‘Plenty, plenty oil,’ the taxi driver snorted. ‘Gov’ament chop money fine, fine. No leave kobo for common man.’
‘What was that?’ Marcia asked.
‘I think he’s saying he’s hungry,’ Femi replied. ‘Now, lunch wouldn’t be a bad idea.’
‘Perhaps we should make a move soon, honey?’ Marcia suggested. ‘What about that place where your uncle’s from?’
They were walking along Bar Beach in the late afternoon, trailing their feet in the cool gritty spume. A school of Sunday worshippers had set up along the cinnamon sand. Their white gowns whipped and flailed in the sea breeze like so many snow geese preparing for flight. Two of their number had plunged into the water, the soaked white cloth clinging hungrily to their limbs. Waves smashed all around them. The marooned hulk of a rusting shipwreck lay in the distance. Not a beach for swimming, Femi thought. A place to look out at the world, the earth’s edge, and step back, awe-struck and grateful.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ he replied. ‘First thing. We’ll catch a flight.’ He held his wife by the waist and kissed her neck.
That night the electricity supply was cut. The generators were not switched on. Femi woke in the stillness listening in vain for the rotation of the fan. He could hear his wife’s breath whistling out of her. Her contented rest. His thighs squelched as he shifted in bed. His body steamed. He threw the sheet away from himself and waited for sleep to arrive. After an hour of staring into the dark he began to drift into something that was not quite unconsciousness. A mosquito sang in his ear. He slapped his head, jolting fully awake, his heart drumming with that old fear. He covered himself again, despite the heat, and tried to be still.
The next day they took a domestic flight to Jos, flying over a huge swathe of country. There was a sense of rushing away from things – from chaos and heat – that Femi barely acknowledged to himself. He could not explain to his wife this need for escape, his inability to breathe. It was like the past repeating itself.
He remembered Jos as a place of happiness. He had travelled there on holiday with his parents, spending time with his uncle’s family, his wealthy cousins. The landscape was sparser here, less hostile. It was cooler too, the air chilly at times. The uncle’s house was old colonial with a stone fire-place that crackled in the evenings. He did not really need it; it was never that cold. But the uncle was like that. He held onto things from the past, from the old days. He could not see that people laughed at him. Tea and scones in the afternoon.
Femi and Marcia visited the local museums. They drove out to a game reserve where the animals were shut up in cages. A big zoo. They seemed morose and lifeless, even the chimpanzees, as if each had come to terms with a prison sentence.
‘Why are they all locked up?’ Marcia asked her husband.
‘Search me,’ he shrugged.
‘But there’s so much land here,’ she exclaimed. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’
Femi cornered a park attendant who did not seem to know the reason either, who appeared more eager to have his picture taken with them, or rather with Marcia. Femi gazed at her through the viewfinder. In London people thought she was West Indian. In the Bahamas, where they had spent their last holiday, they assumed she was African. Here people knew she was different, but how? And then she opened her mouth and all the heavy words fell out. She was a bit plain, but people flocked to her as to a movie star. His American wife. Why was that so important here? A life of privation and dreams garnered from videos highlighting success and convenience food?
He took two photographs and put away the camera. He could feel the anger again, spiralling to the surface. ‘Let’s go!’ he called. His feet edged from side to side. He thought only of the car and the journey back.
There were three park attendants now, enquiring about the Empire State Building, asking about LA. Marcia had never been to New York. LA was a place for fallen people, according to her mother.
‘Come on, Marsh! Come on! Let’s go!’ He had not meant to shout.
‘Well, honey, we were only talking.’ She turned to the attendants and waved in apology. ‘Really, that was rude. You didn’t have to yell like that.’ Her eyes burned in her down-turned face.
He wanted to take it back, the outburst, but it was already too late. He did not say anything.
The next day they drove to his uncle’s house. Other people lived there now. It seemed smaller than the house in his memory; a tiny worn-down bungalow, the expansive grounds nothing but a small yard now. Femi knocked on the front door. No one answered.
