Refuge

by Andrew Brown

  Richard crumpled up the piece of paper and threw it inaccurately at the waste-paper basket. It bounced off the wall and rolled behind a potted fern. Cursing, he rose and stooped to pick it up. He felt a twinge of pain running from his right buttock up to the centre of his spine. He winced but still stretched to reach the ball of paper. His shoulder muscle felt stiff and uncooperative. He could feel the tension across the breadth of his back, pulling down on the sides of his neck. He stood up with the paper in his hand, rolling his shoulders to try to relieve the pressure. Sighing, he went back to his desk, took a sip of water and swallowed the painkillers. He flattened the crinkled message out on his desk. Only a cellphone number was scrawled on the torn page.

  Richard left the piece of paper on one side of his desk and started to do some work, but the sudden awareness of the tightness around his shoulders and the presence of the telephone number within his field of vision distracted him. After an unproductive half-hour he picked up the note and dialled the number, holding the receiver with one hand and prodding at his shoulder with the other. He felt a small surge of anticipation when the call was answered. A woman’s voice asked him whether he would like to make a booking. There was something illicit about talking to a strange woman on her cellphone, as if the communication could only be furtive, no matter how innocent. He felt foolish and guilty, eyeing the half-open door in case Nadine made an appearance. He hurriedly made a booking for three o’clock the following afternoon. The woman’s manner was courteous and a little distant, but her voice had a warm lilt that stayed with him for some time after he ended the call.

  FIVE

  THE SWEAT BEADED and trickled down Ifasen’s neck in rivulets as he picked his way between the rows of cars. The tarmac was searing underfoot and he could feel the heat gnawing at his worn shoes like coals from an open fire. The exhaust fumes filled the air with a biting chemical odour as the cars lined up, deeper and further into the distance, sweeping away down the incline. He heard the fans switch on in front of the engines, one by one, as their internal temperatures rose. He noticed how the revs of the motors climbed, almost imperceptibly, in response to the driver’s demand for cooler air in their cloistered compartments. The smaller the engine, the higher the buzz as it idled. The diesel bakkies made the lowest sound, kicking over like bored tractors. Ifasen looked at the Land Cruisers, their fat tyres oozing out like slugs from beneath the bodywork. In comparison the thin wheels on the tinny Korean hatchbacks looked like buttons stuck on the side of cardboard cut-outs. Sometimes he would tell someone if he saw their tyre was flat. More often now he did not bother, tired of the dismissive waves of the hands. He watched the commuters drive off, the rubber tearing on the rim as it squeezed onto the tar.

  Sometimes he fought off boredom by estimating the value of the cars waiting around him. It was usually more than a million rand. His record was two million seven hundred thousand, on a day when the luxury 4X4s lined up as if at a motor show. But unfailingly the lights would change and the millions’ worth would disappear, only to be replaced by another offering of prosperity. It was endless, the movement of people and their vehicles, an extravagant river that never ran dry.

  The car beside him threw out swirling clouds of oily smoke as the driver pushed the accelerator in anticipation of the lights changing. The smoke drifted slowly, hardly clearing. Ifasen glared at him but the man avoided any eye contact. Some days he found the drivers’ reactions amusing, the way they avoided looking at him, or waited for him to walk alongside the window and then gently edged forward, surreptitiously indicating that they had more important things to do or that the lights were about to change, so they could not dally. An open window was always the most promising, but inevitably the glass would glide up, as if by some invisible hand, slotting into place just before he could reach the door. The driver would look away from him, or sometimes just shrug, as if the workings of their car were a mystery to them. The most farcical were the manicured women elevated in their fourwheel drives, one hand playing with the rear-view mirror and the other clutching a cellular telephone to their ear. Distracted by their phone call, their eyes would wander until, by accident, they met his attentive gaze. He could see the panicked frown pick at their eyebrows, the way they started to lose concentration on the conversation. He would watch them for a while, playing with their averted, worried stare. Then he would move forward, not quickly, but with a focus that made them start. They would lean awkwardly towards the window, pushing their elbow down to lock the door, or stretch forward to touch a central-locking button, the four doors giving a defiant clunk as he approached. What did they think, he wondered, these comical people with so much to fear?

