Little Bee by Chris Cleave Page B

a kind woman. I asked her why was she doing this good thing for us. She said it was
because we were all human beings. I said, Excuse me miss
but I do not think Yevette is a human being. I think she is another species
with a louder mouth. Yevette and the farmer’s wife started laughing
then, and we talked for a little while about where we had all come from and
where we were going to. She told me the direction to go to
Kingston-upon-Thames, but she also told me that I shouldn’t. You don’t want to go to the suburbs, dear, she said. Neither fish nor flesh, the suburbs. Unnatural places, full of unnatural people. I laughed. I told her, Maybe I will fit right in.
    The
farmer’s wife was surprised when we asked for five plates instead of four, but
she brought them anyway. We divided the food into five portions, and we gave
the biggest helping to the daughter of the woman with no name, because she was
still growing.
    That
night I dreamed about my village before the men came. There was a swing that
the boys had made. It was the old tire of a car, and the boys had tied ropes
around it and suspended it from the high branch of a tree. This was a big old
limba tree and it grew a little way apart from our homes, near to the
schoolhouse. Even before I was big enough to go on the swing, my mother would
sit me down in the dark red dust by the trunk of the limba so I could watch the
big children swinging. I loved to listen to them laughing and singing. Two, three, four children at once, all ways up, with legs and arms
and heads all tangled up and dragging in the red scrape of dust at the lowest
point of the swing. Aie! Ouch! Get off me in the name of god! Do not
push! There was always a lot of chatter and joking around the swing, and up
above my head in the branches of the limba tree there were grumpy hornbills
that shouted back at us. Nkiruka would get down from the swing sometimes and
pick me up in her arms and give me little pieces of soft uncooked dough to
squeeze between my chubby fingers.
    Everything
was happiness and singing when I was a little girl. There was plenty of time
for it. We did not have hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or
sadness either, because none of these had been connected to our village yet. I
sat in between the roots of my limba tree and I laughed while I watched Nkiruka
swinging back and fro, back and fro. The tether of the swing was very long, so
it took a long time for her to travel from one end of its swing to the other. It
never looked like it was in a rush, that swing . I used
to watch it all day long and I never realized I was watching a pendulum
counting down the last seasons of peace in my village.
    In
my dream I watched that tire swinging back and fro, back and fro, in that
village we did not yet know was built on an oil field and would soon be fought
over by men in a crazy hurry to drill down into the oil. This is the trouble
with all happiness—all of it is built on top of something that men want.
    I
dreamed of watching Nkiruka swinging back and fro, back and fro, and when I
woke up there were tears in my eyes and in the light of the moon I was watching
something else swinging back and fro, back and fro. I could not tell what it
was. I wiped the tears from my eyes and I opened them fully, and then I saw
what it was that was swinging through the air at the end of my bed.
    It
was a single Dunlop Green Flash trainer. The other one had fallen off the foot
of the woman with no name. She had hanged herself from one of the long chains
that reached up to the roof. Her body was naked apart from that one shoe. She
was very thin. Her ribs and her hipbones were sharp. Her eyes bulged open and
pointed up into thin blue light. They glittered. The chain had crushed her neck
as thin as her ankle. I watched the Dunlop Green Flash trainer and the bare
dark brown foot with its gray sole, swinging back and fro past the end of my
bed. The Green Flash trainer glowed in the moonlight, like a slow and