Rosewater

by Tade Thompson

  I am pondering this when the homeless man is buried. Even though the body goes into the ground I can feel him somewhere out there, in the air as Korede says.

  It’s dark when we all enter the van and return to the junction of Kehinde and Ago. Each goes their own way, and I never see them again. Well, that’s not entirely true, but it is virtually true. Almost true.

  By the time I get home a lot of the knowledge is gone, as if being together in the same place with Korede and Seline enhanced whatever was nascent in me. It seems like a dream by the time I slink into my room, avoiding my mother.

  Because I am curious, I look up Esho on Nimbus, trying to find out about the painted clock. I find out that Esho is the Anglicisation of the old name ‘Eso’, and that the clock painting tradition has been going on for centuries. In the late 1700s the village is under threat from marauders, mixed Portuguese and Zanzibar slavers, although the accounts vary. A white priest called Father Marinementus, who plies his trade in Eso, comes up with the idea of building a fake clock tower in order to fool the marauders into believing that the village is already an outpost of some European empire. As the village is never attacked, the people of Eso think it has worked and keep doing it.

  All those years, painting fake time to fool scouts bearing telescopes, faking time to stay alive.

  From that day I begin to find things for people. It is an obsession, compulsively done, with a strange erotic need for completion. I find car keys, memories, heirloom brooches, squirreled away money, PINs, mobile phones, photographs of loved ones, mathematical formulae, and spouses. There are always women looking for errant husbands, and cuckolds locating wives. This does not end in violence as often as could be imagined.

  I do not plan to become a thief. It just happens naturally. I go with my parents to my uncle’s house and the valuables burn like coals in my mind. It’s irritating and drawing my attention while we converse and sip Star Lager and eat pepper soup. I cannot concentrate and I make excuses-not completely false, I do need the toilet.

  After I empty my bladder I wander into my aunt’s room. I find her gold and diamonds in a box under the carpet in a false floor. I know the key is on her dresser hiding in plain sight. I know my uncle has thousands of dollars in cash in the ceiling space. I also know they have a vermin problem and that he is worried about rats eating the cash. I take an indeterminate wad of cash and stick it in my waistband, then I take a golden crucifix from the jewellery stash. I know, in the same transcendental way, when my cousin Eliza is about to come looking for me. I know when and where to hide from her to avoid discovery. Eliza is puzzled when I get back to the main party before her. She would later die in a horrific car crash at Ore with four of her school friends.

  That night, in my room, under the covers, and with a torch, I stare at my swag, rotating the cross so that it catches the light and counting the money. I feel powerful, and not because of my emergence as a sensitive, which I do not even recognise, but because I can buy things without having to ask or justify to my parents. I would like to say that I used my power for good, dispensing gifts and food to the poor and living happily ever after, but that would be untrue. I use my purchasing power for junk food, premium pornography, alcohol, lap dances, drugs, alcohol, clothes, shoes, alcohol, and other dissipations.

  Stealing is unlike anything else I ever experience. Our people say stolen meat is twice as sweet. I say, stolen anything is a hundred times as sweet and fulfilling.

  Until you get caught.

  For one year I am the Rat, the Termite, the Eater of Wealth, the Still One, the Quiet. We live in a nice area where there is a low incidence of robbery and families know each other for up to three generations. Things consistently go missing and nobody can explain it. Some say there is a spirit, and there is some historical precedent of emere assisting the possessed person to find items of value. Pentecostals pray and cast out demons to no avail. Some preach with fog horns, stating how it’s Biblical to kill thieves according to Exodus twenty-two, and it’s true that in many parts of Nigeria we tend to go Old Testament on those caught stealing. Thieves are generally beaten within an inch of their lives and necklaced. No thief ever believes this is their destiny until there is a tyre around their neck and the petrol is wetting their hair, fumes choking their ability to cry out for mercy. Babalawo cast spells, leave curses, and lay fetishes. I am immune to all this but afraid in the forty percent of my mind that might believe in the supernatural.

