Little Bee

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” the white man said. “Here comes that doofus of a guard again.”

  “He’s only doing his job.”

  “Yeah, but can’t they let us do our own thing even for one minute?”

  “Oh, relax. The holiday was free, remember? We were never going to have it all our own way.”

  The guard came level with the white couple and he stopped. He was coughing. He had his hands on his knees.

  “Please, mister, missus,” he said. “Sorry please to come back to hotel compound.”

  “But why?” the white woman said. “We were just going for a walk along the beach.”

  “It is not safe missus,” the guard said. “Not safe for you and mister. Sorry boss.”

  “But why?” said the white man. “What is actually the problem?”

  “No problem,” said the guard. “Here is very good place. Very good. But all tourist must stay please in hotel compound.”

  Unseen in the jungle, the dogs were barking louder now. The sisters could hear the shouts of the men running with them. Kindness was trembling. The two sisters held each other. Now one of the dogs howled and the others joined in. In the hiding place there was a splashing on the dry leaves and a smell of urine—the reality of Kindness’s fear. Little Bee looked into her eyes. It didn’t look as if her sister was even seeing her.

  Down on the beach the white man was saying, “Is this about money?”

  And the guard was saying, “No mister.”

  The guard stood up straight and looked into the jungle where the noise of the dogs was. He unslung his rifle. Little Bee saw the way he held it. He took the safety catch off and he reached down to check the magazine. Two magazines—I remember that myself—bound back-to-back with blue insulation tape.

  The white man said, “Oh don’t give us the big performance. Just tell us how much you want. Come on. My wife is sick to the gills of being cooped up in that fuckin compound. What will you take to let us go for a walk on our own? One dollar?”

  The guard shook his head. He wasn’t looking at the white man. He was watching a flock of red birds flying up from the jungle, two hundred yards away.

  “No dollar,” the guard said.

  “Ten dollars, then,” the white woman said.

  “Oh for the love of god, Sarah,” the white man said. “That is way too much. That’s a week’s wages here.”

  “Don’t be such a tight-arse,” the white woman said. “What’s ten dollars to us? It’s nice to be able to do something for these people. God knows they have little enough.”

  “Well, look then, five dollars,” the white man said.

  The guard was watching the treetops. One hundred and fifty yards away, up a shallow gully, the tips of the palm ferns were twitching.

  “You come back with me now,” the guard said. “Hotel compound is best for you.”

  “Listen,” the white man said. “I’m sorry if we offended you by offering money and I respect you for not taking it. But I have my editor telling me what’s best for me fifty-one weeks of the year. I didn’t come here to have anyone edit my holiday.”

  The guard lifted the muzzle of his gun. He fired three shots in the air, just above the white man’s head. The barking of the dogs and the yelling of the men stopped for a moment. Then they started up again, louder. The white couple stood very still. Their mouths were open. They were struck, perhaps, by the bullets that had missed them.

  “Please, mister and missus,” the guard said. “Trouble is come here. You do not know my country.”

  The sisters heard the thwack of machetes clearing a path. Kindness grabbed Little Bee’s hand and pulled her to her feet. The two sisters walked out of the cover of the jungle and onto the sand. Holding hands, they stood there looking up at the white man and the white woman—Andrew, and me—in hope and expectation. I suppose there was nothing else in the developing world they could do.

  They stood on the sand, clutching each other, keeping themselves upright on their failing legs. Kindness straining her head to watch for the approaching dogs, but Little Bee looking steadily at me, ignoring Andrew, ignoring the guard.

  “Please missus,” she said, “take us to the hotel compound with you.”

  The guard looked at her, then he looked back up at the jungle. He shook his head.

  “Hotel compound is for tourist,” he said. “Not for you girls.”

  “Please,” said Little Bee, looking directly at me. “Bad men are hunting us. They will kill us.”

