Graceland (39 page)

Elvis traced patterns in the cracked and parched earth beneath his feet. There is a message in it all somewhere, he mused, a point to the chaos. But no matter how hard he tried, the meaning always seemed to be out there somewhere beyond reach, mocking him.

He found a quiet spot that didn’t seem to have a claim staked on it. Curling up, he covered himself with the torn bit of cloth he had been wrapping his father’s corpse in, and settled down to sleep.

Elvis woke up in Bridge City, feeling more than slightly confused. His stomach rumbled noisily but he was too broke to eat. He got up and stretched. He wondered what to do for money, remembering Okon telling him something about selling blood in hospitals. But which hospital? Just then he heard someone call his name. He turned round and, sure enough, there was Okon.

“I was just thinking about you.”

“Den I will indeed live long.”

They both laughed.

“What are you doing here?” Elvis asked.

“I should be asking you. I live here.”

“Since Maroko was demolished?”

“No. For months before den. You?”

“I just got here last night,” Elvis said. “But I’m not ready to talk about it yet.”

Okon nodded sagely: “Words cannot be force. When dey are ready dey will come. Have you eaten yet? No? Come den.”

And over breakfast Elvis probed Okon about what he did. Whether he still sold blood for a living.

Okon laughed. “No. I stop dat long time. For a while we hijacked corpses from roadsides and even homes which we sold for organ transplants.”

Elvis shuddered. Okon noted it.

“I know how you feel,” he said. “It is bad for a man’s soul, waiting at roadside like vulture, for someone to die, so you can steal fresh corpse, but man must survive. When dey start to demand alive people, me I quit. I am not murderer. Hustler? Survivor? Yes. But definitely not a murderer.”

Elvis had stopped eating and had been studying Okon’s face.

“But your face tell me you know about dat type of thing,” Okon continued.

“And now?” Elvis asked.

For the first time he really saw Okon for what he was: a tired man. His eyes were bloodshot and rheumy and fought hard to suppress any glimpse of the soul beneath. His face was weathered dark-brown leather with fine lines all over it.

“I am caretaker.”

“Caretaker?”

“Don’t rush things, my friend—gently, gently. Watch, look, learn. If you like things, den you can join. Until den, just come here and eat. I will square de owner. Okay?” Okon said softly.

Elvis nodded.

“Why are you helping me?” he asked.

“Because nobody help me.”

Elvis looked away, suddenly guilty that he had questioned Okon’s intentions.

“Have you heard anything about the King?” Elvis asked.

“So you never hear?”

“Hear what?”

“De King done die.”

The days passed quickly, and Elvis felt he had always lived in Bridge City. Time lost all meaning in the face of that deprivation. In Bridge City the only thing to look forward to was surviving the evening and making it through the night. Elvis soon got into the swing of things with the help and guidance of Okon. He became a caretaker, guarding the young beggar children while they slept.

Bridge City was a dangerous place, and when darkness fell, it was easy to be very much alone in the crowds that milled everywhere. Hundreds of oil lamps flickered unsteadily on tables, trays, mats spread on the ground and any other surface the hawkers who flocked to Bridge City at night could find to display their wares. Yet even all that light could not penetrate the deeper shadows that hung like presences everywhere.

Young children who had been out all day begging were prime targets for the scavengers spawned by this place. They were beaten, raped, robbed and sometimes killed. So they came up with the idea of “caretakers.” The children paid one set of scavengers to protect them against the others—simple and effective. Just thinking about the degradation made Elvis’s skin crawl. He watched the children huddled on rubber sheeting exposed to the night and the vampire mosquitoes. On rainy nights they slept standing up, swaying with the wind as the rain was blown everywhere, flooding their sleeping places.

The two things Elvis missed most were books and music—not the public embrace of record-store-mounted speakers, but self-chosen music, the sound of an old record scratching the melody from its hard vinyl, or the crackle of a radio fighting static to manifest a song from the mystery of the ether. He often thought about teaching these children to dance. He didn’t expect it to save them, but it would give them something in their lives that they did not have to beg, fight for or steal.

He had come to terms with the King’s death; but he hadn’t come to terms, and probably never would, with the way the King had been deified. He was spoken of with a deeply profound reverence, and the appendage “Blessings be upon his name,” usually reserved for prophets in Islam, was being used whenever his name was invoked. A group of Rastafarians even claimed he was the Emperor Selassie, Christ himself, the Lion of Judah, returned to lead them home.

