Dangerous Love (26 page)

Omovo, taken aback by his sudden return, replied: ‘Which one you dey? It's Monday. I want to be clean.'

‘Do you need to take so long? Or have you got a woman there with you?'

‘No-o!'

‘Eh-heh, then baf quick!'

‘But the next bathroom is free.'

‘Is it? Why didn't you say so?'

Omovo finished his shower in a hurry. The assistant deputy bachelor went into the adjacent compartment and, amidst complaints about women and business, had a shower while singing in his voice of a stentorian frog.

When he left home for the office he saw the morning as all mist. He should have hurried to work, for it was always difficult catching a bus at that time of day. But he stopped at his compound front and, breathing in deeply the smell of earth and dew, stared at the crowds of ghetto-dwellers hurrying to their different jobs. The morning was all mist and in the mist people hurried, like shades in an earthly purgatory, to the bus-stop. With heads bent forward, as if they were carrying invisible burdens, they all trudged in the same direction. There was no one in opposite motion. In the mist he could not see their individualities, could not distinguish their clothes, could not see their faces, or the kinds of shoes they wore. They seemed, curiously, like sleepwalkers.

As he joined them, as he entered the mist, the people ceased to be blurred; the shadows materialised and became real. The abstract crowd broke down into its composite of individuals. He breathed their breath. He smelt the breakfasts that still lingered on them. He saw many different faces. He saw them old and mask-like. He saw them wrinkled and sober, lean and battered, old faces with lines made deeper by the morning. He saw them young with faces bewildered, frantic, unadjusted to the new day. When he saw people he recognised greetings were brightly exchanged.

As he went with the crowd to the bus-stop he experienced a sudden lucidity. He too had become part of the mist, part of the ‘exodus', as Okoro often called the passage from ghetto to office. He felt – given the masses of people struggling for few buses, the crush, the hassle – that the passage was another kind of traffic jam, a jam from which there was no escape. Where are we going? he thought. And after all this, after the exhaustion of arriving, what then? He thought about the wrinkle on his forehead: a one-way traffic, a line drawn by a child. He hurried to the bus-stop.

At the bus-stop the frenzy, the chaos, the crush, was as intense as ever. The bus-stop was really a clearing at the roadside, an arena in which every morning masses of hardworking folk fought out a continuity of unjustly balanced struggles. The danfo buses were so few in relation to the demand that whenever one of them swerved into the bus-stop human heads surged to it with a relentless ferocity. People rushed, elbowed one another, necks were squeezed, shirts dragged back, people were shoved, pulled under, or trampled upon. People did anything to get on the buses. It was a pitiful sight, and it was impossible to catch a bus without sacrifice, without pain: a grazed wrist, a broken arm, a torn shirt, a scratched eye, or even roughly massaged breasts. But the sacrifice was worth it if the bus was caught, for there were always the victims, those who struggled passionately, who were wounded, had their clothes destroyed, and who never succeeded in embarking. Omovo always marvelled at people's responses to the first part of a working day. Some seemed curiously to relish the confusion, the rush, the required nimbleness. Some smiled foolishly as they were shoved, others fought back with implacable bitterness, lashing in all directions as if the rest of the crowd were their antagonists, as if getting on the bus was not their real goal. And there were moments of sinister entertainment when fights broke out or when two people, abandoning their attempts at getting to work early, began abusing one another with insults ranging from insinuations of impotence to oblique statements concerning the other person's grandfather's rectum. Omovo had always thought of the bus-stop in the mornings as the perfect symbol of the society, and through that, of life in general. He had always been afraid to tackle it as a subject for a painting.

When he arrived it seemed at first that he was fortunate to have a bus swerve near him. But the driver, relishing the whole drama and his unique place in it, swerved with too much flourish and barely missed knocking over a good section of the crowd. The bus conductor, a boy no more than twelve, bellowed the destinations of the vehicle and leapt from the doorway where he had been clinging. Omovo had calculated where the bus would stop. Then he waited, poised, for the driver's dependable sudden reverse. And then he ducked past a swarm of people, made for the front seat, jerked open the door, and leapt in with a single fluid motion. But then he found he had to wrestle for the only seat with a formidable woman. Using the combination of her massive frame and her huge breasts she attempted to squeeze Omovo against the door, to crowd him out of the competition. But Omovo ducked under her arm and managed to gain the seat. She kept pulling at his shirt, and when this ploy failed, as he was already safely seated, she spat at him. The driver said:

‘Ha, madam, he is your son's age. You no get shame?'

