Butterfly Fish (12 page)

Queenie London 1970: London Nah Wah

After two months in England Queenie still hadn't fully adapted. She missed her mother's marauding smile. She caught it circling the sink taps in her room or hovering near cracks on the white ceiling. Sometimes it was the last thing she saw before falling asleep. She missed the sight of lone street vendors on hot tarmac roads, selling spicy rice and stew on broad, green leaves and warm balls of greasy
akara
. She longed for raucous house parties where there was always somebody new to meet. And the pleasure of bodies dancing so close you could smell intentions mingled with sweat.

She missed the markets. She often recalled the endless chatter and the lingering rich scents of fresh fish, sweet ripening fruits, people's strong, healthy bodies. Markets in London were not the haggling, bustling markets of back home. Lagos markets fed off the heat. They were animals in their own right, with the heads being the upper halves of traders mid-custom and the tail-ends the backs of customers walking to stalls. Queenie now carried the unfamiliar sensation of the cold in her bones. It even changed her walk, instead of the practiced sashay she'd unleashed in Nigeria drawing admiring glances; she now walked hurriedly, body tucked in and braced with the cruel cold climate perpetually at her heels.

At times at night her room got damp, making her fear of catching flu very real. Mice had gnawed their way through floorboards making holes in her underwear the weight of a yawn. They screeched at each other in an abrasive language and repeatedly flew across the table as if they planned to topple it. In retaliation, Queenie threw anything she could grab quickly at the moving targets of sound. Usually weapons that had no impact: books, shoes, a purple hot water bottle. Sometimes, she saw herself caught in a mousetrap, giant mice hurling objects at her.

One evening she took a walk up Lavender Hill, an undulating stretch of road peppered with shops. She liked the odd, interesting stores; the retro sweets haven selling multi-coloured sins that became small planets on your tongue, the pink and white umbrella shaped treats in tall glass jars that made her think of sugar cane sticks. There was a typewriter shop with rare models in the display window, neatly arranged in rows of five on each side. She imagined the ribbons coming undone at night, pressed against the glass imprinting half formed sentences.

At Sal's Café, an armpit of a place sporting chipped wooden tables, maroon walls were decorated with old film noir posters and the smell of coffee and hot chocolate intertwined. She saw men who worked construction slouched in their seats, dried bits of cement splattered on their jeans, faces bearing an unhealthy pallor. Broken shadows inched forward and sipped from their cups. Sal himself was a stocky Italian with thinning black hair and a tic in his face travelled through his features. He always wore a stained white apron over his clothes. She liked Sal's because it was warm and cosy, and because occasionally the same drunken tramp would come in spouting poetry. He'd tell her she was beautiful, and eventually stumble out with a piece of cake in his hands. Sal's became one of her havens; she often rushed in counting coins from fingers made crooked by the cold unintentionally blowing cloudy breaths in the paths of those she crossed.

She was on her way to Sal's that day, when she caught the white
handwritten sign in the Gift! charity shop window:
Store Assistant Wanted. Stop by for details
. She peered in, noticed racks of used clothing, stacks of crossword puzzles next to old videos, scuffed shoes dented from rough travels. Beautiful abstract paintings were propped up against mauve walls. Bookshelves teemed with paperbacks. Records, lampshades and china tableware all shared an area. A jewellery display cabinet was positioned beneath the cash register and in the window display sat a family of puppets.

Slouched and wide-eyed, the puppets looked as if they spoke to each other between the ringing of the cash register making up stories about the customers, where they'd come from and who they were buying gifts for. A slender, pink haired woman wearing blue-framed glasses emerged from a set of double doors with a poster of a naked woman entering a lamp. Next to the doors a white arrow read
Staff Only
underneath. The woman also carried a basket of scarves. Queenie pushed the shop door open gently and was greeted by an upbeat song on the radio about rockets. She smiled at the sole staff member who darted a quick, curious glance her way. She walked leisurely through, studying items that grabbed her attention picking up a few here and there.

“Looking for anything in particular?” the lady asked a warm, open expression on her face. She'd set the basket at her feet next to a rack of empty hangers and was efficiently slotting scarves into them. Queenie edged closer. “Actually, I'm here about the sign.”

The woman's face crinkled in confusion. “The sign, what sign?”

“The position,” Queenie said, her accent suddenly sounding thicker to her own ears.

“Oh the job!” Realization dawned with a half laugh on the woman.

Sighing audibly, Queenie internally admonished herself for not stopping by after having prepared. “You are a charity?” she said with a tone of uncertainty that Ella the store manager found charming. As if she'd come in on a hunch and Ella liked the idea of Gift! delivering the unexpected.

“Yes, we're a homeless charity. Do you like the shop?”

Queenie's lips curved. “A lot, it's like a contained mad market indoors.”

“I never thought of it that way but you're right. That's a good way of putting it!” Ella replied, already half way through emptying her basket. They were still the only two people in the shop and the song on the radio changed. A man was now singing about living in a missing train carriage with a bright-eyed girl in rough, urgent tones over heavy guitar riffs.

British people nah wah!
Queenie thought,
even their songs were strange
.

“Sorry about earlier, sometimes there's just too much going on in my head. Have you had any experience working in a shop?” Ella asked, glancing at her over a shoulder and admiring Queenie's striking features.

“A little, back home I worked in our local tailor's shop. I learn fast and I like people.”

“Well, liking people certainly helps in this job, in fact a lot of jobs I suspect!” Ella was intrigued by this warm young woman who seemed very present. Queenie walked towards the display window. “I love the family of puppets. You sold one?”

