I WOKE UP ON Sarah’s sofa. At first I did not know where I was. I had to open my eyes and look all around me. There were cushions on the sofa and they were made of orange silk. The cushions had birds and flowers embroidered on them. The sun was coming in through the windows, and these windows had curtains that reached all the way down to the floor. They were made of orange velvet. There was a coffee table with a glass top, so thick that it looked green from the side. On the shelf underneath the tabletop there were magazines. One was about fashion and one was concerned with how to make the home more beautiful. I sat up and put my feet on the floor. The floor was covered with wood.

If I was telling this story to the girls back home they would be asking me, How can a table be made of coffee and what is this thing called velvet and how come that woman you were staying with did not keep her wood in a pile at the side of the house like everybody else? How come she left it lying all over her floor, was she very lazy? And I would have to tell them: a coffee table is not made out of coffee, and velvet is a fabric as soft as the underside of infant clouds, and the wood on Sarah’s floor was not firewood, it was a SWEDISH-ENGINEERED FLOOR WITH THREE-STRIP ANTIQUE LACQUER AND MINIMUM 3MM REAL WOOD VENEER CERTIFIED BY THE FOREST STEWARDSHIP COUNCIL (FSC) AS BEING MANUFACTURED USING ETHICAL FORESTRY PRACTICES, and I know this because I saw a floor just like it advertised in the magazine that was underneath the coffee table and which concerned beautiful homes. And the girls from back home, their eyes would go wide and they would say, Weh, because now they would understand that I had finally arrived in a place beyond the end of the world—a place where wood was made by machines—and they would be wondering what sorcery I survived next.

Imagine how tired I would become, telling my story to the girls from back home. This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles. Or maybe you would like to, but you can’t. Your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house.

If I mention to you, casually, that Sarah’s house was close to a large park full of deer that were very tame, you do not jump up out of your seat and shout, My god! Fetch me my gun and I will go to hunt one of those foolish animals! No, instead you stay seated and you rub your chin wisely and you say to yourself, Hmm, I suppose that must be Richmond Park, just outside London.

This is a story for sophisticated people, like you.

I do not have to describe to you the taste of the tea that Sarah made for me when she came down into the living room of her house that morning. We never tasted tea in my village, even though they grow it in the east of my country, where the land rises up into the clouds and the trees grow long soft beards of moss from the wet air. There in the east, the plantations stretch up the green hillsides and vanish into the mist. The tea they grow, that vanishes too. I think all of it is exported. Myself I never tasted tea until I was exported with it. The boat I traveled in to your country, it was loaded with tea. It was piled up in the cargo hold in thick brown paper sacks. I dug into the sacks to hide. After two days I was too weak to hide anymore, so I came up out of the hold. The captain of the ship, he locked me in a cabin. He said it would not be safe to put me with the crew. So for three weeks and five thousand miles I looked at the ocean through a small round window of glass and I read a book that the captain gave me. The book was called Great Expectations and it was about a boy called Pip but I do not know how it ended because the boat arrived in the UK and the captain handed me over to the immigration authorities.

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.

“I could not see what they did to my sister. It was on the other side of the boat that the planks were broken. That is the side I could see through. The killer, the one with the wound in his neck, I could see him. He was far off from his men. He was walking in the shore break. He was smoking cigarettes from a packet he had taken out of the pocket of the guard he killed. He was looking out over the ocean. It looked as if he was waiting for something to come from there. Sometimes he put his hand up to touch the wound in his neck. His shoulders were down. It was as if he was carrying a weight.”

Sarah’s whole body was shaking, so hard that the kitchen table was trembling. She was crying.

“Your sister,” she was saying. “Your beautiful sister, oh my god, oh Jesus, I…”

I did not want to hurt Sarah any more. I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

“Near the end I heard Nkiruka begging to die. I heard the hunters laughing. Then I listened to my sister’s bones being broken one by one. That is how my sister died. Yes she was a beautiful girl, you are right. In my village they said she was the kind of girl that could make a man forget his troubles. But sometimes it does not work out like people say. When the men and the dogs were finished with my sister, the only parts of her that they threw into the sea were the parts that could not be eaten.”

