Little Bee

Three weeks and five thousand miles on a tea ship—maybe if you scratched me you would still find that my skin smells of it. When they put me in the immigration detention center, they gave me a brown blanket and a white plastic cup of tea. And when I tasted it, all I wanted to do was to get back into the boat and go home again, to my country. Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from. Also it vanishes—the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup. It disappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist. I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other. How sad that must make you—like children who long for absent mothers. I am sorry.

So, we drank tea in Sarah’s kitchen. Charlie was still asleep in his bedroom at the top of the stairs. Sarah put her hand on mine.

“We need to talk about what happened,” she said. “Are you ready to talk about that? About what happened after the men took you away down the beach?”

I did not reply straightaway. I sat at the table, with my eyes looking all around the kitchen, taking in all the new and wonderful sights. For example there was a refrigerator in Sarah’s kitchen, a huge silver box with an icemaker machine built into it. The front of the icemaker machine was clear glass and you could see what it was doing inside there. It was making a small, bright cube of ice. It was nearly ready. You will laugh at me—silly village girl—for staring at an ice cube like this. You will laugh, but this was the first time I had seen water made solid. It was beautiful—because if this could be done, then perhaps it could be done to everything else that was always escaping and running away and vanishing into sand or mist. Everything could be made solid again, yes, even the time when I played with Nkiruka in the red dust under the rope swing. In those days I believed such things were possible in your country. I knew there were large miracles just waiting for me to discover them, if only I could find the center, the source of all these small wonders.

Behind the cold glass, the ice cube trembled on its little metal arm. It glistened, like a human soul. Sarah looked at me. Her eyes were shining.

“Bee?” she said. “I really need to know. Are you ready to talk about it?”

The ice cube was finished. THUNK, it went, down into the collecting tray. Sarah blinked. The icemaker started making a new cube.

“Sarah,” I said, “you do not need to know what happened. It was not your fault.”

Sarah held my hands between hers.

“Please, Bee,” she said. “I need to know.”

I sighed. I was angry. I did not want to talk about it, but if this woman was going to make me do it then I would do it quickly and I would not spare her.

“Okay Sarah,” I said. “After you left, the men took us away down the beach. We walked for a short time, maybe one hour. We came to a boat on the sand. It was upside down. Some of its planks were broken. It looked like it had been broken by a storm and thrown up onto the beach and left there. The underside of the boat was white from the sun. All the paint had cracked and peeled off it. Even the barnacles on the boat were crumbling off it. The hunters pushed me under the boat and they told me to listen. They said they would let me go, once it was over. It was dark under the boat, and there were crabs moving around under there. They raped my sister. They pushed her up against the side of the boat and they raped her. I heard her moaning. I could not hear everything, through the planks of the boat. It was muffled, the sound. I heard my sister choking, like she was being strangled. I heard the sound of her body beating against the planks. It went on for a very long time. It went on into the hot part of the day, but it was dark and cool under the boat. At first my sister shouted out verses from the scriptures but later her mind began to go, and then she started to shout out the songs we sang when we were children. In the end there were just screams. At first they were screams of pain but finally they changed and they were like the screams of a newborn baby. There was no grief in them. They were automatic. They went on and on. Each scream was exactly the same, like a machine was making them.”

I looked up and I saw Sarah staring at me. Her face was completely white and her eyes were red and her hands were up to cover her mouth. She was shaking and I was shaking too, because I had never told this to anyone before.