The End of the Day

by Claire North

  Charlie said, “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Will you stay for afternoon tea? I can do cucumber sandwiches.”

  “That’s very kind, but I must be going.”

  A policeman. An impromptu roadblock, he swaggers round in mirrored shades and white gloves, collecting a little dash, the fee, you see, the policeman’s fee for passing this point, and what if you haven’t committed a crime, he’s the law, he’ll find something you’ve done, you wait and see.

  Charlie delivers to him three thousand U.S. dollars in used notes.

  The policeman stands on the side of the road, door to his car open, music playing loud, mouth hanging wide.

  “You don possess? I no sabi.”

  “It’s from my employer,” explained Charlie, Yomi hovering uneasily behind, now afraid—it’s hard to say whether of the policeman, or of the large sum of money changing hands in public view. “He requested that I give you this gift, as a courtesy. Or as a warning.”

  The policeman doesn’t understand. He takes the money home, and hides it—of all places—under the bed, and doesn’t tell his wife.

  A church.

  There are five thousand people packed into a hall that was perhaps designed for conferences. In the afternoon, there will be five thousand more, come to witness a different preacher. Today’s pastor is small, in his late sixties, dressed in bright purple polyester, a choir of five swaying behind him, a drummer and guitarist largely doing their own thing. He prowls up and down and calls out Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! Jesus spare us, Jesus redeem us, Jesus, Jesus!

  Women have brought their underpants for him to bless, to help them get pregnant. He sells sanctified sanitary pads and holy children’s T-shirts and sacred bottles of vegetable oil, guaranteed to keep the demon gluttony away. As the pastor cries out his judgement upon the world, men with yellow buckets move between the rows of weeping, joyous, ecstatic people, hope in their hearts and music in their lungs, and collect naira in large-denomination notes.

  “Jesus! Jesus Jesus!”

  A woman with a lump in her breast falls to her knees before him, and weeps and weeps, and he presses his hands to her forehead and cries, “Begone, demon, begone! Begone to the void, begone!” and she writhes and screams and talks in tongues and her daughter also cries, alone at home as the preacher does his work, because her daughter is a doctor and knows what will come, has seen her mother’s fate writ large and cannot convince her to take the chemo, no matter how hard she tries.

  “Jesus! Jesus commands you! Jesus heals you!”

  The Harbinger of Death sits in the front row, and doesn’t realise that the Harbinger of Pestilence is also there, thirty-two rows further back.

  At night, golf clubs swing in Ikoyi, the expats drink with other expats in an expats’ hotel. The music plays along the shores of the lagoon, the jet skis bounce across the water, the moon rises, the supermarkets clatter with the sound of trolleys on grubby floors, meat sizzles on the red-hot pan, the croakers croak and the boats move through the thin-legged shacks that sit on the water, away from the landlubber’s laws, and Charlie listens to music by the beautiful, stinking, litter-laced sea, and closes his eyes to hear it more, and is, for a little while, at peace.

  Chapter 65

  Finding Isabella Abayomi was surprisingly hard.

  He hadn’t been given a home address by Milton Keynes, only a time and a venue. The venue was a nightclub in Yaba, the door unmarked. He walked past it twice before finding it, and knocked with a great sense of unease. The door was answered by a woman, who glowered and exclaimed, “Yes yes? Wetin dey happen?”

  “I’m looking for Isabella Abayomi …”

  “Fifteen hundred naira!”

  “I’m sorry, I …”

  “Gi mi!”

  He hesitated. Isabella Abayomi was the last person on his list, and though this felt a little like extortion, he did have a job to do. He handed over the money. The woman gave him a stub of paper with a number on it, and stamped his hand with the inky image of Minnie Mouse. This done, she finally stood aside, and he walked through.

