Little Bee - Chris Cleave [111]
“Why is the child dressed in this fashion?” he said.
Sarah looked straight back at him. She said, “The child believes he has special powers.”
The commander grinned. “Well, I am just a man,” he said. “I will not arrest any of you at this time.”
Everybody laughed, but the military police followed our taxi from the airport. I was very frightened but Sarah gripped my hand. I will not leave you, she said. So long as Charlie and I are here, you are safe. The police waited outside our hotel. We stayed there for two weeks, and so did they.
The window of our room looked out over Abuja. Tall buildings stretched back for miles, tall and clean, some covered in silver glass that reflected the long, straight boulevards. I watched the city as the sunset made the buildings glow red, and then I watched all night. I could not sleep.
When the sun rose it shone between the horizon and the base of the clouds. It blazed on the golden dome of the mosque while the four tall towers were still lit up with electric lights. It was beautiful. Sarah came out onto the balcony of our room, and she found me standing there and staring.
“This is your city,” she said. “Are you proud?”
“I did not know such a thing existed in my country. I am still trying to feel that it is mine.”
I stood there all morning while the heat of the day grew stronger and the streets grew busy with car taxis and scooter taxis and walking sellers with their swaying racks of T-shirts and head-scarves and medicine.
Charlie sat inside, watching cartoons with the air-conditioning on, and Sarah laid out all of Andrew’s papers on a long, low table. On each pile of papers we placed a shoe, or a lamp or a glass, to stop them blowing in the breeze from the big mahogany fans that spun on the ceiling. Sarah explained how she was going to write the book that Andrew had been researching. I need to collect more stories like yours, she said. Do you think we can do that here? Without going down to the south of the country?
I did not answer. I looked through some of the papers and then I went and stood on the balcony again. Sarah came and stood beside me.
“What is it?” she said.
I nodded my head down at the military police car waiting on the street below. Two men leaned against it, in green uniforms with berets and sunglasses. One of them looked up. He said something when he saw us, and his colleague looked up too. They stared up at our balcony for a long time, and then they lit cigarettes and sat in the car, one in the front seat and one in the backseat, with the doors open and their heavy boots resting on the tarmac.
“You know it is not a good idea to collect stories,” I said.
Sarah shook her head. “I don’t agree. I think it’s the only way we’ll make you safe.”
“What do you mean?”
Sarah lifted her eyes up from the street.
“Our problem is that you only have your own story. One story makes you weak. But as soon as we have one hundred stories, you will be strong. If we can show that what happened to your village happened to a hundred villages, then the power is on our side. We need to collect the stories of people who’ve been through the same things as you. We need to make it undeniable. Then we can send the stories to a lawyer and we’ll let the authorities know, if anything happens to you, those stories will go straight to the media. Do you see? I think that was what Andrew hoped to do with his book. It was his way of saving girls like you.”
I shrugged. “What if the authorities are not afraid of the media?”
Sarah nodded, slowly. “That’s a possibility,” she said. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
I looked out across the towers of Abuja. The great buildings shimmered in the heat, as if they were insubstantial, as if they could be awoken from and forgotten with a splash of cold water to the face.
“I do not know,” I said. “I do not know how things are in my country. Until I was fourteen years old