Little Bee

I shook my head. “No Charlie. It is a very hot day. You cannot run around in your costume like that or you will boil, I am telling you, and then you will be no good to us at all to fight the baddies. Take off your Batman costume, right now, and then you will just be yourself and you can go to cool off in the sea.”

“No!”

“Please Charlie, you must. It is for your health.”

Charlie shook his head. I stood him in the sand and I knelt down beside him and I whispered in his ear.

“Charlie,” I said, “do you remember when I promised you, if you took off your costume, that I would tell you my real name?”

Charlie nodded.

“So do you still want to know my real name?”

Charlie tilted his head to one side so that both of the ears of his mask flopped over. Then he tilted it to the other side. Then finally he looked straight at me.

“What is yours real name?” he whispered.

I smiled. “My name is Udo.”

“Ooh-doh?”

“That is it. Udo means, peace. Do you know what peace is, Charlie?”

Charlie shook his head.

“Peace is a time when people can tell each other their real names.”

Charlie grinned. I looked over his shoulder. The soldiers were walking across the sand toward us now. They were walking slowly, with their rifles in their hands pointing down at the sand, and while the soldiers walked, the waves rolled in to the beach and crashed upon the sand one by one at this final end of their journey. The waves rolled and rolled and there was no end to the power of them, cold enough to wake a young girl from dreams, loud enough to tell and retell the future. I bent my head and I kissed Charlie on the forehead. He stared at me.

“Udo?” he said.

“Yes Charlie?”

“I is going to take off mine Batman costume now.”

The soldiers were almost on us now.

“Hurry then, Charlie,” I whispered.

Charlie pulled off the mask first, and the local children gasped when they saw his blond hair. Their curiosity was greater than their fear of the soldiers and they ran with their skinny legs straining toward the place where we were, and then when Charlie took off the rest of his costume and they saw his skinny white body they said, Weh! because such a child had never before been seen in that place. And then Charlie laughed, and he slipped out from my arms and I stood up and stayed very still. Behind me I felt the soft shocks of the soldiers’ boots in the sand and in front of me all of the local children ran with Charlie down to the crashing water by the rocky point. I felt the hard hand of a soldier on my arm but I did not turn around. I smiled and I watched Charlie running away with the children, with his head down and his happy arms spinning like propellers, and I cried with joy when the children all began to play together in the sparkling foam of the waves that broke between worlds at the point. It was beautiful, and that is a word I would not need to explain to the girls from back home, and I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language. The waves still smashed against the beach, furious and irresistible. But me, I watched all of those children smiling and dancing and splashing one another in salt water and bright sunlight, and I laughed and laughed and laughed until the sound of the sea was drowned.

If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.

– Nigerian proverb

notes

THANK YOU FOR READING this story. The characters in it are imagined, although the action takes place in a reality which is intended to call to mind our own.

The “Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre” in the text does not exist in the real world, although some of its particulars would seem familiar to the thousands of asylum seekers detained in the ten real immigration removal centers [1]^. which are operational in the United Kingdom at the time of writing, since they are based on the testimony of former interns of these places.

Similarly, the beach on which Sarah and Little Bee first meet in the novel is not intended to correspond to any specific location in Nigeria, although the interethnic and oil-related conflicts from which Little Bee is fleeing are real and ongoing in the Delta region of that country, which at the time of writing is the world’s eighth-biggest petroleum-exporting nation. [2]^. In the period leading up to the writing of this novel, Nigeria was the second-biggest African exporter of asylum applicants to the United Kingdom. [3]^.

Jamaica is an order of magnitude less significant as a point of origin of asylum seekers, although during the same period between one hundred and one thousand Jamaicans each year sought asylum in the United Kingdom. [4]^.