There was nobody left to ask about ordinary things. Little Bee was no use. I couldn’t ask her: are these blue gloves okay? She’d only stare at them, as if they were the first pair of gloves she had ever seen, which was quite possibly the case. (Yes, but are they dark enough, Little Bee? Between you and me—you as the refugee from horror and me as the editor of an edgy monthly magazine—would we call that shade blue, courageous, or blue, irreverent?)
Ordinary things were going to be the hardest, I realized. There was nobody to ask about them. This was something undeniable, now that Andrew was gone: there was nobody left with a strong opinion about life in a civilized country.
Our robin hopped out from the foxgloves with a worm in its beak. The worm skin was puce, the color of bruising.
“Come on, Batman, we have to go.”
“In a minute, Mummy.”
In the quiet of the garden then the robin shook his worm, and swallowed its life from the light into darkness with the quick indifference of a god. I felt nothing at all. I looked at my son, pale and bemused in the neatly planted garden, and I looked past him at Little Bee, tired and mud-stained, waiting for us to go through into the house.
So, I realized—life had finally broken through. How silly it looked now, my careful set of defenses against nature: my brazen magazine, my handsome husband, my Maginot Line of motherhood and affairs. The world, the real world, had found a way through. It had sat down on my sofa and it would not be denied any longer.
I went through the house to the front door to tell the undertaker we would be with him in a minute. He nodded. I looked behind the undertaker at his men, pale and hungover in their coattails. I have drunk gin myself in my time and I recognized that solemn expression they wore. One part pity, three parts I’ll-never-drink-again. The men nodded at me. It is a peculiar sensation, as a woman with a very good job, to be pitied by men with tattoos and headaches. It’s the way people will always look at me now, I suppose, as a foreigner in this country of my heart I should never have come to.
On the street in front of our house, the hearse and the limo stood waiting. I went out into the driveway to look through the green glass of the hearse. Andrew’s coffin was there, lying on bright chrome rollers. Andrew, my husband of eight years. I thought: I should feel something now. I thought: Rollers. How practical.
On our street the semidetached houses stretched to infinity in both directions. The clouds scrolled across the sky, blandly oppressive, each one resembling the next, all threatening rain. I looked back at Andrew’s coffin and I thought about his face. I thought about it dead. How slowly he had died, over those last two years. How imperceptible it had been, that transition in his facial expression, from deadly serious to seriously dead. Already those two faces were blurring together for me. My husband alive and my husband dead—they now seemed only semidetached, as if under the coffin lid I would find the two of them fused like Siamese twins, eyes agape, looking to infinity in both directions.
And now this thought came into my head with the full clarity of horror: Andrew was once a passionate, loving, brilliant man.
Staring at my husband’s coffin, I clung to this thought. I held it up before my own memory like a tentative flag of truce. I remembered Andrew at the newspaper we both worked for when we met, having a shouting match with his editor over some lofty point of principle that got him gloriously fired, on the spot, and sent him striding fierce and beautiful into the corridor. The first time that I thought, This is a man to be proud of. And then Andrew practically tripping over me eavesdropping in the corridor, openmouthed, pretending I was walking past on my way to the newsroom. Andrew grinning at me, unhesitatingly, and saying, Fancy buying a former colleague a spot of dinner? It was one in a billion. It was like catching lightning in a bottle.
The marriage cooled when Charlie was born. As if that one lightning strike was all we got, and most of the heat from it had to go into our child. Nigeria had accelerated the cooling and now death had finished it, but my disaffection and my affair with Lawrence had come first. That was what my mind was stuck on, I realized. There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.
This, then, was when real sorrow arrived. This was the shock that set me trembling, as if something seismic had been released deep inside me and was blindly inching toward the surface. I trembled, but there was no release of tears.
I went back inside the house, and collected my son and Little Bee. Mismatched, dazed, semidetached, we walked to my husband’s funeral. Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn’t the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn’t deserve my own pity.
After it was all over, someone or other drove us home. I clung on to Charlie in the backseat of a car. I remember the car smelled of stale cigarettes. I stroked Charlie’s head and pointed out the everyday things that we passed, invoking the comfort of houses and shops and cars by the hopeful magic of whispering their names. Ordinary nouns were what we needed, I decided. Everyday things would get us through. Never mind that Charlie’s Batman costume was covered in grave mud. When we got home I put it in the wash and I gave him the clean one. When it hurt too much to prize open the box of washing powder, I used the other hand.
I remember sitting with Charlie while we watched the water flood into the machine, rising behind the round glass door. The machine lurched into its familiar grinding preamble, and Charlie and I had a perfectly ordinary conversation. That was the worst moment for me. We talked about what he wanted for lunch. Charlie said he wanted crisps. I demurred. He insisted. I acquiesced. I was a pushover at that moment and my son knew it. I conceded on tomato ketchup and ice cream too, and there was triumph in Charlie’s face and horror in his eyes. There was extraordinary pain behind the ordinary nouns.
We ate, and then Little Bee took Charlie out into the garden to play. I had been so focused on my son that I had forgotten all about her and it actually surprised me that she was still there.
