Little Bee

I blinked and I looked around at the spare bedroom. From the clean white walls and the green velvet curtains, I saw the jungle creepers shrink back into the darkest corners of the room.

“You seemed miles off.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I still have not quite woken up.”

Sarah took my arm, and we went to find Charlie.

Charlie was very excited when Sarah told him we were going on an adventure. He said, “Is we going to Gotham City?”

Sarah laughed. “Are we going. Yes, Batman, we’re going to Gotham City.”

“In the Batmobile?”

Sarah opened her mouth to say yes but Lawrence was in the kitchen with us and he shook his head.

“No, let’s take the bat train. It’s a nightmare trying to park a Batmobile on a weekday.”

Charlie looked disappointed, but as soon as we were out of the door he raced ahead of us along the pavement with his bat cape blowing behind him.

It was the first time I had been on a train. Charlie was very proud to show me how to sit on the seat and to explain how he was driving the train. It looked complicated. There were a great many levers and buttons and switches, although none of them were visible to my eyes. Charlie drove the train to a station called Waterloo and then the doors opened and a voice said, All change please, all change. Charlie moved his lips so that I would understand it was his voice.

The station was very crowded with the ghosts I saw the first time I was in London. There were thousands of them and they did not look at one another in the eyes and they moved very fast but they never bumped into one another or even touched one another at all. The ghosts seemed to know their routes exactly, as if they were racing along unseen paths through the night and the jungle that was closing in all around everything, closing in with the sound of men screaming and the smoke of burning houses. I shut my eyes tight to squeeze all that memory out of them.

Sarah walked ahead of us, holding Charlie’s hand, and I walked behind with Lawrence. We left the station and we went out onto a bridge over a busy street. The day was very sunny already. When we stepped out into the light the heat and the roar of the traffic and the sharp smell of the burned gasoline made me dizzy.

“Nice day for it,” said Lawrence.

“Yes.”

“Shall I point out the sights? Just over there, that’s the Royal Festival Hall, and just to the right-over the top of that building? Those sort of capsules, slowly turning? That’s the London Eye.”

The sun blazed on the see-through skin of the capsules.

“I do not feel like sightseeing,” I said. “How can you pretend everything is normal between us?”

He shrugged. “How else would you like me to talk? You’ve got something on me, I’ve got something on you. It’s unpleasant but we’re stuck with each other, so we might as well just get on with it.”

“I do not think I can just pretend it is okay.”

“Well if you can’t pretend in London, where can you pretend?” He sniffed, and put on a pair of sunglasses, and waved his hand at the street. “I mean look,” he said. “There’s eight million people here pretending the others aren’t getting on their nerves. I believe it’s called civilization.”

I pressed my nails into the palms of my hands until I felt them sharper than my anger. We walked along for a while in silence. I looked at all the faces as we passed them by. Once I saw my mother, but when I looked more closely she was somebody else’s.

I did not know how I could feel so cold on such a hot and sunny day.

We were walking more quickly now because Charlie was very excited and he kept running ahead, pulling on Sarah’s arm to make her go faster. We came out from a dark passageway between two huge square concrete buildings, and there it was: the River Thames, with all the buildings of London spread out in a line of great power on the far bank. We pushed through the crowds across the wide stone walkway and we leaned on the iron railings to look out over the river. There was no wind, and the waves on the water were small and silky. The light was very bright and there were passengers sunning themselves on the open tops of the pleasure boats that sailed between the bridges.

“Isn’t this nice?” said Sarah.

Charlie climbed up on the iron railing and he stood next to his mother, firing some unseen gun at the passengers on the boats. The noise that this weapon made was choom-choom-choom and the effect that it had was to make the boat passengers relax in their bright white seats and lean their smiling faces up into the blue sky and drink cool clear water from bottles. Lawrence stood beside Sarah and he put a hand on her shoulder. Charlie, Sarah, and Lawrence stood looking over the river but I turned my back to it in anger.