He hadn’t heard from Redemption for a while and though he asked repeatedly, nobody seemed to have heard from him.

Elvis ran into Madam Caro a week after arriving in Bridge City, where she had already set up a thriving bar. She gave him a bottle of beer on the house and expressed her condolences at his father’s death. When he asked how she knew, she explained that she had run into Comfort a few days after Maroko was razed.

“Did she find his body?” he asked.

Madam Caro nodded.

“But he was not complete. We can only hope he can still find peace on the other side.”

Elvis smiled sadly.

“And Comfort?’

“She done move to Aje. Her shop still dey Balogun side. If you want to visit her, I get de address.”

“Thank you, but no,” he said, shaking his head.

“What of Redemption? Any news?”

She said she hadn’t heard from him but that she would keep her eyes and ears open. She went off to serve another customer. Aside from her limp, she was no worse for wear.

That had been three weeks ago, and hardly a day went by without Elvis wondering if Redemption had survived the Colonel’s men, and if so, where he was. In a few weeks he had lost everyone in Lagos who meant anything to him—his father, the King, Redemption, even Comfort. He was occasionally tempted to ask Madam Caro for Comfort’s address, but always decided against it. Sunday had been the only thing they had in common and now he was dead. Elvis didn’t see the point of contacting her, but it was hard not to give in to the loneliness and feel sorry for himself.

He walked to Madam Caro’s and bought a beer. Bringing it back to where the children slept, he sat watching over them. He pulled the Fulani pouch from under his shirt, unzipped it, took out his mother’s journal and stroked the cover repeatedly. He was lucky that it had survived prison. Next to it was Aunt Felicia’s postcard. Suddenly the idea of America didn’t seem so bad. He lit a cigarette and, looking up, caught the eye of one of the kids. She smiled at him. Her eyes were round and glowed strangely. Her teeth were small, white and even, and he wondered in an abstracted way where or when these children washed. There were no bathrooms, yet their skin glowed with a lovely sheen, and apart from the odd one, they never smelled.

The girl stood up and approached him. She was wearing a loose smock and he could see through it her barely formed breasts, their nipples grazing the material. She was only about twelve, maybe thirteen, and yet when she walked she swayed with knowledge far beyond her years.

She stood before him and he stared at her transfixed. Her lips parted slightly and her tongue darted out to lick her upper lip and he followed her every movement, his tongue licking in sync. She knelt before him and the movement made her sleeve drop, exposing one of her small breasts. His eyes grew big and he fought the spell, but the wave seemed to drown him in its power. She reached out and stroked his sex, and despite himself he felt his lust swell.

She smiled and took his hand and placed it on her breast and he watched while, with no help from him, his fingers began to move, stroking her nipple. It hardened and her breathing grew shallow and hoarse and she stroked him faster and faster and suddenly he let out a strangled cry and staggered up and away from her.

“Stop! Stop!” he yelled.

She stood up, confused and a little afraid. No one stirred except for one child, who glanced in their direction for a moment before looking away, uninterested. He wondered why his body had not cringed, why he had enjoyed it, desired more.

Okon sauntered over from behind the shrubbery in the shadows, which served as a toilet. He had heard Elvis’s cry and thought he was fighting off scavengers. Now he felt irritated because he had cut himself off to come and help and felt the familiar discomfort of unfinished business.

“What’s de matter?” he asked Elvis harshly.

Elvis opened his mouth but no sound came. Speechless, he pointed to the half-naked girl.

Okon understood and laughed. “Don’t start your shit. Different laws apply here. She wants it and dat’s all dat matters,” he said.

“But she is a child,” Elvis stammered.

“You go learn. We call her Oliver Twist because she no fit to get enough. I was her first, you know—did a good job, didn’t I?”

Okon looked past Elvis to the girl, who had developed a coy and seductive manner. Elvis looked from Okon to the girl and back again, something in his gaze causing the girl to drop her eyes. Okon yanked her roughly to him, pressing her close. Although Elvis held his hands over his ears, he could still hear the sounds of their coupling, crude and lusty: her delicate whimpers and his deeper, harsher grunts. He wondered why he sat there with his hands over his ears, his sex throbbing, doing nothing. As they both staggered out into the light, Okon was adjusting his trousers. The sleeve on the girl’s dress was still down, showing her breast. Her eyes held a curious mix of satisfaction, shame and pity when she looked at Elvis.