  I can’t stop, though. I have a lifestyle now, and I tell my parents with absolute credibility that my holiday job and gifts from grateful people fund my parties and clothes and nightlife. My father snorts with wavering credulity. My mother is the first to put it together, finding and stealing. If you can find anything, will you have the moral fortitude to stay honest? My mother looks at me and thinks not.

  At this time I know nothing of the xenosphere or my connection to other sensitives or regulars. I think the ability is a mystical thing, spiritual or juju-based. It does occur to me that the objects and valuables I find have to belong to someone. I am useless in prospecting for gold or oil, for example.

  The day I am caught a specific song plays on the radio, Fela Kuti’s “Mr Follow-Follow,” a song I cannot hear without nausea anymore. It rings through the house on the primitive Hi-Fi my father insists on. I have a sort-of girlfriend called Fadeke who is the epitome of materialistic Lagos. She is bought and paid for from her extensions to her stilettos, a razor blade sisi eko trophy. She is the woman who asks for money without irony or shame. She is coming over and I don’t have anything for her because I spent everything the night before. I am slightly hungover, but I have a strong sense of cash in the neighbourhood which I know is because it is the end of the month and people have their paychecks.

  The strange thing is I do not steal from my parents normally. I know where the house valuables are, of course. My intention is to borrow from my mother’s stash and return it when I have done some scavenging. She puts some of her money in the bank, some sewn into some out-of-fashion clothes deep in the recesses of her wardrobe. I have a switchblade now; I carry it for this very purpose since many people do what my mother has done. Nigerians do not really trust the whole digital money, Bitcoin, cash-you-can’t-see palaver. I’m slicing and dicing when I hear her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ says my mother.

  There is no explanation that makes sense so I just stand there with her ripped clothing in one hand and a knife in the other. I can feel the weight of the cash, the exact weight of the truth. In my pocket my phone vibrates and I know it’s Fadeke. My brain freezes, and not only can I not think of a lie, I cannot think anything. I am afraid that I have been damaged by my actions or a curse or the hand of God. You hear about that kind of thing happening to those who deserve it.

  My mother’s entire face scolds me in that combination of surrendering the curve of her mouth to gravity and her eyes to moisture. She spreads out her arms and looks up at heaven and says, ‘aiye me re.’, which means ‘this is my life.’

  ‘Mummy —’ I start.

  ‘Do you know why you are my only child?’ she asks.

  ‘No, Ma,’ I say, using the more respectful form to try and butter her up. I put the jacket with the ruined lining down.

  ‘When you came out of me you ripped so many blood vessels that I bled and bled. They took me to Igbobi and transfused and sewed, but nothing helped. At one point my blood stopped clotting. The surgeons had no choice but to take my womb out.’

  Her voice is calm and I don’t like that. I want hysterics, but this emotionless delivery bothers me. She is usually incontinent of anger and distress.

  ‘No more children after that, of course. But your father and I, we lavished all our love on you. He did not take another wife, though he could have. Maybe he has other children outside, I don’t know, but he has never paraded it in front of my face. You were everything to me.’

  She sits on the edge of the bed, two feet or so from me.

>   ‘I love you, but you are a thief and I didn’t bring up my child to steal. You cannot be my child.’

  This is good. Melodrama I can deal with. I am about to launch an explanation when I see her hand go to the whistle that every family in the neighbourhood has.

  ‘Mummy, what are you doing?’

  ‘Ole! Thief!’ she screams. She blows the whistle and I vomit with fear and disbelief.

  In Lagos the whistle is a tool of a Community Watch. One blast of the whistle at midnight means all is well. A sustained note at any time of day or night means there is trouble and the blower needs help. People would come running.

  I run, out of the room, down the stairs, out the front door, into the waiting crowd. They do not seize me because they think I am fleeing from whatever the danger is. I am halfway down the street, passing a startled Fadeke, by the time my mother has updated the vigilantes.

