Little Bee (27 page)

“What
happened to wanting, Sarah, was getting a few of the things we wanted.”

I
smiled, and sat down at my desk. I scrolled through the mocked-up pages on
Clarissa’s screen.

“These
are actually pretty good,” I said.

“Of
course they’re good, darling, I’ve been doing the exact same story every single
month for ten years. Cosmetic surgery and sex toys I can do with my eyes
closed.”

I
leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. Clarissa put her hand on my
shoulder.

“But seriously, Sarah?”

“Mmm?”

“Please
just give yourself a day to think about it, will you? The refugee piece, I
mean. You’re in a state at the moment, with everything that’s happened. Why
don’t you take tomorrow off, just to make sure you’re sure, and if you are sure
then of course I’ll make it happen for
you.
But if
you’re not sure, then let’s not throw away our careers over it right now, okay
darling?”

I
opened my eyes. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll take a day.”

Clarissa
sagged with relief.
“Thank you, doll.
Because it’s not
so bad, what we do.
Really.
No one dies when we write
about fashion.”

I
looked out over the editorial floor and saw the girls watching me back:
speculative, excited,
predatory
.

I
took another half-empty train back to Kingston and arrived home at two in the
afternoon. It was hot and hazy, with
a stillness
and a
heaviness to the day. We needed some rain to break it.

Lawrence
was in the kitchen when I got back home. I put the kettle on.

“Where’s
Bee?”

“She’s
in the garden.”

I
looked out and saw her, lying on the grass, at the far end of the garden beside
the laurel bush.

“She
seem okay to you?”

He
just shrugged.

“What
is it? You two really haven’t hit it off, have you?”

“It’s
not that,” said Lawrence.

“There’s
a tension though, isn’t there? I can feel it.”

I
realized I had stirred one of the tea bags until it burst. I drained the mug
into the sink and started again.

Lawrence
stood behind me and put his arms around my waist.

“It’s
you who seems tense,” he said. “Is it work?”

I
leaned my head backward onto his shoulder and sighed.

“Work
was hideous,” I said. “I lasted forty minutes. I’m wondering if I should quit.”

He
sighed into the back of my neck.

“I
knew it,” he said. “I knew something like this was coming.”

I
looked out at Little Bee, lying on her back, watching the hazy sky filling in
with gray.

“Do
you remember what it felt like to be her age?
Or Charlie’s
age?
Do you remember back when you felt you could actually
do something
to make the world better?”

“You’re
talking to the wrong man. I work for central government, remember?
Actually doing something
is the mistake we’re trained to
avoid.”

“Stop
it, Lawrence, I’m being serious.”

“Did
I ever think I could change the world? Is that your question?”

“Yes.”

“A bit, maybe.
When I first joined the civil service, I
suppose I was quite idealistic.”

“When
did it change?”

“When I realized we weren’t going to change the
world.
Certainly not if that involved implementing any computer systems.
Round about lunchtime on the first day.”

I
smiled and put my mouth close to Lawrence’s ear.

“Well
you’ve changed my world,” I said.

Lawrence
swallowed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes I suppose I have.”

Behind
us the icemaker dropped another cube. We stood for a while and looked out at
Little Bee.

“Look
at her,” I said. “I’m so scared. Do you really think I can save her?”

Lawrence
shrugged. “Maybe you can. And don’t take this the wrong way, but so what? Save
her and there’s a whole world of them behind her.
A whole
swarm of Little Bees, coming here to feed.”

“Or
to pollinate,” I said.

“I
think that’s naive,” said Lawrence.

“I
think my features editor would agree with you.”

Lawrence
massaged my shoulders and I closed my eyes.

“What’s
eating you?” said Lawrence.

“I
can’t seem to use the magazine to make a difference,” I said. “But that’s how
it was conceived. It was meant to have an edge. It was never meant to be just
another fashion rag.”

“So
what’s stopping you?”

“Every
time we put in something deep and meaningful, the circulation drops.”

“So
people’s lives are hard enough. You can see how they might not want to be
reminded that everyone else’s lives are shit too.”

“I
suppose so. Maybe Andrew was right after all. Maybe I need to grow up and get a
grown-up’s job.”

Lawrence
held me close.

“Or
maybe you should relax for a little while and just enjoy what you’ve got.”

I
looked out at the garden. The sky was darker now. It seemed the rain couldn’t
be far off.

“Little
Bee has changed me, Lawrence. I can’t look at her without thinking how shallow
my life is.”

