‘Your father hasn’t paid for his pictures yet.’
On another day, with a glint in his eyes, in a tone of conspiracy, he said:
‘Worry your father for me. I will give you a shilling if he pays for his pictures.’
He went on pestering me like that, asking if I had in turn been pestering Dad. He then threatened never to feed me again or speak to me till the pictures had been paid for. One day I saw him looking hungry and miserable and when I asked him what was wrong he snarled at me, snatched up the tripods of his camera and, screaming that no one ever paid for their photographs, pursued me down the street. He was quite fierce that day. His hunger and bitterness made him ugly, and I avoided him for a while.
His hunger got worse. In the mornings he no longer bothered to change the photographs in the glass cabinet. He no longer bothered to surprise us. The old images turned brown and sad and curled up at the edges under the bleaching force of the sunlight. In the nights we heard him raving, abusing everyone for not paying up, shouting that it was people like us who drove honest men to crime and corruption. His clothes became shabby and his beard turned wiry and brown. But even his hunger couldn’t extinguish his spirit and in the afternoons he still went up and down the place, taking pictures with demented eyes and in a constancy of bad temper.
The children stopped gathering round his cabinet. We invented new games and played football. One afternoon, while playing, we kicked the ball too hard into an unintended goal, smashing the photographer’s cabinet. He came out, waving a machete, his eyes mad, his movements listless, his tongue coated with white sediments. He trembled in the sunlight, feeble and ill. He came to the cabinet, looked at the destruction we had wrought, and said:
‘Don’t touch the cabinet! I kill anyone who touches it!’
And so the football remained in the cabinet with the smashed glass and the browning photographs. The adults who went past shook their heads in bewilderment at this strange new form of photographic montage. The football was still in the cabinet when it rained. Water flooded the images. Insects bred in the cabinet and curious forms of mould and fungi grew on the innocent subjects of his industry and we all felt sad that the photographer had lost interest in his craft. He wasted away in his tiny room, trembling in the grip of an abnormal fever, and when we saw him he was always covered in a filthy black cloth.
I felt so sad about his pictures that I began to pester Dad, who always got into a temper whenever the subject was raised. So I pestered Mum, but she got bonier the more I pestered her; and so I stopped, and forgot the sadness altogether. And in the afternoons, because I couldn’t go to Madame Koto’s bar, nor look at the pictures in the broken glass cabinet, my feet started to itch again, and I resumed wandering the roads of the world.
Sometimes I played in the forest. My favourite place was the clearing. In the afternoons the forest wasn’t frightening, though I often heard strange drums and singing and trees groaning before they fell. I heard the axes and drills in the distances. And every day the forest thinned a little. The trees I got to know so well were cut down and only their stumps, dripping sap, remained.
I wandered through the forest, collecting rusted padlocks, green bird-eggs, abandoned necklaces, and ritual dolls. Sometimes I watched the men felling trees and sometimes the companies building roads. I made some money running errands for the workers, errands to young girls who rebuffed their advances and to married women who were secretive and full of riddles in their replies, errands to buy cooked food and soft drinks. With the pennies they gave me I bought bread and fried coconut chips and iced water for myself. And then I saved some of the money and offered it to the photographer for our pictures. But when he saw how much I offered he burst into a feverish temper, and chased me out, thinking that I was mocking him.
The days were always long except when I played or wandered. The streets were long and convoluted. It took me hours to get lost and many more to find my way back again. I began to enjoy getting lost. In my wanderings I left our area altogether, with its jumbled profusion of shacks and huts and bungalows, and followed the route of the buses that took workers to the city centre. At the roadsides, women roasted corn. In palm-wine bars and eating-houses, men swallowed fist-sized dollops of eba, gesticulating furiously, arguing about politics. At a barber’s shop, I watched a man being shaved bald. Next to the barber’s shop there was a pool office. A man, wearing a blue French suit, his arms round a beautiful woman, came out; I started towards him. He didn’t recognise me. When he got into a car, with the woman, both smiling on that hot day, and when they drove off, it occurred to me that I had seen the future incarnation of my father’s better self, his successful double.
