She gasped at the sudden blackness and the silence that followed, only her breath and heartbeat in her ears.
* * *
“Limah!” Asana whispered sharply. Ah! Limah knew she had to be out before Auntie Muni came. She tapped the metal door insistently, pulling out her phone.
“The number you have dialed has been switched off,” reported the British woman who had won the contract to voice all such messages. “Please try again later.”
It was almost four a.m. In an hour, Auntie Muni would be at the market or close.
“Limah!”
Banging now, Asana wondered with mounting anxiety whether her friend had forgotten to drop off the key before heading to collect her son. She only had one and had given it to Limah.
Asana sank to the cement incline that rose into the stall. Seething, she rehearsed the curses she would hurl at Limah, and the cluelessness she would perform if Auntie Muni came to meet her locked out.
She rented the stall from Auntie Muni for thirty thousand a week. She only had use of it at night, to sleep in when the market closed. As part of their rental agreement, Asana cleaned the stall before she left in the morning, had her bath at the market shower, and then returned to sell Special Ice water for Auntie Muni, getting five pesewas for every thirty-pesewa sachet she sold, on top of the 2,500 a day Auntie Muni paid her.
The arrangement was a luxury Asana worked hard to keep so she wouldn’t have to return to sleeping outside, praying away rain, armed robbers, and rapists. The ten thousand she took from Limah each week enabled her to save some of the roughly 200,000 (twenty cedis in the new money) she earned weekly selling for Auntie Muni. She planned to buy her own Special Ice carton and bring her junior sister from their uncle’s farm in Yendi to sell for her until she could one day own a market stall.
But every week, Limah did something to risk Auntie Muni finding out that Asana let her use the stall to sleep with her police officer. She always seemed to forget something—a scarf, a still-smoking mosquito coil, a condom wrapper—and she always left later than their agreed upon four a.m., giving Asana little time to clean up after her. This week, she had not only told Limah to leave at three, but made an excuse not to watch Adama, hoping Limah would finish early to pick him up. Asana regretted this now, realizing she had no guarantee Limah would come straight back to her.
Ready to pound the metal door again, she heard a rustle coming from inside. Her pocket vibrated. She hissed Limah’s name into her phone. “Open for me.”
Asana listened for the metallic slide of the unlocking door and pushed her way in. Her eyes adjusting to the darkness, she turned toward the sound of two distinct ragged breaths, suddenly afraid she had entered a trap.
“Limah? Gom beni?” she asked in their native Dagbani, hoping the rapist or armed robber who might be holding her friend hostage couldn’t understand.
“I am fine.” Limah’s voice shook.
“Why are you in the dark?” Asana’s eyes still adjusting, she moved toward Limah’s voice and tripped. Scrimmaging to her elbows, Asana turned to see what had made her fall. It hadn’t been Limah’s selling pan or some other discarded object. Whatever it was had the mass of an animal. A big one. Like one of the cows the men in Yendi used to pool money to buy and kill for Eid. She pulled herself up, yanking her phone from her pocket.
“Charles,” Limah explained as Asana directed the device’s light to the body.
Asana gasped. There was a lifeless police officer in Auntie Muni’s stall, and there was blood. She put her hands on her head.
“I thought he was an attacker.”
Asana nodded understanding. There wasn’t a female among them who didn’t know the fear that came with night. Whether guarding the wares they sold in the storage sheds, or asleep on the roadside just outside Mal’ Atta, they lived with the paranoia of attacks past and recent. Even those who could pay to sleep in padlocked market stalls were vulnerable to armed robbers and rapists who knew they might be inside, easily overpowered.
“We have to get him out of here before Auntie Muni comes.”
“He’s too heavy.” Limah’s voice was thin with despair. “We should call the police.”
“And tell them what? You thought your married officer was an attacker so you killed him?” Asana turned her phone’s light on Limah. Her friend sat defeated, the swatch of fabric she had earlier worn wrapped around her hair now draped around her shoulders and streaked with blood, the balding circle of scalp she was so self-conscious about, exposed. “A police officer is dead. It will be your word—a kayayo—against his family’s desire to bury him honorably, his wife’s embarrassment, and his fellow officers’ fear of crackdown when it’s discovered he was with you instead of at his checkpoint. No. We have to remove him and clean this place before the market opens.”
More afraid of what Auntie Muni might do to her than the police, Asana turned her phone around, the light searing her eyes. 3:57 a.m. The market opened at six, but proprietors would start arriving by five.
“The AMA inspectors will be here,” she reminded Limah. The Accra Metropolitan Assembly often dispatched officials for surprise sanitation checks, but it being National Sanitation Day, they would be in the market in numbers. “And no telling when the Munhwɛ people will start coming. We have to do it now.”
“We could take him to the hospital.”
“Do you have 150,000 for a taxi to Korle Bu?” Asana sucked her teeth. “He’s already dead. Start cleaning up. I’m going to find us some help to clear the body.”
* * *
Muni accidentally kicked a short stack of plastic buckets as she turned the corner on the path to her stall.
“Who left these here?” she asked the small girl sweeping in front of the first shop in the row. Even though it wasn’t her stall, the AMA inspectors would use such infractions to threaten to fine the owner—a pretext for negotiating lesser levies that would bypass the city’s coffers for their own pockets. Where the inspectors started, they would linger. “Clear them now.”
“Yes, Auntie Muni.”
In front of her stall, Muni parted her bag’s leather-band-and-gold-link handles to rummage for her keys. She dug past her phone, her face-powder compact, blotting papers, a handkerchief, a Munhwɛ TV flyer, P.K chewing gum wrappers, and magazine perfume strips she collected, always on the hunt for a new scent. Finally, she found her wallet, pulling out the keys that dangled from the ring attached to the zipper.
Muni tugged at the padlock and latched the heavy spinach-green metal door to the loop that moored it to the cement wall. She sniffed compulsively, as she did every morning. To her surprise, her shop smelled good. Fresh even.
Her kayayo and tenant Asana did a good job cleaning the stall, but there was a smell about the girl that always lingered. None of Muni’s customers had yet complained about an unpleasant musk, and most of her lace was sheathed in plastic, but she worried nonetheless that the girl’s raw odor would pique a sensitive nose like hers or seep into her stock.
This morning, though, the place had a lemony antiseptic smell to it. The shelves looked neater too.
Tank u, ma dear. Outdid urself. D shop is luking gr8, she texted Asana, using the shorthand her son, Abdul, messaged her with.
Abdul and his sister would be coming soon to help her man the shop. She had seen on the Munhwɛ TV flyer that the area MP and his wife, Alice, were planning to welcome Ahmed Razak to the market. Alice had become something of a friend during her husband’s campaign, meeting regularly with the market shopkeepers to rally their support. Even after his win, Alice always dropped by Muni’s stall and picked up a few yards of lace when she was at Mal’ Atta. Muni looked forward to showing her the new pieces that had come in.
Abdul