Like Joshua Said

  But it wasn’t all gloom; he’d brought some presents with him most of them edible. We spent a lot of that weekend nibbling at Choco-Milo cubes and pieces of suya spiced barbecue that were so well prepared and sold by northern traders – those guys certainly knew what to do with a knife, spices and meat.

  The new week began on a very low key which perhaps was what everyone, apart from me, needed. Mabel had come in underneath a beret and a very large smile; she settled into a very girly chit-chat with the equally triumphant Bisi.

  ‘You wear your beret today?’ Bisi began, pronouncing beret like ferret. ‘It looks good on you. See how fine you look.’

  ‘I just decided to wear it today, so I can look different,’ Mabel replied with a giggle.

  ‘You are not fine. You and your beret are ugly,’ Eze said in loyal anger looking at me for some kind of approval. I nodded.

  ‘Mind your business busybody,’ Bisi fired back without even looking at us.

  They splayed their legs in all the newfound space chuckling quietly and happily. I wanted to kill them even though I knew they deserved the relief – relief from Ireneh’s presence.

  The only thing that marked the absence of Ireneh in that week, apart from the emptiness where he sat and the smile on the faces of his seat mates, was the very word ‘absent’ that kept being repeated by Eze and I during class roll-call. Absences were not unusual in school and never investigated or challenged. Parents would usually stop their children from attending for any number of reasons – a death in the family, poverty, illness or even sheer irresponsibility.

  In a lot of cases, the children made the decision themselves not to come to school; it wasn’t really the sort of thing that a lot of parents lost sleep over – it was free education after all. Given the nonchalant attitude towards attendance in public schools, it was simply a matter of course that a lot of the pupils never made it past secondary education that would have been as free and as impoverished. At some point and quite illiterate, they’d drop out to learn a trade unable to hack it any more in the academic world for lack of the basic background and for sheer lack of interest. In a nutshell, it was seen as up to the family to decide the value of the education and how much of it its members received. So that when Ireneh stayed away for a whole week, no brows were raised. He simply lagged behind in class work.

  ****

  We set out very early in the morning, so early that there was still a very noticeable chill in the air. It was a misty morning which made the air a trifle more humid than usual. We set out walking towards the bus stop that happened to be at the end of the second street from the house. Musa led the way marching forward like his life depended on it and leaving both of us struggling to keep up. He was a young mechanic at the garage that Alhaji Sanni had introduced and offered to us as our guide.

  The Alhaji had not been a surprise – I can’t tell why not. He wore his affluence comfortably and spoke with a reassuring confidence, much like he knew he had you where he wanted. The gate keeper who’d ushered us into the compound had let the Alhaji know of our arrival and he’d asked us to come into his study.

  ‘Welcome,’ he’d greeted in English. ‘You’ll be working with Ibrahim at the garage. Musa will take you there in the morning. Your room is at the back of the compound.’ He reached for the intercom on his desk and spoke in Hausa while Tolu and I looked at each other confused. The gate keeper appeared in less than a minute and motioned to us to follow him and so ended our meeting with the Alhaji.

  In the morning, Musa appeared as the Alhaji had said. He didn’t look any more than twenty, stood not much taller than me, carried a straight athletic frame and was casually dressed in jeans, trainers and a t-shirt. His general manner and way of speaking bespoke one who’d had a spell of secondary education. He let us know who he was and that we had to hurry. So, we hurried.

  We breezed past a few stall owners who were beginning to set up shop for the day. These were mainly food-sellers who wanted to be the lucky early birds guaranteed the first of the corporate workers who left too early to have any breakfast and who would require some quick nourishment.

  Musa greeted a few of them in loud Hausa as we cut through the mist. His greetings seemed to precede us because I heard the sellers’ replies before they actually became visible in the white cloud around us. He certainly knew his area and the people around. We were dressed casually in jean trousers and t-shirts; we’d been warned to come in some old clothes as we were not exactly going to a five star hotel.

  It was a nice way to put it and I got the picture. But if it promised me some action that could lead to some real earning beside the joke that was my association with the shoe-seller Baba Jide, then I was very game.

  Tolu walked very briskly, ahead of me, a chewing stick hanging from the corner of his mouth. It gave the impression he meant business and had left home too early and too hurriedly to even brush his teeth. I trailed behind him trying to look as serious as he did and straightening my shoulders each time I felt them slump. It was seven when we arrived at the bus stop. There were a couple of buses just arriving; Musa crossed over to the other side of the road to a parked Peugeot 504 car.

  The vehicle had seen better days; every inch of its bodywork cried out for the junkyard but when the middle aged man who sat in the driving seat started the engine, it breathed with a life that resonated with hope. Musa greeted him very formally and in the same breath pointed to us in quick introduction.

  ‘Ina kwana? – Good morning,’ I greeted a little apprehensive.

  ‘Lafi ya,’ he replied as he engaged gear and drove out of the bus stop. He drove towards what seemed a crowded part of town picked up speed not long afterwards as the roads were still relatively quiet.

  Up till now, I didn’t have a very detailed picture of what lay in store for us. Musa had simply said it was going to be a car exchange business.

