Chris Cleave - Little Bee

“It is not necessary to handcuff me,” I said. “How could I run away?”

The female officer looked back at me. She was surprised.

“You speak pretty good English,” she said. “Most of the people we bring in don’t speak a word.”

“I thought if I learned to speak like you people do, I would be able to stay.”

The officer smiled.

“It doesn’t matter how you talk, does it?” she said. “You’re a drain on resources. The point is you don’t belong here.”

The van turned the corner at the end of the street. I looked through the metal grille on the back window of the van and I watched two long rows of semidetached houses disappear. I thought about Charlie, fast asleep under his duvet, and I thought of his brave smile, and my heart ached that I would never see him again. There were tears in my eyes.

“But please, what does it mean?” I said. “What does it mean, to belong here?”

The female officer turned to look at me again.

“Well, you’ve got to be British, haven’t you? You’ve got to share our values.”

I turned away from the woman and looked out at the rain.

Three days later a different group of officers took me from another holding cell and they put me in a minibus with one other girl. They took us to Heathrow Airport. They took us straight through the queue at the airport terminal and they put us in a small room. We were all wearing handcuffs. They told us to sit down on the floor-there were no chairs there. There were twenty others in the room, men and women, and it was very hot in there. There was no fresh air and it was difficult to breathe. A guard was standing at the front of the room. She had a truncheon and a can of pepper spray in her belt. I asked her, What is happening here? The guard smiled. She said, What is happening here is that a large number of flying machines that we call AEROPLANES are taking off and landing on a long stretch of tarmac that we call a RUNWAY, because this is a place that we call an AIRPORT, and soon one of those aeroplanes is going to set off for UM-BONGO LAND, where you come from, and you’re going to be on it. Yeah? Whether you like it or bloody not. Now, has anyone else got any questions?

We waited for a long time. Some of the others were taken out of the room. One of them cried. Another, a thin man, he was angry. He tried to resist the guard, and she hit him twice in the stomach with her truncheon. After that he was quiet.

I fell asleep sitting down. When I woke up, I saw a purple dress and long brown legs in front of me.

“Yevette!” I said.

The woman turned around to look at me, but it was not Yevette. At first I was sad not to see my friend, and then I understood that I was happy. If this was not Yevette, then there was a chance that Yevette was still free. I thought of her walking down the street in London, in her purple flip-flops with her eyebrows painted in pencil, buying a pound of salt fish and laughing, WU-ha-ha-ha! into the bright blue sky. And I smiled.

The woman who was not Yevette, she made an angry face at me. What is wrong with you? she said. You think they are sending us on holiday?

I smiled. Yes, I said. I think it will be the holiday of a lifetime.

You should not joke about these things. She turned around and she would not talk to me anymore, and when they called her to stand up for her flight, she walked away without making any trouble and she did not once look back at me.

When I saw her go, my situation became real for me and I was scared now, for the first time. I was scared of going back. I cried and I watched my own tears soaking away into the dirty brown carpet.

They gave us no food or water, and I became faint. After a few more hours they came for me. They walked me straight onto the aeroplane. The other passengers, the paying passengers, they made them stand back while I went first up the aeroplane steps. Everybody was staring at me. They took me to the back of the aeroplane, to the last row of seats before the toilets. They put me in the seat next to the window and a guard sat down beside me, a big man with a shaved head and a gold earring. He wore a blue Nike T-shirt and black Adidas trousers. He took off my handcuffs, and I rubbed my wrists to bring the blood back into my hands.

“Sorry,” said the man. “I don’t like this shit any more than you do.”

“Then why do you do it?”

The man shrugged and did up his seat belt.

“It’s a job, isn’t it?” he said.

He pulled a magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him, and opened it up. There were men’s wristwatches there for sale, and also a fluffy model of the aeroplane that could be given to children.

“You should do a different job, if you do not like this one.”

“No one chooses this job, love. I don’t have qualifications, do I? I used to do laboring, casual, but you can’t compete with the Polskis now. The Poles will do a full day’s work for a kind word and a packet of fags. So here I am, chaperoning girls like you on the holiday of a lifetime. Waste, really, isn’t it? I bet you’re more employable than I am. You should be escorting me, really, shouldn’t you? Back to this place we’re going, whatever the name of it is again.”

“Nigeria.”

“Yeah, that was it. Hot there, is it?”

“Hotter than England.”

“Thought so. These places usually are, where you people come from.”

He went back to his magazine and he turned a few pages. Each time he turned the page, he licked his finger to make it stick. There were tattoos on the knuckles of his fingers, small blue dots. His watch was big and gold but the gold was wearing off. It looked like one of the watches from the aeroplane magazine. He turned a few more pages and then he looked up at me again.

“Don’t say much, do you?”

I shrugged.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind. Rather that than the waterworks.”

“The waterworks?”

“Some of them cry. Some of the people I escort back. The women aren’t the worst, believe it or not. I had this bloke once, Zimbabwe we were going to, sobbed away for six hours straight. Tears and snot everywhere, like a baby, I kid you not. It got embarrassing after a while. Some of the other passengers, you know? Giving it the looks, and all of that. I was like, cheer up mate, it might never happen, but it wasn’t no good. He just kept crying and talking to himself in foreign. Some of you people, I’m sorry to see you go, but this one, I tell you, I couldn’t wait to sign him over. Good money though, that job was. There was no flight out for three days, so they put me up at the Sheraton. Watched Sky Sports for three days, scratched my arse, got paid time and a half. Course the people who really make the money are the big contractors. The ones I’m working for now, Dutch firm, they run the whole show. They run the detention centers and they run the repatriations. So they’re earning either way, whether we lock you up or whether we send you back. Nice, eh?”

“Nice,” I said.

The man tapped his finger against the side of his head.

“But that’s how you’ve got to think, these days, isn’t it? It’s the global economy.”

The plane began to roll backward on the tarmac and some television screens came down from the ceiling. They started to show us a safety film. They said what we should do if the cabin filled with smoke, and they also said where our life jackets were kept in case we landed on water. I saw that they did not show us the position to adopt in case we were deported to a country where it was likely that we would be killed because of events we had witnessed. They said there was more information on the safety card in the seat pocket in front of us.

There was a huge and terrifying roar, so loud that I thought, They have tricked us. I thought we were going on a journey, but actually we are being destroyed. But then there was a great acceleration, and everything started shaking and rising up to a terrifying angle, and suddenly all the vibration was gone and the sound died down and my stomach went crazy. The man beside me, my guard, he looked at me and laughed.