“You must learn to enjoy more. Dese are de fringe benefits of dis job,” Okon said, reaching out to pat Elvis on the back.

Elvis shrank away from his touch. “How could you?”

“No start your shit. We are who we are because we are who we were made. No forget.”

“Yes, I’ll never forget,” Elvis said softly.

He turned round. The girl was still standing there looking at him. He reached out on impulse and pulled her sleeve up, covering her breast. She smiled, suddenly shy, and hiding her face behind her hand, she giggled.

“You be fool,” she said tenderly.

He smiled. “Yes. A fool.”

Later that evening he felt a chill come upon him. Within days he was ill, his fever raging so hard that he passed out into a place of spasms and hallucinations. When he regained consciousness, the young girl was mopping his brow and Okon was nervously smoking a cigarette. Elvis sat up and wrapped the hole-ridden lappa tighter around himself, cowering away from the thundering rain. It came down in solid sheets, and in minutes the ground under the bridge was flooded.

The beggar children slept standing up, gently swaying with the rhythm of the rain. He had been given the only dry spot there was, on top of a pile of tires, as he was the sick one. Besides, he was the gentlest caretaker, taking only what was actually offered to him and in many cases handing it back when he didn’t actually need it.

Okon looked at him. “You worry us,” he said.

“How long was I unconscious?” Elvis asked.

“Four days.”

“Four days?”

“Yes. But you are back.”

He felt the young girl arranging cardboard boxes around him to fend off the spray carried by the wind, and he looked up and his eyes met hers.

“Go and sleep,” he whispered hoarsely.

“Shh,” she said, and wiped his fevered brow.

“I’ll never leave you,” he promised her rashly. He knew somewhere in him that of all the promises ever made, that was the one most likely to be broken. What circumstance did not steal, time eroded.

“Sleep now,” she said gently.

Her fingers, like butterfly wings, cooled his brow. She then climbed up beside him and, wrapping her little body around him for warmth, she slept, and this time he was not aroused.

The rain came down in one solid, unyielding sheet. It had been like this for days now, and few had been able to leave their homes as the city flooded. Shops closed and everything had slowly ground to a halt. No cars moved, because the streets had become canals. The only people about were the beggar children, who were making a fortune by fetching buckets of clean water to housebound people.

The young girl whispered the news to Elvis. Religious leaders, Muslim and Christian, had come together to urge their followers to pray together for the rain to stop.

Across Lagos, in another slum, Comfort waded through the ankle-deep water that flooded her home. She was lucky that the flooding was minor. The new man she was living with sat in a wicker work chair with his feet on top of a stool, reading a newspaper. He stopped to bawl out that he was hungry and then went back to reading.

Dinner was served in watery silence, broken only by the occasional slosh as some undercurrent disturbed them. Tope, her youngest child, paused in her meal to watch a rat that had just swum into the room. Taking careful aim, she hit it on the nose with a lump of fufu. It shrieked in anger and swam out hurriedly, muttering under its breath about the indignities of mixing with the poor. Tope laughed so much that she dropped her small piece of meat in the water. In a flash she was down on the floor, rooting in the water for it. Her brothers, Tunji and Akin, laughed at her loss, but with a triumphant yelp she held up the piece of meat, inspecting it critically before plopping it into her mouth. Her mother regarded her with a bored stare and went back to her own food.

The storm had not eased up for days. Almost as if they were symbiotically bound, Elvis’s fever still burned. Through the film of rain, hazy and unclear, Elvis saw a young boy standing around at a public tap waiting for his bucket to fill up. The public tap was situated directly below a high-voltage power line. Picking up a thin piece of metal, the boy rapped out a tune on the metal beak of the tap, dancing in the puddles, laughing. Suddenly the girl jerked up. Eyes wide, she reached out a trembling hand and pointed. Elvis saw it too. More than four thousand volts of electricity arced from the overhead cable in a beautiful steel-blue hue, like ice reflecting the sun, and hit the upturned bicycle spoke the boy held with the grace of a cat.