by Claire North
Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea. On that trip, he’d crossed paths with the Harbinger of Pestilence many, many times, but the Harbinger of Pestilence’s work had kept him in a hotel near the largest Médecins Sans Frontières team, his shoes stinking of chlorine, a rash developing on his belly from too much time in a sealed white suit; whereas the Harbinger of Death had crossed into Mali, heading for Bamako, then further north to the temples that would soon burn, though no one really understood why.
Botswana. The Harbinger of Death hadn’t expected to be asked to deliver anything to the wild, to the places where no living thing roamed, but there he was in the dead of night, laying out an offering of fresh red meat from the butcher’s shop on the grass.
The lions came once he was gone, and the brown elephants lingered another night by the dried-up riverbank, and perhaps they too saw Death, in whatever fashion such things appear to creatures of the long grass.
In Eritrea the Harbinger of Death had been arrested, and thrown into a tiny room too narrow to sit, too low to stand, and remained there, hunched up around his own body, waiting for the best part of a day, his feet swollen and the floor soaked in piss—his, someone else’s, the dried-up stench of a hundred men’s—until Milton Keynes made a phone call and got him out.
Death had not been impressed by this treatment of his Harbinger, who had after all been sent as a courtesy.
Death, when unimpressed, will make her feelings known. But the journalists who would have told the world of all they saw that night, the night when Death came with a flaming sword, blood in her mouth, were already dead, and the corpses were buried without name.
Durban, the day the school in Glenwood ceremonially tore the last remnant of a low brick wall down. “Once,” said the headmistress, “this wall was built so that the black children learned on one side, and the whites learned on the other. Some walls fall slowly, but in time, they do fall, and our children are the ones who make that future bright.”
Angola, the day the women came to the still waters of the lake, with their glass tubes and their rubber gloves and their carefully cooled medicines in the back of the truck, and took water samples and said yes, today yes, there is no more guinea worm here.
Do nematodes behold Death?
swim swim eat reproduce swim swim eat reproduce
Kenya. “I shot the poacher so the rhino might live. There are five hundred rhino left alive on this planet. There are more poachers who will come, and I will shoot them too.”
Kigali. “We will live. We will make of this land something better, and something new. We will remember the past. We will look to the future. We will build Jerusalem.”
Ghana, a gift from Death to the generals of a book on the history of the French Revolution, the Terror, and all that followed. That year elections were contested and the monitors turned round and proclaimed that the outcome was democratic and fair, and the soldiers stayed home, and the people sang in the streets.
For these things too, Death comes, and some said that on that day, Death too sang and danced, and that night only the old died.
The night before he flies, he brings Emmi flowers, and cooks her dinner, and she’s getting better at accepting both these things, getting better at believing someone might love her, and that’s okay.
The Harbinger of Death flies to Lagos.
Chapter 64
A man met him at the airport. The man was not an inch over five foot, and if he turned sideways he was an almost perfectly thin, straight line. He had a polished shaved head, a little flat nose, perfectly oval eyes and a smile that stretched out so far towards his ears that it seemed to pull his neck out with it, straining muscles in places muscles should not have been strained in their vigorous exercise of friendliness. He clutched a cardboard placard in both hands. On it was written in large black pen: MR HABRENGER.
“Ah you are the Harbinger of Death welcome welcome welcome I am Yomi welcome please come this way let me take your bags thank you your bags did you have a good flight not too long not too hot people complain it’s too hot but this is mild mild really please come here is my car—go away boy go away make you no vex me—sorry the children they always annoying here, here, sit down let me move that you like music, I have the best music you like One Direction?”
“Um …”
“… you should stay tonight! Hey! You see that guy, the pylee they no good, go slow, go slow …”
“Is the traffic always so …?”
“Hold on, I see a way through!”
“Are you supposed to drive on the kerb?”
“Everyone does it—look, he’s driving the wrong way!”
“So he is.”
