The Line in the Sand -Early Chapters
PART ONE https://t.co/TcQdl4ssfehttps://t.co/TcQdl4ssfe
ONE
Dele Verity snapped her sticky eyes wide open in terror, heard Dad’s gentle snoring next door and puffed her cheeks out in relief. Phew, only another bad dream, but the really really sick news is we’re still here. Separated from her parent’s bedroom by white plasterboard, and no larger than the shoe cupboard Mum had in Zadunaria, her bedroom opened on to the front room. She sat up, in a bed so tiny Dad called it a crib, leaned away from the sloping ceiling, fetched the two-plug extension with a sleepy foot and stamped. The pilot light flickered on and the standing fan in the corner grumbled into life, lifting grey buds of dust off its rusty cage. But before Dele could settle into the breeze, the wagging tails on the balls of fluff flopped back down and the fan wheezed to a halt.
‘Electric people, God will punish you, oh,’ she heard a woman shout from the back street. A parrot re-tweeted the woman’s cry.
‘Shut up you or I’ll screw your beak off,’ said Dele with a wry chuckle. She knew that it was not yet half past five because Eddy the civil servant’s smelly bath suds had not gurgled through the shallow gutter running under her bed. A snort came from next door, then a cough and the sound of Dad’s shuffling feet, but Dele didn’t want him to come with her today. She was a big girl now.
She put on her dressing gown. Her door creaked as she prised it open. She crept across the front room, eased her new yellow bucket from under the sink and opened the front door. It opened straight on to the street and the rotting rubbish tips gave the cloying morning air a smell like bad breath. In the dim light Dele could just make out the ghostly muezzin, in his white gown, with white megaphone in hand, as he rattled open the corrugated doors to the mosque. She knew she had to hurry because the man’s calls to his faithful and Pastor Kalistus’s plaintive prayers in response would soon get many out of their beds. So, wedging her feet further into her slippers, she leapt off the sandbags Dad had laid against the floods and skipped down the street, using the bricks wedged in the mud as stepping stones. But, to her dismay, Little Mama had beaten her to the standpipe.
Little Mama was said to be fifteen but looked about nine. And she loved a sales patter. Dele turned away and waited out of range, but Little Mama would not be denied. She walked up to Dele. ‘Do you want tea, green tea, camomile, iroko, palm wine tea, or a coffee, with cow’s milk, tinned milk, do you take sugar?’ she said.
‘I don’t want a drink,’ said Dele.
‘Then can I offer you our marine selection, fried fish?’ said Little Mama, raising a fork to her mouth in pantomime.
‘Have you got shark?’ said Dele. That will shut her up.
Little Mama looked over her shoulder and at the ditch. ‘I think so,’ she said.
‘No, I mean whale,’ said Dele.
Little Mama shook her head.
‘Don’t bother. Maybe tomorrow,’ said Dele.
Little Mama looked disappointed to have let down her client. She went quiet and her face dropped. Dele felt guilty. She turned away from Little Mama and watched the bucket fill. When the water shimmered and tinkled to its brim at last, ‘it’s full,’ said Dele and gave Little Mama a gentle nudge.
‘Don’t worry I’ll have whale next time,’ said Little Mama. She rolled an old vest into a cushion for her head and, without a slop, heaved the bucket on to the pad and made her jaunty way back up the street.
What’s wrong with Little Mama? Relieved that there was no one else in sight, Dele placed her plastic bucket under the trickling tap so that the water did not drum into its base but ran down the sides. The water had barely covered the bottom of the bucket when Sandman’s unmistakable silhouette appeared outside his doorway halfway up the street. Most people called him Sandman, but only behind his back. Some said he got the name because his gowns and fez made him look like a desert dweller. Koseri, Dele’s new best friend, said it was because the way his head and neck jerked forward when he walked made him look like a chicken pecking at sand. Dele’s dad, Wale, said the name suited him because the man was always hatching or laying a plot.
With a short chewing stick hanging from his thin lips and a silver bucket in his left hand, Sandman loomed to within spitting distance of Dele. ‘Hey, yinbo girl, your time’s up. Some of us have important things to do,’ he said. Everything about Sandman, his squeaky voice, long neck, the shifty eyes placed almost on the side of his narrow long face, as if made from a mask too big for him, or as though the eyes could not stand each other, made Dele cringe.
‘My five minutes at the tap takes me to this scratch Dad made here with a blade,’ she said, tipping the bucket towards Sandman.
Sandman didn’t even bother to look. ‘Which stupid line? Shia, you and your mama think you are the only people on this planet,’ he said. He pushed Dele on the shoulder, spinning her round and she slipped on the slimy concrete surround. Sandman laughed, emptied Dele’s bucket into his and tossed hers into the bush. Dele seethed with impotent fury. But Mum would go volcanic if she lost that new bucket. So, watching out for broken glass and snakes and rats and careful not to lose her slippers, she squelched into the swamp to look for the bucket. She found it lying, dented, in a pool of stinking water in the hollow of a fallen tree trunk. As she turned for the standpipe who should she see but her dad striding down the street looking like a bare-knuckled prize-fighter? A white shirt billowed behind his bare chest and he had his fist and jaws clenched. Dele flew out of the swamp to meet him.
‘I saw that,’ said Wale, emptying Sandman’s bucket into Dele’s.
‘Do you know who I am?’ said Sandman. ‘You think you can dis me? I’ll show you that we are not on the same level in this Sankara city,’ he said, pounding his chest.
‘Go on then, tell me. Those filthy bottles of piss you peddle can cure cancer, diabetes, depression, so how come you live on this Nigeria Street with the rest of us?’ said Wale.
Sandman’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. He jabbed three fingers in the air, folding each in turn. This is how I will break your family. One by one like matchsticks. You, your kolo whore and your bastard child. One…by…one, you watch me, you will see.’ Fear clawed at Dele’s chest.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Wale, taking his daughter’s bucket in one hand and her hand in the other. ‘The man is a nonentity. He can’t hurt you. Let’s get you ready for school.’
TWO
A little boy wobbling bedewed plastic bags in his hands and crying “pure water, pure water, buy one, buy one” squeezed through the crowd. He bumped into Dele, swore and pushed off before she could react. It was Friday, a week after the row with Sandman and, to surprise and cheer up her mum, Dele had gone to collect that week’s milk supply from the cash and carry.
