by Sefi Atta
He sucks a piece of kola nut out of his teeth. “I pay you in kind, nothing more.”
“No!” she says, waving her hand. “Not in kind!”
She tells him in a whisper, even though he already knows this about her, that she doesn’t push drugs.
He shrugs. “So, it’s four as usual.”
“Five,” she repeats, spreading her fingers.
The man sees her as walking storage. He will pay her more only if she swallows more.
“Take it or leave it,” he says. “There are many where you came from.”
She is one of his best. He will have trouble finding anyone willing to swallow this many balloons. He is testy because last week the drug law agency arrested more of his couriers at Murtala Mohammed Airport. These ones didn’t even make it past check-in. They were novices, 200-gram mules. He has had to drop his prices because of seizures like this, and is trying to sell more within Nigeria now, but wealthy Nigerians are not easy to hook: they get high on Mercedes Benzes. He wants to target their children who depend on pocket money, or the masses that would have to give up their meals for one hit.
She has seen addicts like this in her neighborhood. One walks around the marketplace naked and scratches his crotch. Street hawkers pack up and run when he begs for food. Heroin makes people mellow, Kazeem says, but the rumor is that when this addict can’t find a little to lace his hemp, he shivers as if he has malaria and vomits on himself. He will steal from his own mother to buy an ounce. What will he do to a stranger?
“Use the boy if you want more money,” Kazeem says. “I will pay you well for that. It is not as if he will know what he is carrying, with his mental condition, and no one will bother to check him at the airports. You’ll see.”
She taps the table. He has never had tact. “This is between me and you,” she says. “Never mention my son again.”
Kazeem leaves her room muttering about her audacity. Everyone is making life difficult for him of late: his couriers, the drug law agency in Lagos, his shippers in Bangkok, the Turks in London, and Colombians in New York. The entire universe is conspiring to make life difficult for him and deprive him of business.
There was a time when he would brag that their organization was the largest in Africa, that he had established their trade routes from Thailand. He even claimed to have taken over South Africa after apartheid, colonized the whole country with cocaine, he said, and spread heroin use in countries as far off as Russia, New Zealand, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. She used to be in awe when she didn’t know a poppy seed from an Asian brown or white. Then she discovered that Kazeem was just a middleman, and not even a high-level one at that.
He reports to bigger men in their organization, and fears them. He is rich in naira terms, but they are wealthy in foreign exchange, these men. Barons they are called. She calls them cheats out of common sense rather than a sense of moral superiority. The balloons she carries are worth over a thousand times more than the amount Kazeem pays her, and packed with a pretty consistent mix. At a time like this, when he needs reliable couriers, if she travels with half a million dollars of heroin in her stomach, is it too much to ask for five thousand?
“Foolish man,” she says.
She drinks a bottle of Swan water to settle her stomach, and lies next to Dara. His body is warmer than hers. Every drop of water she’s had seems to be leaking out of her pores. Is she menstruating early or falling sick? She pats her neck to monitor her temperature and checks her watch. The minute the hour hand reaches twelve, she gets up and pours palm oil into a plastic bowl; and then she dips each balloon in before putting them into her mouth.
She has to be cautious with the oil: too much might get her stomach juices going again and dissolve the latex. The balloons are bulky to swallow. They block her ears as they go lower, and hurt her chest, so she pauses in between to rest. All things considered, they are easier to get down her throat than the surgical-glove fingers she trained with, and anyway, it is like losing your virginity: eventually one becomes accustomed.
When she first started swallowing, she would gag as if someone was strangling her. Her nose would stream with mucus and her eyes would well up with tears. Kazeem would yell, “You’d better keep it down!” If she threw up, he would remind her of how he’d given her a plane ticket, passport and spending money, handed her a suitcase and driven her to the airport. He sent her to Douala, Accra and then to Amsterdam. She traveled with Indian hemp back then. When Indian hemp became less profitable, he gave her cocaine. Heroin is popular these days. He calls it the big H or H, depending. She swallows the last of the balloons. Her stomach is bloated and hard, as if she’s been constipated for weeks.
