The Other Hand

many of those baddies together.
    No, it wasn’t going to work anymore, denying her, or denying what had happened in Africa. A memory can be banished, even indefinitely, deported from consciousness by the relentless everydayness of running a successful magazine, mothering a son, and burying a husband. A human being, though, is a different thing entirely. The existence of a Nigerian girl, alive and standing in one’s own garden—governments may deny such things, or brush them off as statistical anomalies, but human beings cannot.
    I sat at the kitchen table and stared through suddenly wet eyes at the stump where my finger used to be. I realized that it was finally time to face up to what had happened on the beach.
    It should never have happened, of course, in the ordinary run of things. There are countries of the world, and regions of one’s own mind, where it is unwise to travel. I have always thought so, and I have always struck myself as a sensible woman. Independent of mind, but not recklessly so. I would love to have the same arm’s-length relationship with foreign places that other sensible women seem to have.
    Clever me, I went on holiday somewhere different. That season in Nigeria there was an oil war. Andrew and I hadn’t known. The struggle was brief, confused, and scarcely reported. The British and Nigerian governments both deny to this day that it even took place. God knows, they aren’t the only ones who tried denial.
    I still wonder why it came into my head to accept a holiday in Nigeria. I wish I could claim it was the only tourist-board freebie that arrived at the magazine that spring, but we had boxes full of them—crates of unopened envelopes hemorrhaging sunscreen from ruptured sample sachets. I could have chosen Tuscany, or Belize. The former Soviet states were big that season. But no. The cussed streak in me—the one that made me launch Nixie instead of joining some tamer glossy; the one that made me start an affair with Lawrence instead of mending my fences with Andrew—that enduring outward-bound streak gave me an adolescent thrill when a package landed on my desk emblazoned with the question FOR YOUR HOLIDAY THIS YEAR , WHY NOT TRY NIGERIA ? Some wag on my editorial staff had scrawled under this, in black chunky marker, the obvious response. But I was intrigued, and I opened the package. Out fell two open-ended airline tickets and a hotel reservation. It was as simple as turning up at the airport with a bikini.
    Andrew came with me, against his better judgment. The Foreign Office were advising against travel to some parts of Nigeria, but we didn’t think that included ours. He took some convincing, but I reminded him that we’d taken our honeymoon in Cuba, and parts of that place were horrific. Andrew gave in. Looking back on it now, I suppose he thought he had no choice if he wanted to keep me.
    The tourist board that sent the freebies noted that Ibeno Beach was an “adventurous destination.” Actually, at the time we went, it was a cataclysm with borders. To the north there was a malarial jungle and to the west a wide brown river delta. The river was iridescent with oil. It was, I now know, bloated with the corpses of oil workers. To the south was the Atlantic Ocean. On that southern edge I met a girl who was not my magazine’s target reader. Little Bee had fled southeast on bleeding feet from what had once beenher village and was shortly to become an oil field. She fled from the men who would kill her because they were paid to, and the children who would kill her because they were told to. I sat at my kitchen table and I imagined her fleeing through the fields and the jungle, as fast as she could, until she arrived at the beach where Andrew and I were being unconventional. That beach was as far as she got.
    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