‘We should leave a note, maybe,’ Marcia suggested. ‘Then come back in the evening or tomorrow. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind showing you around.’
‘Good thinking,’ Femi replied, but really, his heart was not in it. He wrote a message to say they had called. That his uncle had once lived there. That they were staying in town – he did not mention the name of the hotel. Already he was moving away from this place in his mind. It was too close. It reminded him of them, his parents, and it hurt somewhere he could not locate. They walked around the perimeter, just once. There were trees he had touched, had climbed as a child. He let the memories fly up, skirt around him, flirt. But he would not allow them to touch him, and soon they sloped away.
They visited the market before catching the bush taxi to Kano, where he was born.
‘Oh, I just can’t wait to see it,’ Marcia gushed in the hotel. ‘Home sweet home, no less.’
He smiled, but wondered. Home? He didn’t know quite what she meant. The place you loved; that you returned to; somewhere that drew you back again?
They went to the money changer to exchange some twenty pound notes for naira. When they finished counting the money it filled a carrier bag. Their hands were gloved in scum.
They bargained for leather goods as presents for friends and colleagues. There were acres of printed material, bright as orchids, a chime of fuchsias; their tubular bells. They walked about the car port until they discovered the Jos–Kano bay.
‘Three thousand,’ a driver said.
‘Three thousand what?’ Femi barked. ‘One thousand!’ The haggling was wearing him out. He wanted everything to be fixed, battened down, made comprehensible. ‘One thousand, my friend.’
The driver laughed out loud. He spoke to the driver of the next car, in Hausa. Femi could not understand. They laughed some more and sighed and wiped the sweat from their foreheads as if the humour of the situation had made them expend excessive energy.
‘Two thousand seven,’ the driver said. ‘Las price.’ He could see they were from elsewhere, that they were different. Where else could they go?
Femi sighed and handed over their bags.
‘You heard the man,’ he said to Marcia. ‘Pay him the money.’
‘You sure it’s okay to count it out here?’ Marcia asked, looking about.
‘There’s nowhere else,’ Femi replied. He forced himself to be nonchalant, to hide his own anxiety.
She counted out one hundred and thirty-five notes, and handed them gingerly to the driver. She retrieved a baby wipe to clean her fingers. They sat and waited.
‘What are we waiting for?’ Marcia asked after ten minutes had passed.
There were three passengers already in the station wagon. The driver and the other passengers were in no hurry. An old woman abandoned the front seat and scuttled towards the market. A bearded man slept.
‘He need to full his moto,’ said a man in a navy caftan behind them.
Femi turned. ‘What do you mean? The car’s already full.’
‘Not full,’ the man replied. ‘Plenty space.’
Minutes later the old woman returned. A boy carrying a plastic bucket of oranges trailed behind her. He set it down outside the open front door. She fanned herself as he pared the rind off the fruit so rapidly it was a wonder his hands were unblemished. He bored a hole in the centre of each orange. The woman held up a limp regal hand, offered him some notes.
‘Where’s the ca
mera?’ Marcia said. ‘I need to take this.’
‘What for?’ Femi asked.
‘For posterity. Quick, give me the camera before he’s done.’ She took her photographs and re-entered the car, smiling. ‘Mom’ll just love these pictures.’
Three people arrived all at once, a family: a woman and her grown-up daughters. The driver told Marcia and Femi and the man in the caftan to get out of the car. The bearded man still slept. The new arrivals squeezed into the small area in the rear of the vehicle. Everyone bundled in again – all the space was filled – and the car began to move slowly out of the market, through the congested city, past petrol stations where people seemed to have been thronging for days, into the wilderness.
There was the division again between city and country. Between excess and emptiness, turmoil and peace. No one could remember when people began leaving the land to occupy the cities.
They stopped for food at a roadside buka two hours later. The bearded man needed to relieve himself. They tumbled out of the cramped car and stretched their limbs.
