The Power

by Naomi Alderman

  She sprints down the steps, keeping low, and follows Primrose back through the building, along a corridor, through an empty open-plan office. She sees him veering left and she speeds up. If he gets to his car she’ll have lost him and he’ll come back on them hard and fast; he won’t leave any of them alive. She thinks of his men taking her mum by the throat. He ordered this. He made it come true. Her legs pump harder.

  He goes down another corridor, into a room – there’s a door to the fire-exit stairs and she hears the handle go and she’s saying, Fuck fuck fuck, to herself, but when she hurls her body round the corner Primrose is still in that room. The door was locked, wasn’t it. He’s got hold of a metal bin and he’s bashing at the window to break it and she dives down just like they’d practised, slides and aims for his shin. Her one hand grasps his ankle, sweet, bare flesh and she gives it to him.

  He doesn’t make a sound the first time. He topples to the ground like his knee’s given way, even while his arms are still trying to bash the window with that bin so it clangs into the wall. And as he goes down she grabs his wrist and she gives it to him again.

  She can tell from the way he screams that no one’s done this to him before. It’s not the pain, it’s the surprise, the horror. She sees the line run up his arm, just like on the bloke in her mum’s house, and thinking of that, even remembering it, makes it run stronger and hotter through her. He screams like there are spiders under his skin, like they’re biting him inside his flesh.

  She eases it off a bit.

  ‘Please,’ he says. ‘Please.’

  He looks at her, makes his swimming eyes focus. ‘I know you,’ he says. ‘You’re Monke’s kid. Your mum was Christina, wasn’t she?’

  He’s not supposed to say her mum’s name. He shouldn’t do that. She gets him across the throat and he screams, and then he’s saying, ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

  And then he’s gabbling, ‘I’m sorry about it, I am sorry, it was about your dad but I can help you, you can come and work for me, bright girl like you, strong girl like you, never felt anything like it. Bernie doesn’t want you around, I can tell you that. Come and work for me. Tell me what you want. I can get it for you.’

  Roxy says, ‘You killed my mum.’

  He goes, ‘Your dad killed three of my boys that month.’

  She goes, ‘You sent your men and they killed my mum.’

  And Primrose goes so quiet, so quiet and so still she thinks he’s going to start screaming again any second or he’s going to launch himself at her teeth first. Then he smiles and shrugs. He says, ‘I got nothing for you, love, if this is the way it is. But you were never supposed to see it. Newland said you weren’t going to be home.’

  Someone’s coming up the stairs. She hears them. Feet, more than one pair, boots on the stairs. Could be her dad’s men, could be Primrose’s. Could be she’ll have to run or there’ll be a bullet for her any second.

  ‘I was home, though,’ Roxy says.

  ‘Please,’ says Primrose. ‘Please don’t.’

  And she’s back there again, clean and clear and with the crystals exploding in her brain, back in her mum’s house. It was just what her mum said, just that. She thinks of her dad with his rings on and his knuckles coming away from a man’s mouth dripping blood. This is the only thing worth having. She puts her hand to Primrose’s temples. And she kills him.

  Tunde

  He gets a phone call the day after he puts the video online. It’s from CNN, they say. He thinks they’re kidding. It’s just the kind of thing his friend Charles would do, some stupid joke. He called Tunde once, pretending to be the French ambassador, kept up the snooty accent for ten minutes before he cracked.

  The voice on the other end of the line says, ‘We want the rest of the video. We’re happy to pay whatever you’re asking.’

  He says, ‘What?’

  ‘Is this Tunde? BourdillonBoy97?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s CNN calling. We want to buy the rest of the video you put online of the incident in the grocery store. And any others you have.’

  And he thinks, The rest? The rest? And then he remembers.

  ‘There’s only … it’s only missing a minute or two at the end. Other people came into the shot. I didn’t think it was …’

  ‘We’ll blur the faces. How much are you asking?’

