Rosewater

by Tade Thompson

  ‘Espirit de corps.’

  I walk home and there, at my doorstep, is another reanimate.

  I’m not in the mood for another fight. I consider other options. I could wait it out, but I don’t want to be outside. I have a few friends, but none close enough for me to consider calling them under these circumstances. The reanimate bounces her head against the door. She looks like a school mistress, wearing a skirt and blouse and sensible shoes. She is getting blood on the finish. I expect the other tenants can hear the knocking but ignore it. I am behind her and she has not noticed me yet.

  On a whim I call Aminat.

  It rings once, then there is a loud hissing and I pull the phone away from my ear. It stops and I hear her voice.

  ‘Hello?’ she says.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ I ask.

  ‘Kaaro! Don’t mind me. I’m cooking. How’re things?’

  The reanimate hears me talk and turns.

  ‘This will sound odd and forward of me, so I’m going to apologise in advance —’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I haven’t said what I want to —’

  ‘You can come over.’

  ‘How did you —’

  ‘Be quick. There’s a curfew on.’ She gives me her address.

  I leave just as the reanimate decides to investigate me.

  Aminat plays “Top Rankin’” and hums it to herself when she drops my drink on the side table. She is barefoot, wearing rolled-up jeans and a vest without jewellery, a careful casual look.

  She has a house in Taiwo, one station clockwise from me, closer to the North Ganglion. It’s a more affluent area, with cars in every garage, barbed wire and security systems being common features. They have the kind of high-octane satellite technology that used to be the domain of spy thrillers.

  I’m slightly embarrassed to be there, but Aminat is so natural about it that any discomposure fades quickly. There is warmth and twentieth-century reggae and light incense on the air. She takes me to the bathroom and I think I’m going to get mothered, but she gives me cotton wool, water, soap, plasters, disinfectant, iodine, and a smile. She tells me she’ll be out in the living room when I’m done washing the blood off my face and hands. When I’m half-decent I join her and she plants the drink beside me, leaving a wake of jasmine. She sits opposite me, still mouthing Bob Marley, and she stares.

  ‘Are you some kind of warrior-poet, then?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing even remotely as glamorous as that,’ I say. ‘I can’t fight and I don’t do poetry.’

  ‘And yet your knuckles bleed. Who are you, Kaaro? Is that a first or last name?’

  ‘It’s just Kaaro.’

  ‘Are you Yoruba?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘So your name means “good morning”?’

  ‘Yes and no. The full name is “Ile Kaaro o jiire”, which can be transliterated to “good morning, you’ve woken up well”, but is a term that means “All Yoruba Speaking peoples or lands”.’

  ‘That’s a strange name. Your parents called you that?’

  ‘Yes. My father was an idea man.’

  ‘He told you not to use a surname?’

  ‘No, that was my idea.’

  ‘How do you get away with that in a bank?’ She crosses her legs and takes a sip of her own drink. There is a shadow of agility in her movements, the ghost of an athlete’s drills.

  ‘What exactly did Bola tell you about me?’ I ask.

  She laughs. ‘She said she knew the right guy for me. Good-looking, single, has a reasonable job, and is not a dog. She didn’t seem to know or care if we have anything in common.’

  ‘Do you know what I do at the bank?’

  ‘Counter-fraud, isn’t it? You combat 419 scams, same as Bola.’

  The temptation to look into her head is overwhelming, but I resist. This is one of the reasons I do not date. Once you’ve been in the xenosphere you get used to rapid familiarity. You scan quickly and know that the person in front of you is hiding a second wife or has a secret vice. The usual mutual self-disclosure, which regular people do, is plodding and inaccurate, but necessary for a real relationship. Patience.

  The sound of automatic rifle fire rises above the music for a few seconds, making Aminat flinch.

  ‘The cull,’ she says.

  ‘Tell me about yourself,’ I say. I have no sympathy for reanimates, but something in her voice tells me she does. ‘How do you know Bola?’

  ‘She’s my sister-in-law.’

