by Leye Adenle
I read every other line. I looked around for more. The other walls were devoid of such vandalism. The graffiti was only above the latrine I’d peed in. The remaining lines were:
Beware of familiar spirits
Do not lose your destiny because of what you will eat Nothing in life is free. The price can be death!
To be warned is to be armed Test all spirits – 1 John 4:1
I read the alarming line again: Do not put your hand inside the finger. Was it a common saying I did not know? What did it mean? Did it mean anything?
A man entered the toilet and did a double take at my naked torso.
‘I think there is a girl waiting for you outside,’ he said.
Adesua had come to check on me. I checked myself in the mirror, held my belly in, and stepped out of the toilet. It wasn’t Adesua. It was the waitress who had spilled wine on me and she didn’t have my shirt.
Instead, she spoke urgently and in whispers, looking about as she did so.
She said: ‘I intentionally poured the wine on you because I wanted to warn you that the lady with you has a familiar spirit.’
Chapter 4 A Storm Brewing Over Lagos
I returned to the café in my damp shirt. It was particularly uncomfortable around the collar and the sleeves. Maybe I should have given the waitress more time to iron it. But at least it was clean. I couldn’t even tell where it had been stained.
Two men were seated at the table next to Adesua. A silver ice bucket holding a bottle of Dom Pérignon was on the table between them. They were looking at Adesua like thieves.
‘She managed to get it all out,’ Adesua said as I sat down.
‘Yeah,’ I said and noticed the waitress pointing me out to a man in blue trousers, pinstripe shirt, and a red tie. The man saw me looking and started marching towards me.
‘Sir,’ said the man, whose name badge also gave his job title as being the floor manager. ‘Why were you shouting at my employee just now? Two customers have come to complain about how you spoke to her.’
The employee was standing behind her manager, looking neither offended nor guilty. I was put in a bad situation. I could say she stained my shirt, stop at that and have Adesua think of me as the type of person who talks down to people, or I could say what the girl said about Adesua and risk both upsetting Adesua, and getting the waitress fired. I chose a third option.
‘I wasn’t shouting at her,’ I lied. I looked the girl in the eye, silently communicating how I was saving her ass and she had to save mine in return.
‘You did not say,’ he held up a notepad and read from it, ‘Get out of my sight, you stupid illiterate. You are a fool. You are an imbecile. You are a nincompoop?’
I don’t remember using those exact words but nonetheless Adesua gasped and her mouth remained opened as her eyes remained on me, seeing me in a new light.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said to Adesua. ‘It was a misunderstanding,’ I said to the manager, and to the girl I said things in my mind that had I spoken out loud, the entire clientele of the bar, who were now looking at me, would have descended upon me as one big, righteous, lynch mob. ‘It was just a misunderstanding. She spilled wine on me. It was not like that at all. It was a misunderstanding.’ The manager, realising he now had a larger audience who were no longer pretending not to notice, spoke louder, turning his head to this side then to that side so no one was left out, all the while keeping his eyes on me.
‘We do not condone people insulting our staff at all,’ he said. ‘At all, at all. We do not accept that kind of rude behaviour here. Just because she is a waitress doesn’t mean you can talk to her however you wish.’
Adesua’s head was bent to the table. The other guests were staring. The waitress was just standing there, and a hefty bouncer had left his post by the door and meandered over to the table. Then the manager went there, spitting out the words, ‘Who do you even think you are?’
Now, I do not know what it is about those particular words that makes them a ubiquitous weapon of choice in every Nigerian fracas, and I do not know from where they acquired their strength to instantly escalate an already aggravated situation, but I reacted as predictably and as foolishly as any Nigerian would. I stood up, stepped up to my insulter, and inflated my body. Chest out, chin up, fists formed, arms held slightly out away from my body as if they could be called in an instant into active service and they needed space to manoeuvre.
‘Look,’ I began, then felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. I turned and gazed up at the huge bouncer. His face looked like he was pleading with me not to make him do what he would surely have to do.
