Chris Cleave - Little Bee

Sarah and Lawrence had their arms around each other’s shoulders, but Charlie was looking very small and sad. He was staring down at the mud on the banks of the river. He was firing some kind of a weapon at the mud, but the weapon was having no effect. I put my hand up to my mouth.

“You all right?” said the magazine-seller boy. “Looks like someone walked on your grave.”

I could not answer. How should I start to explain to him that I did not trust Lawrence? How was I supposed to tell him how all of the bad stories begin: The men came and they…?

It would be a long story to explain why I did not like to leave Charlie like that.

“I have to go,” I said.

I turned away from the magazine seller and I walked back across the bridge with heavy steps.

When I got back to the place where the three of them were standing, Sarah turned and smiled at me.

“Where did you disappear to?” she said.

I shrugged. “Nowhere.”

I looked down at the river. Something swam close to the bank but it did not break the surface. All you could see were the swirls in the water where it passed beneath. I looked at Sarah and she looked back at me and we found that we could not smile anymore.

“What’s wrong?” She lowered her voice. “I’m sorry. Is all this water reminding you of the beach?”

I said, “It is only water.”

Charlie was pulling my hand. He wanted to play, so we went down some stone steps that were slimy with some green river plant, down to a thin strip of yellow sand at the edge of the river. There were other children down there too, wearing just their underwear in the hot sun, building sand castles with their mothers and their fathers. We built sand castles too. We built towers and bridges. We built roads, railway lines, and schools. Then we built a hospital for injured superheroes and a hospital for sick bats, because Charlie said his city needed these things. Charlie was concentrating very hard. I said to him, Do you want to take off your Batman costume? But he shook his head.

“I am worried about you. You will be exhausted by this heat. Come on, aren’t you too hot in your costume?”

“Yes but if I is not in mine costume then I is not Batman.”

“Do you need to be Batman all the time?”

Charlie nodded. “Yes, because if I is not Batman all the time then mine Daddy dies.”

Charlie looked down at the sand. He squeezed his fists so tight that I could see the small white bones of his knuckles through the skin.

“Charlie,” I said. “You think your daddy died because you were not Batman?”

Charlie looked up. Through the dark eye holes of his bat mask, I could see the tears in his eyes.

“I was at mine nursery,” he said. “That’s when the baddies got mine Daddy.”

His lip trembled. I pulled him toward me and I held him while he cried. I stared over his shoulder at the cold black drainage tunnels that disappeared into the tall stone wall of the river embankment. I stared into the black mouth of one of them, as wide as my shoulders across, but all I could see was Andrew spinning slowly round on the electrical cord with his eyes watching me each time he revolved. The look in his eyes was the look of those black tunnels: there was no end to them.

“Listen Charlie,” I said. “Your daddy did not die because you were not there. It is not your fault. Do you understand? You are a good boy, Charlie. It is not your fault at all.”

Charlie pulled himself out of my arms and looked at me.

“Why did mine Daddy die?”

I thought about it.

“The baddies got him, Charlie. But they are not the sort of baddies Batman can fight. They are the sort of baddies that your daddy had to fight in his heart and I have to fight in my heart. They are baddies from inside.”

Charlie nodded. “Is there lots?”

“Of what?”

“Of baddies from inside?”

I looked at the dark tunnels, and I shivered.

“Everyone has them,” I said.

“Will we beat them?”

I nodded. “Of course we will.”

“And they won’t get me, will they?”

I smiled. “No, Charlie, I don’t think those baddies will ever get you.”

“And they won’t get you either, will they?”

I sighed.

“Charlie, there are no baddies here by the river. We are on an adventure, okay? Maybe you can take one day off from being Batman.”

Charlie frowned, as if this was another trick of his enemies.

“Batman is always Batman,” he said.

I laughed, and we went back to building the city out of sand. I put a big handful on top of a pile that Charlie said was a multistory Batmobile park.

“Sometimes I wish I could take one day off from being Little Bee,” I said.

Charlie looked up at me. A drop of sweat fell from inside his bat mask. “Why?”

“Well, you see, it was hard to become Little Bee. I had to go through a lot of things. They kept me in prison and I had to train myself to think in a certain way, and to be strong, and to speak your language the way you people speak it. It is even an effort now just to keep it going. Because inside, you know, I am only a village girl. I would like to be a village girl again and do the things that village girls do. I would like to laugh and smile at the boys. I would like to do foolish things when the moon is full. And most of all, you know, I would like to use my real name.”

Charlie paused with his spade in the air.

“But Little Bee is yours real name,” he said.

I shook my head. “Mmm-mmm. Little Bee is only my superhero name. I have a real name too, like you have Charlie.”

Charlie stared.

“What is yours real name?” he said.

“I will tell you my real name if you will take off your Batman costume.”

Charlie frowned. “Actually I have to keep mine Batman costume on forever,” he said.

I smiled. “Okay, Batman. Maybe another time.”

Charlie started to build a sand wall between the wilderness and the suburbs of his city.

“Mmm,” he said.

After a while Lawrence came down the green steps and walked up to us.

“I’ll take over here,” he said. “Go up and see if you can talk some sense into Sarah, will you?”

“Why, what is wrong? Why didn’t she come down here with you?”

Lawrence held his hands out with the palms upward, and he sent air upward out of his mouth so that his hair blew. “Just go and see her, will you?” he said.

I walked up the steps. Sarah was still standing by the railings.

“That bloody man,” she said when she saw me.

“Lawrence?”

“Sometimes I’m not so sure I wouldn’t be better off without him. Oh, I don’t mean that, of course I don’t. But honestly. Don’t I have the right to talk about Andrew?”

“You were arguing?”

Sarah sighed.

“Lawrence still isn’t happy about you being around. It’s putting him on edge.”

“What did you say, about Andrew?”

Sarah looked out across the river.

“I told him I was sorting out Andrew’s office last night. You know, looking through his files. I just wanted to see what bills I’m meant to pay now, check we don’t owe money on any of our cards, that sort of thing.”

She looked at me. “The thing is, it turns out Andrew didn’t stop thinking about what happened on the beach. I thought he’d put it out of his mind, but he hadn’t. He was researching it. There must have been two dozen folders in his office. Stuff about Nigeria. About the oil wars, and the atrocities. And…well, I had no idea how many of you ended up in the UK after what happened to your villages. Andrew had a whole binder full of documents about asylum and detention.”

“Did you read it?”

Sarah chewed her lip. “Not all of it. He had enough in there to read for a month. And he had his own notes attached to each document. It was very meticulous. Very Andrew. There was so much detail in there. I only read a couple of papers, but it was enough to see where he was going with it all. I read an inspectors’ report about the immigration detention centers. How long did you say they kept you in that place, Bee?”