by Claire North
When the first boy came over the wall, he did so in a flop, rather than an acrobatic explosion. He was hoicked up by his colleague on the other side, and nearly missed the top altogether, balancing for a moment precariously on the thin ridge, not sure which way he was going to fall. When he did jump down into the courtyard, Isabella was already there, trying to push him up, knock him back the way he’d come, but the net result was he landed almost on top of her, the two of them falling in a tangled heap to the ground. At her cry, Charlie broke away from the door, instinctive, and tried to grab the boy, pulling him off her, punching him around the head and chest awkwardly, inept, the worry growing that all this activity was hurting his fists far more than it hurt the overgrown kid, who didn’t seem to care but flapped and pushed at Charlie like he was an irritating bee at a picnic. He moved straight for the door, but Isabella caught him by the ankle and held him tight, and when he tried to kick back at her, Charlie wrapped his arms around him and pulled him off-balance, so his foot went wide. Isabella let go, and the entire edifice of scrambling boy and bewildered man toppled again, falling to the earth.
A moment of hands and fingers, clawing in flesh and dust. There was no dignity, no skill, no finesse in anything to do with this fight; just one body moving one way, and another trying to hold it back. Charlie didn’t even notice the shank—it wouldn’t have been fair to call it a knife—until the boy stuck it into the top of his right arm, and even then he assumed it was something else, just a nail catching or a muscle being pulled, until Isabella called out, “Knife!” and he looked down and saw the little blade buried in his flesh.
Realisation of the thing made it at once both painful and terrifying. He rolled back, horrified and fascinated, and the boy leapt to his feet, punching Isabella in the stomach as she tried to grab him. As she fell to the floor, he slid the bolt back and opened the metal door.
His friend ran in at once, and seeing Isabella doubled up and Charlie staring at his own arm in bewilderment, chose to make himself useful by kicking Charlie happily in the kidneys and punching Isabella once in the face. Then, pleased that he’d earned his keep, he turned to his breathless, gasping friend, exclaimed something in cheerful Yoruba, and stood back to give the boss room to work.
In came the boss, white trousers, gold rings. There was a red silk handkerchief in his pocket, Charlie noted dimly from the floor, folded to a perfect triangle. He looked down at Charlie and wasn’t impressed; looked at Isabella and curled his lip in absolute contempt.
“Yansh babe,” he breathed. “Kwat nkpe.”
She replied something in Yoruba; he answered. She said something more, a rattle gun of words, angry, bitter, hateful, begging.
He shook his head, a disappointed pastor.
More words; his taut and contained, hers flying with higher pitch now, higher fear.
He undid the belt of his trousers.
A moment as Charlie tried to understand, or perhaps, more fairly, tried not to understand, to reject comprehension altogether. He looked up at the man, and saw something in his face he thought he’d seen before, a kind of smile, a thing that reminded him of …
(A bed studded with broken glass; a crater full of dust and the beams of torchlight; a man on the edge of it all, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a cigarette, and he had smiled and he had been …)
And he looked at Isabella, and saw that she knew exactly what this was, everything that this moment meant, and there wasn’t any doubt in her mind, any polite inhuman voice saying I say, but no, but really, don’t you think that …
And he looked at the two boys, and saw that they were kids, not even out of their teens, and one had a flick knife and the other—the one whose face was covered in dirt, clothes were torn from the fight—was watching him, and there was something in his eye that Charlie also knew, a look he had seen a thousand times, a memory of
a pale figure against a blasted tree
and it seemed to Charlie that all the world withered in this moment, like embers in the fire
and he wondered, if that was what he saw, what Isabella saw too.
(She sees the man in the white suit, and knows who he is, and what he intends. His name is Jonah, he is the son of a judge whose salary is paid for mainly by the drug runners of Navy Town, and the people smugglers from the north, why only last weekend they played golf together and wasn’t the weather fine …
… but Jonah, Jonah has no interest in the law, so he makes his money taking over the businesses of men his father imprisons for no notable crime, and stealing the lives of people who the law has declared dead, even though they haven’t died, and one day he saw Isabella doing her stand-up, and thought she was magnificent and said, will you be mine, and she said no
she said no and no one says no to Jonah, not here, not ever, not in his town.