I went on walking till I got to the garage. Activity bustled everywhere. There were lorries and transport vehicles and buses reversing, conductors rhythmically chanting their destinations, commuters clambering on, drivers shouting insults at one another, bicyclists tinkling their bells. Traders cried out their wares, buyers haggled loudly, and no one seemed to be still.
There was no stillness anywhere and I went on walking and saw a lot of men carrying loads, carrying monstrous sacks, as if they were damned, or as if they were working out an abysmal slavery. They staggered under the absurd weight of salt bags, cement bags, garri sacks. The weights crushed their heads, compressed their necks, and the veins of their faces were swollen to bursting point. Their expressions were so contorted that they seemed almost inhuman. I watched them buckling under the weights, watched them become knock-kneed, as they ran, with foaming sweat pouring down their bodies. Their trousers were all soaked through and one of the men, rushing past me, farted uncontrollably, wobbling under the horrible load.
Further on I came to the lorries that brought the bags of garri from distant regions of the country. The carriers of loads were lined up at the open backs of the lorries awaiting their turns, with rolled cloths on their heads. I watched the men being loaded, watched them stumble off through the chaos. Each man bore his load differently. Two men at the back of the trucks would lift the bags on to the heads of the load-carriers. Some of the carriers flinched before the shadow of the bags, some recoiled before the loads had even been lifted, and a few invariably seemed to rise towards the load, anticipating its weight, neutralising their pain, before the terrible moment. But there was one among them who was different. He was huge, had bulbous muscles, a toweringly ugly face, and was cross-eyed, I suspected, from the accumulation of too much weight. He was the giant of the garage. They lifted a bag on his head. He made inscrutable noises and flapped his hand.
‘More! More!’ he said.
They lifted a second bag on his head and his neck virtually disappeared and his mighty feet sank into the muddy street.
‘He’s mad!’ said one of the load-carriers behind him.
‘He’s drunk!’ said another.
He turned towards them, his mouth twisted, his face contorted, and shouted, in a strangled voice:
‘Your father is mad! Your mother is drunk!’
Then he turned to the two men at the back of the truck and gesticulated again. He flapped his hand so violently it seemed he was trying to attack them. They drew back in horror.
‘MORE! MORE!’ he cried.
‘That’s enough,’ said one of the two men.
‘Do you think we are politicians?’ said the other.
His gestures became more furious.
‘He’s not mad,’ said the carrier behind him. ‘He’s poor, that’s all.’
‘MORE! MORE!’ the giant squealed.
‘Look, go! That’s enough even for you.’
‘MORE! MORE!’ he said, his voice disappearing.
They lifted one more sack on his head and an extraordinary sound came from his buttocks; his head vanished altogether; the sound continued, unstoppable; and he staggered one way and then another. Those waiting to be loaded fled from behind him. He wobbled in all directions, banging into stalls, toppling tables of fresh fish and neat piles of oranges,
staggering into traders’ wares, trampling on basins of snails. Women screamed at him, pulling at his trousers. He went on staggering, balancing the weights, slipping and miraculously regaining his footage, grunting and swearing, uttering the words ‘MORE! MORE!’ under his breath, and when he went past me I noticed that his crossed eyes were almost normal under the crush, and his muscles trembled uncontrollably, and he groaned so deeply, and he gave off such an unearthly smell of sweat and oppression that I suddenly burst into tears.
People had gathered all around. People had stopped what they were doing, just to see if this man who wasn’t really a giant could manage all that weight. They watched the spectacle of that squat, thick-set man, and it was the only moment I saw people in stillness. And when the man, wobbling and weaving, got to where he was supposed to be relieved of the bags, the unloaders weren’t there. He turned, calling for them; they came running out of a bukka, and arrived too late; for he suddenly threw down the three mountainous bags all at once; one of them spilled open; and he stood perfectly still for a moment, blinking, while people all around cheered him and sang out his nicknames; and then he fell in slow motion on to the sacks and did not stir till he had been dragged to the roadside and revived with a bucket of water and a tumbler full of palm-wine.
