"Laura," she said. "They're ruling it a suicide."
"Who's they?"
The insurance company. Pending a final police report.
Jesus.
CHAPTER 27
She dreamed of horses, woke to silence. Hoisted the jerry can back on her head, began walking.
It seemed she had always been walking, had been born of walking, could hardly remember a time when she hadn't been.
A young woman—a girl—layered in dust-muted indigos, clothed from forehead to ankle with only face and feet and hennaed hands visible, she moved across a parched and powdered landscape, the water balanced on folded cloth atop her head.
A dry land. It stretched out in endless arrangements of thorn bush and scrub grass. Boulders littered the ground like broken teeth, and the sun pushed down. The landscape reverberated from the heat like a horseshoe on an anvil still vibrating from the force of a blow.
Heat and thirst and sand.
The dry season had brought harmattan winds from the northeast that raked across the scrublands of the Sahel, carrying with it the taste of larger sands, wider deserts. When a sudden gust—as hot and dry as camel's breath—threw itself against her, it was the Sahara itself that gritted her eyes, made her cough. Trace elements of that encroaching desert, it collected like salt rind in her tear ducts.
She pulled her head scarf tighter, felt the water slosh inside the jerry can. It seemed as though she had always been walking.
Across the flatlands, the dry grass had been burned away, the fires set in the hope they might flush out bush rats and smaller prey.
The ash cover the fires left behind might enrich the soil as well, might produce green shoots for grazing when the rains came
—if
the rains came, and not so hard as to wash the ash away entirely into the flood plains and saline gullies. There was a time when shed helped guide these controlled burns; now she was walking through their aftermath, the thick grey ash coating her feet.
She had filled the jerry can at the last water hole shed come to, but no matter how many times shed rinsed it out, the water inside still tasted of gasoline. That was two days ago, and the can was already almost empty.
She had outwalked her own dialect, was deep among strangers now. Along the way she passed swaths of failed crops, sticklike in the soil, saw them as the omens they were. A soil grown too sandy for millet, and sparse grasses barely enough to support base grazing. The plains in front of her seemed to grow wider with the walking.
In the distance, a threadbare man in a threadbare shirt pushed a handcart that teetered with gourds along a parallel track, too intent on his load to notice a lone walker. The girl in indigo skirted the edge of a cluster of farm huts, the clay walls and thatched roofs eerily still in the lethargy of midday. She found the local water hole by following bone-ribbed cattle down to a swampy pond where she refilled her jerry can and then struck out across the scrublands toward the next cluster of rooftops. In the evenings these homes would glow with the light of charcoal burners, forming constellations across the plains. On occasion she would catch the smell of stockpiled yams baking in coals or a goat-head stew being stirred, and her mouth would ache for it and her stomach would whisper its faint, complaining plea.
It was a plea that would become more insistent as the days wore on, and with it came the counter-whisper, urging her not to stop, to keep moving.
The girl was chewing kola nuts to quell her appetite and was carefully rationing out the dried dates and cowpeas she carried in the folds of her gown. And all the while, that whispered voice spoke to her:
Keep. Walking. Don't. Stop.
CHAPTER 28
Ruling it a suicide.
The reed-thin insurance adjuster, another in a procession of pink-faced men who'd paraded through their lives since her father's death, sat at his desk in his pink-faced office, blandly unmoved by any of it.
Laura and her mother sat across from him, shell-shocked in the silence.
The pink-faced man spooned Coffee-mate into his Nescafe, drank with pursed lips from a chipped cup. One of Laura's authors was always adding details like that to his memoir—"A flake of dust had settled on her blouse," "A small, faded mustard stain was visible on his necktie." It was a world filled with slightly chipped cups and faintly furrowed brows, and Laura had highlighted these with the query:
"Would you really notice stuff like that?"
Now she knew. You do. You do. The reed-thin man with his hot-dog complexion was drinking Nescafe from a chipped cup, had measured it out with a coffee spoon, had stirred it while informing them that Laura's father, Helen's husband, had seen his life end not in a moment of skidded terror—which was bad enough to imagine—but in despair.
