Doing Dangerously Well

by Carole Enahoro

  “This is not the work of the Lord.” Femi rose and put his arm around the man. “This is the work of the political machinery.”

  The man rolled his eyes heavenwards and muttered to himself.

  Femi let go and sat down again. He flicked open his newspaper, now questioning the idea of sabotaging TransAqua. On the front page was an article about a woman who had killed her husband and children. He flipped through the pages and found more stories of family violence and local hooliganism, which had increased dramatically since the tragedy of the flood.

  The man behind him shouted, “Ah-ah! These women will kill us all!”

  Like so many others forced to choke back their sorrow, small irritations could set Femi off for no reason at all. This time, he did not know what he had found important in the debate, but he erupted again.

  “The women?” Femi shed his earlier sympathies for the man. “Are you serious? Look, why don’t you leave me alone? Go away! The bus will not come today anyway.”

  “Idiot!” the man exclaimed, once more inflated by his own self-importance. “Why are you lingering here if the bus is not coming? I know for a fact that the bus is coming, ergo I will continue to remain at this, the designated waiting area.” He pointed to the concrete block.

  Femi exploded, enraged by the man’s impenetrable self-assurance. “Are you driving the bus?”

  “If you probe the law,” the man took off his glasses, jabbing them in Femi’s face, “you will be comprehend that your dilemma is consequential because, as we all know, you can never prove a negative. That is one thing you can never prove. In law. In the courts. You can never prove a negative. Do you understand what I am now telling you?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “There are no buts. Your sentence cannot finish with a ‘but.’”

  “But, however and nevertheless, all but one person in Kainji knows that when you are standing at a bus stop, you are not in a court of law. One day, I will explain to you the difference between a bus stop and a court of law. But today, I will just tell you one thing. You cannot prove the bus will come.”

  They both tsked and looked into the distance for the bus. It could not have left! Surely TransAqua had taken the threat seriously?

  Then a blast of ferocious intensity slammed into the air. Unseen energies flew into orbit. Detonations from the TransAqua site radiated out with convulsions that made the ground jerk up in unstable ripples of abrupt movement. The imperceptible elements that confirm the integration of existence flew off into a realm of chaotic frenzy. Severed from them, Femi entered the falling, all sounds muted, submerged in reaction to his fear.

  The motorcycle carrying the three recruits careered past him, terror anchoring their bodies into rigid postures.

  “What was that raucousness?” the man asked, a barely audible echo. “How can they construct the dam with such abandon, so close to the most superior building in Kainji?”

  The first thought surfaced: had Ekong placed the firecrackers too near the petrol tanks? Only moments later, another thought: if so, did this bus also carry the same innocent explosive? He dearly wished for the bus to arrive intact, yet he did not want this man to witness its arrival should his suspicions prove correct.

  After a minute, they heard a spluttering sound. Femi spotted the bus as a mere dot in the distance, turning a corner.

  “Idiot!” the man cried. “Look! There it is! Do you need glasses to see it? Please, take my own! There it is!”

  Femi stood with his mouth agape, confused, exhausted. “How could you know the bus was coming?” He asked, shaking his head back into reality. “How could you know for sure?”

  “I knew because my cousin is on the bus.”

  “Your cousin?” Femi turned to face the man. His heart began pounding.

  “Correct, my friend. He called me before he left work. He is bringing money for my sisters. He has found a job for me at the dam. That’s how I knew the bus was coming.” He pursed his lips in self-congratulation.

  Femi looked away from the man to the bus.

  “So,” the man asked, turning with a broad smile towards Femi, “why did you think the bus was not going to arrive? Why were you trying to prove a negative?”

  Femi stood in shock, staring at the bus. As it neared them, he could see the dam workers hanging off the sides, one or two sitting on top of the bus. These people did not look like the traitors he had imagined. In fact, they looked just like him—ordinary men and women hoping to survive the torment of everyday life.

  His pulse raced.

