Wincing at the sight of the bloodied feet, Igwe walked over to the distraught man, to pace beside him on his circuit around the tree. Alighting on an idea, he called to Femi to join them on the circuit. “Let me construct a bier. We can carry Ubaldous to Lagos.”
“The man can move, Igwe. It’s hard to stop him. In fact, he could carry his own bier, my friend. That’s not the problem. His mind cannot survive the journey. He needs peace, not Lagos. Let the others go there.”
The day after this conversation, Ubaldous’s condition improved dramatically. He made it clear to them all that he wished to stay in Jos permanently.
A long wail, swooping down like a bird of prey, summoned Femi and Igwe from their hut.
Igwe yelped.
Fixated by the sight of bleeding feet, dangling legs and the bodily wastes that ran down them, Igwe sobbed. “He heard me, Femi. He must have heard.”
Ubaldous had hanged himself from the branches of the flame tree.
Once again, a great numbness settled within Femi, like that felt by those strange children born without a sense of pain, who cannot feel the heat of a flame. It found room among the other erasures of his life. “He didn’t hear you, Ig. He just knew.”
The immense sorrow of losing their once fierce fighter plunged the compound into mourning. Even the unbalanced grew quiet. Occasionally, mumbled stories about Ubaldous’s many victories laced through the stillness. To honour his memory, Femi named the village after him. Ekong erected a signpost outside the village. Lance laid flowers upon it. Yussef did not emerge from his hut.
After burying Ubaldous under the flame tree that had been his counsellor and his friend, they prepared to move to Lagos. Only the ailing stayed in Jos, muttering angry words to the skies, protected by friends and sheltered by huts on the hills.
Among the followers, Hassan secreted a stone from his village within his belongings, his expression overlaid with distrust, certain that no one could prevent themselves from stealing a treasure so precious. Zainab folded three pages of recipes her mother had written for her, using only the tips of her nails to touch the paper, as if it were made of onion skin and its surface contained the first known script. Her friend Azuka carried two stringed instruments, though she could barely remember the songs her grandmother had taught her. Nevertheless, she knew her humming would be the last record of an entire clan.
The final descendents of now extinct peoples slowly made their way to the country’s former capital and largest city, Lagos.
After a week of recuperation, Barbara reluctantly slipped on a flowered Lurex shirt, stretching its purple blooms across her chest, almost flattening her breasts. She matched this with a pair of orange pantaloons, jammed her feet into a pair of Turkish shoes with turned-up toes, then grabbed her Peruvian poncho and bundled off into the chaos of an autumn day.
Crimson and gold leaves spun like whirling dervishes intent on draining the last gasps of energy from life before they bid the world a dizzy goodbye. In two weeks, three, four perhaps, she knew the winds would come—wild gales, furious that these brash and buxom colours had raised a challenge, thrashing and whipping them until they fell, carpeting the land in soft, submissive layers. There they would lie, muted browns, beiges—ripped, tattered, exhausted.
Gums greeted her. “Hey, Barbara, did you enjoy your holiday? How are your parents?”
“Awful.” She watched as Gums’ smile faded into concern. “They found out I was working for Drop of Life and had simultaneous strokes. Now they have to be fed Jell-O through a straw. My dad gets green, my mom red. That’s how we know whose is whose.”
Gums’ eyes widened. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
Barbara shook her head in frustration. “Just kidding.”
“Well, I guess you’re glad to be back here, then?” Gums ended on an optimistic note.
“Nope,” Barbara sighed, unwilling to be drawn into the warped reality that bred Gums’ relentless cheer.
Gums looked around furtively, smiled a “till later” and made a hasty escape.
Barbara climbed up to her turret hideaway. At her computer, she checked to see how the situation in Nigeria had progressed. Riots had broken out and farmers were attacking infrastructure in broad daylight.
Gums poked her head around the corner and darted a note in her direction.
