“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?
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 headscarves 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 y
ou see? I think that was what Andrew hoped to do with his book. It was his way of saving girls like you.”
I shrugged. “What if the authorities are not afraid of the media?”
Sarah nodded, slowly. “That’s a possibility,” she said. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
I looked out across the towers of Abuja. The great buildings shimmered in the heat, as if they were insubstantial, as if they could be awoken from and forgotten with a splash of cold water to the face.
“I do not know,” I said. “I do not know how things are in my country. Until I was fourteen years old my country was three cassava fields and a limba tree. And after that, I was in yours. So do not ask me how my country works.”
“Hmm,” said Sarah. She waited for a minute, and then she said, “So what do you want us to do?”
I looked again at the city we saw from that balcony. I saw for the first time how much space there was in it. There were wide gaps between the city blocks. I thought these dark green squares were parks and gardens, but now I saw that they were just empty spaces, waiting for something to be built. Abuja was a city that was not finished. This was very interesting for me, to see that my capital city had these green squares of hope built into it. To see how my country carried its dreams in a see-through bag.
I smiled at Sarah. “Let us go and collect the stories.”
“You’re sure?”
“I want to be part of my country’s story.” I pointed out into the heat. “See? They have left space for me.”
Sarah held on to my hand, very tight.
“All right,” she said.
“But, Sarah?”
“Yes?”
“There is one story I must tell you first.”
I told Sarah what happened when Andrew died. The story was hard to hear and it was hard to tell. Afterward I went back inside the hotel room and she stayed out on the balcony on her own. I sat down on the bed with Charlie and he watched cartoons while I watched Sarah’s shoulders shaking.
The next day we started our work. Early in the morning Sarah walked out into the street and she gave a very large amount of money to the military policemen waiting outside the hotel. After this, their eyes were the eyes of the faces on the banknotes that Sarah gave them. They saw nothing but the inside of the military police car’s glove box and the lining of the policemen’s uniform pockets. The policemen’s only rule was, we had to be back at the hotel before sunset each evening.