  His face is still pillow-mashed and his head hurts. He throws out the first stupid number that comes into his head. Five thousand American dollars.

  And they agree so fast that he knows he should have asked for double.

  That weekend he prowls the streets and the clubs looking for footage. A fight between two women on the beach at midnight, the electricity lighting up the eager faces of their audience as the women grunt and struggle to grab each other’s faces, throats. Tunde gets chiaroscuro shots of their faces twisted with rage, half hidden in shadow. The camera makes him feel powerful; as if he’s there but not there. You do what you like, he thinks to himself, but I’m the one who’s going to turn it into something. I’ll be the one who’ll tell the story.

  There’s a girl and a boy making love in a back alley. She coaxes him with a crackling hand at the small of his back. The boy turns around to see Tunde’s camera pointing at him and pauses, and the girl sends a flicker across his face and says, ‘Don’t look at him, look at me.’ When they’re getting close, the girl smiles and lights up the boy’s spine and says to Tunde, ‘Hey, you want some, too?’ That’s when he notices a second woman watching from further down the alley, and he runs as fast as he can, hearing them laughing behind him. Once he’s safely out of the way, he laughs, too. He looks at the footage on the screen. It’s sexy. He’d like someone to do that to him, maybe. Maybe.

  CNN take those pieces of footage, too. They pay. He looks at the money in his account, thinks, I’m a journalist. This is all it means. I found the news and they paid me for it. His parents say, ‘When are you going back to school?’

  And he says, ‘I’m taking a semester off. Practical experience.’ This is his life, starting; he can feel it.

  He learns early on not to use his cellphone camera. Three times in the first few weeks a woman touches the camera and the thing goes dead. He buys a boxful of cheap digital cameras from a truck in Alaba Market but he knows he’s not going to make the kind of money he wants – the kind of money he knows is out there – from footage he can take in Lagos. He reads internet forums discussing what’s happening in Pakistan, in Somalia, in Russia. He can feel the excitement tingling up his spine. This is it. His war, his revolution, his history. Right here, hanging off the tree for anyone to pick. Charles and Joseph call him up to see if he wants to go to a party on Friday night, and he laughs and says, ‘I’ve got bigger plans, man.’ He buys a plane ticket.

  He arrives in Riyadh on the night of the first great riot. This is his luck; if he’d turned up three weeks before he might have run out of money or enthusiasm too early. He’d’ve got the same footage as everyone else: women wearing the batula practising their sparks on each other, giggling shyly. More likely, he would have got nothing – those shots were mostly filmed by women. To be a man, filming here, he needed to arrive on the night that they swarmed through the city.

  It had been sparked by the death of two girls, about twelve years old. An uncle had found them practising their devilry together; a religious man, he had summoned his friends, and the girls had struggled against their punishment and somehow they had both ended up beaten to death. And the neighbours saw and heard. And – who can say why these things happen on Thursday, when the same events might have gone unremarked on Tuesday? – they fought back. A dozen women turned into a hundred. A hundred into a thousand. The police retreated. The women shouted; some made placards. They understood their strength, all at once.

  When Tunde arrives at the airport the security officers at the doors tell him it’s not safe to leave, that foreign visitors should stay here in the terminal and take the first flight home. He has to bri
be three separate men to sneak out. He pays a cab driver double to take him where the women are gathering, shouting and marching. It is the middle of the day and the man is frightened.

  ‘Go home,’ he says as Tunde jumps from the cab, and Tunde cannot tell whether he’s saying what he’s about to do or giving advice.

  Three streets away, he spots the tail of the crowd. He has a feeling something will happen here today, something he has not seen before. He is too excited to be afraid. He is going to be the one to record this thing.

  He follows behind them, holding his camera close to his body so it won’t be too obvious what he’s doing. But still, a couple of the women notice him. They shout at him, first in Arabic and then in English.

  ‘News? CNN? BBC?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘CNN.’

