Little Bee (32 page)

We
waited for a long time. Some of the others were taken out of the room. One of
them cried. Another, a thin man, he was angry. He tried to resist the guard,
and she hit him twice in the stomach with her truncheon. After that he was
quiet.

I
fell asleep sitting down. When I woke up, I saw a purple dress and long brown
legs in front of me.

“Yevette!”
I said.

The
woman turned around to look at me, but it was not Yevette. At first I was sad
not to see my friend, and then I understood that I was happy. If this was not
Yevette, then there was a chance that Yevette was still free. I thought of her
walking down the street in London, in her purple flip-flops with her eyebrows
painted in pencil, buying a pound of salt fish and laughing, WU-ha-ha-ha!
into
the bright blue sky. And I smiled.

The
woman who was not Yevette, she made an angry face at me.
What
is wrong with you?
she
said.
You think they are sending us on holiday?

I
smiled.
Yes,
I said.
I think it
will be the holiday of a lifetime.

You should not joke about these things.
She turned around and she would not
talk to me anymore, and when they called her to stand up for her flight, she
walked away without making any trouble and she did not once look back at me.

When
I saw her go, my situation became real for me and I was scared now, for the
first time. I was scared of going back. I cried and I watched my own tears
soaking away into the dirty brown carpet.

They
gave us no food or water, and I became faint. After a few more hours they came
for me. They walked me straight onto the aeroplane. The other passengers, the
paying passengers, they made them stand back while I went first up the
aeroplane steps. Everybody was staring at me. They took me to the back of the
aeroplane, to the last row of seats before the toilets. They put me in the seat
next to the window and a guard sat down beside me, a big man with a shaved head
and a gold earring. He wore a blue Nike T-shirt and black Adidas trousers. He
took off my handcuffs, and I rubbed my wrists to bring the blood back into my
hands.

“Sorry,”
said the man. “I don’t like this shit any more than you do.”

“Then
why do you do it?”

The
man shrugged and did up his seat belt.

“It’s
a job, isn’t it?” he said.

He
pulled a magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him, and opened it up. There
were men’s wristwatches there for sale, and also a fluffy model of the
aeroplane that could be given to children.

“You
should do a different job, if you do not like this one.”

“No
one chooses this job, love. I don’t have qualifications, do I? I used to do
laboring, casual, but you can’t compete with the Polskis now. The Poles will do
a full day’s work for a kind word and a packet of fags. So here I am,
chaperoning girls like you on the holiday of a lifetime. Waste, really, isn’t
it? I bet you’re more employable than I am. You should be escorting me, really,
shouldn’t you? Back to this place we’re going, whatever the name of it is
again.”

“Nigeria.”

“Yeah,
that was it. Hot there, is it?”

“Hotter than England.”

“Thought so.
These places usually
are,
where you people come from.”

He
went back to his magazine and he turned a few pages. Each time he turned the
page, he licked his finger to make it stick. There were tattoos on the knuckles
of his fingers, small blue dots. His watch was big and gold but the gold was
wearing off. It looked like one of the watches from the aeroplane magazine. He
turned a few more pages and then he looked up at me again.

“Don’t
say much, do you?”

I
shrugged.

“That’s
all right,” he said. “I don’t mind. Rather that than the waterworks.”

“The waterworks?”

“Some
of them cry. Some of the people I escort back. The women aren’t the worst,
believe it or not. I had this bloke once, Zimbabwe we were going to, sobbed
away for six hours straight. Tears and snot everywhere, like a baby, I kid you
not. It got embarrassing after a while. Some of the other passengers, you know?
Giving it the looks, and all of that.
I was like,
cheer
up
mate, it might never happen,
but it wasn’t no good. He just kept crying
and talking to himself in foreign. Some of you people, I’m sorry to see you go,
but this one, I tell you, I couldn’t wait to sign him over. Good money though,
that job was. There was no flight out for three days, so they put me up at the
Sheraton. Watched Sky Sports for three days, scratched my arse, got paid time
and a half. Course the people who really make the money are the big
contractors. The ones I’m working for now, Dutch firm, they run the whole show.
They run the detention centers and they run the repatriations. So they’re
earning either way, whether we lock you up or whether we send you back.
Nice, eh?”

“Nice,”
I said.

The
man tapped his finger against the side of his head.

“But
that’s how you’ve got to think, these days, isn’t it? It’s the global economy.”

The
plane began to roll backward on the tarmac and some television screens came
down from the ceiling. They started to show us a safety film. They said what we
should do if the cabin filled with smoke, and they also said where our life
jackets were kept in case we landed on water. I saw that they did not show us
the position to adopt in case we were deported to a country where it was likely
that we would be killed because of events we had witnessed. They said there was
more information on the safety card in the seat pocket in front of us.

There
was a huge and terrifying roar, so loud that I thought,
They
have tricked us. I thought
we were going on a journey, but actually we are being destroyed.
But
then there was a great acceleration, and everything started shaking and rising
up to a terrifying angle, and suddenly all the vibration was gone and the sound
died down and my stomach went crazy. The man beside me, my guard, he looked at
me and laughed.

“Relax,
love, we’re in the air.”

After
the takeoff, the captain came on the intercom. He said it was a fine, sunny day
in Abuja.

