Dangerous Love (21 page)

‘If you go on like this I will send you back to your wretched people! I will send you back to your miserable family! When you foolish village girls have small education dat's how you behave, eh?'

His anger overflowed. He lashed out with the belt and caught her on the neck. She screamed, jumped sideways, and crashed into the cupboard of food. He lashed at her again. He tore the shoulders of her yellow dress. He went on whipping her until she grabbed the belt, rushed to the door, and ran out into the wet night with her clothes in tatters.

‘Run! Run outside if you like! You will sleep outside tonight,' he shouted.

Then he went and locked the main door and the door to their room.

She stood in front of the compound. She heard the water running in the gutters. Mosquitoes assailed her. The wet wind blew through her. She was standing there when the lights were seized. At first she did not notice. Then the darkness crowded her. She saw a candle being lit in her husband's room. She went and sat on the dirty cement platform. Her clothes stuck to her and she shivered as the wind kept blowing. She listened to the frogs croaking all over the marsh. She was staring at Omovo's house front, wondering what he was doing, when she saw his lean silhouetted form come down the street and into his compound. If he had looked up he wouldn't have seen her anyway. She sat in complete darkness, desolate in her torn dress and white shoes and faded perfume. Her body itched. She scratched herself absent-mindedly. And when the wind stopped blowing her head dropped. She readjusted her position and rested her head on the cradle of her arms. Then she raised her knees. She slept like a lost child that had cried itself to sleep.

An hour later the main door opened. Her husband emerged and in a half-gentle, half-angry voice he commanded her to come in. She was silent. He raised his voice and woke her. He moved towards her. She turned, saw his menacing form creeping towards her, and ran into the street. He pleaded with her to come in, dry herself and get some sleep. She moved further from him, till all he could see was her white shoes. He stayed pleading for a while. When he saw how hopeless his efforts were, when he saw that there was nothing he could say that could make her trust his desire for reconciliation, he went back in. Then he told her he was leaving the doors open so she could come in whenever she wanted.

‘Watch out for thieves,' he said, and disappeared into the house. But she stayed out the whole night and slept on the cement platform.

What was it that woke him?

Was it the rush of images, of birds keening and swarming in his sleep, dark birds fighting in a trapped place, with leaves blown to frenzy all about him?

He stirred on the bed, his mind suspended between waking and nightmare. From beneath the table he heard clutching noises amongst the papers. Then several claws scratched under the bed. He got up and thought: ‘Bloody rats.'

With his awareness of daybreak myriad sounds played upon his consciousness. An alarm clock rang. Cocks crowed. He heard the swishing broom of the woman whose turn it was to sweep the compound. A baby cried insistently in the backyard. An argument between a married couple had started. From the road, through the veil of dawn, he listened to the female prophet who every morning clanged her bell and called on people to repent before the apocalypse. Shortly afterwards he heard the newspaper vendor blasting his horn and announcing the most intriguing items of the day's news. And far away, the muezzin called the faithful to prayer.

He lay back on the bed and when he shut his eyes he remembered the events of the night before. How had he survived the intensities of that night? He didn't know. It was when he became aware of the fan blades blowing cool air at him that he suddenly realised what had woken him up. It wasn't the rats. The lights had been brought back. Feeling curiously happier, he thought about the previous night.

It had been a happy place – the walking, Ifeyiwa dancing, her yellow dress, and the rain. Then it became a sad place –the black-outs, the parting, the incomplete embrace. His eyes focussed and he found that he had been staring unseeing at the quote he had written on the wall: ‘Yesterday is but a dream.'

He turned over and thought about Ifeyiwa. He wondered if she had got home without any trouble. He knew how jealous, how vindictive her husband was. He had heard about the two thugs paid to beat up the photographer who, it was claimed, had attempted to seduce Ifeyiwa. The beating was so severe that the photographer, under cover of darkness, fled from the compound and was never seen again. His shop, with its displays of photographed babies, newly-weds, and hearses stayed empty till it was eventually turned into a barber's shop.