‘Ask her what she said to me,’ I said. ‘Go on, ask her. What did you tell me at the toilet?’
I already knew how it would go. She would remain mute, I would say what she said, she would deny every word, the bouncer would have to throw me out – maybe after punching me – and Adesua would melt away and I would never see her or hear from her again.
‘I told him she is ogbanje,’ the girl said, her hand stretched out and her finger rigidly pointing at Adesua.
The bouncer loosened his grip on me. The manager, who had been about to speak, remained open-mouthed, the crowd gasped as one, and Adesua raised her head from the table.
‘That’s not all. After she said it, I told her to bring me my shirt and she said… ’ I couldn’t repeat it. ‘Tell them what you said. Go on, tell them what you said.’
The girl just stood there silently, menacingly eyeing Adesua.
‘Tell them,’ I said, daring her to repeat her words. She remained silent. I looked around at the hitherto judging faces. I made eye contact with whomever I could. ‘See?’ my eyes were saying. ‘See how it wasn’t like you thought?’ The manager recovered enough to direct his invectives at the girl.
‘What is wrong with you? Are you mad? How can you call our customers… You are a… Get out of my sight, you imbecile. I will deal with you later.’
The girl did not budge. Her eyes did not move from Adesua. She was tapping on the ground with one foot the way women in Nollywood movies do before they start pulling at each other’s hair extensions. I felt I should move between her and Adesua. I saw the bouncer and the manager exchange looks, which somehow communicated that the bouncer should take the girl away. This girl, about five foot to the bouncer’s seven foot, held up her fists to the approaching giant, like a boxer. That was when I realised she was mad.
The bouncer swatted her hands away, put his over-muscular ones around her and lifted her off the ground. She kicked with her feet and the manager and I had to retreat.
‘She is an evil spirit!’ she screamed as the bouncer carried her away, kicking and spitting. Then, suddenly, everything went dark and silent. Not silent-silent – we could still hear the girl shouting from behind the back door she’d been carried through, and the murmur of the guests continued and was even more pronounced now that the music wasn’t playing. But silent. Outside.
The entire bar lit for a brief second as the sky outside silently split open with lightning. Thunder did not follow. From a nearby table someone observed of the black- out, ‘It is everywhere.’ They were looking out of the glass walls of the News Café at the high rises on the other side of the car park. They were right; it was not just the Palm Mall. Everywhere was dark and silent. People began to get up and go outside to investigate whether the blackout really covered the whole of Victoria Island. I was about to join them when suddenly all the car alarms went off. The sky lit up again. Fingers of lightning split the heavens and zigzagged to the corners of earth. The car alarms kept going. We all went outside. Everybody in Palm Mall came out onto the car park. Car owners pointed their keys at their vehicles, pressing buttons that did nothing. If you listened carefully, you could tell that it was not just the cars in Palm Mall. Car alarms were screaming from the estate to the left, the express road to the right, and the whole of Lekki to the rear.
Another silent shower of lightning fizzed across the sky. Adesua gr
ipped my wrist so tightly that it hurt. I looked at her. She was frightened. She was looking at the sky. In another flash of light, I saw the extent of the horror on her face.
‘They have started rolling the drum,’ she said. Da wha’? Da who?
‘What?’ I said.
‘We have to go.’ She stepped forward and dragged me with her.
Other people were sensibly staying away from the cars. Adesua was running towards hers. And taking me with her.
‘Adesua, I think we should wait till the storm is over.’ ‘It’s not a storm,’ she said.
She was strong. She walked quickly. I couldn’t pull away from her grip and I had to almost jog to keep up with her.
‘What do you mean it’s not a storm?’ ‘I’ll explain later.’
She stopped by a white Range Rover Sport. Without letting go of my hand, she opened the driver’s door.