I sat very still at my kitchen table. My mother and my sister had come back with us from the church and they orbited me in a blur of fussing and tidying, so that if a photograph had been taken of us all with a very long exposure it would have shown only me, in sharp focus, surrounded by a ghostly halo that took its azure color from my sister’s cardigan and its eccentricity from my mother’s tendency to close in on me at one end of her orbit, and ask if I was all right. I hardly heard her, I think. They carried on around me for an hour, respectful of my silence, washing the teacups without unnecessary clink, alphabetizing condolence cards whilst minimizing rustle, until I begged them, if they loved me, to go home.
After they left, with tender, drawn-out hugs that made me regret banishing them, I sat back down at the kitchen table and watched Little Bee playing in the garden with Batman. I suppose it had been reckless of us to abandon our home and spend the whole morning at a funeral. In our absence some baddies of the worst stripe had occupied the laurel bush, and now had to be flushed out with water pistols and bamboo canes. It seemed to be dangerous and painstaking work. First Little Bee would creep up to the laurel on her hands and knees, with the hem of her oversize Hawaiian shirt dragging in the dirt. When she spotted a lurking baddy she would jab at him with a yell, causing him to break out into the open. There my son was ready with the water pistol to deliver the coup de grâce. I marveled at how quickly they had become a team. I wasn’t sure I wanted them to be. But what was I to do? To stride out into the garden and say, Little Bee, could you please stop making friends with my son? My son would loudly demand an explanation and it would be no use telling him that Little Bee wasn’t on our side. Not now that she and he had killed so many of those baddies together.
No, it wasn’t going to work anymore, denying her, or denying what had happened in Africa. A memory can be banished, even indefinitely, deported from consciousness by the relentless everydayness of running a successful magazine, mothering a son, and burying a hu
sband. A human being, though, is a different thing entirely. The existence of a Nigerian girl, alive and standing in one’s own garden—governments may deny such things, or brush them off as statistical anomalies, but human beings cannot.
I sat at the kitchen table and stared through suddenly wet eyes at the stump where my finger used to be. I realized that it was finally time to face up to what had happened on the beach.
It should never have happened, of course, in the ordinary run of things. There are countries of the world, and regions of one’s own mind, where it is unwise to travel. I have always thought so, and I have always struck myself as a sensible woman. Independent of mind, but not recklessly so. I would love to have the same arm’s-length relationship with foreign places that other sensible women seem to have.
Clever me, I went on holiday somewhere different. That season in Nigeria there was an oil war. Andrew and I hadn’t known. The struggle was brief, confused, and scarcely reported. The British and Nigerian governments both deny to this day that it even took place. God knows, they aren’t the only ones who tried denial.
I still wonder why it came into my head to accept a holiday in Nigeria. I wish I could claim it was the only tourist-board freebie that arrived at the magazine that spring, but we had boxes full of them—crates of unopened envelopes hemorrhaging sunscreen from ruptured sample sachets. I could have chosen Tuscany, or Belize. The former Soviet states were big that season. But no. The cussed streak in me—the one that made me launch Nixie instead of joining some tamer glossy; the one that made me start an affair with Lawrence instead of mending my fences with Andrew—that enduring outward-bound streak gave me an adolescent thrill when a package landed on my desk emblazoned with the question FOR YOUR HOLIDAY THIS YEAR, WHY NOT TRY NIGERIA? Some wag on my editorial staff had scrawled under this, in black chunky marker, the obvious response. But I was intrigued, and I opened the package. Out fell two open-ended airline tickets and a hotel reservation. It was as simple as turning up at the airport with a bikini.
Andrew came with me, against his better judgment. The Foreign Office were advising against travel to some parts of Nigeria, but we didn’t think that included ours. He took some convincing, but I reminded him that we’d taken our honeymoon in Cuba, and parts of that place were horrific. Andrew gave in. Looking back on it now, I suppose he thought he had no choice if he wanted to keep me.
The tourist board that sent the freebies noted that Ibeno Beach was an “adventurous destination.” Actually, at the time we went, it was a cataclysm with borders. To the north there was a malarial jungle and to the west a wide brown river delta. The river was iridescent with oil. It was, I now know, bloated with the corpses of oil workers. To the south was the Atlantic Ocean. On that southern edge I met a girl who was not my magazine’s target reader. Little Bee had fled southeast on bleeding feet from what had once been her village and was shortly to become an oil field. She fled from the men who would kill her because they were paid to, and the children who would kill her because they were told to. I sat at my kitchen table and I imagined her fleeing through the fields and the jungle, as fast as she could, until she arrived at the beach where Andrew and I were being unconventional. That beach was as far as she got.
My missing finger itched, just thinking about it.
When they came in from the garden, I sent Batman to play in his bat cave and I showed Little Bee where the shower was. I found some clothes for her. Later, when Batman was in bed, I made two G&Ts. Little Bee sat and held hers, rattling the ice cubes. I drank mine down like medicine.
“All right,” I said. “I’m ready. I’m ready for you to tell me what happened.”
“You want to know how I survived?”
“Start from the beginning, will you? Tell me how it was when you first reached the sea.”