Ella followed suit, they stood together behind the items. The puppets leaned into each other.

Bending forward, Ella touched one. “They came in last week. Great aren't they? No we sell them as a complete set.”

Tugging at her coat, Queenie decided that she'd get a warmer jacket as soon as she had more money. “One's missing.”

“Shit!” Ella darted forward for a closer inspection. “How did you know that?”

Queenie shrugged as though it was nothing. “It's a family and there's only a little boy, usually there would be a girl too. And… they look as if they're missing something.”

Brow furrowed, Ella touched the boy puppet in case he disappeared before her eyes. “God well spotted! Somebody must have pinched it.”

“Pinched? Who goes around pinching objects?”

“Sorry, pinched means stolen, some little thief helped themselves. We've had trouble with thieves for a while, another reason it would be good to have an extra pair of hands and eyes.”

Digesting this information, she held Ella's gaze. “So how many people work here?”

“At the moment, there's just me and Simon. They locked eyes briefly. Queenie saw that she was being sized up. Then Ella finally said, “You know the WAC Arts centre down the road?”

Queenie nodded.

“Well,” Ella continued, “Every six months we convert their basement hall into a restaurant for the homeless, serve them three course sit-down meals so they can eat and have some dignity. We've served up to a hundred people in one day and the atmosphere's great. We get lots of volunteers come down to help.”

“Really?” Queenie asked surprised. “Back home beggars and homeless people are considered pests.”

“Oh, there are plenty of people who think that way here believe me! Can you come on Thursday around 3pm for an interview? I'm Ella by the way.”

“Yes. Queenie. Nice to meet you.”

“You too, see you soon.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem.” Ella said, watching Queenie's back disappear through the front door.

At the hostel, Queenie stuffed a pile of dirty laundry into a wheelie bag with a faulty squeaky left wheel. She dragged the bag to the local laundrette and the wheel talked all the way. She flung her clothes into the large, circular mouth of a big, dark yellow washing machine that shook after she slotted coins in. Silently she cried watching her reflection in the machine's glass door. The water rose steadily over her face. She was running out of money, lonely and cold, constantly cold. She had no idea where to start looking for him. She'd come all the way to England riding the split tails of a feeling, on the words of
a broken man. Her gut instinct's slippery outline lay on the ground. She left the laundrette with washing machine cycles whirring inside her and mumbled a short prayer soon caught in the flimsy Ferris wheel of a cobweb clinging to the wet sheen of a lamppost.

Ogoro Must Jump

In the end, it was neither the wives sweeping in like the changing seasons nor the heady, bitter herbal concoctions that fuelled Oba Odion's recovery. It was a childhood memory, a lie that had lined the mouth of a child and rolled out slowly. This lie had fed on Oba Odion's guilt as a boy, till he was certain it stood small shoulder to small shoulder with him. At naming ceremonies, it tripped him up even when he was perfectly steady and rested in the black crescent-shaped shadows under his father's eyes. So the boy Odion wrestled with it and won temporarily.

On the day he left his bedchamber, it was to an air of disappointment from the servants. As if they had hoped death would squeeze him in its grip till he succumbed, limp and placid, while death escaped with another life pocketed. But the servants at the bottom of the palace hierarchy reserved their true irritation for their private quarters. There, they would serve up their disdain for the Oba along with the latest mishaps that had befallen palace residents. The Oba sought out his councilmen who on seeing him pretended to be relieved as well. In their array of bright native outfits, they appeared a council worthy of any good king. They welcomed the renewed health of the Oba with outstretched arms and tense laughter but an outside eye would have noted that just before the Oba appeared they, an assortment of plotters, angled their necks into unspoken
questions, traces of a possible coup evaporating behind false smiles. When the Oba finally sat down after all the back slapping and hailing, he did not stop to ask why none of them had bothered to visit when the fever sat inside him like a stubborn tenant refusing to leave the owner's land.

Stranger things may have happened in Benin but Adesua was convinced the brass head was stealing her dreams. That it waited for her body to be loosened by slumber before it helped itself to a large selection of past and present dreams. Stripping her till she woke up empty-headed and feeling bereft. She wanted dreams that tasted like pink watermelon juice, sunshine in her mouth. But these she believed were being snapped up by cold, hard brass. Even though a short arrow of fear hovered at her chest, she did not want to give the brass head back to the Oba. She knew it had raised her status amongst the other wives, a sword against their lofty sense of importance. She knew it had stolen the words of her dreams, which meant she could not express those lost dreams to anybody. As if the head had sewn invisible stitching in areas of her tongue.

When Kalu the medicine man lay cocooned in his mother's belly, many, many years ago, his preferred view of her womb was from the side. This inclination had not changed; it was the way he liked to look at the world. When giving readings, he would stare dramatically from the side, intensely scrutinizing the pile of useless bones, nuts, leaves and haphazardly gathered debris that meant absolutely nothing before declaring, “This is serious!” to his latest victim. He would pause, let his remark sink into their chest like a tingly ointment, all the while inwardly contemplating the delicious meals he would eat from the plump fowl and fat lambs that they were to bring him in payment. He would allow his bottom lip to tremble, and even managed to break into sweat now and again, before whispering in an otherworldly voice, “to resolve this, we will have to do another reading, this is what you must bring…” Then he would proceed to chant loudly in a made up tongue, widening his eyes till they appeared to pop out of his head and frighten any doubts out of his customer's
mind. Finally, he would throw spiritual liquid (water) sparingly over the stash of nothingness that separated him and his visitor, to slow down whatever doom was cutting a path towards them.