Chris Cleave - Little Bee

“Please, mister and missus,” the guard said. “Trouble is come here. You do not know my country.”

The sisters heard the thwack of machetes clearing a path. Kindness grabbed Little Bee’s hand and pulled her to her feet. The two sisters walked out of the cover of the jungle and onto the sand. Holding hands, they stood there looking up at the white man and the white woman-Andrew, and me-in hope and expectation. I suppose there was nothing else in the developing world they could do.

They stood on the sand, clutching each other, keeping themselves upright on their failing legs. Kindness straining her head to watch for the approaching dogs, but Little Bee looking steadily at me, ignoring Andrew, ignoring the guard.

“Please missus,” she said, “take us to the hotel compound with you.”

The guard looked at her, then he looked back up at the jungle. He shook his head.

“Hotel compound is for tourist,” he said. “Not for you girls.”

“Please,” said Little Bee, looking directly at me. “Bad men are hunting us. They will kill us.”

She spoke to me as a woman, knowing I would understand. But I didn’t understand. Three days earlier, just before we left for Heathrow, I had been standing on a bare concrete slab in our garden, asking Andrew exactly when the hell he planned to build his bloody glasshouse there. That was the biggest issue in my life-that glasshouse, or the lack of it. That absent glasshouse, and all other structures past and future that might helpfully be erected in the larger emotional absence between me and my husband. I was a modern woman and disappointment was something I understood better than fear. The hunters would kill her? My stomach lurched, but my mind still asserted it was just a figure of speech.

“Oh for goodness’ sake,” I said. “You’re a child. Why would anyone want to kill you?”

Little Bee looked back at me and she said, “Because we saw them killing everyone else.”

I opened my mouth but Andrew spoke first. I think he was suffering the same intellectual jet lag. As if our hearts had now arrived on the beach but our minds were still hours behind. Andrew’s eyes were terrified but his voice said, “This is fuckin bullshit. This is a classic Nigeria scam. Come on, we’re going back to the hotel.”

Andrew started to pull me back along the beach. I went with him, twisting my head to look back at the sisters. The guard followed behind us. He walked backward and aimed his gun at the jungle. Little Bee followed with Kindness, ten yards behind.

The guard said, “You girls stop following us.”

He pointed his gun at the sisters. They looked right back at him. The guard was slightly older than the girls, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and he had a thin mustache. I suppose he was proud he could grow one. He had a green beret and there was sweat trickling from under it. I could see the veins in his temples. The whites of his eyes were yellow.

Little Bee said, “What is your name, soldier?”

And he said, “My name is ‘I will shoot if you don’t stop following.’”

Little Bee shrugged and tapped her chest. “My name is Little Bee,” she said. “Here is my heart. Shoot here if you want.”

And Kindness said, “Bullets is okay. Bullets is quick.”

They kept on following us along the beach. The guard’s eyes went wide.

“Who is chasing you girls?”

“The same men who burned our village. The oil company’s men.”

The rifle began to shake in the guard’s hand. “Christjesus,” he said.

There were men’s shouts and dogs’ barking, very loud now. I couldn’t hear the surf anymore.

Five brown dogs came out of the jungle, running. They were mad from howling. Their sides and their paws were bleeding from the jungle thorns. The sisters screamed and ran past the guard. The guard stopped and he lifted his gun and he fired. The lead dog somersaulted over in the sand. His ear was shot off and a piece of his head too, I think. The pack of dogs skidded and stopped and they tore into the fallen dog. They were biting out chunks of the neck flesh while the back legs were still thrashing and twitching. I screamed. The guard was shaking.

From out of the jungle, six men came running. They wore tracksuit trousers, all torn, and vests and running shoes, gold chains. They moved quickly up on us. They ignored the dogs. One was holding a bow, holding it drawn. The others were waving their machetes, daring the guard to shoot. They came right up to us.

There was a leader. He had a wound in his neck. It was rotting-I could smell it. I knew he was going to die soon. Another of the men wore a wire necklace and it was strung with dried brown things that looked like mushrooms. When he saw Kindness, this man pointed at her, then he made circles on his nipples with his fingers and he grinned. I am trying to report this as matter-of-factly as I know how.

The guard said, “Keep walking, mister and missus.”

But the man with the neck wound-the leader-said, “No, you stop.”

“I will shoot,” the guard said.

But the man said, “Maybe you will get one of us, maybe two.”

The man with the bow was aiming at the guard’s neck, and he said, “Maybe you get none of us. Maybe you should of shoot us when we was far away.”

The guard stopped walking backward, and we stopped too. Little Bee and Kindness went around behind us. They put me and my husband between themselves and the hunters.

The hunters were passing around a bottle of something I thought was wine. They were taking turns to drink. The man with the bow and arrows was getting an erection. I could see it under his tracksuit trousers. But his expression didn’t change and his eyes never moved from our guard’s neck. He was wearing a black bandanna. The bandanna said EMPORIO ARMANI. I looked at Andrew. I tried to speak calmly, but the words were crushed in my throat.

“Andrew,” I said. “Please give them anything they want.”

Andrew looked at the man with the neck wound and he said, “What do you want?”

The hunters looked at one another. The man with the neck wound stepped up to me. His eyes flickered, rolled up inside his head, then snapped back down and stared madly at me, the pupils tiny and the irises bullet-hard and gleaming like copper. His mouth twitched from a smile, to a grimace, to a cruel thin line, to a bitter and amused disdain. The emotions played across his face like a television flipped impatiently between channels. I smelled his sweat and his rot. He made a sound, an involuntary moan which seemed to surprise him-his eyes went wide-and he tore off my beach wrap. He looked down at the pale lilac material in his hands, curiously, and seemed to be wondering how it had got there. I screamed and clasped my arms over my breasts. I cringed away from the man, from the way he looked at me-now patiently, as if encouraging a slow learner; now furiously; now with a pregnant, vespertine calm.

I was wearing a very small green bikini. I will say that again, and maybe I will begin to understand it myself. In the contested delta area of an African country in the middle of a three-way oil war, because there was a beach next to the war, because the state tourist board had mail-merged tickets for that beach to every magazine listed in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, because it was that year’s cut, and because as editor I was first in the queue when distributors sent their own freebies to my magazine’s office, I was wearing a very small green bandeau bikini from Hermès. It occurred to me, as I stood there with my arms crossed over my tits, that I had freeloaded myself to annihilation.

The wounded man stepped so close to me that I felt the sand sink under my feet from his weight. He ran his finger over my shoulder, over my bare skin, and he said, “What do we want? We want…to practice…our English.”