Chris Cleave - Little Bee

Little Bee and Lawrence stared at me, wide-eyed, and I remember the last rational thought that went through my mind: He isn’t on the sand, and he didn’t go up the steps, so he must be in the river. Even as I thought it, I could feel the second stage of my mind shutting down. The panic simply rose up out of my chest to engulf me. I splashed out into the Thames, knee-high, then waist-high, staring down into the muddy brown water, screaming Charlie’s name at the floating plastic bags and the startled gulls.

I saw something under the water, lying on the muddy sludge. Underwater, distorted by ripples, it looked like a bone-white face. I reached down and grabbed for it. I lifted it up into the bright day. It was a cracked plastic mask from a tourist stand, with its snapped elastic showing how it had blown into the river. As I held it up, dripping muddy water, I realized that my phone had been in the hand I held the mask in. My phone was gone, somewhere-my life was gone-lost in the sand or the river. I stood in the water, holding a mask. I didn’t know what to do now. I heard a whistling sound and I looked down sharply. I understood that the breeze was whistling through the empty eyeholes of the mask, and that is when I truly began to scream.

Charlie O’Rourke. Four years old. Batman. What went through my mind? His perfect little white teeth. His look of fierce concentration when he was dispatching baddies. The way he hugged me, once, when I was sad. The way, since Africa, that I had been running between worlds-between Andrew and Lawrence, between Little Bee and my job-running everywhere except to the world where I belonged. Why had I never run to Charlie? I screamed at myself. My son, my beautiful boy. Gone, gone. He had disappeared as he had lived, while I was looking the other way. I looked at the empty days before me, and there was no end to them.

My voice sank to a whisper. I breathed Charlie’s name.

Then I felt hands on my shoulders. It was Lawrence.

“We need to be systematic about this now,” he said. “Sarah, you stay here and keep calling for him, so he knows where to come back to if he’s wandering. I’ll go and ask people to start looking, and I’ll keep looking myself. And Bee, you take my phone and you go up on the embankment and you call the police. Then you wait for them, so you can show them where we are when they arrive.”

Lawrence handed his phone to Little Bee, and turned back to me. I stared at him dumbly.

“I know it sounds extreme,” he said, “but the police are good at this. I’m sure we’ll find Charlie before they get here, but just on the off chance that we don’t, it makes sense for us to bring them in sooner rather than later.”

“Okay, do it,” I said. “Do it now.”

Little Bee was still standing there, holding Lawrence’s phone in her hand, staring at Lawrence and me with large and frightened eyes. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t already running.

“Go!” I said.

She still stared at me. “The police…,” she said.

Understanding buzzed dully in my mind. The number. Of course! She didn’t know the emergency number.

“The number is 999,” I said.

She just stood there. I couldn’t work out what the problem was.

“The police, Sarah,” she said.

I stared at her. Her eyes were pleading. She looked terrified. And then, very slowly, her face changed. It became firm, resolved. She took a deep breath, and she nodded at me. She turned, slowly at first and then very fast, and she ran up the steps to the embankment. When she was halfway up, Lawrence raised a hand to his mouth.

“Oh shit, the police,” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head.

“Never mind.”

Lawrence ran off. I began shouting again for Charlie. I called and called, while the tourists stared, and the breeze left me shivering in my wet jeans. At first I called out Charlie’s name as a sound for him to home in on, but as my voice began to go I realized that another line had been crossed and I was shouting the name just to hear it, to ensure its continuing existence. I realized that the name was all I had in the world.

Then a voice came from behind me. It was Lawrence.

“Sarah?” he said. “It’s okay. I found him.”

Lawrence held Charlie in his arms. My son was filthy, and his bat cape hung straight down, heavy with water. I ran to him, took him into my arms and held him. I pressed my face into his neck and I breathed in his smell, the sharp salt of his sweat and the sewer tang of the dirt. The tears streamed down my face.

“Charlie,” I whispered. “Oh my world, my whole world.”

“Get off, Mummy! You’re squashing me!”

“Where were you?”

Charlie held out his hands to the sides, palms upward, and answered me as if I was simple.

“In mine bat cave.”

Lawrence grinned and pointed at the wall of the embankment.

“He was right inside one of those drainage pipes.”

“Oh Charlie. Didn’t you hear us all shouting? Didn’t you see us all looking for you?”

Charlie grinned beneath his bat mask.

“I was hiding,” he said.

“Why? Why didn’t you come out? Couldn’t you see how worried we all were?”

My son looked forlornly at the ground. “ Lawrence and Bee was all cross and they wasn’t playing with me. So I went into mine bat cave.”

“Oh Charlie. Mummy’s been so confused. So terribly silly and selfish. I promise you, Charlie, I’ll never be so silly again. You’re my whole world, you know that? I’ll never forget that again. Do you know how much you mean to me?”

Charlie blinked at me, sensing an opportunity.

“Can I have an ice cream?” he said.

I hugged my son. I felt his warm, sleepy breath on my neck, and through the thin gray fabric of his costume I felt the gentle, insistent pressure of the bones beneath his skin.

I looked up at Lawrence and I said, Thank you.

THE POLICEMEN CAME AFTER five minutes. There were three of them. They came slowly, in a silver car with bright blue and orange stripes along the sides and a long bar of lights on the roof. They pushed through the crowds on the walkway and they stopped beside the steps that led down to the sand. They got out of the car and they put on their hats. They were wearing white short-sleeved shirts and thick black vests with a black-and-white checkered stripe. The vests had many pockets, and in them there were batons and radios and handcuffs and other things I could not guess the names of. I was thinking, Charlie would like this. These policemen have more gadgets than Batman.

If I was telling this story to the girls from back home, I would have to explain to them that the policemen of the United Kingdom did not carry guns.

– Weh! No pistol?

– No pistol.

– Weh! That is one topsy-turvy kingdom, where the girls can show their bobbis but the police cannot show their guns.

And I would have to nod and tell them again, Much of my life in that country was lived in such confusion.

The policemen slammed the police-car doors behind them: thunk. I shivered. When you are a refugee, you learn to pay attention to doors. When they are open; when they are closed; the particular sound they make; the side of them that you are on. I wanted to run. Instead I held my hands out to the policemen. I said, Here is the place.

One of the policemen came close while the other two ran down the steps. The policeman who came, he was not much older than me I think. He was tall, with orange hair under his hat. I tried to smile at him, but I couldn’t. My heart was beating, beating. I was scared that my Queen’s English would fail me. Then the most wonderful thing happened. The policeman’s radio buzzed and crackled and a voice came from it, and the voice said: THE CHILD HAS BEEN FOUND. I gave a smile like the sun, but the policeman did not. My smile faded.