That second set of tracks.
Her father hadn't been able to go through with it, not the first time. He'd hit his brakes. Had sat there in the winter dark and then, slowly, had cranked the wheel and headed back up the hill for another run.
Sorrow as strong as a fist. It wrapped its knuckles around Laura's heart, squeezed it in a charley-horse grip. Laura's father, turning the car around. Laura's father, driving back up that hill. It must have been the loneliest ride of his life. And though she didn't know it at the time, everything that followed would come back to this: the image of her father turning the car around, and Laura wanting the people responsible to know what they had done.
—You find those fuckers before I do.
That's what her brother had said to Brisebois that first night, but as events played out, it would become clear that there was a misplaced pronoun in that sentence. Her brother should have said:
You find those fuckers before she does.
CHAPTER 29
Across the scrubland sands: a highway. Blacktop drawn like a line on a map. The girl in indigo turned, followed it southward.
She tried walking on the asphalt at first, but the heat of it seared her feet and she was forced alongside it instead, on the slower-going shoulders where the soil was as soft as sifted flour. Trucks rolled by in caravan, enveloping her in veils of harmattan dust and forcing her to steady the empty jerry can on her head. It had been easier to carry when it was full.
She walked herself in and out of dust.
Memories wavered in the heat. The past had become a mirage and the sun-warmed clay of her village was fading now with every step, with every gust of wind. The wives and uncles, the slow drift of cattle, the thump of millet in mortar: it seemed so distant, lacking as it did the substance and certainty of the walk, of one foot gliding in front of the other endlessly.
She was of the Sahel, from a clan rumoured to carry Arabian blood in their veins. The Lost Tribe of Israel. The descendants of Roman soldiers gone astray in the desert and taken in by Nubian riders—biblical tales and trade-route trysts put forth to explain the long limbs, the dust-coloured skin. But hers were a people born not of moonlight seductions or cast-off tribes, but of dust itself: a people given form from the very landscape they inhabited.
Who she was—and where she came from—was etched into her skin, was present in the delicate geometry of scars cut into her face, scars that both accentuated her beauty and identified her kinship line. The older wives had done their job well, and the lines they'd so painstakingly drawn—thin razored slices, with ashes quickly rubbed in to stop the bleeding and set the scar—had been the envy of the other girls throughout her childhood.
She wore her beauty like a map, and as she approached another crossroad cluster of buildings, jerry can on head, she pulled her head scarf in closer. Not so tight as to elicit suspicion, but enough to deflect it—she hoped.
Low-slung buildings, more mortar than brick, and a desultory motor-park market crowded the roadside, and as she threaded her way through the maze of stalls, her eyes would occasionally meet those of the Sahel traders. They would stop, would stare at her quizzically while she passed, trying to decipher the glimpse they'd gotten of the scars on her face, trying to read the story these told, trying to pin her in place. But hers was a small and dwindling clan, little known and often overlooked, and no one ever managed to unlock its secrets.
Her layered robes, indigo with scarlet trim, the embroidered sleeves of her
taqua,
even the manner in which her head scarf was draped—the style of loose knot, the way the folds fell—these too provided a map to who she was. Had anyone been able to read it, they could have charted the exact path she'd followed, right back to a specific wadi, a specific ridge, a specific village, even perhaps a specific home. That was the fear, that she would be unravelled, revealed.
She remembered outdoor schoolyard lessons as a child, under the spread of a shade tree, as the teacher spun a sun-bleached globe in front of them, the continents blurring into each other and then gradually separating as the world slowed. She felt as though she were walking on that globe now, turning it with her feet.
Her teacher had been from Mali, had stopped the spinning world at Africa, had pointed to the nook below the bulge, had said in mockery, "Here, in the armpit of Africa—Nigeria. "
Her uncle fumed at this when he heard, stormed back the next day, demanded apology, and the teacher, suddenly deferential, acquiesced, speaking in a polite French that was both elegant and afraid. Her uncle had paid good money to put her and her siblings in a proper
lycée,
and he wasn't going to have them insulted by some mendicant Malinese schoolteacher.