“You okay?”
“I’m … I’m not in a hurry, I think, I think that’s what I mean to say, there’s no need to rush on my behalf …”
“Eh, this is how you get around in Lagos, you’re in Naira now, you gotta learn how these things work!”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Hey—you here to kill anyone big?”
“No, I don’t actually kill …”
“There’s bad blood, bad blood flowing now, people are scared and when people are scared, big kasala, it all feeds itself, fear and fear and fear and fear feeding itself hey, if you could make an engine that worked like fear there’d be no more pollution, no more stink in the air but only fear, only fear you know, beats entropy, till Death she comes. But eh—you live, don’t you? You live while you are alive and that’s how the fear stops, so hey hey, live, that be all, live!”
Yomi chuckled at this thought, then slammed his fist into his horn as a car scraped along the side of his own.
A hotel in Ikoyi, Lagos Island. Huge pride was taken in the place feeling like it was anywhere in the world, except, perhaps, in Nigeria. The floors, polished by a rotating machine on the end of a pole pushed by a woman who’d been told to leave her hooped earrings at home; the potted plants, rubbery with dark grey grit like cat litter all around the base of the stem. The reception desk, with a brass plaque on it that said Reception; the red uniforms, far too heavy and hot for the climate, the bright smiles, the man who stood by the elevator and leapt, as if stung by a cattle prod, to press the button before you could and—now this was the impressive part—didn’t demand a tip for his service: was this Lagos?
The Harbinger of Death stood in the window of his room on the seventh floor, and looked out across the lagoon towards the fume-smothered brown-grey shimmering horizon, heard the car horns blare in the street, felt the rattling of the local generators buzzing behind the houses, and for a moment wasn’t sure if he hadn’t been here before. Maybe he had—or rather, maybe another Harbinger of Death had been here, some few years ago, and he was remembering her thoughts, all the memories of the Harbingers blurring into one, arrivals, departures, arrivals, departures …
(For a moment, Charlie closed his eyes, and thought he knew how it felt to soar above the walls of burning Rome, eagle wings and yellow eyes, and found absolutely nothing strange in this thought.)
(Jet lag can be a funny thing. Just jet lag.)
Lagos, in the evening, walking along the inland shore. The air around the lagoon is skin sticky. Even on the water, where cooler breezes should blow away clinging sweat and the smell of stagnation, the heat seems to break up from the bottom of the boat as if being cut free from the sea. It is hard to find a place where there aren’t other people, except in the hotel room. At the side of the busy roads stand women with great vats and platters balanced on their heads—moin moin, akara, ewa agoyin and bread, fried plantain, beef stew, black beans and vinegary nibbles, barbecued meat to burn to the pit of your belly, sacks of boiled peanut and charcoal-grilled croaker fish covered in orange sauce that tingled on the ends of Charlie’s fingers long after he’d licked them clean. He toyed with buying green eggplant from a man in shorts and flip-flops who stood outside a shop that was 99 per cent mobile phones to only 1 per cent air to breathe, and decided against it. Traveller’s sick
ness was almost inevitable, and there was a certain argument in getting it over and done with, but he wasn’t in Lagos for long; maybe this time, maybe, he could dodge that bullet.
A police car in the distance, and the women squatting by their sizzling tin-foil stoves vanished like morning mist, no fuss, just a part of business. Oyinbo, oyinbo, called the children as Charlie wove his way through the deadly, yield-none traffic. Oyinbo, oyinbo, foreigner, white man! Sometimes there were pavements on the side of the roads. Sometimes there weren’t. Sometimes there were shallow muddy paths where a pavement had been intended, but no slabs had arrived. Sometimes there were giant advertising hoardings offering American burgers or redemption in the bosom of Christ. There were very few beggars. Even the old widows, stooped and toothless, waddled up and down the road trying to sell bruised fruit or toy guns, their bodies swathed round with purples and blues, yellows and greens, scuffed at the hem.
