by Leye Adenle
There was a strange look of curiosity on her face as she watched me. As if she was searching for something on my face. Her detached, clinical inspection of my wailing haunted me for years after.
As I grew older I thought of him less, and her strange behaviour following his death worried me less. For bringing it all back I was doubly angry at whoever left that letter on my desk. It was a prank, no doubt, and a gang of conspirators in the office were going to pay for it. The disappearing ink was genius, I admit. The unexpected December rain was a lucky coincidence. But referring to my late dad was just wrong.
The next day at work I nodded my way through my early morning meeting while planning my revenge. There had to be an Act Two to the prank. I had to find a way to turn it round on them. Immediately after the meeting I put the light purple paper into the middle of a notebook and went down to the banking hall. Normally, non-banking members of staff such as IT personnel are not allowed behind the counters in the banking hall, but I still had the code to get through the door, so no one challenged me.
I’d taken a new cashier through the banking system a week ago. I went to her cubicle. She’d flirted with me the week before. I remember being surprised when she stood from her chair and she was a lot taller than me. In fact, she was much, much taller than most of the men she worked with.
The cashier smiled and spread her hands for a hug when she saw me coming. I asked if I could quickly check something. I put the paper under the ultraviolet light used to check suspicious currency notes. I remembered from primary school that invisible ink could be seen under UV lights. I didn’t see anything on either side of the paper. It
occurred to me that there’s probably a difference between disappearing ink and invisible ink. I’d hoped that defeat- ing the pranksters in this little way would mark the start of my total victory over them.
Dismayed, I thanked the very tall girl and began to leave when my phone started vibrating. Thank God it was on silent, as workers are not allowed to have their phones on them behind the counter. I hurried out into the banking hall to take the call. The number was withheld. I answered it all the same. A female voice said, ‘Is that you?’
I looked around for who it was that could see me, even as I tried to place the voice. ‘Who is this?’ I said.
‘It’s me, Adesua.’
She was standing by the door, holding her phone to her ear with one hand and waving with the other. She was beautiful. Even more beautiful than yesterday evening. I hoped she couldn’t notice my heart pounding as I stood in front of her and held out my hand for a handshake.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said, trying to sound cool. She ignored my hand and went in for a full-on hug instead. It felt great. Her hair smelt luxuriously sweet. Her voice, when she said ‘good morning’ into my ear, sounded
like the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.
‘What are you doing here?’ she threw my question back at me.
‘I work here.’
‘I thought you were in IT.’
‘Yeah. I’m in the IT department. What about you, what are you doing here?’
‘Look at you, head office IT guru.’ She squeezed my shoulder. ‘I came to cash a cheque. I was just leaving when I saw you. Is that the letter?’
Adesua took the purple paper from me and held it up to inspect it.
‘You still don’t know who sent it?’ she asked.
‘No, but I know it’s one of my colleagues. It’s a practical joke. I knew it was a joke, I just didn’t know they used disappearing ink.’
‘I know you knew it was a joke.’
I started over-analysing. Why did she say she knew I knew it was a joke? Why did I even say it myself? I shouldn’t have said it. Saying it suggested that I didn’t know it was a joke. Was she being patronising by saying she knew I knew? No, that’s not the word. She was being kind. Polite. I was pathetic. She probably actually meant, we both know you thought the letter was something other than a prank, but let’s just say you knew it was a prank.
‘So, who is Brother Moses?’ she said. ‘Who?’
‘The person who is meant to teach you magic. You said you know it’s a prank. Who is Brother Moses? Who wrote the letter?’
‘Oh. I haven’t found out.’
‘So they don’t know that you know?’
‘I guess not. They think I chopped.’ Was she playing along or was I playing along?
‘So the prank is still on?’ ‘I guess you could say so.’
‘That’s cool. I want to know how it ends.’
She seemed genuinely and innocently interested. ‘What time do you do lunch?’ she said.
‘Around one.’
‘One? Want to meet for lunch? Maybe you would have met Brother Moses by then.’
‘One is fine. Where?’
‘Let’s see. You work here, I work in Dolphin Estate. The Ikoyi Club is halfway.’
I wasn’t a member of the Ikoyi Club. Of course, a girl like her would be a member. Her parents were probably members, as were the people she hung out with, no doubt.
Did she see the apprehension creeping into my soul?
She said, ‘Or we could have a coffee now, seeing as I’m here. Just next door. Can you take a break now?’
I couldn’t. ‘Yes,’ I said.
We walked together to the coffee shop next to the bank and both ordered cappuccinos. She pointed out how it was the second thing we had in common. Red wine, and now coffee. Then she corrected herself. We had three things in common. We were also both Edo.