‘Help me, sir,’ a voice said from the ground. Behind us, between her Range Rover and a yellow Hummer, a cripple was on some sort of wooden board. His shriveled legs flapped from the sides of his belly that lay flat on the contraption. He raised one hand towards me and balanced his irregular mass on the other. He was a beggar. He’d been caught in the storm. I instinctively reached down but Adesua slapped my hand away before I made contact.
‘Don’t touch him,’ she said. ‘He’s a frog.’
Chapter 5 Lapu, Lapo, Laki
Adesua was superhumanly strong. She flicked her leg at the cripple, and with this gentle kick she propelled him five feet up into the air and at least twice as far away from us. With one hand, she lifted me into her car through the driver’s door and placed me in a sitting position on the passenger seat. She leapt in and closed her door. Just as she did, I heard a thump on my window. I looked but couldn’t see what it was. Just as I looked away, I heard it again. It sounded like someone was throwing something soft but heavy at us. I kept watching the window, waiting for the thump again. A frog leapt onto the glass. Thump! Its grey arms were spread, its white belly was against the glass, and it scraped with its legs as it tried to stop itself sliding off. I screamed, Adesua fired up the engine, revved loudly, and we screeched off.
She didn’t slow down as she turned out of our lane onto the one between two rows of parked cars leading to the exit. My body pressed into my door. I expected the car to tip over onto its side. My side. I was grappling with the seatbelt when she tapped the throttle. The car lunged forward and my head slammed into the headrest. The sky lit up. Ahead of us, standing in the open gate, was the mad waitress from the bar. Adesua didn’t slow down. The girl didn’t move out of the way. I gripped the edge of my seat with my right hand, pushed the other hand against the dashboard, and pressed my foot down hard on a non-existent brake pedal in my footwell. We were a metre from hitting the girl when Adesua swerved left. This time I felt the wheels leave the ground. At lord knows what speed, we were suddenly facing the grinning grilles of a parked truck, and we’d run out of road.
I woke up and sat up. It was dark and silent. My body was damp with sweat. I was in my bed. It had all been a dream, but my heart was pounding hard nonetheless. It was a bad dream. I lay back down and tried to figure out what part was dream and what part was real. I was at the News Café, and Adesua was there. And we got into her car. I decided that much was real, but from that point on, everything must have been a dream. It was hot. There was a blackout, which meant no air conditioning as the land- lord had recently told the caretaker not to start the generator after midnight. I got up, staggered, steadied myself, and went to open the window. I drew the curtain back and saw the sky light up. I let go of the curtain, stepped back and grimaced in anticipation of the thunder. It never came. Then I remembered the electrical storm. So that part had not been a dream. What else was not a dream?
Standing there in front of the curtain which was intermittently lighting up, I began to remember more of the dream and I steadily became confused because none of it felt like a dream, even though all of it was too strange to be real. I could not remember anything beyond the moment when we were about to crash into a massive truck and die. I couldn’t remember Adesua dropping me at home. Had I been that drunk? Did I pass out in her car? If so, how did I give her directions to get to my place? Something strange was happening. Suddenly, I felt uncomfortable about the thunderless, rainless, windless electrical storm, about all those car alarms going off at once, about the state-wide blackout. What if it was not just Lagos wide? What if it was the whole of Nigeria? What if it was the entire planet? As potently alarming as the thought was, I knew it couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. If the storm was happening worldwide, and if it had caused the blackout, and that too was worldwide, that would mean something really, really bad was happening. That just couldn’t be the case. The world could not be ending.
I went to leave the room. At the door I heard voices. I stopped and listened. The voices were coming from the tiny parlour of my one-bedroom apartment. Moving slowly, so that I would not be heard, I placed my ear to the door. My heart was beating so fast that it failed to keep a regular pattern and was doing more of a double-time random morse code rhythm. Had I left the door open? Had robbers got in? A male voice was speaking slowly and calmly, but I couldn’t pick out anything he was saying. He did not seem to be speaking any language I’d heard before. It was not Edo, it was not Yoruba, it was not African sounding at all, nor did it sound European or Asian or Arab or even Latin. Through the plywood door the man’s voice was muffled, and the sounds seemed like gibberish. ‘Da da da da dum, da rum hum, la la da de. Lapu, lapo, laki.’ And so it went on. Then, someone knocked on my bedroom door three times exactly where I’d placed my ear. I jumped. Adesua’s voice said, ‘You can come out any time you’re ready.’
