Читать книгу Welcome to Lagos - Chibundu Onuzo - Страница 23

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Lagos bus parks attract an assortment of individuals. There are those who wish to make honest money, lifting bread and bananas to the newcomers as they fall out of buses; charging prices that would make black skin blush. Those who wish to steal from the arrivés, offering to carry bags and promptly disappearing. And of course those who are there solely for entertainment: to chase a thief, to fetch petrol for burning if the thief is caught and to fall into any diversion that comes their way.

As for the newcomers, two types only: a JJC with a destination and a JJC whose ambition saw no further than reaching the city. At first, they are indistinguishable. They both study the bus park with a dazed expression, taking in the hawkers with large trays of groundnuts wobbling on their heads, the young boys walking aimlessly in groups. Lagos is no different from anywhere, except there are more people, and more noise, and more. But when they are done marveling at the sameness of it all, one type continues on his way and the other remembers that he has nowhere to go.

—Nigerian Journal editorial

CHIKE HAD SLEPT FITFULLY and yet even in that shallow surface sleep, his dreams had been violent, of hands clutching him from behind, of being buried under a wall of water, eyes fixed on a sky that was burning. There was a time he looked for symbols in his dreams, oneirology of the most absurd kind. The phase had ended when he found himself pondering over a recurring bucket. The bucket meant nothing, as it would have meant nothing if he had seen it when awake, broken and disused on the side of the road.

He knew these memories of Bayelsa would gradually recede and then disappear from both his conscious and subconscious. When he killed his first man, in Jos, he had thought the image of the man jerking backwards, blood pouring from his mouth, would never leave him. And now, years later, the features were indistinct, blurred into caricature. He remembered a bald head and a large scar on his cheek. Or perhaps that was the second man he killed. Memories were deceptive.

The woman from last night was awake but she had not spoken to him. They had smiled at each other at the filling station in Ọrẹ, her top teeth resting attractively on her bottom lip. Their approach to the city did not interest her. She stared down at her lap, ignoring the billboards that welcomed them to Lagos.

Bournvita Welcomes You to Lagos: the Center of Excellence.

WELCOME TO LAGOS.

PAY YOUR TAX.

EKO O NI BAJẸ.

Welcome to Lagos.

Stuck in Traffic? Only One Station to Listen to: Rhythmic 94.8 FM

Who would he be in this new city? His experience would be of little use here. When the bus slowed in traffic, he had scanned ahead for an ambush, a useless precaution now. The sun was rising over the city. People were already amove, dashing across the expressways in their office clothes, hurdling over cement barriers and dashing to safety again. Women in bright overalls sprouted like fluorescent lichen along the highway, sweeping dust into piles blown away by rushing traffic. There were roadside saplings planted at precise intervals, a regimented attempt at beauty. Near the state boundary, they passed three statues, white stone men in flowing robes, their fists clenched, their heads covered with square caps. The men stared away from the city towards the newcomers, menace in their stance.

“Who are they?” Chike asked the driver.

“We call them Aro Mẹta. The three wise men of Lagos.”

“What are they saying?”

“Shine your eye.”

OMA CLIMBED DOWN FROM the bus a step behind the man from last night. Her husband would be looking for her by now, going through the rooms in their house, opening and shutting drawers, locking and unlocking doors. He would call her brother and her mother, then he would call her “friends,” that tight circle of wives whose husbands were professionals in Yenagoa.

Her husband, I.K., loved her, in the way you loved expensive shoes, to be polished and glossed but, at the end of the day, to be trodden on. He would never believe she would dare board a bus to Lagos and sit beside a strange man with their legs touching.

Yesterday, she had woken up beside her husband, planning to spend her morning in the salon. I.K. liked her to look a certain way, hair curled, eyebrows shaped, and skin the color of building sand. She served his breakfast of steaming yams, body-temperature eggs, and a glass of watermelon juice, blended minutes before I.K. sat down. At the door, he had noticed his footprints from last night, dark tracks she had not yet mopped away.

“You sit at home and do nothing. At least you can make sure this place doesn’t turn into a pigsty.”

As he walked towards her, she thought, He’ll be late to work and in the evening, that’ll be my fault too. When he was gone, she spat out the blood, a red trickle she rinsed carefully from the basin. Then she arranged her possessions in the bag that now sat on her lap, brushing against the stranger from last night.

“Brother Chike, good morning,” a young girl said when they disembarked. She was filthy, almost deliberately ungroomed. I.K. would have sniggered at her matted hair and clothes smeared with dirt. There were two other men with this Chike.