I remember a day in secondary school when a new girl whose family had migrated from Fiji joined our school. Fiona. She was awesomely beautiful, as teenage girls are awesomely beautiful to teenage boys. The school didn’t yet have a desk for her so Mrs Oyawoye asked if she could share mine. Our chairs were side by side behind my desk. We both had one leg under the desk and one leg outside. To achieve this sharing of space, she had to pull her skirt even higher up her thighs. Our shoulders, our arms, and our legs touched. Mrs Oyawoye pointed her ruler at me and asked me to answer the question on something that must have had to do with the geography lesson – I wasn’t listening. I didn’t know what the question was, so need- less to say I didn’t know the answer, but I had a stronger reason not to stand up.
It was geography class all over again as I had coffee with Adesua that day. I could not remember the last time I had felt that way. I was embarrassed, in love, and afraid, all at the same time.
She was telling me about her job in PR in England before she moved back to Nigeria.
‘I’ve just been talking and talking,’ she said. She dropped her hand from under her chin and rested her fingers on my hand on the table. I felt a tingle flow from her fingers, through my skin to the warm mug I was holding, and on to the other hand.
‘Tell me if I’m talking too much,’ she said.
I shook my head. To attempt to talk would have been to expose my current situation.
‘Babes.’ She drew her fingers over my arm as she lifted her hand.
‘Can we see each other tonight? After work?’
‘Yeah.’
I had to be cool. I had to be cool. ‘Great. I’ll call you at six.’
I nodded. I was afraid to say anything in case I said something that ruined everything.
‘You’re so cute,’ she said, looking into my eyes, study- ing me with a curiosity that suggested she saw something other than my geeky face. ‘I’ll call you at six.’
She pushed her chair out with her bum, leaned across the table, brought the side of her face to the side of mine and whispered, ‘I think I like you.’
Then she picked up her handbag and left. I stayed in my chair for the next ten minutes.
Chapter 3 Red Wine and Familiar Spirits
‘Do not put your hand inside the finger. What does that mean?’ Rachel said.
She turned the light purple paper around, and like everyone else who’d handled it she held it up to light to inspect it.
I was unable to concentrate on anything after I re- turned to the office from having coffee with Adesua. I was checking the time every ten minutes or less. It was driving me mad and I needed something to occupy my mind: something other than work. So I booked one of the glass-walled meeting areas and sent a meeting invitation to Rachel.
I’d written down the words of the letter onto a piece of paper I liberated from a printer. I was sure I remembered it exactly. My memory is good like that. Rachel read it first, before picking up the blank purple paper. I watched her closely. I still didn’t know who wrote it, so everyone was a suspect.
‘And you found it on your table?’ she said.
‘Yes. What are you thinking?’
She looked too serious about the letter to be one of the pranksters.
‘I don’t think it is a practical joke.’
‘No? You think it’s real?’
She looked at me as if what I said made her deeply disappointed in me.
‘It’s a scam,’ she said.
‘A scam? How?’
‘I don’t know. But this is one. Maybe they’ll ask you to pay them some money to join them, or they’ll say your father left something valuable for you, or… I don’t know. But I know it is a scam.’
‘A scam?’
I thought about it as I looked at the blank purple paper. I shook my head.
‘No. It is a prank. Someone in this office left the letter on my desk. If it was posted, I would agree that it could be a scam, but the envelope doesn’t have a stamp.’
‘So what? Letters are hand delivered to the office every day. A clerk could have collected it from the mail room and dropped it onto your table.’
‘I just don’t see how they can use it to scam me. I think it’s someone in this office and I think the prank is to get me to believe someone is really going to teach me magic.’
I looked out through the glass wall at the expanse of the open plan office of the IT department. Maybe the per- petrators were watching Rachel and me scratching our heads over their pièce de résistance.
‘You know it rained yesterday?’ Rachel said.
‘Yeah.’
‘The letter said that rain must not beat you.’
‘Yeah. So?’
‘They are good. There used to be a scam, they would tell someone that they have a special liquid that they use to wash special paper into money. They will pour a little quantity of the liquid and wash some paper in front of the mugun and it would turn into money. Then they will say they need money to buy more special paper to wash into money. As a guarantee that they won’t cheat the person, they will tell him to hold on to the remaining liquid while they go and use his money to buy more paper. Overnight, no matter how careful the mugun is, the glass container holding the special liquid would break. The next day, it is the mugun who is hiding from the fraudsters, thinking he has lost the extremely expensive special liquid they gave him to hold as surety for his money.
‘Those kind of scam artists who know chemistry like that can easily make ink disappear on paper. I bet that it was predicted that it would rain yesterday and they were hoping the rain would have drenched you, then you would have believed them totally and you would think you had lost your chance to learn juju, and they would tell you there is a way for you to still learn it but it’ll cost some money.’
It actually made sense. I felt stupid that I’d not come up with the theory myself.
‘What should I do?’ I said.
‘You mean when Brother Amos contacts you?’
‘It’s Brother Moses.’
‘Moses, Amos, whatever. Report him to EFCC.’
‘What would I tell them?’
‘That he’s trying to dupe you.’
‘But... I... The letter is blank. He can claim he never sent anything to me.’
‘Mehn, these guys are good.’