The man continued with his strange words ‘Lapu, lapo, laki. Da da da, rum, da da da kum. Kapa, da da. Ru, ru, zoo la do la.’
Adesua spoke back to him. She spoke louder and with more force. The man replied to her angry voice with his calm ‘da da’s and she raised her voice even more. They were having an argument in their strange language.
I knocked on the door. They both stopped talking.
‘Who are you?’ I said.
Adesua replied, ‘Me or he?’
‘He.’
They had another brief exchange. The man next spoke to me: ‘Master Osaretin, please do come and join us.’
He called me master. Was it Brother Moses? What the hell was going on?
I found my jeans and shirt on the chair by the bed. When I opened the door, it was not because I was less afraid. If the world was indeed ending, I wanted to be with other people, even if they seemed to have something to do with the brewing apocalypse.
They had lit a candle, stuck it to one of my plates, and placed it on a square stool in the middle of the room. Adesua was standing to the left behind the stool, and a bearded man was on the right. He was a couple of inches shorter than Adesua, who had taken off her shoes, and placed them on top of the stool, so that they lay along two edges, with the tips touching together at one corner.
The man was holding his own shoes in one hand. Purple brogues. That would have been strange if he was not also wearing a purple fedora, a purple corduroy jacket with huge lapels, the whitest shirt I’d ever seen with glass buttons that sparkled in the weak light of the candle, and baggy dark purple trousers that were striped with different shades of purple.
Adesua stared at me without the smile I’d come to expect from her. The man, on the other hand, was beaming. His face looked young in spite of the abundant grey streaks in his enormous beard.
‘I am so very delighted to meet you at last,’ he said. He carefully placed his shoes on the ground without taking his eyes off me, and slid his feet into them. He then took off his hat, stepped out from behind the stool, and extend- ed his right hand to me. He had a huge afro.
I did not think it was safe to shake hands with him, so I kept mine firmly by my sides.
‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘What
are you doing here?’
‘I am Brother Moses. We have an appointment. I sent you a letter.
‘You are the one who sent the letter? The magician?’ ‘Yes, yes. The magician. And so are you, Master Osaretin.’
‘I am not a magician. Magic is not real. Who are you?
What do you people want from me?’
‘Oh, magic is real, Master Osaretin, you just wait till we teach you some.’
‘No. This is a scam. You are fraudsters. None of this is real. Who are you people? ’
‘I told you. We are magicians, just like you.’
‘No. I am not like you. I am not a magician. I am not a fraudster. Who are you people? What do you want from me?’
‘Magic is not real? How do you explain all of this?’ The entire living room lit up. The storm was real. ‘How are you doing that?’ I said. ‘What is going on?’ ‘You tell me.’
‘It is not magic.’ ‘Then what is it?’
The room lit up again.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how you’re doing it.’
‘Well, Master Osaretin, there is a name people use for things they cannot explain. But you do not believe. Not yet. And you are right, in a way. We are not the same. Not yet. You cannot imagine a world with magic. I cannot imagine a world without magic. But I was once like you. You see, Master Osaretin, we only know what we know until we know more.’
Adesua had been watching, but she did not appear to be interested in the conversation. She was merely witnessing something occurring in her immediate vicinity.
‘Adesua, what’s going on?’ I said.
She turned her face away from me and spoke to Brother Moses in their strange language and in her angry voice. She was quite upset at him over something, but why was she ignoring me?
‘What’s going on?’ I repeated.
Brother Moses answered me while Adesua stood and looked at me as if I was the reason she was upset.
‘What you are witnessing is a syzygy,’ he said. ‘I don’t speak your language,’ I said.