Omovo tried not to think about Ifeyiwa. Where could all the thinking lead, to what place, what precipice? Occasional companionship, an intense and distant friendship, decorous on the outside, was all he could really ask from her. He wanted more, burnt for more. She needed more – anything less would suffocate her. He turned over on the bed again as if the motion would stop him thinking, but the image of the two birds on the banks of the stagnant stream came back to him. When the image passed he found himself thinking about the painting, and beneath the thoughts was the growing panic that he couldn't remember any details of that other night in the park. Then he remembered Dr Okocha's quote: In dreams begin responsibilities. He felt reassured. In loss begins art, he thought. He found himself staring at the wall:

‘...and tomorrow is only a vision.'

He sat up on the bed. What is a dream and what isn't, he wondered. What is a vision and what isn't? His head throbbed. He could sleep no longer. He stared at the painting he had done to illustrate a poem Okur had written after their mother's death. It was an oil painting of three red birds scattered in a concussive expanse of colours. Okur had said that he had written the poem under the influence of marijuana.

Omovo shut his eyes and tried to forget. But one thought led to another. He lay back on his bed hoping to catch a little more sleep, but as he shut his eyes a rush of images poured over him. He couldn't escape them. Birds, keening, swooped on him. Wherever he turned, thousands of white birds were flying into his eyes. When he fought them off and ran he found some of them clinging to his hair. He pulled them off and screamed when he discovered that all the birds had been blinded. He sat up, and opened his eyes. Everything in the room was in place.

His mouth tasted sour. He needed to brush his teeth and he couldn't remember where he kept his chewing stick. Throwing the sheet off him, he stood up. His eyes went to the quote on the wall, as if magnetised by the words:

‘But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness…'

He pressed toothpaste on the brush and paused to regard himself in the mirror. He was dismayed at the longish shape of his head. He left the room wondering what on earth Ifeyiwa saw in him. Outside, it was cold and damp. The sky was the colour of an old man's beard. The air was fresh. And as he walked the length of the compound he could smell the day's new odours rising from the rooms. Children were balanced on potties. Some of the women had begun the morning's cooking. Some men, their faces heavy with sleep, stood in front of their rooms brushing their teeth with chewing sticks and scratching their stomachs. Young girls fetched water from the well.

When Omovo came back into the room he embarked on clearing up the profusion of objects on the table. His room was in such a mess that he abandoned the attempt at clarification. Then he stood there uncertain of what to do with himself, apprehensive of what the day held, he became aware that there was something he hadn't completed. Finally his eyes were drawn to the wall:

‘...and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day.'

I

Not long afterwards he heard a knock on the sitting room door. Then he heard his father talking to someone in an irritated but controlled tone of voice. Omovo opened his door and looked out and saw it was a Jehovah's Witness. His father told the woman pointedly that he didn't want to be preached to and didn't want any of the pamphlets. He shut the door in the woman's face. When he turned round he caught Omovo's eyes. Omovo, flustered, said: ‘Good morning, Dad.'

His father nodded absent-mindedly. He didn't move and he didn't look at his son. The wrinkles on his face had deepened further. His eyes had the wandering, unfocussed gaze of one who didn't want to fix his attention on anything. He looked lost, as if he couldn't recognise the details of his own sitting room. Omovo wanted to say something to his father. Anything. He wanted, for example, to ask his father to tell him a story. Any story. A story of ancient African heroes, of heroes that became gods, of gods that were banished from the earth. He wanted, spontaneously, to sing a song in his native Urhobo language. He wanted to ask about his father's business. Was it progressing? Were the debts turning into profits? Omovo wanted to ask all these things simultaneously: but he was stopped by the acres of frozen emotions, of cold spaces between them.

The curious thing was that his father stood next to the door with an expectancy about his stance which Omovo only noticed afterwards. After a moment his father made a vague gesture, picked up the Sunday papers from the table, adjusted his wrapper, and went into his room.

