My missing finger itched, just thinking about it.

When they came in from the garden, I sent Batman to play in his bat cave and I showed Little Bee where the shower was. I found some clothes for her. Later, when Batman was in bed, I made two G &Ts. Little Bee sat and held hers, rattling the ice cubes. I drank mine down like medicine.

“All right,” I said. “I’m ready. I’m ready for you to tell me what happened.”

“You want to know how I survived?”

“Start from the beginning, will you? Tell me how it was when you first reached the sea.”

So she told me how she hid, on the day she arrived at the beach. She had been running for six days, traveling through the fields by night and hiding in jungles and swamps when daybreak came. I turned off the radio in the kitchen, and I sat very quietly while she told me how she holed up in a salient of jungle that grew right down to the sand. She lay there all through the hottest part of the day, watching the waves. She told me she hadn’t seen the sea before, and she didn’t quite believe in it.

In the late afternoon Little Bee’s sister, Nkiruka, came down out of the jungle and found her hiding place. She sat down next to her. They hugged for a long time. They were happy that Nkiruka had managed to follow Little Bee’s trail, but they were scared because it meant that others could do it too. Nkiruka looked into her sister’s eyes and said that they must make up new names for themselves. It was not safe to use their true names, which spoke so loudly of their tribe and of their region. Nkiruka said her name was “Kindness” now. Her younger sister wanted to reply to Kindness, but she could not think of a name for herself.

The two sisters waited. The shadows were deepening. A pair of hornbills came to crack seeds in the trees above their heads. And then-sitting at my kitchen table she said she remembered this so clearly that she could almost reach out and stroke the fuzzy black back of the thing-a bee blew in on the sea breeze and it landed between the two sisters. The bee was small and it touched down on a pale flower-frangipani, she told me, although she said she wasn’t sure about the European name-and then the bee flew off again, without any fuss. She hadn’t noticed the flower before the bee came, but now she saw that the flower was beautiful. She turned to Kindness.

“My name is Little Bee,” she said.

When she heard this name, Kindness smiled. Little Bee told me that her big sister was a very pretty girl. She was the kind of girl the men said could make them forget their troubles. She was the kind of girl the women said was trouble. Little Bee wondered which it was going to be.

The two sisters lay still and quiet till sunset. Then they crept down the sand to wash their feet in the surf. The salt stung in their cuts but they did not cry out. It was sensible of them to keep quiet. The men chasing them might have given up, or they might not. The trouble was, the sisters had seen what had been done to their village. There weren’t supposed to be any survivors to tell the story. The men were hunting down the fleeing women and children and burying their bodies under branches and rocks.

Back undercover, the girls bound each other’s feet in fresh green leaves and they waited for the dawn. It was not cold, but they hadn’t eaten for two days. They shivered. Monkeys screamed under the moon.

I still think about the two sisters there, shivering through the night. While I watch them in my mind, again and again, small pink crabs follow the thin smell of blood to the place where their feet recently stood in the shore break, but they do not find anything dead there yet. The soft pink crabs make hard little clicking noises under the bright white stars. One by one, they dig themselves back into the sand to wait.

I wish my brain did not fill in the frightful details like this. I wish I was a woman who cared deeply about shoes and concealer. I wish I was not the sort of woman who ended up sitting at her kitchen table listening to a refugee girl talking about her awful fear of the dawn.

The way Little Bee told it, at sunrise there was a white mist hanging thick in the jungle and spilling out over the sand. The sisters watched a white couple walking up the beach. The language they spoke was the official language of Little Bee’s country, but these were the first whites she had seen. She and Kindness watched them from behind a stand of palms. They drew back when the couple came level with their hiding place. The whites stopped to look out at the sea.

“Listen to that surf, Andrew,” the white woman said. “It’s so unbelievably peaceful here.”

“I’m still a bit scared, frankly. We should go back inside the hotel compound.”

The white woman smiled. “Compounds are made for stepping outside. I was scared of you, the first time I met you.”

“Course you were. Big Irish hunk of love like me. We’re savages, don’t you know.”

“Barbarians.”

“Vagabonds.”

“Cunts.”

“Oh come on now, dear, that’s just your mother talking.”

The white woman laughed, and pulled herself close to the man’s body. She kissed him on the cheek.

“I love you, Andrew. I’m pleased we came away. I’m so sorry I let you down. It won’t happen again.”

“Really?”

“Really. I don’t love Lawrence. How could I? Let’s make a fresh start, hmm?”

On the beach, the white man smiled. In the shadows, Little Bee cupped her hand over Kindness’s ear. She whispered: What is a cunt? Kindness looked back at her, and rolled her eyes. Right down there, girl, right close to your vagabond. Little Bee bit her hand so she wouldn’t giggle.

But then the sisters heard dogs. They could hear everything, because there was a cool morning breeze, a land breeze that carried all sounds. The dogs were still a long way off, but the sisters heard them barking. Kindness grabbed Little Bee’s arm. Down on the beach, the white woman looked up at the jungle.

“Oh listen, Andrew,” she said. “Dogs!”

“Probably the local lads are hunting. Must be plenty to catch in this jungle.”

“Still, I wouldn’t have thought they’d use dogs.”

“So what in the hell did you think they’d use?”

The white woman shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Elephants?”

The white man laughed. “You insufferable English,” he said. “The empire’s still alive for you, isn’t it? You only need to close your eyes.”

Now a soldier came running up the beach from the direction the white couple had come. He was panting. He wore olive-green trousers and a light gray vest dark with sweat. He had military boots on, and they were heavy with damp sand. He had a rifle slung on his back, and the barrel was swinging at the sky.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” the white man said. “Here comes that doofus of a guard again.”

“He’s only doing his job.”

“Yeah, but can’t they let us do our own thing even for one minute?”

“Oh, relax. The holiday was free, remember? We were never going to have it all our own way.”

The guard came level with the white couple and he stopped. He was coughing. He had his hands on his knees.

“Please, mister, missus,” he said. “Sorry please to come back to hotel compound.”

“But why?” the white woman said. “We were just going for a walk along the beach.”

“It is not safe missus,” the guard said. “Not safe for you and mister. Sorry boss.”

“But why?” said the white man. “What is actually the problem?”

“No problem,” said the guard. “Here is very good place. Very good. But all tourist must stay please in hotel compound.”

Unseen in the jungle, the dogs were barking louder now. The sisters could hear the shouts of the men running with them. Kindness was trembling. The two sisters held each other. Now one of the dogs howled and the others joined in. In the hiding place there was a splashing on the dry leaves and a smell of urine-the reality of Kindness’s fear. Little Bee looked into her eyes. It didn’t look as if her sister was even seeing her.