Doing Dangerously Well (15 page)

He ran to the toilet, knelt down on the floor and vomited.

The plane flew over flooded areas and Kolo saw people still sitting on rooftops, hands extended to him for help. Yet he could picture only his brother, that reflection of himself, begging for rescue, trapped in the all-engulfing water.

By the time he returned to Abuja, it was nearing Christmas-a critical time for his next move. He now concentrated solely on his ascent to the presidency.

The phone rang: Mary Glass, exactly on time.

“Ah, Ms. Glass.” He ensured that his words slipped out with a tone of utter nonchalance. “I thought it only fair to mention that the French are making a bid-their speed vastly exceeds that of TransAqua. And of course, so does the verbosity of their contract.” In-jokes would keep her loyal. “Unless you can assist in …” a judicious cough, “… other matters, we really have no use for you.”

“But we have no contract! How could we make such a commitment without one?”

He spoke slowly, with meaning. “There can be no contract before the act itself.”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Think about who signs the contract. At the moment, I can’t.”

Finally the woman understood. “I will call the ambassador.”

“And what influence does he have?” Kolo drawled. “He’s only a go-between, after all.”

“He’ll call the president.”

“Timeline?”

“This week.”

“
Bonne chance, Mademoiselle Glass!”

On the 30th of December, exactly one week after that phone call, Kolo sat chewing his nails in his office at the Ministry for Natural Resources, a small wire leading from a radio on his
desk to an earpiece in his ear. At 5:10 p.m., he stopped chewing and jerked into an upright position. His bleached skin brightened, a small flush of pink accentuating the rash on his cheeks.

An hour later, the general marched in, his immovable facial muscles finally allowing him to form an expression that could be widely interpreted—and Kolo had no doubt that it signalled a final comprehension, myriad recollections, a raw awareness nearing shock.

“A cunning man!” The general’s voice carried admiration, if not a little fear.

“Political life!” Kolo shrugged with apology, as he hid his nails under his agbada. “Will you be able to, ehm, to manage the situation henceforth?”

The general stood rigid and saluted. There was no question that he had to support a man from his own ethnic group.

The next day, the entire nation heard the news that the president’s helicopter had crashed as it carried his entourage back from a meeting with the emir of Kano. Kolo entered the government offices in an agbada in muted green—to reflect the colours of the Nigerian flag—head hung low in mourning. In the corridors of power, colleagues expressed outrage that their president had not left office voluntarily instead of being “forced out.”

“Does the man have to pull the country down with him?” Kolo tutted. “Why couldn’t he have left office gracefully instead of creating this wahala? Every man should know when his time is up.”

On the preferred date for coups in Nigeria, that is to say the first day of January, Ogbe Kolo acceded to the presidency. Citizens greeted each other with the customary salutation for the New Year: “Happy New Coup.”

Kolo’s yellow face was placed in Nigerian embassies and high commissions worldwide. For Kolo, however, this represented a minor achievement compared to his greater ambitions.

I
gwe and his sister Ekwii had stayed with Femi since November, through nights of ghostly screams. One morning they heard a commotion at the top of the apartment building, heard people begging with a woman to come off the roof and heard the thud as her body hit the pavement. The body lay outside the building for a week, tucked into an alleyway, waiting for medical staff diverted to the flooded areas to attend to it, waiting for family killed in the flood to claim her, waiting for space in an overcrowded morgue. As the smell of rotting flesh encased the building, Femi was sheltered and guarded by his two friends. They soon moved him from the sterility of a bureaucratic, preplanned capital to the peaceful, hilly paradise of nearby Jos.

Three months passed, yet he still lay in mourning, cognizant of events yet caring little of their import. He was sealed in the past, living through memories like an epic told backwards. His friends worried that the tales that had taken thirty years to tell
might take another thirty to retell and Femi’s spirit would grow younger and younger until he died at the story of his birth. And thus they feared he would walk his first steps, speak his first words, see the first pair of astonished eyes as he slipped back into the eternal peace of the womb.

Femi’s system shut down to a baseline of survival, of near existence—a life of atoms, molecules and cells, of organs and tissue, of mere mechanics. The life of energy, of soul and spirit, of will and whim, of a unique character and its interaction with the world, these vanished as quickly as if death had taken him too. His days no longer contained the joy of living, or even the combat of survival. They were simply existence: the in-breath and out-breath, the feeding of the body and the expelling of that nourishment.

Femi wandered through the vast panoramas of his desolation, unable to find comfort. He pictured his mother feeding the chickens, could even hear the tick-tick-tick of the corn feed as it skipped across the earth, unable to stay put, and the feeling of the ground quaking under her feet. He heard the screeching of the hens, which caused her to look around in panic. He imagined her screams of recognition as the sky turned black, the deafening roar that obliterated everything. He saw his father flung above the water into the air, looking down and seeing the surging swell, tumbling back towards the horror, plummeting towards the chasm. He felt his brother’s anguish as the water crashed down on him, realizing that his days of dreaming had come to an end. He imagined Amos struggling to live, closing his eyes and holding his breath in the hope that he would surface above the waves. He wondered how the water tasted, whether of living things or of death.

He pictured his brother lying with legs splayed, naked, in a final humiliation. He pictured his father’s corpse hundreds of
miles from the place that had nurtured him, wrenched away from his ancestors, lying alone in some foreign land. He imagined unearthing his mother and witnessing the bewilderment in her eyes.

