Easy Motion Tourist

by Leye Adenle

  Anger slowly built till it encouraged me up the remaining two flights of stairs.

  Magnanimous was in front of the room poised to knock on the door when he saw me.

  ‘Ah, Mr Collins. Good morning.’ His face brightened.

  ‘Good morning.’ What was he doing at the door? I was now suspicious of everyone. I tried not to take deep breaths but he could see that I was sweating.

  ‘Why were you hiding from the police?’

  He had played along in the lobby so I guessed I owed him the truth.

  ‘Something terrible happened at Ronnie’s Bar yesterday. The police came and took me with them.’ I gave him the abbreviated version. Despite his smile, he seemed to have a knowing look when I mentioned Ronnie’s bar, swiftly replaced by a concerned grimace.

  ‘Yes, yes. I heard,’ he said. And then: ‘Terrible thing. Terrible thing.’

  And just like that it was gone. The next instant, his face had fluidly changed into a blankness that a poker player would have envied.

  ‘The policeman came to return your phone. You left it at the station.’

  ‘He did? Where is it?’ I held out my hand.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry. When I saw you, I told him you checked out in the morning.’

  So, Inspector Ibrahim had only come to return my phone and not to cart me away for more lessons on how not to cross the Nigerian police. I felt like a coward. It was a feeling I was fast getting used to.

  ‘How did you know I was in this room?’

  ‘A member of the night duty staff told me you had moved into a different room with a girl.’

  So much for not being seen. He really did have a gift for facial expressions: he looked alarmed and concerned at the same time, then lowering his voice and nodding towards the door to the room I shared with Amaka, he said: ‘Are your things safe?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I moved everything over this morning.’

  ‘No. I mean, things like your passport, money, valuable things.’

  ‘Oh no. She’s not that kind of girl.’

  It registered with me how quickly I defended her, and with that I became ashamed that I’d already made up my mind to forget her story and flee to London – to abandon the woman who had saved me from Cell B. Then again, there was the piece in the newspaper and many questions. I waited to see him get into the lift before I knocked. Amaka opened the door quicker than I expected. She had a towel wrapped around her body. I held the page with the article up to her face even before I stepped in.

  ‘What do you know about this?’ I said. I was surprised to hear the forcefulness in my own voice. Surely I wasn’t angry with her. How could I be? But for once, I felt like I was thinking clearly, and good sense demanded that I not be soft.

  She took the paper and walked back into the room, reading where my finger had pointed. I watched her butt cheeks gliding against each other under the towel.

  She tossed the paper onto the bed as if it was of no consequence.

  ‘I had nothing to do with it,’ she said. Without turning to look at me, she unravelled the towel, held it out in both hands and rewrapped it around her then crossed her hands across her chest.

  I believed her but I couldn’t just back down after charging in accusing her.

  ‘Your friend was just here looking for me,’ I said, as if it was her fault.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The bloke in charge at the station.’

  ‘Inspector Ibrahim?’

  ‘Yeah, him.’

  ‘He’s not my friend.’

  ‘But you know him.’

  ‘In my line of business I meet many people, police officers included.’

  ‘Well, he was just here. I almost bumped into him.’

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is he still here?’

  ‘No. He left. They told him I’d checked out.’

  ‘Good. If he really wants to find you he’ll search every room in every hotel in Lagos but he’ll not come back to this one.’

  She was right. Now it made sense that she had not simply checked us into another hotel.

  ‘You want to back out now?’

  ‘Look, I don’t really know who you are,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about you. Who are you? What is this charity you work for? What’s it called? What exactly do you do and why do you do it? I’m getting myself mixed up in this thing and it appears there’s so much I don’t know. I’ve been arrested, I’ve watched a man’s head blown to pieces, and I’m being hunted. It’s all a bit too much. I’ve got a feeling there’s a lot you’re not telling me. If we’re going to do this thing together you’ve got to tell me everything – full disclosure. I’m one minute away from getting back on a plane home.’

  She turned and I saw that she had been crying. My shoulders dropped.

  ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing is wrong. Street Samaritans.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Street Samaritans. That’s the name of the organisation I work for. I’m the fundraiser – officially. What I do for the girls, what I told you about, that’s my own thing. No one else knows about it and I want to keep it that way. What else do you want to know?’

  I wanted to wrap my arms around her and tell her everything was going to be OK.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said.

  ‘No. You want to know, so I’m telling you. What next?’

  I stood, silent.

  ‘Ask me.’

  I had to say something. ‘What did you do before this?’

  ‘This is the only job I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Really, Amaka, it’s…’

  ‘Next.’

  ‘Does the job pay well?’

  ‘No. Money isn’t everything.’

  ‘Why this? Why this job?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No. Earlier, when I asked you why you do this, you said it was bound to happen. What did you mean by that?’

