Nothing at all made him think to ask anything about Bendic.
IV
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Finally, it is evening. The lights come on in the new high-rise shop that was built across the street, and Ajie sees that there are men sitting, drinking beer, on one of the balconies. Their loud voices and laughter reach him, and he stands up to push the window out a little. Ismaila is outside the gate, talking to a man. Ajie heard the gate rattle and thought it was Ma returning from church. He steps out and sees it isn’t Ma. It is a man dressed in a faded blue babariga. Maybe the neighbor’s gateman, Ajie thinks.
He returns inside. There is something strange about standing in the room you grew up in after you have been away from home for a very long time. To look at the bed you slept in when you were eight or thirteen and still are expected to sleep in at twenty-six.
Paul’s bed is still there by the window, and the reading table is still wooden and brown, with all the old nicks, scratches, inkblots, and dull gleams of candle wax.
Outside the window, the air darkens, and Ajie hears Ismaila laughing.
He steps outside and tells Ismaila he is going for a stroll. “No problem,” Ismaila says, “I go tell madam when she return from church.”
Ajie turns left at the lights, veering from Nzimiro. There are many more bikes on the roads than there used to be. Even in this once reserved part of town, there is a disproportionate increase. Light, handy, and fast, these bikes have a mild insouciance about them. Something playful and bad-tempered at the same time. Yesterday, stuck in traffic for about an hour on the way from the airport, Ajie left the driver in the car and hailed a bike. He hadn’t returned to Port Harcourt after five years, he said to himself, only to be trapped in the hot stickiness of a small car held up on East-West Road. He took a seat on the well-padded pillion, and when the Okada man moved the bike, he felt the rush of wind on his face, inside his shirt, and on the back of his neck. He could see Port Harcourt again, but not through a car window.
He approaches the barbershop on Ogoja Street. It seems wider than he remembers it, and full of light. He can see the mirrors, and the little generator outside trembling and puffing smoke. A boy, nearly as tall as the door, pushes the lacy blinds to one side and walks out. He pauses midstep, pats his hands over his pockets, front and back. Keys, wallet, mobile phone, what has he forgotten? He turns around and steps back into the shop.
There have been times when Ajie would turn a street corner or look into a car and see someone’s back, a profile or head that looked just like Paul’s. He understands how these things work — it’s just his mind playing tricks on him. Still, he would increase his pace, and when he got close enough to the stranger, he would stare a little bit too long.
Once, on the London Tube, he sat opposite a boy wearing dark green skinny jeans. There was a quality to this boy’s nose, his eyebrows, his boots, the way he stood up when the train stopped at Moorgate station. There was a something Paul-like about him. Ajie saw it right after the boy sat down opposite him, so he placed his eyes on him and kept them there. Their eyes met. The boy looked away, but Ajie didn’t. The train wobbled in the track and howled, and then the boy returned the stare, attempting some kind of feeble protest: What are you looking at? he seemed to ask. When the boy stood up to leave the train at Moorgate, he picked up his backpack from the ground, and Ajie saw it was the same army-green as Paul’s bag, the one he carried on that day he left the house over a decade ago, on another continent. Ajie stood up a little too late to follow the boy, and the doors beeped and slammed shut in his face.
On Herbert Macaulay Road, he wants to point out to Paul that the video club has been demolished. He wonders aloud in disgust at why so many shops have been built so close to the road.
There is a huge billboard advertising a mobile phone network, a young man and woman holding phones to their ears and smiling lovingly at each other. Just beyond that is a billboard advertising a church. The pastor, a man in a shiny suit, is smiling with his hands held together on his chest; his wife, a woman in a red skirt suit and a large black hat, is to his right. Farther down the road, there are more billboards, posters stuck on fences, on electric poles and transformers, of preachers with a variety of titles — bishops, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and reverend pastors — inviting members of the public to different church programs: Night of Encounter, Operation Claim Your Victory, At the Red Sea: Your Enemies Must Drown. They promise a “power-packed” event where the Word would be shared and miracles will manifest. Some note that they will be “ministering, in partnership with the Holy Ghost.” They all promise divine favor, fruit of the womb, increases in business, prosperity, healing, open doors, and freedom from demonic oppression.
A white Jeep pulls up right beside him, and Ajie stops walking. A woman in a blond weave sticks her face out the window to ask if he knows the way to Atako Street. He points in the direction of the street, which is in fact the very next turn. After she drives off, he notices a small banner tied to a transformer, fluttering a little in the breeze, and on it a minister with the title “Field Marshal of the Most High,” inviting the public to a night of answered prayers specifically tagged: Lord Give Me a Spouse Lest I Die.
Ajie follows the road heading back to Nzimiro and wonders about Mrs. Braide, their former neighbor from number 6. She used to go to a church like these. When they were children, Ma and most people they knew viewed those places of worship with suspicion. Now, he thinks, there is such a mania for them. When did this change?
Ma said Mrs. Braide had relocated to Abuja after kidnapping got rife in Port Harcourt in the past couple of years. Armed militants who claimed they were struggling to get a fairer deal for the oil-producing minorities who had been neglected by government began kidnapping European oil workers for ransom.
These days, since the number of European workers has dwindled, just about anyone is up for grabs if you are deemed wealthy enough to cough up some money, or your family or friends are. Local criminals have found a new trade.
Ma told Ajie that sometimes the negotiations for ransom scaled down from millions of naira to hundreds of thousands, then down to tens of thousands, when it became obvious the captive’s family really had no money. A band of kidnappers begged a family to send them mobile phone credit, at least, to cover the captive’s call cost and feeding expenses for the two weeks. Sometimes kidnappers just ceased making contact with the captive’s family even when negotiations were going well, and they would later learn or simply accept after waiting for months that their loved one had died from an illness or been shot by accident. Ma warned Ajie to be careful, not to let people know he had come from abroad, since they might think he was rich, and Ajie just looked at her and wondered how he could be kidnapped from his own streets.
As he turns onto Yakubu Avenue, Ajie spots Ismaila and his friend from a distance. They are now two little black things crouched on their haunches, like professional beggars at Garrison Junction. Are they writing on the sand or what? he wonders.
“Madam done return,” Ismaila says to him.
“Oh. Okay. Thank you, Ismaila.”
Ma is in the kitchen, standing over the sink. “You did not eat your food.” She wipes her hand on a kitchen towel and hangs it back on the peg. She uncovers a ceramic bowl on the gas burner, then puts it back. There is boiled yam in it.
“I will eat later.”