Little Bee

My job was to find people who would normally be scared to talk to a foreign journalist, but who talked to Sarah because I promised them that she was a good person. These were people who believed what I told them, because my story was the same as theirs. I discovered there were a lot of us in my country, people who had seen things the oil companies wished we had not seen. People the government would prefer to be silent. We went all around the southeast of my country in an old white Peugeot, just like the one that my father used to have.

I sat in the passenger seat and Sarah drove, with Charlie smiling and laughing in the back. We listened to the music on the local radio stations, turned up very loud. The red dust from the road blew everywhere, even inside the car, and when we took off Charlie’s Batman suit to wash him at the end of each day, his white skin had two bright red diamonds on it, where the eyeholes of his mask had been.

Sometimes I got scared. Sometimes when we arrived in a village, I saw the way some of the men looked at me and I remembered how me and my sister were hunted. I wondered if there was still money from the oil companies, for anyone who would shut my mouth for once and all. I was scared of the village men, but Sarah just smiled. Relax, she said. Remember what happened at the airport. Nothing’s going to happen to you so long as I’m here.

And I did begin to relax. In each village I found people with stories, and Sarah wrote them down. It was easy. We started to be happy. We thought we had done enough to save ourselves. We thought, this is a good trick.

One night when we had been in my country for two weeks, I dreamed of my sister Nkiruka. She walked up out of the sea. First the surface of the water swirled from the movement of something unseen and then, in the hollow between two waves, I saw the top of her head with white foam dancing around it. Then my sister’s face rose above the water and slowly she walked up the beach toward me and she stood there smiling and wearing the Hawaiian shirt that I was wearing when they released me from detention. It was soaked with salt water. My sister spoke my name once, and then she waited.

When Sarah woke up, I went to her. Please, I said, we have to go to the sea. I must say good-bye to my sister. Sarah looked at me for a long time, and then she nodded. We did not say anything. That morning Sarah gave the policemen much more money than before. We drove south to Benin City and we got there in the late afternoon. We stayed overnight in another hotel that was just the same, and the next morning we drove south again, to the coast. We left early, when the sun was still low in the sky and the light shining into the car windows was warm and golden. Charlie sighed and banged his heels on the backseat.

“Is we nearly there yet?” he said.

Sarah smiled at him in the rearview mirror.

“Nearly, darling,” she said.

The road ran out at one of the fishing villages they have in that place, and we stepped down onto the sand. Charlie laughed and ran down the beach to make sand castles. I sat on the beach next to Sarah and we looked out over the ocean. There was no sound except for the waves breaking on the beach. After a long time, Sarah turned to me.

She said, “I’m proud we’ve come this far.”

I took her hand. “You know, Sarah, since I left my country, often I think to myself, how would I explain these things to the girls back home?”

Sarah laughed and stretched her hands along the beach in both directions.

“Well?” said Sarah. “How would you explain this to the girls back home? I mean, this would take some explaining, wouldn’t you say?”

I shook my head. “I would not explain this to the girls back home.”

“No?”

“No, Sarah. Because today I am saying good-bye to all that. We are the girls back home now. You and me. There is nothing else for me to go back to. I do not need to tell this story to anyone else. Thank you for saving me, Sarah.”

When I said this I saw that Sarah was crying, and then I was crying too.

When the day became hotter, the beach filled up with people. There were fishermen who walked out into the waves and sent wide bright nets spinning out before them, and there were old men who came to sit and look at the sea, and mothers who brought their children to splash in the water.

“We should go and ask these people if anyone has a story,” I said.

Sarah smiled and pointed at Charlie. “Yes, but it can wait,” she said. “Look, he’s having such fun.”