“Sarah,
you’re talking absolute shit. We see the world’s problems every day on
television. Don’t tell me this is the first time you’ve realized they’re real. Don’t
tell me those people wouldn’t swap lives with you if they could. Their lives
are fucked up. But fucking up your life too? That isn’t going to help them.”

“Well
I’m not helping them now, am I?”

“How
could you possibly do more? You cut off a
finger
to
save that girl. And now you’re sheltering her.
Food, lodging,
solicitor…none of that comes cheap.
You’re taking down a good salary and
you’re spending it to help.”

“Ten percent.
That’s all I’m giving her.
One
finger in ten.
Ten pounds in every hundred.
Ten
percent is hardly a wholehearted commitment.”

“Reevaluate
that. Ten percent is the cost of doing business. Ten percent buys you a stable
world to get on with your life in. Here, safe in the West. That’s the way to
think of it. If everyone gave ten percent, we wouldn’t need to give asylum.”

“You
still want me to kick her out, don’t you?”

Lawrence
spun me round to look at him. There was something in his eyes that looked
almost like panic, and at that moment it troubled me for reasons I could not
fathom.

“No,”
he said.
“Absolutely not.
You keep her and you look
after her. But please, please don’t throw your own life away. I care about you
too much for that. I care about
us
too much.”

“Oh,
I don’t know, I really don’t.” I sighed. “I miss Andrew,” I said.

Lawrence
took his hands from my waist, and took a step back.

“Oh
please,” I said. “That came out all wrong. I just mean, he was so good with the
ordinary things. He was no nonsense, you know? He would just say to me,
Don’t
be so
bloody foolish, Sarah. Of course you shall keep your job.
And I would
feel awful because of the way he would talk to me, but I
would
keep my job and then of course he’d turn out to be right, which was even worse
in a way. But I miss him, Lawrence. It’s funny how you can miss someone like
that.”

Lawrence
stood against the opposite counter, watching me.

“So
what do you want from me?” he said. “You want me to start getting on my high
horse like Andrew did?”

I
smiled. “Oh, come here,” I said.

I
hugged him, and breathed in the soft, clean smell of his skin.

“I’m
being impossible again, aren’t I?”

“You’re
being bereaved. It’s going to take a while for all the pieces to fall into
place. It’s good that you’re taking a look at your life, really it is, but I
don’t think you should rush into anything, you know? If you still feel like
quitting your job in six months’ time, then do it by all means. But right now
your job is paying for you to do something worthwhile. It is possible to do
good things with an imperfect situation. God knows, I should know.”

I
blinked back tears. “Compromise, eh? Isn’t it sad, growing up? You start off
like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save
the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee’s age, and you
realize that some of the world’s badness is inside you, that maybe you’re a
part of it. And then you get a little bit older still, and a bit more
comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you’ve seen in
yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten percent.”

“Maybe
that’s just developing as a person, Sarah.”

I
sighed, and looked out at Little Bee.

“Well,”
I said. “Maybe this is a developing world.”

I WILL TELL YOU
what happened, the day my story changed. It began very early in the morning,
after the second night Lawrence stayed at Sarah’s house. It was still just
dark. I was lying on the bed in the room Sarah gave me, but I was not sleeping.
I was trying to see my future, but I could not see it at all.

Sarah
came into the room about the same time as the daylight.

“How
did you sleep?” she said.

“I
heard the owls calling.
Outside the window.”

“That’s
nice. That’s one of the good things about living out of town.”

I
rubbed my eyes and sat up on the bed.

Sarah
said, “I’m taking the day off work. I thought we could go into London.”

I
dropped my hands back down onto the blankets. I said, “I like it here.”

Sarah
shook her head. “These are the suburbs,” she said. “Nothing ever
happens
here.”

I
said, “That is why I like it.”

“Don’t
be silly! Let’s all go to London. It’s a beautiful
day,
we’ll laze about on the South Bank and just watch the world go by. Charlie
loves it there. Come on, it’ll be an adventure for you.”

I
stood up and I said,
Okay.

What
is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in
your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the
refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes
and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the
jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we
had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and
you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see
where beating hearts have left us.

When
we were children,
me
and Nkiruka, there was a place we
went in the jungle near our village, a secret place, and that was where we
played houses. The last time we went on that adventure my big sister was ten
years old and I was eight. We were already too old for the game and both of us
knew it, but we agreed to dream our dream one last time so that we could fix it
into our memories, before we awoke from it forever.