  A long corridor, lit by erratic bulbs. The walls were lined with posters—some cartoonish, some of faces, men and women striking heroic poses or leering or grinning or glowering at the camera, bright reds and yellows, blues and greens bursting around their names, times and dates on the bottom. The woman shooed him to the end of the corridor when he paused to look, to where it opened out into a wider room, circular, around which were nailed long wooden benches pressed, like square pegs into round holes, erratically against the wall. A stage was in the middle, lit by two bright lights inside rusting cans nailed to the ceiling. A microphone stood in the centre. Of the hundred or so possible seats, seventy were filled, and music played from a boom box on one side of the stage. Charlie opened his mouth to try and explain again, Harbinger of Death, you see, not really here for this, have to find …

  … but the woman was gone. He looked around, bewildered, and having no better idea of what to do, sat down in a corner by himself. A couple in front of him whispered and giggled, swapping photos on their mobile phones. An earnest old man read a newspaper alone. A group of teenagers, too young for the intense beer they were drinking, whooped and shrieked happily in a corner.

  Charlie waited.

  At last, the woman who’d answered the door marched down to the stage and turned the boom box off. This seemed to mark a ceremonial event, for the room fell silent now, waiting as one.

  Then another woman walked on stage. Her face was narrow, drawn down to a pointed chin. Her hair was wound up tight in a great blue and purple turban. Her eyebrows were two perfect half-circles above her small oval eyes. Her lips were painted blue, her fingernails were violet, as were her toes, visible where they popped out between her silver sandals. She walked up to the microphone, took it off its stand without a blink and said,

  “Last night a thief tried to mug a policeman. The policeman was alone, didn’t have his badge, but as the thief stole his wallet he shouted, ‘Hey, give me my money back, I’m a policeman!’ ‘You’re a policeman?’ replied the thief. ‘In that case, you should give me my money back!’”

  Chapter 66

  “A rabbi, an imam and a priest walk into a bar …”

  “Knock knock!”

  “So listen to this, he says, he says …”

  “My religion, explains the imam, is the greatest religion in the world!”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Doctor doctor, I think I’m insane!”

  “What’s the difference between English football and a tea bag?”

  “No, says the priest, my religion is the greatest in the world!”

  “Fuck.”

  “The tea bag stays in the cup longer.”

  “You’re both mistaken, explains the rabbi. My religion is the greatest religion in the world, let me tell you why …”

  “Fuck who?”

  “And it’s the final round of the jungle football!”

  “… needed to repair the roof of the synagogue …”

  “Tsk tsk. Fuck whom.”

  “What do you call an American who’ll do the jobs that no one wants for little money and not complain?”

  “… but it was a Sabbath! The money was right there, I could have taken it, but on a Sabbath I can’t handle money …”

  “There’s the elephant again, running down the middle, the insects are scattered to every side, he shoots, he scoooorrresss!”

  “Putin can’t stand homosexuals, but the Bolshoi Ballet on the other hand …”

  “An immigrant.”

  “… so I closed my eyes, and I prayed, I prayed with all my might …”

  “What does the cheese say to itself in the morning?”

  “Suddenly the elephant stops. He freezes in the middle of the field. He drops the ball!”

  “Halloumi!”

  “And finally they see the centipede, it’s the centipede who’s been crawling up the elephant’s leg �
��”

  “And suddenly, my prayers were answered! I opened my eyes, and all around, for a radius of about ten yards, it was Thursday.”

  Chapter 67

  Isabella Abayomi was a comedian.

  It took Charlie a few startled minutes to realise this. She didn’t tell jokes, and her references were to a news cycle that he wasn’t part of, but as his ear adjusted, he began to hear the meaning behind the names she named, the stories she told, and without noticing when, he started laughing.

  “… and the policeman said, ‘But you’re not Jesus, I know Jesus, and besides, Jesus was Igbo!’”

  The laughter was slow to come, as she gently built up her matter from the most mundane to the bizarre. A trip to do her washing evolved into an alien gunfight over the skyline of Lagos; dinner with her mother grew into a diatribe on corruption in the military; a mission to get her shoe repaired evolved into a quest to found a religion.

