Chris Cleave - Little Bee

I lay back on the bed and looked up at the chains. I was thinking, That sunshine, that color yellow, maybe I will not see very much of these now. Maybe the new color of my life was gray. Two years in the gray detention center, and now I was an illegal immigrant. That means, you are free until they catch you. That means, you live in a gray area. I thought about how I was going to live. I thought about the years, living as quiet as could be. Hiding my colors and living in the twilight and the shadows. I sighed, and I tried to breathe deeply. I wanted to cry when I looked up at those chains and thought about the color gray.

I was thinking, if the head of the United Nations telephoned one morning and said, Greetings, Little Bee, to you falls the great honor of designing a national flag for all the world’s refugees, then the flag I would make would be gray. You would not need any particular fabric to make it. I would say that the flag could be any shape and it could be made with anything you had. A worn-out old brassiere, for example, that has been washed so many times it has become gray. You could fly it on the end of a broom handle, if you did not have a flagpole. Although if you did have a spare flagpole, for example in that line of tall white flagpoles outside the United Nations building in New York City, then I think that old gray brassiere would make a fine spectacle, flying in the long colorful line of flags. I would fly it between the Stars and Stripes and the big red Chinese flag. That would be a good trick. Thinking about this, I made myself laugh.

“What de hell you laughin at, Bug?”

“I was thinking about the color gray.”

Yevette frowned.

“Don’t yu go crazy too please, Bug,” she said.

I lay back on the bed and I looked up to the ceiling, but all that was there were those long chains dangling down. I thought, I could hang myself by the neck from those, no problem.

In the afternoon the farmer’s wife came. She brought food. There was bread and cheese in a basket, and a sharp knife to cut the bread with. I thought, I can cut open my veins with that knife, if the men come. The farmer’s wife was a kind woman. I asked her why was she doing this good thing for us. She said it was because we were all human beings. I said, Excuse me miss but I do not think Yevette is a human being. I think she is another species with a louder mouth. Yevette and the farmer’s wife started laughing then, and we talked for a little while about where we had all come from and where we were going to. She told me the direction to go to Kingston-upon-Thames, but she also told me that I shouldn’t. You don’t want to go to the suburbs, dear, she said. Neither fish nor flesh, the suburbs. Unnatural places, full of unnatural people. I laughed. I told her, Maybe I will fit right in.

The farmer’s wife was surprised when we asked for five plates instead of four, but she brought them anyway. We divided the food into five portions, and we gave the biggest helping to the daughter of the woman with no name, because she was still growing.

That night I dreamed about my village before the men came. There was a swing that the boys had made. It was the old tire of a car, and the boys had tied ropes around it and suspended it from the high branch of a tree. This was a big old limba tree and it grew a little way apart from our homes, near to the schoolhouse. Even before I was big enough to go on the swing, my mother would sit me down in the dark red dust by the trunk of the limba so I could watch the big children swinging. I loved to listen to them laughing and singing. Two, three, four children at once, all ways up, with legs and arms and heads all tangled up and dragging in the red scrape of dust at the lowest point of the swing. Aie! Ouch! Get off me in the name of god! Do not push! There was always a lot of chatter and joking around the swing, and up above my head in the branches of the limba tree there were grumpy hornbills that shouted back at us. Nkiruka would get down from the swing sometimes and pick me up in her arms and give me little pieces of soft uncooked dough to squeeze between my chubby fingers.

Everything was happiness and singing when I was a little girl. There was plenty of time for it. We did not have hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or sadness either, because none of these had been connected to our village yet. I sat in between the roots of my limba tree and I laughed while I watched Nkiruka swinging back and fro, back and fro. The tether of the swing was very long, so it took a long time for her to travel from one end of its swing to the other. It never looked like it was in a rush, that swing. I used to watch it all day long and I never realized I was watching a pendulum counting down the last seasons of peace in my village.

In my dream I watched that tire swinging back and fro, back and fro, in that village we did not yet know was built on an oil field and would soon be fought over by men in a crazy hurry to drill down into the oil. This is the trouble with all happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.

I dreamed of watching Nkiruka swinging back and fro, back and fro, and when I woke up there were tears in my eyes and in the light of the moon I was watching something else swinging back and fro, back and fro. I could not tell what it was. I wiped the tears from my eyes and I opened them fully, and then I saw what it was that was swinging through the air at the end of my bed.

It was a single Dunlop Green Flash trainer. The other one had fallen off the foot of the woman with no name. She had hanged herself from one of the long chains that reached up to the roof. Her body was naked apart from that one shoe. She was very thin. Her ribs and her hipbones were sharp. Her eyes bulged open and pointed up into thin blue light. They glittered. The chain had crushed her neck as thin as her ankle. I watched the Dunlop Green Flash trainer and the bare dark brown foot with its gray sole, swinging back and fro past the end of my bed. The Green Flash trainer glowed in the moonlight, like a slow and shining silver fish, and the bare foot chased it like a shark. They swum circles around one another. The chain squeaked quietly.

I went and touched the bare leg of the girl with no name. It was cold. I looked over at Yevette and the sari girl. They were sleeping. Yevette was muttering in her sleep. I started to walk over to Yevette’s bed to wake her, but my foot slipped on something wet. I knelt down and touched it. It was urine. It was as cold as the painted concrete floor. A puddle of it had collected underneath the girl with no name. I looked up and I saw a single drop of urine hang from the big toe of her bare foot, then sparkle as it fell to the floor. I stood up quickly. I felt so depressed about the urine. I did not want to wake up the other girls because then they would see it too, and then we would all be seeing it, and then none of us could deny it. I do not know why the small puddle of urine made me start to cry. I do not know why the mind chooses these small things to break itself on.

I went over to the bed that the girl with no name had been sleeping on, and I picked up her T-shirt. I was going to go back and use the T-shirt to wipe up the urine, but then I saw the see-through plastic bag of documents on the end of the bed. I opened it and I started to read the story of the girl with no name.

The men came and they… That was how all of our stories started. I was still crying, and it was difficult to read in the dim light from the moon. I put the girl’s documents back down on the bed and I closed the bag carefully. I held it tightly in my hands. I was thinking, I could take this girl’s story for my own. I could take these documents and I could take this story with its official red stamp at the end of it that tells everyone it is TRUE. Maybe I can win my asylum case with these papers. I thought about it for one minute, but while I held the girl’s story in my hands the squeaking of her chain seemed to get louder, and I had to drop her story back down on the bed because I knew how it ended. A story is a powerful thing in my country, and God help the girl who takes one that is not her own. So I left it on the girl’s bed, every word of it, including the paper clips and all the photographs of the scar tissue and the names of the missing daughters, and all of the red ink that said this was CONFIRMED.