‘It’s boiling again,’ Femi noted. They had climbed down from the plateau and the temperature had soared. He thought of the city back home. London. Its midwinter shiver. The snow and ice they had left behind. Home. When had that occurred, this subtle transference of affection for another place? Like a love, adulterous and unwitting. He wiped the glaze of sweat from his face, took a gulp of warm water from the bottle. He pinched his shirt away from his stomach. It flew back, soaking, sucking greedily against him. Never before had he longed for the icy embrace of cold.
‘Everyone’s so friendly here, honey,’ Marcia said, returning from a food stall. She had bought chinchin and fried plantain chips, sealed in plastic bags. ‘Let’s go join the others.’ She moved off without awaiting a reply.
They sat at low wooden tables with splintered formica surfaces. Marcia ordered pepper soup because the woman in the back of the car recommended it.
‘I’ll share with you,’ Femi said. ‘I’m not that hungry. You’ll never finish it anyway.’
‘Oh yeah!’ Marcia said conspiratorially to the woman who had given her the advice. ‘Just watch me.’ The women laughed.
The food arrived and Marcia could manage only two mouthfuls. She drained half a bottle of Star beer in five minutes. ‘I feel like my mouth is eroding,’ she whispered to Femi. She crunched the plantain chips, her teeth making small, requisite moves. ‘Boy, could I do with some water.’
‘Drink the beer,’ her husband advised. ‘We’ll buy some more water in town. When we get there.’
Femi ate the soup slowly, the way his mother had taught him. Even though he was not hungry and his mouth burned, he finished the dish. A memory savoured. His mother had always emphasized thoroughness in cooking, never eating at the roadside, boiling the water. When she prepared the fiery stews, she showed him how to approach them so that the pleasure would overwhelm the pain. As a boy he could always outshine his friends when eating pepper soup. He coughed now, just once, but that was the only betrayal.
The travellers squeezed into the car again. Femi felt the wind on his face with relief; he was feverish with heat. He wanted to leave this place now, to be on an aeroplane high above here, sipping vodka on ice, watching a blockbuster. But Marcia wanted to visit the town where he had been born.
There was a panic now inside him, a pressure behind the eyes, an angry migraine. He was afraid it would reveal itself to anyone who peered too closely. The wind lapped eagerly at his face. The driver said some words he could not hear. Everyone else laughed.
Ahead of them the landscape grew more and more indistinct. In this part of the country the dust from the desert was beginning to unravel. Soon it would rise, thick and all-engulfing, sweep its way across the land, finding its way into every crevice, covering surfaces in a thin beige blanket.
It was like a dream now, the horizon stretching on for ever, flat and uneventful. Sparse vegetation. They had not passed a town or a village in over an hour. The old woman and one of the women at the back slept. It seemed to Femi they were moving in slow motion – the wind, the dust, the slight swaying of the driver’s head. Marcia was spellbound by the scenery. He saw her blink, her eyelids droop, resting closed for a moment, then rising only halfway. Soon she too would sleep. He envied her ability to do so in the discomfort of the car.
He wanted her to sleep and when she woke to be safe in bed in London. He would bring her tea and the buttered waffles she loved. They would talk and laugh. It would be easy. He could not remember why he had brought her here. It felt reckless now and irresponsible. He did not know what he would do if he lost her. There had been too much loss here. That was clear to him now.
And then it seemed to him they were slowing. He could no longer feel the wind or hear the churn of the engine. No one reacted. Neither the driver nor the bearded man behind him, nor any of the other occupants.
Femi nudged his wife. ‘Something’s happening,’ he whispered. He had this sudden fear, a vision, a memory: here in the semi-desert, no authority around – men with cutlasses appearing from the bush, pools of blood beside still necks. The car was crawling now, but they remained on the highway. At the last moment, the driver veered onto the lay-by.
‘Weytin dey pass?’ one of the men asked at last.
‘Humph! Petrol finis,’ the driver replied. He did not sound concerned.
The old woman fanned herself. The other man was fast asleep. The family in the back stared out of the window, fascinated by everything around them.
‘Now what?’ Marcia asked, excited. This was part of an adventure for her.
‘Maybe they’ll send another taxi,’ Femi said, but his voice was uncertain. ‘Either that or we’ll have to wait for a car to pass by.’
