The Other Hand

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 monthlocked 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 ofdeath. Death was something that could only occur if the evil schemes of the baddies were not constantly foiled—and that, of course, was unthinkable.
    That summer—the summer my husband died—we all had identities we were loath to let go of. My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s surname, and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality, that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
    To flee from cruelty is the most natural thing in the world, of course. And the timing that brought us together that summer was so very cruel. Little Bee telephoned us on the morning they released her from the detention center. My husband picked up her call. I