24Jan

Musa the Blind Lovemaker of Lagos Bar Beach

Musa The Blind Lovemaker

By Sola Odemuyiwa

Tammy Wynette came on the radio.

‘Rashidi, how many times I go tell you. It is “star” not “stand” by your man,’ said Musa.

Rashidi shook his head. ‘Ah, ah, oga I know Tammy hin voice well well,’ he said in a respectful tone.

‘Check when you get home then,’ said Musa, blinking the stinging sweat from his eyes. He much preferred Billie Holliday. If life was not fun poke slinky fun at it.

The traffic stopped again. Rashidi sighed and switched the engine off. ‘Oga open window oh,’ he said, as he jerked up the handbrake. Horns blared, trumpeting the anger of their drivers. Over the road, and lit up by flashing neon colours, a ring of motorcyclists exchanged fists and hard-baked points of view, as if a melee or cacophony would clear the road. Rashidi rolled his eyes at Musa in the rear-view mirror. ‘Lagos, centre of excellence,’ he said, in a tone of doleful irony.

The sun had long set and varicose Lagos gasped in its own fusty breath, an ugly bubble, its stenotic roads clogged by the same sweaty, sooty, willing people that it had to turn round before daybreak. In Lagos they say you must circulate or you quench, yet nothing moved, except the throng swelling, like oedema, out of shops, bars and offices. Sweat glued Musa’s collar to his neck, seeped off his bare scalp. He sat forward then leaned back, scratched his neck, pulled the shirt away from his sobbing armpits and let the windows down just enough to keep out prying hands. He found a stiff envelope in the dark with which to fan his face and pumping his right heel, he strained his eyes through the dark glasses for a glimpse of those raffia booths on the beach. Then, in that same moonlit darkness, and like an economic miracle, the ugly bubble burst into a tickle of fresh air and the driver hunched over the steering wheel, gunned the engine and shot the car forward, his feet flitting from pedal to pedal in defence of his line against a predatory bus. Ten seconds later the bus in front stopped. Rashidi cursed and yanked up the handbrake. Musa had had enough. ‘I have to dey go. If you find place to park, behind that broken bus…wait for me,’ he said, feeling for the dollar notes in his trouser pocket. So horny was he that he could fuck a pear. As he opened the car door a blast of humid heat knocked his head back. Clambering over the boulders behind his misty lenses, and without as much as a pause to dust himself down, he hurried to the dip in the beach where a dozen women sat roasting plantains. Behind them the raffia booths that housed his anticipated pleasure, creaked in the wind.

One woman in what looked like a red top saw him first. She made a loud smacking noise with her lips and called out. Marcus. The man behind her muttered into her ear and they disappeared downhill and behind the booths. Musa swooned with envy, the dizzying pounding in his chest reaching from ear to ear. On call at work, he didn’t have much time. Ignoring the other calls, the grasping hands, the sibilant hisses, clicks and clucks of invitation, he strode round the back of the group to their leader Cordelia. Rumour had it that she owned a three-storey apartment block. If true she should be running the country, or at least the Central Bank, with the image of a retired vagina on the thousand naira note.

‘What have you got for me tonight?’ he said, leaning to whisper in her ear.

‘What you pay for,’ she said in her nicotined rasp. Cordelia had a brazier all to herself and kept the smoke from her face with casual waves of a piece of cardboard. In dark glasses and a yellow, off the left shoulder crop top, like the others she was wearing a wig the size of a portable TV.

Musa put on his Zimbabwe accent. ‘Cordelia, no be like this…I don’t want that hard plank you gave me last time.’

‘Half price you say. It is what you pay for. Small money, small mattress,’ she said. ‘How much you get today?’

This was not on my budget. Musa wafted the crisp ten dollar bill under her nose. She whipped off her glasses and her eyes shot out. ‘Sorry, Marcus. I no see you well. ‘Ten dollars?’ she said.

The power of that genie in the wallet made Musa’s head swim. While Cordelia made a phone call he wriggled his toes and stole anxious glances at the fluorescent watch hidden under his shirt sleeve.

‘Ten dollars?’ she said, slipping the phone down her blouse at last.