And what was worse, she said no and she tried to make it funny.
She laughed at him.
All this, Isabella sees.
All this she has seen coming for so many years, so many years of refusing to be afraid, and in refusing, giving life to her fears, for it is an act of will to be fearless, and an act of will requires contemplation of the facts.
She has played out this moment a thousand times already in her imagination, and now it is come, she has only one rule, only one, which she will repeat to herself through every second of what is to come: she will fight and she will live. She will live.)
Jonah said again, a curse upon her head, undoing the button of his trousers, “Yansh babe,” and she refused to flinch.
Then Charlie said, “I am the Harbinger of Death.”
His voice was weak, knocked from him by a kick to the kidneys, a blade still lodged in his arm. For a brief moment he wondered if the blade was sterile; then he thought that perhaps he was an imbecile, so repeated again, “I am the Harbinger of Death. When they locked me up, my employer came in the night, and when the sun rose, even the crows were dead, black feathers on the floor. In Belarus, when they took me to the rich man’s house and put a gun to my head, I called on Death and he answered, he always answers, you see, the fire, the flood, our lady all in white, Santa Muerte, he’s coming, always, always in your shadow, he’s—”
The boy who hadn’t been in the fight, enthusiastic, eager to make a good impression, kicked Charlie again in the soft bend of his stomach, and he collapsed, gagging over his words, which had indeed made no more dent upon the moment than a butter knife on diamond.
What was Death, here?
Nothing to get worked up about really.
But the man, Jonah, was perhaps a little more circumspect, and with a gesture of his fingers, Charlie was picked up from the floor and held in the boys’ arms for his attention. Trousers half falling down, no bother to him, he shuffled over to Charlie, looked in his eyes, turned his head this way and that, examining every feature of the Harbinger’s face. Charlie tried to look away, and couldn’t. Then the man reached up with his left hand, and hard, pulling at skin so it stretched and compressed like rubber, ran his fingers across every part of Charlie’s face, pressing into his eyes, tweaking his nose, pulling at his lips so that his fingers bumped against Charlie’s gritted teeth, and seeing Charlie flinch and try to pull away, he smiled.
He smiled, for he was God, and Death was something for the old and lesser men.
He half nodded, and Charlie was pushed back to the ground, held, facing Isabella. Jonah walked back to her, enjoying himself, slapped her once across the mouth, and when she didn’t fall, slapped her again, holding her down with one hand around her throat.
Isabella glared at him, biting her lip until it bled, better blood than tears …
Then a woman’s voice said, from the still-open door of the courtyard, “I will kill you.”
She said it very calmly, steady and flat. Eyes turned to her, this new guest on the scene. She held a pistol in her hands, a double grip around the handle, and at the sight of her, Isabella nearly choked with relief. Her hair was tight cornr
ows cut to beaded ends at the back of her neck; her skin was paler than Isabella’s, but still deep, dark and warm. Her high cheekbones were set against wide, bright eyes. She wore a yellow long-sleeved top and a green wraparound skirt. Two large hoop earrings hung down to the sides of her neck, and a mobile phone was lodged in her bra.
She pointed the gun at Jonah, and for a moment, he didn’t seem to believe it.
“You no happen,” he hissed. “You no dare.”
“I don’t think you believe that,” replied the woman firmly. “Comot!” And again, when they didn’t move. “Comot!”
She stepped aside, leaving the door free for them to move, and kept stepping, guiding by the motion of her weapon the two boys, suddenly children again, and the older man, towards the street beyond. “Comot!” For a moment, her voice, so calm and flat, nearly rising to a shriek, her control wavering for just a second, the gun shaking in her grip.