So she told me how she hid, on the day she arrived at the beach. She had been running for six days, traveling through the fields by night and hiding in jungles and swamps when daybreak came. I turned off the radio in the kitchen, and I sat very quietly while she told me how she holed up in a salient of jungle that grew right down to the sand. She lay there all through the hottest part of the day, watching the waves. She told me she hadn’t seen the sea before, and she didn’t quite believe in it.
In the late afternoon Little Bee’s sister, Nkiruka, came down out of the jungle and found her hiding place. She sat down next to her. They hugged for a long time. They were happy that Nkiruka had managed to follow Little Bee’s trail, but they were scared because it meant that others could do it too. Nkiruka looked into her sister’s eyes and said that they must make up new names for themselves. It was not safe to use their true names, which spoke so loudly of their tribe and of their region. Nkiruka said her name was “Kindness” now. Her younger sister wanted to reply to Kindness, but she could not think of a name for herself.
The two sisters waited. The shadows were deepening. A pair of hornbills came to crack seeds in the trees above their heads. And then—sitting at my kitchen table she said she remembered this so clearly that she could almost reach out and stroke the fuzzy black back of the thing—a bee blew in on the sea breeze and it landed between the two sisters. The bee was small and it touched down on a pale flower—frangipani, she told me, although she said she wasn’t sure about the European name—and then the bee flew off again, without any fuss. She hadn’t noticed the flower before the bee came, but now she saw that the flower was beautiful. She turned to Kindness.
“My name is Little Bee,” she said.
When she heard this name, Kindness smiled. Little Bee told me that her big sister was a very pretty girl. She was the kind of girl the men said could make them forget their troubles. She was the kind of girl the women said was trouble. Little Bee wondered which it was going to be.
The two sisters lay still and quiet till sunset. Then they crept down the sand to wash their feet in the surf. The salt stung in their cuts but they did not cry out. It was sensible of them to keep quiet. The men chasing them might have given up, or they might not. The trouble was, the sisters had seen what had been done to their village. There weren’t supposed to be any survivors to tell the story. The men were hunting down the fleeing women and children and burying their bodies under branches and rocks.
Back undercover, the girls bound each other’s feet in fresh green leaves and they waited for the dawn. It was not cold, but they hadn’t eaten for two days. They shivered. Monkeys screamed under the moon.
I still think about the two sisters there, shivering through the night. While I watch them in my mind, again and again, small pink crabs follow the thin smell of blood to the place where their feet recently stood in the shore break, but they do not find anything dead there yet. The soft pink crabs make hard little clicking noises under the bright white stars. One by one, they dig themselves back into the sand to wait.
I wish my brain did not fill in the frightful details like this. I wish I was a woman who cared deeply about shoes and concealer. I wish I was not the sort of woman who ended up sitting at her kitchen table listening to a refugee girl talking about her awful fear of the dawn.
The way Little Bee told it, at sunrise there was a white mist hanging thick in the jungle and spilling out over the sand. The sisters watched a white couple walking up the beach. The language they spoke was the official language of Little Bee’s country, but these were the first whites she had seen. She and Kindness watched them from behind a stand of palms. They drew back when the couple came level with their hiding place. The whites stopped to look out at the sea.
“Listen to that surf, Andrew,” the white woman said. “It’s so unbelievably peaceful here.”
“I’m still a bit scared, frankly. We should go back inside the hotel compound.”
The white woman smiled. “Compounds are made for stepping outside. I was scared of you, the first time I met you.”
“Course you were. Big Irish hunk of love like me. We’re savages, don’t you know.”
“Barbari
ans.”
“Vagabonds.”
“Cunts.”
“Oh come on now, dear, that’s just your mother talking.”
The white woman laughed, and pulled herself close to the man’s body. She kissed him on the cheek.
“I love you, Andrew. I’m pleased we came away. I’m so sorry I let you down. It won’t happen again.”
“Really?”
“Really. I don’t love Lawrence. How could I? Let’s make a fresh start, hmm?”
On the beach, the white man smiled. In the shadows, Little Bee cupped her hand over Kindness’s ear. She whispered: What is a cunt? Kindness looked back at her, and rolled her eyes. Right down there, girl, right close to your vagabond. Little Bee bit her hand so she wouldn’t giggle.
But then the sisters heard dogs. They could hear everything, because there was a cool morning breeze, a land breeze that carried all sounds. The dogs were still a long way off, but the sisters heard them barking. Kindness grabbed Little Bee’s arm. Down on the beach, the white woman looked up at the jungle.
“Oh listen, Andrew,” she said. “Dogs!”
“Probably the local lads are hunting. Must be plenty to catch in this jungle.”
“Still, I wouldn’t have thought they’d use dogs.”
“So what in the hell did you think they’d use?”
The white woman shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Elephants?”
The white man laughed. “You insufferable English,” he said. “The empire’s still alive for you, isn’t it? You only need to close your eyes.”
Now a soldier came running up the beach from the direction the white couple had come. He was panting. He wore olive-green trousers and a light gray vest dark with sweat. He had military boots on, and they were heavy with damp sand. He had a rifle slung on his back, and the barrel was swinging at the sky.