  Because they hear her shout my name the mob turns on Fadeke.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Rosewater, Lagos: 2066

  It is a Saturday so neither Aminat nor I need rush away. I know I still have an interrogation to continue, but I feel so languid that nothing exists for me outside this room. When I open my eyes, the first thing I see is the spine of a book on the display case titled How to Listen to God. There is a ceiling fan with three blades, static.

  The night before we never made it to the bedroom and there is minor disorder in the living room. I am lying on the carpet, one leg on the sofa. Aminat’s head is on my shoulder, arm flung across my chest. Parts of me are numb, but pleasantly so. I am getting unfocused psychic noise from Aminat and I wonder if she is dreaming. With sheer force of will I resist entering the xenosphere to find out.

  Through the gaps in the blinds I see that the sun is out. Mid-morning. I hear the songs of people hawking breakfast foods. Despite the air conditioning I can smell burnt flesh. Faint, but definitely present, from the bonfires of reanimates that the Special Detachment put down over the course of the night. They will miss a few here and there, and for the next four months reanimates will keep turning up in the oddest places. Teenagers will spend their aggression on some before finally killing them. The reanimates will kill some people, mostly elderly or babies, those caught by surprise, those who are not vigilant. There will be brief public outrage and indignation, which will last a week in the dailies. It will then go quiet until the Opening next year.

  I nudge Aminat. She shifts her limbs and mutters something.

  ‘Loo,’ I say.

  She mumbles and points in a general direction away from her. I get up and explore. A door leads me out of the front room to a short corridor adorned with landscape watercolours and beige paint. At the far end there’s a kitchen, a flight of stairs going up, and a door on the left of that. A house this big has two toilets at the least, but I do not need to snoop. I do my business in the small one staring at a line drawing of a small boy pissing into a stream. There are foreign and domestic magazines in a rack next to the toilet. The foreign are British and English Language Chinese publications. There is even an old American magazine dating back to 2014, which is not even yellowed. It should really be in a museum or at least preserved in some fashion.

  I make some tea in the kitchen, then return to the sitting room. Aminat is still asleep, lying curled up on her left side. She has some stretch marks on her hips, but otherwise has a long, toned body with pear-shaped breasts. A ten centimetre scar runs along the line of her rib-cage on the right side. It’s surgical and I remember that she was ecstatic on the night of the Opening. She is strong like an athlete, I remember feeling that during in the night. I sit opposite her and watch her sleep while I drink. My bruises are tender and the reanimate must have tagged my mouth because the tea hurts when I start drinking. I wonder if I can get away with turning on the television.

  I read How to Listen to God until she yawns, stretches, and sits up.

  ‘Hi,’ she says.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘I thought you might be gone.’

  ‘Why?’

  She shrugs. ‘I’ve been with men who have not been impressed with me come sunrise.’

  ‘Then they’re stupid.’

  She smiles. ‘You’re sweet.’ She leaps to her feet, puts on her panties and walks out, dodging me when I try to grab hold of her. I hear a door close and her voiding. I hear sounds of her gargling water before she emerges.

  Aminat leads me by the hand to the kitchen and shoves me into a seat at a small, square dining table. She now has a long white tee shirt on. She empties a percolator that looks like it cost the earth. The dead coffee goes in a bag, and then in a bin.

  ‘Coffee, then food for me. You?’ she asks.

  ‘I’ll have what you’re having,’ I say.

  ‘Good, because I have excellent taste. I’m going to make yam and eggs.’

  I do not think I am hungry, but I am sure I will eat. I want to eat for her.

  ‘What do you normally do on Saturdays?’ she asks. She adds beans to the percolator. One falls to the counter and she hands it to me. I smell it and pop it in my mouth. It has the smell and taste of tobacco and wood.

  ‘Depends. I work if I have a freelance job on the go. If not, I visit the hospital.’

  ‘Why? Do you have a sick relative?’

  ‘No, I just go to … help out.’ This is only partially true. I go to hospitals for perspective. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I usually go to Lagos to see my family.’ She adds water and flips the switch. ‘Mum, dad, younger brother.’

