The Other Hand

him my uncle. And my father and my uncle lived very happily in that place until the afternoon when the men came and shot them.
    So, it was astonishing to see all these new, beautiful shining cars parked outside these big, perfect houses. I walked through many streets like this.
    I walked all morning. The buildings got bigger and heavier. The streets got wider and busier. I stared at everything, and I did not mind the hunger in my stomach or the aching in my legs because I was amazed by each new wonder. Each time I saw something for the first time—a nearly naked girl on an advertising billboard, or a red double-decker bus, or a glittering building so tall it made you dizzy—the excitement in my stomach was so fierce it hurt. The noise was too much—the roar of the traffic and the shouting. Soon there were such crowds on the streets that it seemed I was nothing. I was pushed and bumped all over the pavements, and no one took any notice of me. I kept on walking as straight as I could, following one street and then another, and just as the buildings got so big it seemed they could not possibly stand up, and the noise got so loud it seemed as if my body would be shaken to pieces, I turned a corner and I gasped and ran across one last busy road,with car horns blasting and the drivers screaming, and I leaned over a low white stone wall and stared and stared, because there in front of me was the River Thames. Boats were pushing along through the muddy brown water, honking their horns under the bridges. All along the river to the left and the right, there were huge towers that rose high into the blue sky. Some were still being built, with huge yellow cranes moving above them. They even trained the birds of the air to help them build? Weh!
    I stayed there on the bank of the river and I stared and stared at these marvels. The sun shone out of the bright blue sky. It was warm, and a soft breeze blew along the bank of the river. I whispered to my sister Nkiruka, because it seemed to me that she was there in the flowing of the river and the blowing of the breeze.
    “Look at this place, sister. We are going to be all right here. There will be room for two girls like us in a country as fine as this. We are not going to suffer anymore.”
    I smiled, and I walked away down the embankment of the river, in the direction of the west. I knew that if I followed along the bank, I would get to Kingston—that is why they call it Kingston-upon-Thames. I wanted to get there as quick as I could, because now the crowds in London were starting to frighten me. In my village we never saw more than fifty people in one place. If you ever saw more than that, it meant that you had died and gone to the city of the spirits. That is where the dead go, to a city, to live together in their thousands because they do not need the space to grow their fields of cassava. When you are dead you are not hungry for cassava, only for company.
    A million people were all around me. Their faces hurried past. I looked and looked. I never saw the faces of my family but when you have lost everyone, you never lose the habit of looking. My sister, my mother, my father and my uncle. Every face I see, I am looking for them in it. If I did meet you then the first thing you would have noticed would have been my eyes staring at your face, as if they were trying to see someone else in you, as if they were desperate to make you into a ghost. If we did meet, I hope you did not take this personally.
    I hurried along the river embankment, through the crowds, through my memories, through this city of the dead. Once, beside a tall stone needle engraved with strange symbols, my legs burned and I needed to rest, so I stood still for a moment and the dead flowed around me, like the muddy brown Thames flowing around the pillar of a bridge.
    If I was telling this story to the girls from back home, I would have to explain to them how it was possible to be drowning in a river of people and also to feel so very, very alone. But truly, I do not think I would have the words.

four

    EARLY ON THE MORNING of Andrew’s funeral, before Little Bee arrived, I remember looking down from the bedroom window of our house in Kingston-upon-Thames. Out by the pond, Batman was poking at baddies with a plastic junior golf club, looking skinny and forlorn. I wondered if I should warm up some milk and make him a cup of something. I remember wondering if there was anything that could be put into a cup that