back to my detention
cell and I unwound the cloth from my breasts and I breathed
deeply.
Then I took off my heavy boots and I drew my knees up to my
chin. Once
a week, I sat on the foam mattress
of my bed and I painted my
toenails. I found the little bottle of nail varnish at the
bottom of
a charity box. It still had the price ticket on it. If I
ever discover
the person who gave it then I will tell them, for the cost
of one British
pound and ninety-nine pence, they saved my life. Because
this is what
I did in that place, to remind myself I was alive
underneath everything:
under my steel toe caps I wore bright red nail varnish.
Sometimes when
I took my boots off I screwed up my eyes against the tears
and I rocked
back and fro,
shivering from the cold.
My big sister Nkiruka, she
became a woman in the growing season, under the African
sun, and who
can blame her if the great red heat of it made her giddy
and flirtatious?
Who could not lean back against the doorpost of their house
and smile
with quiet indulgence when they saw my mother sitting her
down to say,
Nkiruka, beloved one, you must not smile at the older boys
like that?
Me, I was a woman under white
fluorescent strip lights, in an underground room in an
immigration detention
center forty miles east of London. There were no seasons
there. It was
cold, cold, cold, and I did not have anyone to smile at.
Those cold
years are frozen inside me. The African girl they locked up
in the immigration
detention center, poor child, she never really escaped. In
my soul she
is still locked up in there, forever, under the fluorescent
lights,
curled up on the green linoleum floor with her knees tucked
up under
her chin. And this woman they released from the immigration
detention
center, this creature that I am, she is a new breed of
human. There
is nothing natural about me. I was born—no, I was reborn—in
captivity.
I learned my language from your newspapers, my clothes are
your castoffs,
and it is your pound that makes my pockets ache with its
absence. Imagine
a young woman cut out from a smiling Save the Children
magazine advertisement,
who dresses herself in threadbare pink clothes from the
recycling bin
in your local supermarket car park and speaks English like
the leader
column of The Times, if you please. I would cross
the street
to avoid me. Truly, this is the one thing that people from
your country
and
People from my country agree
on. They say, That refugee girl is not
one of us. That girl does not belong.
That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an
unfamiliar
face in the moon.
So, I am a refugee, and I get
very lonely. Is it my fault if I do not look like an
English girl and
I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English
girl must have
skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers?
Who says a
Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English, as if English
had collided
with Ibo, high in the upper atmosphere, and rained down
into her mouth
in a shower that half-drowns
her and leaves her choking
up sweet tales about the bright African colors and the
taste of fried
plantain? Not like a storyteller, but like a victim rescued
from the
flood, coughing up the colonial water from her lungs?
Excuse me for learning your
language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I
did not come
to talk to you about the bright African colors. I am a born-
again citizen
of the developing world, and I will prove to you that the
color of my
life is gray. And if it should be that I secretly
love fried
plantain, then that must stay between us and I implore you
to tell
no one. Okay?
The morning they let us out
of the detention center, they gave us all our possessions.
I held mine
in a see-through plastic bag. A Collins Gem Pocket
English
Dictionary, one pair of gray socks, one pair of gray
briefs, and
one United Kingdom Driver’s License that was not mine, and
one water-stained
business card that was not
mine either. If you want to know, these things belonged to
a white man
called Andrew O’Rourke. I met him on a beach.
This small plastic bag is what
I was holding in my hand when the detention officer told me
to go and
stand in the queue for the telephone. The first girl in the
queue, she
was tall and she was pretty. Her thing was beauty, not
talking. I wondered
which of us had made the best choice to survive. This girl,
she had
plucked her eyebrows out and then she had drawn them back
on again with
a pencil. This is what she had done to save her life. She
was wearing
a purple dress, an A-line dress with pink stars and moons
in the
pattern. She had a nice pink
scarf wrapped around her hair, and purple flip-flops on her
feet. I
was thinking she must have been locked up a very long time
in our detention
center. One has to go through a very great number of the
charity boxes,
you will understand, to put together an outfit that is
truly an ensemble.
On the girl’s brown legs
there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those
scars cover
the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your
dress? I thought
that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please
to agree with
me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers
want us to
think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy
them. We must
see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret.
Because take
it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar
means, I survived.
In a few breaths’ time I
will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them
the same way
we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another
beauty.
A sad story means, this storyteller is alive.
The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her,
something
marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.
The girl with the purple A-line
dress and the scars on her legs, she was already talking
into the telephone
receiver. She was saying, Hello, taxi? Yu come pick me up,
yeh? Good.