Omovo wiped his face. The woman glared at him.

‘God go punish you,' she said.

The bus moved suddenly.

‘You are a bad loser,' Omovo shouted at her. She made an abusive sign. The bus conductor laughed mischievously at all those who were left behind. The crowd swallowed the woman. The bus was in full motion down the road when Omovo realised, to his dismay, that his new white shirt had been dirtied and that two of his buttons were missing.

‘That's life,' the driver said, smiling.

After crossing the wooden bridge over the murky creek at Waterside, he had to get off and catch another bus to Apapa. He had now entered the stage of the journey to work which one of his friends had dubbed ‘the great trek'. It was the passage through the residential district of Apapa. This was the district of the rich, of expatriates, with their well-built houses, porches, swings, flower gardens and swimming pools. The houses lay silent behind hedges and freshly cut lawns. Creepers covered the doors. Tall whistling pine trees scented the air. Birds called. Every house had a shed with a guard. Dogs barked. It was like journeying into another country.

Omovo tramped on with the crowd along the dusty road. An empty danfo bus hurtled towards them, the conductor hollering its destination. The bus turned and parked. People poured at it, Omovo amongst them. He struggled, was shoved and squashed. He wasn't successful. The bus drove away with people clinging to the doorway, others hanging on at the back. Smoke and dust clouded its departure. People who had failed to embark grumbled and cursed the driver.

Omovo pushed on, battered, breathing heavily from the exertion. When he looked up he saw his friend Okoro, leaning against an Indian almond tree. His friend smiled.

‘I watched you nearly get yourself killed,' he said.

‘I'm late.'

‘I don't bother to rush any more. It's suckers that rush.'

‘Suckers, eh?'

‘Yeah.'

For someone who wasn't rushing, Okoro looked in a bad way. He looked exhausted, as if he had already lived the whole day in advance. His hair was dusty, his shirt rough, his jacket a little dirty, and his matching trousers unpressed, with creases like lines on a map.

‘You look as if you slept in the street.'

‘I had a great weekend.'

‘It shows.'

The crowd surged past. When a bus came along it broke into a kind of hysteria. The sun was out and the mists had gone. Omovo often thought of the crowd as an organism, a single body with many arms and legs. But now he felt certain the crowd was nothing more than separate cells, individual, each dedicated to its own function.

‘How was the party?'

‘Fantastic. Excellent. Plenty of women, wine and food. The Yorubas know how to spend money.'

The sun grew brighter, its rays filtering through the branches of the whistling pines. Okoro shaded his eyes. Omovo wiped the sweat off his face with a handkerchief.

‘Did you take July with you?'

‘Where?'

‘To the party.'

‘No. She's too precious for that. I treat my women with style. I got my head screwed in the right direction, man. What do you take me for?'

‘An American.'

‘What?'

‘You've got a lot of Americanisms in your mouth these days.'

‘I've been reading Hadley Chase.'

‘I know.'

‘Just read a novel of his called
Eve.
Picked up a lot of phrases and tricks, you know.'

‘I bet!'

‘But don't bet your right arm to a bad penny.'

‘Anyway did you know Hadley Chase is an Englishman, not an American?'

‘Pull another one.'

‘Really.'

‘He writes like an American so that's fine by me.'

‘Good.'

‘Sure.'

‘So how is July?'

‘Great. Beyond belief. Food to a starving man. Did I tell you we went to the Surulere night club together?'

‘No.'

‘She paid our taxi fares, paid for the tickets, and even bought the drinks. Too much, she is. Special. A grand chick. We danced and did things. She didn't mind.'

‘Lucky bastard.'