  She spoke to me as a woman, knowing I would understand. But I didn’t understand. Three days earlier, just before we left for Heathrow, I had been standing on a bare concrete slab in our garden, asking Andrew exactly when the hell he planned to build his bloody glasshouse there. That was the biggest issue in my life—that glasshouse, or the lack of it. That absent glasshouse, and all other structures past and future that might helpfully be erected in the larger emotional absence between me and my husband. I was a modern woman and disappointment was something I understood better than fear. The hunters would kill her? My stomach lurched, but my mind still asserted it was just a figure of speech.

  “Oh for goodness’ sake,” I said. “You’re a child. Why would anyone want to kill you?”

  Little Bee looked back at me and she said, “Because we saw them killing everyone else.”

  I opened my mouth but Andrew spoke first. I think he was suffering the same intellectual jet lag. As if our hearts had now arrived on the beach but our minds were still hours behind. Andrew’s eyes were terrified but his voice said, “This is fuckin bullshit. This is a classic Nigeria scam. Come on, we’re going back to the hotel.”

  Andrew started to pull me back along the beach. I went with him, twisting my head to look back at the sisters. The guard followed behind us. He walked backward and aimed his gun at the jungle. Little Bee followed with Kindness, ten yards behind.

  The guard said, “You girls stop following us.”

  He pointed his gun at the sisters. They looked right back at him. The guard was slightly older than the girls, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and he had a thin mustache. I suppose he was proud he could grow one. He had a green beret and there was sweat trickling from under it. I could see the veins in his temples. The whites of his eyes were yellow.

  Little Bee said, “What is your name, soldier?”

  And he said, “My name is ‘I will shoot if you don’t stop following.’”

  Little Bee shrugged and tapped her chest. “My name is Little Bee,” she said. “Here is my heart. Shoot here if you want.”

  And Kindness said, “Bullets is okay. Bullets is quick.”

  They kept on following us along the beach. The guard’s eyes went wide.

  “Who is chasing you girls?”

  “The same men who burned our village. The oil company’s men.”

  The rifle began to shake in the guard’s hand. “Christjesus,” he said.

  There were men’s shouts and dogs’ barking, very loud now. I couldn’t hear the surf anymore.

  Five brown dogs came out of the jungle, running. They were mad from howling. Their sides and their paws were bleeding from the jungle thorns. The sisters screamed and ran past the guard. The guard stopped and he lifted his gun and he fired. The lead dog somersaulted over in the sand. His ear was shot off and a piece of his head too, I think. The pack of dogs skidded and stopped and they tore into the fallen dog. They were biting out chunks of the neck flesh while the back legs were still thrashing and twitching. I screamed. The guard was shaking.

  From out of the jungle, six men came running. They wore tracksuit trousers, all torn, and vests and running shoes, gold chains. They moved quickly up on us. They ignored the dogs. One was holding a bow, holding it drawn. The others were waving their machetes, daring the guard to shoot. They came right up to us.

  There was a leader. He had a wound in his neck. It was rotting—I could smell it. I knew he was going to die soon. Another of the men wore a wire necklace and it
was strung with dried brown things that looked like mushrooms. When he saw Kindness, this man pointed at her, then he made circles on his nipples with his fingers and he grinned. I am trying to report this as matter-of-factly as I know how.

  The guard said, “Keep walking, mister and missus.”

  But the man with the neck wound—the leader—said, “No, you stop.”

  “I will shoot,” the guard said.

  But the man said, “Maybe you will get one of us, maybe two.”

  The man with the bow was aiming at the guard’s neck, and he said, “Maybe you get none of us. Maybe you should of shoot us when we was far away.”

  The guard stopped walking backward, and we stopped too. Little Bee and Kindness went around behind us. They put me and my husband between themselves and the hunters.

  The hunters were passing around a bottle of something I thought was wine. They were taking turns to drink. The man with the bow and arrows was getting an erection. I could see it under his tracksuit trousers. But his expression didn’t change and his eyes never moved from our guard’s neck. He was wearing a black bandanna. The bandanna said EMPORIO ARMANI. I looked at Andrew. I tried to speak calmly, but the words were crushed in my throat.