  But today their deliberate refusal to acknowledge his presence left him angered. His plastic mobiles twirled on their hanger, flimsy fairies and blue dolphins cavorting together in the warm air. The heat was oppressive and his potential customers secluded themselves in cool, inaccessible privacy. A woman with two small children jostling on the back seat slowed and stopped a distance from him. She shook her head in irritation at him even before he had reached her window. She was wearing a thin-strapped cotton top that pulled tightly across her chest, flattening her already shrunken breasts. Cigarette smoke drifted towards the open crack at the top of her window, curling along the length of glass. She glared at him and screwed up her face, as if his very existence was repulsive to her. There was such ugliness in her expression, such hatred as she clenched her jaw, that Ifasen felt guilty, as if he had shown her children something evil, somehow disclosed to them a world they ought not to have seen. But they were unaware of him, needling each other with pinches and jabs.

  The woman reminded him of his mother; she had the same narrow, pinched demeanour and ungracious spirit of retribution. Home could never wander far from his thoughts – not only for all that he had forsaken, but for the shame he felt when he imagined his parents’ disapproval, looking down on him as he struggled to sell his plastic trinkets. Such aspirations they had had for him, the nobility of the clergy, the satisfaction of a professional career, the vigour of academic achievement. And how would he explain Abayomi’s work to them, the ambiguity of pleasuring men? How surprised they would be to know what he had become. He hardly knew how to countenance it himself. The woman looked away, her mouth tight and creased. He knew his mother made the same shrew-face at beggars on the streets of Abuja.

  Today he could not bring himself to mouth the word ‘please’ or even look forlornly at the cars as they drew up towards him. He had not sold anything all day. It was too hot for anyone to open their window or stop their car. He looked dishevelled and unclean and no one wanted to be contaminated. His shoulders hung off his thin frame. He thought about seeking refuge from the sun under the canopy of a pavement tree. Then, to his surprise, he heard a short hoot and turned to see a woman winding down the window of a rusted Volkswagen beetle. He forced a smile as he trotted up to her.

  The cloying aroma of jasmine incense escaped from the interior of the car. ‘Good morning,’ he said, trying to seem polite. The woman had natural blonde hair, matted into the beginnings of dreadlocks like bunches of drying fish. A nose ring shone out from her nostril. Her eyes looked weepy and red in the corners, as if she might have an infection. Ifasen thought about saying something, but stopped himself, holding up his mobiles for her to look at instead.

  The woman gazed at them appreciatively. ‘They’re pretty, hey?’ She spoke slowly and her voice drawled a bit, as if she was half-asleep. Ifasen nodded eagerly. A delivery van waiting behind them hooted as the cars in front started to move.

  ‘Would you like to buy one?’ Ifasen ignored the shouts from the van. ‘They’re only fifteen rand each.’

  ‘They’re so damn pretty, man. You make them yourself?’

  The factory-pressed cut-outs fluttered about before her. Ifasen shook his head reluctantly: no, these weren’t made by me, he thought ruefully. For God’s sake, look at them, my girl.

  The van’s hooter blar
ed at them. A young man with no front teeth and a closely cropped haircut stuck his head out of the window. ‘Lady, where the hell did you get your licence, mei bru? Fucking Tafelberg Furnishers? Drive, man! Drive!’

  ‘Ja, hey,’ the woman said vaguely, waving to Ifasen. ‘Check you again. Pretty things, hey? Such pretty things …’ Her voice trailed off as the car jerked forward, powered as much by the expletives blasting from behind as the engine itself.

  ‘Fucking nowhere to go to and all day to get there!’ As the delivery van drew alongside him, Ifasen opened his mouth to protest.

  ‘What you looking at, poes?’ the driver said, his face close to Ifasen’s, curled up in a snarl. The van kept rolling forward and the man’s insults were lost in the roar of traffic around him. The lanes slowly cleared and for a moment the air was still again.