  ‘It is a very fast business,’ Musa said again at our prodding, his accent in pidgin quite strange to hear. You sell and move on to the next motor. Mallam Ibrahim runs it. He makes plenty of money from the business. It is very hard work and you need to find your market but when you have settled down, you could make some serious money.’

  ‘Well, it is not too bad to try. Is this business legal?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean by legal? Am I a criminal? Even if it is not legal, who will know and who will arrest us – the police? Ha! Where are they? Mallam has put them inside his pocket. Anyway, we don’t have any crime in Nigeria apart from drug trafficking and armed robbery. We have no law so how can we have crime?’

  ‘If you don’t count the recent Shari'ah come into effect,’ I thought to myself. His speech had pushed too hard; there was no need to preach to the converted. We were already as good as in with him; his heavy attempt to show us that there was no danger whatsoever in what we were going to do only put my alert signals up. I was not going to let the opportunity pass however. I didn’t have very many alternative options left and my suspicions could easily be wrong.

  There was very little talk among us as the car sped towards the Sabon Gari or foreigners’ district as it housed most of the non-northerners of the city. Traffic was already beginning to pick up rapidly and our driver, Bello, was obviously trying to avoid the congestion that would directly result from this. He swerved around a few potholes that appeared on the road just before the rowdiness that was Sabon Gari and, skilfully squeezing into the space left by a huge bus that had veered to the right, hit the road towards our destination. It was now seven forty-five and a few rays of sunlight were beginning to break through the clouds; little swirls of dust clouds raised by buses constantly stopping on the sandy shoulders to pick up passengers billowed into us as we raced down the road. It was always dusty up north, one of the welcoming signs that always greeted visitors.

  ****

 

  ‘Children!’ Mrs Deji rapped on her desk in the middle of the week as she tried to get our attention. ‘Everyone of you should
come with a bag of sawdust to school tomorrow. You can see it is raining now; anyone who doesn’t come with sawdust will be in trouble.’

  ‘O-o-h,’ came a few groans in class mixed with fewer cheers. Even though, this particular task usually ended in fun, no one in class liked any kind of assignment academic or otherwise.

  The announcement was not a surprise. Sawdust was a usual requirement in the rainy season or we’d be cut off from using most of the school grounds, by water. The playground was, already, not as accessible these days. The rains had come early and they always came in a downpour, dark clouds riddled with fearsome flashes of lightning giving a long warning beforehand. It was nature being quite fair because when it did eventually rain, there was very little anyone could do for protection – umbrellas would only shield you as far down as the shoulders, the wind slap-hitting you with the pounding showers. Roofs and windows of cars and houses had to be in perfect condition to weather the storm or the cars and houses would end up sustaining little pools within them while raincoats had to be stretched and fastened closer to the skin than complexion for one to stand a chance of staying dry.

  Within a few minutes of the first showers, puddles would form on the streets and roads; the red earth would become slippery mud and gutters would fill up, overflowing onto the roads so that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began.

  The school compound had been flooded after only a day’s rain and we had waded in knee-deep water to get to our classrooms. For a lot of us, it was exciting, our rubber sandals perfect for the situation, precisely what they were meant for. Sometimes, we’d even go out of our way to look for puddles we could wade in delighting in the feel of the water in our shoes. Our parents were always horrified by that, constantly warning about jiggers in those pools that’d bore their way into our skin; somehow, their warning never really registered.

  The few kids who wore leather sandals were left looking foolish as they had to take off their footwear and cross the water barefoot. Their number never seemed to change year after year; even those in my class who spent half of the previous year’s rainy season treading water barefoot still retained their leather sandals. Evidently, they didn’t think the risk they ran of infections or of ruining their footwear was that high.

  Assembly happened in class now; they were much briefer as we only had to say a few prayers and sing the national anthem. All the floors of the building were now also always crowded at break times and it became much more important to pay attention to safety rules. The school did a good job as safety instructions were given much more often in class with regard to the use of the corridors; it was all one and the same really – don’t run along the corridors, we were repeatedly told in different ways over and over again.

  The water on the playground always receded quite quickly after a rainfall leaving behind a muddy and retentive soft bottom. The school’s solution to this was to request of every pupil that they come in with a bag of sawdust. This was fun for us; sawdust was readily available off every carpenter’s shed and it was fun to play with. The carpenters, themselves, didn’t have any use for the substance and were always thankful for any outlet to dispose of it so that as far as they were concerned, we were a Godsend. And sawdust gathering always began as warfare as we’d batter one another with more than what we put in our bags and carry specks of wood shavings in our hair for days afterwards despite how many showers we had.

  The sawdust would be spread and levelled on the playground to soak up the moisture and provide us with a firm makeshift until the sun reappeared for long enough to harden the earth. However, with the onset of the rainy season of the south, this was a dream. In a short time, the sawdust would be washed off by another small deluge and we would engage our rubber sandals again in more water-treading to get to class and, eventually, go on more sawdust trips.

  The day Ireneh re-appeared, he came with a bag of sawdust. I was as surprised at this as I was relieved to see him.

  ‘Ha, so you have come back? What happened to you? I was beginning to think that you died?’ I joked.

