Being Bee by Catherine Bateson Page B

the numbers wouldn’t work.’
    Harley’s fingers were drumming on the table, both hands, all of his fingers. He started smacking the table as though it were a bongo drum. He kept chewing his bun, even though I could have sworn he’d swallowed it all.
    â€˜Harley,’ I said as quietly as I could while still being heard above the bongo drum. ‘Harley, it’s okay. That happened years ago, right?’
    â€˜It was the beginning,’ Harley said, ‘and in the beginning there is always mud and coldness and you never know if you’ll be one of the saved or one of the damned. Someone or something dies. I didn’t know. I was in the phone box and I didn’t know. I was scared, Little Bee, I was too scared to go out of the phone box. I knew I had to stay there until they came to get me – they couldn’t hear me because of the rain. So I had to stay there. But I couldn’t breathe because there were no windows.’
    â€˜There aren’t windows in phone boxes,’ I said, ‘but there aren’t doors either.’
    â€˜There were then. There aren’t now but there were then. There were doors and no windows and the door was shut and there was no air coming in and I couldn’t make them speak to me through the rain. So I took off my shoe. My good school shoe. The one Jasmine had helped me buy and I tried to make a window myself so I could breathe. They came but the wrong ones came.That was the beginning and it was dark and cold and the dog died.’
    â€˜What?’ This wasn’t a story I understood. ‘Why did the dog die?’
    â€˜I can’t remember. I can’t remember everything. I’m not one of those people who remember. I’m a forgetter most of the time. I forget everything. It’s better to forget. They’ll let you begin again. Pepi was frightened by the breaking glass, and he ran out on to the road. A car came. See it’s better to forget.’
    â€˜Oh, Harley, that must have been dreadful.’
    â€˜It was. It was awful. I shouldn’t have taken Pepi. He was Jasmine’s dog, not even mine.’
    I felt a little bit sick. It was the sticky bun, I thought, and too much toast for breakfast.
    â€˜Maybe I’ll just have to find a phone,’ I said, getting up. I was going to take my glass and plate to the sink to wash them. That’s all I was going to do, but Harley jumped up and grabbed my arms.
    â€˜You can’t do that,’ he said fiercely. ‘I won’t let them get you, Little Bee. They’ll turn you from To Be to Not to Be. That’s what they do. They keep you in rooms like phone boxes and there’s no one there except other ones that aren’t you but they say you’re the same as them and you miss Jasmine who cried and cried but didn’t ever stop loving you even after what you’d done. But it wasn’t your fault. If there’d been windows youwouldn’t have smashed anything. If it hadn’t been raining. If it wasn’t so dark. You can’t go, To Be. You don’t want to go there.’
    He was much bigger than I was and he was holding my arms really tightly. He bent down so his face was too close to mine and I could see the patches where he hadn’t shaved very well and little black hairs were bristling out of his skin. But his eyes looked very scared and his mouth sort of looked like mouths do before their owners begin to cry.
    â€˜Harley,’ I said, not moving. ‘Harley, it’s not raining today and it’s still very light outside. Is there anyone else here? The people who live here with you, are they here?’
    I felt his grip on my arm lessen a little.
    â€˜No, they aren’t here. They’ve run away too. They’ve run from my drawings. The drawings give us nightmares. But Tony says the drawings are good and need to be drawn. I don’t think you need to run away, Little Bee.’
    â€˜I’ll be