I took my catch up to Ade’s bedroom, unfolded the aeroplanes and spread them on the floor.
********?
********?
********?
Ade had tried to communicate with me. But I could not read.
The rains arrived, and I was unable to play outside. I had been born during that same season four years previously, and now, amid the tumult, as when newly born, I felt exhausted once again. The rain beat down upon the roofs, on to the streets, the tangle of green, like so many exclamation marks puncturing the earth, thrumming up the water and effacing reflections.
Taiwo, for days now afflicted, like us all, with mindless boredom, sprawled in her armchair in an obscure and heavy trance. Occasionally she would wake, as if from hibernation, look around helplessly, then hunt for herself in the wardrobe mirror. But after a few minutes her eyelids would fall shut. And for days I had been confined to my room, with vacant Taiwo as my guard and keeper, with no more stimulus than the sodden scenery. Even the sounds of Lagos were crowded out by the beating of the rain, which afflicted everything, not only us, the human inhabitants of the house, but also the voiceless drunken animal life, the mice and the birds, who had disappeared at the first cloudburst, and most helplessly of all, the inanimate objects, the wardrobe, which pulped and swelled, Mother’s trunk, the floorboards, which grew patches of white fur dotted with the blue eyes of mould.
Father, it seemed, was the only one among us untroubled by the rain. He had become absorbed in his work at the Lagos Executive Development Board. In a large yellow mac he mounted his bicycle and left the house before dawn, no longer lunched at home and often returned after dark. Once I saw him pedalling furiously homeward, bent over his handlebars, his tailcoats flapping foolishly over the rear wheel. After he dried himself off he would sit on the veranda. Sometimes his colleague Mr Honeyman would stop by. There were blessed evenings when Father called me from my room, dismissing Taiwo for the night, evenings when, projected on a sheet hung at the far end of the veranda, I witnessed grainy, poorly shot photographs of Lagosians in fancy dress. Then, towards the end of the rainy season, Mr Honeyman produced a different kind of photograph, a bird’s-eye view of Lagos. Father pointed to our house, which looked like a toy box. It was so tiny and inconsequential. And so near the centre! They were making plans to clear the slums, which were circled in red. They planned to install plumbing and a sewage system, evict people from their homes, which were to be replaced with hotels and office blocks, banks, parliament buildings and new roads. But what excited them most were skyscrapers.
‘We will make ourselves comfortable among the clouds!’ Mr Honeyman said, beneath the rattling veranda roof. ‘We’ll solve the problem of housing in Lagos, and overcome the spread of disease by elevation!’
While Father was absorbed in his city planner’s dreams, I was making plans of my own. I knew I needed to leave the house and enter the town. Although I had resolved to take matters into my own hands, I did not know how to manage it. But then something quite unexpected happened.
It had been an afternoon of low cloud and relentless rain. That day I had sat with my elbows on the windowsill, gazing wall-eyed at the rain, in a stupidity of doubt, until Father called me, and at length we ate in the dining room. The meal was sombre but for the cutlery’s chime and clatter. When I returned to my room I looked out of the window and found the world transformed! The sun had emerged, the wind had fallen to a soft breeze, which stirred the branches of the ebony tree. I climbed out through my bedroom window into the still-damp sun-bright garden, impossibly happy. I ran through grass, under the tree and around the kitchen compound to the lakeshore.
Taiwo was floating face-down in the water.
11. In Lagos
Came the great market days. The rains had flooded the town, filled the streets, overwhelmed our garden — but now grasses, tubers and flowers were everywhere springing up. Birds appeared, and the air vibrated with their wing beats. To think that only a week previously we had been besieged by that empty damp season, and in semi-darkness the world had shrunk to enclose us. But now, through cloudless skies, the sun shone brightly. A hot dry summer-season with far views across the lagoon. The lawn quickly became parched. The foundations of a swallow’s nest appeared below the eaves. High-spirited in the new atmosphere, we rolled up our sleeves, and listened to the swallows, who rained down on us a living symphony, then took off, shrilling, to return with moss, twigs and rags.
It was during this season that I became acquainted for the first time with the market. Already a week had passed since Taiwo’s death. Father had asked Iffe to take care of me until he found a new nursemaid (in fact he never found one). So here we were, Iffe, Ade and I, beneath the low sky, passing through the front garden on our way to Jankara market. We walked on the sandy road, by dew-damp lawns. Elephant grass waved its stalks far above my head. The shopkeeper Riley greeted us — ‘Good morning!’ — and the watchmen at the gate of the Honeymans’ did the same — ‘E ku aro!’ Beside us a cockerel was stirring up dust. He stopped, swelled his neck and summoned up a cry; the little thong-like tongue thrashed in the violent beak, and from deep in his throat he wished me well. We reached the street where buses ran amid clouds of dust. The yellow bus rounded a corner and, shuddering, pulled to a stop. We boarded, and the sky arched higher.
I thought, but not for long, of Taiwo. No one knew the exact manner of her death; there were no witnesses. Did she fall? Or had she taken her own life? I wondered if the church gave a full burial for suicides. The bus was picking up speed. On the seat beside Ade I leaned forward. Would Taiwo’s family prepare her face — her last, set permanently — as she herself would have wished: scrubbed, hair pulled back from the wide forehead, painted lips and cheeks, eyebrows plucked? My feet in new leather shoes felt prickly. I heard a blend of bells and horns and turned to face the window. What, I asked myself, did thoughts of Taiwo matter now? Had I not wished my nursemaid dead? Happy or obedient fate had heard my plea! At that moment it simply stirred me that I had won my freedom, was seated presently on the tinny, but thunderous, bus looking through the dusty glass — we were crossing the Macgregor Canal. How my luck had changed!
The trading district came into view. We got off the bus and entered the market. Ade and I hung back and hurdled the bands of shade that spanned the walkway between stands — for no other reason than we wanted to — the rules of a game we had not discussed, and it made our progress slow. Every so often Iffe stopped, turned and clicked her tongue, which released us from the shadows’ spell, and we came running to where, a moment earlier, she had been standing. The stalls rose hugely above me. We reached the section of fresh produce where each type of vegetable was stacked together: we walked among brown sticky roots, past oranges in tea chests, past tomatoes with their smell like sunshine, past masses of corncobs behind Iffe to her stand. The morning was hot, damp, substantial, smelling of dust, and a warm sweet odour like caramelizing sugar.