  An old beggar lumbered off the centre island, dragging a shrivelled leg and pushing his crutch hard onto the tar, letting the battered wooden post take his full weight. The man worked the intersection alongside Ifasen every day. The colour had bleached from his torn clothes, fading into a uniform grey, save for a bright red piece of yachting rope, wound around his waist as a belt. The man hobbled towards Ifasen and hissed at him. Ifasen had grown accustomed to his strange manner; he knew the beggar was given to unpredictable outbursts of mirth and rage. The man often spoke to himself, berating himself so loudly that he scared the commuters and sometimes chased off any hope of sales. Ifasen took a step back to let him pass. The beggar reeked of urine and unwashed sweat. A small car approached in the fast lane, and the old man turned to face it, defiantly standing in the way. The car slowed, flashed its lights and then started to drift into the middle lane. The beggar began to murmur to himself, a low hum of obscenities that flowed like a well-oiled poem. With his free hand he gesticulated feebly towards the open lane. The driver had slowed almost to a stop as he drew level with him. Suddenly the old man leapt to life, stretching his eyes and showing his teeth and tongue like a wild animal. He stuck out his gnarled hand towards the passenger in the back seat, a young Muslim woman wearing a headscarf. She shrieked in alarm and scuttled across the seat to the other side of the car. The driver whipped around in his seat, aggressive, sizing up first the beggar, then Ifasen, assessing the beggar’s intentions. The robot changed again and he pulled off quickly into the intersection. A minibus taxi screeched through the red light, nearly colliding with the small car. Raised voices echoed hollowly back and forth. The beggar grunted again, as if satisfied with the chaos, and shuffled across the lane of moving traffic, making the waiting cars hoot in annoyance as they tried to speed off. He waved his hand in dismissal, still grumbling to himself.

  Ifasen did not mind the beggar, although the man did sometimes intimidate his potential buyers. He reminded Ifasen of an old fisherman he had met as a child on holiday in the Niger Delta. Both men were self-absorbed and demented, but also ultimately harmless. Ifasen had been given a new fishing rod for his birthday, a flimsy rod with reel line as thin as cotton. He had stood on the mud flats, trying to cast his small lump of bait into the deeper channels, but landing time and again in the shallow grasses. The stems shredded his bait and caught his hook. Each time he had to snap the line and start again. His frustration rose at the injustice of his own childish ineptitude. The old man had watched him for a while, standing still on the grey beach, staring at Ifasen and making him feel self-conscious. Then the man walked up to Ifasen and, without a word, took his rod from him, neatly reeling up the line and securing the hook.

  He showed Ifasen how to wrap thin strips of putrid animal fat around bread as bait, his thick fingers blackened with grease. Then he took him by the collar of his shirt, pinching the fabric into his fist, and led him past the young fishermen who stood proudly with their rods gleaming in the sun, neat lines running out straight and deep into the still water. They pulled their fresh prawns from the buckets, still snapping their small tails, and spun elasticised thread around them to attach them to the hooks. The ends of their lines branched into an array of red-and-white floats and large, dull sinkers.

  The young men bayed at them as they passed. ‘Don’t you know that fish don’t eat dead goat, old man? What are you trying to catch? Vultures?’ Then they laughed and slapped their thighs at their clever humour. The first time Ifasen had been embarrassed and a little scared by the old man’s calloused grip on his arm. But the fisherman waved off the young men, spitting globules onto the sand beside them. He took Ifasen down to a rickety jetty that jutted out into the water. That day the two of them caught six basking carp, their fat silver-green bodies slapping against the sides of the bucket. The young men had thrown line after line into the water, their hooks coming up with the shrivelled remains of prawn tails. But the old man said nothing, fishing as if the others did not exist. And when they walked back together, Ifasen grinned triumphantly at their empty hands, but the old man just growled quietly. Then he dropped his hold of the young boy and drifted across the scrub flats, disappearing wordlessly behind the sand mounds.

  Ifasen had taken two of the biggest fish back to the spacious holiday home. He presented them to Abeni with a proud smile. ‘What a clever boy you are,’ she exclaimed proudly. But even as she spoke, he had noticed her disquiet. She placed the fish in the enamel sink and poured some cool water over them. She seemed uncertain as to how to proceed. He wondered whether she had perhaps not gutted a fish before. The thought of slicing open their taut bellies and delving inside with bare fingers made him feel faint.

