Harmattan (29 page)

‘She is. Walter met her a few years back, at some function that the American ambassador was throwing down at the Hotel Gaweye. She was a chambermaid there and he was just about to finish his first season in the country. Fell head over heels with each other. Next thing you know they’ve
tied the knot
and he’s whisked her off home with him.’

‘They went to Canada?’

‘Yes. But beautiful Binta there wasn’t happy in Quebec. Too cold. Snow and all that,’ Archie said, widening his kind, green eyes and flashing his crooked teeth at me.

‘Wanted to come back home to be near her family.’

‘And now they’ve got their own family,’ Abdelkrim said.

Archie smiled. ‘Yes. That’s little Dorette. Canadian born and citizen of the République du Niger!’

We all glanced at Binta, as she covered her breasts and leaned her golden-skinned baby across her knee to wind her. She looked towards our table and smiled.

Archie held up his beer bottle and smiled back, then chinked our bottles. ‘To good friends – and to departed ones.’

‘To our mother. May she meet our ancestors soon, and may God show us each other again,’ Abdelkrim said, tilting his bottle back.

Archie pushed his chair back. ‘I’ll introduce you. Walter’s just getting out of the pool.’ Abdelkrim reached across the table andput his hand on Archie’s wrist.

‘Another time, my friend. We have a big problem and I need your help.’

‘Of course I’ll help, if I can,’ Archie said, pulling his chair back towards the table. ‘What can I do?’

Abdelkrim lit a cigarette and sighed.

Archie pulled a funny face and pretended to hold his nose as Abdelkrim’s blue smoke wafted around us. I smiled back and fanned the air in front of me.

‘We have to get our mother’s body back to our village by tomorrow morning.’

Archie opened his hands and nodded, his expression serious now.

‘She must be laid to rest immediately. If we are unable to do this, her spirit will never be at peace.’ Abdelkrim sat back in his chair and glanced at me. ‘That is what my people believe.’

‘Right,’ Archie said, thoughtfully. ‘And what? You need money to get to Wadata?’

‘I need you and your car, my friend.’

Archie stared blankly for a few moments, first at Abdelkrim and then at me. ‘My car? You want
me
to transport your mother’s body?’

‘I’m sorry to ask,’ my brother said, ‘but I can’t think of any other way.’

Archie scratched the bridge of his pale nose. ‘You’ve seen my car, Abdel,’ he said. ‘It’s a wreck!’

‘It’s a Mercedes,’ Abdelkrim said, a little smile softening his grim expression.

‘Mercedes Benz is a very reliable make of car. And with your students on strike you are not so busy, I think?’

Archie Cargo was fiddling with a lock of his hair now. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I bought that car three years ago – from a French guy who fancied himself as a Paris-Dakar rally driver. Somehow he’d managed to get it across the Ténéré Desert, but it was already half destroyed by the time he arrived in Niamey!’ He lifted Abdelkim’s plastic lighter and began playing with it. ‘As for my students; I’d like to think that they’d be back at the college tomorrow.’

‘I wouldn’t count on that,’ Abdelkrim said. ‘Have you seen what’s going on out there? There are gendarmerie and soldiers everywhere!’

‘Why do you think I’m staying here out of the way?’ Archie said. He eyed my brother up and down. ‘What about you, Abdel? Won’t your superiors be looking for you?’ Abdelkrim shuffled. ‘I’m kind of on a half day’s compassionate leave–unofficially.

There’s someone watching my back but, yes, I’ll need to notify my unit that I’m burying my mother.’

Archie set the lighter on its end, then flicked it with his finger. ‘Wadata. That’s Tera country, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How far is it? One hundred and fifty kilometres?’

My brother nodded. ‘Something like that.’

‘A long drive. Even if we left now, we’d be driving through the night.’

‘There’s a good road, part of the way. Of course, I will cover all costs,’

Abdelkrim said. ‘That is… when I get paid.’

Archie Cargo waved the comment aside. ‘Hmm. And my car’s hardly equipped…’

‘I wouldn’t ask, Archie,’ Abdelkrim said, ‘but it’s either you or the
camion
.’

The thought of my poor mother’s shrouded body being thrown about on the back of one of the huge desert trucks like the one that had transported me to the city only the previous evening filled me with horror.