Rickety stalls teetering on mounds of stinking refuse lined the narrow dust track and Kubaku’s hit song “Sankara of Excellence” boomed from box speakers stacked outside a barber’s saloon. Above, a grey bird hopped this way and that on top of a pole and a couple of snagged balloons hung from lank and faded buntings, like rags on a washing line. Have I gone past the railway line? thought Dele with a little tick of disquiet in her chest, now sorry for giving Koseri the slip after Maths. And Mum would go off the Richter scale if she was late. She steadied the tray of milk tins on her head with a tentative wobble of her neck and, watching where she put her feet lest she turn her ankle in a pothole, followed the street round a right bend. Here, the crowd thinned out and ahead, a bloated ditch lazed like a sated serpent in the blazing heat. Behind it stood a weather-beaten green train carriage mounted on bricks, the smartest house Dele had seen on the street. A young woman with skin as black as a crow emerged from behind the coach carrying an armful of firewood. She had a ChinAfrican toddler in tow. The child toppled over, brayed, tears and snot running down her orange face on silver tracks laid by forerunners. Distracted by the child, Dele did not see a man swing a red bucket from the coach window until it was too late. A broad arc of fluid slapped into the ditch, hissed, reared up and spewed a smell of night soil and rotten eggs.
‘Hey,’ said Dele. Pinching her nostrils against the smell, she stamped hot slime off her feet and wedged her mascot back into place.
‘Hoy, hoy, milk seller girl, come.’
Dele blinked the searing sweat and smoke from the roadside cooking fires from her eyes, steadied the tray with a tap of the hand, put on her trading smile and turned towards the caller. A man with teeth in such disarray that his lips seemed to have grown out of their way to avoid the chop, stood in front of what looked like a storeyhigh pile of rusting steel and rubble. Round of shoulder, with long arms and small hands, his T-shirt showed the scary face of Monday Babubacka the General who, with the rest of the world distracted, invaded North Roko the year before, on 9/11.
‘How many do you want?’ said Dele, batting away a beefy fly.
‘I give you sixty,’ said the man.
Dele shook her head. A lick of salty sweat slipped between her lips.
‘Come on, my fine girl. Original or fake?’ the man said. With one giant leap he was upon her, wrapping her in his shadow and his aroma of cooling charcoal. ‘Hah, original…import. I give you hundred Roko for all,’ he said, pawing a tin.
Dele closed her eyes tight and tried to do a quick sum. A hundred Roko seemed far too much when Mum got them for thirty and sold them for between fifty and sixty Roko. But she’d be over the moon with a hundred. My mascot’s working and this man might even tell me how to get home. ‘Ok,’ she said, lifting the tray off her head and lowering it over a shallow pothole. The man’s stare down the front of her blouse made her blush.
‘The money is inside my house. You want a big man like me to carry tray in this hot sun? You think I am your boy-boy?’ said the man, puffing himself up.
The snap in his voice made Dele start back and the thick oily smell of pork roasting on the charcoal-black woman’s fire made her retch.
‘No, I remember now sir. My mama will not be happy for me to sell at that price. She crossed one hand over the other like a supplicant puppy at a dogs’ show. ‘Look at me and this my brother,’ she said, with a toss of the head at the bundle on her back. ‘At that price all my brothers and sisters will die of hungry,’ she said, slipping into the demotic that she thought might clinch a sale. ‘Hunger,’ she whispered to herself in correction as she turned side-on, to show the swaddled bundle.
The man’s shoulders dropped further. He hacked his throat and spat. ‘What spoiled you like this?’ he said, sneering at the rash on the side of Dele’s leg. Someone laughed. Dele blushed. Her dad had a rash like that too and she also had his stubby, cocktail-sausage toes. The man lobbed a tin over Dele’s head.
‘Ah no, please sir,’ she said, pushing a clump of damp hair back from her face. As she bent over to stop a tin rolling into the ditch a stabbing pain from the cluster of swollen glands in her groins forced her straight back up. The tray crashed to the ground. Two tins of milk hovered for a few seconds in a grassy dip before they rolled and squelched into the ditch. The bad-toothed man laughed.
‘Milk seller, no vex, major is not good. Thank God you are not made to suffer like that girl who passed by yesterday. All her eggs, he broken…one by one,’ said a woman in a sweat-streaked blouse. ‘Only God can save us in this Sankara,’ said another as she hurried past. As Dele stooped to retrieve her wares a fair-faced, curvaceous woman, with a large backside, the ideal Sankara woman, according to Dad, came to help. She handed Dele two battered tins. ‘How the pickin?’ she said, with a peep round Dele’s back. Dele prepared to walk away, but the ideal Sankara woman followed her. ‘Can it breathe proper in this hot sun?’ she said and thrust her hand down Dele’s back. ‘Yeah, pah, yeah pah,’ she screeched, yanking her hand back as if she had been stabbed. The woman smacked her thunder thighs and hopped around. ‘Is your head correct, you white girl? Your brother dies, and it is tins you are chasing inside gutter?’ she said, wrestling Dele for the harness. Like chicks attracted to a handful of grain, a crowd soon gathered to watch and before Dele knew it, her harness unravelled, padding dropped off and her mascot, an old Barbie doll, slipped to the ground. Someone gasped. One woman put her hands over her mouth, another over her head in shock. The crowd formed a horseshoe, backing Dele and the ideal Sankara woman up against a culvert.
‘Maybe she’s not well. Look at her hair, like Rasta,’ said one woman.
‘Hundred percent correct and look at her head, like coconut, and her nose like parrot’s nose,’ said another woman.
‘And her thin craw craw legs.’
‘Stupid woman, she is not white,’ said a man in a bright yellow T-shirt.
‘Me. You call me stupid? Ten years I studied in London.’
‘That is where they used cricket bat to knock common-sense from your head,’ said the man in the T-shirt. Dele looked round for help. ‘Please, it’s only my good luck, mascot-’
‘No it is juju,’ said a woman.
A kick to the back of her knee felled Dele. She caught an elbow on a rock and curled into a ball, tucked her head under her forearms and closed her eyes, convinced by the searing pain in her side that she had a spike in her chest. Then followed another kick, from a child’s foot, and another, from its mother perhaps. What sort of woman are you? She thought of her own mother, Jane, in her favourite colour, red, her tanned face sculpted by carefree laughter in the days before the Rokopats forced them out of North Roko and into South Roko. She thought of Wale her dad, who tried to keep them all going from a grubby backroom drug store in Sankara after he lost his pharmacy, “Veritreatable”, in the Zadunaria riots. Then another kick got through, winding her. Dust puffed up her nose. She sneezed. A clear voice rang out.
‘Stop now in the name of all that is still good in your lives in this Sankara.’