Sarah stopped crying and shaking then. She was very still. She was holding on to her tea, like she would be blown away if she did not grip on to it.

“And you,” she whispered. “What happened to you?”

I nodded.

“In the afternoon it got very hot, even under the boat. A breeze started blowing from the sea. It blew sand up against the side of the boat. The sand hissed against the planks. I looked out through the gaps to see what was happening. Out past the surf there were seagulls gliding on the wind. They were very calm. Sometimes they dropped into the sea and swam back up with silver fish in their beaks. I looked at them very hard, because I thought that what had happened to my sister was going to happen to me now, and I wanted to fix my thoughts on something beautiful. But the men did not come for me. After they finished with my sister, the hunters and the dogs went up into the jungle to sleep. But the leader, he did not return to his men. He stood in the surf. The waves were breaking around his knees. He was leaning into the wind. Later it got so hot that the seagulls stopped their fishing. They were just floating on the waves with their heads tucked into their breasts, like this. Then the leader, he stepped forward into the waves. When the water came up to his chest he began to swim. He went straight out into the sea. The seagulls flew up out of his way and then they flapped back down. They only wanted to sleep. The man, he swam out, straight out, and soon I could not see him anymore. He disappeared and all I could see was this line, the line between the sea and the sky, and then it got so hot that even the line disappeared. That is when I came out from under the boat, because I knew the men would be sleeping. I looked all around. There was nobody on the beach and there was no shade. It was so hot I thought I might die just from the heat. I went down into the shore break and I made my clothes wet and I ran toward the hotel compound. I ran through the shallow water so that I would not leave marks on the sand for the men to follow. I came to the place where they murdered the guard. There were more seagulls there. They were fighting over the guard’s body. They flew up when I walked up the beach. I could not look at the guard’s face. There were these little crabs crawling in and out of his trouser leg. There was a wallet on the ground and I picked it up. It was Andrew’s wallet, Sarah. I am sorry. I looked inside. There were many plastic cards inside it. There was one that said DRIVING LICENSE and it had a photo of your husband. That is the one that had your address on it. That is the one that I took. There was another card too, his business card, the one with the telephone number, and I took that too. It blew out of my hand into the waves, but I got it back. Then I went to hide in the jungle, but I stayed where I could still see the beach. Then it began to get cooler and a truck drove up from the direction of the hotel compound. It was a canvas-top truck, a military one. Six soldiers jumped down from the back and they stood looking at the guard. They were poking at his body with the toes of their boots. There was a radio in the cab of the truck and it was playing “One” by U2. I knew this song. It was always playing in our home. This is because the men came from the city one day and they gave us clockwork radios, one to each family in the village. We were supposed to wind them up and listen to the World Service from the BBC, but my sister Nkiruka tuned ours in to the Port Harcourt music station instead. We used to fight over the little windup box because I liked to listen to the news and the current affairs. But now that I was hiding in the jungle behind the beach I wished I had never fought with my sister. Nkiruka loved music and now I saw that she was right because life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs. That is when I started to cry. I did not cry when they killed my sister but I did cry when I heard the music coming out of the soldiers’ truck because I was thinking, That is my sister’s favorite song and she will never hear it again. Do you think I am crazy, Sarah?”

Sarah shook her head. She was biting her nails.

“Everyone in my village liked U2,” I said. “Everyone in my country, maybe. Wouldn’t that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks. I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music. Do you know what? The first week I was in the detention center, U2 were number one here too. That is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.”

Sarah twisted her hands together on the table. She looked at me. Are you all right to go on? she said. Can you tell me how you got away?

