Blood Is Dirt

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Now fuck off,’ said Ugly. ‘And don’ come back. You wan’ aks questions, you aks you own people.’

  I slid off the bench and did my trousers up and looked around for a piece of something that I could stick in the guy’s head. The mechanic took hold of me and ran me out of the workshop so that I landed in the bald tyre the driver had been sitting on. I was surprised to see a look of concern in his face. I was still looking for that piece of piping when Ugly heaved me up and shoved me towards the gates. I ended up in the dust outside the yard, my flies open, minus a shoe and any shred of dignity.

  I wasn’t seeing so well but I did find the shoe. The sky was darkening. I made my way back to the motor park. A bar appeared with a wooden verandah painted blue and pink. I found myself holding on to its railing, needing some help. Two men dragged me to a table and I doubled over and did some sweating into the floorboards.

  ‘You want a drink?’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said and leaned over the railing and vomited again. Somebody gave me a damp rag and I wiped myself down.

  ‘Just get me a taxi,’ I said.

  A smashed-up Peugeot came by a few minutes later. I crawled in and propped myself up in a corner.

  ‘Where you wan’ go?’ asked a voice.

  ‘Y-Kays, Vic Island,’ I heard myself saying, and heard it repeated by seven voices.

  The taxi took me across the lagoon on the Third Axial Road from Ojota to Lagos Island. I saw the water over the lip of the window, dark purple for a minute. I was breathing like a winded dog. Night fell while we were out there on the water. The city looked as friendly as home from the lagoon. If you didn’t know about those hard, beaten streets, those stinking, overpopulated, jammed-solid streets and you hadn’t been tickled with a poker you might be in danger of thinking that Lagos was a reasonable place.

  It was after 8 p.m. by the time I got back into Y-Kays. The girl at reception said there’d been some calls for me, all from the same person, a Nigerian who hadn’t left his name. I got myself to the room and under a shower. I inspected the burn which was a streak through my pubic hair, the skin scorched and blistered underneath. I had to get some antiseptic on that in this climate. The phone rang. I did some internal bleeding and made the monumental effort of answering it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smoothing the hair across my bruised gut. ‘Yes,’ I repeated.

  ‘Oyinbo?

  ‘That’s me. Old whitey. Who’s that out there in the Lagos sky? You the Prince of Darkness?’

  ‘No, no. I’m the driver.’

  ‘The driver from Seriki’s yard?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘How’d you get this number?’

  ‘I was there when they put you in the taxi.’

  ‘I hope you’re more polite than your friends.’

  ‘That was a bad thing they did.’

  ‘Yes, well. What do you want? Tell me your name first.’

  ‘No names.’

  ‘OK So tell me what you want.’

  ‘To talk.’

  I didn’t say anything. The phone hissed. I dried myself off.

  ‘If you want to talk, my friend, you have to fill in the bits where I don’t.’

  ‘We should meet.’

  ‘It’s easier over the phone... and safer.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We should meet.’

  ‘Ah...’ I clicked at last. ‘You want some money. How much?’

  ‘You have CFA?’

  ‘Better than niara.’

  ‘Fifty thousand.’

  ‘Forget it. Good night, my friend.’

  ‘What do you want to pay?’

  We banged on for a few minutes and settled on ten thousand CFA. He said he wanted to meet tonight. I told him I was in no state to go anywhere. He said he would meet me in a blue Datsun Cherry at the entrance to the Tafawa Balewa Square by the horse statues at 10 a.m. tomorrow. We hung up. I told reception not to give my name to anybody under any circumstances.

  I went to switch on the air con and heard a radio playing outside. It was the news read by the sweetest Nigerian voice I’d ever heard. ‘The situation tonight,’ she said, ‘is somewhat dicey, and reinforcements will have to be sent to the region...’ Now, why can’t I meet people who talk like that?

  Lagos. Thursday 22nd February.

  I ate heavily in the morning and went out and bought a new shirt, electric blue with red slashes—not tailing gear. The girl in reception hauled me over and asked for money for the room. I gave her some for keeping her mouth shut plus my laundry. The phone rang. She said it was for me.