  She took a long look at me with her wet, unblinking eyes. I felt like hiding. She walked over without releasing me from her gaze and she pushed her hand into my trouser pocket. I felt her fingers wriggling against my leg. She got my cigarettes and lighter. With her thumb she flicked the lid of the pack of Benson & Hedges and with her front teeth she pulled out a stick. She lit it, took a short drag and pulled a chair over.

  ‘Sit,’ she said.

  I pulled the chair from the dressing table and sat opposite.

  ‘You saw that girl? You saw what they did to her?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like that before?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I have. And it was someone I knew.’

  She took a long drag and released the smoke slowly.

  ‘I was brought up by house girls, maids. When I was young my parents were away a lot. My father was a diplomat. My mother didn’t want me to keep changing schools so I stayed in Nigeria but she always went with him wherever he was posted. So, the nannies raised me. I hated her for leaving me alone like that but now I understand she didn’t trust her husband to be alone.

  ‘I had a particular nanny, my favourite, Aunty Baby. She was Ghanaian. In those days a lot of Togolese and Ghanaian people were in Nigeria. Economic refugees. They thought they would find a better life in Nigeria, but most of them, especially the girls, ended up becoming servants, housemaids. They were the lucky ones. The rest became prostitutes, to survive. These were people who came from middle class families, whose parents were university professors and doctors, but when they came here we would only trust them to clean our homes, cook our food, clean up after our children.

  ‘Aunty Baby was a special person. She loved me. She talked a lot. She told me about her life in Ghana – about the boyfriend she’d left back home, about her journey to Nigeria, about the sixty-year-old gateman down the road from ours who wanted to marry her. She was twenty-one. She’d been studying to be a nurse back in Ghana, but in our house she was the nanny and ev
en then only by name. In truth, she was my servant – my own personal slave at my beck and call. But she was also my friend. She was the perfect big sister I didn’t have. I’m an only child.

  ‘We had other servants in the house, many. A lot of them were boys. I developed early. The house boys were the first to start touching me, then the drivers, then the gatemen. I was only ten and it was open season on me. They would take me into a room and make me do things to them.

  ‘One day, I don’t know how, Aunty Baby found out about me and one particular boy, Sunday. My father was posted to South Africa, then. When they came back, Aunty Baby told mum what had happened; she was furious. She called for Sunday and me. She asked him what he’d been doing to me. He lied that it was he who had caught Aunty Baby interfering with me and that he had threatened to report her. Mum asked me if this was true. I said it was. I don’t know why, but I lied. I said Sunday was telling the truth.

  ‘I remember the look on Aunty Baby’s face that day. She kept calling my name, “Amaka? Amaka?” Mum slapped her. Beat her. It was horrible. That evening, my parents sent her away. She didn’t have a place to go but they had the soldiers march her out. They sacked everyone in the house. They got me a new nanny. A Nigerian girl. Iyabo.’

  She stopped to take a drag.

  ‘Several years later, when I was in university, I saw Aunty Baby again. It was at the hairdressers. She was the one who recognised me. She came to me and lifted the dryer off my head. She shouted “Amaka” and embraced me. This woman, who I had betrayed, embraced me. I thought she worked there but she had only come to do her hair. She took me to her house. She had a nice flat. She told me all that had happened to her since she left our house. She lived rough on the streets for some time, doing odd jobs, then in ‘83 when immigrants were being expelled from Nigeria, she married the old gateman so she could stay.

  ‘The man died and his sons drove her from the house he left behind. She was back on the streets. She started selling her body to feed herself. At first, she had boyfriends. She had five or six at a time, all young, decent civil servants. She told me about each one of them: the one with a small dick, the one with a bent dick, the one who was miserly, the one who snored like the wind if he didn’t have sex before he slept, the one who wanted to marry her. She joked about the shit she had gone through because of me.

  ‘We laughed together at her stories. She and I, we always had laughter. I visited her often at her flat. I met her prostitute friends. We all became friends. They also told me their stories. They had all been forced into that life when they ran out of choices. They were not loose women; they had dreamt different lives for themselves but survival forced them onto the streets. She never once brought up my betrayal.’

  She took another drag and looked around for where to flick the ash building up on the tip of her cigarette. I got the glass ashtray from the dressing table and held it out for her. She took it from me and uncrossed her legs to rest it on her lap.

  ‘One day, I gathered the courage to ask for her forgiveness. She told me I didn’t have to. She said I was a child then; what did I know? But I knew I’d forced her into this life – I had made a prostitute out of her. I begged her to let me do something, anything, to make it up. I would give her money, I would confess to my parents – anything.

  ‘She told me about the people who looked after her at her worst time. She never wanted to sell her body like that. She never blended in. It was killing her. She heard about some foreigners talking about getting people like her off the streets and she went to look for them. That’s how I came to know about the Street Samaritans.

  ‘The charity was in trouble and they needed money. She told me that if I felt like doing something, maybe I could get my parents to donate money to them. She told me that every month a portion of her income still went to the Street Samaritans. I decided to work for the charity instead.’

  ‘You were raped as a child.’

  ‘No. It never went that far.’

  ‘So, when did you lose your virginity?’