  They start to laugh, and for a moment he is afraid, but it passes like a wisp of cloud when they shout to one another, ‘CNN! CNN!’ and more women come, holding their thumbs up and smiling into the camera.

  ‘You cannot walk with us, CNN,’ says one of them, her English a little better than the others’. ‘There will be no men with us today.’

  ‘Oh, but’ – Tunde smiles his broad and winning smile – ‘I’m harmless. You wouldn’t hurt me.’

  The women say, ‘No. No men, no.’

  ‘What do I have to do to convince you to trust me?’ says Tunde. ‘Look, here’s my CNN badge. I’m not carrying any weapons.’ He opens up his jacket, takes it off slowly, swirls it in the air to show both sides.

  The women are watching him. The one whose English is better says, ‘You could be carrying anything.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ he says. ‘You know mine already. I’m at a disadvantage.’

  ‘Noor,’ she says. ‘It means the light. We are the ones who bring the light. Now, tell us, what if you have a gun in a holster on your back, or a taser strapped to your calf?’

  He looks at her, raises an eyebrow. She has dark, laughing eyes. She’s laughing at him.

  ‘Really?’ he says.

  She nods, smiling.

  He unbuttons his shirt slowly. Peels it off his back. There are sparks flying between their fingertips, but he is not afraid.

  ‘No gun taped to my back.’

  ‘I see that,’ she says. ‘Calf?’

  There are maybe thirty women watching this now. Any one of them could kill him with a single blow. In for a penny.

  He undoes his jeans. Slips them down. There’s a little intake of breath around the crowd of women. He turns in a slow circle.

  ‘No taser,’ says Tunde, ‘on my calf.’

  Noor smiles. Licks her top lip.

  ‘Then you should come with us, CNN. Put your clothes back on and follow.’

  He pulls his clothes on hastily and stumbles behind them. She reaches for him and takes his left hand.

  ‘In our country, it is forbidden for a man and a woman to hold hands in the street. In our country, a woman is not allowed to drive a car. Women are no good with cars.’

  She squeezes his hand more tightly. He can feel the crackle of power across her shoulders, like the feeling in the air before a storm. She does not hurt him; not even a flicker of it leaks into him. She pulls him across the empty road to a shopping mall. Outside the entrance, dozens of cars are parked in orderly rows, marked out by red and green and blue flags.

  In the upper floors of the mall, Tunde sees some men and women watching. The young women around him laugh and point at them and make a crackle pass between their fingertips. The men flinch. The women stare hungrily. Their eyes are parched for the sight of it.

  Noor laughs as she makes Tunde stand well back from the bonnet of a black jeep parked right outside the entrance. Her smile is wide and confident.

  ‘Are you recording?’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They do not let us drive a car here,’ she says, ‘but watch what we can do.’

  She puts her palm flat on the bonnet. There is a click and it flicks open.

  She grins at him. She places her hand just so upon the engine, next to the battery.

  The engine kicks on. The car revs. Higher and higher, louder and louder, the motor thudding and screeching, the whole machine trying to escape from her. Noor is laughing as she does it. The noise becomes louder, the sound of an engine in agony, and then a vast, explosive percussion, a great white light out of the engine block, and the whole thing melts, warps down into the tarmac, dripping with oil and hot steel. She grimaces, grabs Tunde’s hand and shouts, ‘Run!’ in his ear, and they do, they run across the parking lot, while she’s saying, ‘Look, film it, film it,’ and he turns back towards the jeep just at the moment that the hot metal hits the fuel line and the whole thing explodes.

  It is so loud and hot that for a moment his camera screen goes white, and then black. And when the picture comes back there are young women advancing across the centre of the screen, each of them backed by the fire, each of them walking with the lightning. They are going from car to car, setting the motors revving and the engine blocks burning into a molten heat. Some of them can do it without touching the cars; they send their lines of power out from their bodies and they are all laughing.