I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “The guards were tapping their boots to the music. They rolled the body onto a sheet. They picked up the sheet by the corners and they lifted it into the truck. I thought I should run out to them and ask them to help me. But I was scared, so I stayed where I was. The soldiers drove back down the beach, and then it was very quiet again. When it was sunset I decided I did not want to go to the hotel compound. I was too scared of the soldiers, so I walked the other way. There were fruit bats flying all around. I waited till it was dark before I went past the place where they killed my sister. There was no moonlight, there was only a blue glow from the small creatures in the sea. Sometimes there was a freshwater stream that ran down the beach where I could drink. I walked all night and when it got light I went back into the jungle. I found a red fruit to eat. I did not know its name but I was hungry. It was bitter and I was very sick. I was very scared the men would come and find me again. When I had to go to the toilet I buried my excrement so that I would not leave any traces. Every noise I heard, I thought it was the men coming back. I said to myself, Little Bee, the men are coming to tear your wings off. It was like this for two more nights and on the last night I came to a port. There were red and green lights flashing out in the sea, and there was a long concrete seawall. I walked all along the top of the wall. There were waves crashing all over me, but there were no guards. Near the end of the seawall, on the land side, there were two ships tied up next to each other. The near one had an Italian flag. The other one was British, so I climbed over the Italian ship to get to it. I went down into the cargo hold. It was easy to find it because there were signs written in English. And English, you know, it is the official language of my country.”

I stopped talking then, and I looked down at the tablecloth. Sarah came around to my side of the table and she sat on the chair beside me and she hugged me for a long time. Then we sat there holding our cold cups of tea. I rested my head on Sarah’s shoulder. Outside, the day grew a little brighter. We did not say anything. After a short time I heard footsteps on the stairs, and then Charlie came into the kitchen. Sarah wiped her eyes and took a deep breath and quickly sat up straight. Charlie was wearing his Batman costume, but without the mask and without the belt that he kept his Batman tools in. It did not look as if he was expecting trouble, that morning. When he saw me he blinked. He was surprised that I was still there, I think. He rubbed his eyes sleepily and pressed the top of his head against his mother’s side.

“Itch till sleep eat I’m,” he said.

“Excuse me Batman?” said Sarah.

“I said, it’s still sleepy time. Why is you awake?”

“Well, Mummy and Little Bee woke up early this morning.”

“Mmm?”

“We had a lot to catch up on.”

“Mmm?”

“Oh god, Batman, is it that you don’t understand, or you don’t agree?”

“Mmm?”

“Oh, I see, darling, you are like a little bat with its sonar. You’ll keep sending out those Mmms until one of them bounces off something solid, won’t you?”

“Mmm?”

Charlie stared at his mother. She looked back at him for a while, and then she turned and smiled at me. Her tears were starting to flow again.

“Charlie has extraordinary eyes, doesn’t he? They’re like ecosystems in aspic.”

“No they isn’t,” said Charlie.

Sarah laughed. “Well darling, what I mean is, anyone can see there’s a lot going on in there.”

She tapped the side of Charlie’s head.

“Hmm,” said Charlie. “Why is you crying, Mummy?”

Sarah gave one big sob and then waved it away. “It’s why are you, Charlie, not why is you,” she said.

“Why are you crying, Mummy?”

Sarah collapsed. It was as if all the strength went out of her bones. She sank down so that her head rested on her arms on the tabletop and she wept.

“Oh, Charlie,” she said. “Mummy is crying because Mummy drank four G and Ts last night. Mummy is crying because of something Mummy has been trying not to think about. I’m so sorry, Charlie. Mummy is too grown up to feel very much anymore, and so when she does, it catches her by surprise.”

“Mmm?” said Charlie.

“Oh Charlie!” said Sarah.

She opened her arms and Charlie climbed up onto her lap and they hugged. It was not right for me to be there with them, so I went out into the garden and I sat down beside the fishpond. I thought about my sister for a long time.

Later, when the sun was higher in the sky and the noise of the traffic on the roads had grown into a constant rumble, Sarah came out into the garden to find me.