Oh, where me come? Me come from Jamaica, darlin, you better
believe
that. Huh? What? Oh, where me come right now? Okay
wait please.
She put her hand to cover the
telephone receiver. She turned around to the second girl in
the queue
and she said, Listen darlin, what name is dis place, where
we at right
now? But the second girl just looked up at her and shrugged
her shoulders.
The second girl was thin and her skin was dark brown and
her eyes were
green like a jelly sweet when you suck the outside sugar
off and hold
it up against the moon. She was so pretty, I cannot even
explain. She
was wearing a yellow sari dress. She was holding a see-
through
Plastic bag like mine, but
there was nothing in it. At first I thought it was empty
but then I
thought, Why do you carry that bag, girl, if there is
nothing in it? I could see her sari through it, so I
decided she
was
holding a bag full of lemon
yellow. That is everything she owned when they let us girls
out.
I knew that second girl a bit.
I was in the same room as her for two weeks one time, but I
never talked
with her. She did not speak one word of anyone’s English.
That is
why she just shrugged and
held on tight to her bag of
lemon yellow. So the girl on the phone, she pointed her
eyes up at the
ceiling, the same way the detention officer at his desk
did.
Then the girl on the phone
turned to the third girl in the queue and she said to her,
Do yu
know the name of dis place where we is at? But the third
girl did not
know either. She just stood there, and she was wearing a
blue T-shirt
and blue denim jeans and white Dunlop Green Flash trainers,
and she
just looked down at her own see-through bag, and her bag
was full of
letters and documents. There was so much paper in that bag,
all crumpled
and creased, she had to hold one hand under the bag to stop
it all bursting
out. Now, this third girl, I knew her a little bit too. She
was not
pretty and she was not a good talker either, but there is
one more thing
that can save you from being sent home early.
This girl’s thing was, she had her story all written down
and made
official. There were rubber stamps at the end of her story
that said
in red ink this is TRUE. I remember she told me her story
once and it
went something like, the-
men-came-and-they-
burned-my-village-
tied-my-girls-
raped-my-girls-
took-my-girls-
whipped-my-husband-
cut-my-breast-
I-ran-away-
through-the-bush-
found-a-ship-
crossed-the-sea-
and-then-they-put-me-in-here.
Or some such story like that. I got confused with all the
stories in
that detention center. All the girls’ stories started out,
the-men-came-and-they.
And all of the stories finished, and-then-they-put-me-in-
here.
All the stories were sad, but you and I have made our
agreement concerning
sad words. With this girl—girl three in the queue—her story
had
made her so sad that she did not know the name of the place
where she
was at and she did not want to know. The girl was not even
curious.
So the girl with the telephone
receiver, she asked her again. What?
she said. Yu no talk neither? How come yu not know the
name
dis place we at?
Then the third girl in the
queue, she just pointed her
eyes up at the ceiling, and so the girl with the telephone
receiver
pointed her own eyes up at the ceiling for a second time. I
was thinking,
Okay,
now the detention officer has
looked at the ceiling one time and girl three has looked at
the ceiling
one time and girl one has looked at the ceiling two
times,
so maybe there are some answers up on that
ceiling after all. Maybe there
is something very cheerful up there. Maybe there are
stories written
on the ceiling that go something like the-men-came-and-
they-
I looked at the ceiling, but
it was only white paint and fluorescent light tubes up
there.
The girl on the telephone,
she finally looked at me. So I said to her, The name of
this place
is the Black Hill Immigration Removal
Centre. The girl stared at me. Yu kiddin wid me,
she said. What kine of a name is dat?
So I pointed at the little metal plate that was screwed on
the wall
above the telephone. The girl looked at it and then she
looked back
to me and she said, Sorry darlin, I can not ridd
it. So I read it out to her, and I pointed to the words one
at a time.
Black hill immigration removal centre, high easter,
chelmsford, essex.
Thank you precious, the first girl said, and she lifted up
the telephone
receiver.
She said into the receiver:
All right now listen mister, the place I is right now is
called Black
Hill Immigration Removal. Then she said, No, please,
wait.
Then she looked sad and she put the telephone
receiver back down on the telephone.
I said, What is wrong? The first girl sighed and she said,
Taxi man
say he no pick up from dis place. Then he say, You people
are scum.
You know dis word?
I said no, because I did not
know for sure, so I took my Collins
Gem Pocket English Dictionary out of my see-through bag
and I looked
up the word. I said to the first girl, You are a film of
impurities
or vegetation that can form on the surface of a liquid.
