“We need some decoration in this place. It’s a bit drab.”
The minister merely nodded.
Increasingly irritated by the minister’s lack of enthusiasm for such a monumental project, Kolo sorted through the many portraits of himself—paintings, sculptures and large ceramic murals—that he had commissioned from Nigeria’s most prominent artists. He beckoned his advisor with two fingers, and the minister dutifully laid out the architectural plans of the entire governmental complex.
“Now, what should go where? This is the question.” Grabbing a pencil, Kolo waited for a response.
Designed in neoclassical style to signify democratic intent, the legislative, executive and judiciary buildings huddled together beneath the protective posture of Aso Rock.
“Sir, in view of the fact that the three branches of government have been unfortunately co-sited, I think that perhaps it might be best to confine these splendid works of art to the executive branch. This would assist in symbolically indicating a separation of powers between your office and those of the legislature and judiciary.”
“Really? Perhaps we should also symbolically indicate a separation between the executive coffers and your paycheque.”
The minister shifted in his chair, his discomfort finally palpable.
“Personally, I find the arrangement quite snug,” Kolo continued.
The minister of information reluctantly replied, “It makes communication much faster.”
“Indeed.” Kolo waited for more contrition.
“And, em, who can deny the therapeutic properties of art.”
“They use it in hospitals.”
They both pored over the plans, placing objects throughout the entire complex in pencil. Thereafter, Kolo personally oversaw their positioning. It took less than a week for the implied surveillance of Kolo’s virtual presence to be felt in all sectors of the administration.
After a successful meeting with Cheeseman the next morning, Sinclair placed a series of red-flagged email herrings to three Nigerian ministers for the unwitting Mary to hook and offer to Kolo as fodder. Then he picked up his handset and dialled 011, followed by 234.
“Office of the minister for the environment. How can I help you?”
“Nkemba! Lovely to hear your voice. How are you?”
“Fine, thank you, Mr. Sinclair. And you yourself, sir?”
“Dangerously well, Nkemba. I’m a menace to the world today.”
“You want speak to the minister, sir?”
“I’d be infinitely grateful, Nkemba. A million thanks.”
Sinclair sat tapping his desk, attempting to contain his anger. Kolo had screwed him over. It would be the first and last time. He’d let Glass try to cope with that maniac, while he would throw his full support behind the minister for the environment. He might not be the brightest of the bunch, but at least he knew how to bend over and enjoy the ride.
After a few moments, the phone clicked.
“Mr. Sinclair, sir!” The baritone had less energy than usual. “How are you?”
“Dangerously well, sir, dangerously well.” Sinclair smiled as he spoke. “And yourself?”
“Not so dangerous, maybe, but alive, praise to God. You-know-who is still too strong.”
“The last tree felled didn’t help, sir?” Sinclair was all sympathy, though his patience had almost run out.
“My friend, you live in a forest. I live in a jungle. As you’re cutting bush in front of you, the bush grows behind you. It’s very difficult.”
“Wonderful analogy, sir. Wonderful! And if I might use the same analogy, I’m here to clear the way, in front and behind. Three trees will be cut down very soon—they are old, with many roots. Your path will be clear, but make sure you take it at the right time.”
“Three trees? Same method?”
“Same method. Don’t you worry, sir. I’m still working in your best interests. I think you’ll provide some exciting leadership for the country.” Sinclair applied the necessary lubrication to his words. “You’re a man of great vision, Minister. Your country needs a man like you.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you. So, Mr. Sinclair,” the minister offered himself up, “can I do anything for you in return?”
“Can I make another small suggestion, sir?” He eased himself in.
“Anything.” The minister’s voice quivered.
“Perhaps you could make contact with Major General Wosu P. Wosu. He’s on board. And if there’s anything else you need, just call. I’m behind you all the way.” Sinclair could feel them both moving in the same direction, thrusting forward together. It felt great. “I think you’ll find, in the next few weeks, that OK will be KO’d.”
