“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.
“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 nod
ded 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.
I smiled at Sarah. “Let us go and collect the stories.”
“You’re sure?”
“I want to be part of my country’s story.” I pointed out into the heat. “See? They have left space for me.”
Sarah held on to my hand, very tight.
“All right,” she said.
“But, Sarah?”
“Yes?”
“There is one story I must tell you first.”
I told Sarah what happened when Andrew died. The story was hard to hear and it was hard to tell. Afterward I went back inside the hotel room and she stayed out on the balcony on her own. I sat down on the bed with Charlie and he watched cartoons while I watched Sarah’s shoulders shaking.
The next day we started our work. Early in the morning Sarah walked out into the street and she gave a very large amount of money to the military policemen waiting outside the hotel. After this, their eyes were the eyes of the faces on the banknotes that Sarah gave them. They saw nothing but the inside of the military police car’s glove box and the lining of the policemen’s uniform pockets. The policemen’s only rule was, we had to be back at the hotel before sunset each evening.
My job was to find people who would normally be scared to talk to a foreign journalist, but who talked to Sarah because I promised them that she was a good person. These were people who believed what I told them, because my story was the same as theirs. I discovered there were a lot of us in my country, people who had seen things the oil companies wished we had not seen. People the government would prefer to be silent. We went all around the southeast of my country in an old white Peugeot, just like the one that my father used to have.
I sat in the passenger seat and Sarah drove, with Charlie smiling and laughing in the back. We listened to the music on the local radio stations, turned up very loud. The red dust from the road blew everywhere, even inside the car, and when we took off Charlie’s Batman suit to wash him at the end of each day, his white skin had two bright red diamonds on it, where the eyeholes of his mask had been.
Sometimes I got scared. Sometimes when we arrived in a village, I saw the way some of the men looked at me and I remembered how me and my sister were hunted. I wondered if there was still money from the oil companies, for anyone who would shut my mouth for once and all. I was scared of the village men, but Sarah just smiled. Relax, she said. Remember what happened at the airport. Nothing’s going to happen to you so long as I’m here.
And I did begin to relax. In each village I found people with stories, and Sarah wrote them down. It was easy. We started to be happy. We thought we had done enough to save ourselves. We thought, this is a good trick.
One night when we had been in my country for two weeks, I dreamed of my sister Nkiruka. She walked up out of the sea. First the surface of the water swirled from the movement of something unseen and then, in the hollow between two waves, I saw the top of her head with white foam dancing around it. Then my sister’s face rose above the water and slowly she walked up the beach toward me and she stood there smiling and wearing the Hawaiian shirt that I was wearing when they released me from detention. It was soaked with salt water. My sister spoke my name once, and then she waited.
When Sarah woke up, I went to her. Please, I said, we have to go to the sea. I must say good-bye to my sister. Sarah looked at me for a long time, and then she nodded. We did not say anything. That morning Sarah gave the policemen much more money than before. We drove south to Benin City and we got there in the late afternoon. We stayed overnight in another hotel that was just the same, and the next morning we drove south again, to the coast. We left early, when the sun was still low in the sky and the light shining into the car windows was warm and golden. Charlie sighed and banged his heels on the backseat.
“Is we nearly there yet?” he said.
Sarah smiled at him in the rearview mirror.
“Nearly, darling,” she said.
The road ran out at one of the fishing villages they have in that place, and we stepped down onto the sand. Charlie laughed and ran down the beach to make sand castles. I sat on the beach next to Sarah and we looked out over the ocean. There was no sound except for the waves breaking on the beach. After a long time, Sarah turned to me.
She said, “I’m proud we’ve come this far.”
I took her hand. “You know, Sarah, since I left my country, often I think to myself, how would I explain these things to the girls back home?”
Sarah laughed and stretched her hands along the beach in both directions.
“Well?” said Sarah. “How would you explain this to the girls back home? I mean, this would take some explaining, wouldn’t you say?”
I shook my head. “I would not explain this to the girls back home.”
“No?”
“No, Sarah. Because today I am saying good-bye to all that. We are the girls back home now. You and me. There is nothing else for me to go back to. I do not need to tell this story to anyone else. Thank you for saving me, Sarah.”
When I said this I saw that Sarah was crying, and then I was crying too.
When the day became hotter, the beach filled up with people. There were fishermen who walked out into the waves and sent wide bright nets spinning out before them, and there were old men who came to sit and look at the sea, and mothers who brought their children to splash in the water.
“We should go and ask these people if anyone has a story,” I said.
Sarah smiled and pointed at Charlie. “Yes, but it can wait,” she said. “Look, he’s having such fun.”
Charlie was running and laughing and I can tell you that a dozen of the local children were running with him, and laughing and shouting because if there is one thing you do not see very often on the beach in my country, it is a white superhero less than one meter in height, with sand and salt water on his cape. Charlie was laughing with the other children, running and playing and chasing.
It was hot, and I dug my toes down into the cooler sand.
“Sarah,” I said. “How long do you think you will stay?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to try coming with me to England? We could try to get you papers this time.”
I shrugged. “They do not want people like me.”
Sarah smiled. “I’m English and I want people like you. Surely I’m not the only one.”
“People will say you are naive.”
Sarah smiled.
“Let them,” she said. “Let them say whatever gives them comfort.”
We sat for a long time and watched the sea.
In the afternoon the sea breeze blew and I fell asleep for a little while, half in and half out of the shade of the trees at the top of the beach. The sun warmed my blood until I could not keep my eyes open, and the sea roared in and out, in and out, and my breathing slipped into time with the waves as I began to dream. I dreamed we all stayed together in my country. I was happy. I dreamed I was a journalist, telling the stories of my country, and we all lived in the same house—me and Charlie and Sarah—in a tall, cool three-story house in Abuja. It was a very beautiful home. It was the sort of place I never even dreamed of, back in the days when our Bible ended at the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew. I was happy in this house that I dreamed of, and the cook and the housekeeper smiled at me and called me princess. Early each morning the garden boy brought me a scented yellow rose for my hair, trembling on its fine green stem with the dew of the night still on it. There was a carved wood veranda, painted white, and a long curved garden with bright flowers and dark shade. I traveled through my country and I listened to stories of all kinds. Not all of them were sad. There were many beautiful stories that I found. There was horror, yes, but there was joy in them too. The dreams of my country are no different from yours—they are as big as the human heart.