“Good morning. I hope you slept well. I didn’t introduce myself yesterday. I’m Chike.”

“Ifeoma. But everyone calls me Oma. What are you doing now?”

“Taking my friend Isoken home.”

“You know what. My cousin may not be awake yet. Maybe . . . I was thinking that . . . I said that I would help you find somewhere to stay. How about I follow you to drop Isoken, if the place is not too far, then I’ll show you a good area.”

“I don’t want to disturb your plans.”

“Not at all. I need to be doing something while I’m waiting for my cousin.”

On the strength of a midnight conversation, Oma trusted this man who did not know enough of Lagos to threaten her. Better to walk with Chike than remain in the bus park until touts began to circle her.

They boarded a bus, a metal carcass on wheels with a floor like a grater, coin-size holes through which you could see the road streaking by. She would find a space for herself in this city. Even if her cousin should turn her away, Lagos was big enough.

“Owa,” the girl said. The bus slowed for them to disembark.

I AM AN ORPHAN. The thought came unbidden to Isoken as she stood in front of her apartment. The door was worn with age and termites. Termites were of the

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Arthropoda

Class: Insecta

Subclass: Pterygota

The syllabus had not demanded you know past phylum but she had crammed it all anyway. Isoken: the virgin geek, sat with her legs crossed because she wanted to marry a suit man, read her textbooks because she wanted to be a pharmacist, invent drugs, and name them after herself, Edwina, her Christian name.

“Is this the place?” Chike asked.

“Yes.”

She was still wearing the jeans that the villagers thought an abomination, that her mother said made her bum shoot out, that she wasn’t going to change because some dunces felt a woman shouldn’t wear men’s clothes. If ever men set upon you, you would want to be wearing the tightest trousers in your wardrobe, trousers that stuck to you and cut off your circulation, trousers that neither you nor a stranger could slide off without a struggle.

“Won’t you knock?” Chike said.

Knocking: a colloquial term for the introduction of the groom’s family to the bride’s. She did not know the origins of the practice. Only that virgins were preferred, fresh ground where no one else had trod. Knocking: present continuous verb for the repeat application of one’s knuckle to a hard surface to produce a rapping sound. The door shuddered, termites scuttling, alarmed and incensed by this assault on their food.

“Who is making noise?”

It was her landlord running down the stairs in his singlet and boxers. He had made a pass at her once, lunging for her chest, missing and squeezing the flesh over her rib cage.

“My parents’ number, Mr. Alabi.”

“Is that why you’re disturbing everyone? And you can’t greet? You see somebody in the morning and is that the first thing you say?”

“Good morning, sir,” Chike said. “As you can see, the girl is in distress. She’s been unable to locate her parents.”

“And who are you?”

“A friend of the family.”

“You said her parents are missing. I thought they all traveled together. Wait, I will bring my phone. You will find them. Stop crying.”

Her parents’ number did not go through on Mr. Alabi’s phone. If they were alive, they would be crying too, secreting salt water from their lachrymal glands. Her parents did not know the word “gland” nor “lachrymal” nor “didactic” nor “encyclopedic.” With her mother, she wore her education loosely, but her father reveled in her vocabulary.

“Your English can break rocks,” he would say when she dropped a word of five syllables or longer into a sentence. She would imagine a sledgehammer joined to her tongue by a thick artery, grinding anything that stood in its way.

“Open the door, let me take my things,” she said to Mr. Alabi.

“I would have said you should stay in the house and wait for them, but you know your rent is due.”

Her clothes were in a metal chest. She left all her skirts, flimsy things that would betray you. She took her mother’s shoes, worn in the heels but still glamorous. She took her father’s workbox, full of tongs and combs and bright plastic rollers. She slid her hand into the pillow foam and felt the empty space. They had taken all their money to Bayelsa.

CHIKE DID NOT KNOW how he had come to exchange the command of one platoon for another. There was Yẹmi, constantly running his mouth, and the girl, on the verge of crying into her rice, and the boy who had somehow attached himself to them, asking to borrow money for his meal. Oma was the only person he did not feel responsible for. She had gone to meet her cousin, promising to return and show them a place to stay. She shook his hand when she said goodbye and it had felt permanent, a small panic rising in him as she walked away.

When he saw her on the other side of the road, loose skirt billowing from the rushing cars, he felt the kind of gratitude he had not known since his childhood when his mother shook him from his dreams.

“Oma, welcome. If you can just give us directions, we’ll find our way.”

“The place is called Tamara Inn. I’m going there too.”

“But your cousin—”

“She doesn’t live there again. I don’t know her new address.”

“A number?”