Perhaps it was that, more than the calm, which made them run. Perhaps then, for the first time, they saw that her fear should make them afraid.
Jonah did his belt back up, pulled it tight, murmured, “You dead, bitches. You dead.”
And he too walked away. Not running; not him. He never ran.
“You dead,” breathed Jonah, and grinned. He stood a few inches from the gun, and spat at the woman’s feet, and walked away.
Chapter 68
Isabella cried.
Charlie thought he might cry too, but as the adrenaline drained from him, the awareness of the blade in his arm occupied all his attention, deadened everything else.
The woman with the gun held Isabella as she rocked and shook and wept, held her tight as tears and snot seeped into her shirt, held her and held her and whispered words in Yoruba that Charlie didn’t understand—my love, I love you, I’m here, I love you, I came, I came, my love, my love …
There wasn’t any shame in her tears. This wasn’t sorrow, or grief, or fear. This was a letting go of a resolve that had been three years in the making; this was the release after the storm. Charlie knew it, remembered how it felt, the moment the terror stopped.
Until Isabella cried no more.
In a land of forests …
… in a land of lakes …
At last the woman with the gun turned to Charlie and, gesturing uneasily, said, “Who’s the oyinbo?”
At this, Isabella, her eyes still red, began to laugh, the tears that had shaken her body a minute ago now transforming to something different, something high and wild that came easily from a place near the screaming part of her soul.
“He’s the Harbinger of Death, abi! He’s the Harbinger of fucking Death!”
The woman’s name was Kemi.
A group of kids surrounded her car as the three of them approached, said miss, miss, we guarded it, even though you parked it here, we guarded it well—and she gave them five hundred naira without looking, and they whooped and laughed and ran away, and there was much rejoicing.
Kemi drove. Isabella sat in the front seat, Charlie in the back. If he didn’t look at his arm, the pain was easier to ignore. He could imagine that it was merely a nasty insect bite, perhaps, or maybe the consequence of a particularly savage bit of tennis. True, he couldn’t quite grapple with the latter fantasy, but it was absurd enough to make him smile, and smiling also served to numb the pain.
Isabella, sitting up front, one hand pressed tight into Kemi’s, seemed to feel the same way. She talked, without much meaning, a babble of words, and sometimes stopped and laughed and exclaimed, “You, with a gun!” and then, “Harbinger of Death,” and laughed and talked a little bit more and sometimes cried, but every time she cried she made it a joke and said, “Tsk, look at me, with my fat red eyes.”
Kemi gripped her hand tighter, and was silent as she drove them to the hospital.
They went to the emergency door, but the nurse took one look at them and snapped, “You can walk, can’t you?” so they went to minor injuries.
The queue at minor injuries was six hours long, and as a junior doctor, eyes huge behind his owl glasses came to inspect them, he pointed at the blade still sticking out of Charlie’s skin and said, “Only that, yes?” and Charlie wasn’t sure how he was supposed to answer.
Then a much more senior doctor saw Charlie huddled in a plastic chair next to Isabella, and barked, “You are a foreigner! What are you doing here?” and sent them off to a hospital for Americans and expats instead.
At the American hospital, they asked Charlie if he had insurance.
He did, pulling the policy from the bottom of his bag. Then they looked at Isabella and said, “You?”
She shook her head, hand still clutched tightly in Kemi’s fist, and Charlie blurted, surprised to hear himself speak, “I’ll pay for her treatment.”
“Don’t be—” began Isabella, but Charlie cut her off.
“I’ll pay.”
Isabella looked for a moment like she might argue, but Kemi squeezed her fingers hard, and she fell silent, and looked at the floor, and there were tears in her eyes again, the tears that only ever come when kindness appears after a long stretch of darkness, and she nodded, and they took her inside.
They gave him a local anaesthetic when they removed the blade, and enough injections and vaccines against he didn’t want to think what diseases that they decided it would be easier to put a cannula in than bother with individual shots.