When Dara gets up, his height overwhelms her, and so does his heavy breathing. Her room is not meant for two. There is not enough space to have a private thought, or smell.
As he dresses, she notes the hairs above his upper lip and in his armpits. He has muscles like a teenager but still has the heart of a child. He sobs whenever she travels, doesn’t like staying with his grandmother, and even his grandmother will not keep him this time.
“Take him to his father’s,” she said, clapping her arthritic hands. “After all, they’re both men. Go on. I can’t control him anymore. Let his father take responsibility for him—for a change.”
In her desperation, she left her mother’s house and headed for her ex-husband’s to ask if he would look after Dara while she was away.
That one stood in his doorway, in his dirty string vest, and said, “Don’t bring that boy anywhere near me! He’s not mine!”
She explained that Dara had never been on a plane, and she was nervous about how he might cope.
“I told you,” he said, finally acknowledging Dara, “to let the nurses smother him.”
She cursed him. His new wife, barely twenty years old, and pregnant again, ran out of the house, and pleaded on her knees, “Ni suuru” Have patience.
Patience she has; she had no home or job when the man threw her out days after Dara was born. She was almost considering prostituting herself when Kazeem came along. She taught Dara how to dress himself, feed himself and helped him to adapt to his handicapped school. She was there when he learned how to weave baskets and kick a football. This month, she has been training with him for his favorite event on sports day, an obstacle race, parent and child. They run through hoops and jump over buckets. He wants to win every time and jeers at the losers. His headmistress is delighted with his academic progress. His report sheet is full of teacher’s comments like: “Omodara is an exemplary student” and “Omodara is a credit to our school.” She will continue to work for Kazeem to make sure Dara remains a student there. The school is not one of those where teachers beat or neglect their students. They are Christian-based; evangelical. They believe in the healing power of prayer, but their fees are expensive.
It is early evening, and the sky bleeds a light shade of orange. She leaves her room with Dara carrying only a handbag, inside which are their passports and plane tickets. The car that will take them to the airport is parked outside the gates of the tenement—a Peugeot 504 that reeks of lemon air-freshener. The driver informs her that her suitcase is in the boot. She doesn’t look too long at his face, in case he is one of those who don’t approve of women couriers. She does notice how he stares at Dara.
“BA,” she says, startling him.
“British Airways,” he confirms.
They drive over potholes, past rubbish piles almost as tall as palm trees. The houses are mostly unpainted. The gutter that runs parallel to the road is thick with slime that resembles boiling tar. Pedestrians cross over it on wooden planks leading to their cement verandas. Street hawkers have already perched kerosene lanterns on their stalls on the roadsides, ready for the night market. Children walk around barefoot. A group of old men have gathered to play a game of ayo. One of them, his eyeglasses secured with Sellotape, cries out in triumph. A rooster flaps its wings and scampers.
The driver
continues to sneak peeks at Dara in his rearview mirror. He takes Third Mainland Bridge to the airport and drops them off in the parking lot. One good thing about the new government is that they have cleaned up the place. The last government was lax; the airport was teeming with touts, from the parking lot to the departure gates. She would have to forge her way through crowds, and was always worried about being mugged.
Now, the police have erected barriers, and they patrol the airport with guns. They will stop anyone who attempts to cross the barriers without evidence to prove that they are traveling, or accompanying someone who is. The drug agency is also on the lookout, but Kazeem worries more about them than she does. Couriers who get caught look like they are couriers; they appear desperate, for a start. One eyeball from an official and they begin to twitch.
They don’t lack guts; they lack imagination. She always ties her headscarf with the aplomb of a Lagos fabric trader, wears conspicuous colors. Her flamboyance helps her to get through passport control and customs. Dara’s presence can do her no harm either, since people are too busy gaping at him.
