I WILL TELL YOU what happened, the day my story changed. It began very early in the morning, after the second night Lawrence stayed at Sarah’s house. It was still just dark. I was lying on the bed in the room Sarah gave me, but I was not sleeping. I was trying to see my future, but I could not see it at all.

Sarah came into the room about the same time as the daylight.

“How did you sleep?” she said.

“I heard the owls calling. Outside the window.”

“That’s nice. That’s one of the good things about living out of town.”

I rubbed my eyes and sat up on the bed.

Sarah said, “I’m taking the day off work. I thought we could go into London.”

I dropped my hands back down onto the blankets. I said, “I like it here.”

Sarah shook her head. “These are the suburbs,” she said. “Nothing ever happens here.”

I said, “That is why I like it.”

“Don’t be silly! Let’s all go to London. It’s a beautiful day, we’ll laze about on the South Bank and just watch the world go by. Charlie loves it there. Come on, it’ll be an adventure for you.”

I stood up and I said, Okay.

What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.

When we were children, me and Nkiruka, there was a place we went in the jungle near our village, a secret place, and that was where we played houses. The last time we went on that adventure my big sister was ten years old and I was eight. We were already too old for the game and both of us knew it, but we agreed to dream our dream one last time so that we could fix it into our memories, before we awoke from it forever.

We crept out of our village in the quietest part of the night. It was the year before the trouble first began with the oil, and two years before my sister started smiling at the older boys, so you can see that it was a peaceful time for our village of Understanding. There were no sentries guarding the road where the houses ended, and we walked out with no one to ask us where we were going. We did not walk out straightaway, though. First we had to wait until the rest of the village was asleep. It took longer than usual because the moon was full, and so bright that it gleamed on the metal roofs and sparkled on the bowl of water that me and my sister kept in our room to wash our faces with. The moon made the dogs and the old people restless, and there were long hours of barking and grumbling before silence came to the last of the houses.

Me and Nkiruka, we watched through the window until the moon grew to an extraordinary size, so big that it filled the window frame. We could see the face of the man in the moon, so close that we could see the madness in his eyes. The moon made everything glow so brightly it felt like day, and not an ordinary day at all but a baffling day, an extra day, like the sixth toe of a cat or like a secret message that you find hidden between the pages of a book you have read many times before and found nothing. The moon shone on the limba tree and it gleamed on the old broken Peugeot and it sparkled on the ghost of the Mercedes. Everything glowed with this pale dark brightness. That is when Nkiruka and I walked out into the night.

The animals and the birds were acting strangely. The monkeys were not howling and the night birds were quiet. We walked out through such a silence, I am not joking, it was as if the little silver clouds that drifted across the face of the moon were leaning down to the earth and whispering, shhh. Nkiruka’s eyes when she looked over at me, they were scared and excited at the same time. We held hands and we walked the mile through the cassava fields to the place where the jungle started. The paths of red earth between the rows of cassava, they gleamed in the moonlight like the rib bones of giants. When we reached the jungle it was silent and dark.

We did not speak, we just walked in before we got too scared. We walked for a long time, and the path got narrower, and the leaves and the branches closed in on us tighter and tighter until we had to walk one behind the other. The branches began closing in on the path so that we had to crouch down. Soon we could not carry on at all. So Nkiruka said, this is not the right path, now we must turn around, and we turned around. But that is when we realized that we were not on a path at all, because the branches and the plants were still very tight all around us. We carried on for a little way, weaving around the plants, but very soon we realized we had missed the path and we were lost.

Under the jungle it was so dark we could not see our own hands, and we held on to each other very close so we would not get separated. All around us now we could hear the noises of the jungle animals moving in the undergrowth, and of course they were very small animals, just rats and shrews and jungle pigs, but in the dark they became huge for us, as big as our fear and growing with it. We did not feel like pretending we had a refrigerator or a washing machine. It did not seem like the kind of night where such appliances would help.