The crowd parted and fell silent. Dele peeped through a gap between her fingers as a man pushed towards her, his head haloed by the yellow sun. In one hand he had a furry black book and he had the other hand tucked into his flowing white cassock. His small head and square, but lopsided, shoulders made him look like an awry weighing scale.
‘Have we not enough Rokopat walaha without flogging our own children. Let her go,’ the man said, dragging Dele up by the elbow. ‘What’s your name?’ he said. Dele staggered on to her feet and brushed grit off her brown school skirt.
‘My name is Dele Verity,’ she said.
‘I am Pastor Ambasirika, they call me Ambasi.’ He made a jerky sign of a cross on Dele’s forehead and waved his arms at the stragglers. ‘You touch her; I will turn your guts into barbed wire.’
The curvy woman sidled over. ‘Sorry my child,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t know pastor was your friend. We just finished service in the railway church.’ Ambasi looked down at the rim of brown dust on the hem of his robe, frowned and pointed with his eyes at the tins of milk scattered about Dele’s tray. The woman picked up the tins and tucked the doll under Dele’s arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. Dele seethed and kissed her teeth. Could have got me killed.
‘Where do you live?’ said Ambasi.
‘Nigeria Street,’ said Dele, poking her left ear.
‘Not far from me. You want me to come with you…to explain?’
Dele shook her head. ‘Show me how to get back over the railway
line…I’ll be alright.’
‘Did you not know?’ said Ambasi. ‘Vandals stole that stretch two days ago to make scaffolding, woks, car parts and the devil knows what else,’ he said.
Dele had heard of Ambasi, the pastor who preached from the church pulpit but also cast juju spells. She imagined him as seven feet tall with large probing eyes, bulging muscles and a magic whisk in bone-crushing hands. The real-life Ambasi was about the height of an average fifteen year old boy. His bald head, with its large vault and pointed chin, looked like a pear. He had a strange sheen to the left side of his face and a smaller, lower, left eye, perhaps the legacy of some sort of surgery or fight. From a mole on his lower lip peeped a thin tuft of grey hair and he had a wrinkled button of a nose that looked like a dried guava. Folds of skin tumbled down his thin neck, yet his straight back, the upright head, smooth swivel on the heels of his shiny ox-blood sandals, and his clear voice hinted of the armed forces.
‘Thank you, sir…pastor,’ said Dele.
‘To me not the gratitude but to the Lord,’ said Ambasi, cracking his knuckles. He ran a finger under his bad eye. ‘You know Algeria Street…between the minaret on Namib and that useless transformer on Angola Street. That’s my area…by the way…what is it with Babubacka and these stupid street names? Come to my table-tennis academy when you need a break from life as a retail magnate.’ He laughed. ‘Dele Verity, the Traytop Mountain. Traytop Mountain, I like the sound of that.’
***
An hour or so later Dele turned, limping, into her street. Like others in central Sankara, Nigeria Street was like a “devil’s golf course,” a narrow collection of potholes and bunkers joined by strips of rubble, and lined almost exclusively by ramshackle dwellings – shacks, mud huts, with the odd tarpaulin tent and unrendered brick bungalow dropped in for good measure. Rumour had it that after some let down, personal or otherwise no one knew, an inebriated colonial governor had decreed that the streets in the working class district of Sankara were to be no wider than he could puke.
A faint aroma of fried plantains swept up on a gust of smoke. Mama Taju pointed at the ocean of oil cooling in her wok. No titbits today she signalled with a sad shake of the head. Dele dug up a smile. Mama Taju pointed down the street with her eyes. ‘Your mama is waiting,’ she said.
Oh no. Jane stood glowering from her perch on top of the sandbags. She had her hands behind her back, like Mrs EsuBiseyu at school just before she gave you six of the best from her crooked white cane. Her gait shortening with cramp and her budding excuses wilting under her mother’s piercing glare, Dele stumbled down the street towards her fate.
‘I’ve been scared out of my wits. Where are your school sandals?
Been playing football outside the barber’s again have you?’ said Jane.
‘I got lost and-’
‘Jesus and what happened to the tins? How many left?’
Dele took the tray off her head, passed a trembling forefinger over each tin like a child learning how to count. She didn’t want to tell her mum that she may have crossed into forbidden territory.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ said Jane. Idiomatic English was a sign that Mum was getting cross. ‘Answer me…you can talk can’t you?’ she said, fingering her silver chain.
Ah, a simple question that I can answer. ‘I can talk,’ said Dele.
‘And what is that?’ said Jane, pointing at the doll.
Dele pointed up the street. ‘Found it on the road…was going to hand it in,’ she said.
‘Get in, shower…all that stuff off your feet…I’ve cleaned out your new bucket. What on earth am I going to do with you, Dele?’
Mum doesn’t love me anymore thought Dele as she climbed into bed that night. Teacher had said every little will helps. So, with her hands together, a gap between the tips of her middle fingers to let the words go straight up to God, Dele prayed for Dad to get the visa to let him take his family with him back to England. Amen. She prayed for God to make Mum happy and more like Dad. Amen. She prayed to get better at Maths and for more time to draw and paint when she got to England. Amen. She prayed for her nose to stop growing and for more tint in her skin, browner and less pink so that she would look more like Dad and not stand out so much in Sankara (she felt guilty for asking for this). She prayed for Koseri and her mum Asafa and prayed for her old friends in Zadunaria, wherever they may be.
THREE
Loud pips from a car radio outside announced the hour of seven. Dele’s mouth burned from the baked beans in a hot pepper stew, the high octane fuel supposed to scramble her brain for that day’s sortie with algebra. Sucking air did not help. She looked round for a mug of water.
Jane stormed in to the front room for the fourth time in as many minutes. ‘It’s hot in there. And why is that contraption making that grating noise?’ she said, pointing at the fan by the window. Dele shuffled her chair back a little so that her shirt did not get snagged on the rough table edge. She tried to get Dad’s attention, wondering whether to ask him for some more water, but changed her mind because she might get him into trouble with Mum for the implied criticism of her cooking. Oblivious to his daughter’s fiery dilemma, Wale swept a fresh white school shirt off the back of the chair and on to a blue bedsheet he had folded over the other half of the table. He switched on the chipped electric iron, pressing it to duty.
‘I don’t care if it’s the end of the week, but you’re not going to school in that crumpled shirt,’ he said. ‘If I can just get the front and collar done,’ he said, shuffling from foot to foot like a girl desperate for the bathroom. As he turned his attention to the shirt sleeves, the pilot light on the iron died. Wale let out a long sigh.
