br /> ‘Sam has gone back to his younger brother. His brother is a trader. Lives in a tiny room just off Twenty Molomo. I’m sorry I had to lose him, but —’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Amazing! Do you sleep at the station, too?’
‘Not yet. I’m now a hanger-on till I can find a place. My First Trumpet has invited me to share his little room with him.’
‘Is not easy,’ Beatrice said, and told him how Lajide wanted her to be his woman.
‘When you’re a man,’ Sango said, ‘they want six months’ or a year’s rent in advance. When you’re an attractive woman, single, or about to be single, they want you as a mistress. That’s the city.’
‘What am I to do, Sango?’
‘If I were not engaged, I would say, marry me. As it is, I can only advise you to stick to Grunnings. He’s much nicer than either of those two men – Lajide or Zamil. He’s responsible, at least.’ He stopped when he noted her obvious disappointment. He looked at her and felt a strong desire to protect her as a woman in danger.
‘I don’t know what to do with my life,’ she said. She glanced round nervously as if to see if anyone had overheard.
Sango said, ‘Let’s go somewhere quiet and you can tell me about it. Do you mind if we pass by the offices of the West African Sensation? I have a report to hand in to the editor.’
‘I don’t mind, Sango. But where’s the girl with you?’
‘Disappeared. Don’t worry. She was just a pick-up.’ He folded his notebook, paid his bill. Together they walked through the thick cigarette fumes. He was flattered by her loyalty to him.
They passed by Zamil’s table and he looked up in surprise. Once out by the lagoon, they found a park bench under a coconut palm looking out at the ships anchored in the lagoon. A woman with a child strapped to her back was buying fish from a canoeman. Near by a man was dragging his nets out of the lagoon and pouring hundreds of silvery little fish into a canoe.
Beatrice talked freely, with little interruption from Sango. He listened, and as her story unfolded he asked himself: what is the secret of getting ahead in the city? Beatrice had disclosed that she came to the city from the Eastern Greens, from the city of coal. She made no secret of what brought her to the city: ‘high life.’ Cars, servants, high-class foods, decent clothes, luxurious living. Since she could not earn the high life herself, she must obtain it by attachment to someone who could. But she was not so well, and having found Grunnings, who did not quite satisfy her, she had to stick to him.
‘But I’m tired of him and want to leave. But should I agree to what Lajide suggests? I do not like him very much.’
Sango thought it over. His mind was confused. Her total trust in him had diverted his original desire for her. He could think of her now only as a sister. He forgot that he ever wanted her.
What he was too blind to see was that Beatrice had fallen in love with him. He talked to her about sticking to Grunnings and she looked only into his eyes and held his hand with tenderness.
Then he realized that she was not listening and had started dozing in the soft sea breeze.
•
Day by day thousands of copies of the West African Sensation rolled off the huge presses, were quickly bundled into waiting green vans that immediately struck out north, east, west, covering the entire country from the central point of the city. In the last few months of his present tour, McMaster’s policy of giving local writers free rein was beginning to pay off. The West African Sensation was becoming a part of life, something eagerly awaited for its stories of politics, crime, sport, and entertainment.
For Sango, life had settled down to a routine and he seemed to be looking for some excitement to brighten up his page. Sometimes he had to remind himself that however exciting crime was, it brought tragedy to someone. But it was his function to report it, and to him it had become something clinical, with neither blood nor sentiment attached.
Unexpectedly, his chance came one afternoon with a strange phone call; and it very nearly altered his whole life. The caller had said that a body had been found floating on the lagoon. McMaster had instantly detailed Sango to cover the assignment.
Sango found on his arrival at the beach that a huge crowd had gathered in the manner of the people of the city. The police vans blared at them through loudspeakers, urging them to keep clear and to touch nothing. The shops and offices had emptied and there were clerks with pencils stuck to their ears, fashionable girls with baskets of shopping slung over their arms, ice-cream hawkers pedalling bicycles, motorists tooting their horns. The coconut palms waved their lazy fronds over the body draped in white and lying on the sands.
Sango went over and took a bold look at the face. It was the body of a man in the prime of life, and, as it turned out later, he had taken his own life. His name, Sango discovered, was Buraimoh Ajikatu. He had been missing from home for about three days. He was a clerk in a big department store and he was married, with four children.
They said he had been finding it increasingly difficult to support his family. To him the city had been an enemy that raised the prices of its commodities without increasing his pay; or even when the pay was increased, the increased prices immediately made things worse than before.
Buraimoh’s plight was not alleviated by a nagging wife. He complained aloud and a friend at the office who worked no harder but always enjoyed the good things of life, said: ‘Have you not heard of the Ufemfe society?’
He had not heard and the friend told him about Lugard Square at midnight. There was to be a meeting. He went, and was enrolled. They promised him all he wanted. And strangely enough, life became bearable. He could not understand why his salary was increased, or why he was promoted to stores assistant, but it was not in his place to question. There was even a promise of becoming branch manager within one month. Why had it not happened all the time he was not an Ufemfe member? That too he could not answer. But he had been initiated and he now knew the secret sign of Ufemfe; this revealed to him that he had been the only non-member in the department store.
One night the blow fell. This was the unexplained portion of the pact. They asked him in a matter-of-fact manner to give them his first-born son. He protested, asked for an alternative sacrifice, and when they would not listen threatened to leave the society. But they told him that he could not leave. There was a way in, but none out – except through death. He was terrified, but adamant.
He had told no one of his plight, and that was when he vanished from home. Now that the good things of life were his, he would not go back and tell his wife. All this Sango learnt, and much more besides. For him it had great significance. By uncovering this veil, he had discovered where all the depressed people of the city went for sustenance. They literally sold their souls to the devil.
Even so, when things became much too unbearable for him, Sango often thought it would not be the worst thing in life to join the Ufemfe. And he would remember that swollen body with its protruding tongue and bulging eyes, a body that had been rescued from the devil’s hands and given a decent Christian burial. And yet the tragedy remained.
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