  The bus drew closer, bumping across the potholes, prayer beads and charms glinting from the rear-view mirror. Though occasionally distracted by the sound of the gears crunching and the squeal of the brakes that thrust forward the hangers-on at the sides of the bus, Femi kept his eyes on the charms, mesmerized by the irony of it all. He shifted his gaze to the driver’s face. He could hardly see it at such a distance, but wondered how he had amassed such a collection, what each charm meant to him and what fears had prompted him to dangle them from his bus.

  “Eh-heh!” The man with the S-shaped body thrust an index finger quivering with self-righteousness into the air. “You see? I told you the bus was in arrival. I told you so!”

  Femi kept his eyes on the charms and moved a step backwards, preparing to run away.

  Silence.

  He saw the flash first, so bright he could not place the origin of the detonation. Then he heard a thunderous boom and felt a vibration under his feet. The sound echoed off all the tin roofs in the marketplace. Femi glanced at the man’s S-shaped back. It froze in disbelief.

  The guts of the bus flew into the air like shrapnel, sending Femi running for protection under a market stall. Metal shards soared high and then curved sharply downwards, increasing in velocity until they dived into buildings, embedding themselves in people’s heads, chests and backs. One man was cut in half, his torso severed from his legs, his intestines sliced neatly in the middle.

  Those in the bus disappeared with the force of the explosion, leaving only slabs of meat, dripping red with blood, spitting through the marketplace. A piece of flesh careened onto Femi’s shoulder. It lay with the skin upwards, the colour of cocoa, soft, with small, curly hairs over it, like those on a forearm. Femi screamed. He wondered who the flesh belonged to—the driver, or the cousin of the man with the S-shaped body, or another innocent soul with family to support.

  He could not touch this tiny fragment of human tissue, so he tried to shrug it off his shoulder. It stuck to him. In desperation, he flicked it away with his index finger, but the blood oozed into his clothing and under his fingernail. He vomited on the side of the road.

  Femi straightened up, and something jolted him out of his stupor. He saw the man’s S-shaped body twist as he began to rotate around to look at him. “Jegede?”

  “Not me. It can’t be.” Femi turned and ran.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Simulacra

  In slapdash fashion, Janet fanned out the newspapers on her boss’s desk. Mary had only to glance at the headlines before the unseen fingers of panic tightened around her throat. Of all the options open to them, those blundering incompetents at African Water Warriors had bombed TransAqua!

  The blood in Mary’s arteries struggled to make its necessary progression through her body. Her heart tried to pump it around. Her breath made brave attempts to assist in this effort. However, heart and lungs had to perform at one hundred percent capacity just to keep her fragile frame on the borderline between inert matter and living organism. So great was her anxiety that exhaustion entirely replaced it. No medically induced coma could have made her feel more fatigued.

  To check whether anyone else knew of her misdemeanour—or indeed had engineered it—she staggered from behind her desk and slipped down the glass-walled corridor. Beano seemed far less buoyant than usual. In fact, he was hunched over his papers, looking intensely distressed. Impressive: she had not realized he carried “distress”
in his repertoire. Jegede was now considered a terrorist—what possible interest could Beano have in Wise Water’s reputation? She had no time to ponder this question in more depth, since she had to rush off to audit Sinclair’s reaction.

  As always on speakerphone, he lounged back in carefree manner, with his feet on the desk on top of neatly fanned newspapers, soles of his shoes immaculately shining. She lingered a moment, scrutinizing him; his demeanour spoke of ennui rather than exultation. On glimpsing her, however, his boredom concreted into malice. His self-absorption often led her to forget his formidable acuity when it came to the food chain, and he clearly recognized in this misfortune the opportunity for Kolo’s renaissance, and thus Mary’s rebirth. As he did not think to consider this the end of his rival’s career, he obviously knew nothing of her unfortunate commission.

  Just as this insight solidified into knowledge, Mary was startled back into material existence as Beano shouted after her down the hall. “It’s Cheeseman!” Beano’s pupils were dilated, darkening his pale eyes. “He’s calling an emergency meeting now! He wants the key people from West Africa there, like five minutes ago.” He tendered the same information via sign language to Sinclair through his transparent office walls.