After a while he got up, his knees knocking, and went back to the truck and took to carrying only two bags. People still kept watching him, to see if he would do something extraordinary with the bags. But the only thing he did, after a few trips, was go into a bukka, put away a great bowl of pounded yam, swallowing handfuls that would have choked a bull. The spectators who left, resuming their busy lives, missed seeing him perform an impromptu fandango with the madame of the bukka and then run off without paying, the madame hot on his heels waving a frying pan.
The garage was the most confusing place I’d ever seen: people shouting everywhere, lorries revving, truck-pullers yelling, music blaring from new record shops and drinking houses, cars screeching, women screaming at pickpockets, and men fighting over who would carry the suitcases of travellers. Across the road a woman was whipping a madman with a broom. Behind me a thief was caught and set upon by traders. There were boys all over the place, roaming around with hungry and cunning eyes. Outside a run-down shed the old bicycle-repairer sat on a chair, smoking a cigarette, surveying the whole confusion. A bus had broken down and people were pushing it. A woman, fat and rich-looking in expensive lace, was ordering a lot of men around. She looked very powerful and had an expression of distilled scorn on her face as she commanded the men to take her baggage from the boot of a taxi. There was so much to see, so much to listen to, with clashing sounds and voices pulling the attention this way and that, with everything happening in frantic simultaneity, that it was impossible to walk straight. I kept bumping into people, stumbling into potholes of mud, tripping over the rubbish that was soggy on the ground. I would be watching one thing, a girl washing a baby’s bottom at the roadside, when a car horn would blast noisily behind me, startling the life out of me. Or I would be wary of the cars behind me, driving by so close that it seemed they were slowly and deliberately trying to run me over, when someone would shout:
‘Get out of my way, you rat!’
I would jump out of the way and a truck-puller, dragging behind him the entire contents of a modest household, or a load-carrier, straining under a monstrous weight of yams, would storm past. I became dizzy, hungry, and confused. No one paid much attention to anyone else. On one side of the street a man would suddenly bolt off with a trader’s tinbox of money. On the other side a woman would be arguing with a customer about the price of breadfruit, while her child was crawling under a stationary lorry. I was going towards the lorry to get the child out when a great cry started all around me. The woman had just realised that her child was missing. The cry was so piercing that other women instantly gathered around, holding their breasts and agitating the air with their hands. The lorry driver started his engine, the child screamed, the women rushed towards me, shoved me out of the way, and some of them went under the lorry, while others pounced on the driver and harassed him for parking his ugly vehicle in front of their stalls. The driver didn’t stand for it and insulted them back and a frightening din of abuse ensued, the women getting so involved that they forgot the child they were concerned about in the first place. I was by now quite obliterated with mud and dirt and I went on further, looking for a water-pump.
I couldn’t find one and I came to a place where men were offloading cement bags from the back of a trailer. Again there was a multitude of load-carriers, their faces obscured by cement-dust, with cement on their sweating eyebrows and on their hair. I wondered how they managed to comb it in the mornings. Some of the load-carriers were boys a little taller than me. I watched the boys buckling under the cement bags, staggering off, dumping them down, coming back, till their supervisor called for a break, and they all went and sat around the outdoor table of a bukka and washed their hands and sweated into their food, eating voraciously.
When they resumed work again I noticed that amongst them was an old man, his son, and his grandchildren, who could not have been much older than me. Among the grandchildren was one who had just started carrying loads that day. He kept crying about his neck and his back and he cried all through the carrying but his father wouldn’t let him stop and drove him on with his tongue, saying he must learn to be a man, and that there were boys younger than him who were a pride to their families, and at that moment he pointed at me. Fearing that the supervisor might notice me as well and take it into his head to order me to break my neck carrying cement bags, I hurried on, searching for a water-pump, till I came to another lorry where men were offloading bags of salt. And I was staring at the strange number plate of the lorry when I heard the protestations of a familiar voice.
