There was one door to the room; it led into the long central corridor and was bolted from inside. There was also a tiny plainboard window which gave directly on to the bed and opened out to a huge, choked and stagnant drain. So it had to be kept shut at all times to keep down the smell and the mosquitoes.
But enough of both still got in. As soon as the lone lightbulb in the room was turned off the mosquitoes began to sing to the ear which was always worse than their bite and, some would say, even worse than the bite of bedbugs which soon followed the mosquitoes in a night-long assault on these smooth-skinned intruders from the GRA. No wonder Chris looked so haggard and worn-out, thought Beatrice.
But although these specific distractions surely must have worked their own havoc on the rites of this closing night to a long drama that had drawn together more than these two survivors in enactments of love and friendship, betrayal and death, there was something deeper than the harassment of heat and bugs laying a restraining hand on the shoulder of the chief celebrant.
Chris had noticed it from the very moment she had walked in that evening that she carried with her a strong aura of that other Beatrice whom he always described in fearful jest as goddessy. And then lying in bed and summoning her to join him and watching her as she finally rose from her chair in the thin darkness of the room she struck him by her stately stylized movement like the Maiden Spirit Mask coming in to the arena, erect, disdainful, highcoiffured, unravished yet by her dance.
She did not rebuff him. But neither did she offer more than the obligatory demands of her ritual. He understood perfectly and soon afterwards led in an effort to divert their minds to childhood fable. The mosquito, which Chris repeatedly but unsuccessfully tried to swat with an old shirt he had brought to bed for the purpose, was taunting the ear in revenge for the insult with which his suit had once
been rejected.
“What’s the bedbug’s excuse,” asked Beatrice “for biting without bothering to sing first?”
“Her story is that man once tried to destroy her and her new-hatched brood by pouring a kettle of hot water on them. Her little ones were about to give up the struggle but she said to them: Don’t give up, whatever is hot will become cold.”
“And so they survived to bite us tonight.”
“Exactly.”
“I wonder what she will tell them after a good spray of aerosol insecticide?” Which led her to ask Chris why he had not thought of buying himself a can of Flit since getting here.
“I thought of it actually the first night but then decided against it in the morning.”
“What?”
“You see, Emmanuel made the point that since aerosol was a remedy our host could not himself afford it was perhaps better not to insult him by introducing it into his household. I was stunned by that argument, and he handed back to me the money I had given him to buy a canister at the petrol station.”
Beatrice was silent for a while. Then she said “What a fellow, that Emmanuel of yours! Still I am glad I won’t be spending five nights here.”
Their low-toned conversation was abruptly interrupted by a major disturbance on the floor. One child, it appeared, had urinated on his brother. The remonstrance, sleepy at first, quickly sharpened into clear-eyed accusations and a general commotion in which someone soon began to cry, calling on his mother. Click! went the switch and the single naked bulb hanging down the centre of the ceiling flooded the room with light. Chris and Beatrice remained still and silent like a couple of mice interrupted far from their hole and sheltering behind utensils in a crowded room.
“Shush!” It must have been either the biggest of the three boys or the bigger of the two girls taking command. Nothing more was heard after that. They were probably speaking by signs and with their eyes, no doubt pointing to the bed and its distinguished occupants. The switch went click again and darkness returned, broken for a while by discreet whispers; and then silence.
THE DECISION by Chris and his two companions to travel to the North by bus instead of Braimoh’s taxi was well taken because a bus was bound to attract less attention to itself than a taxi even when it was as old as Braimoh’s.
The bus they chose was one of a new generation of transports known, even to the illiterate, as Luxurious, so called because they were factory-built and fitted out with upholstered seats. Chris had never been inside a Luxurious before. Indeed his last experience in Kangan buses was years and years ago before he had left to study in Britain. In those days buses were still the crude handiwork of bold and ingenious panel-beaters and welders who knocked any sheet-metal that came to hand into a container on wheels, and got a sign-writer to paint BUS in florid letters all over it.
Before embarking on Luxurious, Chris walked round it sizing it up like a prospective buyer. He felt a curious pride in its transformation which had not entirely abandoned its origins. The florid lettering had remained virtually unchanged by prosperity. Perhaps the same sign-writers of his younger days were still working or, more likely, had influenced generations of apprentices in their peculiar calligraphy. And to think of it, that imaginative roadside welder who created the first crude buses might be the managing director of the transport company that now had a fleet of Luxuriouses! If there had been no progress in the nation’s affairs at the top there had clearly been some near the bottom, albeit undirected and therefore only half-realized.
The sign-writers had long expanded their assignment from merely copying down the short word BUS into more elaborate messages rather in the tradition of that unknown monk working away soberly by candle-light copying out the Lord’s Prayer as he must have done scores of times before and then, seized by a sudden and unprecedented impulse of adoration, proceeded to end the prayer on a new fantastic flourish of his own: For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen!
The sign-writers of Kangan did not work in dark and holy seclusions of monasteries but in free-for-all market-places under the fiery eye of the sun. And yet in ways not unlike the monk’s they sought in their work to capture the past as well as invent a future. Luxurious had inscribed on its blue body in reds, yellows and whites three different legends—one at the back, another at the sides and the third, and perhaps most important, at the masthead, on top of the front windscreen.
Chris, now fully reconciled to his new condition as a wide-eyed newcomer to the ways of Kangan made a mental note of these inscriptions.
The one at the back of the bus, written in the indigenous language of Bassa, concise in the extreme and, for that reason, hard if not impossible to translate said simply: Ife onye metalu—What a man commits. At the sides the inscriptions switched to words of English: All Saints Bus; and in front, also in English, they announced finally (or perhaps initially!) Angel of Mercy.
Chris took a window seat in the middle section of the bus; Braimoh had already secured a place for himself in front just behind the driver; while Emmanuel on an aisle seat at the rear was chatting up a most attractive girl whose striking features had earlier at the ticketing office made not a fleeting impression on Chris himself.
Those three legends now began to tease and exercise his mind; perhaps they came handy as an antidote to anxiety. After the near disaster at the Three Cowrie Bridge he had become persuaded that in moments of stress his face was perhaps too candid a mirror to his mind, and he had set about cultivating what he hoped in future would pass for a relaxed countenance and serve him more prudendy.
But practising deep-breathing exercises and other forms of relaxation therapy in front of a mirror was one thing, and being able to actually look relaxed if a team of vicious security men should for example board the bus now, quite another. To paraphrase a recent wise admonition, how was he to give the impression to the world in such an emergency that this unaccustomed bus in which he now sat nervously was actually his father’s property?
Paradoxically Braimoh who owned nothing to speak of could pass, by the way he sat up there, as the true son of the proprietor of Angel of Mercy, alias All Saints, alias Ife onye metalu.
Glancing back to the rear of the bus Chris saw Emmanuel who didn’t own anything either, at least not for the moment, also pretty much at ease; not to the degree of Braimoh of course, but more so by far than Yours Sincerely who, don’t forget, is one of the troika of proprietors who own Kangan itself! He smiled, bitterly. That Beatrice girl of yours must be closely watched!
If he had a book he could perhaps bury his thoughts in it and escape the betrayal of a tell-tale face. But a man reading a book in a Kangan bus in order to evade notice would have to be out of his mind. So the only reading material he had in his bag were a few unsigned and innocuous poems he had salvaged from scattered papers in Ikem’s house.