Hey Barbie!!! Great weather, huh? Another wonderful day in paradise ☺ Jane has asked for an emergency meeting with you asap. Krystal
Barbara crept off to Jane’s office, her Turkish shoes squeaking as she tiptoed, avoiding the other staff who might be lurking in the wings to assault her with the ritual of the morning greeting.
The antiquity had parked herself behind her desk, life’s manuscript carved into her leathery skin. She wore a sari of oranges and golds, across which she had draped a veil of screaming red. And though the colours told of passion and violence, the overall effect hinted of acceptance and peace.
“Where have you been?” Jane’s tree bark skin settled into stern disapproval.
Barbara was stunned by the relic’s expression. She had expected praise for her hard work. After all, they had come so close to toppling Kolo’s regime. Then she realized there might be a simpler explanation. “Oh my gosh! Have I missed something here? Some kind of do? A birthday, perhaps?”
The antique tossed four newspapers at her. “They’re reporting that Drop of Life is backing insurgency in Nigeria. Is this true?” Her voice could barely control an underlying tremor. Parkinson’s, perhaps? Or anger?
“Absolutely not. Well, technically no.” Fiddling with a bangle, Barbara reasoned that Drop of Life had not backed insurgency, it had been at its forefront.
“I also understand that Jegede’s group may be involved in recent terrorist acts.”
“No, no, that’s factually incorrect.” It was one act, and not that recent—a whole month had passed.
Jane sat silent and Barbara was forced to continue. “We were involved in PR activities.”
“Not according to accounting! What’s this bill from Fantasia Enterprises?” Jane slammed it on the desk, oblivious to any dangers from osteoporosis.
“Construction of a recuperation facility in Jos.”
“With Drop of Life financing?”
“Can’t remember. It was a while ago.”
“Who the hell gave you permission to do that?” Jane shouted, her features as lively as any sixty-year-old’s. “You’ve jeopardized the work of the entire organization! Thanks to you, Life Blood is threatening to cut our funding off. We need you out of here immediately, and, of course, we’re severing all financial links to Jegede’s group.”
Barbara screwed up her eyes in order to better understand these ancient murmurings. “You’re firing me?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m doing. Well observed!”
Barbara shrank into her poncho. This marked the end of her most fertile period: an era of almosts. She had almost fallen in love. She had almost defeated TransAqua. She had almost toppled a regime. She had almost kept a job. Reaching over Jane’s desk, she gathered up the newspapers, planning to paste the articles into a scrapbook.
Seeing in print how much she had already achieved, she could not help but protest. “If you fire me, that’s as much as an admission of guilt. So far, your funding partners are only making spurious—and, I might add, libellous—connections between Drop of Life and insurgency, simply because of our very active PR campaign in the region. Surely you wouldn’t want me to imply anything different?”
The wreck glared at her through a belt of wrinkles, a disconcerting gaze. Age only served to increase their authority, like monuments once gaudy that had now decayed into grandeur. But a buried stream of indignation spurred Barbara on, dictated by her need to protect Femi. “You can’t be so reckless as to give the media any hint … I mean, you can trust me. I’m a loyal employee. Besides, we’ve got nothing to hide, right?”
Jane studied her. “How much do you want?”
“Just my
wages. I’m asking for time to secure Femi’s safety. I’ll do it from home, if necessary.”
“We will continue to pay you,” the obelisk pronounced, “but only until the end of the financial year. Now get out!”
Barbara swirled out of Jane’s office, her poncho enhancing the effect.
Crestfallen, she tramped up to her office turret. The sounds of Siberian throat singing escorted her through her disappointment. It did not occur to her that an immediate departure equated to one without delay. But her relaxation was soon interrupted by the human resources manager, a woman called DeeDee with a voice that dripped with aspartame. “You’re supposed to leave, dear,” she whispered.
“I am quite underwhelmed by my treatment here so far.” Barbara kissed her teeth as her eyes travelled down DeeDee in disdain.
The woman sighed into her paperwork, then escorted Barbara off the premises.