When he had gone Omovo felt a vague yearning, coloured by sadness. He decided to do some painting. He painted for an hour. At first the yearning, the sadness, was lost in his preoccupation. Then after a while he began to feel himself forcing the brush on the canvas. The urge to paint thinned. He felt no impulsion of images. He had been working but nothing caught fire inside him, nothing leapt out at him accidentally from the colours he had painted. He wasn't interested in what he was doing. Then he heard a voice within him say: ‘Why are you doing this?' He took it as a sign and abandoned the canvas.

Omovo was pacing his room when a boy knocked on his door and told him that Ifeyiwa said she was ready and waiting at the backyard. He remembered his promise to sketch her for a painting. The boy looked at him, waiting for a reply. Ifeyiwa had told him not to come back without one. Omovo said: ‘Tell her I'm coming.'

When the boy left, Omovo felt afraid. He was afraid of the spectacle of artist and model, made sinister by the fact that she was married. It troubled him that such an innocent spectacle could be taken as a public confession, a discreet sign of guilt.

Wishing that she would come and pose in a secret place, he got out his sketchbook and board. He moved towards the door and then stopped. He paced the room again. He felt curiously trapped. He felt trapped by his desire and by his inability, his unwillingness to resist its pull. Somewhere in his mind he was aware of the possible consequences of what he was going to do. He didn't want to think of consequences or of anything else. In a sudden outburst he banged on his table. As the papers amidst the clutter flew everywhere, agitated by the small table fan, he suddenly remembered the source of his nightmare.

Eight years ago, as a boy scout at school, he had gone for survival training in the forests. They had stayed two days in the wilds and had lived only on what they could get from the bush. On the evening of the third day they had got lost coming back to their tents. Someone had fired a gun not far from them and all of a sudden the forest swarmed with a confusion of white birds. Omovo fled for cover. He ran behind a tree and saw a woman staring at him. When she moved, bats flew from her dress into his face. He screamed and dashed to find the others. When they came back from their various covers the sky was calm and the forest was clear, as if nothing had happened. When Omovo went with a group of friends to look for the woman they found nothing except a scarecrow in the shape of a crude masquerade.

The act of reaching the source of the memory made Omovo feel elated. Feeling the joy that perhaps accompanies the pull of a strange fate, the magnetism of events being set on course forever, Omovo turned off the fan, picked up the papers, put them on the table, and went out. In the living room he found Blackie sitting on the arm of a chair staring at him. There was no malice in her gaze but she seemed to be staring right into his more secret thoughts. He didn't say anything to her. He rushed out into the compound.

In the backyard Ifeyiwa was hanging out the clothes she had been washing. She looked different. Overnight she seemed to have undergone a disenchantment. She looked pale. She seemed, in a matter of twelve hours, to have lost weight. There was no lustre on her face, and she wore rags. She seemed to have almost no connection with the girl he had walked into dreams with the night before. Omovo burnt for her, burnt for her secret pain, for her dull eyes, her sunken cheeks. He wanted so much to soothe her. He wanted badly for her life to be better, but he didn't know how he could help her. When she saw him her face lit up a trifle and her eyes became defiant. She smiled at him. Unduly conscious of the eyes of the compound, he didn't smile back.

‘What do you want me to do?' she asked.

‘Nothing.'

He had wanted to ask her to sit with her washing in front of her, but she had so suddenly become a mood he wanted to capture forever. He decided, instantly, to sketch her, to make several rapid sketches of her as she performed the ordinary actions of washing and drying clothes. The more he looked at her between sketches the more he noticed her beauty. It had become a hard beauty, softened only by her occasional smiles. The sadness, the love she made him feel, made him want to draw everything that was connected with her, as if his mood, his spirit, his love, as if her mystery and his helplessness, as if that instant resided for all time in the objects present. So as he drew her he also drew the cement wall of the well, the rusted buckets and unwashed plates, the collective kitchens behind her, the naked children with big stomachs near her, the faded blue wall of the compound, and the washing lines weighed down with clothes.