  “Three dollars cheaper! Three dollars cheaper and I’m saying, I don’t care if it’s twenty dollars cheaper, I don’t care if it’s a thousand dollars cheaper, there’s no way I’m wearing it after what he did!”

  Only once did Charlie laugh and realise that he was the only person laughing.

  “So he said, ‘Fuck this, fuck this, I’ve got democracy to defend, I’ve got a new world to build.’” (The room laughs.) “‘I’m a big believer in democracy now, I always was in fact, the dictatorship was such a learning curve’” (laughter), “‘and the first thing I learned was kill the fucking comics!’” (Charlie laughs. No one else does.)

  “Anyway …”

  He thinks: Emmi would love this. She’d get it instantly, and think it was great.

  He doesn’t laugh for a moment, even though the jokes are funny, as that thought passes by.

  “… and I say, no, not Yoruba, you’re barred …”

  By the end of it, one woman to Isabella’s right was laughing out of control, a high shriek that distracted the rest of the room. If everyone else hadn’t been primed to find the thing funny, her ear-popping voice would have been an irritation, but as it was Isabella merely acknowledged the sound with a wry smile and kept on going, and the laughter of her audience fed itself, until even Charlie’s face began to ache.

  One man didn’t laugh. Charlie didn’t spot him, in the shallow darkness of the audience, and if Isabella did, she showed no sign. White trousers, white suit, he sits in the furthest corner from the stage, left leg crossed over his right, hands in his lap, and he does not laugh, and he does not smile.

  The set lasted an hour and a half. When it was done, Isabella Abayomi bowed once, and as briskly as she had arrived, walked away from the microphone. The old woman scurried forward, the boom box went back on, people, smiling, chattering, more alive than they had been when they arrived, stood up, and began to walk away.

  Charlie scurried down the stairs, edged round the side of the stage, somehow feeling that it would have been violating a religious law for him to walk on its surface, looked over his shoulder guiltily, saw no one watching, and followed Isabella through the back door of the theatre, out into a courtyard behind.

  The courtyard was square, a floor of dirt, a couple of chickens, their feet tied together, sitting placidly in a basket by the back gate. A single light burned yellow above the blacked-out window of the club; Isabella had her mobile phone in her hand, checking a message, other hand on the gate, ready to go.

  “Miss Abayomi?” he called out.

  She stopped, head rising fast, almost fearful, took in his skin, his clothes, his expression. “Yes? Can I help you?”

  “Miss Abayomi,” he repeated, shuffling closer as she angled her body round to see him better, back to the door to the street. “I’ve been sent to give you …” He reached into his bag for the little envelope of cards, sealed with her name on it, but she raised one hand as he did and barked,

  “Stop there! What have you got?”

  “A gift, it’s from …”

  “I don’t want gifts, who are you?”

  Strange, a woman who’d been so funny now so defensive, angry even, glaring at him.

  “My name’s Charlie, I’m the Harbinger of Death …”

  He was still holding the envelope out to her, and was surprised at her speed when she knocked it from his hand, slapping it to the floor. He stepped back, then awkwardly, when she neither moved nor spoke, bent down to pick it up again, muttering his usual words, here as a courtesy, here as a warning, don’t know which, my employer, courtesy, courtesy, he is …

  “Fuck off.” Her voice cut through it all. She turned, struggling for a moment with the gate, which didn’t fit squarely into the wall, before dragging it with a creak of metal and dust open, and striding out into the street. Charlie scurried after, envelope in hand.

  “Miss Abayomi, I understand that you probably don’t want to see me, but I’d really like to give you this gift, it’s part of my job, and you don’t have to take my presence as meaning … as necessarily being …”

  She ignored him, marched chin high, shoulders back. He tried following her, but didn’t want to physically grab her, not in the street, quiet though it was, and though he’d met people who didn’t want to hear from him, usually they took the gift that was proffered, as much out of surprise as anything else, and he wasn’t sure if his employer would be pleased to learn that Isabella had not.