‘You no take nine?’ said Musa. He had counted on putting some aside towards Commissioner’s final fee. How for do.

‘Inflation don come,’ she said. ‘But I show you the place to meet…your hostess tonight. You go trek small, but no tell anybody oh, this na for special customer,’ she said.

As if I would rush straight home to compare notes with Yemi. ‘How much do you sell these plantains for in case they ask me. He don burnt, sef,’ he said, in what Musa thought was a good affectation of a Zimbabwean yokel pretending to be Lagos streetwise.

Cordelia dragged on her cigarette. ‘If you tell them na the girls go suffer. They no fit do me nothing.’

‘Which people?’

‘Don’t worry. Go left first, then go small, they are on bench, take the one you like. When you finish…I will give you free boli, or you want me to wrap it for you now?’

Musa set off. He did not much care for Cordelia’s goodie bag. Who did she think he was? Some indigent immigrant?

He found three hostesses sitting on a bench, with the sea fizzling to its death on the sand a few feet below them. Musa tapped the middle hostess on the shoulder because she had the smallest wig and by his reckoning perhaps the least to hide, or because she had the best posture, or because of the artless way she held the cigarette and turned away from the smoke when the wind got up. She handed her cigarette butt to the hostess on her right and led Musa back up hill, the imagined sway of her hips under her shapeless gown, the pants of busy punters he heard through the raffia walls ahead pumping Musa close to bursting point. Inside, he snatched the snagged plastic blind out of her clumsy fingers and yanked it over the bamboo rail. ‘Your name?’ he said, with an impatient growl, his buckle tinkling as he yanked off his belt.

‘Cordelia,’ she said. For a moment he thought she sounded like a neighbour or someone he had heard on the radio. Yet another Cordelia. Ophelia, Cleopatra etcetera, all rhyme with liar or Shakespeare. Business took place under the stars, on a foam mattress mounted on crates, she in her busby wig lapping at one eyebrow and he in his socks and shoes with his dark glasses still strapped on. Sensation numbed inside the sheath she gave him, Musa had just begun the count – he always counted his strokes to get his dollars’ worth – when she jack-knifed and threw him off.

‘What is your problem. You sick?’

‘Go, go. Didn’t you hear?’ she said, in a frightened voice.

Musa was deaf in the left ear, the result of corrective slaps from that woman for scolding her princess when she tore his favourite story book. ‘Hear what? I never finish…not even start,’ he said.

‘Them. Go before you cause me trouble,’ she said, the white of her eyes shining like polished marble.

‘You think I am some johnny just drop tourist? Give me my money,’ said Musa, hauling his trousers up. He grabbed her by the wrist to march her to Cordelia the Elder for a refund.

‘Please sir. Don’t take me there. If they catch me here…big trouble if they arrest me,’ she said in a whisper.

‘Who?’ Musa said, wincing at the pent up lava in his scrotal sac.

Cordelia jerked her wrist from Musa’s grip, pushed her wig back and pointed up the hill. ‘It is them. Their jeep is there,’ she said, with a start back. In the distance, beyond the boundary boulders, the tips of police beacons whisked the misty air blue.

Luck magnet. What is wrong with everybody today? ‘Who are the them?’ said Musa.

‘Did she not say? Roadsweepers.’

‘Ah, them.’ Musa had heard of the Commissioner Sheki’s special task force set up by the Governor to clear vagrants off the streets of Lagos. That man again.

‘What is the problem. Cordelia says you are open to business as long as don’t talk to them,’ he said. Two men in uniform waddled downhill, handcuffs jangling from their belts.

‘Oh, oh. Do you think they have seen me? Who told them? They must not take me there,’ she said, her words shivering from her mouth.

Musa turned to her. ‘Since when…when did you start here?’ he said, piqued again by her fragile air,clear voice, by the smooth sheen of her shoulders, and by the impression her firm breasts had made on his chest. Then, before she could answer and he didn’t know why, but that was the way he was made, the man who called himself the luck magnet flicked off her wig.

Sarowami.

Musa the Blind Lovemaker of Lagos Bar Beach

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