“Sorry,” she said. “I had to take Charlie to nursery.”

“It’s okay.”

She sat down next to me and she put her hand on my shoulder. “How are you feeling?”

I shrugged. “Okay,” I said.

Sarah smiled, but it was a sad smile. “I don’t know what to say,” she said.

“I do not know either.”

We sat there and we watched a cat rolling on the grass on the other side of the garden, in a bright patch of sunshine.

“That cat looks happy,” I said.

“Mmm,” said Sarah. “It’s the neighbor’s.”

I nodded. Sarah took a deep breath.

“Look, do you want to stay here for a while?” she said.

“Here? With you?”

“Yes. With me and Charlie.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I do not know. I am illegal, Sarah. The men can come any minute to send me back to my country.”

“Why did they let you out of the detention center, if you’re not allowed to stay?”

“They made a mistake. If you look good or you talk good, sometimes they make mistakes for you.”

“But you’re free now. They couldn’t just come for you, Bee. This isn’t Nazi Germany. There must be some procedure we can go through. Some appeal. I can tell them what happened to you over there. What will happen to you if you go back.”

I shook my head. “They will tell you Nigeria is a safe country, Sarah. People like me, they can just come and drive us straight to the airport.”

“I’m sure we can work something out, Bee. I edit a magazine. I know people. We could kick up a stink.”

I looked at the ground. Sarah smiled. She put her hand on my hand.

“You’re young, Bee. You don’t know how the world works yet. All you’ve seen is trouble, so you think trouble is all you’re going to get.”

“You have seen trouble too, Sarah. You are making a mistake if you think it is unusual. I am telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.”

Sarah flinched, as if something had struck her face.

“What is it?” I said.

She held her head in her hands. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s silly.”

I could not think of anything to say. I looked all around her garden for something to kill myself with, in case the men suddenly came. There was a shed at the far end of the garden, with a large garden fork leaning against it. That is a fine implement, I thought. If the men suddenly come, I will run with that fork and I will throw myself onto those sharp shining points.

I dug my nails into the soil of the flower bed beside us, and I squeezed the sticky soil between my fingers.

“What are you thinking, Bee?”

“Mmm?”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Oh. Cassava.”

“Why cassava?”

“In my village we grew cassava. We planted it and watered it and when it was high—like this—we plucked its leaves so that the growing would go into the root, and when it was ready we dug it up and peeled it and grated it and pressed it and fermented it and fried it and mixed it with water and made paste out of it and ate it and ate it and ate it. When I slept at night I dreamed of it.”

“What else did you do?”

“Sometimes we played on a rope swing.”

Sarah smiled. She looked away into the garden.

“There isn’t much cassava round here,” she said. “Tons of clematis. Plenty of camellias.”

I nodded. “Cassava would not grow in this soil.”

Sarah smiled, but she was crying at the same time. I held her hand. There were tears running down her face.

“Oh Bee,” she said. “I feel so bloody guilty.”

“This is not your fault, Sarah. I lost my parents and my sister. You have lost your husband. Both of us have lost.”

“I didn’t lose Andrew, Bee. I destroyed him. I cheated on him with another man. That’s the only reason we were in bloody Nigeria in the first place. We thought we needed a holiday. To patch things up. You see?”

I just shrugged my shoulders. Sarah sighed.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve never taken a holiday.”

I looked down at my hands. “Actually, I have never taken a man.”

Sarah blinked. “Yes. Of course. I forget you’re so young, sometimes.”

We sat still for a minute. Sarah’s mobile telephone rang. She talked. When the call was finished she looked very tired.

“That was the nursery. They want me to go and pick up Charlie. He’s been fighting with the other children. They say he’s out of control.” She bit her lip. “He’s never done that before.”