So he lay there, alone, in this pristine, quiet, strange little bubble of foreign wealth in the middle of the teeming city, a needle in his hand and the light white and bright in the ceiling above his head, while Milton Keynes sorted his insurance and nurses in bright blue scrubs padded quietly between the empty beds. Nothing like the hospital Kemi had taken them to, where every walk was a run in disguise; where the injured and the bleeding, the bereaved and the scared wept in the halls. Here was a place for the oyinbo, the white men, the ones come to Lagos to experience sun and spicy food and Afrobeats by the sea, preferably without ever having to leave the safety of the world they knew.
What was the world Charlie knew?
(Something someone had said, breaking into his mind. A world is ending. A world is ending. Breathe out, let it go …)
He closed his eyes, and the after-image of the fluorescent overhead lights stayed in his vision, a moving, out-of-focus rectangle that seemed to sink through the ink of his eyeball of its own accord, pulled down by gravity.
After a few hours, he said, “Can I go?” and the doctor said yes, and they’d call him a cab.
He sat in the waiting room, and felt …
… nothing.
The clock ticked and time passed and he was
just here.
Sitting.
Then his phone buzzed, and it was Milton Keynes, confirming that the insurance was all fine and that his flight was booked for the day after tomorrow back to Dubai, and could he send details of any follow-up vaccinations he might need so they could get that sorted, and he looked at the message, and thought of Isabella, and thought for a moment that this might finally be his time to cry, now that she had probably stopped.
He put the phone back in his pocket without replying, and felt something warm and papery inside. He pulled it out. An envelope, still sealed, Isabella Abayomi written on the front.
He stared at it for a while, like a cat suddenly offered an unknown bowl of food after twenty years of happy eating.
Then he stood up, shuffled to the reception desk, said, “Is the woman I came with still here?” and when the receptionist pointed down the hall, he followed her gesture with mumbled thanks, and walked on, head down, a votive shuffle in a sanctified hall.
Isabella and Kemi were sitting outside an office in the imaging department, waiting for results. Isabella stood painfully when Charlie approached, and Kemi followed, reluctant. Isabella said, “You shouldn’t pay for this …”
But Kemi cut her off with a simple “Thank you. I don’t know why you are here, Harbinger of Death, but for what
you are doing for Isabella tonight—thank you. But may I ask: did those men come tonight because you were here, or were you here because those men came?”
Charlie hesitated. There was no malice in Kemi’s voice, just a calm enquiry from a reasonable woman. A reasonable woman, he mused, with a gun in her handbag. He took a deep breath, and it hurt, so he let it out quickly and, from a more shallow breath, blurted, “I don’t think those men were anything to do with me. I come before Death, and I didn’t see him tonight.”
He held out the envelope, and saw Isabella flinch.
“Please,” he said. “Please. I … I don’t know if it’s … but my employer isn’t … he’s not … sometimes he can be but I don’t think that … There was once a house in Belarus and these men came and they were … Please. Will you take it?”
Isabella shook her head, almost hiding behind Kemi’s stiff, upright frame. Kemi drew in her bottom lip, then puffed it out with an expansion of her cheeks, and took the envelope.
“Thank you,” said Charlie.
“I don’t want it,” snapped Isabella.
Kemi shrugged. “Nevertheless, it has come, and so has Death. These things are here, whether we want them or not.”
She slit the envelope open with one long, sharp nail, and pulled out the cards inside.
Pictures.
Bright pictures, oil paint, photographed and reproduced.
A cottage by the river.
Elephants in the long grass.
A lion’s head, roaring.
Mountains where the wild baboons roam.
Women with children clutched to their bright robes, walking through fields of plenty.
Sunrise over the savannah.
On the back—a place for a stamp, lines drawn for the address.
Picture postcards of another place, a different kind of paradise.
Kemi flicked through them in silence, and Isabella watched, and when they had seen them all, Kemi put them back into the envelope, tapped the envelope twice against the wall to square up its contents, then slipped it into her bag.