Time slowed, moments condensed, squeezing ferocious despair from each articulation, as one instant crept onwards to the next.

Femi began to detest his very being. He could not understand why he alone had been spared, of his entire village the most worthless of all. He wondered why his friends continued to take care of him. He was certain that, in the dark corners of the rooms they shared, they whispered his name with loathing, detesting a character afflicted with such a selfish lethargy. He abhorred the fact of his presence.

Femi did not have the energy to bathe. He could hardly stand up to go to the bathroom. His friends tried to feed him, but he found it tiring to sit up. He felt no hunger, and the small amounts of food he ate made him feel sick. The sensation lingered for hours as he lay on his mat, too tired to vomit, too exhausted to digest. He lost weight. His strength drained away. He felt close to death-it festered within all his thoughts and its cadence invaded his body.

Sometimes he woke up, nauseated by an odour, rancid and putrid. He felt certain it was his body, emanating a vile stench that wafted through the entire room. He was convinced that his friends wished to rid themselves of this burden, yet to his face they would smile and soothe him like the useless animal he was.

He noticed that, when he lay in a certain corner, a nail stuck up out of the wooden floor beneath the linoleum. He felt it on his back, on his arm. He would grind against it, causing it to pierce his skin. For hours, he would rub against it, small movements against its sharp surface, bringing pain to his body,
causing wounds that baffled his friends. The pain brought much relief to him—a brief but insistent connection with his body—but unlike the intense, biting pain of happier days.

Once, some fleeting words managed to drift through the miasma of bewilderment.

“Femi,” Ekwii tapped him on his shoulder. “Kolo has been elected president.”

He searched for an appropriate response, but her words echoed around the hollow that should have been his presence. He thought of his mother swallowing great gulps of water, thrashing about in the flood’s raging torrent. “That’s terrible,” he finally replied, but in truth, he could not remember who Kolo was.

He thought he had said the right words, but the concern in Ekwii’s face indicated that something troubled her. He shut his eyes again and lay back down on the mat.

As the weeks passed, he achieved small victories. At his friends’ insistence, he would swallow more food, pretend to listen to the radio or hold his head up from its slump when they talked. He could not wrest himself from an overwhelming despair, knowing how vast a distance lay between his dreams and the bleak terrain of his reality. His friend Ubaldous paced in erratic circles, scolding himself—Femi wondered why his mentor did not direct his words at him instead.

“Did you hear that?” Igwe asked, squatting down by Femi. “One hundred thousand have now died of water-borne illness. Can you believe it?”

Femi looked into his friend’s eyes. How Igwe must detest him. “Really?” he answered. “That’s a lot of people.”

Igwe frowned at him—not with anger, but with query. “It is a lot of people,” Igwe said softly, putting a gentle hand on his friend’s head. “Do you want some orange drink?”

Femi stared at Igwe and remembered Amos looking up at him as they walked through the fields to school, how he often touched his brother’s head in the same way. Though these dear memories had not been fiercely imprinted during the routine of life, now that all was gone he could not escape them. Tears sprang to his eyes. He lay back down on his mat and cried.

B
uoyed by her career prospects, Barbara decided to pamper herself. She ran a bath. Despite the astronomical cost, the water would calm her down.

The water stopped before it filled the tub. She had forgotten to pay her water bill. Irritated, Barbara sat in the bath, feeling it lap across her body, watching her breasts bob above the water line. They looked young again. She wondered if Archimedes had chanced on this same phenomenon.

After her bath, she wrapped herself in a robe made partially of hemp and called her parents.

“Hello,” her mother answered. “Glass household. Hello? Who’s speak—… Oh heavens, Ernie! Get the other phone! Quick! It’s Barbara. No, upstairs. Barbara, we thought you’d been killed!” Her mother sounded almost disappointed. “We phoned all the local hospitals.”

“No, I’m alive.” She hunted for her water bill.

“Has Mary been in contact?” her father asked.

“I don’t want to work for a corporate oppressor!”

“See what you get for letting her study English at university?” her mother whispered to her father.

He attempted to be the voice of reason. “Look, your sister has agreed to find you some work with her company, but first you’ll have to apologize to her for your comments—”

“What? At Thanksgiving? What’s her prob—”

“Don’t you dare raise your voice in this house,” her mother snapped. “We are your parents, after all. We will not tolerate anger, do you understand?” Barbara heard a click on the other end of the phone.

“Do you see what you’ve done now?” her father asked. “Is it too much to ask you to keep your temper in check?”

“But, Dad—”

“Now just phone your sister and apologize. She’s very upset. Barbie, pride comes before a fall.” The monk put down the phone.

Barbara lit her Himalayan salt candles, sat in lotus position and meditated in front of her shrine for a few minutes, her temples throbbing. She spotted a photograph she had placed there of the two sisters as children.

Barbara fingered the picture, wiped the dust away from it and unfurled its edges. The girls looked so sombre. The perfect Mary, with her socks sitting regimentally at her knees, hair glistening in a bob that always retained its shape, and dress freshly ironed, as crisp as the day of its purchase. Next to her, Barbara—box-like, stern, no socks, hair in a ball, staring at Mary. Her timing was off as always, gaping just as the shutter opened.