He gazed at the bodies of his father and the policeman and then he took in the whole of Maroko. What would he do now? He had no money, and all his worldly possessions had been in their house. Whatever had survived had already been looted, and he didn’t think he could get anything back from the scavengers. He didn’t know what he was going to do about burying his father. Whatever happened, there was no way his father was going to get an elaborate funeral. No cows or dogs slaughtered to ease his passage into the next world. He had to find a way to take his father’s body back to Afikpo. He tried to wrap it in a scavenged length of cloth. He had almost succeeded when he was interrupted by the harsh bark of a voice.
“What are you doing?”
Elvis glanced up and saw the uniform of a soldier with a big shiny gun standing over him.
The uniform barked at him again: “I said, what are you doing?”
“He is my father.”
“So what? Where are you taking dis body?”
“To bury him.”
“No! Government say no dead body can leave here without clearance from HQ. You get clearance?”
“I …”
“Do you want me to arrest you?”
“But …”
“If you annoy me I will kill you and add you to your father.”
“So what happens to my father?”
“You answer soldierman with question?”
Elvis didn’t see the slap coming, but the blow knocked him over. He tasted blood.
“I’m sorry … but my father …”
“All right, since you have apologize, I can let you have de body for some money.”
“I have no money …”
“No what? Get out of here now,” the uniform said, descending on Elvis and pounding him repeatedly with his rifle butt.
Elvis stumbled away. The tears that wouldn’t come for his father streamed freely now as he felt worthless in the face of blind, unreasoning power. He could return later, when it was dark, but he knew the body would be gone.
Elvis started walking again, unable to accept his situation. One minute he had a life — not much of one, but he had one. And the next, everything fell apart. He walked for hours. He had no plans, no ideas about what to do or where he was going, he just walked. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular, but at least he was not standing still.
He kept walking until he found himself underneath one of the many dusty flyovers that littered the city. Another ghetto had been growing here for a long time, but now it just exploded as the influx from Maroko brought more life flooding into it.
All around him, everywhere, there were people: food sellers, softdrink hawkers, tire vulcanizers, small-time car mechanics, women and men lying on top of their belongings and hundreds of beggar children. Over to his left a child slept on a broken chest of drawers and another huddled in a basket once used to store yams.
Some of these children had always lived here. Others, here with their parents, had been displaced from other ghettos by Operation Clean the Nation. His eyes caught those of a young girl no more than twelve. She cut her eyes at him and, heaving her pregnant body up, walked away. He glanced at another child and saw a look of old boredom in his eyes. Elvis read the city, seeing signs not normally visible. A woman sat by the roadside begging for alms, her legs as thick as tree stumps, her arms no more than plump plantain stems clutching the air vainly. Her torso was a lump of soft dough kneaded into shapelessness and swollen by the yeast of shame which she inhaled daily. Her body was covered in ripe yellow and red sores, throbbing with the pus of decay. She sat there as if her pain had taken root.
Some distance away from her, a man stood, then sat, then stood again. Now he danced. Stopped. Shook his head and laughed and then hopped around in an odd birdlike gait. He was deep in conversation with some hallucination. It did not seem strange to Elvis that the spirit world became more visible and tangible the nearer one was to starvation. The man laughed, and as his diaphragm shook, Elvis thought he heard the man’s ribs knocking together, producing a sweet, haunting melody like the wooden xylophones of his small-town childhood.
In another spot, a young girl hawked oranges from a tray on her head. She had just got out from school and had barely had time to put down her books before snatching up the tray and heading for the streets. In a poor family everyone had to earn their keep. She sometimes let her male customers feel her firm breasts for a small fee. She marveled at the sweet stickiness she sometimes felt between her legs. She was saving up to go to secondary school.
Elvis traced patterns in the cracked and parched earth beneath his feet. There is a message in it all somewhere, he mused, a point to the chaos. But no matter how hard he tried, the meaning always seemed to be out there somewhere beyond reach, mocking him.
He found a quiet spot that didn’t seem to have a claim staked on it. Curling up, he covered himself with the torn bit of cloth he had been wrapping his father’s corpse in, and settled down to sleep.
Elvis woke up in Bridge City, feeling more than slightly confused. His stomach rumbled noisily but he was too broke to eat. He got up and stretched. He wondered what to do for money, remembering Okon telling him something about selling blood in hospitals. But which hospital? Just then he heard someone call his name. He turned round and, sure enough, there was Okon.
“I was just thinking about you.”
“Den I will indeed live long.”
They both laughed.
“What are you doing here?” Elvis asked.
“I should be asking you. I live here.”
“Since Maroko was demolished?”
“No. For months before den. You?”
“I just got here last night,” Elvis said. “But I’m not ready to talk about it yet.”
Okon nodded sagely: “Words cannot be force. When dey are ready dey will come. Have you eaten yet? No? Come den.”
And over breakfast Elvis probed Okon about what he did. Whether he still sold blood for a living.
Okon laughed. “No. I stop dat long time. For a while we hijacked corpses from roadsides and even homes which we sold for organ transplants.”
Elvis shuddered. Okon noted it.
“I know how you feel,” he said. “It is bad for a man’s soul, waiting at roadside like vulture, for someone to die, so you can steal fresh corpse, but man must survive. When dey start to demand alive people, me I quit. I am not murderer. Hustler? Survivor? Yes. But definitely not a murderer.”
Elvis had stopped eating and had been studying Okon’s face.
“But your face tell me you know about dat type of thing,” Okon continued.
“And now?” Elvis asked.
For the first time he really saw Okon for what he was: a tired man. His eyes were bloodshot and rheumy and fought hard to suppress any glimpse of the soul beneath. His face was weathered dark-brown leather with fine lines all over it.
“I am caretaker.”
“Caretaker?”
“Don’t rush things, my friend — gently, gently. Watch, look, learn. If you like things, den you can join. Until den, just come here and eat. I will square de owner. Okay?” Okon said softly.
Elvis nodded.
“Why are you helping me?” he asked.
“Because nobody help me.”
Elvis looked away, suddenly guilty that he had questioned Okon’s intentions.
“Have you heard anything about the King?” Elvis asked.
“So you never hear?”
“Hear what?”
“De King done die.”
The days passed quickly, and Elvis felt he had always lived in Bridge City. Time lost all meaning in the face of that deprivation. In Bridge City the only thing to look forward to was surviving the evening and making it through the night. Elvis soon got into the swing of things with the help and guidance of Okon. He became a caretaker, guarding the young beggar children while they slept.