She looked at me and I looked at her and we giggled because
we did not
understand what to do with the information. This was always
my trouble
when I was learning to speak your language. Every word can
defend itself.
Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate
meanings
so the understanding closes on empty air. I admire you
people. You are
like sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as
your money.
So me and the first girl in
the telephone queue, we were giggling at each other, and I
was holding
my see-
Through bag and she was holding
her see-through bag. There was one black eyebrow pencil and
one pair
of tweezers and three rings of dried pineapple in hers. The
first girl
saw me looking at her bag and she stopped giggling. What
you starin
at? she said. I said I did not know. She said, I know what
you tinking.
You tinking, Now the taxi no come for to pick me up, how
far me going
to get wid one eyebrow pencil
an one tweezer an three pineapple
slice? So I told her, Maybe you can use the eyebrow pencil
to write
a message that says HELP ME, and then you can give the
pineapple slices
to the first person who does. The girl looked at me like I
was crazy
in the head and she said to me: Okay darlin, one,
I got no paper for to write no message on, two,
I no know how to write, I only know how to draw on me
eyebrows, an
tree, me intend to eat that pineapple meself.
And she made her eyes wide and stared at me.
While this was happening, the
second girl in the queue, the girl with the lemon-yellow
sari and the
see-
Through bag full of yellow,
she had become the first girl in the queue, because now she
held the
telephone receiver in her own
hand. She was whispering into it in some language that
sounded like
butterflies drowning in honey. I tapped the girl on her
shoulder, and
pulled at her sari, and I said
to her: Please, you must try
to talk to them in English.
The sari girl looked at me, and she stopped talking in her
butterfly
language. Very slowly and carefully, like she was
remembering the words
from a dream, she said into the telephone receiver:
ENGLAND, YES PLEASE.
YES PLEASE THANK YOU, I WANT GO TO ENGLAND.
So the girl in the purple A-line
dress, she put her nose right up to the nose of the girl in
the lemon-yellow
sari, and she tapped her finger on the girl’s forehead and
made a
sound with her mouth like a broom handle hitting an empty
barrel.
Bong! Bong! she said to the girl. You already is in
England,
get it?
And she pointed both her index fingers down at the linoleum
floor. She
said: Dis is England,
darlin, ya nuh see it? Right
here, yeh? Dis where we at all-reddy.
The girl in the yellow sari
went quiet. She just stared back with those green eyes like
jelly moons.
So the girl in the purple dress, the Jamaican girl, she
said, Here,
gimme dat, and she grabbed the telephone receiver out
of the sari
girl’s hand. And she lifted the receiver to her mouth and
she said
Listen, wait, one minnit please.
But then she went quiet and she passed the telephone
receiver to me
and I listened, and it was just the dial tone. So I turned
to the sari
girl. You have to dial a number first, I said. You
understand?
Dial number first, then tell
taxi man where you want to go. Okay?
But the girl in the sari, she
just narrowed her eyes at me, and pulled her see-through
bag of lemon
yellow a little closer to her, like maybe I was going to
take that away
from her the way the other girl had taken the telephone
receiver. The
girl in the purple dress, she sighed and turned to me.
It ain’t
no good darlin, she said. De Lord
gonna call his chillen home fore dis one calls for a taxi.
And she passed the telephone receiver to me. Here,
she said. Yu betta try one time.
I pointed to the third girl
in the queue, the one with the bag of documents and the
blue T-shirt
and the Dunlop Green Flash trainers. What about her? I
said. This girl
is before me in the queue. Yeh,
said the girl in the purple dress, but dis ooman ain’t
got no mo-tee-VAY-shun.
Ain’t dat right darlin? And she stared at the girl with
the documents,
but the girl with the documents just shrugged and looked
down at her
Dunlop Green Flash shoes. Ain’t dat de truth,
said the girl in the purple dress, and she turned back to
me. It’s
up
to yu, darlin. Yu got to
talk us out a here, fore dey change dey mind an
lock us all back up.
I looked down at the telephone
receiver and it was gray and dirty and I was afraid. I
looked back at
the girl in the purple dress. Where do you want to go? I
said. And she
said, Any ends. Excuse me? Anywhere, darlin.
I dialed the taxi number that
was written on the phone. A man’s voice came on. He sounded
tired.
Cab service, he said. The way he said it, it was like
he was doing
me a big favor just by saying
those words.
“Good
morning, I would like a taxi please.”
“You
want a cab?”
“Yes.
Please. A taxicab. For four passengers.”
“Where
from?”
“From
the Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre, please. In High
Easter. It
is near Chelmsford.”