‘I suppose I could try to find a bush taxi driver who would be willing to take a cadaver and give me credit,’ he added.

Archie gave a little snort. ‘It’s a wonder most bush taxi passengers don’t end up
as
cadavers. Most of them are death traps!’

Abdelkrim put his hands to his chest. ‘My friend,’ he said. ‘My good friend. We would need to organise things now.’

Archie looked at me, blankly. There was a long silence. ‘How do we do this, Abdel?’ he said, eventually.

My brother put his cigarette out and patted my arm. ‘Go and wait for us by the entrance, Haoua.’

For a moment I considered protesting, but the sudden, business-like mood of the two men persuaded me otherwise. As I was leaving the pool area, I looked across at Binta’s table. Her bespectacled husband was standing dripping before her now, patting his pale body with a large, thick towel the colour of the bissap flowers by the entrance.

Binta held up one of her baby’s fat, golden hands and waved it in my direction. I smiled and waved back, even though I was sure that the child’s deep, beautiful eyes could not possibly have registered me.

I made my way back along the shiny wet path, past the bushes with leaves bright and green, like plastic, past the guard’s hut and the drooping flag and through the great iron gates, all the while thinking about Fatima and Adamou and wondering how my father would break the news to them about our dear, sweet mother.

I am not sure how long I waited outside the gates of the American Recreation Center.

From time to time, the guard would pop his head out of his hut to spit into the foliage or to clear dust from his nasal passages, but he did not speak to me. Overhead, in the boughs of magnificent and ancient mahogany trees, angry birds screeched and scraked their displeasure at the heat and bustle below. I sat on the seat of the motorcycle, watching the relentless traffic: saloon taxis, bush taxis, cars, buses,
camions
, convoys of military vehicles, ox carts, donkey carts, camels, horses, bicycles, motorcycles, wheelchairs, pedestrians. An endless stream. And high above, like giant dragonflies, three helicopters buzzed angrily across the sweltering, dust-filtered haze, disturbing the birds still more.

When my brother and Archie Cargo eventually appeared, they seemed to have agreed a plan. Archie unlocked his car, popped open the trunk, wound down all of the windows and opened a hatch in the roof, then held open the creaking back door for me.

‘Hop in, Mademoiselle,’ he said.

I looked at Abdelkrim and he nodded affirmation. The interior of the car was stiflingly hot and the distinct smell of layered, stale sweat wafted from the fabric of the seats and head cloth. Archie kneed my door closed, before bending over the motorcycle and taking a firm grasp at the forks. Abdelkrim had hold of the rear of the bike and together they wrestled it up and into the large trunk.

‘Do you think we need to tie the lid down?’ Archie said.

My brother shook his head. ‘No. The barracks isn’t very far. Just drive slowly so that it doesn’t bounce out. Bouleb will have my hide if that happens!’

The barracks was a bleak and imposing kind of place adjoining the city’s main prison, about which there were many terrifying stories told – even in Wadata. We had parked some distance away from the main entrance and Abdelkrim and Archie had removed Sergeant Bouleb’s motorcycle from the trunk of the car. I was sitting in the back, fanning myself with a magazine which had been lying on Archie’s window shelf and observing the forbidding exterior of the barracks over the shoulders of the two men who were now back in the car. An odd little green, plastic man with a white beard and yellow stockings dangled from the rear view mirror and made me smile momentarily.

Archie Cargo’s kind eyes caught my smile, reflected. ‘Are you okay, back there?’ he said.

‘Yes, thank you, Monsieur.’

‘Archie.’

‘Archie,’ I said, hesitantly, and smiled again.

‘That’s my leprechaun.’

‘Leprechaun?’

‘Kind of a good spirit. The
Little People
, we call them. My silly cousin sent him to me from home. He’s my talisman, my amulet, you know?’ he said, whacking at the figure so that it rebounded off the windscreen. ‘Everybody in Niger needs an amulet before making a journey!’

I nodded and leaned back against my seat, feeling at my bundle to make sure that both the cockerel’s foot which Madame Kantao had given me and my treasures were safe. Ahead of us, at the entrance of the barracks, two sentries stood rigidly to attention, rifles by their sides. I noticed that, by blinking first one eye and then the other, I could make the little green man appear to jump, back and forth, between the two sentries.

