She had been sure all along that it was coming to this. Why, why had she got her fortunes entwined with those of this dashing but tragic young man? She knew now. She knew that if a girl went to Tropicana every day, that girl was a pawn; a pawn in the hands of criminals, Senior Service men, contractors, thieves, detectives, liars, cheats, the rabble, the scum of the country’s grasping hands and headlong rush to ‘civilisation’, ‘sophistication’, and all the falsehood it implied. She turned over in her bed, and every time she turned it seemed to her that the meshes twined even more remorselessly. Dennis. Jagwa. Rolled into a ball of steel and nylon cords, inseparable, confused.
Uncle Taiwo had left in the morning when the police called. Jagua’s room with the unopened windows smelt a man smell with erotic odours.
‘Where’s Dennis Odoma?’
‘Why you askin’ me, you tink I know where he live. Go find him in his own house!’
/> ‘We gone there, we don’t see him. Tell us where we kin fin’ him. We got information he use to sleep here.’
‘He don’ sleep here. But what happen? Why you findin’ him so hot-hot?’
‘Dem go tief. When dem reach there, policeman catch Dennis. We been findin’ him for long time now. At las’ de policeman catch him and know him; to make sure he don’ ron away, de police handcuff him to hisself. Dennis wound de policeman and run away with handcuff. The policeman is in hospital now, on danger list.’
They brushed past her into the room as if the picture of the law officer in hospital had awakened a new flood of vengeance against the thieves. Jagua watched them turn up the carpet and shift the radiogram. Then they stamped out.
Jagua flung after them. ‘Go an’ ask Sabina; she mus’ know.’
‘Sabina?’
‘Him gal frien’.’ Jagua felt no qualms of conscience in betraying the girl she envied so much. ‘Dem live togedder for de same house. Sabina’s de name.’
The policeman laughed. ‘So you never hear?’
‘No, what happen?’
‘Why you think we lookin’ for Dennis so hot-hot? Sabina take revolver. She go to de place where dem makin’ some ceremony for somebody who die. She shoot one woman dere, den shoot herself. She say is de woman who make Dennis thief. I think dat Sabina crase. Such fine gal, an’ so young: go waste her life for nothin’ sake!’
‘Sabina, kill … woman – and kill herself, for Dennis?’
This is a dream, Jagua told herself. A mad dream, a nightmare. She saw Sabina again in her jeans with the pendulous buttocks, the face overlaid with too much cold cream, the lips sensuously kissable, with a blot of too-bright lipstick. A girl who was content to live her life among bed-springs, surrounded by fast drinks and chains of cigarettes. Sabina arriving at the funeral ceremony, incongruously dressed. The other women would be in their deckings of gold and gossamer nylon, winking from made-up eyes, holding the cocktail glasses with the tips of their nails. Then the one she sought, coming in – the ex-beauty queen. A momentary exchange of words, and then ‘Have it, now! …’ The recoil of the gun, the sudden diving for safety. And Sabina, alone with the overturned chair and tables and the writhing wife of the dead taxi driver, standing in that wreckage like a messenger from Lucifer’s fold. And the next instant turning the little weapon on her breast.
‘You people, you get strong mind! I don’ fit, at all!’
From the day when the twelve policemen came to search them and Dennis and Sabina showed no fear – even though they had the missing trinkets – Jagua lived in awe and admiration of them, especially of Sabina, the iron-nerved girl in her teens.
When Uncle Taiwo came back in the evening, he told Jagua that if she called herself his woman, she must do her best in every way to help win him votes from the women. She could go round now and begin to give door-to-door talks.
Jagua was in no mood now for such talk. ‘Uncle Taiwo, I beg you. I receive bad news from home. I’m not in de mood.’
‘I goin’ to teach you everythin’ about politics. You think you know nothin’ about politics; and you call yourself Lagos woman!’ He roared with laughter, and roared again and she was embarrassed because his laughter told her that it was a shameful thing not to be interested in the fortunes of the city. He promised to take her to campaign meetings so that she could see for herself, and afterwards they would go to the Tropicana to dance.
They went the following night and afterwards they sat in the Tropicana. It was too early but the chairs and tables were rapidly filling up. Someone who sat with them was talking about Freddie and he was certain Freddie had returned from England, with a white wife. Jagua’s heart leapt uncontrollably. She could not contradict him. Anything could happen to a young man who left Nigeria and went to stay in England for eighteen months.
‘He only been gone eighteen month,’ she said. ‘How he manage return so quick? I don’ think is Freddie you see.’
She downed her beer and turned her attention to the guitar and the big drums which dwarfed the drum-beater of Jimo Ladi and his Leopards. Men and women on the dance floor were wiggling as though they wished to propel their hips away from the rest of their bodies. A girl broke away from her partner in a heated improvisation. She placed a hand on her navel and began gyrating her hips back and forth. She had big hips, rendered out of proportion by the huge bundle of velvet she had tied. The men formed a ring round her and cheered. She threw her head back, far back, forming almost a wrestler’s bridge and how she maintained her balance, Jagua could never tell. Oh, it was good to be young. The men loved her. They were conquered.
‘De lates’ dance,’ remarked Uncle Taiwo. ‘Well, how you like our campaign meetin’?’
‘Is nice. Plenty people come; and you give dem plenty money so dem kin vote for you. But if dem don’ vote, how you kin know? Dey jus’ chop your money for nothin’.’
‘Dem will vote. Sure. And for me too. I goin’ to win de seat in Obanla Constituency, easy. Out of all de sixty seat, das de one we sure of in O.P. 2.’
‘I wish you good luck.’
They did not leave the Tropicana until three in the morning. They were heading for the gate when suddenly the rhythm changed. No more trumpets, no more guitars, no more saxophones. Drums. Drums only. The whisper went round. The Tropicana was going to put on a little show. Jagua – when she heard it was going to be a masquerade dance – begged Uncle Taiwo to let them stay. She dragged him back to their seat. He had been complaining of sleepiness and now he began grumbling aloud. The dance would be primitive, not the thing for the Tropicana, he told her.
Jagua was all ears. Everyone had sat down, gazing at the stage. Brisk, came the drumming. Brisk, rhythmic, fantastic, driven, impelled by some crazy devils. Relentless, brisk: and suddenly, the dancer was there. No! Not a dancer; just a thin bamboo screen, an elliptical screen, painted, stamped with all the existentialist badges and the cubist doctrine. A bamboo screen that hid a secret and stood in the middle of the stage. Two masquerades in chalk-red and blue, surrounded the screen, chanting to it, waving horse-tails. Brisk, came the drumming. Brisk. Incessant, impelling the screen into a sweeping whirlwind of movement, sneezing along, occasionally freezing, dead stop. The masquerades staring with fixed eye and gaping lip, bewildered. What was this? Neither male nor female, a screen, a bamboo screen of reeds in yellow ochre and dabbed with all kinds of weird colours. Only once – and barely for a wink – did Jagua manage to catch a glimpse of the human feet beneath the screen. A man’s feet – or a woman’s? Rhythm. More maddening rhythm. The screen, normally requiring more than one acre of land in which to sweep along and to recreate the wind, the storm, the destruction of crops by the rain.