“I
know where it is. Now you listen to me—”
“Please,
it is okay. I know you do not pick up refugees. We are not
refugees.
We are cleaners. We work in this place.”
“You’re
cleaners.”
“Yes.”
“And
that’s the truth is it? Because if I had a pound for every
bloody
immigrant that got in the back of one of my cabs and didn’t
know where
they wanted to go and started prattling on to my driver in
Swahili and
tried to pay him in cigarettes, I’d be playing golf at this
very moment
instead of talking to you.”
“We
are cleaners.”
“All
right. It’s true you don’t talk like one of them. Where do
you want
to go?”
I had memorized the address
on the United Kingdom Driver’s License in my see-through
plastic bag.
Andrew O’Rourke, the white man I met on the beach: he lived
in Kingston-upon-Thames
in the
English county of Surrey. I
spoke into the telephone.
“Kingston,
please.”
The girl in the purple dress
grabbed my arm and hissed at me. No darlin!
she said. Anywhere but Jamaica. Dey mens be killin me de
minnit I ketch dere, kill me dead.
I did not understand why she was
scared, but I know now. There
is a Kingston in England but there is also a Kingston in
Jamaica, where
the climate is different. This is another great work you
sorcerers have
done—even your cities have
two tails.
“Kingston?”
said the man on the telephone.
“Kingston-upon-Thames,”
I said.
“That’s
bloody miles away isn’t it? That’s over in, what?”
“Surrey,”
I said.
“Surrey.
You are four cleaners from leafy Surrey, is that what
you’re trying
to tell me?”
“No.
We are cleaners from nearby. But they are sending us on a
cleaning job
in Surrey.”
“Cash
or account then?”
The
man sounded so tired.
“What?”
“Will
you pay in cash, or is it going on the detention center’s
bill?”
“We
will pay in cash, mister. We will pay when we get there.”
“You’d
better.”
I listened for a minute and
then I pressed my hand down on the cradle of the telephone
receiver.
I dialed another number. This was the telephone number from
the business
card I carried in my see-through plastic bag. The business
card was
damaged by water. I could not tell if the last number was
an 8 or a
3. I tried an 8, because in my country odd numbers bring
bad luck, and
that is one thing I had already had enough of.
A man answered the call. He
was angry.
“Who
is this? It’s bloody six in the morning.”
“Is
this Mister Andrew O’Rourke?”
“Yeah.
Who are you?”
“Can
I come to see you, Mister?”
“Who
the hell is this?”
“We
met on the beach in Nigeria. I remember you very well,
Mister O’Rourke.
I am in England
now. Can I come to see you
and Sarah? I do not have anywhere else to go.”
There was silence on the other
end of the line. Then the man coughed, and started to
laugh.
“This
is a windup, right? Who is this? I’m warning you, I get
nutters like
you on my case all the time. Leave me alone, or you won’t
get away
with it. My paper always prosecutes. They’ll have
this call traced and find out
who you are and have you arrested. You wouldn’t be the
first.”
“You
don’t believe it is me?”
“Just
leave me alone. Understand? I don’t want to hear about it.
All that
stuff happened a long time ago and it wasn’t my fault.”
“I
will come to your house. That way you will believe it is
me.”
“No.”
“I
do not know anyone else in this country, Mister O’Rourke. I
am sorry.
I am just telling you, so that you can be ready.”
The man did not sound angry
anymore. He made a small sound, like a child when it is
nervous
about what will happen. I hung
up the phone and turned around to the other girls. My heart
was pounding
so fast, I thought I would
vomit right there on the linoleum floor. The other girls
were staring
at me, nervous and expectant.
Well?
said the girl in the purple dress.
Hmm?
I said.
De
taxi, darlin! What is happenin about de taxi?
Oh
yes, the taxi. The taxi man said a cab will pick us up in
ten minutes.
He said we are to wait outside.
The girl in the purple dress,
she smiled.
“Mi
name is Yevette. From Jamaica, zeen. You useful,
darlin. What dey call yu?”
“My
name is Little Bee.”
“What
kinda name yu call dat?”
“It
is my name.”
“What
kind of place yu come from, dey go roun callin little gals
de names
of insects?”
“Nigeria.”
Yevette laughed. It was a big
laugh, like the way the chief baddy laughs in the pirate
films. WU-
ha-ha-ha-ha!
It made the telephone receiver rattle in its cradle. Nye-
JIRRYA!
said Yevette. Then she
turned round to the others,
the girl in the sari and the girl with the documents.