  Then Na’imah walked into the kitchen and saw the fish lying in the kitchen sink. ‘What you think, that we can eat these mud scavengers, Abeni? Where did you get this rubbish, my girl? May Allah have mercy on us!’

  ‘I am sorry, madam,’ Abeni stammered. ‘A friend gave them to me. I did not mean them for the family. They were only for me to eat. My people eat such fish, madam.’

  Na’imah sneered at her. ‘Abeni, your people do many things that are not acceptable in the eyes of Allah. Take them outside; I will not have them in my kitchen. May Allah forgive us.’ Na’imah did not notice as Ifasen slid out of the room, his cheeks wet with tears and failure.

  In the end, Abeni had kept the fish for herself, gutting them and baking them in a hollowed-out termite mound in the back garden, smothering them with fresh tomato and onion. Later that evening, Ifasen slunk out of the kitchen and scampered off behind the house with a plate of rice and fish. The white flesh had flaked off the bone in sizeable mouthfuls. He had never eaten anything so deliciously fresh and forbidden. He had thought of the old fisherman, sitting somewhere around a leaping fire, enjoying his food at his leisure.

  He thought of him again now as the beggar stumbled onto the pavement, still mumbling expletives. Two Zimbabwean men who had been working the other side of the intersection came over to Ifasen’s side once the traffic had cleared. They were selling silver windscreen shields and cellphone chargers, draped over their arms like dead snakes. They had started working at the intersection only a few weeks before, arriving without introduction. Ifasen had ignored them, but the old beggar was enraged and had tried to chase them off. The men were young and agile, and sidestepped his flailing arms with ease, laughing and taunting him.

  They nodded reservedly towards Ifasen. ‘Have you sold anything today?’ he asked them.

  ‘No, just two screens. It’s too hot. They’re all too hot and too busy to even ask how much.’ The speaker paused and looked down the road. A line of cars had pulled off from the intersection some distance away, sending them like a wave up the gentle slope towards them. ‘Here come some more. Let’s see if we have any luck.’ The other Zimbabwean snorted dejectedly, but rearranged the cables on his arm in preparation.

  After another hour of tramping between the lanes, still none of them had managed to sell anything. The beggar had been handed a plastic packet of food scraps and was sitting a distance away on the grass verge, picking at the squashed sandwiches and old chop bones. The two Zimbabwean
s ambled off to the nearby petrol station to get water. Only Ifasen remained, standing still in the burning sun, now not even trying to display his wares.

  The sultry weather in Obeokuta had been as intense, sometimes stifling when the wind was still. But the heat had brought out the smells of the earth and the surrounding undergrowth, filling the air with a fragrance that was undeniably home: acacia blossoms and turned earth, cowpats and vanilla pods. It was a heady, moist aroma full of promise. On hot days, he used to stand in the classroom with the door ajar and all the windows wide, letting the warm scents brush across the desktops. It had calmed his learners and filled him with a quiet, resolute ambition. But here the heat seemed meaningless and dirty, filled with fumes that coated his exposed skin in layers of grime. Every step seemed to raise his body temperature, sucking at his resolve. It left him feeling embittered about his circumstances. He longed for a return to the serenity of teaching, the respect and sense of purpose that it afforded him. He had loved the easy, joking interactions with his young pupils and the brightness of their naive eyes. His time as a student teacher – and then for a short while as a permanent member of staff, before he left the country altogether – seemed blessed. It was rich with memories of Abayomi, the excited learning of young minds, the secure routine of teaching and the camaraderie of his fellow teachers. How much he had abandoned for this hellish non-existence.

  Ifasen wandered between the stopped cars. As they moved off, he became aware of a metallic-green BMW with tinted windows. The car drove past slowly, drifting up to the line as the robots turned orange and then accelerating through to reach the other side. Ifasen watched through squinted eyes as it drove into the forecourt of the petrol station. But it did not stop. Instead it turned around and crossed over the double-laned road to come back towards the intersection. The young male driver was alone in the car and he watched Ifasen closely as he glided by on the other side of the island. Ifasen thought the man gave a slight nod of the head. A few minutes later the BMW reappeared on Ifasen’s side of the road, the tyres crunching on the fragments of glass and stone on the verge as it pulled up. The fan in the engine switched on while the car idled.