  “Miss Abayomi …”

  She rounded the corner at the end of the road, into a dirt alley that ran between houses back towards the main street, the rattle of generators and the smell of petrol rising up from behind the dry beige walls.

  “Miss Abayomi!”

  “Hey, oyinbo!”

  The voice came from straight ahead, where a man stepped out from the shelter of a door into the street. Two more men followed, but the one who’d spoken waved them to a halt, flanking him, one either side. The two men wore dirty vests and baggy shorts. The man in charge wore white suit trousers, white shirt, seven gold rings and a gold crucifix, encrusted with diamonds, which bounced gently around his chest. “Eh, oyinbo,” he said, head on one side, curious, “how now?”

  The man from the club; the man who had not laughed. Maybe he was a disgruntled customer? Maybe a reviewer who took his work too seriously?

  Charlie considered both these thoughts as a patient, faced with a picture of their own tumour, may sometimes say ‘Maybe the scan was wrong’ or ‘I’d like a second opinion’—in all earnestness, believing none of it.

  Isabella stopped dead, and so did Charlie. He looked at her, and saw fear again in her eyes, the starting, jumping thing that had turned her from funny to angry in a bare second. She stared first at the man in white, then at the Harbinger, and for a moment he thought she saw Death as she saw him, and the two were briefly one.

  Then the man said, “Wetin wasala, yansh babe?”

  “We no go tumble you,” she replied, quick and high, then blurted: “Oyinbo Harbinger of Death!”

  The man raised his eyebrows, looked at Charlie again, wasn’t impressed. “You wan try me?” he mused, and to his surprise, Charlie felt Isabella’s hand slip into his own.

  “Does Death come tonight?” she whispered, her lips barely moving with the sound.

  “I … I don’t think so.”

  “Then run!”

  He only ran because she pulled him; even then it took him a few stumbling moments for his feet to move, for the realisation to sink into his mind that yes, he was now running, and yes, the men were following, two men in grubby clothes running flat out, and their boss in his shiny shoes following at a more sedate pace, confident in his boys, sure of himself.

  If the men hadn’t followed, Charlie would have found the whole thing hilarious.

  But perhaps it was, even now, even with the suspicion growing on him that he might be running for his life. Perhaps there was something laughable in the entire thing, perhaps …

  They rounded a corner, heading back towards the comedy club. Isabella shove
d her shoulder into the metal door that they’d come through, nearly falling into the dirt as it gave way reluctantly beneath her, pulled Charlie in behind, slammed the door shut. One of the running boys got his shoulder against it, and Charlie heaved and pushed with Isabella, throwing all his weight against the metal as they struggled to force it closed.

  For a moment they balanced there, in a tug of war; then the door slammed shut and Isabella rammed a bolt across. Charlie pressed his back against the door still, as it shuddered and bounced beneath the force of kicks and fists, as Isabella ran to the door to the club’s rear entrance, heaving on it hard.

  The door was locked; the music was silent.

  Isabella cursed, reaching again into her pocket for her mobile phone, as the door against Charlie’s back screeched and rocked, the bolt rattling in the wall, screws loose in the metal.

  “Are you calling the police?” gasped Charlie as the straining metal knocked against his spine.

  “Police no good,” she snapped. “You dumb?”

  “But you’re calling someone good?” he whimpered hopefully.

  She silenced him with a gesture, though the kicking against the door continued. Held the mobile to her ear, waited for the connection, taut now, a professional doing a job. When she spoke, it was Yoruba, fast and sharp, and Charlie didn’t understand. She couldn’t have spoken more than ten words before the call was over. She hung up, moved towards the door to throw her weight against it too.

  “You know that gentleman?” asked Charlie, head wobbling with each blow to the metal.

  She spat in reply.

  Before Charlie could ask anything more, the banging stopped.

  For a moment, the two stood in silence, eyes locked, waiting for the next thing.

  They waited.

  Outside, the sound of something moving.

  Isabella held her phone tight in her fist, a weapon ready to strike. Charlie didn’t move, still hauling down breath, still pressed against the door.