Chris Cleave - Little Bee

“GET HIM OUT! GET HIM OUT!”

My son squirmed in my grip and broke free. It happened very quickly. He stood at the very edge of the hole. He looked back at me and then he turned and inched forward, but the greengrocer’s grass overlapped the edge of the hole and it yielded under his feet and he fell, with his bat cape flying behind him, down into the grave. He landed with a thump on top of Andrew’s coffin. There was a single, urgent scream from one of the other mourners. I think it was the first sound, since Andrew died, that really broke the silence.

The scream ran on and on in my mind. I felt nauseous, and the horizon lurched insanely. Still kneeling, I leaned out over the edge of the pit. Down below, in the dark shadow, my son was banging on the coffin and screaming Daddy, Daddy, get OUT! He clung to the coffin lid, and planted his bat shoes against the sidewall of the grave, and heaved against the screws that held the lid closed. I hung my arms down over the edge of the hole. I implored Charlie to take my hands so I could pull him back up. I don’t think he heard me at all.

At first, my son moved with a breathless confidence. Batman was undefeated, after all, that spring. He had overcome the Penguin, the Puffin, and Mr. Freeze. It was simply not a possibility in my son’s mind that he might not overcome this new challenge. He screamed in rage and fury. He wouldn’t give up, but if I am strict and force myself now to decide upon the precise moment in this whole story when my heart irreparably broke, it was the moment when I saw the weariness and the doubt creep into my son’s small muscles as his fingers slipped, for the tenth time, from the pale oak lid.

The mourners clustered around the edge of the grave, paralyzed by the horror of this thing, this first discovery of death that was worse than death itself. I tried to go forward but the hands on my elbows were holding me back. I strained against their grip and looked at all the horror-struck faces around the grave and I was thinking, Why doesn’t someone do something?

But it is hard, very hard, to be the first.

Finally it was Little Bee who went down into the grave and held up my son for other hands to haul out. Charlie was kicking and biting and struggling furiously in his muddied mask and cape. He wanted to go back down. And it was Little Bee, once she herself had been extricated, who hugged him and held him back as he screamed, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, while each of the principal mourners stepped onto the thin strip of greengrocer’s grass and dropped in their small handfuls of clay. My son’s screaming seemed to go on for a cruelly long time. I remember wondering if my mind would shatter with the noise, like a wineglass broken by a soprano. In fact a former colleague of Andrew’s, a war reporter who had been in Iraq and Darfur, did call me a few days later with the name of a combat-fatigue counselor he used. That’s kind of you, I told him, but I haven’t been at war.

At the graveside, when the screaming was over, I picked up Charlie and held him on my front, with his head resting on my shoulder. He was exhausted. Through the eyeholes of his bat mask, I could see his eyelids drooping. I watched the other mourners filing away in a slow line toward the car park. Brightly colored umbrellas broke out above the somber suits. It was starting to rain.

Little Bee stayed behind with me. We stood by the side of the grave and we stared at each other.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It is nothing,” said Little Bee. “I just did what anyone would do.”

“Yes,” I said. “Except that everyone else didn’t.”

Little Bee shrugged.

“It is easier when you are from outside.”

I shivered. The rain came down harder.

“This is never going to end,” I said. “Is it, Little Bee?”

“However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again. That is what we used to say in my village.”

“April showers bring May flowers. That’s what we used to say in mine.”

We tried to smile at each other.

I never did drop my own clay into the grave. I couldn’t seem to put it down either. Two hours later, alone for a moment at the kitchen table of our house, I realized I was still gripping it. I left it there on the tablecloth, a small beige lump on top of the clean blue cotton. When I came back a few minutes later, someone had been past and tidied it.

A few days later the obituary in The Times noted that there had been poignant scenes at their former columnist’s funeral. Andrew’s editor sent me the cutting, in a heavy cream envelope, with a crisp white compliments slip.

ONE OF THE THINGS I would have to explain to the girls from back home, if I was telling them this story, is the simple little word horror. It means something different to the people from my village.

In your country, if you are not scared enough already, you can go to watch a horror film. Afterward you can go out of the cinema into the night and for a little while there is horror in everything. Perhaps there are murderers lying in wait for you at home. You think this because there is a light on in your house that you are certain you did not leave on. And when you remove your makeup in the mirror last thing, you see a strange look in your own eyes. It is not you. For one hour you are haunted, and you do not trust anybody, and then the feeling fades away. Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.

For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you. That would be a good trick. If I could do that, please believe me, I would already be standing in the foyer. I would be laughing with the kiosk boy, and exchanging British one-pound coins for hot buttered popcorn, and saying, Phew, thank the Good Lord all that is over, that is the most frightening film I ever saw and I think next time I will go to see a comedy, or maybe a romantic film with kissing. But the film in your memory, you cannot walk out of it so easily. Wherever you go it is always playing. So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.

Some days I wonder how many there are just like me. Thousands, I think, just floating on the oceans right now. In between our world and yours. If we cannot pay smugglers to transport us, we stow away on cargo ships. In the dark, in freight containers. Breathing quietly in the darkness, hungry, hearing the strange clanking sounds of ships, smelling the diesel oil and the paint, listening to the bom-bom-bom of the engines. Wide-awake at night, hearing the singing of whales rising up from the deep sea and vibrating through the ship. All of us whispering, praying, thinking. And what are we thinking of? Of physical safety, of peace of mind. Of all these imaginary countries that are now being served in the foyer.

I stowed away in a great steel boat, but the horror stowed away inside me. When I left my homeland I thought I had escaped-but out on the open sea, I started to have nightmares. I was naive to suppose I had left my country with nothing. It was a heavy cargo that I carried.

They unloaded my cargo in a port on the estuary of the Thames river. I did not walk across the gangplank, I was carried off the ship by your immigration officials and they put me into detention. It was no joke inside the detention center. What will I say about this? Your system is cruel, but many of you were kind to me. You sent charity boxes. You dressed my horror in boots and a colorful shirt. You sent it something to paint its nails with. You posted it books and newspapers. Now the horror can speak the Queen’s English. This is how we can speak now of sanctuary and refuge. This is how I can tell you-soon-soon as we say in my country-a little about the thing I was running from.