What she fears most are flight delays. An hour is nothing to worry about, two hours and her heartbeat will rise; three, and they will leave the departure gates and find their way back home. She knows couriers who have convulsed and died when balloons burst inside them. That is why she refuses to travel Nigerian Airways. British Airways flights are fairly timely.
Dara keeps playing with the rope that leads to the check-in desk. “Please,” she says. “Leave that thing alone, for heaven’s sake.”
People are looking at him as if he is unearthly. His hand drops immediately. One warning is usually all he needs.
Customs officers ahead are preoccupied with a teenage boy who is traveling business class. They open his suitcase and ruffle his belongings, mostly jeans and T-shirts. The only questionable items they can find are two small ebony carvings.
“Have you got written permission for dis?” one customs officer asks.
“Pardon?” the boy says in an English accent.
“Have you got written permission?”
“Why would I need written permission?”
“You’re not allowed to travel with national antiquities.”
“But I bought them at Hotel Le Meridien. Daddy?”
The boy waves at a gray-haired man who has been talking to a woman at the first-class check-in desk. The man is definitely his father. The father has a pot belly and the boy is lanky, but they have the same prominent widow’s peak.
“What’s going on?” the man asks the customs officer.
The boy explains. The customs officer fidgets with the carvings. Perhaps he thought the boy was alone and could get away with hustling him.
“Come on,” the boy’s father says. “They’re just souvenirs.”
The customs officer shakes his head. “They’re national antiquities, sah.”
“I don’t believe this,” the boy says. “Bookends?”
“He is a student,” his father says. “He is going back to school. Now, see how you’ve scattered his suitcase for no reason, eh? They’re common souvenirs for tourists. You can even buy them here at the airport. What is wrong with you people? The work you’re supposed to do, you don’t do. The one you’re not supposed to do, you do, eh?”
“I’m following directives,” the customs officer mumbles.
He has to be careful. He doesn’t know whom he is addressing. The elite are so well-connected that if this man isn’t someone important, he will certainly know someone who is.
The commotion is convenient for her. She checks in without scrutiny. The customs officer, still sore about his dressing down, beckons impatiently. “Step forward,” he says, and then lifts his hand and orders, “Step back.”
Customs checks are not for drugs, or terrorist weapons, or precious artwork, anyway. They are for bushmeat, stockfish, smoked herring, live snails and all the other foods that people slip into their luggage, knowing that they are prohibited overseas.
Between passport control and the gate, she loses sight of the boy with the bookends. He is probably in a special lounge, not in the row of seats by the gates with faulty air conditioning. There are two Nigerias, after all, two ways to enter and two ways to leave: one for people with a lot of money, and the other for everyone else.
She stops at the airport café to buy Dara a cold Maltina and tells him he deserves one for being good. He laughs; he loves to be praised.
A waitress, in an oversized waistcoat and trousers that are too tight, pours his Maltina into his glass. Dara claps to congratulate himself, and then spits out froth after his first gulp.
“Behave yourself,” she says, as she pays the waitress. “You’re not a baby anymore.”
The waitress says through her nose, “Burt it is nort his fault.”
She does not defend herself. First of all, does this waitress imagine she’s living overseas because she works in an airport? Why else would she speak with such an odd accent? And who is she to judge? If she cares so much for the handicapped, doesn’t she wonder why there are so few of them around, or is there a special country for them, too? Stray animals are more prominent in Nigeria.
“He’s making a mess,” she says.
Dara knows how to behave in school to impress his teachers. He knows how to frustrate his grandmother so that she will tire of him. He certainly knows how to get the attention of a pretty girl.
“Burt he’s nort doing it on purpose,” the waitress insists.
“He is an intelligent boy. He knows exactly what he is doing.”
Showing off, she thinks, womanizing like his father. Just wait. Wait until he grabs that high backside of yours, then you will know why I discipline him.
