Little Bee

Lawrence stared at me, and his face was thin and sad in the orange glow of the streetlamps filtering in through the yellow silk blinds. The flutter in my stomach surprised me, and I realized that the hairs on my arms were up.

“Sarah,” he said, “I honestly don’t think you know how hard this is.”

seven

VERY EARLY THE NEXT morning, Sarah looked into my room.

“I’m glad you’re awake,” she said. “We’ve run out of milk for Charlie’s breakfast, so I’m popping down to the shop before he wakes up. Two minutes. Do you want to come?”

It was raining, so we went in Sarah’s car. The windscreen wipers squeaked across the glass. Sarah chewed her lip between her teeth.

“Look,” she said. “ Lawrence staying overnight. I realize it must look a bit sudden. So I wanted to have this chat with you. I just wanted you to understand.”

I laughed. Sarah was surprised and she looked across at me.

“It is not hard to understand,” I said. “We are all trying to be happy in this world. I am happy because I do not think the men will come to kill me today. You are happy because you can make your own choices. And Lawrence is your choice, right?”

Sarah laughed and shook her head while she steered through the rain.

“Well,” she said. “That was a lot easier than I thought it would be.”

I smiled. It was good to see her laughing like this.

I said to her, “I do not think you are wrong for living the life you were born in. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf, that is the proverb in my country.”

“That’s beautiful,” said Sarah.

“Actually that is not the proverb in my country.”

“No?”

“No! Why would we have a proverb with wolves in it? We have two hundred proverbs about monkeys, three hundred about cassava. We talk about what we know. But I have noticed, in your country, I can say anything so long as I say that is the proverb in my country. Then people will nod their heads and look very serious.”

Sarah laughed again.

“That is a good trick,” she said. “Isn’t that what you say, Bee?”

I smiled. Happiness for Sarah was a long future where she could live the life of her choice. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf and a bee must be a bee. And when they run out of milk, all God’s creatures must go to the shop.

Sarah looked across at me from the driving seat.

“Bless you for understanding,” she said.

I understood, but Sarah’s happiness and Sarah’s future are more things I would have to explain to the girls from back home.

A country’s future is found in its natural resources. It is my country’s biggest export. It leaves so quickly through our seaports, the girls from my village could never even see it and they could not know what it looked like. Actually the future looks like gasoline. I discovered this when I was reading the newspapers in the detention center, and finally I made sense of what had happened to me back home. What had happened was, the oil companies had discovered a huge reserve of the future underneath my village. To be precise what they discovered was crude oil, which is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.

The men came while we were preparing the evening meal, while the blue wood smoke mixed with the thick steam of the cassava pots in the golden evening sun. It happened so quickly that the women had to grab us children and run with us into the jungle. We hid there while we listened to the screams of the men who stayed behind to fight.

On the dashboard of Sarah’s car, a light went on.

“Oh,” she said. “We need petrol.”

Water sprayed up off the rainy road. Sarah turned the car into a service station. We got out. There were no other cars. I listened to the rain beating down on the canopy above the gasoline pumps. Sarah looked at me as she held the gasoline hose.

“Do you still want to stay?” she said.

I nodded.

The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high-pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it. The nozzle of the gasoline hose went right inside the fuel tank of Sarah’s car, so that the transfer of the fluid was hidden. I still do not know what gasoline truly looks like. If it looks the way it smells on a rainy morning, then I suppose it must flash like the most brilliant happiness, so intense that you would go blind or crazy if you even looked at it. Maybe that is why they do not let us see gasoline.

When the filling was finished, Sarah went inside the service-station shop to pay. She came out with a large plastic bottle of milk, and we drove back to the house. It was still only six thirty in the morning.

Sarah closed the front door behind us and she yawned.

“Charlie won’t be up for an hour at least,” she said. “I think I might go back to bed.”

I nodded. Sarah smiled. On her face was a look of relief. I realized: this is what you can do for her, Little Bee. You can understand.

I went into the kitchen and I filled the kettle to make myself a drink of tea.