“I will come to your house. That way you will believe it is me.”

“No.”

“I do not know anyone else in this country, Mister O’Rourke. I am sorry. I am just telling you, so that you can be ready.”

The man did not sound angry anymore. He made a small sound, like a child when it is nervous about what will happen. I hung up the phone and turned around to the other girls. My heart was pounding so fast, I thought I would vomit right there on the linoleum floor. The other girls were staring at me, nervous and expectant.

Well? said the girl in the purple dress.

Hmm? I said.

De taxi, darlin! What is happenin about de taxi?

Oh yes, the taxi. The taxi man said a cab will pick us up in ten minutes. He said we are to wait outside.

The girl in the purple dress, she smiled.

“Mi name is Yevette. From Jamaica, zeen. You useful, darlin. What dey call yu?”

“My name is Little Bee.”

“What kinda name yu call dat?”

“It is my name.”

“What kind of place yu come from, dey go roun callin little gals de names of insects?”

“ Nigeria.”

Yevette laughed. It was a big laugh, like the way the chief baddy laughs in the pirate films. WU-ha-ha-ha-ha! It made the telephone receiver rattle in its cradle. Nye-JIRRYA! said Yevette. Then she turned round to the others, the girl in the sari and the girl with the documents. Come wid us, gals, she said. We de United Nations, see it, an today we is all followin Nye-JIRRYA. WU-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Yevette was still laughing when the four of us girls walked out past the security desk, toward the door. The detention officer looked up from his newspaper when we went by. The topless girl was gone now-the officer had turned the page. I looked down at his newspaper. The headline on the new page said ASYLUM SEEKERS EATING OUR SWANS. I looked back at the detention officer, but he would not look up at me. While I looked, he moved his arm over the page to cover the headline. He made it look like he needed to scratch his elbow. Or maybe he really did need to scratch his elbow. I realized I knew nothing about men apart from the fear. A uniform that is too big for you, a desk that is too small for you, an eight-hour shift that is too long for you, and suddenly here comes a girl with three kilos of documents and no motivation, another one with jelly-green eyes and a yellow sari who is so beautiful you cannot look at her for too long in case your eyeballs go ploof, a third girl from Nigeria who is named after a honeybee, and a noisy woman from Jamaica who laughs like the pirate Bluebeard. Perhaps this is exactly the type of circumstance that makes a man’s elbow itch.

I turned to look back at the detention officer just before we went out through the double doors. He was watching us leave. He looked very small and lonely there, with his thin little wrists, under the fluorescent lights. The light made his skin look green, the color of a baby caterpillar just out of the egg. The early-morning sunshine was shining in through the door glass. The officer screwed up his eyes against the daylight. I suppose we were just silhouettes to him. He opened his mouth, like he was going to say something, but he stopped.

What? I said. I realized he was going to tell us there had been a mistake. I wondered if we should run. I did not want to go back in detention. I wondered how far we would get if we ran. I wondered if they would come after us with dogs.

The detention officer stood up. I heard his chair scrape on the linoleum floor. He stood there with his hands at his sides.

“Ladies?” he said.

“Yes?”

He looked down at the ground, and then up again.

“Best of luck,” he said.

And we girls turned around and walked toward the light.

I pushed open the double doors, and then I froze. It was the sunlight that stopped me. I felt so fragile from the detention center, I was afraid those bright rays of sunshine could snap me in half. I couldn’t take that first step outside.

“What is de holdup, Lil Bee?”

Yevette was standing behind me. I was blocking the door for everyone.

“One moment, please.”

Outside, the fresh air smelled of wet grass. It blew in my face. The smell made me panic. For two years I had smelled only bleach, and my nail varnish, and the other detainees’ cigarettes. Nothing natural. Nothing like this. I felt that if I took one step forward, the earth itself would rise up and reject me. There was nothing natural about me now. I stood there in my heavy boots with my breasts strapped down, neither a woman nor a girl, a creature who had forgotten her language and learned yours, whose past had crumbled to dust.

“What de hell yu waitin fo, darlin?”

“I am scared, Yevette.”

Yevette shook her head and she smiled.

“Maybe yu’s right to be scared, Lil Bee, cos yu a smart girl. Maybe me jus too dumb to be fraid. But me spend eighteen month locked up in dat place, an if yu tink me dumb enough to wait one second longer on account of your tremblin an your quakin, yu better tink two times.”

I turned round to face her and I gripped on to the door frame.

“I can’t move,” I said.

That is when Yevette gave me a great push in the chest and I flew backward. And that is how it was, the first time I touched the soil of England as a free woman, it was not with the soles of my boots but with the seat of my trousers.

“WU-ha-ha-ha!” said Yevette. “Welcome in de U-nited Kindom, int dat glorious?”

When I got my breath back I started laughing too. I sat on the ground, with the warm sun shining on my back, and I realized that the earth had not rejected me and the sunlight had not snapped me in two.

I stood up and I smiled at Yevette. We all took a few steps away from the detention center buildings. As we walked, when the other girls were not looking, I reached under my Hawaiian shirt and I undid the band of cotton that held my breasts strapped down. I unwound it and threw it on the ground and ground it into the dirt with the heel of my boot. I breathed deeply in the fresh, clean air.

When we came to the main gate, the four of us girls stopped for a moment. We looked out through the high razor-wire fence and down the slopes of Black Hill. The English countryside stretched away to the horizon. Soft mist was hanging in the valleys, and the tops of the low hills were gold in the morning sun, and I smiled because the whole world was fresh and new and bright.

two

FROM THE SPRING OF 2007 until the end of that long summer when Little Bee came to live with us, my son removed his Batman costume only at bath times. I ordered a twin costume that I substituted while he splashed in the suds, so that at least I could wash the boy sweat and the grass stains out of the first. It was a dirty, green-kneed job, fighting master criminals. If it wasn’t Mr. Freeze with his dastardly ice ray, then it was the Penguin-Batman’s deadly foe-or the even more sinister Puffin, whose absolute wickedness the original creators of the Batman franchise had inexplicably failed to chronicle. My son and I lived with the consequences-a houseful of acolytes, henchmen and stooges, ogling us from behind the sofa, cackling darkly in the thin gap beside the bookcase, and generally bursting out at us willy-nilly. It was one shock after another, in fact. At four years old, asleep and awake, my son lived at constant readiness. There was no question of separating him from the demonic bat mask, the Lycra suit, the glossy yellow utility belt and the jet-black cape. And there was no use addressing my son by his Christian name. He would only look behind him, cock his head, and shrug-as if to say, My bat senses can detect no boy of that name here, madam. The only name my son answered to, that summer, was Batman. Nor was there any point explaining to him that his father had died. My son didn’t believe in the physical possibility of death. Death was something that could only occur if the evil schemes of the baddies were not constantly foiled-and that, of course, was unthinkable.