Their flight boards twenty minutes late. She stops sweating as soon as the air conditioning on the plane is on full blast. They settle in two window seats by the left wing. Across the aisle, a bald man clears his throat and snorts. She helps Dara to fasten his seat belt and then loosens hers.
If she presses her stomach hard enough, she can feel the balloons. She must not eat or drink, and since the flight attendants are on the lookout for passengers who don’t, she will have to switch her tray with Dara’s. He can easily eat enough for two. Normally, she hides portions of her meals in her handbag and flushes them down the toilet. For now, she watches Dara as he studies the signs—exit, no smoking—and then the long line of heads in front of them.
The most trying part of being his mother is the guessing; not prompting him to feed and dress himself, not his allergies and ointments and wayward limbs, not even trying to restrain him whenever he gets excited over women. Just as she thinks she has a good sense of what is going on in his mind, it tightens and shuts her out like a knot.
He is fascinated, not frightened, as the plane takes off. The sky is pure indigo. Soon she is able to see the horizon, and the flight attendants walk down the aisles to offer drinks. Tonight, they are serving beef stew or tarragon chicken for dinner. The smell reminds her of baking meat pies. Her mouth waters. The passengers behind her choose the chicken. A flight attendant, blonde with coral lipstick, asks in a chirpy voice, “Chicken or beef?”
She chooses the chicken for herself and the beef for Dara. He plays with his fork. She makes a show of helping him to lift the foil cover of his packed meal. Close up, the beef smells like a burp.
The bald man across the aisle protests, “I specifically requested a meal without salt.”
“Give me one moment,” the attendant says.
“I specifically requested,” the man says, even more loudly, “no salt.”
“Just a moment, please,” the attendant says in a pleasant voice, as if she is speaking to a willful child.
“For medical reasons,” he says and snorts.
The attendant turns to her with a conspiratorial smile and asks, “All right?”
“Oh, yes,” she says.
Distractions are perfect for her. Dara is gobbling carrots. The at
tendant tilts her head as if she is observing a puppy.
“He’s got a good appetite, hasn’t he?” she says.
“Oh, yes.”
You with your skinny self, she thinks. Just don’t lean too far over him if you know what is good for you.
The attendant carries on up the aisle. She exchanges Dara’s beef for her chicken and whispers, “Well done. When you finish, we’ll go to the toilet before you sleep.”
He pees on the toilet seat and forgets to wash his hands. She sends him back in and he does as she tells him, but emerges with his head bowed. She ignores his sulky face and follows him down the aisle.
As usual, she bites off corners of the blanket bags before tearing them open. She spreads his blanket over him, and hers over her lap. Dara raises his over his head. She lowers the window shutter, places her pillow against it and closes her eyes.
He begins to snore and she realizes how long it has been since she’s had company on a flight. In the days of cocaine, Kazeem would fill a plane with carriers. Sometimes, twenty of them would be on board, smuggling in their luggage, in their clothing, or in their stomachs. Kazeem recruited grandparents, government officials, mothers traveling with their children. In those days, whenever a courier was caught, it caused a scandal. The newspapers would go wild with their reports—An Epidemic of Drug Mules, and such. There was the case of the woman who stuffed cocaine in her dead baby and cradled the baby as if it were sleeping, and another case of a society woman who swore she thought she was carrying diamonds. That woman had been smuggling when British Airways was British Caledonian, when British Caledonian was BOAC. Princess So-and-So, famous for cramming a condom of cocaine into her vagina.
These days, Kazeem sends only one courier per flight. He uses just as many men as women, and oyinbos from England and America. The oyinbos are rarely stopped. He pays them twice as much, and will use children as mules with their parents’ consent. There was that eleven-year-old boy who was caught at La Guardia with God knows how many grams of heroin in his stomach. The boy was charged as a juvenile. In England, Kazeem said, the boy would have been handed over to social services and placed with foster parents. “The English are more civilized,” he said, “far more advanced than the Americans when it comes to these matters.”