Adesua called at exactly six o’clock and asked if we could meet at the News Café at the Palms Mall. She said she had a meeting at Lekki phase one, so she could be there in ten minutes. It took me over forty minutes to get to Lekki Tollgate. She withheld her number when she called, so I couldn’t call to tell her about the traffic that was bound to make me late. It was one of those Lagos traffic jams that, when you finally get through it, you can’t see what caused it. An hour had passed since she called when I finally drove into Palms Mall. She had not called to ask where I was. I started to worry that if she wasn’t in the News Café I wouldn’t know if she had not yet arrived or if she had already left. To make matters worse, I had to switch off my AC because my car overheats in traffic, so I arrived with wet patches under my arms. My face was also shining like someone selling mango in the traffic jam.
Adesua was waiting for me at a table. She had bought a bottle of wine, which she had not touched. Two glasses were set on the table, one in front of her and one in front of the empty seat opposite her. She had seen me, so I couldn’t sniff my armpits. I pinned my arms to my sides and walked over to her as if that was the way I normally walked.
She got up when I reached the table, and came and gave me a hug. I hugged her waist so that I didn’t have to raise my hands and I ended up resting my hands on her bum. Idiot!
‘The hold-up got you,’ she said.
‘Yeah. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly. It wasn’t your fault.’
We sat and I noticed that there was a menu on my side of the table but not in front of her. The News Café is not the kind of place I normally go to buy food. I would never ever take a girl there unless I had just been paid a bonus. If she wasn’t planning to eat, I would tell her I wasn’t hungry either.
‘I didn’t have your number so I couldn’t call you,’ I said.
She looked as if she didn’t understand. ‘You withheld your number,’ I explained.
Her face lit as she got my meaning, and she said, ‘Sorry, I don’t give my number out.’
Deflated. Wounded. Defeated. Humiliated. Oppressed. Embarrassed. All are words that cannot sufficiently describe how I felt at that moment. She held the serious look for a moment longer, then her face cracked into a tickled smile and she placed her fingers on my forearm.
‘I’m kidding,’ she said. ‘It’s my company phone and I’m not meant to use it for personal stuff. I’ll text you my personal number.
Be cool, Osaretin. Be cool. Breathe in. Breathe out. ‘I got us wine,’ she said. ‘I’m not hungry. Are you?’
‘Nope.’
She poured me a glass then she poured hers. She raised her glass for a toast.
‘To us,’ she said.
When I placed my glass back down, she said, ‘So, tell me about Brother Moses. What happened?’
‘Nothing yet. I think it could be a scam.’ ‘A scam? How?’
I was about to start presenting Rachel’s theory as if it were mine when a waitress came to stand over us with her notepad ready to take orders.
‘We’re fine,’ I said.
The waitress picked up the menu in front of me and knocked my glass over, spilling red wine all over the front of my shirt and my trousers, even as I jumped backwards trying to avoid the carnage. She dropped the menu and her notepad on the table and started using a handkerchief that had been in her back pocket to attempt to stop the wine dripping off the edge of the table, all the while saying, ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry, sir.’
It was my white, long-sleeved Ralph Lauren Polo shirt. It was red wine. It pained me. I was beyond-beyond angry.
Adesua watched with a noticeable lack of excitement. It was almost as if the aftermath interested her more than the accident – which she had not reacted to either – and even then she looked more curious than interested.
‘Put salt on it,’ Adesua said. And to the girl, ‘Can you get some salt, please? A lot of salt.’
The girl looked at Adesua. The two women stared at each other, neither one blinking or looking away.
The girl turned to me.
‘Sir, we have special soa
p that we use to clean stains. If you go to the men’s toilet and take off your shirt, I will quickly clean it and return it to you.’
Adesua placed her hand on my arm and spoke to the girl. ‘It’s fine. We are fine. Just get some salt.’
‘Madam, we don’t give salt for people to put on their clothes. If he gives me his shirt, I will clean it and dry it in less than fifteen minutes. We have a pressing iron I can use to dry it.’
I thought the girl was a bit rude, or it could have been her poor education that had deprived her of the vocabu- lary to say what she really meant to say without sounding the way she did. Nevertheless, I was soaked to the skin and preferred to take the shirt off and have it washed with their special soap rather than add salt to the mess. I didn’t even believe the salt thing would work. It did seem strange that they had an iron for that very purpose. How often did they spill wine on their customers to warrant such preparedness? But I was more concerned with having my shirt cleaned than the café’s laundry arrangements.
I told Adesua it would be fine. The girl followed me to the men’s toilet. I handed the shirt out to her and went to pee. As I did so I wondered what I would do for the fifteen minutes she had promised it would take to clean the shirt. That was when I noticed the lines of text scribbled onto the wall in front of me. The most prominent line read: Beware of strange women. I read another: Keep your secrets secret. My eyes wandered to another: Do not rain on your own parade. I finished my business and was zipping up when another line caught my eyes:
Do not put your hand inside the finger.