I started to cry because the darkness was complete and I did not think it would ever end. But Nkiruka, she held me close and she rocked me and she whispered to me, Do not be sad, little sister. What is my name? And through my sobs I said, Your name is Nkiruka. And my sister rubbed my head and she said, Yes, that is right. My name means “the future is bright.” See? Would our mother and our father have given me this name if it was not true? As long as you are with me, little sister, the darkness will not last forever. I stopped crying then, and I fell asleep with my head on my sister’s shoulder.

I woke up before Nkiruka. I was cold, and it was dawn. The jungle birds were waking up and there was a pale light all around us, a thin gray-green light. All around us there were low fern plants and ground creepers, and the leaves were dripping with the dew. I stood up and took a few steps forward, because it seemed to me that the light was brighter in that direction. I pushed aside a low branch, and that is when I saw it. There was a very old jeep in the undergrowth. Its tires had rotted away to nothing and the creepers and the ferns were growing out through the arches of its wheels. The black plastic seats were tattered and the short rusty springs were poking out through them. Fungus was growing on the doors. The jeep was pointed away from me, and I walked closer.

I saw that the jungle and the jeep had grown together, so that there was no telling where the one ended and the other began—whether the jungle grew out of the jeep or the jeep grew out of the jungle. The foot wells of the jeep were filled with the rotted leaves of many seasons, and all the jeep’s metal had become the same dark color as the fallen leaves and the earth. Lying across the front seats there was the skeleton of a man. At first I did not see it because the skeleton was dressed in clothes the same color as the leaves, but the clothes were so torn and ragged that the white bones shone through them in the early-morning light. It looked as if the skeleton had become tired from driving and he had laid himself down across the two front seats to sleep. His skull lay on the dashboard, a little way apart from the rest of the skeleton. He was looking up at a small bright patch of sky, high above us through a gap in the forest canopy. I know this because the skull was wearing sunglasses and the sky was reflected in one of the lenses. A snail had crawled across this lens and eaten all the green mold and dirt off it, and it was in the glistening trail of this creature that the glass reflected the sky. Now the snail was halfway along one arm of the sunglasses. I went closer to look. The sunglasses had thin gold frames. On the corner of the lens that reflected the sky, the snail had crawled across the place where the glasses said Ray-Ban. I supposed that this had been the man’s name, because I was young and my troubles had still not found me and I did not yet understand that there could be reasons for wearing a name that was not one’s own.

I stood and looked down at Ray-Ban’s skull for a long time, watching my own face reflected in his sunglasses. I saw myself fixed in the landscape of my country: a young girl with tall dark trees and a small patch of sunlight. I stared for a long time, and the skull did not turn away and neither did I, and I understood that this is how it would always be for me.

After a few minutes I walked back to my sister. The branches closed behind me. I did not understand why the jeep was there. I did not know that there had been a war in my country nearly thirty years before. The war, the roads, the orders—everything that had brought the jeep to that place had been overgrown by the jungle. I was eight years old and I thought that the jeep had grown up out of the ground, like the ferns and the tall trees all around us. I thought it had grown up quite naturally from a seed in the red soil of my country, as native as cassava.

I knew that I did not want my sister to see it.

I followed my steps back to the place where Nkiruka was still sleeping. I stroked her cheek. Wake up, I said. The day has returned. We can find the way home now. Nkiruka smiled at me and sat up. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. There, she said. Didn’t I tell you that the darkness would not last forever?

“Is everything alright?” said Sarah.

I blinked and I looked around at the spare bedroom. From the clean white walls and the green velvet curtains, I saw the jungle creepers shrink back into the darkest corners of the room.

“You seemed miles off.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I still have not quite woken up.”

Sarah took my arm, and we went to find Charlie.

Charlie was very excited when Sarah told him we were going on an adventure. He said, “Is we going to Gotham City?”

Sarah laughed. “Are we going. Yes, Batman, we’re going to Gotham City.”

“In the Batmobile?”

Sarah opened her mouth to say yes but Lawrence was in the kitchen with us and he shook his head.

“No, let’s take the bat train. It’s a nightmare trying to park a Batmobile on a weekday.”

Charlie looked disappointed, but as soon as we were out of the door he raced ahead of us along the pavement with his bat cape blowing behind him.

