The new Kreektown settlers were sharper than knives. I was cut, again and again, and it was to Mata Nimito, hermit cloudcaster and stargazer, that I turned.
‘Kiwami ananwusu,’ he had said. ‘You were nurturetaught to live among the People. It’s a new world now. Now, you must not put naked fingers in a crab basket.’
‘How can I live in this world, Mata?’
‘Practiselearn. The lesson of the crab.’
‘What is that lesson, Mata?’
‘Carry your truthsweetness inside; but as for the world, show them only your crabshell.’
And I blended in.
MATA NIMITO, who had no traffic with the world, the great teacher of that world; Mata Nimito, who lived all those years only to die in the week I returned . . . No one did guilt like Menai. It weighed me down now. I had been close to the old man, until I fled his circumcision blade . . .
I rose queasily and walked towards the door again. A wave of memory rode me, and suddenly I was a seventeen-year-old, in that same bar, but it was not Ma’Calico’s anymore; it was Cletus’s Motel, and the language was Menai, the people were Menai . . . I fled the room, fearing another vivid hallucination, stopping only on the threshold, where I gasped.
Amana was right behind me. She was dogging me too often these days. One of these days I was going to come up against the iroko of her mother. There was the usual mischief in her eyes. ‘You’re throwing up!’
‘I’m not drunk.’
She peered into my eyes. ‘But something is wrong. Right?’
I stared.
I had tried to figure her out, without much luck. She was sprite-like in many ways, liberated from the very real things that weighed people down. Her fellow villagers discounted her from the scheme of things, as though they understood that she was outside their norm. Even the dreaded roughboys seemed to hold her in some reverence. When she scolded them, they smiled bashfully, and they brought their quarrels for her opinions. If she had a boyfriend, he did not live in Kreektown, but she did disappear behind the treeline several times a day with a variety of men who emerged, angry and frustrated, while she followed, beaming with a transcendental contentment.
That morning, she had disappeared with a woman, Fati, for the first time.
She looked right and left now and winked conspiratorially. ‘This is a secret, okay? Ma’Calico will kill me if she knows.’ Then she turned for the trees.
I hesitated. I had seen Ma’Calico’s hands at close quarters. They were old, far older than she was: her face looked fifty but her hands were sixty. Those hands had scraped and peeled, had squashed and soaked and burned—and they had done all that in the wet and dry, in the hot and cold, in the smoky blaze. She did not boast often, that iroko, but when she did it was always about her smart Amana, who at twenty-six would still have been station manager of DRCD’s Kreektown base if rioters had not burned it down the very day she arrived from Abuja to begin her posting, and Ma’Calico’s eyes would soften.
Amana reached the line of trees. She turned and gestured impatiently, and the memory of Ma’Calico waned. I followed. We walked briskly into Kreektown’s shroud, which could make dusk of a brilliant noon. A clump of trees. A timeless peace. The hard-packed earth softened. I followed her. I knew the land but not the lie of it any longer. A lot had changed in a decade. We walked in long shadows, but daylight held its own—which was just as well, for I loathed the dark. Then, barely three hundred metres from her mother’s parlour, we arrived at Amana’s redoubt. It was a long, comfortable bench in a grove with associated creature comforts, which she clearly frequented. There was no time to talk, and she straddled the bench with an urgency that telegraphed. She spread a red velvet cloth between us, pulled out her purse, and produced a deck of playing cards.
She stared as I redid my top buttons. ‘What style do you prefer?’ she asked guardedly.
I was breathlessly silent.
‘Okay, let’s play Red Bushmeat,’ she volunteered. That turned out to be a variation of a card game popularised by motor-park touts across Nigeria. I was no virgin myself and determined to teach her a painful lesson. I doubled her opening stake, and we played passionately for thirty frenzied minutes. Every time I lost a game, a grunt of frustration would slip my iron control, but her delight was ever bubbling under the surface. She had quick fingers and dealt with a croupier’s skill. She had eyes only for her cards. After thirty minutes I was hooked.
Although I was sweating liberally, I could have played a few more rounds, but she was the daughter of Ma’Calico all right. A seam of discipline underpinned her greed. She reined in her flushed abandon with a sigh of satisfaction and gathered up her winnings. She folded up her red velvet cloth, her purse bulging with my money, and then she fixed me calmly with perhaps the first serious look I had seen on her.
‘Do you have something to tell me?’ Her voice was very polished, very much the station manager’s.
I stared with angry frustration.
‘I can keep a secret,’ she assured me.
I rose. ‘I’m sure you can,’ I said, still smarting from my earlier misapprehension. ‘I’m a journalist; I have a burial to cover.’
‘I’m going as well.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘He’s the last of the dead people.’
It was my chance to own up, but instead I said, ‘There’s still Jonszer . . . and—’
‘Okay, okay.’ Irritably, her accent plunging from station manager to agbero, she allowed, ‘Second-to-last.’
We were walking back now. As we reached the treeline, she paused. ‘Honestly, I can keep a secret.’
‘That’s very good for you,’ I told her.
* * *
AT MA’CALICO’S, I went up to my room and waited for evening and the burial. When I shut my eyes, the dead Menai I had known swam in and out of my tipsy vision. I sat up and reached for Palaver. A trucker passing through to Warri had left his copy for me. Badu was still front-page news; this time, it was the fact that he had done nothing for all of four days. I turned to page seven. My column was gone, despite the standby pieces I always kept on file. It was replaced by a shameless pastiche of those same standby pieces by Patience from Motoring. Oddly enough, she had a picture on her new byline, a courtesy Patrick had denied me throughout the over one hundred iterations of my column. There was no chink in the paper caused by the absence of Roving Eye. The ease with which I had dropped out of my old life—and the swiftness with which I had been replaced—depressed and frightened me. I was like a stunted shrub: a couple of tugs and up came years of growth, yanked out of the soil with one hand. I had written for Palaver for two and a half years, but I had dropped out and that was that. I put away the newspaper. This was, after all, how I wanted it: there was no one in my life whose loss could really hurt me.
That was why I had fled Kreektown all those years ago. I closed my eyes and tried not to remember the ninth of December, 1998. Tried not to remember every wrinkle on every lost face, every accent of every lost voice . . .
* * *
I WAS orphaned.
The short hawker arrived at Kreektown Square just before noon and began to set up his stall. It was the perfect timing for an entrance. The other traders had settled into their own routines. Sisi Mari’s sewing machine was singing its monotone, and the middle-aged Ruma was already yawning seamlessly. By Ntupong’s gin joint, I killed time with a pack of cards and a complimentary shot while I watched for a shoeshine prospect. There were hundreds of filthy shoes in Kreektown, but few of their owners were prepared to have them shined, for a fee. My business day was half gone, and I hadn’t even opened my shoeshine box.
The hawker set his portmanteau carefully on the ground. At first