‘It’s only quarter past seven. Thought we’d have power till half past. That’ll have to do,’ he said, putting the shirt to one side. He turned away and coughed into an elbow.
‘Power here flits in and out like a moth…’ said Jane, scratching her head.
‘That’s why electricity to Siroko people is like sunshine to the English…ah it’s bright today, a bit overcast, what’s tomorrow’s forecast, do you think we’ll have any next week…this month?’ Wale shrugged. ‘You have to laugh.’
‘Can’t Dele iron her own shirt? Thirteen, and still your little girlgirl. Rifiti over the road there already runs a shop,’ said Jane.
Why does Mum keep adding years to my age?
‘Rifiti’s sixteen, and Dele’s twelve-’
Jane tossed back her thick sandy hair. She turned to Dele. ‘Life’s not silk and perfume you know. It’s smelly; like a loo. It is a loo. And if you go on like this, you’ll spend the rest of your life shovelling and cleaning up other people’s…mess.’
‘I’m getting better,’ said Dele. To Dele, twisting numbers into new ugly forms, naming them after a tiny x and asking you to find it, was a form of torture; and should be banned, frowned on or at least optional, like blowing your nose.
‘Teachers tell you what you want to hear. But you don’t have pretty shades of opinion in maths. Two times two is what…four. It is four in Outer Mongolia. It is four as well in Monrovia. Isn’t it Wale?’ said Jane.
‘We’re getting there, aren’t we my little girl-girl,’ said Wale. He walked round the table to hug Dele round the shoulders. He left the better soap for Dele and Jane and so smelt of cheap, home-made South Roko soap, sometimes like a tomato at other times like a banana. Today he smelt like boiled snail. ‘Mum didn’t sleep that well…which reminds me, I need to see if we can move the manger from under that damp spot,’ he said. Dele fished the beans out of the stew with her fork and fought back a sniffle.
‘I wish your Home Office would make up its mind…about these visas,’ said Jane. She sat down next to Dele.
‘If only we’d applied when I said…anyway water under the bridge of Verity,’ Wale said.
Dele looked up. Did mum not want to go to England?
‘Been through this,’ said Jane, running her hand back through her hair.
‘They danced in the streets here when Babubacka took over from that thief. In the national interest he said. Shaking his fist full of cast-iron answers…in the national interest, then only cast-iron fists…in the national interest, then he dropped the pretence and simply ruled over us…in the national interest. I told you that smelly flycatcher he calls a mouth was full of a rancid pile of lies…you wouldn’t listen,’ said Wale.
Jane rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘I was making the perfectly legitimate case that because some animists burned down a farmer’s hut, didn’t mean we should up staves. North Roko was my home, you know, but trust your juggernaut of unique African perspective to sweep my mild dissent before it,’ she said.
‘This is not about me. ‘It’s about nabobs and vagabonds in power and…power without steering,’ said Wale. He dropped his head, and let his arms hang by his side.
Poor dad. A motorbike revved up outside. It sounded like an aeroplane taking off.
Jane turned the tap. At first nothing happened, then the tap growled and a few brown drops spluttered out. ‘Grit. Perhaps we should pan for gold,’ said Jane. Wale didn’t reply. ‘Didn’t mean it,’ Jane said. She put the jug down and gave Wale a hug. Wale put an arm round her back. ‘That’s better,’ she said.
‘Calo, calo,’ said Wale, waltzing round with Jane, a grin on his face. They bumped into the table, spilling some of Dele’s water.
Dele knew that ‘calo’ was short for calories or warmth, but she hadn’t heard them use the code, or heard them giggle in bed since Babubacka’s men forced them out of North Roko. Her mind leapt back a year to North Roko, to Esau their helper, to the cars, one white one blue, to the swimming pool and her green and blue-walled bedroom, to her friends at the Niroko Junior School. She wondered what happened to Amina. Amina, the high jumper, had been her best friend. Now it was Koseri, dark, giggling Koseri. At school they called them the “little tinklers,” after ebony and ivory piano keys.
The clang of the sooty kettle on the kerosene stove dragged her back to reality. Jane pointed at Wale’s wristwatch. ‘Aren’t you going to open up? Cleaners will be here soon, and we’ve got to fix that gap between the corner bricks in the shop,’ she said.
‘You mean I’ve got to fix the bricks. Told them not to come today, I’m hoping they’ll deliver what’s left of “Veritreatable.” They’ve taken all the drugs, but at least the ledgers might help me trace old clients…and the debtors. But I haven’t heard…and I smell trouble,’ he said. He rubbed a greying sideboard and leaned backward to peer through the window slats.
‘We could do without this…and your palaver with Sandman,’ said Jane.
‘I couldn’t help it. We haven’t seen him for over a week or so, wonder what he’s up to,’ said Wale, cradling his mug in his hands. He peeped out on to the street again, an anxious look on his face, then turned to see if Dele was watching. Dele looked away and in her muddle, took in too full a fork of spicy beans.
‘Stop scoffing your food, and leave your ear alone,’ said Jane.
‘You asked me to drink lots of water,’ said Dele, between gasps of breath.
‘Someone has to stand up to that pest. The man is a dick. No; he’d cut his off to spite his mistress and he’s so ugly she’d be delighted.’ Wale laughed. ‘Perhaps that’s why they deported him from UK…at Her Majesty’s pleasure. For indecent exposure.’ He spread his arms out like a performer. ‘Sandmangate…after the indecent exposure, the merciful cover-up,’ he said, putting on the portentous air of a newsreader.
Dele shuffled her feet on the floor.
‘Language,’ said Jane, but the mirth in her parrot grey eyes betrayed her.
‘Sorry,’ said Wale, with an exaggerated bow. Dele, saw with a little jolt in her chest, that her father had begun to look like a Siroko man. He had a thinning crown, a deep wrinkle shaped like a wishbone on the back of his neck and the armholes on his shirt dropped almost halfway to his elbows.
‘Mum, why does Little Mama talk like that?’
Wale sighed and looked at Jane as though to ask if he should tell.
Jane shrugged consent.
‘Her mum was in her busy coffee shop…’ said Wale. ‘A Rokopat general wanted her shop for his friend.’
Jane took up the story. ‘But Little Mama’s mum wouldn’t give it up. So the general took it by force. He shot her. They said it was an accident, that he thought his life was in danger when Little Mama’s mum ducked behind the counter,’ said Jane.
‘Poor Little Mama saw it all,’ said Wale.
