The Famished Road

  ‘Tell me a story,’ I said.

  ‘Blow out the candle and sleep.’

  ‘Tell me a story first and then I will sleep.’

  ‘If I tell you a story you won’t be able to sleep.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He got up and blew out the candle. The room was quiet. I could hear him breathing.

  ‘It’s a hard life,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what the rats used to say.’

  ‘What do rats know about life,’ he said.

  ‘Why is it hard?’ I asked.

  He was quiet.

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If you wait till the sunbird starts to sing you won’t be able to sleep.’

  ‘Will you come and visit us?’

  ‘Every day.’

  I knew he was lying. That was when I knew we wouldn’t be seeing him for a long time. It even occurred to me that we might never see him again. But his lie made me less anxious. I was going to ask him to promise that he would come and see us often, but he started grinding his teeth. I lay awake hoping that he would suddenly resume talking, the way he did when he was drunk. He did start to talk, but he was talking in his sleep, and I couldn’t make out what fantastical things he was saying. Then he turned, and he kicked, and his teeth-grinding lessened, and his speech quietened. He had convinced me. I would miss him.

  In the morning he was gone. I felt sad he wasn’t there. He had taken pictures of everyone except himself. And after a while I forgot what he looked like. I remembered him only as a glass cabinet and a flashing camera. The only name I had for him was Photographer. He left a written message to Dad to say he was leaving and to thank us for our help. Dad was pleased with the letter and on some happy nights we sat up and talked about many things and many people, but we were fondest of the photographer. And it was because of our fondness that I was sure that some day we would see him again.

  BOOK FOUR

  1

  MADAME KOTO GREW distant. Her frame became bigger. Her voice became arrogant. She wore a lot of bangles and necklaces and seemed weighed down by the sheer quantity of decoration she carried on her body. She walked slowly, like one who has recently acquired power. Her face had taken on a new seriousness, and her eyes were harder than ever. I didn’t go to Madame Koto’s bar so much any more.

  Dad spoke badly of her, though at first he did not prevent me going to sit in her bar. I would sit there amongst the flies which increased with the customers. When the thugs came in I would slip out and wander. Afterwards I would play in front of our house.

  On some afternoons, after the first visitation of the thugs, it seemed that nothing ever happened in the world. In the mornings Mum went hawking. On some evenings she returned early. She often had a vacant look on her face, as though the market had disappeared.

  In the afternoons the heat was humid. The shadows were sharp as knives. And the air was still. The boiling air made even the birdcalls sound like something heard in a stifling dream. The sweat of those afternoons became vapours in the brain. It became possible to sleep with eyes wide open. It was so hot that sleepwalking seemed natural. Time did not move at all.

  I would sit on the platform in front of our house and watch the rubbish along the roadside reduced to crust by the flies and the sun. A flock of egrets, flying past overhead, always made the children jump up and down in the street, singing:

  ‘Leke Leke

  Give me one

  White finger.’

  The children would flap their fingers, palms-down, to the flight of the birds. When the birds had gone, white dots in golden-furnace sky, the children would look at their fingernails and find one or two of them miraculously speckled with whiteness.

  Time moved slower than the hot air. In the distance, from the forest, came the unending crack of axes on trees. The sound became as familiar as the woodpeckers or the drumming of rain on cocoyam leaves. The noise of machines also became familiar, drilling an insistent beat on the sleep-inducing afternoons.

  Sometimes it seemed that the world had stopped moving and the sun would never set. Sometimes it seemed that the brightness of the sun burned people out of reality. I sat one afternoon thinking about the photographer when I saw a boy running down the street, his shorts tattered, his shirt flapping, and he was chasing the metal rim of a bicycle wheel. Three men were behind him, also running. But as he passed the van a terrible light, like the momentous flash of a giant camera, appeared in the sky, blinding me with its brilliance, and I saw the boy’s shadow vanish. I shut my eyes. Luminous colours, like the flames of alcohol, danced in my eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw the metal rim rolling along by itself. The boy had become his own shadow. The three men ran past the metal rim. The boy’s shadow melted and the rim rolled over and fell near the gutter. I screamed. A dog barked. I hurried over and picked up the bicycle rim and went to the burnt van and looked all around and I couldn’t find the boy anywhere. I asked the traders at their stalls if they had seen the boy and they replied that they hadn’t seen anything unusual. I threw the rim on to the back of the burnt van, now bulging with rubbish, and sat in front of our compound, puzzled, annoyed.

