Chris Cleave - Little Bee

“Relax, love, we’re in the air.”

After the takeoff, the captain came on the intercom. He said it was a fine, sunny day in Abuja.

I understood that for a few hours I was not in anyone’s country. I said to myself, Look here, Little Bee-finally, you are flying. Buzz, buzz. I pressed my nose against the aeroplane window. I watched the forests and the fields and the roads with their tiny cars, all those tiny precious lives. Me, I felt that my own life was already over. From very high up in the sky, all alone, I could see the curve of the world.

And then I heard a voice, a kind and gentle voice that was familiar.

“Bee?” said the voice.

I turned from the window and saw Sarah. She was standing in the aisle and she was smiling. Charlie was holding her hand and he was smiling too. He was wearing his Batman outfit and he was grinning as if he had just killed all the baddies.

“We is in the sky, isn’t we?” he said.

“No darling,” said Sarah. “We are in the sky, aren’t we.”

I did not understand what I was seeing. Sarah reached over the guard and she put her hand on my hand.

“Lawrence found out what flight they were putting you on,” she said. “He’s not entirely bad, at the end of the day. We couldn’t let you go back alone, Bee. Could we Batman?”

Charlie shook his head. Now he looked very solemn.

“No,” he said. “Because you is our friend.”

The guard, he did not know what to do.

“I’ve seen bloody everything now,” he said.

Finally he stood up and made room for Sarah and Charlie to sit beside me. They hugged me while I cried, and the other passengers turned around in their seats to stare at this miracle, and the aeroplane flew all of us into the future at five hundred and fifty miles per hour.

After some time they brought us peanuts, and Coca-Cola in tiny cans. Charlie drank his too quickly, and the Coca-Cola came out of his nose. After Sarah cleaned him up, she turned to me.

“I did wonder why Andrew didn’t leave a note,” she said. “And then I thought about it. It wasn’t Andrew’s style. He didn’t really like to write about himself.”

I nodded.

“Anyway, he left me something better than a note.”

“What?”

Sarah smiled. “A story.”

At Abuja they opened the aeroplane doors, and heat and memory rolled in. We walked across the tarmac through the shimmering air. In the terminal building my guard signed me over to the authorities. Cheerio, he said. Best of luck, love.

The military police were waiting for me in a small room, wearing uniforms and gold-framed sunglasses. They could not arrest me because Sarah was with me. She would not leave my side. I am a British journalist, she said. Anything you do to this woman, I will report it. The military police were uncertain, so they called their commander. The commander came, in a camouflage uniform and a red beret, with tribal scars on his cheeks. He looked at my deportation document, and he looked at me and Sarah and Charlie. He stood there for a long time, scratching his belly and nodding.

“Why is the child dressed in this fashion?” he said.

Sarah looked straight back at him. She said, “The child believes he has special powers.”

The commander grinned. “Well, I am just a man,” he said. “I will not arrest any of you at this time.”

Everybody laughed, but the military police followed our taxi from the airport. I was very frightened but Sarah gripped my hand. I will not leave you, she said. So long as Charlie and I are here, you are safe. The police waited outside our hotel. We stayed there for two weeks, and so did they.

The window of our room looked out over Abuja. Tall buildings stretched back for miles, tall and clean, some covered in silver glass that reflected the long, straight boulevards. I watched the city as the sunset made the buildings glow red, and then I watched all night. I could not sleep.

When the sun rose it shone between the horizon and the base of the clouds. It blazed on the golden dome of the mosque while the four tall towers were still lit up with electric lights. It was beautiful. Sarah came out onto the balcony of our room, and she found me standing there and staring.

“This is your city,” she said. “Are you proud?”

“I did not know such a thing existed in my country. I am still trying to feel that it is mine.”

I stood there all morning while the heat of the day grew stronger and the streets grew busy with car taxis and scooter taxis and walking sellers with their swaying racks of T-shirts and head-scarves and medicine.

Charlie sat inside, watching cartoons with the air-conditioning on, and Sarah laid out all of Andrew’s papers on a long, low table. On each pile of papers we placed a shoe, or a lamp or a glass, to stop them blowing in the breeze from the big mahogany fans that spun on the ceiling. Sarah explained how she was going to write the book that Andrew had been researching. I need to collect more stories like yours, she said. Do you think we can do that here? Without going down to the south of the country?

I did not answer. I looked through some of the papers and then I went and stood on the balcony again. Sarah came and stood beside me.

“What is it?” she said.

I nodded my head down at the military police car waiting on the street below. Two men leaned against it, in green uniforms with berets and sunglasses. One of them looked up. He said something when he saw us, and his colleague looked up too. They stared up at our balcony for a long time, and then they lit cigarettes and sat in the car, one in the front seat and one in the backseat, with the doors open and their heavy boots resting on the tarmac.

“You know it is not a good idea to collect stories,” I said.

Sarah shook her head. “I don’t agree. I think it’s the only way we’ll make you safe.”

“What do you mean?”

Sarah lifted her eyes up from the street.

“Our problem is that you only have your own story. One story makes you weak. But as soon as we have one hundred stories, you will be strong. If we can show that what happened to your village happened to a hundred villages, then the power is on our side. We need to collect the stories of people who’ve been through the same things as you. We need to make it undeniable. Then we can send the stories to a lawyer and we’ll let the authorities know, if anything happens to you, those stories will go straight to the media. Do you see? I think that was what Andrew hoped to do with his book. It was his way of saving girls like you.”

I shrugged. “What if the authorities are not afraid of the media?”

Sarah nodded, slowly. “That’s a possibility,” she said. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

I looked out across the towers of Abuja. The great buildings shimmered in the heat, as if they were insubstantial, as if they could be awoken from and forgotten with a splash of cold water to the face.

“I do not know,” I said. “I do not know how things are in my country. Until I was fourteen years old my country was three cassava fields and a limba tree. And after that, I was in yours. So do not ask me how my country works.”

“Hmm,” said Sarah. She waited for a minute, and then she said, “So what do you want us to do?”

I looked again at the city we saw from that balcony. I saw for the first time how much space there was in it. There were wide gaps between the city blocks. I thought these dark green squares were parks and gardens, but now I saw that they were just empty spaces, waiting for something to be built. Abuja was a city that was not finished. This was very interesting for me, to see that my capital city had these green squares of hope built into it. To see how my country carried its dreams in a see-through bag.