‘Come here,’ said Jane. She pulled Dele in. ‘Sorry darling. I don’t mean to be cross with you. I’ll make you a pancake when you get back,’ said Jane, patting Dele on the back. I shouldn’t have made fun of Little Mama. I’d die if a soldier shot mum.
‘You’re sure you don’t want me to come with you?’ said Wale. Dele shook her head. ‘I’m meeting Koseri at the top of the street,’ she said.
‘Good, she’s more streetwise. I know you were trying to help, but you shouldn’t have gone to the depot without her,’ said Jane.
‘My little girl must have got the gene for getting lost from me. Perhaps that’s how I ended up with your mum in North Roko. Stowed away at Heathrow, but got on the wrong flight,’ said Wale, with a chuckle.
‘Charming, your dad.’
Dele swung her pink plastic satchel over her shoulders and lifted her school stool on to her head. She turned round to wave beside the peanut seller’s stall half way up the street. Jane waved from her usual spot in front of their crumbling saloon; with two hands high up in the air, like a teenager at a pop concert. Wale, behind her, taller by half a head, stood with hands on Jane’s shoulders. His fixed grin, cocked head, small ears, big round eyes made him look like a sad teddy bear.
FOUR
Three weeks dragged on and her dad still hadn’t heard about the visas. Dele gave up football and stole off after school to play tabletennis at Ambasi’s academy instead. Then Mum found out. Volcanic does not get close. They made up in the end over a sugary pancake on a Wednesday night two days later.
That same night Dele dreamed not of staghorn-headed soldiers chasing her on the beach, but about Koseri, her best friend who lived up the street. So when she heard a crash she thought it was the sound of Asafa, Koseri’s mother, collapsing to the floor in shock at catching the girls inspecting each other’s little bits in the dream. Then came an even louder crash. Thinking that it was probably Suba and Aka the “boxing match couple” from across the street at it again, Dele pulled the inviting warm counterpane with its sweet and sour morning smell and the aroma of her first pancake fart of the morning back over her head. Barely had she snuggled back down again when she heard frightened whispers and scurrying feet. Cursing the loss of those last few bonus minutes in bed, Dele crept through the door to peep out of the window in the front room. Her heart thwacked against her throat because a giant, with what looked like a good chunk of the left side of his skull missing, stood a few feet away scratching his ear with a pistol butt.
What is this?
‘What number that?’ the man said, waving his pistol at a ghostly ruin. Mr and Mrs Nalukwani and ten children live there.
‘On this street, sir, we do not have yet local government numbers, sir,’ said a woman, cowering from the man.
‘I am looking for number six, don’t hide the people who killed our man,’ said the giant.
‘They are not here sir,’ said one woman, jabbing the ring in the side of her nose. ‘We just want to draw water for-’
‘Shut up.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ said the woman.
The big man dipped into his pocket and threw something in the air, it looked like a nut. He caught it in his mouth. A man in a white gown pushed to the front and, in his eagerness, bumped into the big man’s elbow. Sandman. Dele trembled with terror.
‘Look how you make me wet my uniform, what do you want?’ the man said, glaring at Sandman.
Sandman tapped his lips with his joined fingertips, bowed and shuffled up to the man. Dele strained to hear what was said.
‘Have you forgotten me?’ said Sandman. He lowered his voice. Dele thought she heard him say something about their meeting at a netball match.
Sandman? Netball?
The big man threw another nut into the lightening sky, tipped his head back but missed this time. He swore at Sandman. ‘So where is this pharmacist man?’ he said.
Dad’s a pharmacist.
‘All of you go,’ said the man. He waved the small crowd away and straddled the ditch on Dele’s side of the street. Sandman scurried after him. The two men conferred, Sandman’s head and red fez jerking, his eyes darting about like a nervous pigeon, while the big man, stooped, his knobbly head held still and with his forefinger over one ear, looked like a teacher listening to the class snitch. The man nodded three times, then, with an air of final comprehension, he raised an arm and pointed straight at Dele’s window. Dele fell backwards as if she had been punched. At that, the door creaked behind her and Wale shuffled in, with the little drag of his left foot. He had a tatty green and white loincloth round his waist and a threadbare green towel hung lopsided from his neck.
‘What are you doing, darling, wrestling the stool before breakfast?’ he said. He turned and coughed into his elbow.
‘There’s a big…Rokopat man outside,’ Dele said, righting the stool and crawling away from the window.
Wale sucked his teeth. ‘Have they nothing better to do, but defend us from a few insolent market women?’ Dele went back to the window.
‘This him?’ said the big man, as Wale appeared outside.
Sandman nodded.
‘How can I help you?’ said Wale. He stepped off the sandbags.
‘You are pharmacist?’
‘You are sick?’ said Wale.
‘I charge you for Mulou,’ said the big man.
‘I think you’ve got the wrong man…man,’ said Wale.
Sandman whispered into the big man’s ear. The man nodded. ‘Where your woman?’ he said.
Mum. Dele dashed into the back room where, Jane, in the grip of a yawn, had her arms stretched out to the ceiling. ‘Mum, quick come, it’s Dad and Sandman outside and this giant Rokopat soldier with a funny head.’
Jane screeched. ‘Oh my God, oh…your dad and that creepy Sandman again, no…disaster…wait here.’ She tied a scarf round her hair, pulled a pair of jeans on under her nightshirt, tripped into one slipper and with the other slipper in her left hand, hopped outside. Dele scampered back to the window. Wale had his hands cuffed behind him. He turned to the window and with a blink and an almost imperceptible shake of the head warned Dele to stay out of sight. In that split second and for the first time ever Dele saw fear in her father’s eyes. He winced when he saw Jane and moved towards her but a soldier grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him away. Dele saw him stumble. Each staggering step he took away from her stabbed her chest with icicles. A green lorry trundled up. Dele saw the soldier tumble her dad over its tailgate and into the dark. He then rattled a chain through hooks and rings and marched to the front. Doors clanged shut.
Dad. Tears prickled Dele’s eyes. Through a blur she saw the big man point at Mum.
‘Handcuff her too,’ he said. ‘Either you are guilty of this offence or you are an enemy combatant. How do you people say it: heads you lose tails you lose, not so? We will take you to Alaga.’ A soldier jerked Jane by the elbow. Jane’s scarf slipped off and she dropped her slipper. Sandman laughed, pointing at Jane’s untidy morning hair. ‘Take her,’ said the big man. A soldier lifted Jane over his shoulder and threw her into the back of the same lorry.
Mum.
