Girls at War (12 page)

“It is much too early for raids,” he said to Gladys, who had both her palms on her breast as though to still a thumping heart. “They rarely come before ten o’clock.”

But she remained tongue-tied from her recent fright. Nwankwo saw an opportunity there and took it at once.

“Where does your friend live?”

“250 Douglas Road.”

“Ah! That’s the very centre of town—a terrible place. No bunkers, nothing. I won’t advise you to go there before 6 p.m.; it’s not safe. If you don’t mind I will take you to my place where there is a good bunker and then as soon as it is safe, around six, I shall drive you to your friend. How’s that?”

“It’s all right,” she said lifelessly. “I am so frightened of this thing. That’s why I refused to work in Owerri. I don’t even know who asked me to come out today.”

“You’ll be all right. We are used to it.”

“But your family is not there with you?”

“No,” he said. “Nobody has his family there. We like to say it is because of air-raids but I can assure you there is more to it. Owerri is a real swinging town and we live the life of gay bachelors.”

“That is what I have heard.”

“You will not just hear it; you will see it today. I shall take you to a real swinging party. A friend of mine, a Lieutenant-Colonel, is having a birthday party. He’s hired the Sound Smashers to play. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”

He was immediately and thoroughly ashamed of himself. He hated the parties and frivolities to which his friends clung like drowning men. And to talk so approvingly of them because he wanted to take a girl home! And this particular girl too, who had once had such beautiful faith in the struggle and was betrayed (no doubt about it) by some man like him out for a good time. He shook his head sadly.

“What is it?” asked Gladys.

“Nothing. Just my thoughts.”

They made the rest of the journey to Owerri practically in silence.

She made herself at home very quickly as if she was a regular girl friend of his. She changed into a house dress and put away her auburn wig.

“That is a lovely hair-do. Why do you hide it with a wig?”

“Thank you,” she said leaving his question unanswered for a while. Then she said: “Men are funny.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You are now a beauty queen,” she mimicked.

“Oh, that! I mean every word of it.” He pulled her to him and kissed her. She neither refused nor yielded fully, which he liked for a start. Too many girls were simply too easy those days. War sickness, some called it.

He drove off a little later to look in at the office and she busied herself in the kitchen helping his boy with lunch. It must have been literally a look-in, for he was back within half an hour, rubbing his hands and saying he could not stay away too long from his beauty queen.

As they sat down to lunch, she said: “You have nothing in your fridge.”

“Like what?” he asked, half-offended.

“Like meat,” she replied undaunted.

“Do you still eat meat?” he challenged.

“Who am I? But other big men like you eat.”

“I don’t know which big men you have in mind. But they are not like me. I don’t make money trading with the enemy or selling relief or …”

“Augusta’s boyfriend doesn’t do that. He just gets foreign exchange.”

“How does he get it? He swindles the government—that’s how he gets foreign exchange, whoever he is. Who is Augusta, by the way?”

“My girlfriend.”

“I see.”

“She gave me three dollars last time which I changed to forty-five pounds. The man gave her fifty dollars.”

“Well, my dear girl, I don’t traffic in foreign exchange and I don’t have meat in my fridge. We are fighting a war and I happen to know that some young boys at the front drink gari and water once in three days.”

“It is true,” she said simply. “Monkey de work, baboon de chop.”

“It is not even that; it is worse,” he said, his voice beginning to shake. “People are dying every day. As we talk now somebody is dying.”

“It is true,” she said again.

“Plane!” screamed his boy from the kitchen.

“My mother!” screamed Gladys. As they scuttled towards the bunker of palm stems and red earth, covering their heads with their hands and stooping slightly in their flight, the entire sky was exploding with the clamour of jets and the huge noise of homemade anti-aircraft rockets.

Inside the bunker she clung to him even after the plane had gone and the guns, late to start and also to end, had all died down again.

“It was only passing,” he told her, his voice a little shaky. “It didn’t drop anything. From its direction I should say it was going to the war front. Perhaps our people who are pressing them. That’s what they always do. Whenever our boys press them, they send an SOS to the Russians and Egyptians to bring the planes.” He drew a long breath.

She said nothing, just clung to him. They could hear his boy telling the servant from the next house that there were two of them and one dived like this and the other dived like that.