  That evening I heard that an old man who lived near us had been staring at a lizard, while drinking ogogoro in the afternoon heat, when a flaming-yellow angel flew past his face and blinded him. I did not believe the story.

  2

  THEN ONE AFTERNOON time moved and something happened in the world. I had been sleeping on the cement platform and when I woke the photographer’s glass cabinet was gone. Someone had set fire to the rubbish on the back of the burnt van. The rubbish crackled with flames, the smoke was black and awful, and through the afternoon the street stank of smouldering rubber and burning rats.

  It was impossible to escape the thick smoke, which formed a haze on the hot unmoving air, and it was impossible to avoid the pungency of the smells, which were harsh on the lining of the throat. So I began to wander. There was music and dancing at Madame Koto’s bar. The place was packed with complete strangers. Madame Koto was singing joyfully above the loud voices and the vigorous revelry. The bar stank of cheap perfume and sweat and spilt palm-wine and trapped heat. The benches and tables had been moved. Paper handkerchiefs were soggy on the floor. Bones and cigarette stubs were all over the place. I looked for Madame Koto but all I saw were men in bright hats, women in phoney lace, waving white handkerchiefs in the air, dancing and stamping to high-life music. The men, covered in sweat, so that it seemed they had just emerged from steaming rivers, had bits of foam at the sides of their mouths. The armpits and the backs of the women’s dresses were wet. I couldn’t see where the music was coming from.

  It seemed that I had walked into the wrong bar, had stepped into another reality on the edge of the forest. On the floor there were eaten bits of chicken and squashed jollof rice on paper plates. The walls were full of almanacs with severe faces, bearded faces, mildly squinted eyes, pictures which suggested terrible ritual societies and secret cabals. There were odd-looking calendars with goats in transformations into human beings, fishes with heads of birds, birds with the bodies of women. Sometimes the dancing got so frenzied that a couple, crushed against the walls, would bring down some of the calendars, and would themselves sink to the ground.

  Everyone danced in a curious heat. A woman grabbed my hands. I noticed a female midget near the counter, staring at me. A man danced on my toes. I looked up and the midget was gone. It was very hot. I poured sweat. The woman made me dance with her. She drew me to her and my face pressed against her groin and an intoxicating smell staggered me like a new kind of dangerous wine. The woman held my face to her and danced slowly to the music while I suffocated in an old fever that sent a radiant fire bounding through my blood. The woman laughed and pushed me away and drew me to her again with a curious passion and I felt myself lifting from the ground, feet still on the ground, head swirling, a spasm seizing me, and still lifting, till I was almost flying, someone squir
ted palm-wine on my face, and I collapsed amongst the dancing feet in an excruciating pleasure. The woman made me get up. The world swayed; my eyes became a little drowsy; the woman turned me round, and laughed again, and danced with me, shaking her hips. The palm-wine ran down my face, down my neck, joined with the stickiness of my sweat, and mingled with the pleasurable weakness in my legs. The music and the flies buzzed around my face. Then a thick-set man, who had come between me and the woman, took one look down at me, and very loudly, so that no one could possibly miss it, said:

  ‘Watch your women-o! There’s a small boy here who wants to fuck!’

  The women burst out laughing. Their large hungry eyes sought me out. I fled into the crowd and hid my embarrassment behind the counter.

  That was when I located the source of the music. On the counter was an evil-looking instrument with a metal funnel that would have delighted the imagination of wizards. There was a disc which kept turning, a handle cranked round by a spirit, a long piece of metal with a needle on the whirling disc, and music coming out of the funnel without anyone singing into it. It seemed a perfect instrument for the celebration of the dead, for the dances of light spirits and fine witches. I fled for a second time, fled from the inhuman thing, and fell backwards, tripping. A woman in a red gown caught me.