Sandman got in the front of the same lorry with the big man. The lorry lurched up the street. Dele charged through the door, hurdled the ditch, darted between the crumbling green jalopy and dustbin and chased after the van. ‘Mum, dad, stop, help.’ The lorry slowed down and Dele caught up. Reaching through the hot exhaust fumes, she grabbed the tail-gate by her finger-tips and pulled herself up. Just as she thought she had lift-off she felt Koseri’s long arms pull her down. She fell, hands first, into a puddle and stubbed her right toe. ‘What are you doing?’ she said, scrambling to her feet just as the left brake light blinked twice, and the lorry turned right and out of sight.
Asafa, Koseri’s mother, seemed to appear out of nowhere too.
She cuffed Dele round the ear.
‘They’ve gone,’ said Dele pointing up the street in despair.
‘Why do I have to chase you to get ready for school, eh?’ said Asafa in her singing voice. ‘Get back home now, you stupid girl,’ she said, rolling up a blouse sleeve. She leaned over to whisper to Dele. ‘What did you think you were doing? You want to die? Do you think the Alaga canton is for small girls?’ she said.
Dele shook her head. ‘It’s Mum and…Dad…taken,’ she said. She shook mud and a wriggling worm off a finger.
Asafa wiped Dele’s face with a cloth. ‘They’ll be back soon.’ She did not sound convincing. ‘How can Sandman do this? Wicked liar.’ On their way back down the street Dele saw her mother’s brown left slipper and Wale’s blue toothbrush in the mud. She picked them up. ‘Koseri look why don’t you go in, fetch Dele’s things and we’ll meet you at home,’ said Asafa, taking off her green scarf to reveal a receding hairline of fat cornrows. ‘I’ll let Mrs Oyenuga know that you won’t be coming in to school today,’ she said. Asafa set a plastic bowl of steaming vegetable soup in front of Dele and wrapped Koseri’s bowl in a towel. Dele closed her eyes, put her hands together.
Please God keep mum and dad safe.
‘This will get cold,’ said Asafa, feeling Koseri’s bowl.
‘I’ll go and get her,’ said Dele. Just then Mama Taju burst through the door, her eyes as large as chicken eggs. Rivulets of sweat burrowed through her face powder.
‘This woman why do you always have to shout?’ said Asafa, cupping hands over her ears.
Mama Taju slapped her thighs, the Siroko woman’s distress signal. ‘Curse me if you like but you cannot go back…to…your house,’ she said, pointing at Dele. ‘Sharijujumen, the original juju people are coming. Anywhere they smell smoke they add more fire. Even Rokopats fear them.’
‘Oh my God in heaven. Where is Koseri?’ said Asafa. ‘Wait here,’ she said and dashed, barefooted, out of the kitchen just as Jonas, Mama Taju’s barrel-chested husband, burst in wearing his trademark striped black and white T-shirt and trainers.
‘Sharijujumen are looking for foreigners. They are blaming them for Mulou’s death. Put this on, quick, inside there,’ he said in a trembling voice. He handed Dele a dark blue bicycle helmet and a change of clothes, a white long-sleeved shirt and a charcoal skirt.
‘What about Koseri?’ said Dele.
‘They’ll look after themselves,’ said Jonas, his face freckled with sweat. ‘Quick, no time for debate,’ he said and slipped out of the room. In a daze, Dele had to tie a knot in the waist of the skirt to make it fit.
Jonas was waiting. He lifted her on to the backseat and weaved his gruff-sounding bike through the late morning traffic. Dele clung on to the passenger’s bar, her head in a whirl. The outsized helmet seeming to spin through the air. Fear, despair, anxiety buzzed through her mind. They arrived outside a blue and white striped twostorey building. It had blue United Nations curtains hanging half way down its windows. Jonas lifted Dele off the bike, went inside and Dele squeezed the wet out of her helmet. She hung it on a handlebar to dry.
Jonas soon came back with a worried look on his face. ‘The madam of the house is not in, let’s eat,’ he said, pointing over the street at a general store. ‘Remember, straight down on to the ground when the woman comes back. It will show her that you are not proud,’ he said taking a big chunk out of a meat pie. ‘Eat now, you don’t know when your next meal will be born.’
At four o’clock a woman in a violet bandana arrived in a dark green jeep. With her came a girl in a pink dress. Dele threw herself on the rocky ground in front of them, her feet hanging over the edge of the gutter. The woman waved the little girl back behind her as if Dele carried some deadly bug. ‘Did I not tell you that we were full?’ she said to Jonas in a rasping tone of reproach. A corner of her mouth curled up and her eyes narrowed. She pulled Dele up by the collar and led her inside the house to plonk her on a three-legged chair at a dining table; but not before she whipped away a bowl of fruit. Dele brushed the dust off her hands and knees and tried not to fall off the wobbly chair. The girl in pink walked in soon after. Dele thought the girl was seven, maybe eight, years old, but she had a cruel face and a turned down mouth. Her eyes reminded Dele of the pointed end of a biro. The girl took her left thumb out of her mouth. ‘Why are you sitting on our chair when you have pineapple skin,’ she said, with a leer. She pointed at Dele’s knees. Dele gulped. Her rash started to itch. A heaviness came over her: her arms felt like soaked timber and her hair like seaweed. She clenched her jaw and tried not to cry or scratch, rubbing her legs with the ball of her hand so that they did not bleed. The girl scoffed and, with her nose in the air, put her thumb back in her mouth and left.
Dele heard angry voices through the wall. She heard the word money come up several times. ‘Last time I did not hear from you for…well, till after that child died,’ said the woman.
‘But Ajoks, Teri helped get you this job.’ Ajoks. She has a nickname like normal humans.
‘She doesn’t feed me,’ said the woman as she walked into the dining room, followed by Jonas.
Jonas rapped his thigh with his bunch of keys. ‘Let’s go, this woman is a…a…is not a woman, thanks for your help. It is greatly appreciated.’ The wiry bandana woman fanned her face, with the air of a woman who couldn’t care less.
Even if she takes me she will only make me miserable.
Dele didn’t like to see Jonas beg. ‘I know somewhere else,’ she said, thinking of Ambasi, the pastor at whose tables she played tennis.
‘I told you, these small girls know more than you think,’ said Ajoks.
Jonas smacked his keys against his thigh again. ‘More walaha in our area. We can’t go back,’ he said, his voice striking several sorrowful notes. They got on to the bike. Back on the main road women and children jostled for space on long queues for fuel. They brought rusting jerry cans, bright plastic bowls, buckets; Dele saw that one woman had brought a teapot. Jonas flicked sweat off his face and glanced down at his fuel gauge. ‘We may have to walk part of the way home, if we are to get you somewhere safe. And it will soon get dark. That woman wasted our time.’ Dele wondered why Mama Taju and Jonas could not put her up for the night, but Jonas seemed to have read her mind. He shook the sweat off his forehead. ‘They are watching. Spies can tell; and you are obvious…’
‘I could go to the pastor, my friend, near Morocco Street,’ said Dele, taking one sticky hand off the bar to wipe it on her skirt.