I
understood that for a few hours I was not in anyone’s country. I said to
myself,
Look here, Little Bee—finally, you are flying. Buzz,
buzz.
I pressed my nose against the aeroplane window. I watched the
forests and the fields and the roads with their tiny cars, all those tiny
precious lives. Me, I felt that my own life was already over. From very high up
in the sky, all alone, I could see the curve of the world.

And
then I heard a voice, a kind and gentle voice that was familiar.

“Bee?”
said the voice.

I
turned from the window and saw Sarah. She was standing in the aisle and she was
smiling. Charlie was holding her hand and he was smiling too. He was wearing
his Batman outfit and he was grinning as if he had just killed all the baddies.

“We
is
in the sky, isn’t we?” he said.

“No
darling,” said Sarah. “We
are
in the sky,
aren’t
we.
”

I
did not understand what I was seeing. Sarah reached over the guard and she put
her hand on my hand.

“Lawrence
found out what flight they were putting you on,” she said. “He’s not entirely bad,
at the end of the day. We couldn’t let you go back alone, Bee. Could we
Batman?”

Charlie
shook his head. Now he looked very solemn.

“No,”
he said. “Because you
is
our friend.”

The
guard, he did not know what to do.

“I’ve
seen bloody everything now,” he said.

Finally
he stood up and made room for Sarah and Charlie to sit beside me. They hugged
me while I cried, and the other passengers turned around in their seats to
stare at this miracle, and the aeroplane flew all of us into the future at five
hundred and fifty miles per hour.

After
some time they brought us peanuts, and Coca-Cola in tiny cans. Charlie drank
his too quickly, and the Coca-Cola came out of his nose. After Sarah cleaned
him up, she turned to me.

“I
did wonder why Andrew didn’t leave a note,” she said. “And then I thought about
it. It wasn’t Andrew’s style. He didn’t really like to write about himself.”

I
nodded.

“Anyway,
he left me something better than a note.”

“What?”

Sarah
smiled.
“A story.”

At
Abuja they opened the aeroplane doors, and heat and memory rolled in. We walked
across the tarmac through the shimmering air. In the terminal building my guard
signed me over to the authorities.
Cheerio,
he said.
Best of luck, love.

The
military police were waiting for me in a small room, wearing uniforms and
gold-framed sunglasses. They could not arrest me because Sarah was with me. She
would not leave my side.
I am a British journalist,
she said.
Anything you do to this woman, I will report it.
The military police were uncertain, so they called their commander. The
commander came, in a camouflage uniform and a red beret, with tribal scars on
his cheeks. He looked at my deportation document, and he looked at me and Sarah
and Charlie. He stood there for a long time, scratching his belly and nodding.

“Why
is the child dressed in this fashion?” he said.

Sarah
looked straight back at him. She said, “The child believes he has special
powers.”

The
commander grinned. “Well, I am just a man,” he said. “I will not arrest any of
you at this time.”

Everybody
laughed, but the military police followed our taxi from the airport. I was very
frightened but Sarah gripped my hand.
I will not leave you,
she said.
So long as Charlie and I are here, you are safe.
The police waited outside our hotel. We stayed there for two weeks, and so did
they.

The
window of our room looked out over Abuja. Tall buildings stretched back for
miles, tall and clean, some covered in silver glass that reflected the long,
straight boulevards. I watched the city as the sunset made the buildings glow
red, and then I watched all night. I could not sleep.

When
the sun rose it shone between the horizon and the base of the clouds. It blazed
on the golden dome of the mosque while the four tall towers were still lit up
with electric lights. It was beautiful. Sarah came out onto the balcony of our
room, and she found me standing there and staring.

“This
is your city,” she said. “Are you proud?”

“I
did not know such a thing existed in my country. I am still trying to feel that
it is mine.”

I
stood there all morning while the heat of the day grew stronger and the streets
grew busy with car taxis and scooter taxis and walking sellers with their
swaying racks of T-shirts and head-scarves and medicine.

Charlie
sat inside, watching cartoons with the air-conditioning on, and Sarah laid out
all of Andrew’s papers on a long, low table. On each pile of papers we placed a
shoe, or a lamp or a glass, to stop them blowing in the breeze from the big
mahogany fans that spun on the ceiling. Sarah explained how she was going to
write the book that Andrew had been researching.
I need to
collect more stories like yours,
she said.
Do you
think we can do that here?
Without going down to the south of
the country?

I
did not answer. I looked through some of the papers and then I went and stood
on the balcony again. Sarah came and stood beside me.

“What
is it?” she said.

I
nodded my head down at the military police car waiting on the street below. Two
men leaned against it, in green uniforms with berets and sunglasses. One of
them looked up. He said something when he saw us, and his colleague looked up
too. They stared up at our balcony for a long time, and then they lit
cigarettes and sat in the car, one in the front seat and one in the backseat,
with the doors open and their heavy boots resting on the tarmac.

“You
know it is not a good idea to collect stories,” I said.

Sarah
shook her head. “I don’t agree. I think it’s the only way we’ll make you safe.”

“What
do you mean?”

Sarah
lifted her eyes up from the street.

“Our
problem is that you only have your own story. One story makes you weak. But as
soon as we have one hundred stories, you will be strong. If we can show that
what happened to your village happened to a hundred villages, then the power is
on our side. We need to collect the stories of people who’ve been through the
same things as you. We need to make it undeniable. Then we can send the stories
to a lawyer and we’ll let the authorities know, if anything happens to you,
those stories will go straight to the media. Do you see? I think that was what
Andrew hoped to do with his book. It was his way of saving girls like you.”