She picked up her telephone again and pressed some buttons. She held the telephone up to her ear while she looked over my shoulder, over the garden. She was still chewing her lip. After a few seconds, there was the sound of another telephone ringing. It was a small, distant sound, from inside the house. Sarah’s face went still. Then, slowly, she took the telephone down from her ear and pressed one of its buttons. From the house, the sound of the other telephone stopped.

“Oh Jesus,” said Sarah. “Oh no.”

“What? What is it?”

Sarah took a deep breath. Her whole body shuddered.

“I called Andrew. I don’t know why. It was completely automatic, I didn’t even think. You know…if there’s a problem with Charlie, I always call Andrew. I just forgot he was…you know. Oh god. I’m really losing it. I thought I was ready, you know, to hear what happened to you…and your sister. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t ready for it. Oh god.”

We sat there and I held her hand while she cried. Afterward, she passed her telephone to me. She pointed at the screen.

“He’s still in my address book. Do you see?”

The screen of her telephone said ANDREW, and then a number. Just ANDREW—there was no surname.

“Will you delete him for me, Bee? I can’t do it.”

I held her telephone in my hands. I had seen people speaking on mobile phones, but I always thought they would be very complicated. You will laugh at me—there she goes again, that silly little girl with the smell of tea in her skin and the stains of cassava tops still on her fingers—but I always thought there would be a frequency to find. I thought you would have to turn some dial until you found the signal of your friend, very small and faint, like tuning in to the BBC World Service on a windup radio. I supposed that mobile telephones were difficult like this. You would turn the dial through all the hissing and the squeaking sounds, and first you would hear your friend’s voice very strange and thin and nearly drowned out by howling—like your friend had been squashed as flat as a biscuit and dropped into a metal box full of monkeys—but then you would turn the dial just one tiny fraction more and suddenly your friend would say something like, God save the Queen!, and tell you all about the weather in the shipping areas around the offshore waters of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. After that, you could talk.

But actually I discovered that it was much easier than this to use a mobile telephone. Everything is so easy in your country. Next to the name, ANDREW, there was a thing that said OPTIONS, and I pressed it. Option three was DELETE, so I pressed that, and Andrew O’Rourke was gone.

“Thank you,” said Sarah. “I just couldn’t do it myself.”

She looked down at her phone for a long time.

“I feel so bloody frightened, Bee. There’s no one to call. Andrew was absolutely unbearable sometimes but he was always so sensible. I suppose it was crazy of me, to send Charlie straight back to the nursery, after yesterday. But I thought it would be good for him, to get back into the routine. There’s no one to ask anymore, Bee. Do you understand? I don’t know if I can do this on my own. Make all the right decisions for Charlie on my own. Years of it, do you see? The right behavior, the right schools, the right friends, the right university, the right wife. Oh god, poor old Charlie.”

I put my hand on her hand.

“If you want, I can come to the nursery with you,” I said.

Sarah tilted her head and looked at me for a long time. Then she smiled.

“Not dressed like that,” she said.

Ten minutes later I left the house with Sarah. I was wearing a pink summer dress she lent me. It was the prettiest thing I had ever worn. Around the neck it had fine white flowers stitched in, very delicate and fancy. I felt like the Queen of England. It was a sunny morning and there was a cool breeze and I skipped along the pavement behind Sarah and every time we passed a cat or a postman or a woman pushing a pram I smiled and I said, How do you do? All of them looked at me like I was a crazy girl, I do not know why. I was thinking, That is no way to greet your monarch.

I did not like the nursery. It was in a big house with tall windows, but the windows were not open even though it was a fine day. Inside, the air was stuffy. It smelled of toilets and poster paint, and this was exactly the smell of the therapy room in the immigration detention center, so I was feeling sad from the memory. In the detention center they did not open the windows because the windows did not open. In the therapy room they gave us poster paints and brushes and they told us we must express ourselves. I used a lot of red paint. When the therapeutic assistant looked at what I painted, she said it would be good for me to try to move on. I said, yes madam, it will be my pleasure. If you will just open a little window for me, or even better a door, I will be happy to move on right away. I smiled, but the therapeutic assistant did not think it was a good joke.