  “Andrew,” I said. “Please give them anything they want.”

  Andrew looked at the man with the neck wound and he said, “What do you want?”

  The hunters looked at one another. The man with the neck wound stepped up to me. His eyes flickered, rolled up inside his head, then snapped back down and stared madly at me, the pupils tiny and the irises bullet-hard and gleaming like copper. His mouth twitched from a smile, to a grimace, to a cruel thin line, to a bitter and amused disdain. The emotions played across his face like a television flipped impatiently between channels. I smelled his sweat and his rot. He made a sound, an involuntary moan which seemed to surprise him—his eyes went wide—and he tore off my beach wrap. He looked down at the pale lilac material in his hands, curiously, and seemed to be wondering how it had got there. I screamed and clasped my arms over my breasts. I cringed away from the man, from the way he looked at me—now patiently, as if encouraging a slow learner; now furiously; now with a pregnant, vespertine calm.

  I was wearing a very small green bikini. I will say that again, and maybe I will begin to understand it myself. In the contested delta area of an African country in the middle of a three-way oil war, because there was a beach next to the war, because the state tourist board had mail-merged tickets for that beach to every magazine listed in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, because it was that year’s cut, and because as editor I was first in the queue when distributors sent their own freebies to my magazine’s office, I was wearing a very small green bandeau bikini from Hermès. It occurred to me, as I stood there with my arms crossed over my tits, that I had freeloaded myself to annihilation.

  The wounded man stepped so close to me that I felt the sand sink under my feet from his weight. He ran his finger over my shoulder, over my bare skin, and he said, “What do we want? We want … to practice … our English.”

  The hunters exploded into laughter. They passed around the bottle again. For a moment, when one of them raised the bottle, I saw something with a pupil staring out of it. It was pressed up against the glass. Then the man put the bottle down, and the thing disappeared back into the liquid. I say liquid because I didn’t think it was wine anymore.

  Andrew said, “We have money, and we can get more later.”

  The wounded man giggled and made a noise like a pig, which made him giggle more. Then his face set suddenly into an expression of complete seriousness. He said, “You give me what you got now. There is no later.”

  Andrew took his wallet from his pocket. He passed it to the wounded man. The man took it—his hand was shaking—and he pulled out the banknotes and threw the wallet down on the sand. He passed the money behind him to the men, without looking or counting. He was breathing very heavily and there was sweat running down his face. His neck wound was wide open. It was green blue. It was obscene.

  I said, “You need medical attention. We could get help for you at the hotel.”

  The man said, “Medicine not fix what these girls have seen. These girls got to pay for what they seen. Give me the girls.”

  I said, “No.”

  The wounded man looked at me, astonished. “What you say?”

  “I said no. These girls are coming with us to the compound. If you try to stop them, our guard will shoot you.”

  The wounded man widened his eyes in an indulgent simulacrum of fear. He put both his hands on the top of his head and turned himself through two shuffling circles on the sand. When he faced me again he grinned and said, “Where are you from, missus?”

  “We live in Kingston,” I said.

  The man cocked his head and looked interestedly at me.

  “Kingston-upon-Thames,” I said. “It’s in London.”

  The man nodded. “I know where Kingston is,” he said. “I studied mechanical engineering there.”

  He looked down at the sand. He stood in silence for a moment. Then he moved, and it was very quick. I saw his machete go up, I saw the blade flash in the rising sun, I saw a tiny flinch—that was all the guard had time for. The blade went into the guard’s throat and it rang. It rang when it struck the bones of the neck. The metal was still ringing when the man yanked it out and the guard dropped into the sand. The blade rang, I remember, as if the machete was a bell and the guard’s life was the clapper.

  The killer said, “You ever hear a noise like that in Kingston-upon-Thames?”

