Chris Cleave - The Other Hand

The other hand by chris cleave (this is as its written on the bookcover)

The story starts with 4 refugee girls in a mixed immigration removal centre in Essex. The story is told through Little Bee, on of these girls. The girls are strangers to each other & they all have their own story to tell. They have been at the detention centre for 2 yrs. It is a cold, concrete building with subterranean rooms. There were bars on the windows, ‘they let us exercise outdoors for 30mins a day unless it was raining. If you got a headache you had to apply for 1 paracetomol 24 hrs before you needed it by filling in a special form’.
Little Bee who was from Nigeria, hid her body under baggy charity clothes & swathed it in a bandage – in case the men came. During the 2 yrs in detention Little Bee learnt the queens English, because to get out you either talk good or dress good.
One of the other girls, Yvette, ‘de loud one from Jamaica’, she dress in pretty charity clothes. She would survive by using her body, which is how Yvette, Little Bee, the girl in the yellow sari & the one with no name, found themselves in a queue by the telephone in reception, waiting to get a taxi to get them away from the centre. But to go where? They have no money, no address, no passport, just their plastic bag with little or nothing in. Except for Little Bee, she has an address, the one she picked up on the beach in Nigeria – Andrew O’Rourke, Kingston-on-Thames.
Yvette rings for a taxi in her pidgeon English. ‘Yuh come pick me up, yeh’. ‘Where me come? Me from Jamaica darling!’ ‘Oh, where we come right now?’ She turns to the others ‘ wat name is dis place?’ the yellow sari says ‘England’.
Eventually Little Bee points to the address over the phone ‘ Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre’. Yvette repeats the name into the phone ‘no please wait!’ she puts the phone down.
‘Taxi man he no pick up from dis place’. ‘Eh, & what is scum?’

The story follows the path of the Little Bee who has now realized she is an illegal immigrant. She walks to Kingston, Surrey from Essex. She crossed the M25, saw houses with two storeys & no broken windows. She turned up on the doorstep of Andrew O’Rourkes house on the day of his funeral, she met, again, his wife Sarah. For the first time she meets Charlie their 4yr old son who will not take off his Batman suit, even when his arch enemy ‘puffin’ did a poo in it!
Sarah & Charlie now become a major part of the story and we learn of how Little Bee had Andrew’s wallet. It started five years earlier when the oil men came to take the village , they had found oil and were told to destroy the village & the people & leave no survivors.

As Bee thought of her village in Nigeria before the men came “ everything was happiness & singing, we did not have to hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or sadness either because none of these things had been connected to our village yet”

Sarah was taking Bee & Charlie on an adventure. Bee reflects: “ what is an adventure, little girls in your country they hide in the gap between the washing machine & the refrigerator & make believe they are in the jungle with green snakes & monkeys all around them. Me and my sister we used to hide in a gap in the jungle with green snakes & monkeys all around us and make believe we had a washing machine and a refrigerator”

When on the adventure Bee is worried that Charlie is getting too hot in his batman costume” Come on, aren’t you too hot in your costume?”
“Yes, but if I is not in mine costume then I is not Batman”
‘Do you need to be Batman all the time’
Yes, because if I is not Batman all the time then mine daddy dies.
‘Charlie do you think your daddy died because you were not batman?’
With trembling lip he said ‘I was at mine nursery, that’s when the baddies got mine daddy’

Its funny then sad it burys deep inside. You think about it, I thought all the way to work about how you could help these people – no we can’t just open our doors and let everyone in, the country couldn’t sustain it. But these people some of them, have no family & are going back to certain death. I felt so guilty that I am one of the people who have said ‘send em back where they came from’. What is the answer, besides go in & shoot all the powerful tyrants, but another would probably take their place!.
Little Bee was happy in her own country with her own family until it was all taken away.
‘ there were even children in there and they could not remember their life before detention. No-one there had committed a crime, but would you be released tomorrow, next year or never?’
It has sharp, witty dialogue, it makes you want to laugh and cry in the same moment.
We should all read this book and feel humble.

One of the questions asked of author (taken from the website: www.chriscleave.com):
Is the novel based on a true story?
there’s one true story in particular that made me determined to write the novel. In 2001 an Angolan man named Manuel Bravo fled to England and claimed asylum on the grounds that he and his family would be persecuted and killed if they were returned to Angola. He lived in a state of uncertainty for four years pending a decision on his application. Then, without warning, in September 2005 Manuel Bravo and his 13-year-old son were seized in a dawn raid and interned at an Immigration Removal Centre in southern England. They were told that they would be forcibly deported to Angola the next morning. That night, Manuel Bravo took his own life by hanging himself in a stairwell. His son was awoken in his cell and told the news. What had happened was that Manuel Bravo, aware of a rule under which unaccompanied minors cannot be deported from the UK, had taken his own life in order to save the life of his son. Among his last words to his child were: “Be brave. Work hard. Do well at school.”