Come wid us,
gals, she said. We de United Nations, see it,
an today we is all followin Nye-JIRRYA.WU-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Yevette was still laughing
when the four of us girls walked out past the security
desk, toward
the door. The detention officer looked up from his
newspaper when we
went by. The topless girl was gone now—the officer had
turned the
page. I looked down at his newspaper. The headline on the
new page said
asylum seekers eating our swans. I looked back at the
detention officer,
but he would not look up at me. While I looked, he moved
his arm over
the page to cover the headline. He made it look like he
needed to scratch
his elbow. Or maybe he really did
need to scratch his elbow. I realized I knew nothing about
men apart
from the fear. A uniform that is too big for you, a desk
that is too
small for you, an eight-hour
shift that is too long for
you, and suddenly here comes a girl with three kilos of
documents and
no motivation, another one with jelly-green eyes and a
yellow sari who
is so beautiful you cannot look at her for too long in case
your eyeballs
go ploof, a third girl from Nigeria who is named
after a honeybee,
and a noisy woman from Jamaica who laughs like the pirate
Bluebeard.
Perhaps this is exactly the type of circumstance that makes
a man’s
elbow itch.
I turned to look back at the
detention officer just before we went out through the
double doors.
He was watching us leave. He looked very small and lonely
there, with
his thin little wrists, under the fluorescent lights. The
light made
his skin look green, the color of a baby caterpillar just
out of the
egg. The early-morning sunshine was shining in through the
door glass.
The officer screwed up his eyes against the daylight. I
suppose we were
just silhouettes to him. He opened his mouth, like he was
going to say
something, but he stopped.
What?
I said. I realized he was going to tell us there had been a
mistake.
I wondered if we should run. I did not want to go back in
detention.
I wondered how far we would get if we ran. I wondered if
they would
come after us with dogs. The detention officer stood up. I
heard his
chair scrape on the
linoleum floor. He stood there
with his hands at his sides.
“Ladies?”
he said.
“Yes?”
He
looked down at the ground, and then up again.
“Best
of luck,” he said.
And
we girls turned around and walked toward the light.
I pushed open the double doors,
and then I froze. It was the sunlight that stopped me. I
felt so fragile
from the detention center, I was afraid those bright rays
of sunshine
could snap me in half. I couldn’t take that first step
outside.
“What
is de holdup, Lil Bee?” Yevette was standing behind me. I
was blocking
the door for
everyone.
“One
moment, please.”
Outside, the fresh air smelled
of wet grass. It blew in my face. The smell made me panic.
For two years
I had smelled only bleach, and my nail varnish, and the
other detainees’
cigarettes. Nothing natural. Nothing like this. I felt that
if I took
one step forward, the earth itself would rise up and reject
me. There
was nothing natural about me now. I stood there in my heavy
boots with
my breasts strapped down, neither a woman nor a girl, a
creature who
had forgotten her language and learned yours, whose past
had crumbled
to dust.
“What
de hell yu waitin fo, darlin?”
“I
am scared, Yevette.”
Yevette
shook her head and she smiled.
“Maybe
yu’s right to be scared, Lil Bee, cos yu a smart girl.
Maybe me jus
too dumb to be fraid. But me spend eighteen month locked up
in dat place,
an if yu tink me dumb enough to wait one second longer on
account of
your tremblin an your quakin, yu better tink two times.”
I
turned round to face her and I gripped on to the door frame.
“I
can’t move,” I said.
That is when Yevette gave me
a great push in the chest and I flew backward. And that is
how it was,
the first time I touched the soil of England as a free
woman, it was
not with the soles of my boots but with the seat of my
trousers.
“WU-ha-ha-ha!”
said Yevette. “Welcome in de U-nited Kindom, int dat
glorious?”
When I got my breath back I
started laughing too. I sat on the ground, with the warm
sun shining
on my back, and I realized that the earth had not rejected
me and the
sunlight had not snapped me in two.
I stood up and I smiled at
Yevette. We all took a few steps away from the detention
center buildings.
As we walked, when the other girls were not looking, I
reached under
my Hawaiian shirt and I undid the band of cotton that held
my breasts
strapped down. I unwound it and threw it on the ground and
ground it
into the dirt with the heel of my boot. I breathed deeply
in the fresh,
clean air.
When we came to the main gate,
the four of us girls stopped for a moment. We looked out
through the
high razor-wire fence and down the slopes of Black Hill.
The English
countryside stretched away to the horizon. Soft mist was
hanging in
the valleys, and the tops of the low hills were gold in the
morning
sun, and I smiled because the whole world was fresh and new
and bright.