Little Bee - Chris Cleave [113]
“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.”
Charlie was running and laughing and I can tell you that a dozen of the local children were running with him, and laughing and shouting because if there is one thing you do not see very often on the beach in my country, it is a white superhero less than one meter in height, with sand and salt water on his cape. Charlie was laughing with the other children, running and playing and chasing.
It was hot, and I dug my toes down into the cooler sand.
“Sarah,” I said. “How long do you think you will stay?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to try coming with me to England? We could try to get you papers this time.”
I shrugged. “They do not want people like me.”
Sarah smiled. “I’m English and I want people like you. Surely I’m not the only one.”
“People will say you are naive.”
Sarah smiled.
“Let them,” she said. “Let them say whatever gives them comfort.”
We sat for a long time and watched the sea.
In the afternoon the sea breeze blew and I fell asleep for a little while, half in and half out of the shade of the trees at the top of the beach. The sun warmed my blood until I could not keep my eyes open, and the sea roared in and out, in and out, and my breathing slipped into time with the waves as I began to dream. I dreamed we all stayed together in my country. I was happy. I dreamed I was a journalist, telling the stories of my country, and we all lived in the same house—me and Charlie and Sarah—in a tall, cool three-story house in Abuja. It was a very beautiful home. It was the sort of place I never even dreamed of, back in the days when our Bible ended at the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew. I was happy in this house that I dreamed of, and the cook and the housekeeper smiled at me and called me princess. Early each morning the garden boy brought me a scented yellow rose for my hair, trembling on its fine green stem with the dew of the night still on