They tumbled out of the vehicle again, stretching along the side of the road. There was no escape from the sun. No shade, no breeze. They waited.
Then two men on bicycles approached. Femi could not understand where they were going in all this nothingness, where they had come from. He could not remember the last time he had seen human life after the restaurant. The cyclists stopped for the waving driver. He greeted them in Hausa and explained the situation. Then he untied a jerry can dangling off the side of the car, a baby against a mother’s hip. One of the cyclists alighted while the driver took his place. He cycled off into the distance like a man with all the time in the world. The man who had loaned the bicycle ambled down the bank and into the bush.
‘What’s he doing?’ Marcia asked. ‘Where’s he going?’
Femi shrugged. He did not know these things, what lay off the beaten track of life. How other people lived. He wanted to be back on the road, safe and well-informed. He thought of trains and coaches, aeroplanes that adhered to schedules. Running water, endless electricity. He craved these things. They made him more secure in the world.
He glanced about. ‘Anything could happen out here,’ he said. He had heard stories of highway robbers, groups of a hundred men and more with guns and cutlasses, stopping whole stretches of traffic, killing everyone, sparing no one. And here they were, a single car without a driver. Sweat meandered down his sideburns, dripped off the edge of his chin. The panic pushed up behind his eyes again.
‘Like what?’ Marcia asked. Her eyes were alive with the experience. ‘Whad’ya mean? There’s nothing out there.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ Femi said. ‘Do you remember the last time we passed a petrol station? Who knows how long the driver’s going to be.’
‘Oh, it’ll be all right, honey,’ she said. ‘Look, no one else is bothered.’
The family of three had climbed down the bank and were taking photographs. The old woman had spread out her wrapper on the grass. She and the bearded man unpacked plastic containers in preparation for a meal. The other man walked off for a distance and squatted beside the bush. He hitched up his caftan and a thick stream of urine bubbled into the soil.
‘Stop staring!’ Marcia nu
dged her husband, giggling. ‘How would you like it?’
The old woman waved to them, but Femi remained rooted. He looked off into the bush from where he could hear a faint tinkling of bells. Three boys emerged. Behind them trailed a thin herd of cattle, the bones almost jutting through the hide. They passed the stranded passengers, the abandoned car, as if they were apparitions not to be paid attention to.
The man in the caftan joined the picnickers. He called out to Femi, who only waved back and turned his head. He felt removed from the others, yet compelled to stand aside. He thought of his mother then, and of all that was lost.
He looked out at the wilderness wondering how he had arrived here, this point in his life. The journey had been a mistake. The heat only fanned the anger that stirred in him, but he could not explain it.
‘Hey there, honey.’ Marcia walked towards him holding something, he could not tell what. She wore sunglasses, a light print dress and sandals. Her brow was clear and dry. She had become another person here; this unfettered creature emerging out of his wife’s skin. She looked the same, made a similar sound, but there was no disquiet, no fluster in her. ‘Here, have some water,’ she said, holding out a tin cup. ‘The nice lady gave us some water. It’s too hot out here. You’re parched.’
‘Marsh, I’ve told you a thousand fucking times not to drink the water!’ The exasperation burst out of him, raw and uncontrolled.
She winced. The others turned to look.
‘Oh, be quiet!’ she said, but without passion. She was tired of his anger, his strangeness here. She entered the car, leaned her head against the door and closed her eyes.
Femi paced along the bank, avoiding the others, implacable. Was there a word to describe this feeling? Could such a corrosive phrase exist? As the heat from the chilli had leaked into the pepper soup, so he felt the wrath being bled out of his pores. His damp skin tingled with rage. His mother had died from the cholera. Something in the water. Then his father a year later. From the loneliness. Ungovernable grief. And here he was, his own invincible army of one. Who was there to blame? He could not make sense of it, even after all the years. He looked out at the savannah. God isn’t here, he whispered to himself. And then he wept, hard and bitterly, crouching down to the soil.
A Life Elsewhere Page 15