It was the first time I had been on a train. Charlie was very proud to show me how to sit on the seat and to explain how he was driving the train. It looked complicated. There were a great many levers and buttons and switches, although none of them were visible to my eyes. Charlie drove the train to a station called Waterloo and then the doors opened and a voice said, All change please, all change. Charlie moved his lips so that I would understand it was his voice.

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.

The walkway was very wide, and the people stopped in big groups to watch the street artists who were performing in that place. There was a woman dressed all in gold, with a gold crown and gold paint on her face, and she stood on a gold box as still as a statue and only moved when money was dropped into a hat in front of her. Next to her there was a man who had disguised himself to look like a lizard. He hid in a big black box and when money was dropped into the top of the box he would pop out of it, whistling and snapping his hands to make the children laugh and squeal. I watched a little boy go to put a coin into the top of the box. He moved forward very slowly and suspiciously, with the coin held out in front of him. This is exactly how you would approach a giant money-eating lizard in a box, in case the clever idea came into his head to eat you up at the same time as the coin, and go home early with a belly full of boy instead of working all day for small change. The boy kept looking backward at his mother and his father, and they were smiling and urging him forward with an encouraging magic that they were pushing through the air to him with their hands, and they were saying to their boy, Go on, you can do it, go on.

And I was looking very hard at these people, because this is how it was with them: the boy’s father had dark skin, darker even than my own, and the boy’s mother was a white woman. They were holding hands and smiling at their boy, whose skin was light brown. It was the color of the man and the woman joined in happiness. It was such a good color that tears came into my eyes. I would not even try to explain this to the girls from back home because they would not believe it. If I told them that there were in this city children that were born of black and white parents, holding hands in the street and smiling with pride, they would only shake their heads and say, Little miss been-to is making up her tales again.

But I saw it with my eyes. I saw the boy finally reach the big black box where the lizard man was hiding, and I saw him stretching up on his toes to release the coin he was holding in his fist, and I saw the coin tumbling through the bright blue sky with the sunshine flashing upon it and the Queen of England’s face upon the coin—with her lips moving and saying Good Lord, we appear to be falling—and I saw the lizard man spring up out of his box and the boy run away giggling and screaming, and I saw his mother and his father lift him up, and I saw the three of them hugging one another tight and laughing while the crowd looked and laughed with them. This I saw with my own eyes, and when I looked around the crowd I saw that there was more of it. There were people in that crowd, and strolling along the walkway, from all of the different colors and nationalities of the earth. There were more races even than I recognized from the detention center. I stood with my back against the railings and my mouth open and I watched them walking past, more and more of them. And then I realized it. I said to myself, Little Bee, there is no them. This endless procession of people, walking along beside this great river, these people are you.

All that time in the detention center I was trapped by walls, and all those days living at Sarah’s house in a street full of white faces, I was trapped because I knew I could never go unnoticed. But now I understood that at last I could disappear into the human race, like Yevette chose to do, as simply as a bee vanishes into the hive. I did not even tell my feet to do it: they were full of joy and they took the first step all on their own.

And then they stopped. I thought, Little Bee, you have tried this before. You ran away, but your troubles traveled with you. How will you stop them from finding you this time? How will you stop them from shrieking in the night?

So I took a step back and I leaned against the railings again, to think. The sun was pleasant on the back of my neck. Lawrence was pointing out something to Charlie. Those columns on the bridge, he was saying. See how the water swirls around them?

On the walkway in front of me, the crowd kept coming. The adults were all walking but many of the children were gliding. There were children with scooters, children with bicycles, children with wheels hidden in their shoes. I smiled at a beautiful woman with brightly colored clothes. Mothers were calling out their children’s names—strong names like Sophie and Joshua and Jack—names with protecting magic.

