The Other Hand

make you safe.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Sarah lifted her eyes up from the street.
    “Our problem is that you only have your own story. One story makes you weak. But as soon as we have one hundred stories, you will be strong. If we can show that what happened to your village happened to a hundred villages, then the power is on our side. We need to collect the stories of people who’ve been through the same things as you. We need to make it undeniable. Then we can send the stories to a lawyer and we’ll let the authorities know, if anything happens to you, those stories will go straight to the media. Do you see? I think that was what Andrew hoped to do with his book. It was his way of saving girls like you.”
    I shrugged. “What if the authorities are not afraid of the media?”
    Sarah nodded, slowly. “That’s a possibility,” she said. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
    I looked out across the towers of Abuja. The great buildings shimmered in the heat, as if they were insubstantial, as if they could be awoken from and forgotten with a splash of cold water to the face.
    “I do not know,” I said. “I do not know how things are in my country. Until I was fourteen years old my country was three cassava fields and a limba tree. And after that, I was in yours. So do not ask me how my country works.”
    “Hmm,” said Sarah. She waited for a minute, and then she said, “So what do you want us to do?”
    I looked again at the city we saw from that balcony. I saw for the first time how much space there was in it. There were wide gaps between the city blocks. I thought these dark green squares were parks and gardens, but now I saw that they were just empty spaces, waiting for something to be built. Abuja was a city that was not finished. This was very interesting for me, to see that my capital city had these green squares of hope built into it. To see how my country carried its dreams in a see-through bag.
    I smiled at Sarah. “Let us go and collect the stories.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “I want to be part of my country’s story.” I pointed out into the heat. “See? They have left space for me.”
    Sarah held on to my hand, very tight.
    “All right,” she said.
    “But, Sarah?”
    “Yes?”
    “There is one story I must tell you first.”
    I told Sarah what happened when Andrew died. The story was hard to hear and it was hard to tell. Afterward I went back inside the hotel room and she stayed out on the balcony on her own. I sat down on the bed with Charlie and he watched cartoons while I watched Sarah’s shoulders shaking.
    The next day we started our work. Early in the morning Sarah walked out into the street and she gave a very large amount of money to the military policemen waiting outside the hotel. After this, their eyes were the eyes of the faces on the banknotes that Sarah gave them. They saw nothing but the inside of the military police car’s glove box and the lining of the policemen’s uniform pockets. The policemen’s only rule was, we had to be back at the hotel before sunset each evening.
    My job was to find people who would normally be scared to talk to a foreign journalist, but who talked to Sarah because I promised them that she was a good person. These were people who believed what I told them, because my story was the same as theirs. I discovered there were a lot of us in my country, people who had seen things the oil companies wished we had not seen. People the government would prefer to be silent. We went all around the southeast of my country in an old white Peugeot, just like the one that my father used to have.
    I sat in the passenger seat and Sarah drove, with Charlie smiling and laughing in the back. We listened to the music on the local radio stations, turned up very loud. The red dust from the road blew everywhere, even inside the car, and when we took off Charlie’s Batman suit to wash him at the end of each day, his white skin had two bright red diamonds on it, where the eyeholes of his mask had been.
    Sometimes I got scared. Sometimes when we arrived in a village, I saw the way some of the men looked at me and I remembered how me and my sister were hunted. I wondered if there was still money from the oil companies, for anyone who would shut my mouth for once and all. I was scared of the village men, but Sarah just smiled. Relax, she said. Remember what happened at the airport. Nothing’s going to happen to you so long as I’m here.
    And I did begin to