A portmanteau was no novelty in Kreektown. It was the care with which it was handled that caught the eye; that, and the very idea that a petty trader’s stock-in-trade was so precious as to be ferried to market not in an oily carton or mildewed sack but in a portmanteau.
Utoma stopped ogling Etie in the adjacent stall and watched the short hawker with the suspicion reserved for a rival. It would have been rather silly, carrying eggs in portmanteaus, but Utoma sold eggs; that was the thing. He had lost a kidney and half his weight in the eighteen years since his Trevi inoculation, but he was the last surviving member of the modest Egg Sellers Association of Kreektown Market, a rather lucrative position. So he turned away from Etie’s cosmetics stall and glared at the hawker.
Since his arrival, the hawker had dispensed a ‘good-morning’ each to the traders on either side of his stall, so he couldn’t very well be called arrogant.
Yet it was a close thing.
They didn’t call Etie ‘Man-Magnet’ for nothing and she would have felt the loss of Utoma’s attention immediately. She glanced towards the distraction without skipping a strand in the hair she was braiding. The sneer she’d prepared for a woman faded. When the hawker lifted his portmanteau tenderly onto a bench, her fingers grew rigid in her customer’s hair. There was one calamity Etie had lived in dread of: a real cosmetologist setting up in Kreektown.
Etie was my neighbour and fellow orphan. She was six years old at the time of the Trevi inoculation and had coped well until her mother died of kidney failure and she had her first seizure.
She held no certificates, but in her small shop on Crown Prince Street she stocked a variety of nail varnishes and lipsticks—and she regularly succeeded in plaiting a hundred and fifty Bob Marley braids on Letitia’s head, which was not much larger than a grapefruit. Any other village in the world would be glad for her talents, but she knew the new Kreektown girls very well. That she was Menai counted for nothing with the new Kreektowners. Any quack with the gumption to put cosmetologist on a signboard would kill her business. The new Kreektown didn’t have enough business for two cosmetics stalls.
Kreektown’s traders watched the hawker narrowly. He had a fetish for the colour red. It was the colour of his clothes, his portmanteau, and the plastic tablecloth he spread on the rack to display his goods.
That tablecloth seemed to incense Ruma. Her merchandise was the most expensive in the market, yet she laid her fabrics out, Menai weaves and ankaras, brocades—even her imported ten-thousand-naira-per-yard Hollandis—she laid them all out directly on the wooden panels of the stall. She muttered, and it was handy that there were now so few of us who spoke the tongue in the market, ‘Ayamuni jakpasi! Just who does this upstartchild think he is, to spread a red clothshrine for his stock? Is he selling gold fabric? Or did he import his own brocades from the land of ancestorsMenai?’
Eventually, the short hawker was satisfied with the symmetry of the tablecloth. He placed an envelope on it and opened the portmanteau reverently.
Even the customers sensed something momentous in the offing and loitered around the red stall. Oga Somuzo, having haggled Ma’Bamou’s size forty-eight jeans right down to a desperate four hundred naira, refrained from paying—confident that a better bargain would emerge from the red portmanteau.
What did emerge was a carton, which contained a smaller package wrapped in layers and layers of old newspapers. A drift of newsprint slowly massed around the hawker’s feet as he carefully unfurled the contents of the carton. The scent of camphor filled the air. Nobody was expecting the old pair of shoes that eventually stood, pompously, in the centre of the red tablecloth.
Saint John scratched his forehead. Lesser mortals could scratch their heads and armpits, but Saint John did things his own way—and frequent perplexity, coupled with his unfamiliarity with the nail clipper, had left him with a forehead more ravaged than his fifty years would have portended. ‘Ezitatu?’ He spluttered, ‘All this potmanto palaver for the sake of one common pair of secondhand shoes?’
‘That are not even polished,’ I added, hinting heavily.
There was something like pity in the hawker’s eyes as he glanced at us. He probably didn’t see anyone worth the trouble of puffing his goods to, because without a word, he bent over and began to gather the newspapers strewn about his feet. This was probably the moment most of us decided he was a pompous little imp.
Ma’Bamou had the only secondhand clothes shop in Kreektown. She brought in her stock of okrika monthly in huge bales that travelled six hundred circuitous smugglers’ kilometres from Cotonou Port in the back of Tamiyo’s Peugeot. She walked mincingly over to the portmanteau with the aid of her iron walking stick. It was really empty. There was just that arrogant pair of shoes, which to her professional eyes would have seemed grade B. She sniffed, a sound balanced delicately between relief and contempt, and returned to her stall; there was no need for a word. Oga Somuzo followed heavily, clearly aware that his old bid for the jeans was history.
Yet they were the only ones who walked away. Even Etie and her customer, whose hair was half in braids and half-afro, joined the crowd around the red stall. Kreektown might have been a village, but it was no ordinary place. We were more than most towns and cities—we were an entire nation, the last stronghold of Menai in the world. This was certainly not so inconsequential a place that a dirty pair of shoes should cause a stir.
So it caused a stir, the very nerve of a hawker who came to Kreektown Market just to sell an old pair of shoes. To whom did he plan to sell them? Did he take the Menai for mugus? The cheek of it! We milled angrily around the stall, although there was no violence in the air. We did not manhandle idiots of any stripe, but we did know how to ridicule a fool so well that when he got home he’d look himself very well in the mirror.
‘Where the rest of your market?’ began Jonszer mildly enough. A knowing wink flickered in his left eye. He knew every excuse in the book. ‘They steal it for bus, not so?’
‘Me, I’m not a trader,’ said the hawker, pulling an affidavit out of the envelope and showing it around, ‘I’m the son of Doctor Nnamdi Azikiwe’s former houseboy.’
This sort of boasting was new to us. It was one thing to boast about wiping a big man’s toilet seats for a living. But no, this young man was far more superior than that to an ordinary trader: he was the son of a man who wiped a big man’s toilet seats for a living.
We were going to have fun that afternoon.
Yet around me was gathering the largest crowd Kreektown had mustered in months—which had not come for a sleepcatastrophe. It was my best marketing opportunity yet: to publicly transform a lacklustre pair of shoes and remind Kreektowners that a shoe-shiner of distinction lived amongst them.
The downside to my plan was the free shoeshine for the arrogant hawker, but it would only cost a smear of polish anyway. I sat on my shoeshine box and took the left shoe.
The hawker did not notice.
‘I use to know one trader’s apprentice like that,’ Mukaila whispered to Saint John, in a voice that carried. ‘One day like that, he miss his bus at Onitsha Motor Park, and he begin to chitchat this very nice lady . . . then they branch inside hotel . . .’
‘Ajajaa!’
‘. . . when they finish, the apprentice try to go but she hold him by the belt. He said he thought it was girlfriend-and-boyfriend matter, she said no, it was business.’
‘Who settled it?’ asked Saint John, who knew the story only too well.
‘Motor park touts,’ replied Mukaila. ‘They said they didn’t know where the boy came from, but that Onitsha prostitute don’t use to wear badge . . . I swear to God, that apprentice sell all his master’s okrika that day, to pay the nice lady.’
‘Me, I’m not an apprentice . . .’ protested the hawker, over loud laughter.
‘Is it that you’re stranded?’ asked