“I see dem well well,” said the other with equal excitement. “If no to say de ting de kill porson e for sweet for eye. To God.”

“Imagine!” said Gladys, finding her voice at last. She had a way, he thought, of conveying with a few words or even a single word whole layers of meaning. Now it was at once her astonishment as well as reproof, tinged perhaps with grudging admiration for people who could be so light-hearted about these bringers of death.

“Don’t be so scared,” he said. She moved closer and he began to kiss her and squeeze her breasts. She yielded more and more and then fully. The bunker was dark and unswept and might harbour crawling things. He thought of bringing a mat from the main house but reluctantly decided against it. Another plane might pass and send a neighbour or simply a chance passerby crashing into them. That would be only slightly better than a certain gentleman in another air-raid who was seen in broad daylight fleeing his bedroom for his bunker stark-naked pursued by a woman in a similar state!

Just as Glady had feared, her friend was not in town. It would seem her powerful boyfriend had wangled for her a flight to Libreville to shop. So her neighbours thought anyway.

“Great!” said Nwankwo as they drove away. “She will come back on an arms plane loaded with shoes, wigs, pants, bras, cosmetics and what have you, which she will then sell and make thousands of pounds. You girls are really at war, aren’t you?”

She said nothing and he thought he had got through at last to her. Then suddenly she said, “That is what you men want us to do.”

“Well,” he said, “here is one man who doesn’t want you to do that. Do you remember that girl in khaki jeans who searched me without mercy at the checkpoint?”

She began to laugh.

“That is the girl I want you to become again. Do you remember her? No wig. I don’t even think she had any earrings …”

“Ah, na lie-o. I had earrings.”

“All right. But you know what I mean.”

“That time done pass. Now everybody want survival. They call it number six. You put your number six; I put my number six. Everything all right.”

The Lieutenant-Colonel’s party turned into something quite unexpected. But before it did things had been going well enough. There was goat-meat, some chicken and rice and plenty of home-made spirits. There was one fiery brand nicknamed “tracer” which indeed sent a flame down your gullet. The funny thing was looking at it in the bottle it had the innocent appearance of an orange drink. But the thing that caused the greatest stir was the bread—one little roll for each person! It was the size of a golf ball and about the same consistency too! But it was real bread. The band was good too and there were many girls. And to improve matters even further two white Red Cross people soon arrived with a bottle of Courvoisier and a bottle of Scotch! The party gave them a standing ovation and then scrambled to get a taste. It soon turned out from his general behaviour, however, that one of the white men had probably drunk too much already. And the reason it would seem was that a pilot he knew well had been killed in a crash at the airport last night, flying in relief in awful weather.

Few people at the party had heard of the crash by then. So there was an immediate damping of the air. Some dancing couples went back to their seats and the band stopped. Then for some strange reason the drunken Red Cross man just exploded.

“Why should a man, a decent man, throw away his life. For nothing! Charley didn’t need to die. Not for this stinking place. Yes, everything stinks here. Even these girls who come here all dolled up and smiling, what are they worth? Don’t I know? A head of stockfish, that’s all, or one American dollar and they are ready to tumble into bed.”

In the threatening silence following the explosion one of the young officers walked up to him and gave him three thundering slaps—right! left! right!—pulled him up from his seat and (there were things like tears in his eyes) shoved him outside. His friend, who had tried in vain to shut him up, followed him out and the silenced party heard them drive off. The officer who did the job returned dusting his palms.

“Fucking beast!” said he with an impressive coolness. And all the girls showed with their eyes that they rated him a man and a hero.

“Do you know him?” Gladys asked Nwankwo.

He didn’t answer her. Instead he spoke generally to the party.

“The fellow was clearly drunk,” he said.

“I don’t care,” said the officer. “It is when a man is drunk that he speaks what is on his mind.”

“So you beat him for what was on his mind,” said the host, “that is the spirit, Joe.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Joe, saluting.

“His name is Joe,” Gladys and the girl on her left said in unison, turning to each other.

At the same time Nwankwo and a friend on the other side of him were saying quietly, very quietly, that although the man had been rude and offensive what he had said about the girls was unfortunately the bitter truth, only he was the wrong man to say it.

