Little Bee

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.

The people here by the river were not like the ghosts from the train station. They were walking slowly. They were enjoying themselves, and smiling, and eating hot dogs and ice creams. Near to where we were standing, a man was selling silver balloons, and souvenir postcards, and plastic masks of the British Royal Family. The tourists wore these masks to have their photographs taken with the Houses of Parliament behind them on the far side of the river, which made everybody laugh very much. With their fingers some of them made the V-for-victory sign in their photographs, and this made them laugh even more.