Homebound, Barbara’s drooping deportment limited her gaze to the dead leaves at her feet, the battered, pulped, macerated muck that despoiled the cityscape, cleaving to the treads of shoes, slipping people up. The manure of trees: like her, life’s excrescence.
Drained of her remaining energy, she slogged home at a funereal pace, finally making it to her front door. There, in a leaden stupor, she searched her Hausa handbag for keys, swaying slightly. Unable to find them, she retraced darkened interior routes with her fingers, feeling through all the crevices of the bag in a state of narcosis, prodding for holes. No keys. She shook her bag. No jangling. She looked at her porch door and began to sob, little coughing sounds that evacuated tears of frustration and inadequacy. The skin on her forehead tightened.
She reached inside her pantaloons pocket for her tissues and touched the cold, hard surface of keys, as always aloof and unmoved in their feudal reign over chaotic minds. She pulled the set out with trembling hands and jabbed one into the slot, succeeding at this simple act only after a number of attempts. The moment she entered, she threw her bag on the floor and stumbled to her bed.
Days later, Barbara awoke, her mind enshrouded in a gauze of abandonment and failure. Simple routines, habits and events—cleaning teeth, making free-trade coffee, pouring oat milk—took enormous time and concentration. Different liquids spilled over the kitchen counter. Her hands would not stop trembling.
She thumped herself down in an armchair, adjusted a picture of Femi on her shrine and wondered how to help him stay alive. Weary and lacking concentration, she punched in the new number in Lagos to see if she could get through to him, and after four attempts at this basic task, finally managed to order the numbers in the correct sequence.
For the first time since the explosions at TransAqua, someone answered.
“Hello. It’s Barbara. How now?”
Silence on the other end.
She injected greater modulation into her monotone. “Femi? How body-oh?”
“It’s Igwe,” the voice snapped. “Which body? Ubaldous body dead. Femi body hunted. My body fear everything. Maybe one body be virus, and kill all of us. So which body you and your New York-Paris-London international dynamite self dey interested in? Please gist me! But wait first. Make I settle down for best comfort. Just a minute.”
He cut off the phone.
She managed to punch in the numbers one more time.
He had turned the phone off completely.
This last call wounded her the most, stabs that pushed out from within her body, piercing the very wall of her skin. Igwe’s frenetic solicitude, hovering over Femi, protecting him, indicated to Barbara that he knew the worth of a person. And it was suddenly clear that he, like all others, held her responsible for Ubaldous’s death—indeed, even the bomb fatalities; worse still, this bleak harvest would continue until each member of Femi’s group had been massacred, buried too deeply to hint of their misfortunes, their hands leaving no trace of their tragedy.
She kept thinking of Femi: the beauty of his face, a face that told of the splendour and majesty of Nigeria’s past, a breathtaking beauty that described the country’s dreams. She had hoped to enact her future through the fecundity and lushness of his habitus. Instead, her hand had pulled him through her own sterile landscape and, in doing so, had led him to his almost inevitable end.
And so she cried, grieving for a man who had not yet died.
Once again, days passed. Barbara did not clean her teeth; she had no energy. Her tongue felt around the inside of her mouth, wondering how much longer she could bear to rest in her own filth. She sweated at night. The sheets smelled. Her body itched. She could hardly move.
Dozens of hazy thoughts circled in her mind. Those that terrorized her, she tried to banish. They flitted in and out, despite her constant vigilance.
With a listless hopelessness, Barbara wondered if Astro could help, whether his world of growth could save her from a propensity towards destruction. Gentle memories of fish swimming underneath Astro’s apartment floor calmed her. These small creatures provided him with an insight into a vanishing realm of innocence. Perhaps the belief in the existence of that innocence gave Astro his special energy, whereas the absence of the same belief gave Barbara hers.
Tired, worn and weak, she picked up the phone. “Hey, Astro!”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Barbara.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed.
Silence.