‘Back, past Barracks junction? No way.’ Jonas shook his head and put one foot down to steady the bike. The traffic inched forward. Jonas lifted his foot and pushed off again, from crawl to walking pace. Sensing Jonas about to change up, Dele leapt off the pillion and darted between a lorry and a white van.
‘Hey, hey, come back,’ said Jonas, grabbing Dele by the collar, but she tore free, vaulted over a yellow jalopy and did not stop running until she got to Ambasi’s street.
Hungry and breathless, she arrived at Algeria Street in dusty orange twilight, but the sight of the leaning lamp post in front of Ambasi’s wrought iron gate gave her a second wind; and hope. She staggered down the slight incline to cup her ear to the door and knock, but heard only a hollow echo from the wooden letter box. Needle, a tall thin man with bulbous eyes, hurried past. Needle played at Ambasi’s tennis tables.
‘Hey Needle…seen the pastor?’ said Dele. Needle quickened his step, waved but did not stop. Perhaps pastor’s gone to the railway carriage service. In the distance the last sliver of sunshine sunk behind a mountain of refuse and as the dark rushed in, as though starved of light for days, the first candle flames appeared in the windows. Dele sat down on the pile of bricks outside Ambasi’s house to wait but everyone seemed to stop to stare so, pulling her shirt tight against the cold, she crossed the street to poke her head through the door of a beer parlour.
Inside, two men sharing a dwarf bottle of beer sat under a bunting of African national flags. A reggae tune chugged out of the radio.
‘You blind?’ snapped a woman in a yellow scarf. She steadied the foot-high stack of drinking glasses in her hand with a turn of the wrist and swerved round Dele.
‘Sorry ma,’ said Dele. ‘I’m looking for my pastor, Ambasi. I play table tennis with his…’ She turned to point through the raffia curtains.
‘He’s not here. Why your shirt is torn?’ said the barwoman, waltzing off before Dele could reply.
‘Sharijujumen took pastor,’ said the older man.
‘The man sometimes talks sense,’ said the younger drinker.
‘If he has sense why did he not tell them what they want to hear?’ said the barwoman, prodding light out of a fluorescent bulb on the ceiling with a bamboo pole. Then she turned to Dele. ‘What are you still doing here? Vamoose.’
FIVE
Dele crashed into a bench and sat down to rub the kidney-shaped bump on her shin. Where’s Mum? Where’s Dad? A street light blinked and died. The moon dived behind a cloud and the ensuing darkness came with a fear Dele had never known before; worse than when she was match point down at table tennis, or when she waited outside OY’s office to be whacked for a prank, or when Mum went volcanic, or even when the soldiers came to their house in Zadunaria. Tonight, fear oozed from her skin dripped from her wet, seaweed-thick, hair. And it smelled of sour milk and rotten banana, beaded on her fingertips and made them shake and her lips trilled like insects’ wings. Please God help…bring back Mum and Dad she prayed. A mist seemed to wrap round her to pump cold, yellow air down her throat. Scooped out spent, cold, hungry, she wanted to lay her head down there, close her eyes for ever and float away. But Mr Odutta, the school chaplain had said during assembly that that would be a sin.
Out from behind the massive cloud came the moon with its sorry shine. Street children scurried past Dele’s bench. She had heard of them, the scafos, short for scavengers, who searched refuse mountains for scraps to sell, or eat. A little girl, perhaps five or six years old came past, dragging a car grille along the ground, the clanging sounded like a chainsaw grinding at metal inside Dele’s head. A few yards behind the girl came a boy, wobbling under the car door he carried on his head. He stopped, stared at Dele for a few moments before he spoke.
‘What you doing here?’ he said in a voice that sounded like bursting blister packs. Fear booted Dele’s heart against her chest. But she pushed off the bench on woolly legs to stand toe to toe with the boy and put on the best scowl she could muster, practised for weeks in her bedroom mirror.
‘Waiting for my papa,’ said Dele, pointing over her shoulder.
‘You want to do?’ said the boy. He looked down at his crotch.
‘He is drinking, if he come out he will kill you,’ said Dele, trying hard to suppress the urge to brush the boy’s odour, a smell like that of a blocked drain, away. While they exchanged silent fire in the dark another girl came past dragging a computer on a sheet or blanket. The blanket gave way and the computer toppled over.
‘Fucking hell,’ said the girl. Her sharp screech made Dele jump. The boy chuckled, a look of triumph in his eyes, steadied his cargo with a deft turn of his neck and walked away.
Must find somewhere for the night. Dele sidled over to warm herself near the cooling embers of a cooking fire. A few minutes later a girl emerged from a shack to douse the flames with a bucket of water and shovel up the charcoal. ‘For tomorrow,’ she said.
Hungry, Dele swayed down the street to look for a shed, a kiosk, bus-stop, anywhere for shelter. She found none. Despair clawed her throat. She turned round and dragged her leaden legs back up the street. The hum from the main road grew louder as she drew level with the beer parlour once again. Then she saw, in the glow from a kerosene lamp, a man sitting on the pile of bricks outside Ambasi’s house. When the man stirred his bowl and raised his fork to his mouth an aroma of fried plantains of such intolerable promise it almost felled her, swept over Dele; and if eyes could chew she would have had her fill from fifty paces. With her belly screaming attack but her head whispering caution, Dele bustled towards her target, bending over as if to retrieve or search for a coin, or stopping to wipe an imaginary raindrop off the back of her hand, whenever the man appeared to look her way. She had got to within a few strides of her target when the man shovelled more food into his mouth, put his bowl down beside him and lifted a flask to his mouth. He closed his eyes and turned away, towards the main road. Dele dropped all pretence. As she ran up the man’s greedy glugs and chomps got louder, sucking her on. He still had his face turned when Dele pounced, swept the bowl off the bricks, stuffing the salty plantains into her mouth as she ran away. Tule, tule,’ shouted the man. Fuelled by mortal fear, Dele threw the bowl over her shoulder hoping to slow her pursuer, but soon felt the man’s spicy breath on her neck. She ducked, doubled back on herself, but twisted an ankle on a hard mud rut and fell.
‘You are die, you hear me? Dead,’ said the man, dragging her to her feet.