We
crept out of our village in the quietest part of the night. It was the year
before the trouble first began with the oil, and two years before my sister
started smiling at the older boys, so you can see that it was a peaceful time
for our village of Understanding. There were no sentries guarding the road
where the houses ended, and we walked out with no one to ask us where we were
going. We did not walk out straightaway, though. First we had to wait until the
rest of the village was asleep. It took longer than usual because the moon was
full, and so bright that it gleamed on the metal roofs and sparkled on the bowl
of water that me and my sister kept in our room to wash our faces with. The
moon made the dogs and the old people restless, and there were long hours of
barking and grumbling before silence came to the last of the houses.

Me
and Nkiruka, we watched through the window until the moon grew to an
extraordinary size, so big that it filled the window frame. We could see the
face of the man in the moon, so close that we could see the madness in his
eyes. The moon made everything glow so brightly it felt like day, and not an
ordinary day at all but a baffling day, an extra day, like the sixth toe of a
cat or like a secret message that you find hidden between the pages of a book
you have read many times before and found nothing. The moon shone on the limba
tree and it gleamed on the old broken Peugeot and it sparkled on the ghost of
the Mercedes. Everything glowed with this pale dark brightness. That is when
Nkiruka and I walked out into the night.

The
animals and the birds were acting strangely. The monkeys were not howling and
the night birds were quiet. We walked out through such a silence, I am not
joking,
it was as if the little silver clouds that drifted
across the face of the moon were leaning down to the earth and whispering,
shhh.
Nkiruka’s eyes when she looked over at me, they were
scared and excited at the same time. We held hands and we walked the mile
through the cassava fields to the place where the jungle started. The paths of
red earth between the rows of cassava, they gleamed in the moonlight like the
rib bones of giants. When we reached the jungle it was silent and dark.

We
did not
speak,
we just walked in before we got too
scared. We walked for a long time, and the path got narrower, and the leaves
and the branches closed in on us tighter and tighter until we had to walk one
behind the other. The branches began closing in on the path so that we had to
crouch down. Soon we could not carry on at all. So Nkiruka said,
this is not the right path, now we must turn around,
and
we turned around. But that is when we realized that we were not on a path at
all, because the branches and the plants were still very tight all around us. We
carried on for a little way, weaving around the plants, but very soon we
realized we had missed the path and we were lost.

Under
the jungle it was so dark we could not see our own hands, and we held on to
each other very close so we would not get separated. All around us now we could
hear the noises of the jungle animals moving in the undergrowth, and of course
they were very small animals, just rats and shrews and jungle pigs, but in the
dark they became huge for us, as big as our fear and growing with it. We did
not feel like pretending we had a refrigerator or a washing machine. It did not
seem like the kind of night where such appliances would help.

I
started to cry because the darkness was complete and I did not think it would
ever end. But Nkiruka, she held me close and she rocked me and she whispered to
me,
Do
not be sad, little sister. What is my name?
And through my sobs I said,
Your
name is
Nkiruka.
And my sister rubbed my head and she said,
Yes
, that is right. My name
means “the future is bright.” See? Would our mother and our father have given
me this name if it was not true? As long as you are with me, little sister, the
darkness will not last forever.
I stopped crying then, and I fell asleep
with my head on my sister’s shoulder.

I
woke up before Nkiruka. I was cold, and it was dawn. The jungle birds were
waking up and there was a pale light all around us, a thin gray-green light. All
around us there were low fern plants and ground creepers, and the leaves were
dripping with the dew. I stood up and took a few steps forward, because it
seemed to me that the light was brighter in that direction. I pushed aside a
low branch, and that is when I saw it. There was a very old jeep in the
undergrowth. Its tires had rotted away to nothing and the creepers and the
ferns were growing out through the arches of its wheels. The black plastic
seats were tattered and the short rusty springs were poking out through them. Fungus
was growing on the doors. The jeep was pointed away from me, and I walked
closer.

