Little Bee

On the concrete floor of the cell I saw a tear splash, and I looked up into Sarah’s face.

“You know what the worst thing is?” she said. “If I had tried harder, I suppose I could have saved Andrew too.”

When she went, the cell door closed behind her with a noise like the boom of thunder on the first day of the rainy season.

They came for me at four o’clock in the morning. There were three uniformed immigration officers, one woman and two men. I heard their shoes banging on the linoleum of the corridor. I had been awake all night, waiting for them. I was still wearing the summer dress that Sarah had given me, with the pretty lace around the neck. I stood up, so I was waiting for them when they banged open the door. We walked out of the cell. The door closed behind me. Boom, went the door, and that was it. Out in the street it was raining. They put me in the back of a van. The road was wet and the headlights pushed streaks of light along it. One of the back windows was half open. The back of the van had a smell of vomit, but the air that blew in smelled of London. All along the streets the windows of the apartments were silent and blind, with their curtains closed. I disappeared without anyone to see me go. The female officer handcuffed me to the back of the seat in front.

“It is not necessary to handcuff me,” I said. “How could I run away?”

The female officer looked back at me. She was surprised.

“You speak pretty good English,” she said. “Most of the people we bring in don’t speak a word.”

“I thought if I learned to speak like you people do, I would be able to stay.”

The officer smiled.

“It doesn’t matter how you talk, does it?” she said. “You’re a drain on resources. The point is you don’t belong here.”

The van turned the corner at the end of the street. I looked through the metal grille on the back window of the van and I watched two long rows of semidetached houses disappear. I thought about Charlie, fast asleep under his duvet, and I thought of his brave smile, and my heart ached that I would never see him again. There were tears in my eyes.

“But please, what does it mean?” I said. “What does it mean, to belong here?”

The female officer turned to look at me again.

“Well, you’ve got to be British, haven’t you? You’ve got to share our values.”

I turned away from the woman and looked out at the rain.

Three days later a different group of officers took me from another holding cell and they put me in a minibus with one other girl. They took us to Heathrow Airport. They took us straight through the queue at the airport terminal and they put us in a small room. We were all wearing handcuffs. They told us to sit down on the floor-there were no chairs there. There were twenty others in the room, men and women, and it was very hot in there. There was no fresh air and it was difficult to breathe. A guard was standing at the front of the room. She had a truncheon and a can of pepper spray in her belt. I asked her, What is happening here? The guard smiled. She said, What is happening here is that a large number of flying machines that we call AEROPLANES are taking off and landing on a long stretch of tarmac that we call a RUNWAY, because this is a place that we call an AIRPORT, and soon one of those aeroplanes is going to set off for UM-BONGO LAND, where you come from, and you’re going to be on it. Yeah? Whether you like it or bloody not. Now, has anyone else got any questions?

We waited for a long time. Some of the others were taken out of the room. One of them cried. Another, a thin man, he was angry. He tried to resist the guard, and she hit him twice in the stomach with her truncheon. After that he was quiet.

I fell asleep sitting down. When I woke up, I saw a purple dress and long brown legs in front of me.

“Yevette!” I said.

The woman turned around to look at me, but it was not Yevette. At first I was sad not to see my friend, and then I understood that I was happy. If this was not Yevette, then there was a chance that Yevette was still free. I thought of her walking down the street in London, in her purple flip-flops with her eyebrows painted in pencil, buying a pound of salt fish and laughing, WU-ha-ha-ha! into the bright blue sky. And I smiled.

The woman who was not Yevette, she made an angry face at me. What is wrong with you? she said. You think they are sending us on holiday?

I smiled. Yes, I said. I think it will be the holiday of a lifetime.

You should not joke about these things. She turned around and she would not talk to me anymore, and when they called her to stand up for her flight, she walked away without making any trouble and she did not once look back at me.

When I saw her go, my situation became real for me and I was scared now, for the first time. I was scared of going back. I cried and I watched my own tears soaking away into the dirty brown carpet.