  ‘Oyinbo?’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, hearing a different voice.

  ‘Wilfred can’t make it.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘The driver.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘Why? He change his mind?’

  ‘He got a job. He want meet you tonight.’

  ‘Not at night. No way.’

  ‘OK, you tell me.’

  ‘I’ll meet you on the road by Bar Beach where Akin Adesola Street meets the sea.’

  ‘Two o’clock.’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  I dumped the phone and wondered why names were suddenly being used and decided to get careful. I spent the morning getting myself downtown and into Companies House. I looked up Seriki Haulage and found it belonged to someone called Ben Agu and that Awaya Transportation was owned by Bof Nwanu. The offices were registered in Ikeja somewhere, but I wasn’t going out there for fun.

  The traffic was at a standstill on Lagos Island and I had to walk it across Five Cowrie Creek and pick up a taxi outside the Ivorian embassy. It took me to Bar Beach, which wasn’t a beach any more since it got swept out to sea in a cyclone.

  The palm trees thumped past the window and the sea breeze mingled with the cabbie’s air freshener which hung from his rearview in the shape of a plastic tortoise. I wondered what tortoises and fresh air had in common and decided I’d never make it in marketing. Then I saw the Datsun and thought marketing’s got to be better than this, even if you do spend a week talking about nozzles on lavatory cleaner.

  I told the cabbie to stop and reverse up to the boot of the Datsun. There was nobody in the car unless he was sleeping. A moped puttered past. The cabbie looked at me. I did a 360-degree scan. Nobody. I got out and circled the Datsun. Empty. No keys in the ignition. The car in gear. No floor carpeting. A hole where the radio had been. The keys were in the boot. I had a weak feeling in my stomach.

  I opened the boot.

  It doesn’t take long for the maggots to get started on things in West Africa. Wilfred, if that was his name, was seething. He was in the foetal position with his back to me, his neck twisted over his shoulder so that even I knew it was broken. His back was lined with deep grooves, as was his forehead. There were holes in his cheeks and where his eyeballs should have been was charred a deep matt black. It’s terrible what an oxyacetylene torch can do to human flesh.

  Chapter 14

  Lagos. Thursday 22nd February.

  The cabbie didn’t say a word, just pulled away, looking at me out of the corner of his face. He was nervous. He knew the colour white people were supposed to be.

  ‘You vomit out the window,’ he said after a minute.

  ‘I’m OK,’ I said, breathing back the heavy breakfast, trying to filter out the taint of tortoise air freshener.

  Snooping wasn’t working. The level I was at, you snooped around, you got your car smashed to a Dinky, a chargrilled pubis and a welding course for psychotics. The business was being taken seriously down to the lowest possible level.

  I checked out of Y-Kays with a damp shirt and a plastic bag. In the hours it took to get to the Eko Bridge Motor Park for the long-haul taxis to Cotonou I persuaded the cabbie that there was only one future for him and it didn’t involve a past which featured our visit to Bar Beach. He was a young man, but wise enough to know
where he’d never been.

  I waved him off at the motor park but didn’t take a taxi. I still had the Hotel Ritalori to check. A strange choice for a white man fresh from London—not near the airport, not downtown either. I walked across the bridge and took a cab from the railway station to the Surulere district.

  The cab wrestled its way into another jam. I was keen on getting into a temporary vegetative state but the radio was on and that beautiful voice was giving out the ugly incidents of the day—‘A blue Datsun containing the dead body of thirty-two year-old lorry driver, Wilfred Aketi, was found on Bar Beach late this afternoon. A police spokesman said that his neck had been broken and his body badly burned using an oxyacetylene torch. They are treating the case as a gangland murder. Now for a summary of the main points—Petrol shortages continue in Lagos...’ The cabbie jabbed the radio and Highlife filled the car. Who wanted to know about petrol shortages in a half-million-car traffic jam?