“Ah-ah! OK will be KO’d!” The minister neighed a laugh. “You’re a poet, my friend. A true poet!”
“And you will be crowned king, sir.”
The minister whinnied in approval. “Ah-ah, Sinclair!” His excitement grew to fever pitch. “You have the mind of a businessman but the heart of a politician.” He screamed out the last words. “You’re a true Nigerian-oh! Yes, oh yes! Oh, Sinclair.” The excitement of the news overcame him at last. He let out a groan. “If only I could depend on others as I can depend on you.” He sighed and bid his friend farewell.
When he put down the phone, Sinclair was exhausted. He had to take a few minutes to catch his breath.
FIFTEEN
Oyinbo
Ottawa’s cotton wool blossoms flurried past Barbara’s window, a festive confetti of blushing white, flamingo pink and daring fuchsia carried by the breezes of an unseasonably early spring. The petals tripped over people’s feet in giddy circles, revelling in the last few moments of their short lives. High above, the pines looked down on this uncouth display of nature at its most intoxicated, appalled by its unbridled sense of elation. The pines stood tall through all seasons, sober and staid, but this annual carousal made them question the substance of an existence based on certainty rather than celebration.
Mary-bland, unchanging Mary-she was the powerful pine. And Barbara, tumbling and capricious, was the blossom. She knew Mary despised the blossom as much as Barbara scorned the pine. She nodded to herself, ingesting this wisdom.
Barbara moved away from the window, catching sight of Astro packing his plastic bags for his trip back home. Astro—neither pine nor blossom, more constant, yet ethereal.
The wind. Astro was the wind.
She flipped open her cellphone and dialled a number. “Hello. It’s Barbara.”
“Barbara, darling,” her father shouted. “How are you? Can you hear me?”
“Yes. The line’s pretty clear.”
“Can you hear me?” he repeated. “Speak louder. The phone …” Then, to his wife, “The phone lines are appalling.”
Barbara rustled some paper in front of the mouthpiece and tapped it a couple of times. Yellow eyes shot heavenwards.
“How’s Kenya?” her father shouted.
“Pretty hot. I’ve been on safari. Did you get the carvings?”
“Ah, that’s much better,” her father said to her mother. “Yes,” he yelled. “We got them. Why did it have Canadian stamps?”
“UNEP ships everything to Canada,” Barbara yelled back. “For security reasons.”
“Very wise,” her father commented to himself.
“I’m just phoning to say they’re flying me to Nigeria today, so I’ll be gone for a week.”
“Be careful,” her father shouted. “I’ve been in those kinds of places. Have you got a pen?”
“Yes.”
“Right. Take this down. Don’t, I repeat, do not eat the food. Got that? And for god’s sake, don’t drink anything. Even bottled drinks.” He raised his voice half an octave. “Never, I repeat, never ask for ice—that’s made with local water too. Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know. Don’t take local transport. And most importantly, if you’re in an accident, and I’m only saying if, don’t, I repeat, do not under any circumstances get a blood transfusi
on. It’s probably infected.”
“Okay. Got it.”
“Now, read it back to me. Let’s make sure you’ve got it.”
“No eating, no drinking, no transportation, don’t talk to anyone, no transfusions.”
“And no ice. Well done. Don’t forget they still have AIDS there.”
“No sex. Got that. Okay, gotta go. Bye.”
Barbara snapped her cellphone shut. She dodged and bobbed around the apartment, throwing her most valuable items into a suitcase, cramming in numerous boxes of condoms around the sides, as these would doubtless be in short supply.
Astro watched her pack. “Bobble, what are you planning to do over there?”
“They’re just presents, Astro. For my friends.”
“What friends? You don’t know anyone!”
Barbara adjusted her sarong. “Yes, I do. There’s Femi.”
“You’ve never met the guy! You don’t even know if he’s alive!”
“And I have an important contact I’m seeing in Lagos. She’s a journalist called …” she scanned her memory, “… some local name.”