  ‘You’re Dele’s sister?’

  ‘No, the first husband. Dominic.’

  ‘Oh? I didn’t know she was married before.’

  She rose, went to a display case and returned with one of those digital frames that change photographs every few seconds. This one cycled through photos of the same man in different places and circumstances.

  ‘That’s Dominic Arigbede,’ she says. ‘Was.’

  He is thin, reedy even, with hollowed out cheeks in the manner of a congenitally underweight person rather than a starving or sick one. A bit fair skinned like Aminat. His eyes are warm and expressive. Here he is receiving a qualification in something. Here he is in a suit. Here he is getting married to a painfully young Bola.

  ‘When did they split up?’

  ‘They didn’t. He died.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  She shrugs and takes the photo frame out of my hands. ‘I see him in dreams sometimes. He always asks me to tell Bola to come see him.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Well … why are you single, with your good taste in shoes and … erm … magnificent breasts?’

  ‘Just garden variety divorced, I’m afraid. My ex wanted someone more fecund.’

  ‘Again, sorry. I’m a magnet for bad topics tonight.’

  ‘No need to apologise. He’s generous. I got the house and a good alimony. It affords me a lot of freedoms. What about you?’

  ‘I never married. It just never happened.’

  ‘Children?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just never happened for me.’

  ‘What did your parents say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I hardly talk to them.’

  ‘Can I ask how old you are?’

  ‘Older than forty, younger than fifty.’

  ‘Why no last name? Are you a criminal? Are you dangerous?’ Conspiratorial tone now, one eyebrow up. There’s a linear indentation on both temples that suggests she wears glasses.

  I walk over to her.

  ‘I am not dangerous.’

  She stands. ‘We’ll see.’

  While we make love, in our moisture and our hunger, the ketoconazole rubs off and I lift into the xenosphere.

  I’m still thrusting when I see the butterfly, Molara.

  She stares, wings slowly flapping, antennae twitching here and there.

  Go away, I think at her.

  She does not.

  When I climax her wings spread fully and my whole world is full of the blue and black pattern.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lagos, 2032, 2042, 2043

  Being a sensitive is difficult to explain. There is no omen at birth, no weather phenomenon, no annunciation to herald my arrival. I am a normal child by all accounts, with five fingers and toes, nappy rash, and cradle cap.

  The first time I find something I’m eight or nine years old, skipping along our street, trying to get home before it’s dark. Even though it’s Lagos, my neighbourhood is safe for kids. I get a sudden urge to investigate a garbage can. I don’t know why. When I open it there’s a baby, a girl. She is bloody, surrounded by trash, but alive, awake and calm. She looks at me and blinks. I lift her out. I remember being fascinated by her size and the way her hands move, almost like an experiment, and the way her whole body responds with a startle every few minutes.

  I plan to take her home and keep her. I have no siblings and to my childish mind
this is the solution to everything. I carry her along, but an adult stops me, a woman wearing a wrapper and head tie.

  ‘Whose child is that?’ she says, accusation heavy in her voice.

  ‘She’s my sister,’ I say. At this point the baby starts to sniffle.

  ‘This one is your sister?’

  Seeing as the baby looks nothing like me and is filthy, the woman’s suspicions are understandable, but not to me at eight.

  ‘Yes. I’m taking her home.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘It … it’s … I mean —’

  ‘She’s your sister and you can’t remember her name?’

  ‘I —’

  ‘Give that baby to me.’

  The baby starts crying at this, attracting a small crowd. The woman takes the baby from me and cradles her. Soon the police arrive. When I protest they scuff me behind the head.

  I shout, ‘She’s my sister! She’s mine, she’s mine!’ until my mother comes to get me. She assumes that I must have heard the baby crying. She is not angry with me, however. Her eyes are soft and moist as she orders me to take a bath. Later I find out that a house girl a few streets away had become pregnant, hidden her figure, delivered, and thrown the baby and placenta into the bin. This is the first time I hear the word ‘placenta’ and I am disgusted when I look it up.