When the dancing resumed Captain Joe came to Gladys for a dance. She sprang to her feet even before the word was out of his mouth. Then she remembered immediately and turned round to take permission from Nwankwo. At the same time the Captain also turned to him and said, “Excuse me.”

“Go ahead,” said Nwankwo, looking somewhere between the two.

It was a long dance and he followed them with his eyes without appearing to do so. Occasionally a relief plane passed overhead and somebody immediately switched off the lights saying it might be the Intruder. But it was only an excuse to dance in the dark and make the girls giggle, for the sound of the Intruder was well known.

Gladys came back feeling very self-conscious and asked Nwankwo to dance with her. But he wouldn’t. “Don’t bother about me,” he said, “I am enjoying myself perfectly sitting here and watching those of you who dance.”

“Then let’s go,” she said, “if you won’t dance.”

“But I never dance, believe me. So please, enjoy yourself.”

She danced next with the Lieutenant-Colonel and again with Captain Joe, and then Nwankwo agreed to take her home.

“I am sorry I didn’t dance,” he said as they drove away. “But I swore never to dance as long as this war lasts.”

She said nothing.

“When I think of somebody like that pilot who got killed last night. And he had no hand whatever in the quarrel. All his concern was to bring us food …”

“I hope that his friend is not like him,” said Gladys.

“The man was just upset by his friend’s death. But what I am saying is that with people like that getting killed and our own boys suffering and dying at the war fronts I don’t see why we should sit around throwing parties and dancing.”

“You took me there,” said she in final revolt. “They are your friends. I don’t know them before.”

“Look, my dear, I am not blaming you. I am merely telling you why I personally refuse to dance. Anyway, let’s change the subject … Do you still say you want to go back tomorrow? My driver can take you early enough on Monday morning for you to go to work. No? All right, just as you wish. You are the boss.”

She gave him a shock by the readiness with which she followed him to bed and by her language.

“You want to shell?” she asked. And without waiting for an answer said, “Go ahead but don’t pour in troops!”

He didn’t want to pour in troops either and so it was all right. But she wanted visual assurance and so he showed her.

One of the ingenious economics taught by the war was that a rubber condom could be used over and over again. All you had to do was wash it out, dry it and shake a lot of talcum powder over it to prevent its sticking; and it was as good as new. It had to be the real British thing, though, not some of the cheap stuff they brought in from Lisbon which was about as strong as a dry cocoyam leaf in the harmattan.

He had his pleasure but wrote the girl off. He might just as well have slept with a prostitute, he thought. It was clear as daylight to him now that she was kept by some army officer. What a terrible transformation in the short period of less than two years! Wasn’t it a miracle that she still had memories of the other life, that she even remembered her name? If the affair of the drunken Red Cross man should happen again now, he said to himself, he would stand up beside the fellow and tell the party that here was a man of truth. What a terrible fate to befall a whole generation! The mothers of tomorrow!

By morning he was feeling a little better and more generous in his judgments. Gladys, he thought, was just a mirror reflecting a society that had gone completely rotten and maggoty at the centre. The mirror itself was intact; a lot of smudge but no more. All that was needed was a clean duster. “I have a duty to her,” he told himself, “the little girl that once revealed to me our situation. Now she is in danger, under some terrible influence.”

He wanted to get to the bottom of this deadly influence. It was clearly not just her good-time girlfriend, Augusta, or whatever her name was. There must be some man at the centre of it, perhaps one of these heartless attack-traders who traffic in foreign currencies and make their hundreds of thousands by sending young men to hazard their lives bartering looted goods for cigarettes behind enemy lines, or one of those contractors who receive piles of money daily for food they never deliver to the army. Or perhaps some vulgar and cowardly army officer full of filthy barrack talk and fictitious stories of heroism. He decided he had to find out. Last night he had thought
of sending his driver alone to take her home. But no, he must go and see for himself where she lived. Something was bound to reveal itself there. Something on which he could anchor his saving operation. As he prepared for the trip his feeling towards her softened with every passing minute. He assembled for her half of the food he had received at the relief centre the day before. Difficult as things were, he thought a girl who had something to eat would be spared, not all, but some of the temptation. He would arrange with his friend at the WCC to deliver something to her every fortnight.