"Africa is not an arm," her uncle explained on the walk back. He was speaking in Hausa, the language of business, not the French of the
lycée.
"Unacceptable! He should look more closely at his maps, that teacher of yours. He should look at the true shape of it. Africa is not an arm, it is a gun, and Nigeria is where the trigger lies."
Then, slipping into his grandfather's dialect for added emphasis,
"Anyway, we are not Nigerians, we are something else."
What was Nigeria?
It was the crosshairs of the world. You could look at any wall map and see this: North America on the left, Asia on the right,
Europe up top. Draw one line down the middle and another lengthwise and what would you see, dead centre? Nigeria.
What was Nigeria?
It was a net, loosely thrown, a name on a map, one created by the British to paper over the gaping cracks in the joinery. A conjurer's trick, where the many became one, a sleight of hand, like the tired magic of old men making coins disappear. "There is no Nigeria." This was the lesson her uncle had wished to impart.
"There is Fulani and Hausa, Igbo and Tiv, Efik and Kanuri, Gwari and Yoruba. But Nigeria? That is only the pail we carry these in."
But she knew better.
She knew that the naming of a place helped bring it into existence. The naming of a location—or a person, a child—was a way of claiming them. Until you named something, it wasn't fully real. The trick to staying invisible, then, was to remain nameless.
Without a name, you couldn't be pinned in place, couldn't be cornered or captured. The key was to keep walking, keep moving, keep heading south, out of the Sahel.
CHAPTER 30
Dear Mr. Curtis!
I bring joyful news! The transfer has gone through!
The money will be in your account tomorrow morning. All the necessary modalities have been arranged.
Perhaps I am running ahead of myself. First, allow me my introductions: My name is Lawrence Atuche, and I have been asked by my colleague Victor Okechukwu (who, as you may know, has taken ill) to oversee the transfer of Miss Sandra's estate into your bank account for safekeep.
I have attached the OFFICIAL REMITTANCE NOTICE from the Central Bank:
To the Attention of Mr. Henry Curtis: Please be informed that as Head of the Administrative and Legal Reconciliation Department of the Central Bank of Nigeria, I have approved for immediate payment the sum of$US 35,600,000 (THIRTY FIVE MILLION SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND) into your account as listed on the application as submitted by one Victor Okechukwu. Once confirmation has been received and payment has been notarized, said funds will be transferred within 24 (TWENTY-FOURl Hours.With sincere wishes,R. Bola Soludo, Director of Operations. CBN
CHAPTER 31
The tumbledown towns along the highway were closer together now, larger, more dishevelled, more cluttered with life and commerce. Tin roofs and square walls had replaced thatched roofs and curved clay.
She searched out market wells to refill her water can, was chased away as often as not by the other women. She learned to hang back and wait. In the ebb and flow of people, she would find an opening and follow an older woman in, unscrewing the corroded lid of the can quickly, filling it with water and then disappearing before anyone took note. As thirsty as she was, she never drank until shed put distance between herself and the well, walking as swiftly as possible, the sudden strain of the water's weight both reassuring and painful. Only when she was away from the crowds would she allow herself a drink from the spout. The water turned the dust in her mouth to a slick of clay, and she couldn't escape the taste of fuel. But even then, the hardest part was to sip, not to gulp.
Not to drink so quickly as to develop stomach cramps.
If she kept to the main road and larger centres, if she avoided the side streets and enclaves where outsiders were instantly noted, she might yet remain invisible. A young woman, a girl, barefoot with battered jerry can on head: other than the puzzled glances from Sahel traders, she hardly existed. She was certainly not worth the robbing, having long since divested herself of anything of value, the bracelets and the silver coins that once dangled richly from her robes—the birthright of her mother's kinship line—given up for food. Her family's history was now scattered across the Sahel: the