  Time passes, I grow a bit.

  School is uneventful. I don’t hate it or love it; I don’t distinguish myself in any way. I’m neither sporty nor brainy nor cool. I stay out of trouble. At home I see very little of my father, who works all the time. My mother and I drift apart emotionally over time, not that there is hate, but more like we are going through the motions of being parent and child. Memory is always distorted by time, but I think this distance starts with the baby girl whom I find but cannot keep.

  I’m seventeen. I get a vacation job in a paper factory while considering university. It’s boring and clerical. I am the youngest person in the entire complex, and everyone is bemused by my presence. I make enough money to pay for my travel and lunch, but nothing else. I am surrounded by old, uninteresting people. There is a guy in my office who is forty years old!

  One day I am looking for a taxi in Lagos, at a bus stop in Ikorodu Road, late for work, about to spend money that I do not have, when I get this feeling. It is like déjà vu, almost remembered from when I was eight, but not. It is like knowing two plus two is four without having to learn it. It is a certainty, not just a conviction, the way believing in God is a conviction, but believing in gravity is a certainty.

  My body seems to know it faster than my mind, because I leave the bus stop. I walk along Ikorodu Road for seven minutes. I stop and wait for seventy seconds, just as a taxi disgorges a gaggle of students. I get in and give the driver a destination I have never heard of, and have no intention of reaching. I am calm when I do all this.

  I tell the taxi driver to stop after he has driven for fifteen minutes and eight seconds. I pay him and exit the vehicle. I pause and turn around. There are street traders and face-to-face bungalows. The road is untarred but strangely lacks potholes. Each car raises a cloud of dust when it passes. There are no storefronts or street lights.

  I am in the middle of a street, so I start to walk north. I arrive at a t-junction. Kehinde Street, perpendicular to Ago Street. I wait. Nobody stares at me or wonders why I am standing still, neither do I feel uncomfortable.

  When they write about this kind of thing or when they make movies about it, they always make it seem like a seer will hear voices or see visions, but I now know they are wrong. There are no voices, no visions. There is only knowledge.

  Then people start to turn up and stand next to me, odd, disharmonious individuals with whom I would not ordinarily be seen. I am dressed for work in a white shirt and black trousers, with a tie and two pens in my pocket, one blue, one red. The first to appear is an old man, completely bald, bespectacled, about four feet tall, face lined and cracked. He stands to my right, leaning on a walking stick. I know his name is Korede though I’ve never met him. He is followed by a slender girl, maybe four or five years older than me, sweating in her cotton blouse and out of breath, although not because of exertion but because of some condition, perhaps sickle cell. She has a long face and the whites of her eyes are discoloured, a tinge of yellow. She smells of pineapples and tobacco. This girl stands in front of me, blocking my view of the road, but I am not angry. Her name is Seline.

  Another joins, then another, then another. Despite the fact that I have never met them, I do not feel unfamiliarity. This is sometimes called jamais vu. I know that they know me too, these people. I wonder what we are all waiting for.

  ‘A truck,’ says Korede, although I did not speak aloud. ‘Or a bus.’

  ‘Van,’ says Seline.

  I know Seline is right, but then so is Korede, even though he is wrong. The van pulls up, trailing a gigantic dust cloud. We all get in, but the van does not start moving.

  ‘One more,’ says the driver, and this is right, I think. Seline looks at me, puzzled.

  ‘It’s his first time,’ says Korede. ‘He does not know.’

  ‘He’s the youngest,’ says Seline.

  ‘Omo t’oba m’owo we, a b’agba jeun,’ says Korede. The child who knows how to wash his hands will eat with the elders.

  And what is so great about eating with the elders? They speak about matters of which I know nothing, and some of them smell. I think this to myself, but Korede picks it up and scowls briefly. His fist tightens on his stick.

  Nobody says anything and I am on the verge of asking a question, when the door to the van slides open and a portly man enters. His name is Iyanda. The van continues and I lose track of the winding paths it traverses. The hand never gets lost on the way to the mouth, says someone. Or perhaps they think it, I do not know, but it is meant to comfort me.