  There seemed to be more blood than one skinny African boy could possibly have had inside him. It went on and on. That guard lying there with sand covering his eyeballs and his neck gaping, as if it was hanging on a hinge, wide open. It looked like a mouth. This very calm, middle-class voice in my head said: Pac-Man. Pac-Man. Oh gosh, he looks just like Pac-Man. We all stood in silence as we watched the guard bleed to death. It took the longest time. I remember thinking, Thank god we left Charlie with my parents.

  When I lifted my head, the killer was watching me. It wasn’t a mean expression. I have seen checkout girls look at me like that when I forget my reward card. I have seen Lawrence look at me that way when I tell him I have my period. The killer was watching me with an expression, really, of mild annoyance.

  “This guard died because of you,” he said.

  I must have felt things, back in those days, because tears were running down my face.

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  The killer shook his head. He made a steeple of his fingers around the handle of the machete, held it up so that the point aligned with my throat, and eyed me sorrowfully along the trembling axis of the blade.

  “I live here,” he said. “You were crazy to come.”

  I began to cry then, out of fear. Andrew was shaking. Kindness began to pray in her tribal language.

  “Ekenem-i Maria,” she said, “gratia ju-i obi Dinweni nonyel-i, I nwe ngozi kali ikporo nine na ngozi dili nwa afo-i bu Jesu.”

  The killer looked up at Kindness and he said, “You will die next.”

  Kindness looked back at him. “Nso Maria Nne Ciuku,” she said, “yo nyel’anyi bu ndi njo, kita, n’ubosi nke onwu anyi. Amen.”

  The killer nodded. He breathed. I heard the cold surf in ebb and resurgent. The brown dogs left off the carcass of the killed dog and they came closer. They stood with their legs trembling and their hackles up, the blood stiff on their fur. The killer took one step toward Kindness but I did not think my mind could survive seeing the machete cut into her.

  I said, “No. Please … please, leave her alone.”

  The killer stopped and he turned to me and he said, “You again?”

  He was smiling.

  Andrew said, “Sarah, please, I think the best thing we can do here is to …”

  “To what, Andrew? To shut up and hope they won’t get round to killing us too?”

 
“I just think this is not our affair and so …”

  “Ah,” the killer said. “Not your affair.”

  He turned to the other hunters and spread his arms.

  “Not his affair, him say. Him say, this is black-man business. Ha ha ha ha!”

  The hunters laughed. They slapped one another on the back and the dogs started to circle us. When the killer turned back, his face was serious.

  “First time I hear white man say my business not his business. You got our gold. You got our oil. What is wrong with our girls?”

  “Nothing,” said poor Andrew. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Are you a racist?”

  Rassist, was how he pronounced the word.

  “No, of course not.”

  The killer stared at Andrew. “Well?” he said. “You want to save these girls, mister?”

  Andrew coughed. I watched him. My husband’s hands twitched—his strong, fine hands I had often watched, gripping coffees, clicking across keyboards, making deadlines. My husband, who had filed his Sunday column from the departure lounge of the airport the previous day, down to the wire as usual. I’d been scanning it for typos when they called our flight. The last paragraph went: We are a self-interested society. How will our children learn to put others before themselves if we do not?

  “Well?” said the killer. “You want to save them?”

  Andrew looked down at his hands. He stood like that for a long time. Above us, seabirds circled and called to one another in that agonized way they have. I tried to stop my legs from shaking.

  “Please,” I said. “If you will let us take the girls with us, then we will do whatever you want. Let us all go back to the compound, please, and we will give you anything. Money, medicine, anything.”

  The killer made a high, shrill yelp and a shiver shook his whole body. He giggled, and a dribble of blood escaped through his neat white teeth to splash down onto the dirty green nylon of his tracksuit top.

  “You think I care bout that stuff?” he said. “You don’t see this hole in my neck? I am dead in two days. You think I care bout money and medicine?”

  “So what do you want?” Andrew said.