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.