  After about forty minutes the van swirls round a roundabout in a town called Esho, unfamiliar to me. We come to a stop in front of the most prominent structure, a clock tower with no clock. There is a painted-on clock face.

  ‘It’s odd here,’ says Korede. ‘Every hour someone climbs the belfry and paints the correct time. There is no bell in the belfry, but a rod with a loop of wrought iron marks the spot where one might have hung. There is a strict rota for this adhered to quite rigidly by the townsfolk.’

  Old people know shit and like to share. I’m just not fond of listening.

  The van parks directly under the painted clock and the ground is spattered with old and new paint. I find this more interesting than the clock itself. It is like an art installation, a living explosion of myriad colours rioting in the early afternoon sun. We all pile out and orient ourselves.

  The Esho townsfolk ignore us, by and large. Footprints lead over and away from the paint puddle. Hundreds, maybe thousands of shoeprints, some fresh, some faded, some mere ghosts of impressions of the living and the dead. I know that Iyanda has a brief notion to buy the town a new hall and clock that works, but I also know that the town is not poor. I can see that there are cars, that the Mercedes count is high enough, that there are no beggars in the town square. That people are dressed well enough suggests affluence. No, this painting behaviour is there by design. This is tradition.

  The building might be a town hall, might have been a chapel in the past, but I know it does not matter. There is a man waiting outside the double doors, which are open. Inside there is a coffin. I disembark with the others from the van and as one we all avoid the paint. Iyanda is idly doing sums in his head about the cost of paint over a one-year period multiplied by the probability of falls. Seline wishes he would stop seeing things in monetary value all the time. ‘We are here for our fallen brother,’ says Korede. ‘We should focus on him.’

  We surround the casket and I know who the dead man was. I have seen dead bodies before, even of family members, but none affects me as much as this man whom I have never seen before but who is not a stranger. He is bearded, w
ith scattered grey and white hair. His face is scarred as if he ran through an entire warehouse of razor blades. His eyes are sutured shut, although the thread is small and I only see it because I am interested in such things. There is perfume, but also the faint whiff of formaldehyde underneath it all. I feel deep sorrow and surprise myself by being on the verge of tears.

  Korede sidles up to me.

  ‘You don’t always use your cane,’ I say.

  ‘I’m all right for short distances,’ he says. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Upset. Why do I feel I know him when we’ve never met? Why do I feel sad?’

  Korede sighs. ‘You’re upset because you feel the absence of a person like you, different from others, but not in a visible way. You feel like you know him because people like us are always aware of each other, but not in a conscious way. It’s like breathing. Most of the time you don’t know you’re doing it, but try holding your breath and I bet you’ll miss it.’ He laughs, a short bark. This close I can see all of his pores. I cannot believe this will happen to me some day.

  ‘Who are we?’

  ‘We are people who know,’ says Korede, as if that explains it.

  I look at the corpse. ‘It feels like he’s not dead.’

  ‘That’s because he isn’t. His spirit is in the air somewhere. This man was a homeless vagrant. The one we mourn only took refuge in this body. He has moved on.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You will. I saw him once, you know. It was the most frightening day of my life. Pray you never encounter him.’

  Before I can ask what he means Korede drifts away.

  There is no eulogy and no biological family attends. There are drinks, there is music and dancing, and none of this seems odd to me. At some point during the revelry, while I am slightly tipsy, Seline corners me and tells me I am a finder.

  ‘Nothing will be lost, and nothing will be hidden from you.’

  Like Korede, she does not explain, neither does she need to. I know. I see the world differently. The physical objects are all the same, the cheap finish on the casket, the linoleum floor of the room, the dingy chandeliers, the cheap booze, the music, the body odour of some of the people with me, and the sensation of fan-generated air on my forearm skin. But there is more now, as if an organ or gland that was closed off is now functioning and I can sense an extra dimension. It’s like one of those console games where items of value glow when the player comes into proximity.