When Dele saw his Rokopat uniform she wished she could fly.
‘Sorry sir…I thought it was pastor…Ambasi…uncle Ambasi,’ she said, gasping for air and gasping in fear.
The soldier kicked her. Winded, Dele tried to roll away.
‘Please don’t. He calls me little sparrow…we have a game, hop…step and run for your chop-chop. Please, how can I do such a thing if I knew it was you? Pastor will pay you back,’ she said, squeaking with pain between breaths.
‘You think I fool,’ said the soldier. He shook his fist in Dele’s face and stamped on Dele’s left foot again. ‘Let me see you run now,’ he said. What you civilians need is iron discipline. Sit up.’ He barked into a walkie-talkie and forced Dele to sit cross-legged on the ground beside the foul-smelling ditch. She wretched, wracked with pain. Across the road the barwoman rattled down her shutters and shook her head; the fearful pity in her eyes obvious even in the dark. A van arrived. Two men jumped out and chained Dele’s hands to her ankles behind her back. ‘Take her away,’ said the soldier. A man with a flatbridged nose hauled Dele over the van’s tail-gate.
That’s a hard knobbly mattress. She heard a man shout. ‘Ouch, ah, ah, my leg, my arm, oh,’ said the man.
‘Sorry, they threw me on top of you-’
‘Shut up in there, now, now,’ said a soldier, flashing his torch around the hold. He swung in over the tailgate. ‘Ah chicken,’ he said. He marched to the front of the hold, broke a few fowl off, as you would with a bunch of bananas, and threw the chickens out of the lorry. Clapping the dirt off his hands, he stomped over to padlock Dele’s wrists to a floor joist, grunted, as though with satisfaction at his night’s work, and leapt back out over the tailgate. Soon, Dele heard the rattling and clanging of the covers against the side of the lorry but the tarpaulin did not reach all the way down, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she picked out a huddled form in the opposite corner.
‘Sorry, did I hurt you?’ she said.
The man groaned. ‘Rokopat men drove a jeep over my arm, to stop me writing, punishment for anyone who speaks English or looks like he will not swallow their pile of bullshit,’ he said. ‘Ah,’ he groaned again and doubled up in obvious pain. A dark fluid ran down his face, seeping into his pale shorts and a soiled bandage hung round his otherwise bare chest.
‘Why?’ said Dele. A stupid question, but she had to ask.
The chains on his ankles and wrists clanged against the floor. ‘I wrote article for fun. Saying that this our land of quarrelling telegraph lines, garbage tips as high as giraffe and farting gutters is like a form of tourist attraction for more developed countries. Because it is what they were like hundreds of years ago, difference is…now we have better ammunition to kill each other than they had then. Rokopats came to my workshop and charged me with misrepresentation of government efforts. That I am not transparent? How, I asked. I said I am too poor to have anything to hide. They said I could not be poor because I write in English and so must be one of those who are cheating illiterate market women.’
‘Where do you work and do you-’
‘I’m a tailor, but I am training as a journalist. I promised my mama a new dress for a wedding. If I don’t turn up she’ll know something is wrong.’ Saro closed his eyes and sighed. ‘What about you?’ he said.
Dele told Saro about her day. ‘I feel as if I’ve been beaten all over with barbed wire and I don’t know where Mum and Dad are,’ said Dele.
‘This place, na wah oh,’ wheezed Saro, coughing with the effort.
Dele recalled how her dad used to dance with her to that Kubaku hit song, Na wah oh, about life in South Roko. She knew the lyrics but didn’t know what they meant. My beautiful people, meek and mild, when we run and jump the wind cannot resist us…we smile, we smile, in rain or shine while he and his and anyone who knows him rob us so blind they are richer than Croesus.
‘They burned Kubaku’s house down,’ said Saro, groaning as the lorry lurched sideways. ‘Roko. I call it a rock joined by giant zeroes…I am so…tired.’
***
Dele gritted her teeth against the pain in her back and neck and tried to keep out the stench of human and fowl excrement by pressing her nose into the gap between the side and back of the lorry for fresh air. After hours, during which she thought she had lost the use of her hands and feet and the back of her neck felt as if it had been turned on a hot spit, the lorry pulled out of another wristwrenching descent and rocked to a halt. Through a gap in the roof she could just make out the claret streaks of dawn in the sky. A few feet away Saro lay still, oblivious it seemed to the loud jocose banter, or the clang of pots and pans outside. The tarpaulin covers rolled back and a soldier vaulted in over the tail-gate.
‘You deaf in there?’ He poked Saro with a finger.
‘He’s asleep,’ said Dele.
‘Who asked you?’ the man said, his black beret cocked to the right in the Rokopat fashion. Saro’s frown had relaxed into what looked like a permanent and restful sigh. ‘He is dead,’ he said for the benefit of his colleagues. ‘What do we do with his handcuffs?’ he said.
‘You signed for them?’ said the man on the ground.
‘Yes, if we don’t return them…we could say they lost…when he ran away-’
‘You are more stupid than a saucepan. Have you ever heard of government prisoner escape, in the history of Sankara central prison? Where did you train? Sandhurst or West Point or Guantanamo? There are different category of death in custody…accidental suicide, deliberate suicide, fall out of bed, swallow of singlet or toilet roll or fishbone by mistake, drink too much water from swimming pool or head-butt the officer’s gun or bullets, but to escape?’
Dele heard a stamp to attention and another, superior, voice.
‘Where is this person?’
‘Here,’ said the soldier from inside the van.
‘Hah, they travel first class now? This is why this country is going down the pants,’ said the superior, banging on the tail-gate.
‘He lasted longer than my guestimation,’ said the soldier, throwing the remaining fowls out of the lorry, and, flapping his arms like wings, he leapt after the cackling birds. As the feathers floated to the floor Dele looked through a chink between tailgate and the side of the lorry and saw the driver wipe his shaven head and salute.
‘What of the girl?’ he said.
That’s me.
‘What type question is that? Is gear engaged inside that half toolbox you call a head?’ said the superior. Dele could not see him.
The man laughed, hacked up phlegm. ‘You know what they call me?’ What’s he going to do?
‘“ESBT, eliminate surplus before terminus”, sir,’ said the driver.
‘OK. Do it one time…no mess.’
The driver climbed over the tailgate with a gun between his teeth. ‘Please, I said I am sorry, it was only because I was hungry,’ she said. The man shook his head. Will it hurt? A gun went off. Hot spikes clapped into Dele’s ears. Then a firecracker went off in her arm sockets and the lorry spun into the dark.
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