The Spider King's Daughter

by Onuzo, Chibundu

  I set it on the bonnet, which had cooled, and climbed on in what I hoped was a delicate but unconsciously seductive manner. I waited to see if he would follow. Finally he said, ‘If a customer drives by I’ll have to go.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, leaning backwards on to the windscreen. ‘So back to how you became a hawker.’

  * * *

  Intermittently he would jump down to chase after a car, returning with a fraction of what I had in my wallet. He spoke pidgin to some of his customers but the English he used with me was confident and without traces of the grammar you expect from drivers, hawkers, etcetera. His manners too were those of a host. He offered me an ice cream and when I tried to pay, he waved my money away. I was even glad he had been reluctant to speak to me at first. It was the natural reaction to someone he had only known for two and a half weeks.

  ‘Where was I,’ he said for what seemed like the fiftieth time that afternoon.

  ‘You were just going to tell me about your aunty.’

  ‘Yes. Aunty Precious. She is my— I think your driver is back.’

  Behind Hassan trailed a man in oil-stained overalls.

  ‘Aunty, this is the mechanic.’

  ‘Good afternoon.’

  We slid off the car front to let him look inside. Leaning in, he shook his head and made a clicking sound.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The carburettor.’

  I played along.

  ‘Can you fix it?’

  ‘I will try my best. It might take me some time.’

  For ten minutes, I watched the quack bang a spanner in the hood of my car. Finally he slammed the bonnet shut and said, ‘Test it.’

  As expected, the car hummed beautifully.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred.’

  We both knew that there was nothing wrong with my jeep. Yet arguing over money with this ragged man would not look good. I brought out my wallet and counted out the sum.

  As Hassan started the car I remembered something.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  After he told me, I waited for him to ask for mine. When he didn’t, I wound up my window and nodded to Hassan. It probably wouldn’t have been worth it. After all he is a hawker.

  ‘What’s yours?’

  I slid the window down again.

  ‘Abikẹ. Abikẹ Johnson.’

  The first proper sentence I say to her and the only thing I could think of was ‘I didn’t think cars like this could break down.’

  She was taller than I’d expected. In the back seat she looked small and young; I would have placed her age at no more than fifteen. Outside, she stood without awkwardness and the small breasts under her shirt were carried with ease.

  That first time I saw her, she had been a vision after the sweat and grime of the road. The more she stopped and rolled down her window, the more unsure I became of her looks. As I studied her now I was almost certain she was not pretty. Still there was a quality to her face, an edge that would make her stand out in a line of much better-looking girls.

  * * *

  ‘How was hawking today?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Do you enjoy hawking?’

  I wondered what she saw when she looked at me: a boy in cracked shoes, an ice-cream seller, a strange creature to be prodded with her questions.

  ‘Have you been hawking for long?’

  ‘How did you become a hawker?’

  Her insistence was beginning to grate.

  ‘You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.’

  It would be better for both of us if I found an excuse to leave. I reached for my sack but her fingers were there before mine. Brushing my hand away she picked it up, placed it on the hood and climbed on. Until this moment, she had been a lonely girl in a large car. If I thought it odd that she only bought ice cream from me, though up to six of us might flock to her window, I didn’t let it bother me. If I thought she smiled too much when we spoke and looked in my eyes too little, I put it down to shyness. As I watched her climb on to the car it struck me. All this time she had been flirting. Despite my shabby clothes and sweaty body, for some reason this increasingly attractive girl was flirting with me!

  ‘If a customer drives by, I’ll have to go,’ I said in a feeble attempt to regain control.

  ‘OK. So, back to how you became a hawker.’

  At this point I should have said, No, tell me a bit about yourself, but I was flattered. For the next hour, when I wasn’t selling ice cream, I spoke about myself.

  ‘I’ve been hawking for about two years now.’

  ‘That means you were sixteen when you started.’

  ‘Yes. I started really late. Most of the guys had been hawking for years by the time I joined.’

  ‘What were you doing before?’

  ‘Other things.’

  A battered Peugeot pulled up beside us. ‘Bros, are you a big man or a hawker?’

  ‘Wetin you want?’

  ‘Abeg give me one ice cream.’

  ‘Hundred naira.’

  ‘Give me for eighty.’

  ‘Hundred last price.’

  Before we could exchange, traffic moved.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  I jumped down with my sack.

  When I came back, she was leaning against the windscreen, her legs stretching the length of the bonnet, her feet dangling over its edges.

  ‘Sorry about that. Where were we?’

  ‘We were talking about what you did before hawking.’

  I placed the sack between us and returned to my former position.

  ‘Before I started hawking I thought it was a simple thing. You find some sweets, find a road and start selling.’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘A lot. You need to consider the type of traffic on the road, the type of cars, the kind of people—’

  ‘Ssss!’

  A woman in a red Toyota was beckoning.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  When I returned, the leg closest to me had slid up, making a triangle of her calf, her thigh and the shiny black metal of the hood.

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Would you like an ice cream?’

  She nodded and brought out her wallet.