“I foolishly left my phone behind.”

They passed through a neighborhood of small businesses and modest houses, the industrial rumble of generators filling the air. Roadside food was there for the foraging, suya skewered and grilling, meat pies trapped in lit-up glass cages, golden nuggets of puffpuff bobbing in vats of hot oil, boli and groundnut to be mashed together in one mouthful.

The hotel’s electronic sign flashed from afar, the letters expanding and contracting, restless on the building’s facade. There was no one else in Tamara Inn. The dining room was empty, the TV tuned to CNN at odds with the shabby cloth napkins, folded into collapsing shapes, waiting for guests to shake them free. They would all share one room. Chike and Oma would split the cost. Yẹmi took him aside before he paid.

“Which kain thing be this? Maybe she wan’ use us for ritual o.”

“She can’t kill all of us at the same time.”

“No be joke matter.”

They were led to their room by flashlight, single file down the corridor, Chike last in the column, stumbling in the dark. Their room lights were working, thankfully. He noticed the room’s curtains first: a pale yellow that showed the dirt from the countless fingers that had twitched them aside. A concrete view lay behind the mesh of mosquito netting nailed to the wooden window frames. The bed was large enough for three, four with imagination, not that Oma or Isoken would imagine such a thing.

Isoken went to the bathroom and locked the door. They heard the gush of running water and then the sound of bathing, rain crashing on zinc. Oma stripped the pillows, baring their lumpy foam bodies. She turned their cases inside out and began to dress them again, stuffing them into their sacks.

“Are you going to do that for the sheets as well?” Chike asked.

“Should I?”

“I don’t know. I was joking.”

In the bathroom, Isoken was crying, the sound passing through the door and into the room.

“What’s the matter with her?” Oma asked, holding a pillow to her body like a baby.

“A difficult time recently,” Chike said.

“Well, whatever the matter is, there’s no use crying for so long. We’ve all had difficult times.”

She grasped the edge of the sheet and tore it off the bed.

“Difficult times are made better with good music,” Fineboy sang.

“That’s one of the jingles from Bayelsa Beats, isn’t it?” Oma said.

“Yup. I used to work there.”

“Really? I’ve never heard of any presenter called Fineboy.”

“I did the opening lines. Like: ‘You’re listening to High Life Monday on Bayelsa Beats FM. Don’t touch that dial.’”

“Chineke! It’s like the radio is inside the room. Isn’t that marvelous,” she said, turning to Chike.

“Yes,” he said. “There are many marvelous things about Fineboy.”

“How do you know each other?”

“We met while we were working,” Chike said.

“You worked in radio as well?”

“No. I was a government worker.”

“I hope I’m not asking too many questions.”

The mattress lay exposed. In its center was a large brown stain, some waste product excreted or blood released, the mark too spread out to be ordinary menses. Blood from a deflowering perhaps, a quaking teenager and his girlfriend, fumbling until they soiled the sheets. Oma began to lift the mattress.

“Please come and help me. It’s heavy.”

Chike and Yẹmi joined her. Only Fineboy remained aloof on the floor.

“Don’t bother,” the boy said when the mattress stood straight, needing only a push to be flipped over.

“Why?”

“The other side is worse.”

Chike walked around and saw the green growth, spiraling in all directions.

“You don’t want to see,” he said to Oma. “Let’s just put it back the way it was.”

Isoken came out of the bathroom in cleaner, freer clothes and they took their sleeping positions. Women on the bed, men on the floor, Fineboy as far away from the women as possible.

CHIKE WOKE UP AT three in the morning, the time ticking on his watch face. His platoon would be on night patrol, creeping through the Delta.

“Yẹmi. Are you sleeping?”

“Wetin?”

“Your family nkọ?” Chike asked.

“My mother is dead. My father dey for Ijẹbu.”

“Why didn’t you go there?”

“I no fit stay for his house. I have junior ones at home he is feeding and work plenty in Lagos pass Ijẹbu. I even get family members for this Lagos. They are useless people. If I visit them, they go say they wan’ help me, that make I come do houseboy work. How I go dey wash toilet for person wey get the same surname as me.”

“So what will you do?”

“Maybe driver. You nkọ?”

“I don’t know.”

When the army had offered to sponsor his university degree, so certain had he been that he would always be a soldier, he had chosen zoology out of his interest in animals. And now of what use was his knowledge of the migratory patterns of West African birds? Who would hire him for being able to distinguish a dolphin from a porpoise? Most important, the certificate that could prove his higher education was locked in his trunk in Bayelsa.

“I’ll find something,” Chike said. “I’m not worried.”