In Charlie’s nursery, the play leader did not think I was a good joke either. I knew she was the play leader because she had a badge on her green apron that said PLAY LEADER. She stared at me but she did not speak to me, she spoke to Sarah. She said, I’m sorry, we can’t have visitors, it’s policy. Is this the child’s carer? Sarah looked at me and then she turned back to the play leader. She said, Look, it’s complicated, okay? The play leader frowned. Finally she let me stand by the door while Sarah went into the room and tried to calm Charlie.

Poor Charlie. They had made him take off his Batman costume—that was what had started it. They had made him take it off because he had urinated in it. They wanted him to be clean, but Charlie did not want to be clean. He preferred to be stinking in his black mask and cape than to smell fresh in the white cotton overall they had put him in. His face was red and dirty with poster paint and tears. He was howling with rage. When anyone came near him he hit at them, with his small fists banging into their knees. He bit and he scratched and he screamed. He stood with his back pressed into the corner. He faced out into the room and he screamed, NO NO NO NO NO!

Sarah went up to him. She knelt down so her face was close to his. She said, Oh darling. Charlie stopped shouting. He looked at Sarah. His bottom lip trembled. Then his jaw became firm again. He leaned toward his mother, and he spat. He said, GO AWAY I WANT MY DADDY!

They were making the other children sit cross-legged on the floor, in the far corner of the room. They were having story time. The other children were facing away from Charlie’s corner, but they kept wriggling around to look over their shoulders with pale, scared faces. A woman was reading them the story. She wore blue jeans and white trainers and a turquoise sweatshirt. She was saying, and Max tamed them by the trick of TURN AROUND AND FACE FRONT, CAITLIN by the trick of staring straight into their eyes and saying EMMA, PLEASE CONCENTRATE, JAMES, STOP WHISPERING of staring straight into their eyes and saying WILL YOU FACE FRONT, OLLIE, THERE’S NOTHING GOING ON BEHIND YOU.

Sarah knelt on the floor and she wiped Charlie’s spit off her cheek. She was crying. She was holding her arms out to Charlie. Charlie turned around and hid his face in the corner. The woman reading the story was saying, be still.

I went toward Sarah. The play leader gave me a look which meant, I told you to stay by the door. I gave her a look back which meant, How dare you? It was a very good look. I learned it from Queen Elizabeth the Second, on the back of the British five-pound note. The play leader took one step back and I went up to Sarah. I touched her on the shoulder.

Sarah looked up at me.

“Oh god,” she said. “Poor Charlie, I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you normally do when he is like this?”

“I cope. I always cope. Oh god, Bee, I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’ve forgotten how to cope.”

Sarah covered her face with her hands. The play leader took her away and sat her down.

I went into the corner with Charlie. I stood next to him and I turned my face into the corner too. I did not look at him, I looked at the bricks and I did not say anything. I am good at looking at bricks and not saying anything. In the immigration detention center I did it for two years, and that is my record.

I was thinking what I would do in that nursery room, if the men came suddenly. It was not an easy room, I am telling you. For example, there was nothing to cut yourself with. All the scissors were made of plastic and their ends were round and soft. If I suddenly needed to kill myself in that room, I did not know how I was going to do it.

After a long time Charlie looked up at me. “What is you doing?” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders. “I am thinking how to escape from this place.”

Silence. Charlie sighed. “They tooked mine Batman costume.”

“Why did they do that?”

“Because of why I done a wee in my Batman costume.”

I knelt down and looked into Charlie’s eyes. “We are the same, you and me. I spent two years in a place like this. They make us do the things we do not want. Does it make you cross?”

Charlie nodded.

I said, “It makes me cross too.”

From behind us I could hear that the rest of the nursery was going back to its own business. Children were talking and shouting again, and the women were helping and laughing and scolding. In our corner, Charlie looked at the ground.