Power goes out, again, again, the people groan, curse, mutter, how can we work this way? In the sprawling shanty houses that press against each other in every nook of Lagos, that crawl to the edges of the white mansions where the superstars and the pop stars and the God stars and the military men live, the cables are tugged every which way across the sky, and the electricity company curses and says, “How can we provide you with anything, when you steal it all?”
“You don’t even have anything for us to steal!” comes the reply. “You don’t even give us that!”
And so it goes on.
Morning, Charlie had a long appointments list. Yomi met him outside the hotel gate. Charlie had to run down to vouch for his fuming driver—the security guards wouldn’t let him in, until Charlie appeared.
“Where you wanna go today?” asked Yomi.
“I need to pick a few things up, then drop a few things off.”
A shrug. “It’s your job, abi!”
They drove through the chugging Lagos traffic, horn blaring sociably. Yomi, after some persuasion, flicked the radio on, rolled through the stations.
“And I say Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!”
“Oh Barbara Ann, take my hand …”
“Fighting in the north …”
“I’m talking about the environmental consequences of …”
“Difference is, Yoruba, I’m talking about the nation now, the Yoruba nation …”
“The time is twelve, midnight my brother …”
“God don butta my bread.”
“Our country dem wan repair …”
“Eh, that sounds like you’ve got a serious problem, caller, a serious problem, let’s ask our listeners at home what they think.”
In the end, they settled for what Yomi assured Charlie was mildly acceptable Yo-pop and Afrobeat, if you liked that kind of thing.
Charlie did. Charlie liked hearing the music of the places he went. It was something that always stuck with him, a thing he remembered and cherished. If he got the chance, he’d like to visit the Africa Shrine, but Yomi tutted and said no no, if you want to hear real music, proper music, I’ll take you to Ikeja, you can hear the new bands play, the new songs!
Is it like One Direction? Charlie asked, his heart sinking.
Yomi glared at him, a sudden fury in his gaze so hard that Charlie swallowed, fought not to look away. “All that is music for the driving and the working,” he replied. “Naira music is music for the people, the justice and the soul.”
Charlie said he thought that sounded perfect. In the day they drove out of Lagos, a hundred miles there, a hundred miles back, to deliver a bucket and spade to a family deep in a muddy river delta, where distant plumes of flame turned the sky black and orange. Then they went at night to listen to the new music being made, and Charlie ended up getting slightly drunk with a very drunk Yomi, and the two of them shared a taxi back to Lagos Island with an educational technologist (“technology can change the way our children learn”) and a nurse (“the reason the rural nurses don’t turn up for work is because the work they’re being asked to do is ridiculous”).
The next day, they drove again through the too-bright, belching wide Lagos streets, beneath the growing towers of the banks and the telecom companies, past the heavy palm trees and round the endless growling byways and highways. Charlie checked his phone for the list of names he had to visit, and doubted they’d make it to all of them, not through a city so wide, so dense, through a place of concrete and tar, iron and dirt, of weaving cars and shouting hawkers, of buses bursting to the seams, of billboards and markets, shops and docks; he’d need to add another day at least, maybe two—but that was okay, these things happened, and in an odd sort of way, through the heat and the sweat and the grumbling and the noise, he was having a good time. The wet heat of the city was burning something of the dryness of the Syrian desert from him, and now when he closed his eyes at night he only sometimes—only when he permitted his mind to wander—saw the eyes of a hundred corpses staring back at him. Only sometimes. Then he felt guilt that he didn’t see them more. Then he saw them again. Then he turned on the light and washed his face to drive their glares away. Then, eventually, he slept, and the world moved on, and the music played and the voices chattered and the earth was piled upon the bones, and sometimes he remembered, and sometimes he simply lived, and sometimes—very occasionally—he was okay with doing both.
