Chris Cleave - Little Bee

There are things the men can do to you in this life, I promise you, it would be much better to kill yourself first. Once you have this knowledge, your eyes are always flickering from this place to that, watching for the moment when the men will come.

In the immigration detention center, they told us we must be disciplined to overcome our fears. This is the discipline I learned: whenever I go into a new place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly, I make sure I am ready. The first time I went into Sarah’s bathroom I was thinking, Yes Little Bee, in here you would break the mirror of that medicine cabinet and cut your wrists with the splinters. When Sarah took me for a ride in her car I was thinking, Here, Little Bee, you would roll down the window and unbuckle your seat belt and tip yourself out of the window, no fuss, in front of the very next lorry that comes the other way. And when Sarah took me for a day in Richmond Park, she was looking at the scenery but I was looking for a hollow in the ground where I could hide and lie very still until all that you would find of me was a small white skull that the foxes and the rabbits would fuss over with their soft, wet noses.

If the men come suddenly, I will be ready to kill myself. Do you feel sorry for me, for thinking always in this way? If the men come and they find you not ready, then it will be me who is feeling sorry for you.

For the first six months in the detention center, I screamed every night and in the day I imagined a thousand ways to kill myself. I worked out how to kill myself in every single one of the situations a girl like me might get into in the detention center. In the medical wing, morphine. In the cleaners’ room, bleach. In the kitchens, boiling fat. You think I am exaggerating? Some of the others that were detained with me, they really did these things. The detention officers sent the bodies away in the night, because it was not good for the local people to see the slow ambulances leaving that place.

Or what if they released me? And I went to a movie and I had to kill myself there? I would throw myself down from the projection gallery. Or a restaurant? I would hide in the biggest refrigerator and go into a long, cool sleep. Or the seaside? Ah, at the seaside, I would steal an ice-cream van and drive it into the sea. You would never see me again. The only thing to show that a frightened African girl had ever existed would be two thousand melting ice creams, bobbing in their packets on the cool blue waves.

After a hundred sleepless nights I had finished working out how to kill myself in every single corner of the detention center and the country outside, but I still carried on imagining. I was weak from horror and they put me in the medical wing. Away from the other prisoners I lay between the scratchy sheets and I spent each day all alone in my mind. I knew they planned to deport me so I started to imagine killing myself back home in Nigeria. It was just like killing myself in the detention center but the scenery was nicer. This was a small and unexpected happiness. In forests, in quiet villages, on the sides of mountains I took my own life again and again.

In the most beautiful places I secretly lingered over the act. Once, in a deep and hot jungle that smelled of wet moss and the excrement of monkeys, I took nearly one whole day to chop down trees and build a tall tower to hang myself from by the neck. I had a machete. I imagined the sticky sap on my hands and the sweet honey smell of it, the good tired feeling in my arms from the chopping, and the screeches of the monkeys who were angry when I cut their trees down. I worked hard in my imagination and I tied the tree trunks together with vines and creepers and I used a special knot that my sister Nkiruka showed me. It was a big day’s work for a small girl. I was proud. At the end of that whole day alone in my sickbed working on my suicide tower, I realized I could just have climbed a jungle tree and jumped with my silly head first onto a rock.

This was the first time that I smiled.

I began to eat the meals they brought me. I thought to myself, you must keep up your strength, Little Bee, or you will be too weak to kill your foolish self when the time arrives, and then you will be sorry. I started to walk from the medical wing to the canteen at mealtimes, so that I could choose my food instead of having it brought to me. I started asking myself questions like: Which will make me stronger for the act of suicide? The carrots or the peas?

In the canteen there was a television that was always on. I began to learn more about life in your country. I watched programs called Love Island and Hell’s Kitchen and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and I worked out how I would kill myself on all of those shows. Drowning, knives, and ask the audience.

One day the detention officers gave all of us a copy of a book called LIFE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. It explains the history of your country and how to fit in. I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth). I worked out how to kill myself under Labour and Conservative governments, and why it was not important to have a plan for suicide under the Liberal Democrats. I began to understand how your country worked.

They moved me out of the medical wing. I still screamed in the night, but not every night. I realized that I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope. I realized I had killed myself back to life.

I read your novels. I read the newspapers you sent. In the opinion columns I underlined the grand sentences and I looked up every word in my Collins Gem. I practiced for hours in front of the mirror until I could make the big words look natural in my mouth.

I read a lot about your Royal Family. I like your Queen more than I like her English. Do you know how you would kill yourself during a garden party with Queen Elizabeth the Second on the great lawn of Buckingham Palace in London, just in case you were invited? I do. Me, I would kill myself with a broken champagne glass, or maybe a sharp lobster claw, or even a small piece of cucumber that I could suck down into my windpipe, if the men suddenly came.

I often wonder what the Queen would do, if the men suddenly came. You cannot tell me she does not think about it a lot. When I read in LIFE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM about some of the things that have happened to the women in the Queen’s job, I understood that she must think about it all of the time. I think that if the Queen and I met then we would have many things in common.

The Queen smiles sometimes but if you look at her eyes in her portrait on the back of the five-pound note, you will see she is carrying a heavy cargo too. The Queen and me, we are ready for the worst. In public you will see both of us smiling and sometimes even laughing, but if you were a man who looked at us in a certain way we would both of us make sure we were dead before you could lay a single finger on our bodies. Me and the Queen of England, we would not give you the satisfaction.

It is good to live like this. Once you are ready to die, you do not suffer so badly from the horror. So I was nervous but I was smiling, because I was ready to die, that morning they let us girls out of detention.

I will tell you what happened when the taxi driver came. The four of us girls, we were waiting outside the Immigration Detention Centre. We were keeping our backs to it, because this is what you do to a big gray monster who has kept you in his belly for two years, when he suddenly spits you out. You keep your back to him and you talk in whispers, in case he remembers you and the clever idea comes into his mind to swallow you all up again.