“I want mine daddy,” he said.

“Your daddy is dead, Charlie. Do you know what this means?”

“Yes. In heaven.”

“Yes.”

“Where’s heaven?”

“It is a place like this. Like a nursery, or a detention center, or a strange country far away. He wants to come home to you, but he can’t. Your daddy is like my daddy.”

“Oh. Is yours daddy dead too?”

“Yes Charlie. My daddy is dead and my mummy is dead and my sister is dead too. All of them are dead.”

“Why?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “The baddies got them, Charlie.”

Charlie twisted his hands together and bent down to pick up a small scrap of red paper from the floor. He tore at it, and he put it on his tongue to see how it tasted, and then it got stuck on his fingers because of the dampness. He held his tongue between his teeth so he could concentrate on peeling the paper off his fingers. Then he looked up.

“Is you sad like me?”

I made my face go into a smile. “Do I look sad, Charlie?”

Charlie looked at me. I tickled him under his arms and he started to laugh.

“Do we look sad, Charlie? Hey? You and me? Are we sad now?”

Charlie was laughing and wriggling finally, so I pulled him close to me and I looked in his eyes. “We are not going to be sad, Charlie. Not you and me. Especially not you, Charlie, because you are the luckiest boy in the world. You know why this is?”

“Why?”

“Because you have a mama, Charlie, and she loves you, and that is something, no?”

I gave Charlie a little push toward his mother and he ran to her. He buried his face against her dress and they hugged each other. Sarah was crying and smiling at the same time. She was speaking into Charlie’s ear, saying Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Then Charlie’s voice came, and it was muffled against his mother’s dress. He said, I’m NOT Charlie, Mummy, I’m Batman.

Sarah looked at me over Charlie’s shoulder and she just said, Thank you, not making any sound but just moving her lips.

We walked home from the nursery with Charlie swinging between us. The day was beautiful. The sun was hot and the air was buzzing with bees and the scent of flowers was everywhere. Beside the pavement there were the front gardens of the houses, full of soft colors. It was hard not to be full of hope.

“I think I shall teach you the names of all of the English flowers,” said Sarah. “This is fuchsia, and this is a rose, and this is honeysuckle. What? What are you smiling about?”

“There are no goats. That is why you have all these beautiful flowers.”

“There were goats, in your village?”

“Yes, and they ate all the flowers.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do not be sorry. We ate all the goats.”

Sarah frowned. “Still,” she said. “I think I’d rather have honeysuckle.”

“One day I will take you where I come from and you will eat only cassava for a week and then you will tell me if you would rather have honeysuckle or goat.”

Sarah smiled and leaned over to smell the honeysuckle blossom. Now I saw that she was crying again.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Sarah. “I can’t seem to stop. Oh look at me, I’m all over the place.”

Charlie looked up at his mother and I rubbed the top of his head to show him everything was okay. We started to walk again. Sarah blew her nose on a tissue. She said, “How long am I going to be like this, do you suppose?”

“It was one year for me, after they killed my sister.”

“Before you could think straight again?”

“Before I could think at all. At first I was just running, running, running—getting away from where it happened, you know? Then there was the detention center. It was very bad. It is not possible to think clearly in there. You have not committed a crime, so all you can think of is, When will I be let out? But they tell you nothing. After a month, six months, you start to think, Maybe I will grow old in here. Maybe I will die here. Maybe I am already dead. For the first year all I could think about was killing myself. When everyone else is dead, sometimes you think it would be easier to join them, you know? But you have to move on. Move on, move on, they tell you. As if you are stubborn. As if you are chewing on their flowers like a goat. Move on, move on. At five P.M. they tell you to move on and at six P.M. they lock you back in your cell.”

“Didn’t they give you any help at all in that place?”

I sighed.

“They tried to help us, you know? There were some good people. Psychiatrists, volunteers. But there was only so much they could do for us in there. One of the psychiatrists, she said to me, Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich. To be well in your mind you have first to be free, you see?”