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  The one I chose for her was from the bottom. Just holding the wrapper numbed my fingers. For myself, I chose a runny ice cream at the top: an acquired taste.

  ‘So was hawking difficult when you first started?’

  ‘Very, very difficult.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘It was different from anything I’d done before.’

  Biting into the plastic, I squeezed the bottom and spurted cold, sweet, milk on to my tongue. Beside me, she nibbled a small opening in the corner and squeezed a few drops into her mouth.

  ‘I wasn’t used to shouting Buy This and Buy That in the middle of a road. You should have seen what I was like a few years ago. If you’d known me, you wouldn’t have thought I’d be able to do this job.’

  ‘I wonder what you were like.’

  A little girl in the backseat of a Benz caught my eye.

  ‘I’m really sorry. Excuse me.’

  It went on like this for the whole hour. A snippet of conversation about myself, a customer calling, my running and returning breathless, another snippet, a customer, running, breathless, until the driver came back and she left and the only things I knew about her were her name, her age and her laugh. Her tongue snakes out, her head rolls back, her mouth is sliced to reveal small, immaculate teeth. Surprisingly, the sound released is mellow.

  Chapter 7

  I didn’t become a hawker straight away. Six months after my father died, we moved to Mile 12 and Uncle Kayode, one of his friends, found me a place at a local school. He could not afford my private school fees nor could he find me a job if I had no SSCE results. The place at the government school was a compromise. ‘M
anage it for two years,’ he said. ‘After you graduate, we’ll see what we can do.’

  It was an all-boys school, old, prestigious, some famous Nigerians had been there in its glory days. During assembly I could not take my eyes off the crumbling buildings. In my first lesson, I used my lap for a desk and spent the whole hour straining to hear the teacher. Her voice was too quiet for the one hundred and twenty of us stuffed into that room.

  I lasted three months. By that time, I was beginning to see that the largesse of my father’s friends would run out. It was one of my classmates that steered me to my current profession. He was bragging of a friend who made ‘good money’ from selling sweets on the road. He clammed up once I tried to find out more.

  None of my classmates liked me. I was curt, I sneered at their grammar, I faked an American twang, anything to show I was different. At break time, instead of joining their football matches, I would wander to the edge of the playing fields and remember my old school where only twenty of us sat in a class with unbroken tables and chairs.

  I blamed my father bitterly on those afternoons. He was too weak to tell his glamorous wife that he could not afford the gold she was so fond of and the annual trips abroad. I imagined him borrowing to feed her cravings for luxury, our cravings for luxury. There was a time Jọkẹ and I would only eat restaurant food. And then there were his relatives who were always at our house asking for money. Sometimes the same man would come three times in a week and each time he would leave with a brown envelope.

  ‘He’s my cousin,’ I heard him say to my mother once.

  ‘Is that why you had to give him all the money in the house?’

  ‘He needed it for his school fees.’

  ‘He’s been in that university for eight years now. What kind of degree is that?’

  ‘Darling, I’ve told you before. In my whole family, I am the most successful so I must give back the most.’

  He must have been heavily in debt when he died. This was why it all fell apart so easily.

  Since my classmate wouldn’t tell me how to become a hawker, I decided to find out for myself. Every morning I would drop Jọkẹ at school, pick a road at random and start a conversation with a hawker to find out where he got the goods. At first they mistrusted me. My pidgin was faltering; I spoke too loudly, enunciated too slowly. Some said I should go to the expensive Stop and Buy. ‘Everything we get,’ one said, ‘they also get am for there.’ I smiled at that. Even I was not so naive.

  Eventually Wednesday, a Mile 12 hawker, told me the truth. They got the sweets from large wholesalers and took home only fifteen per cent of what they sold. When I first heard how paltry the commission was, I laughed and offended him. Surely, he had to be a little mad to work ten hours a day, seven days a week for a sum my mother used to spend on a packet of Kellogg’s Cornflakes.

  I chose my road carefully. It wasn’t too small, it wasn’t too dirty, it had an adequate amount of traffic. What I failed to note was the type of traffic my seemingly perfect location had. It was a danfo route and not many people who had spare cash to buy sweets entered these cramped yellow and black buses.

  My first mistake was forgivable. I was new to the job. I could change location. My second was more serious. I wouldn’t hawk. I could not overcome the indignity of shouting ‘Buy Mentos!’ to a road full of people. On the rare occasion someone beckoned, I would saunter over with a slight irritation in my face and I never, ever, ran. I would rather lose a customer than chase after him.

  It was a woman in one of these danfos who pointed me in the right direction. She was sitting at the window seat with her head drooping out. When she saw me looking she smiled. Usually, when people wanted my attention they hissed. I shambled to her side.

  ‘Which sweet do you want?’

  ‘You should try. When I see you frowning under this sun I feel sorry for you.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Hawking like this won’t help you. Smile sometimes, come and stand on the road more often and try.’

  She smiled again, this time a smaller, more natural smile, then traffic relented and her head was gone.