In the front, to my right, Abdelkrim was busy scribbling a note to Sergeant Bouleb, a grubby exercise book on his lap. When he had finished writing, he tore the page out of the book.

Archie took an envelope from a little locker beneath the dashboard and handed it to him. ‘Seal it and write your sergeant’s name on the front,’ he said.

Abdelkrim did as he was told and then handed the envelope back to his friend.

‘Back in a moment,’ Archie said, getting out of the car.

‘What is he doing?’ I said, as we watched him cross the road and walk in the direction of the sentries.

‘We’re just letting Bouleb know that his bike is here,’ Abdelkrim replied, slumping down in his seat. ‘It’s best if I keep out of sight.’

Archie was talking to one of the sentries, his hands waving about and occasionally pointing towards the motorcycle, which was now parked a few metres behind us. When he eventually persuaded the soldier to take the envelope, he crossed the road again and got back into the driver’s seat. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘That’s that. Where to now?’

‘We’ll need water, fuel, that sort of thing,’ my brother said. He looked at Archie, a great frown on his face. ‘I don’t have much money left.’

‘We’ll sort that out again, Abdel,’ Archie said, starting the engine.

I remained in the car while Abdelkrim and Archie shopped in a French
supermarché.

Through the dirty rear window of the vehicle and the perfectly clear glass of the shop front, I could make out an abundance of foodstuffs and beverages the likes of which I had never seen before. Tins stacked to the ceiling, shelf after shelf of brightly coloured boxes, beautiful photographs of succulent meats and fish, and fruit and vegetables so flawless they did not look real.

The men emerged from this wondrous place carrying a tray of bottled water and several brown paper bags. ‘Throw my jacket over the water, will you, Haoua,’ Archie said, placing the tray on the back seat beside me. ‘Keep it in the shade.’ He dropped a chocolate bar into my lap and got back into the driver’s seat.

I thanked him and tore open the packaging. Part of me wanting to savour this most wonderful treat: instead, I bit into it greedily, surprised to discover that the chocolate was not just delicious, but cold and brittle. I was happy to allow the awful pain deep within me to be pushed aside, if only for a few moments.

Abdelkrim was lighting another cigarette. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he said, addressing his friend.

‘I’m not bothered,’ Archie said. He tilted his head back towards me. ‘Just so long as your little sister there doesn’t mind.’ They both looked at me.

I shrugged, my cheeks bulging. Cigarette smoke was the least of my worries at that moment.

Abdelkrim exhaled and shook his head. ‘I suppose there’s nothing else for it but to collect the body now.’

The body
.

Archie leaned across and patted my brother on the shoulder, then pursed his lips and sat back. He drummed a rhythm on the streering wheel. ‘What about a…casket?’ he said.

‘
Walayi!
I hadn’t even thought of that!’ Abdelkrim said.

‘It’s only just crossed my mind,’ Archie said. He glanced at me briefly and lowered his voice. ‘Presumably she’ll be wrapped in some kind of shroud at the mortuary, of course. But, you know, Abdel, we’re going to have to carry her on the roof. We can hardly do that without some kind of receptacle.’

‘
D’accord
.’ My brother blew smoke out of the window and then cradled his face in his free hand. ‘
Merde
!’

‘And we’ll need some ropes.’

‘Yes.’

Until then I had not considered this indignity for my mother. And a casket was not only necessary for transportation. In the past, my people had buried their dead in shrouds only, but wild dogs had become an ever increasing problem in and around Wadata.Abdelkrim sighed heavily and threw his cigarette out of the window. ‘What about the university, Archie?’

‘The university?’

‘Your workshop. You have timber there,
n’est-ce pas
? I can’t afford to buy a coffin.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Could we make something ourselves?’

Archie leaned forward and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. ‘This is getting crazier by the moment! I make furniture, not coffins,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ my brother said.

There was a brief silence, then Archie slammed back into his seat. ‘Right. I guess we can knock something up. It’s going to take a while though.’

‘How long do you think?’

Archie shrugged. ‘I suppose we can rip a couple of sheets of chipboard and cobble something together in an hour or so. If you’re helping me. It’s not going to be very pretty though.’

My brother held his hand out to shake Archie’s. ‘Thank you, my friend,’ he said. ‘I will repay you for your kindness.’

‘Hey, you know I’m always looking for money making ideas for my students.

Who knows; perhaps this could be the beginning of another little side line!’