I
saw that the jungle and the jeep had grown together, so that there was no
telling where the one ended and the other began—whether the jungle grew out of
the jeep or the jeep grew out of the jungle. The foot wells of the jeep were
filled with the rotted leaves of many seasons, and all the jeep’s metal had
become the same dark color as the fallen leaves and the earth. Lying across the
front seats there was the skeleton of a man. At first I did not see it because
the skeleton was dressed in clothes the same color as the leaves, but the
clothes were so torn and ragged that the white bones shone through them in the
early-morning light. It looked as if the skeleton had become tired from driving
and he had laid himself down across the two front seats to sleep. His skull lay
on the dashboard, a little way apart from the rest of the skeleton. He was
looking up at a small bright patch of sky, high above us through a gap in the
forest canopy. I know this because the skull was wearing sunglasses and the sky
was reflected in one of the lenses. A snail had crawled across this lens and
eaten all the green mold and dirt off it, and it was in the glistening trail of
this creature that the glass reflected the sky. Now the snail was halfway along
one arm of the sunglasses. I went closer to look. The sunglasses had thin gold
frames. On the corner of the lens that reflected the sky, the snail had crawled
across the place where the glasses said
Ray-Ban.
I
supposed that this had been the man’s name, because I was young and my troubles
had still not found me and I did not yet understand that there could be reasons
for wearing a name that was not one’s own.

I
stood and looked down at Ray-Ban’s skull for a long time, watching my own face
reflected in his sunglasses. I saw myself fixed in the landscape of my country:
a young girl with tall dark trees and a small patch of sunlight. I stared for a
long time, and the skull did not turn away and neither did I, and I understood
that this is how it would always be for me.

After
a few minutes I walked back to my sister. The branches closed behind me. I did
not understand why the jeep was there. I did not know that there had been a war
in my country nearly thirty years before. The war, the roads, the
orders—everything that had brought the jeep to that place had been overgrown by
the jungle. I was eight years old and I thought that the jeep had grown up out
of the ground, like the ferns and the tall trees all around us. I thought it
had grown up quite naturally from a seed in the red soil of my country, as
native as cassava.

I
knew that I did not want my sister to see it.

I
followed my steps back to the place where Nkiruka was still sleeping. I stroked
her cheek.
Wake up,
I said.
The
day has returned. We can find the way home now.
Nkiruka smiled at me and
sat up. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.
There,
she said.
Didn’t I tell you that the darkness would not
last forever?

“Is
everything alright?” said Sarah.

I
blinked and I looked around at the spare bedroom. From the clean white walls
and the green velvet curtains, I saw the jungle creepers shrink back into the
darkest corners of the room.

“You
seemed miles off.”

“Sorry,”
I said. “I still have not quite woken up.”

Sarah
took my arm, and we went to find Charlie.

Charlie
was very excited when Sarah told him we were going on an adventure. He said,
“Is we going to Gotham City?”

Sarah
laughed. “
Are we
going.
Yes, Batman, we’re going to Gotham City.”

“In the Batmobile?”

Sarah
opened her mouth to say yes but Lawrence was in the kitchen with us and he
shook his head.

“No,
let’s take the bat train. It’s a nightmare trying to park a Batmobile on a
weekday.”

Charlie
looked disappointed, but as soon as we were out of the door he raced ahead of
us along the pavement with his bat cape blowing behind him.

It
was the first time I had been on a train. Charlie was very proud to show me how
to sit on the seat and to explain how he was driving the train. It looked
complicated. There were a great many levers and buttons and switches, although
none of them were visible to my eyes. Charlie drove the train to a station
called Waterloo and then the doors opened and a voice said,
All
change please, all change.
Charlie moved his lips so that I would understand it was his voice.

The
station was very crowded with the ghosts I saw the first time I was in London. There
were thousands of them and they did not look at one another in the eyes and
they moved very fast but they never bumped into one another or even touched one
another at all. The ghosts seemed to know their routes exactly, as if they were
racing along unseen paths through the night and the jungle that was closing in
all around everything, closing in with the sound of men screaming and the smoke
of burning houses. I shut my eyes tight to squeeze all that memory out of them.

Sarah
walked ahead of us, holding Charlie’s hand, and I walked behind with Lawrence. We
left the station and we went out onto a bridge over a busy street. The day was
very sunny already. When we stepped out into the light the heat and the roar of
the traffic and the sharp smell of the burned gasoline made me dizzy.

“Nice
day for it,” said Lawrence.

“Yes.”

“Shall
I point out the sights? Just over there, that’s the Royal Festival Hall, and
just to the right—over the top of that building? Those
sort
of capsules, slowly turning? That’s the London Eye.”

The
sun blazed on the see-through skin of the capsules.

“I
do not feel like sightseeing,” I said. “How can you pretend everything is
normal between us?”

He
shrugged. “How else would you like me to talk? You’ve got something on
me,
I’ve got something on you. It’s unpleasant but we’re stuck
with each other, so we might as well just get on with it.”