Sarah pressed the tissue into the corners of her eyes. “I’m not sure it’s easier out here, Bee.”

“But I will help you.”

Sarah smiled. “You’re sixteen years old, Bee. You’re a refugee. You’re an orphan, for god’s sake. I’m the one who ought to be helping you.”

I pulled on Sarah’s shoulder to stop her. I took her left hand and I held it up to her. Charlie stood and looked up at us with big eyes.

“Look, Sarah. You have helped me enough already. You cut off your own finger for me. You saved my life.”

“I should have done more. I should have saved your sister too.”

“How?”

“I should have thought of something.”

I shook my head. “You did everything you could, Sarah.”

“But we should never have been in that situation, Bee. Don’t you see? We went on holiday to a place we had no right to be.”

“And what if you had not been there, Sarah? If you and Andrew had not been there, then Nkiruka and me, we would both be dead.” I turned to Charlie. “Your mummy saved my life, did you know that? She saved me from the baddies.”

Charlie looked up at his mother. “Like Batman?” he said.

Sarah smiled, the way I was used to now, with the tears starting to come to her eyes again. “Like Batmum.”

“Is that why you isn’t got your one finger?”

“Why I haven’t got one finger. Yes, darling.”

“Did the baddies take it? The Penguin?”

“No, darling.”

“Was it the Puffin?”

Sarah laughed.

“Yes darling, it was that awful Puffin.”

Charlie grinned. Naughty naughty Puffin, he said, and he ran ahead of us down the pavement, shooting baddies with a gun that was not visible to my eyes. Sarah turned to me.

“Bless you,” she said.

I held tight to her arm and I placed the palm of her left hand on the back of my left hand. I arranged my fingers underneath hers so that the only one of my fingers you could see was the one that was missing from Sarah’s hand. I saw how it could be. I saw how we could make a life again. I know it was crazy to think it but my heart was pounding, pounding, pounding.

“I will help you,” I said. “If you want me to stay then this is how it will be between us. Maybe I will only be able to stay for one month, maybe only one week. Someday, the men will come. But while I am here I will be like your daughter. I will love you as if you were my mother and I will love Charlie as if he was my brother.”

Sarah stared at me. “Goodness,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s just that on the way home from the nursery, with the other mothers, we usually talk about potty training and cakes.”

I dropped Sarah’s hand and I looked down at the ground.

“Oh Bee, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all just a little bit sudden and a little bit serious, that’s all. I’m so confused. I need a bit more time to think.”

I looked up at Sarah again. In her eyes I saw that it was new for her, this feeling of not knowing straightaway what to do. Her eyes were the eyes of a creature who has only just been born. Before it is familiar with its world, there is only terror. I knew this expression very well. Once you have seen as many people as I have being pushed in through the doors of the immigration detention center, it is easy to recognize this look. It made me want to remove that pain from Sarah’s life as quickly as I could.

“I am sorry, Sarah. Please forget about it. I will leave. You see? The psychiatrist at the detention center was right, she could not do anything for me. I am still crazy.”

Sarah did not say anything. She just held on to my arm and we followed Charlie down the street. Charlie was racing along and knocking the heads off the roses in the front gardens. He knocked them off with karate chops. They fell, each one with a sudden fall and a silent explosion of petals. Like my story with Nkiruka, like my story with Yevette. My feet crushed the petals as we passed over them, and I realized that my story was only made of endings.

Back at the house, we sat in Sarah’s kitchen. We drank tea again and I wondered if it would be the last time. I closed my eyes. My village, my family, that disappearing taste. Everything vanishes and drains away into sand or mist. That is a good trick.

When I opened my eyes again, Sarah was watching me.

“You know, Bee, I was thinking about what you said, about you staying. About us helping each other. I think you’re right. Maybe it is time to be serious. Maybe these are serious times.”