‘I haven't finished. So, we were at our table when a tall guy came over. He wore dark glasses and looked like a guy with bread. He grinned at us. I grinned back. Then I look sideways and see her smiling at him too. So I say to myself: “Hey, is this a showdown?” The tall guy says, “Hello baby, long time no see. What a place to meet again. Ain't you gonna say hello?” He had this cheap fake American accent and I notice his teeth is kinda too big for his mouth. My woman says to him: “Hello, Amama. I don't think I'm happy to meet you again. I am with my lover so please take your big teeth away from here.” The tall guy takes off his glasses, puts them on again, looks at her, then at me, and then like a goofy fool he goes away. You know what we did?' Okoro said, turning to grab a surprised Omovo, ‘We burst out laughing and didn't stop until the tears rushed out of our eyes.'

Omovo smiled and, propelling his friend forward, said: ‘It's a great story. But let's hurry or we'll never get to work today.'

‘You're jealous.'

‘Because I didn't laugh?'

‘You don't have a woman, that's why.'

‘You're right.'

They pushed on.

‘Have you seen Keme?'

‘He came to my place. Said he wants to leave town.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Yeah.'

‘What about the dead girl? He hasn't given up has he? It's not his style.'

‘He hasn't. But the body vanished. The police said they couldn't find it.'

Okoro laughed nervously. Then he was silent. Then he swore and said: ‘During the war dead bodies didn't vanish. They simply decayed or were eaten by dogs.' He paused. ‘You know, I remember seeing a man's leg under a tree. A burnt leg. No toes. Maggots were crawling out of it.'

He was silent again, then he said in a strange voice: ‘Some of us were lucky. Bloody lucky. Young and lucky.'

‘Take it easy.'

‘Sure I'm taking it easy. I forget, that's all. You learn the trick of forgetting. You just dance when you can, get a woman, go to work, and forget.'

‘Let's change the subject.'

‘Sure. Let's change the world, why just the subject?'

‘Let's change it.'

‘Change it into wine.'

‘Let's forget it.'

‘Why?'

‘Let's.'

‘You know, Dele said he is frightened. What of? His father is rich. He's going off to America. He's gone and got a good woman pregnant. And he's afraid. And me? I wake up on some nights and the war is still going on. Bombs falling. A man, shot through the chest, is calling my name. I look. He's my father. Mines go off. Bullets sounding everywhere. Journalists hiding in shattered doorways. My gun's wet with someone's blood and I'm shooting in all directions like a mad man. I run through the city and see bodies rotting in the streets. I go and report to my officer and he's fucking a woman against the wall in his bunker. I go back to sleep and enter another nightmare. Now look at us. It's supposed to be a time of peace and yet we are frightened.'

Omovo stayed silent. Okoro laughed. His voice lightened.

‘Nobodies, that's what we are. People who remain at the bottom, filing documents, running errands, a life of overtimes.'

‘We are not nobodies.'

‘What a life.'

‘We don't have to be.'

‘I must read harder for my papers. Must go to university. Must own a car, have a good job and plenty of money.'

‘Let's hurry. All those buses and we haven't even rushed for one.'

‘It's suckers that rush.'

‘Sure.'

‘Talking of suckers, you know a really strange thing happened to me the other day.'

‘What?'

‘I went to one of our town people's meetings and at the end of it we had a dance. I couldn't join them.'

‘Why?'

‘I found I had almost forgotten how to do our traditional dance. I was really ashamed. All the elders kept mocking me. I mean here I am. I can do any disco dance, but I have forgotten the dance of my own people. It's really strange.'

‘I know what you mean, I can't speak my mother's language at all and I struggle with my father's. How did this happen to us, eh?'

‘We've been selling our souls without knowing it, I guess.'

‘Yeah. Something has been stolen from us, all of us,' Omovo said, echoing Ifeyiwa's words.

They tramped on silently.

‘Let's hurry,' Omovo urged.

‘Hurrying is for...' Okoro started to say, when an old man, his breath heavy with ogogoro, bumped into him.

‘Are you mad?' Okoro shouted at the old man. The man began to apologise, but changed it into a curse.