  The twang of an unnatural instrument raged through my head. Someone gave me a cup of palm-wine. I gulped it down. They filled my cup and I drank it all again. The woman who had caught me had a face crinkled in rolls of fat. Foams of sweat clung to her hairline. The music was full of hunger, yearnings, and the woman danced as if she were praying to a new god of the good life. Her eyes were dark with shadows, her lips red as blood, and she had white coral beads round her neck. Her face was crowded with laughter. She twirled me in an odd dance. Another man caught me, and twirled me on. I became dizzy. Flies did somersaults in my eyes. I became lost in the curious jungle of the crowd, lost in the midst of giants.

  The bar seemed to keep expanding. The density of bodies got worse. I was a little comforted when I saw the woman in the red gown again. She was dancing with a fat man who seemed to have power. He thrust himself towards her, crushing her groin in the sensual yearning heat of the music. Then I saw through her changed appearance. When I stopped being deceived by her hair – which was different, as though a god had refashioned it in her sleep – and when I saw through all the make-up, and managed to brush past the distractions of her strong perfume, I was amazed to find that I was staring at Madame Koto. She was amused at my astonishment. She gave me a blue plastic cup of palm-wine. A dead fly floated on its froth. I blew the fly away, and drank. The bar gyrated.

  ‘Madame Koto!’ I cried.

  She burst out laughing. The man she was dancing with swept her away into the music of celebration, into the tight-jammed bodies.

  Then the bar took on a sinister light. I saw its other sides, felt its secret moods. The men and women seemed like better versions of the spirits who used to come here, and who had tried to steal me away. They had a greater mastery of the secrets of human disguise. I heard their metallic voices and the laughter of their perfumes, and underneath all the dancing and the energy was the invasion of a rancid smell. The wind blew in and the smell got worse as if it were blowing from a marsh where animals had died.

  Then I noticed the women. They had convincing veined hands, their complexions were different on different parts of their bodies, their eyes were hungry, and most of them were lean. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, but their mouths, curled as if in constant repugnance, spoke to me of an infernal unhappiness which I couldn’t understand. And, like some of the men, when they laughed their tongues were freckled, or like parchment. Some of their skins glistened as if with scales. I tried to escape from the bar, but couldn’t find a way out of the crowding. I drank more wine. Bodies, banging against one another, grew more heated. I could see a man’s hand under a table searching between a woman’s legs.

  Someone hit me on the head as I was staring at the hand. I turned and saw the midget woman. She was short, with thick thighs, a heavy body, big breasts, and the beautiful and sad face of a twelve-year-old whose mother has just died. She held my hand and led me deeper into the bar, behind the counter, where the instrument sang. She made me sit down with her on a mat of chicken feathers. The midget woman had an unbelievably young face, all made up, and her eyes were the shape of lovely almonds. Then, holding my arm, she spoke to me in a wonderful voice. She made a passionate speech to me saying that she would take me with her and that she would love me for ever. Her eyes became sad. She said that she was certain that I no longer remembered her. My eyeballs began to burn. The music stopped. She was silent, and she lowered her face till the music started again. Then she began pulling my arm, pestering me with words I couldn’t understand. I tried to get up, but she held me down. I tried to break into a sudden run, but she grabbed the back of my shorts with muscular arms and pulled me back and dragged me close to her. A heady smell, like charmed perfume and a secret sweating, came from her and dulled my brain. And then, with her face close to mine, her lips full like a woman’s, her face small like a girl’s, she drew even closer to me and whispered something which I didn’t hear. She awaited my reply. I stared at her with incomprehension. Then she repeated what she had said.

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  I blinked.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  She smiled. Her lips widened, as if they were made of elastic material. Then she threw her head back and startled me with the sudden force of her ironic laughter. Her tongue too was freckled. Instead of teeth she had coral beads. I screamed. She began to weep. I bolted, crashing against the counter, producing an ugly sound from the instrument. I scurried around, saw the door, dashed for it, banged into the red form of Madame Koto, and just about made it outside.