“Oh, okay, then. What was I thinking? I can see you’re right on top of things.” He marched out of the room with his plastic bags.
At the airport check-in, Astro knotted the tops of his plastic bags with sharp tugs and wrote “A” on them in felt tip pen. He chucked them onto the scales, sniffling.
“Take care, Bimble.” His voice wobbled. “Send me a postca-”
“Passport?” the woman at check-in reached for his documentation.
“Yeah, I’ve got one,” Disoriented, Astro sniffed. “Bib, why—”
“Can I have it, then, please? And your ticket?”
“Sure! Take it! Take everything! What do I care?”
“Just need the passport and ticket, sir.” She tapped into her computer.
Barbara traced the outline of Astro’s lips with her finger, then fell on him in a passionate embrace in which time/space and all material existence disappeared. After protracted complaints from check-out and other passengers, she abandoned him at the US Immigration checkpoint, making her way to the Air Nigeria counter, bound for Lagos. A vast array of people stood in a haphazard queue, all jostling, arguing, bidding noisy, tearful goodbyes, some screaming recognition of long-lost friends. They carried oversized boxes of electronics, suitcases wrapped with duct tape and overstuffed bags, some of which emitted a pungent odour of meaty food. Almost every passenger carried crates of fresh water, water filters and the like; some rushed to airport washrooms, returning with dozens of filled water bottles.
The women wore enormous headdresses and voluminous wrappers of vivid colour, while the men, in billowing tunics with elaborate embroidery, gesticulated their way past the airport’s officialdom. Other passengers leaned on their luggage, slumped, their despairing eyes conveying the mark of death. Perhaps they had discovered yet another dead relative or had to attend yet another funeral.
The plane was two hours late. Barbara, anxious to secure a seat and having heard horror stories about overbooking, stormed her way to the front through the crowds at the gate. After a brief sprint to elbow out any last competitors, she finally made it onto the aircraft and sat between a large, boisterous woman with a cooler on her lap and a businessman on his cellphone.
“Is Wole on seat?” he boomed.
“Excuse me.” Barbara tapped him on his shoulder. “You can’t use the phone while we’re taxiing. It’s totally against IATA regulations.
“Wole?” the man shouted. “Hey, Wole! Worraps? I’m on the plane. Yes. We’re just leaving the terminal now.”
The woman slammed down the tray in front of her, opened a dish and spooned out some hot food smelling of rotting flesh. She then started to slurp it up.
Barbara fumed to herself. “Okay. Just keep centred. Stay in the ever-present now. Find joy in this moment.”
“777,” the progress report continued. “Pretty full. The stewardess is now walking down the aisle … Twenty litres only … I have an oyinbo sitting next to me.” He paused, and then discreetly, at the top of his voice: “Forty-five, maybe fifty.”
Barbara butted in. “Thirty-seven, actually.” When she heard no correction, she snatched the phone from him and yelled into it. “I’m thirty-seven, though I can’t see how it’s any of your business.”
He snatched his phone back. He kissed his teeth and threw her a long look of deep contempt. He lingered in this censorious scrutiny before gathering himself, turning his shoulder away from her and resuming the conversation. “Oh. The stewardess is starting her instructions. No, I’m not scared. We all have to die sometime. But I’d prefer to die first class.”
Barbara pressed her buzzer.
After a minute, a flight attendant appeared. “Yes, ma’am?”
Barbara looked knowingly at her fellow passenger. The flight attendant looked at her, query in her eyes. Barbara nodded again at the cellphone and the tray. Finally, the attendant understood.
“Sir, sir.”
He waved her to hold. “The stewardess is trying to speak to me.”
“She’s called a flight attendant,” Barbara pronounced at full volume.
“Yes. No, she’s standing next to me. Ah-ah! Wole! How am I supposed to know?” More discussion. “Just a minute.” He turned to the flight attendant. “Yes?”
“Please put the cellphone away, sir. We’re getting ready for takeoff.”