  ‘I just didn’t want to see those devils. That’s why I didn’t come to school,’ he replied. ‘Let devil baptise them’

  I did not need to ask to whom he was referring but I thought how lucky he was to be able to decide when to come to school or not. ‘Don’t mind them,’ I tried to pacify him. ‘They are all crazy. How did you know that we had to bring sawdust?’

  ‘There are some school children who live in the yard next to our own. I saw them gathering sawdust and they told me.’

  ‘You have missed plenty of lessons,’ I said without a point. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I know, and because of those wicked people. That Mabel and her yam head, if she talks to me anyhow or looks for my trouble, if she even just looks my way, I swear I am going to damage her.’ He was obviously still seething at the episode from two weeks before. I didn’t need convincing that he meant his words.

  ‘You know that Mrs Deji will flog you if you touch her so you better leave her alone.’

  ‘Let her flog me. I don’t care,’ he spouted back adamant. ‘Is it not flogging? I won’t die, after all, she is not God. But she is also going to see my trouble.’

  ‘If you give her trouble, she will send you to the headmaster’s office,’ I threatened on behalf of the teacher. ‘Do you want that? Because if she sends you there, headmaster will flog you on your buttocks naked, twelve strokes.’

  ‘That won’t happen to me,’ he said unmoved. Who do they want to flog like that? Am I an animal? They are mad.’

  It seemed we would go on like that forever – I pointing out the dangers and he, waving them away. We did not though; we were outside only as long as it took for the children of Primary 5 and 6 to spread out a small fraction of the sawdust that the school had collected. The rest were stacked in huge heaps on a raised wooden platform at the side of the school building where the extended roof offered it some protection from the rain.

  ****

  The workshop was held up more by sticks than by bricks. It didn’t look a very expensive affair, quite dispensable, but meant to be an effective spot for some kind of car-job headquarters. The roof was simply piles of zinc sheet spread along the wooden frame ceiling. I could imagine the deafening shock they’d get in the shelter when it rained.

  Bello dumped the car in a gaping space between two tired looking old Volkswagen vehicles and got out abruptly. We also got out and stood by Bello as Musa walked into the workshop and made his way over to a low bench that we had not noticed earlier.

  The bench was hidden behind the cars that littered the space in the shelter and on it were perched two men. One of them got up when he saw Musa approach; he was wiry and looked like he would snap if he walked too quickly. He could not be older than twenty-three I judged. He exchanged a few words with Musa out of earshot and went back to speak to his companion who stood up a few seconds later. This was Ibrahim. He was quite large and similar to Bello our driver in build and age; he had the look of boss about him and wore deep tribal marks on both cheeks proudly.

  He spoke to Musa who looked over his shoulder, presently, and beckoned to us. We approached a little tentatively, Tolu leading the way. When we got very close, I noticed his eyes for the first time; they were small and wide, more like slits in his wide face. They burned red and questioning. He regarded me only for a second before resting those eyes on Tolu much to my relief. He spoke in rapid Hausa and pointed to a few of the depressing looking cars to his right as he did so. In the middle of his delivery, he broke off unexpectedly, leaned down, picked up a nasty looking twig and threw it at a trespassing hen and her brood cursing as he did so. The birds clucked away terrified and the boss turned his attention back to the cars.

  Suddenly, he began to move; there was no reason why this action should earn any special recognition, he was an able bodied man after all. But in the short time I had spent in the presence of this massive hulk of a man with fla
t openings for eyes, I had ruled out motion from the things he’d even bother with. My shock was not perceptible, simply, the gentle and fascinating surprise I always feel whenever a monster bus I board gets moving out of the park, I having spent the last twenty minutes wondering how on earth it would.

  Mallam Ibrahim reached the cars, Tolu following closely behind him and I, bored with trying to understand, stood away from them. I suppose I thought if he suddenly turned around and grabbed Tolu by the throat – from which there could be no escape for sure – I would hit the exit faster than the sound Tolu would make for help. From where I stood, I turned my eyes to the cars Ibrahim had drawn our attention to earlier. They were an astonishing case in themselves; even at their level of wretchedness, some were still worse off than others and that was saying a lot since the best looking ones among them would have knocked the credibility off ‘Pimp My Ride’. There must have been about thirty of them parked on a grassy expanse of the garage grounds. It was easy to tell the order in which they had come in by how much their tyres had sagged under their weights. Even as I watched, two more cars were brought in and parked in front of a now forming rectangular column with a large width. The drivers got out of the spluttering vehicles and moved over to the boys working away in the workshop. One of them came forward to meet the drivers and they started a dialogue in Hausa.

  After a short while, Big Boss finished speaking and Tolu plodded over to me; it had seemed an interminable length of time and in all that time, Big Boss had kept making expressive gestures with his head, hands, hips and legs. For no reason at all, I suddenly began to hope severely that I wasn’t simply a new recruit to something sinister. I’d heard tales of criminal gangs and how they routinely performed bizarre experiments on their friends as a warning to their enemies. It’d be awful if they tried running nails through my fingers for example as they’d certainly split and I’d end up with eighteen fingers and two mashed stumps where my little fingers used to be.