  The Ritalori was a modern hotel with a swimming pool and an exclusively Nigerian clientele. Why did Napier come here when his big buddy Graydon was out on Vic Island? If he couldn’t afford the Eko Meridien he could have slummed it in the faded grandeur of the Federal Palace or bummed it in Y-Kays. Napier wasn’t stupid enough to think he could get his money back on his own, not in this city of roaring humanity. He must have had a Nigerian contact. Someone who lived close to the Ritalori. When that line didn’t work he went to Graydon, Graydon to David, David to me. Something wasn’t right. If Gale had painted Graydon straight he had to be a lot better lifeline than the High Commission or me. And there was something else—Graydon employed Ali, Ali gave David sexual favours, David sent Napier to me. That stank.

  I checked in at reception under my own name, which was unavoidable. I gave the guy a couple of thousand CFA and asked him if he’d come across my half brother back in January. It took some time and another thousand before he found Napier. He’d stayed two nights. The night he arrived, when he checked in at 3 a.m., and the following night. He must have had a friend.

  I put a call through to Bagado, who was back in his old routine and working late in the office at 8 p.m. I asked him if he’d found Napier’s address book in the Hotel du Lac, which he had.

  ‘How many Lagos numbers in there?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Graydon Strudwick?’

  ‘Yes. Two for him.’

  ‘David Bartholomew?’

  ‘British High Commission, yes.’

  ‘The other two?’

  ‘Robert Keshi in the storage department of NNPC.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘He won’t talk. I’ve called him three times.’

  ‘The other one?’

  ‘Emmanuel Quarshie. He won’t talk either.’

  ‘Is he in the Surulere area?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and gave me the number and address. ‘You got anything for me?’

  ‘Loose ends,’ I said. ‘But ones that end painfully. Did the Land Office show?’

  ‘Not yet. No computer.’

  ‘You spoke to Strudwick?’

  ‘He said Briggs came to a party on Sunday eleventh Feb. He said he was surprised to see him, not at the party, they have open house every Sunday, he just didn’t know he was in town. I asked him if he thought Briggs was anxious. He said he was always anxious. He said the man was a broker, it was his job to be anxious. You live on lots of little two per cents it makes you worry. That’s the kind of thing I heard from Graydon Strudwick. Flannel.’

  ‘The money he’s got buys bolts of the stuff,’ I said. ‘Bondougou on your back?’

  ‘He’s letting me get on with it, but he’s watching.’

  ‘He knows, Bagado.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ he said. ‘He asks after you. I’ve told him you were off Briggs. I said there was no money in it.’

  ‘He take that?’

  ‘I wasn’t so nice about you.’

  ‘You told him about the high-heeled boots, the miniskirts, my nights on street corners?’

  ‘And more.’

  ‘My heart of gold?’

  ‘If you’d had one you’d have pawned it a long time ago.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you believe this stuff.’

  ‘Your form in ethics wouldn’t get the betting up.’

  ‘When I’m up for a sainthood I won’t ask you for a reference.’

  ‘Just go and talk to Quarshie,’ he said. ‘Beatification’s a long way off.’

  I gave myself a mouthwash of the right stuff and spangled my brain with a Heineken. I dialled Quarshie. He demanded a name in a plummy English accent. I gave him Steven Wright.

  ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

  ‘We have a friend in common.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Look, before I tell you my business there’s something you should know...’ I cut into that with a mouthwash and let it hang.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s not going to go away, Mr Quarshie. I’m not going to go away.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Napier Briggs.’

  ‘Oh, my God! I can’t...’

  ‘Listen.’

  ‘I’m not...’

  ‘You are, Mr Quarshie, you just don’t know it,’ I said. ‘Have you been threatened?’

  ‘By whom?’

  I shut up.

  ‘Why should I be threatened?’ he said.

  ‘Let’s talk about it. Tonight.’

  ‘Tonight. I can’t.’

  ‘You can,’ I said. ‘It has to be tonight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because then it’s over and you can go back to living.’

  ‘You know where I am?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘But, Mr Quarshie, don’t call anybody else before I come. Are you on your own?’