And I thought to myself: that is it. My troubles will find me very easily in this town of stone and iron if I keep my foolish name that I chose at the edge of the jungle. So I will take a name that suits this city instead. I will blend in and I will wear a bright smile and colorful clothes and I will forget all about Charlie and Sarah and Lawrence and Andrew. With my new name, I will not even belong in Little Bee’s story anymore. Her story will end like this: One hot day in early summer Little Bee awoke weary from her troubles and she traveled to the banks of a great river in the company of three sorcerers—a boy with the powers of a bat, a good sorceress who once saved her life on purpose, and a bad sorcerer. And as the three enchanters gazed upon the mighty river, Little Bee turned away and spoke some magic words to herself, and when the others turned around Little Bee had flown away, and when they searched for her she had gone, and there was nothing to tell that the young girl had ever existed in this world except for a man’s large Hawaiian shirt that the good sorceress would wash and iron and fold at the back of a drawer because she would never be able to bear to throw it away.

I smiled as I looked into the great crowd of people passing by, and my feet started again to take the first steps to join them. I smiled even brighter when I felt the strength of those steps. All the power of the city was flowing up through the warm stones beneath my feet and entering my body. Yes, I thought. This is the moment. Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living.

To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well—here is the truth—you have to talk yourself out of it.

After six steps I was inside the crowd, getting pushed this way and that way. I did not mind and I did not look back. I let myself be taken along by this river of human souls that flowed beside the water. I was happy. I smelled the mud on the banks of the river and the dust of the gray pigeons’ wings and the flat dry smell of the ancient stone buildings and the hot breath of cigarettes and chewing gum that floated through the crowd. Everyone was talking and shouting in all the languages they had carried with them to release in that place, and the words mingled in the London air which understood them all. I listened very carefully to the sound of the city and I wondered what name it would whisper me to call myself.

The crowd took me up onto a bridge and I started to cross it. It was good to watch the passenger boats pass out of sight underneath my feet, with the people relaxing in their chairs, and the bald tops of the old men’s heads turning pink in the sun, and the children shouting under the bridge to hear the echoes of their voices, and the tourist guide on the boat’s loudspeakers booming out, WELCOME WILLKOMMEN BIENVENUE BENVENUTO BIENVENIDO À LONDRES.

Near the middle of the bridge there was a boy selling magazines. He had a shaved head and a sliver ring in his nose, like a bull, and a green coat with a fur hood even though it was so hot, and he had light brown skin and he smiled when he saw me staring at him.

“What?” he said.

I smiled back. “Nothing.”

“Big Issue?” he said.

“No,” I said, “I am going to be fine now, I think.”

The boy laughed. “No! I mean, do you want to buy one of these?” He spoke slowly and he held up a magazine. “See? It’s called, the Big Issue.”

I giggled and I bit the side of my hand because I was embarrassed.

“Sorry,” I said. “I am new in this town.”

The boy nodded. “Me too,” he said. “What’s your name?”

I looked behind him at the huge city rising out of the river, mighty and illuminated. Then I looked back in the boy’s eyes.

“My name is London Sunshine.”

The boy grinned. “What kind of a name is that?”

“It is the kind of name that starts off heavy but ends up light.”

The boy blinked at me, and the next moment we were both laughing together. This was a good trick. In this moment I very nearly named myself back to life.

But while I was laughing I looked back across the river, and my eyes fell on something they could not look away from. Sarah and Charlie and Lawrence were still there, standing at the railings, talking and looking out over the river. They had not seen me, but I could not stop looking at them. The smile disappeared from my face.

“What’s wrong?” said the magazine-seller boy.

Sarah and Lawrence had their arms around each other’s shoulders, but Charlie was looking very small and sad. He was staring down at the mud on the banks of the river. He was firing some kind of a weapon at the mud, but the weapon was having no effect. I put my hand up to my mouth.

“You all right?” said the magazine-seller boy. “Looks like someone walked on your grave.”

I could not answer. How should I start to explain to him that I did not trust Lawrence? How was I supposed to tell him how all of the bad stories begin: The men came and they…?

It would be a long story to explain why I did not like to leave Charlie like that.

“I have to go,” I said.

I turned away from the magazine seller and I walked back across the bridge with heavy steps.

When I got back to the place where the three of them were standing, Sarah turned and smiled at me.

“Where did you disappear to?” she said.