I heard the voice briefly and I sought the face. And then I saw Dad amongst the load-carriers. He looked completely different. His hair was white and his face was mask-like with engrained cement. He was almost naked except for a very disgusting pair of tattered shorts which I had never seen before. They loaded two bags of salt on his head and he cried ‘GOD, SAVE ME!’ and he wobbled and the bag on top fell back into the lorry. The men loading him insulted his ancestry, wounding me, and Dad kept blinking as the sweat and salt poured into his eyes. The men loading him shouted about how he had been giving them a lot of trouble and behaving like a woman and if he couldn’t carry mere bags of salt he should crawl back into his wife’s bed. Dad was still staggering, like a boxer under the onslaught of too many blows, when the loaders dumped the second bag on his head for the second time. For a moment Dad stood perfectly still. Then he wobbled. His muscles twitched erratically. The bags were very huge and compact, like boulders of rock, and salt poured out of one of them on to Dad’s shoulder.
‘MOVE! MOVE ON!’ said one of the loaders.
‘OR YOU WANT ANOTHER BAG, EH?’ said the other.
For a moment I thought Dad was going to succumb to the dare and be forced deeper into the earth by the sheer weight of bags that could have been pillars of stone. And I couldn’t bear the thought of it and in a voice so thin in the midst of the chaos all around, I cried:
‘Dad! No!’
Several eyes turned towards me. Dad swung many ways, trying to locate the source of the cry, and when he faced my direction he stopped. His face kept twitching and his neck muscles kept palpitating, as if he was suffering a cramp. One of the loaders said:
‘MOVE ON, MAN!’
And as the salt poured on his shoulder, tears streamed from his eyes, and there was shame on his face as he staggered right past me, almost crushing me with his mighty buckling feet. He appeared not to have seen me and he struggled on, trying to bear the load with dignity, weaving in the compensating direction of the load’s gravity. He weaved uncontrollably, women and children scattering before his advance as if he were an insane animal. Sweat poured down his back and I followed him at a distance, grieving for the cuts and wo
unds on his arms. As he was turning a corner he tripped, regained his balance, wobbled, and then slid on the mud and rubbish on the road, and fell. The salt bags dropped slowly from his head, and I thought, shutting my eyes and screaming, that they would crush him. But when I opened my eyes I saw the bags in the mud. One of them had rolled over the gutter. Dad stayed on the ground, covered in mud, not moving, as if dead, while his blood trickled from his back and mixed with the rubbish of the earth. And then the supervisor came running towards him, shouting; and a truck-pusher went past him, growling; and Dad suddenly got up, rolling and sliding on the mud, losing grip and standing again, and then he ran in two directions before shooting across the road. A lorry almost knocked him over, but he went on running, and I could see him fleeing into the labyrinth of stalls, ducking under the eaves of kiosks, till he disappeared into the confusion of the garage market, with people tearing after him because they thought he was a thief. I didn’t stay and I didn’t want a water-pump any more. I half-ran, half-walked the distance home. And I was unhappy. My wanderings had at last betrayed me, because for the first time in my life I had seen one of the secret sources of my father’s misery.
9
WHEN I GOT home I sat outside and didn’t play with any of the children. I felt very wretched and didn’t notice the daylight pass into evening. Mosquitoes and fireflies appeared. Lamps were lit inside rooms. The men of the compound talked about politics, about the Party of the Poor. They too had come with loudhailers and leaflets and had promised a lot of things and had won considerable support because they said they would never poison the people.
It was dark when Mum returned. She looked haggard and sunblackened. She shuffled into the room, dropped her tray of provisions, fell on the bed, lay there unmoving, and was instantly asleep. I warmed the food and swept the room. When she woke up, she looked better. She sat down and ate. After eating she lay on the bed and I sat on Dad’s chair, watching the door. She was silent. I told her I had seen Dad; she started to work up a temper about my having begun wandering again, but she was too tired to sustain it. She lay there, grumbling in an ancient monotone about how hard life was, and I listened intently, for I had begun to understand something of what she meant. We stayed up till very late, in complete silence, waiting for Dad to return.