  I heard myself and realised it had not come out as intended.

  Thoughts of her getting violated as a child had caused me to ask such a foolish, insensitive question.

  ‘I did not lose it,’ she said. ‘I got rid of it.’

  She stubbed out the cigarette.

  ‘Ever since I was young, men have always wanted to sleep with me. I was curious and my virginity was in the way. One day, I picked the right boy and I let him do it. For me.’

  ‘What about Aunty Baby. What happened to her?’ I knew she was going to tell me she was murdered, like that girl in the gutter.

  ‘We are going to see her tonight.’

  ‘But I thought…’

  ‘It wasn’t her. It was Iyabo, her replacement. When the girl came to live with us my dad told me she was a distant relative. Anytime my parents were away she would sneak out of the house and not come back till the next day. One day she didn’t come back. The soldiers – we had soldiers guarding the house – called my parents. Iyabo had been gone for two days when mum flew in from Togo. I went with the driver and a soldier to pick her up. We were staying on the mainland then, Ikeja GRA, not far from the airport. We had sirens. The driver was going so fast that it was too late by the time he saw the body.’

  She stopped to light another cigarette.

  ‘We drove over her. She’d been on the road, three blocks from the house, all the time. The soldier told the driver to stop. I watched from the backseat. He went to the body and covered his nose. We all knew it was her. She was still wearing the red jeans mum gave her.’

  She offered me her cigarette. I took it. The tip was wet. I wanted to hold her against my chest.

  27

  ‘Maybe he was using a different name?’ Ibrahim said.

  The plain clothes police officers standing in front of his desk looked at each other and were somehow able to communicate who should take the question.

  ‘I don’t think so sir,’ said the man who had drawn the short straw.

  ‘Why? Why don’t you think so?’

  ‘Sir, after we checked the hotel register we also spoke to the night manager and he assured us that the minister has never lodged at the hotel before.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean the minister wasn’t there. Maybe it wasn’t official. Maybe he sneaked in and sneaked out. He didn’t want anyone to know he was there. He used another name and he didn’t come with his official car. He used her car. She took him there. No one would have recognised them.’

  Ibrahim was talking to himself and his subordinates were dutifully standing at attention until he started making sense again. He pulled out a pen from his breast pocket, held it in a fist, brought it close to his forehead above his right eye and rubbed his thumb up and down its lid while looking at the ceiling.

  ‘Do you know what the minister looks like?’ Ibrahim asked.

  The officer hesitated before shaking his head.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked the other.

  ‘No, sir.’

  Ibrahim nodded like his point had just been proven.

  ‘So, you see? They were together. They were at the hotel. Together.’

  ‘Sir,’ the first man said. His body shrunk in subservience. ‘Who, sir?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You said they were together, sir?’

  ‘Yes. They were.’

  ‘Who, sir?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘I know what to do.’

  A knock broke the awkwardness. They all turned to look. An older policeman walked in.

  ‘Sir, the car is ready,’ the man said.

  ‘Car?’

  ‘Yes, sir. You said I should go and wash the car; that we are going to Victoria Island.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Ibrahim ran his palm over his stubble and ended by scratching under his chin where it had begun to itch
. He was going to a mansion in Victoria Island to meet with people he didn’t like, but who could cost him his job, if they so decided.

  His predecessor had advised him that when the crimes of the mainland spill over into the island, the island folk panic. They form associations, they plan, they plot, they influence legislation and they get police commissioners sacked and replacements installed. They do whatever it takes to keep their beloved island safe, including ordering a senior police officer to come to waste valuable police time pandering to their self-importance. The man blamed them for his redeployment to Jigawa.

  It was getting close to the next hour. The police commissioner would call for another update. The man had stayed up through the night as well, perhaps also taking calls. During one of the tense, short phone conversations, he told Ibrahim to attend the Victoria Island Neighbourhood Association meeting in the afternoon. That call made Ibrahim sick to his belly.

  The association was probably one of the most powerful organisations in Nigeria. He knew about it before his predecessor warned him not to offend any of its members; it brought together oil company chief executives, senators, retired generals, important politicians, old money, new money and government money. Rival CEOs sat together on its board, united by their determination to protect the sacred image of their island. The attendance register of meetings read like a Who’s Who of the most powerful people in Nigeria. He knew a few enterprising businessmen who rented apartments on the island just to become members of the association.

  It was, he concluded, his bad luck that it was having its monthly meeting that day, and an ominous sign that they had specifically asked for him.

  The landlords and landladies would have questions for him. They had heard about the ritual murder, some of them had even seen it on television. Now they wanted the man in charge of Bar Beach Police Station to come and explain to them how such a thing could have happened on their island, close to their homes and offices. They would demand assurances that this was a one-off, and that he would never let it happen again. He had to convince them he could deliver on this. If they were not convinced, they would find another police inspector and he would be posted to Kontagora. If he was lucky. ‘Compulsory retirement’ was how they got rid of the man before his predecessor.