  ‘Every weekend?’

  ‘Most. I just help supervise the house girl, plait my mother’s hair, that sort of thing. My mum thinks the girl is a witch. Which, who knows? She is rather slothful.’

  ‘How long have you been in Rosewater?’

  She cocks her head to the left. ‘How do you know I haven’t always been here? It’s not that old.’

  ‘Because I have always been here and would have noticed someone as striking as you before now.’

  She laughs and takes the basket out, empties the grounds. ‘Flatterer. I’ve been here three years.’

  ‘Why leave Lagos? More money, more jobs … better class of men. Or women.’

  ‘Pfft.’ She pours two black coffees into identical mugs that sport yellow smiley faces with an linear red smudge at the eleven o’clock position. She opens a cabinet under the sink and selects a large yam, hairy with rootlets and gnarly with clumps of soil. She places it on the kitchen top and starts to cut it into slices.

  ‘I was sick.’

  ‘I figured. I saw how you reacted at the Opening.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m grateful. I love Utopicity and what it does for us. For what it’s done for me.’

  ‘What was wrong with you, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘I don’t mind. I enjoy spreading the story, you know? About a year after my husband left I got this persistent cough, low-grade, but really irritating. Two months, I took every pill or cough mixture under the sun. Nothing. When I started losing weight my doctor did a sputum test. I had tuberculosis. TB. Consumption.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that. Must have been rough.’

  ‘It was. One of my lungs collapsed and I had a thoracotomy to release it.’ She raises her tee shirt, revealing the curve of her buttocks, stretch marks on her thigh and the merciless curvilinear scar that I saw earlier. ‘This was a big problem for me. I did long jump and triple jump in school. I hated this weakness, the inability to function. Plus, as a bonus, I found out that the reason I got TB in the first place was because my immunity was down. My immunity was down because the bastard gave me HIV.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Don’t worry; I did the tests after my healing and every three months since. All gone. No TB, no HIV, no nothing.’ Using a paring knife, she works the skin off each yam slice in one long peel, then drops them in a basin and turns on the tap. ‘Are you scared, Kaaro?’

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Catching plague.’
She concentrates inordinately on her task, washing the pieces before placing them in a sauce pan. The moment is pregnant.

  I push the chair back and stand, coming up behind her. I turn her around and kiss her on the lips, as wet as possible. ‘I am from Rosewater. In this place, we do not fear pestilence.’

  I kiss her again and insinuate myself under her tee shirt.

  The knife clangs into the basin.

  We decide to spend the day together. I feel up to a trip to Lagos, anything to get away from the baked flesh smell that will cling to Rosewater over the next week. She insists on driving and I don’t argue the point. It takes two and a half hours to get there and the journey is stultifying sameness punctuated with police checkpoints. We are stopped seventeen times and give money at each before we are waved through. There are automata behind the policemen at some places. They are stumpy, tank-like moving turrets that are seven feet tall. They are old, ten, maybe twenty years, and ill-maintained, repurposed American gear abandoned in conflict zones. If you look closely you can see the embossed stars and stripes, even when painted over with the green-white-green Nigerian flag. I have never seen them in action, and I wonder at times if these are rolling hulks with flashing indicator lights and no active ordnance.

  Driving south always nauseates me. I feel like I should be wanted by the police because of my youth as a thief. I know I am not, but something in my soul thinks that is unfair for me to be free.

  Each time the traffic slows we are besieged by young boys and girls trying to sell us something, mostly snacks, fizzy drinks, ‘pure’ water, magazines, Joss sticks, almanacs, and religious stickers. This happens in Rosewater too, but it is not as frenzied. Aminat enjoys these as opportunities to socialise. She is wearing dark glasses and a sleeveless black top with oversized silver circles for earrings, and perhaps looks like a movie star to them. She buys everything and chats with the children whenever she can, cajoling and teasing. They, in turn, love her and smear her car with their fingerprints, which she does not seem to mind.