He turned back to his cellphone. “She says we’re getting ready for takeoff. She wants me to put the cellphone away.” More discussion. “Well, those are the regulations. Otherwise the pilot cannot hear what the control tower is saying.” A pause. “Yes, but the plane could crash …” Barbara tried to grab the cellphone again. He held his hand in an imperious stop sign. “… if people use their cellphones.”
The woman next to Barbara unbuckled her seat belt. “Where is the toilet?” she barked in enquiry.
“Please,” the flight attendant said. “Sit down. You can’t move until the seat belt light—”
The woman shifted her cooler onto Barbara’s lap and stood up. “I need to go now.” She bumped past Barbara and the businessman.
The flight attendant lurched after her. Barbara, seizing the opportunity, stormed to the front to deposit the foul-smelling cooler on the flight attendant’s seat. She had specifically requested a seat next to vegetarians.
“No,” the man was saying when she got back. “I said it could crash …” he shouted the last word, “… if the pilot cannot hear the control tower.” He settled back, legs wide, and laid his arm across the back of Barbara’s seat. “That Russian plane crashed because some idiot didn’t close his cellphone-oh.” He took his shoes off. “Oh—now we’re taking off.”
“Please, sir, turn your cellphone off,” the flight attendant called from the back of the aircraft, where she was busy rattling the toilet door.
“Of course,” he yelled back at her. He stretched out his toes. “Well, the pilot thought he was cleared for takeoff, but no, there was another plane landing. Anyway, sha, you know these backward countries like Russia. You would think people died quickly. But no—in a crash like that, people burn. It takes time.”
Barbara popped 6 milligrams of tranquillizer into her mouth and looked down at the newspaper on his lap. Laid out in florid colour—a shocking report of another dam rupture.
She grabbed the paper and scanned the news, breathless: a dam downstream from Kainji had broken. Young, proud and strong, Jebba Dam had been heroically carrying the extra load its older sister had abandoned. Now, buckled in pain and screaming for help, it could hold no more and had broken, killing another hundred thousand people.
Discouraged, she laid her drugged head on the welcoming bosom of gentle slumber, eventually slumping onto the businessman’s outraged breast, and only awoke, with a jolt, after the plane had executed a bumpy landing. She could already smell the humidity through the air conditioning system.
She grabbed h
er bags as passengers started jamming the corridors to the exits.
“Please sit down!” a voice urgently warned. “Stay in your seats until the plane has come to a complete halt and the warning lights have been turned off.”
Women dragged bulky objects into the aisle and blocked the exits.
Finally, after an interminable taxi, the plane stopped and the doors were opened by the flight attendants with vexed scowls, looking as if their nerves were frayed to one or two gossamer threads that linked them to continued sanity. The boil of passengers burst and the plane emptied. Barbara followed as people ran across the tarmac of Lagos’s Murtala Muhammed International Airport towards the terminal. Small women assumed Herculean strength as they carried bags twice their size on heads, shoulders, hips, streeling children.
It was nighttime and, though Barbara could see very little, the humid air punched into her and she could smell the odours that signalled a shift of culture—smells that carried more weight, stronger presence, greater purpose. Voices shouted from all directions, workers lolled in doorways or strolled to their posts, and the stars could be seen through the haze of humidity, as there were few lights to erase the night sky.
Inside the terminal she followed the crowd as they rounded a corner and dashed into customs and immigration, joining a vast sea of people in a cavernous hall with no working fans. Only four or five officers were on duty. The heat was oppressive. There were no seats.
Barbara spotted the man who had sat next to her. He had managed to bulldoze his way close to the front—within thirty people he would be served. She could see him on his cellphone. He was no doubt relaying his good news to his friend. Barbara sat down on her suitcase.
Over two hours later, Barbara reached the immigration counter.
“Name?” The immigration officer fanned himself with some papers.
“Barbara Glass.”
He flicked open her passport. “Glass? That’s your name?” He leaned on his podium. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Of course I’m sure.”
“Why?”
“Pardon?”
“Why Glass?”
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