  Later that day a man crooked his finger at me. Before I could reach him, the bus started moving. I turned to walk back to my place on the side of the road. I had tried. Then I turned back. The danfo was fifty metres ahead of me and it was gathering speed.

  I ran.

  Hurtling on to the highway with a clear stretch ahead of it, no traffic to slow it down, moving ten metres to my one step. I ran. Futile, pointless, impossible, you didn’t have to tell me any of this; the fact I could just see the number plate was enough. And then I ran some more. I ran after that bus like someone inside was going to buy my entire rack. I ran after the bus until I couldn’t see it any more.

  I took home seventy-five naira that day. After chasing ten cars and selling five hundred naira’s worth of sweets, I could not even buy a loaf of bread. That night I worked out that I had to sell two thousand naira’s worth of product everyday to make hawking worth my while. I changed to a road with traffic lights to get a wider variety of customers. I added ten naira to the price if the customer was in a new Toyota; twenty if they were in a Mercedes. Still, even with sales more than trebled, I never took home more than four hundred naira.

  I was about to tell Abikẹ about Aunty Precious and how she helped me when the driver returned with a mechanic. This mechanic charged her 1500 naira for a spanner twist and a few drops of engine oil. She didn’t bother to haggle though it was clear he was asking for at least triple the normal price. Is she really so naïve or was she just trying to impress me? I don’t like either answer.

  Chapter 8

  Three weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed I’d soon be sitting on a roadside talking to a hawker like an old friend. Yet here I was returning home after spending an hour with this boy, wishing my driver had stayed away longer. As we drove up to the entrance, Hassan became nervous. He is afraid of the two armed guards that stand in front of my gate, which is impenetrable to certain types of missile.

  ‘Please no let them point their gun at me.’

  ‘They wouldn’t dare with me here.’

  The first guard swaggered to the car and flashed his torch at my driver’s face. Hassan shrank under the glare, his head almost touching the steering wheel.

  ‘Good evening, sah.’

  How dare they bully my driver when they knew I was in the car? My window slid down.

  ‘Turn off that torch. What do you want?’

  ‘Why are you just coming back from school?’

  ‘Open the gate.’

  His partner called from where he was standing. ‘You no go give us answer?’

  ‘Open this gate now.’

  ‘Your father said we should ask why you come late.’

  ‘You have asked me.’

  The guard by my car spoke into his walkie-talkie and the gate rolled open.

  He was asking about me because it was Wednesday. Wednesday is the only day my father will see petitioners. It is also by silent agreement the day we meet for sparring. It was clumsy of me to forget. I should have planned the breakdown for tomorrow.

  ‘Hassan, drop me in his study.’

  Standing two storeys high, with a rooftop swimming pool, my father’s ‘study’ is not the expected room filled with books. He comes here to meet guests secretly. I am the only one of his children allowed inside. When I came to his actual study, Mr Dosunmu was standing outside the door.

  ‘Good evening, Abikẹ.’

  I cannot pinpoint what Mr Dosunmu is to my father. Right-hand man would suggest dependence. Maybe stooge. He looks like a stooge. Short and pot-bellied with a silent manner that makes him seem smaller.

  ‘He is in a meeting.’

  Without knocking, I pushed the door open. My father bared his teeth when he saw me, the birthmark on his temple stretching with his lips.

  ‘This is my daughter Abikẹ.’

  The man opposite him turned. When he nodded
at me, I nodded back, holding his gaze. I have no respect for people who choose to play games with my father.

  ‘So we have finished our discussion for the day?’

  ‘But, Mr Johnson, what about—’

  ‘We have finished our discussion for the day. Leave anything extra with Dosunmu.’

  My father stood and extended his hand.

  ‘I must say that—’

  ‘This has been a most pleasant meeting,’ my father completed. ‘You need say no more. Really.’

  The man jerked upright. There was something in the ‘really’ that forbade discussion. They shook hands, my father’s hand doing all the gripping, the other hand barely participating. When he dragged his feet out, my father and I were left alone. I remained standing.

  ‘So, Abikẹ, where have you been?’

  He knew.

  ‘That’s all you know about her? After an hour?’

  ‘Mr T, it might seem small to you but it’s quite important. She has a nice laugh so she must be a happy person and she’s seventeen so . . .’ I trailed off. ‘What kind of guy talks about himself for an hour? I wonder what she thinks of me. Next time—’

  ‘If there is a next time. She might be tired of you.’ He sounded almost annoyed.

  ‘Don’t worry. There will be a next time. How can she resist all my second-hand glory?’

  ‘Boy, you buy your clothes from Yaba. Third-hand is closer to the truth.’

  ‘I have to go. Aunty Precious will be waiting.’

  I patted the cardboard by his hand and walked to the road that led to Aunty Precious BLESSED FOOD STORES.

  I entered the shop just under a year ago looking for a better deal. At first I tried to buy from my wholesaler to sell on at a profit but I was told my quantities were too small. So with ten months of savings, I left the warehouse and started my search for a shop owner who would split fifty per cent of their cost price and give me sixty per cent of the profit. After all, I would be the one running in the sun.