I shrugged. “Nowhere.”

I looked down at the river. Something swam close to the bank but it did not break the surface. All you could see were the swirls in the water where it passed beneath. I looked at Sarah and she looked back at me and we found that we could not smile anymore.

“What’s wrong?” She lowered her voice. “I’m sorry. Is all this water reminding you of the beach?”

I said, “It is only water.”

Charlie was pulling my hand. He wanted to play, so we went down some stone steps that were slimy with some green river plant, down to a thin strip of yellow sand at the edge of the river. There were other children down there too, wearing just their underwear in the hot sun, building sand castles with their mothers and their fathers. We built sand castles too. We built towers and bridges. We built roads, railway lines, and schools. Then we built a hospital for injured superheroes and a hospital for sick bats, because Charlie said his city needed these things. Charlie was concentrating very hard. I said to him, Do you want to take off your Batman costume? But he shook his head.

“I am worried about you. You will be exhausted by this heat. Come on, aren’t you too hot in your costume?”

“Yes but if I is not in mine costume then I is not Batman.”

“Do you need to be Batman all the time?”

Charlie nodded. “Yes, because if I is not Batman all the time then mine Daddy dies.”

Charlie looked down at the sand. He squeezed his fists so tight that I could see the small white bones of his knuckles through the skin.

“Charlie,” I said. “You think your daddy died because you were not Batman?”

Charlie looked up. Through the dark eye holes of his bat mask, I could see the tears in his eyes.

“I was at mine nursery,” he said. “That’s when the baddies got mine Daddy.”

His lip trembled. I pulled him toward me and I held him while he cried. I stared over his shoulder at the cold black drainage tunnels that disappeared into the tall stone wall of the river embankment. I stared into the black mouth of one of them, as wide as my shoulders across, but all I could see was Andrew spinning slowly round on the electrical cord with his eyes watching me each time he revolved. The look in his eyes was the look of those black tunnels: there was no end to them.

“Listen Charlie,” I said. “Your daddy did not die because you were not there. It is not your fault. Do you understand? You are a good boy, Charlie. It is not your fault at all.”

Charlie pulled himself out of my arms and looked at me.

“Why did mine Daddy die?”

I thought about it.

“The baddies got him, Charlie. But they are not the sort of baddies Batman can fight. They are the sort of baddies that your daddy had to fight in his heart and I have to fight in my heart. They are baddies from inside.”

Charlie nodded. “Is there lots?”

“Of what?”

“Of baddies from inside?”

I looked at the dark tunnels, and I shivered.

“Everyone has them,” I said.

“Will we beat them?”

I nodded. “Of course we will.”

“And they won’t get me, will they?”

I smiled. “No, Charlie, I don’t think those baddies will ever get you.”

“And they won’t get you either, will they?”

I sighed.

“Charlie, there are no baddies here by the river. We are on an adventure, okay? Maybe you can take one day off from being Batman.”

Charlie frowned, as if this was another trick of his enemies.

“Batman is always Batman,” he said.

I laughed, and we went back to building the city out of sand. I put a big handful on top of a pile that Charlie said was a multistory Batmobile park.

“Sometimes I wish I could take one day off from being Little Bee,” I said.

Charlie looked up at me. A drop of sweat fell from inside his bat mask. “Why?”

“Well, you see, it was hard to become Little Bee. I had to go through a lot of things. They kept me in prison and I had to train myself to think in a certain way, and to be strong, and to speak your language the way you people speak it. It is even an effort now just to keep it going. Because inside, you know, I am only a village girl. I would like to be a village girl again and do the things that village girls do. I would like to laugh and smile at the boys. I would like to do foolish things when the moon is full. And most of all, you know, I would like to use my real name.”

Charlie paused with his spade in the air.

“But Little Bee is yours real name,” he said.

I shook my head. “Mmm-mmm. Little Bee is only my superhero name. I have a real name too, like you have Charlie.”

Charlie stared.

“What is yours real name?” he said.

“I will tell you my real name if you will take off your Batman costume.”

Charlie frowned. “Actually I have to keep mine Batman costume on forever,” he said.