Busy busy busy. There were times when Death liked to work like this, many appointments in one place, all at once; Saga had warned him to keep an eye out for such things, be sure to get his flight back home. “Earthquakes, tsunamis, intense local shocks of that sort, keep an eye out for Pestilence, usually a sign of something if she’s around …” Then she’d thought about it again, and added, “Or maybe it’s just Milton Keynes. Do a job lot on a single airline ticket, visit as many people in one place as possible, economise, be efficient in your harbingering—after all, it’s hell getting through immigration in Moscow these days, and visits to Israel or Cuba almost always need a separate passport.”
A shopping mall, anywhere in the world, families having fried chicken on plastic chairs as the shoppers moved around them, brilliant pinks and ruby reds on their bodies, eager to buy the latest black-and-whites from the designer outlets. Kitchen goods, children’s books, video games, DVDs of the latest Nollywood hit, travel agent, pharmacy megastore complete with deluxe nappies. The dapper men stared at the gold watches in the windows, their silk handkerchiefs folded immaculately in their jacket pockets, leather shoes polished to perfection—by day he sells washing machines, and at night to supplement his income he teaches a little maths to some of the children in his street, where he still lives with his wife, his mother, her mother, their two sons—but you will not tell this from his clothes, not him, not this perfect gentleman!
In an international chain that sells international makes of baby buggy, made in China, the Harbinger of Death gives a woman with bright red lips and deep black eyes a book of laws bought from a shop near the university. She takes it nervously, then looks up and says, “Is it Boko Haram? Are they going to shoot this place up, like they did in Nairobi?”
Charlie doesn’t know.
As they headed towards Mushin, Yomi’s phone rang. “You appear to be heading into Mushin,” said the polite voice on the other end of the line. “Are you all right?”
“Yes yes,” barked Yomi briskly. “I’m taking my client there!”
After he hung up, Yomi looked briefly ashamed, then blurted, fast, “My wife. She insisted I got the car fitted. Just in case, you know.”
Charlie didn’t answer.
“She wants to move to Abuja,” he added, into the silence. “She says it’s a better place, but I visited Abuja once, and it was boring. Boring boring boring, no good, not like here, not like Lagos, Lagos is the magic place, that I swear, that I swear until the day I die.”
His honour a little restored at this proud declaration, they drove on, to the sound of the radio.
Unpaved streets between unlicensed houses. The first time Charlie visi
ted a shanty town, he’d imagined dark, Dickensian alleys, leering faces. The first time he visited a shanty town, someone had tried to sell him a Coca-Cola and had wanted to know which mobile phone network he recommended. That man had lived in a single room the size of Charlie’s kitchen, which he shared with seven others. The roof was corrugated iron, the walls were patched with card. They watched football on a TV 30×30 cm, stole the power from the big development next door, and Charlie had wondered what team they supported, and where he could get the shirt. They squatted in a gulley dug in the road out back to shit and piss, but what the hell, the man had said, it’s a roof, it’s family, it’s home, you know?
Now he comes to Mushin, and gives a woman and her three children a trowel and a tape measure. The woman smiles and says thank you, and her children stare and say thank you also, because that’s what good manners ask, and Charlie gets into the car and drives away again, back onto the belching bypass that swings above the streets of blustering, waiting men.
In an expensive condo on the shores of Victoria Island, the Harbinger of Death passes through two security men and a PA to reach a boss who sits with his feet up on a polished glass desk, a man who made something big in telecoms a few years back, and has now got so rich he’s forgotten what it was like to run a business and doesn’t realise how little of his own profit he really sees. Charlie gives him a small brush, of the kind used for cleaning the inside of tight-lipped bottles, metal fibres spiking off the side, and the man stares at it then laughs and says, “It is for the gun, no?” and pulls from his desk a revolver, brand new, elephant-tusk handle and heavy silver, almost too heavy to lift, the kickback hard enough to break the hand if you’re not paying attention. “I got it for the streets,” he explained. “The streets, the people, uch, the people, so jealous!”