  Sinclair threw himself out of his sprawl. He caught up with Mary and Beano as they scrambled down the corridor to Cheeseman’s office. They arrived to face a closed glass door, through which they could plainly see their boss reading a newspaper. Familiar with this form of control, Mary lingered with the rest of the team outside the plate glass, waiting for the storm to break, thinking Sinclair would have to dredge a bit more concern from his shallow puddle of a personality to get through this meeting.

  “In!” Cheeseman finally yelled.

  He stood up and turned to face the window as they arrived, so they awaited his latest performance. A skilled thespian, he rotated slowly to face them, then picked up the broadsheet from his desk, holding it like soiled toilet paper between the tips of his index finger and thumb. Bringing it to chest height, he let it fall open primly.

  “What the hell is this?” He spoke with an affected calm.

  Mary scuttled into transparency—a blank expression framed within a nondescript face. Sinclair feigned profound wretchedness while Beano’s unusually polychromatic complexion turned not rosy, not crimson, not deep scarlet, but pale. He simply stared in horror at the photo of TransAqua’s Kainji headquarters smouldering at the dam site, a wing collapsed into rubble.

  “It’s like an amputation!” Beano craned his neck towards the paper.

  “You’re damn right it’s an amputation!” Cheeseman roared.

  The bonehead did not seem to notice his boss’s exploding anger. He just stood there, arms folded, peering at the paper, unaware of his surroundings.

  In the midst of Sinclair’s uncharacteristic silence, Mary took charge. The bedlam of Nigerian politics had so far allowed her to cover her tracks, yet even inside this dense jungle of duplicity, someone—anyone—might chance upon the small chink of light that shone upon her activities. And that included a man whose reflection often blinded him to anything beyond it.

  “This is appalling news, sir,” Mary said, in an attempt to draw out any potential discoveries.

  “You think? Do you know how much this is gonna cost us?” Cheeseman slammed the newspaper on his glass desk. “We gotta get some more workers over there pronto. Get some Portakabins. Whatever we need. Just make sure you don’t start yet another,” he yelped the last two words, “spending spree!”

  Mary’s guts unclenched a little: it appeared as if no one knew of her complicity. She adjusted her stance to provide greater comfort. “It’s an unmitigated disaster, sir. Bates recently visited the site and assured Sinclair that it could not be breached. It’s hardly his fault, though: he’s a novice in this end of the business.”

  Turning to his protegé, Sinclair added, as a final betrayal, “Interesting how quickly Jegede’s profile escalated in the international arena. I would have thought your dad could have handled that.”

  “Uh, he has no, like, control over that kinda thing. At least, I don’t think so, John.” Beano’s physiognomy streaked with ever-changing luminescent hues.

  “Riiiiight. Well, maybe he can help this time ’round, Beans.”

  Mary gambled on the fact that Sinclair was on the wrong track. There was no reason for Ambassador Bates to support a terrorist. She continued with her exposition. “But, sir, at least we’re rid of Jegede. His reputation can’t recuperate from this. We’ll have all the public support we need.” Then she remembered to add, “Perhaps we should send condolence cards to the families, sir.” Chestnut eyes swivelled to a new target, the naive dolt to her left. “Beano, could you take care of that?”

  During the meeting, Sinclair had allowed his sentient stereo to be flooded with Mozart’s whatever—some cultural thing Rachel had taken him to the previous evening. It had a note of ecstasy, mixed with—Requiem Mass, that was it—mixed with a slight touch of grief. Transporting himself back to the work of the self-indulgent composer, he set one of the Requiem’s jingles into a repeat loop through his internal sound system and set his face to reflect its minor keys.

  Sinclair noted Mary’s agitation bordering on panic; not in her face, of course, simply in her unstable posture. He wondered what had caused such alarm—most probably some act by Kolo executed without prior consultation. Perhaps even a bombing? Really, very little out of the ordinary: she should be used to the president’s anarchic predisposition by now.