“Oh, hey, Barbara.” He had used her entire name. “How are you doing?”
“Fine. I thought I’d come and visit. D’you mind?”
“No, I’m busy.”
“Busy? What kind of busy?” She wondered if he had a girlfriend.
“Busy busy.” He did. He slammed down the phone.
She went straight to bed.
The next day she awoke, her chest constricted by panic. Dressing completely for the first time in days, she tore out of her apartment. As she staggered around Ottawa, trying to pull herself together, small things brought her to tears: a particular colour of Astroturf green, children wearing caps with earflaps, bobbles jiggling as they ran.
She spotted the haven of a gardening centre and ran to it. On entering, she was immediately enwrapped in the familiar smells, the tender fragrances of Astro’s fellow travellers—the leaves, the dew, the plants. Her body crunched forward, retching out almost endless tears.
Ailing, she collapsed onto a bench to watch a man tending seedlings. His hands immediately attracted her attention, fingers putting a seed to bed, pulling its blanket around it, protecting it. Seeing her, the gardener approached.
“Need any help with gardening? It may initially seem daunting, but you’ll get the hang of it.”
She shook her head, recalling those other midwife hands, those of her lost companion, which delivered small seedlings to the light of day, nurturing them with the milk of fresh water. She used to wonder what events had shaped them, those long fingers, those strong veins. Never again would she sit in the company of someone who dreamed, not of glory, power or triumph, but of flowers and grasses.
Barbara walked home through the leaves, watching herself from above, not quite connected to her physical being. She entered her apartment and found herself lying in bed days later, not knowing how she came to be there. She sat up, her heart beating as if she were being attacked. She thought she might be insane.
She existed on very little sleep, dozing only in the early morning when teeny stars struggled for display, elbowing past night’s shadows. Though she made a concerted effort to remember the activity of her waking hours, she found that she continued to lose time. She could not even concentrate on the small routines of daily life. It took hours just to open her eyes, days for her to gather enough energy to stand up. While her life had always been lived in vivid colour, now she saw only greys. Her heart beat with greater insistence and intensity, as if it were a separate being within her, trying to escape. It felt like her body were trying to kill her. The erratic pulsing often woke her up. She would gasp for air and felt like screaming.
As days passed, the crack between being and feeling opened up ever wider. The more she pondered her failings, the more she spiralled into the darker reaches of her mind, that area whose currents pulled her down into its oblivion. Her waking life now alternated between sudden surges of violent, choking panic and long stretches of stultifying stupor.
Sometimes Barbara sat, holding vigil over time, fighting the daze, willing herself to remember each moment. During these occasions, she waited for a call from Astro. She waited to hear Femi’s voice. Her desperation even drove her to wait for her parents to ring. Nothing.
Barbara wanted only rest, only peace, only acceptance. All else was gone. Debilitated by clouded thoughts, with a body barely able to cope, she continued to sink into despair. Hope had always been her constant companion, urging her on through the torment and folly of life. She did not know how to sustain life now that all hope had gone.
She could hear the howl of autumn outside.
Barbara finally responded to a call to action. In movements that appeared mechanical and effortless, she filled up her bathtub with hot water. She then walked into the kitchen, took a knife from a drawer, lay in the bath and cut her wrists.
TWENTY-SIX
Absolute Zero
Aduvet of rich burgundy silk draped over the edges of Kolo’s bed. Underneath its plump embrace, within its tender custody, lay an ailing president. His carved ebony bedside table, on which a small crystal table lamp cast its benevolent light, overflowed with medications, liniments and vitamins. A portrait of a healthier and more confident Kolo rested above the head of his bed, separately illuminated. All the curtains were closed.
Kolo lay back on fleshy pillows, picking at the Chinese ties on his pink satin pyjamas. He smiled in weary fashion. Today TransAqua would start to move in the mighty turbines. More people would need to be displaced. And now they would see what they had only heard of. Trouble loomed like a black cloud.
Doing Dangerously Well Page 29