I smiled. “Okay, Batman. Maybe another time.”

Charlie started to build a sand wall between the wilderness and the suburbs of his city.

“Mmm,” he said.

After a while Lawrence came down the green steps and walked up to us.

“I’ll take over here,” he said. “Go up and see if you can talk some sense into Sarah, will you?”

“Why, what is wrong? Why didn’t she come down here with you?”

Lawrence held his hands out with the palms upward, and he sent air upward out of his mouth so that his hair blew. “Just go and see her, will you?” he said.

I walked up the steps. Sarah was still standing by the railings.

“That bloody man,” she said when she saw me.

“Lawrence?”

“Sometimes I’m not so sure I wouldn’t be better off without him. Oh, I don’t mean that, of course I don’t. But honestly. Don’t I have the right to talk about Andrew?”

“You were arguing?”

Sarah sighed.

“Lawrence still isn’t happy about you being around. It’s putting him on edge.”

“What did you say, about Andrew?”

Sarah looked out across the river.

“I told him I was sorting out Andrew’s office last night. You know, looking through his files. I just wanted to see what bills I’m meant to pay now, check we don’t owe money on any of our cards, that sort of thing.”

She looked at me. “The thing is, it turns out Andrew didn’t stop thinking about what happened on the beach. I thought he’d put it out of his mind, but he hadn’t. He was researching it. There must have been two dozen folders in his office. Stuff about Nigeria. About the oil wars, and the atrocities. And…well, I had no idea how many of you ended up in the UK after what happened to your villages. Andrew had a whole binder full of documents about asylum and detention.”

“Did you read it?”

Sarah chewed her lip. “Not all of it. He had enough in there to read for a month. And he had his own notes attached to each document. It was very meticulous. Very Andrew. There was so much detail in there. I only read a couple of papers, but it was enough to see where he was going with it all. I read an inspectors’ report about the immigration detention centers. How long did you say they kept you in that place, Bee?”

“Two years.”

“Oh Bee. I had no idea how hellish they are. I was imagining, I don’t know, a sort of high-security hotel, I suppose. Is it true they keep it deliberately cold in there? Is it true you have to apply in writing if you just need a paracetamol?”

I smiled. “If you are planning to have a headache, you need to apply twenty-four hours in advance.”

Sarah sighed. “So it is true, then. Andrew highlighted this one passage that said, We find the humiliating procedures excessive. We do not see how anyone could abuse an excess of sanitary towels. Did you really have to apply for them too?”

I nodded. “They would only give them to us one at a time. You had to fill in a form.”

Sarah twisted her hands together on the top bar of the iron railings. “The thing is,” she said, “I think I know why Andrew highlighted that passage. I mean, people would skim-read the barred windows and the perimeter fence. But if you really wanted to bring it home, you’d show how a girl has to apply in writing for Kotex Ultra. Right?”

She stopped, and she looked down to where Lawrence and Charlie were laughing and kicking sand at each other. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet. “I think Andrew was planning a book,” she said. “That’s what I told Lawrence.”

I looked up at Sarah.

“That is why he was angry?”

Sarah nodded. “I said I thought maybe I should carry on Andrew’s work. You know, read through his notes. Find out a bit more about the detention centers. Maybe even, I don’t know, write the book myself.”

“You said all that to Lawrence?”

“That’s when he went ballistic.” Sarah sighed. “I think he’s jealous of Andrew.”

We stood and looked out over the river for a long time. A breeze had started to blow. It was not much, but enough to darken the smooth surface of the river. Now, I thought. I gripped my hands onto the railings and tried to make the courage of the city flow into my bones again.

“Sarah,” I said. “I want to tell you my feelings about Lawrence.”

She looked at me sharply.

“I know what you’re going to tell me. You’ll tell me he cares more about himself than he cares about me. You’ll tell me to watch out for him. And I’ll tell you that’s just what men are like, but you’re too young to know it yet, and so you and I will argue too, and then I really will be utterly miserable. So don’t say it, okay?”

I shook my head.

“Please, Sarah.”