  As if enough good fortune had not breezed his way, Mary’s damnation of Beano Bates induced thundering notes of conquest, his personal version of last night’s paralyzingly long concert. (It needed editing, that was obvious.) Through Mary’s small interaction with the child, and given the short-lived memory of a corporation, Beano had become her problem, not his, part of her history. Bad move.

  The seed of privilege had tried to plant himself, confident in the fecundity of its manure, where overhanging trees had already spread thick roots. He had blithely recommended the minister for the environment—probably the weakest member of the Nigerian government—and thought he could elbow his way in! Sinclair was also certain that the trespasser had schemed to support Jegede, perhaps to destabilize Kolo. For such betrayals the boy deserved to be implicated in a future termination. So Sinclair whispered to him, just outside the range of Mary’s hearing, forcing her to edge towards them. “This situation can’t go on—it’s spinning out of control.” He waited for her to sidle even closer. “The minister for the environment is planning a coup. Kolo’s days would be numbered, if he could count.”

  Beano strained an inferior chuckle. “The writing’s on the wall, but can he read?”

  Again, a mosaic of pigments irradiated Beano’s complexion, all of them meeting Sinclair’s expectations: he now had no doubt that the child was sponsoring another candidate. He did not bother to study Mary’s expression, since she directed its various inflections. Rather, he examined her gait as she slipped back into her office. Her pace did not quicken; instead she strode away with resolution. He hoped this did not signal a change in her extermination protocols. If so, then why?

  With the exception of a precautionary plan securing the minister of finance as insurance, Sinclair could now escape Nigeria’s constant abrasion upon his nerves. The other two could sort it out. Sinclair eased back into his office to recommence his conversation with the president of the less powerful, poverty-stricken nation of Niger. Its new dam would staunch the flow of the Niger River’s waters to Kainji, making Mary’s constant renegotiations moot.

  “Ah! Bonjour, monsieur le Président! Je m’excuse profondément pour l’intérruption.”

  “Pas de problème, mon ami. Alors, comment vas-tu?”

  “Dangereusement bien, monsieur le Président, dangereusement bien.”

  During the bus journey back to Jos, time stretched out like an expanding rubber band. Femi felt its tension, as if his entire wor
ld verged on snapping. The bus bumped along and swerved around potholes. His skin prickled with chafing so sharp that even the touch of his clothes caused high-voltage stings of intolerable pain. He felt like screaming. In agony, Femi could let no hand touch him.

  Sounds too amplified, their decibels intolerable to his ears. Usually silent, Ekong’s cries for help sent jagged shards of shrill, discordant notes ripping through every nerve.

  The ferocious gladiator scrambled around the bus, sniffing the air. “The smell! It’s choking me!”

  “What smell?” Yussef asked.

  “Gasoline. Everywhere.” Ekong lurched for the window and threw up over two passengers.

  Yussef, usually terrified of this unpredictable and explosive character, turned his full attention to him, and whispered words of comfort. Gently, he placed Ekong in the seat next to Femi and went to clean up the vomit at the feet of the irate passengers. Lance just stared at him as he worked.

  On the next leg of the journey, Yussef himself sat next to Femi, having noticed his leader’s discomfort. But although Yussef’s usual tangy odour was fairly weak, Femi’s strained nerves could hardly cope. Its pungency engulfed him in a strangling stench as powerful as any garrotte.

  As they neared Abuja, the bus backfired. Yu screamed and jumped up, then just as quickly sat down. He hunched into himself, staring at the ground. Slowly, the stench of feces reached Femi’s nostrils. Yussef had defecated in his trousers.

  A passenger in front whipped her head around. “Enh?” She sniffed the air. “Is that your smell?”

  Femi frowned back. “Am I dead?”

  “Enh?”

  “Am I dead?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Okay. Then it must be my own smell. Only a dead man cannot produce it.” His eyelids drooped in disdain.

  Highly indignant, she whipped back around.

  Hardly able to move without pain, and incapable of helping Yu, Femi motioned to Igwe to assist his embarrassed comrade. His companion, sitting at the front of the bus, chose to ignore Femi’s gesticulations.