signed me into care, and he seemed chief suspect for the role of Bolting Dad. I traced him to his golf club on Rounds Street. I watched him all day, following him four blocks to Poplar, where he lunched with three suits. Afterwards, we both walked back to the club; the one was well-fed, the other—following twelve anonymous paces behind—very, very, hungry. He drank till late. That afternoon when I went to confront my father I did not have a plan. By that evening, I had come to picture how different my life might have been, and it became quite clear what I had to do. I suppose the hunger was a factor. I didn’t even have enough money for a knife—I slipped one off the shelf of a hardware store on Poplar East. When he left his club it was 7:00 p.m. and dark, and as he dumped his golf clubs in the boot, I approached. As he opened his Porsche he felt the point of my knife in his side and drove thirty minutes, talking all the way. He was a barrister, all right: eight inches from a painful death and he couldn’t stop talking. I guess that blade kind of inspired him into the performance of his life. He slowed down along Old Kent Road, and I stepped out of the car. He still has the £7.89 knife that I got for free—and the contents of the wallet that he spilled desperately into my lap. Sometimes I wonder whether he was just a gifted liar or whether my arrival in the maternity with Negroid features truly had dissolved the marriage of his Caucasian clients, my ‘legal’ parents, Felix and Laura Fraser. I’ve never bothered to look for them. They can go to Hell—along with the adulterer who supplied my Negroid genes.
ZANDA ATTURK
Kreektown | 15th March, 2005
I got lost on my way back, which was ridiculous because I had spent the first eighteen years of my life in Kreektown. I was thinking too hard on my future, or the lack of it, and when the horse stopped moving I realised he was knee-deep in a swamp. I spent the next few minutes kicking and cursing, but the animal was quite frozen with fear. So I climbed down into the viscous mud myself, and the horse turned readily enough to follow me. We finally gained solid ground, the horse and I and the stink between us. The light was beginning to fail. As the shadows lengthened in the forest, my fear grew.
I heard the village called Kreektown before I saw it and followed the highlife music that led me to Ntupong’s Joint, the only saloon left in the village square. It was a dramatic village surrounded by an encroaching forest. One moment I was under the canopy of trees, the next I was walking down a street of mostly empty homes where the industry of barefoot life moved in sync with the economy of mobile phones. One moment I was dragging my horse down the footpath, past a length of python curing on a grill, the next I was in a depleted village square, two hundred metres across. The earth under me was packed hard enough for cars. The roads were wide enough for cars, but all around Kreektown, the mechanicals that proliferated were motorbikes. I crossed the square where a noisy generator powered a football viewing centre. Next door, a motorbike repairer was hard at work.
The joint was just across the square. Recently, I had watched Kiri Ntupong’s TV testimony at the Justice Omakasa Enquiry into the Menai Inoculation. Despite my straits, I couldn’t help smiling at the prospect of seeing the old man after so many years.
He had died the week before.
I stood in the doorway, a little stunned at the news. I did not recognise the large woman who was now weeping all over again. There were only four patrons in the large parlour. Wedged around a table, they were locked in an intense game of cards. We shook hands solemnly, and one of them, a garrulous raconteur, gave me his business card. He was bearded and defiant with it. I looked at the card, puzzled. ‘Hameed . . . are you supposed to do this?’
‘Do what?’
‘Give people cards saying you’re a secret service agent?’
‘Don’t worry yourself about that. What about my boss that posted me to a village as small as this? Am I supposed to pretend to be a farmer or what?’
I turned the card over. ‘This is not very . . . secret.’
‘Is the best way,’ he assured me. ‘Do you know how many oil worker kidnapping cases I’ve solved from this very chair?’ His companions nodded their corroboration as they watched him deal the pack. ‘So if you hear any coup plots or secession talk, just call my Nokia, there’s cool money there for you, eh?’ He yelled, ‘Woman! Ntupong don chop im own life finish! Wey my peppersoup?’
She wiped her tears brightly. ‘Is coming, my oga!’
He gave me a ‘one Nigeria’ sign, a twining index and middle finger, and returned to his game.
I stepped back into the square and stared. The houses were familiar, but the faces were not. A decade had swept past like a century, and the last of the Menai were dispersed. I paused just outside the kamira, listening to the scary silence of the weavers’ guild house. I had grown up to the hypnotic chakata-chakata of the looms. I pushed the door open, and it fell, hingeless, into the abandoned yard. A sigh of dust rose regretfully. A goat stared from a sill. Several jamayas sat in a weavers’ circle, as though their owners were holding a guild meeting in an inner room and would soon return to the looms.
I walked on. Strangers lived here now, had moved into the empty homes: Sonja’s shop was now Fati’s ‘International’ Stores, Solo’s Chemist was now a card recharge shop, and in Kreektown Square, instead of the Mata’s beloved Menai, all I could hear were snatches of pidgin English, a curse in Sontik, and an argument in Nnewi-accented Igbo. I stood in Kreektown Square, where I had dropped my shoeshine box on December 9, 1998, to catch the ferry to Onitsha and the world. I knew no one here, now.
And no one knew me.
Instead, there was new resentment in the Kreektown air. People came here because they had nowhere else to go. Across Sontik State there was talk of secession. Indigenes of the new Sontik Republic would, with all her oil, immediately rocket to the highest per capita income in Africa. But no one would think it, to judge from the wretched eyes that followed me as I led my lame horse towards Ma’Calico’s. A low-grade malice tinged the eyes that looked at me, who drove a twenty-year-old banger into town: I had another place to go after my business with the Kreektown smuggler. As I turned into Ma’Calico’s yard, I felt that jailhouse grudge sink into me.
I couldn’t leave, either.
It wasn’t an attack of conscience because I had abandoned my doomed hometown. It was the prospect of a police interrogation. Patrick and I shared a mutual dislike for each other, but I needed his job as much as he did the only Palaver journalist who had ever won a Reporter-of-the-Year award. I was a difficult journalist to sack, despite my touted truancies, but after being conned by Korba Adevo, I was not going to be saved by all the awards in the Nigerian Union of Journalists.
A young woman leaned against the doorway at Ma’Calico’s, eating an avocado. She was lean and angular. Her slow eyes followed me with a python’s lazy grace. I remembered her bruising brazenness from when I had passed through earlier. Now, she was also wearing blood-red lipstick. ‘You wan’ room?’ she asked with a winning smile. I supposed it was the pattern: thieves took their loot up to Adevo’s for cash and the locals tried to retain as much of the proceeds for the local economy as they could.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told her politely. ‘I don’t do prostitutes.’
There was a momentary blankness, as though the sense of the words had eluded her at its first pass before boomeranging into the sacristy of her mind. Then she doubled over with the violence of a retch and laughed so hard that tears grew like translucent, animated tendrils down her cheeks. I watched her half-eaten avocado roll away in the dust. Thinking back, I suppose I was still in shock and thoughts that would normally have stopped at that were now popping through before I could