  He said he was and told me how to find his house in the street. The only one with gates and those painted red oxide. I hung up and the phone rang immediately.

  ‘This is Prince,’ said a voice.

  ‘Prince who?’ I asked, looking for a punchline.

  ‘Prince!’ he said, exasperated.

  ‘Prince of Darkness, Prince Charles, Prince Sihanouk. Which?’

  ‘I’m black.’

  ‘If you’ve been drinking,’ I said, ‘you haven’t done enough.’ I slammed down the phone. There are arseholes everywhere in Lagos trying to get an inch of your tail.

  I found a street hawker outside with a spare lad and asked him to take me to Quarshie’s. It wasn’t far from the hotel. I gave him a few niara and he beat it. There was no streetlighting, just auras from the houses which made the beaten earth road darker. I found the gates, they were embossed with a large ‘Q’. There was no watchman, a quiet neighbourhood. A little further on was a mango tree and a box underneath it for people to sit in the shade. I took the box, went into Quarshie’s compound and placed it a metre inside.

  Quarshie hadn’t invested in outside lights—get the ‘Q’ on the door before you mess around with security. The house was middle-class professional and there was a light on in only half of it. Through the net curtains I saw a short stocky man standing in the middle of his living room. He was hunched with his hands in his pockets, pushing down his trousers, which looked as if they were being inexorably hauled up his arse by the thick braces he was wearing. His tie was off, his white shirt open at the collar and his heavy black-rimmed specs dragged on his face. He stared at a bare section of the wall in front of him.

  In the corner of the room was a bar with a little red barrel on the counter with ‘Watney’s’ in gold on it. On the shelves behind were bottles arranged to fill the space—Vat 69, Bols Avocaat, Blue Curaçao, Bailey’s Irish Cream. Cocktail hour looked like hell in this house.

  Next to the bar was an open sliding door to a mosquito-screened verandah. I went down the side of the house into the back garden. I checked over the eight-foot-high back wall and found another garden. I walked back and slipped the catch on the
screen door of the verandah which whinged but didn’t turn Quarshie’s head. I went through the sliding door and behind the bar.

  Quarshie must have been trying to find his inner child or locate his id because he didn’t move, not even when I poured myself a Vat 69. I rested my elbow on the Watney’s barrel, which was only for show, and remembered bad nights in empty London rooms with Party Sevens up to the ceiling. I’d just found the mini fridge when Quarshie, as if warned by the ancestors he’d been summoning, slowly turned.

  ‘Good evening.’

  ‘Mr Wright?’

  ‘Don’t let me disturb you.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ he said, that plum still in his mouth.

  ‘Were you educated in England, Mr Quarshie?’

  ‘Millfield and King’s College, London.’

  ‘What did they teach you there?’

  ‘A lot I didn’t need to know about engineering.’

  ‘I thought everything was important in engineering.’

  ‘Not if you’re going to work in Lagos.’

  ‘Did you meet Napier Briggs in London?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s Black Label in the fridge, I’ll take one.’

  I ditched my Vat 69 into an empty ice bucket and poured us both a Black Label. Quarshie came to the bar and laid a flat hand on it to support himself and socked back the whisky.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said. ‘Did Napier stay with you, Mr Quarshie?’

  ‘He was in the Ritalori.’

  ‘For a night.’

  ‘He came here. He didn’t stay.’

  ‘What did he want to talk about?’

  ‘I don’t understand your interest.’

  ‘He lost a lot of money and he’s been killed.’

  ‘I know, but who are you? You’re not police. You don’t look very Scotland Yard.’

  ‘I told you. I’m a friend. I don’t like seeing friends ripped off and killed.’

  ‘Then you have no weight, Mr Wright. No weight to throw around like you’re doing at the moment.’

  This annoyed me. I looked under the bar and came across a long plastic-handled rat’s-tail ice pick. The sort they use to have a go at those long oblong bars of ice you see guys selling in sackcloth. I tapped the counter with it.