“I don’t want to hear it. I’ve chosen Lawrence. I’m thirty-two, Bee. If I want to make a stable life for Charlie, I have to start sticking with my choices. I didn’t stick with Andrew, and now I know I should have. But now there’s Lawrence. And he isn’t perfect, you’re right. But I can’t just keep walking away.” Sarah took a deep and shaking breath. “At some point you just have to have to turn around and face your life head-on.”

She looked at me for a long time, and then she held on to me and we hugged each other tight.

“Oh Bee,” said Sarah.

We stood and held each other like that, and after we had been quiet for a long time Sarah stood up straight and swept back her hair.

“Go down and play with Charlie and Lawrence,” she said. “I have to make a phone call.”

I looked at Sarah and she smiled at me, and I walked back down the steps to the place Lawrence and Charlie were playing. They were picking up the small round stones from the edge of the mud and throwing them into the river. When I came close, Charlie carried on throwing stones and Lawrence turned to me.

“Did you talk her out of it?” he said.

“Out of what?”

“Her book. She had some idea she was going to finish a book Andrew was writing. Didn’t she tell you?”

“Yes. She told me. I did not talk her out of the book but I did not talk her out of you either.”

Lawrence grinned. “Good girl. See? We’re going to get along after all. Is she still upset? Why hasn’t she come down here with you?”

“She is making a phone call.”

“Fair enough.”

We stood there for a moment, looking at each other.

“You still think I’m a bastard, don’t you?”

I shrugged.

“I’m not,” said Lawrence. “I’ll even help you, if you help me.”

“What help do you need from me?”

“You could just go, Little Bee. Couldn’t you? Quietly and without fuss.”

“I already thought about that.”

“So what’s stopping you? Money? I can give you money.”

I looked down at my shoes and then I looked back up. “You will pay me to go away?”

“Don’t make it sound like that. It isn’t easy to get started in this country without money for food and rent. I don’t want to put you on the streets, that’s all.”

He was still holding a stone in his hand and I took it from between his fingers. It was warm and smooth and I turned it around and around in my hands, polishing it with the moisture in my palms.

I said, “What is your wife’s name?”

Lawrence looked at his hands. “Linda.”

“And your children?”

Lawrence did not look in my eyes.

“Sonia,” he said. “And Stephen. And Simon’s the, um, the baby.”

“Hmm.”

I weighed the stone and I turned it around and around between my fingers and then I dropped it on the sand.

“You should go back to them,” I said.

Lawrence looked at me then, and I felt a great sadness because there was nothing in his eyes. I looked away over the water. I looked and I saw the blue reflection of the sky. I stared for a long time now, because I understood that I was looking into the eyes of death again, and death was still not looking away and neither could I.

Then there was the barking of dogs. I jumped, and my eyes followed the sound and I felt relief, because I saw the dogs up on the walkway above us, and they were only fat yellow family dogs, out for a walk with their master. Then I saw Sarah, coming down the steps toward us. Her arms were hanging by her sides, and in one of her hands she held her mobile phone. She walked up to us, took a deep breath, and smiled.

“I called work,” she said. “I’ve got something to tell you both.”

She held out her hands to both of us, but then she hesitated. She looked all around the place where we were standing.

“Um, where’s Charlie?” she said.

She said it very quietly, then she said it again, louder, looking at us this time.

I looked all along the thin strip of sand. Children were still making their sand castles beside the river, although the level of the water was rising and the beach was getting narrower. None of the children was Charlie.

“Charlie?” Sarah shouted. “Charlie? Oh my god. CHARLIE!”

I spun around under the hot sun. We ran up and down. We called his name. We called again and again.

Charlie was gone.

“Oh my god!” said Sarah. “Someone’s taken him! Oh my god! CHARLIE!”

Horror filled me completely, so that I could not even move. While Sarah screamed for her child I widened my eyes into the blackness of the drainage tunnels in the embankment wall, and I stared into them. I looked for a long time. I saw that the night horrors of all our worlds had found one another, so that there was no telling where the one ended and the other began—whether the jungle grew out of the jeep or the jeep grew out of the jungle.