  Under the open sky, I stopped to catch my breath. My heart beat fast. My legs were quivering. I was still breathing heavily when I caught a glimpse of Madame Koto coming after me. I ran on; she pursued me in her red gown. She was barefoot and she ran so hard that her hair fell off. Underneath I saw her real hair, patchy in places, and dishevelled. It scared me. She made a determined effort and caught me just before I got to the street. She dragged me back to the bar, laughing and berating me affectionately.

  ‘You keep running away from me,’ she said.

  She had two fresh cuts on her face. They were new scarifications. They were black as if ash had recently been used to stop the bleeding. Her face was different because of the marks.

  ‘You let my wig fall off my head,’ she muttered, as she stooped and picked it up.

  When we got to the door she pushed me in, blocked the way, and wore her wig. She looked instantly younger.

  ‘This is a party,’ she said. ‘Go and enjoy yourself. Go and pour drinks for people.’

  Then she shut the backyard door behind her. It was rowdier inside. It seemed more people had joined the celebrations. I didn’t know which way to turn, for I was crowded on all sides. The noise was louder. I wanted to avoid the midget woman. I looked around for her. She was no longer behind the counter. I pushed my way to all corners of the bar, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I wanted to spot her before she spotted me, so that I could run. I went and stayed near the counter, and planned my escape.

  The men danced tightly with the women. Everyone sweated profusely. The women twisted and thrust their hips at the men. Madame Koto reappeared. She wore a different attire, a striped black and white skirt, a yellow blouse. She seemed to have a faint glimmer of gold on her hair. It was a mystery. She fanned herself with a newspaper. Some of the men had taken off their shirts, revealing muscular bodies with long scars. One of the women began yelling. No one paid her any attention. The men were quite drunk. They swayed, instead of dancing, with bloodshot eyes.

  One of the women was practically cross-eyed with drunkenness. A man grabbed her round the waist and squeezed her buttocks. She wriggled excitedly. The man procee
ded to grind his hips against hers as if he didn’t want the slightest space between them. The woman’s breasts were wet against her blouse.

  Outside, the wind blew hard. The music inside spoke of release from suffering. A ghost appeared amongst the celebrants. The wind blew, the strips of curtain were fanned apart, and a yellow bird flew into the heated space of the bar. Suddenly there was commotion everywhere. The bird flew into the ceiling, rebounded against the wall, fell back dazed, and landed on the woman’s hair. The woman screamed. The bird tried to fly away but its claws were caught. Screaming in mortal terror, the woman touched her hair, felt the quivering bird, didn’t understand what it was, threw her head forward and shrieked as though a demon had entered her brain. Her terror spread through the bar and people scattered all over the place. They had seen the bird struggling in her hair, and had taken it for a bad sign. Then the woman stopped shrieking. Her eyes were wide open.

  ‘Help me!’ she cried.

  No one helped her. Madame Koto stood near the door, her hands at her breasts, an exclamatory expression on her face. The woman shook her head, letting out a high-pitched scream which must have scared the poor bird more than anything else, for it beat its wings so vigorously that its feathers came flying off. In a last desperate resort, the woman took off her wig, thrashed it in the air, and sent the bird sailing through the bar. It hit a wall, flew, and dropped in the middle of the dance floor, twitching. There was a moment’s pause. People started to rush forward when the bird recovered, took off into the ceiling, bounced down, flew about the tight space, crashed against the counter, and fell first on the trumpet-like loudspeaker of the instrument, and then on the turning disc. The music ground to a feathered halt.

  ‘It’s landed on the gramophone!’ someone cried.

  The bird was still. I knew that this was my moment to escape. Madame Koto rushed to the gramophone, snatched up the bird, held it tight, and hurried out of the bar through the backyard door. The ghost followed her. The celebrants let out a new cry, a quivering cheer, as though the sign after all had been favourable.