  Tunde pans up to look at the people watching from the windows, to see what they are doing. There are men trying to drag their women from the glass. And there are women shrugging off their hands. Not bothering to say a word. Watching and watching. Palms pressed against the glass. He knows then that this thing is going to take the world and everything will be different and he is so glad he shouts for joy, whooping with the others among the flames.

  In Manfouha, to the west of the city, an elderly Ethiopian woman walks out of a half-built, scaffold-supported building into the street to greet them, her hands held high, calling out something that none of them can understand. Her back is bent, her shoulders hunched forward, her spine humped between her shoulder blades. Noor takes her palm between her two hands, and the older woman watches her like a patient observing a doctor’s treatment. Noor puts two fingers to her palm and shows her how to use the thing that must always have been in her, must have been waiting all the years of her life to emerge. This is how it works. The younger women can wake it up in the older ones; but from now on all women will have it.

  The older woman starts to cry when the gentle force of it wakes up the lines of her nerves and ligaments. You can see it in her face on the footage when she feels it inside her. She does not have much to give. A tiny spark jumps between her fingertips and Noor’s arm. She must be eighty years old, and the tears run down her face as she does it again and again. She holds up her two palms and starts to ululate. The other women take it up and the street is filled with the sound, the city is filled with it; the country – Tunde thinks – must be full of this joyful warning. He is the only man here, the only one filming. This revolution feels like his personal miracle, a thing to overturn the world.

  He travels with them through the night and records the things he sees. In the north of the city they see a woman in an upstairs room behind a barred window. She drops a note down through the bars – Tunde cannot get close enough to read it, but there is a ripple through the crowd as the message is passed from person to person. They break down the door and he follows them as they find the man who has been holding her prisoner cowering in a kitchen cupboard. They do not even bother to hurt him; they take the woman with them as they gather and grow. In the campus of the Health Sciences department a man runs towards them, firing an army rifle and shouting in Arabic and English about their offence against their betters. He wounds three of the women in the leg or arm and the others are on him like a tide. There is a sound like eggs frying. When Tunde gets close enough to show what has been done, he is perfectly still, the twisted-vine marks across his face and neck so thick that his features are barely discernible.

  At last, near dawn, crowded around by women who show no signs of tiring, Noor takes his hand and leads him to an apartment, a room, a bed. It belo
ngs to a friend of hers, she says, a student. Six people live here. But half the city has fled now and the place is empty. The electricity isn’t working. She makes a spark in her hand to find their way, and there, in the flash of her, she takes off his jacket, pulls his shirt over his head. She looks at his body as she did before: open and hungry. She kisses him.

  ‘I have never done this before,’ she says, and he tells her the same is true for him and he does not feel ashamed.

  She puts her palm to his chest. ‘I am a free woman,’ she says.

  He feels it. It is exhilarating. In the streets there are still shouts and crackles and sporadic sounds of gunfire. Here in a bedroom covered with posters of pop singers and movie stars, their bodies are warm together. She unbuttons his jeans and he steps out of them; she goes carefully; he can feel her skein starting to hum. He is afraid, he is turned on; it is all bundled up together, as it is in his fantasies.

  ‘You are a good man,’ she says. ‘You are beautiful.’

  She runs the back of her hand over the sparse fur of his chest. She lets a tiny crackle go, a prickle at his hair’s ends, glowing faintly. It feels good. Every line of his body is coming into focus as she touches him, as if he hadn’t really been there at all, before.

  He wants to be inside her; his body is already telling him what to do, how to move this thing forward, how to take her arms, how to bring her down on to the bed, how to consummate. But the body has contradictory impulses: fear is as significant as lust, physical pain as strong as desire. He holds himself there, wanting and not-wanting. He lets her set the pace.

  It takes a long while, and it is good. She shows him what to do, with his mouth and with his fingers. By the time she is riding him, sweating and calling out, the sun has risen on a new day in Riyadh. And when she loses control as she finishes she sends a jolt through his buttocks and across his pelvis and he barely feels the pain at all, so great is the delight.