Harmattan (30 page)

I do not remember resting my head on Archie Cargo’s jacket and the tray of bottled water, but that is where I found myself: emerging, crusty-eyed and sticky, from a thick slumber. Once again I was in the vehicle by myself. All of the windows and the roof had been left open, but my clothes were wet with perspiration and my head was throbbing.

In front of me, the back of the empty passenger seat came into focus. Already the interior of the car felt familiar: safe somehow, despite my discomfort and the hollow feeling in my gut. I considered a little tear in the fabric and, for a moment, wondered how it had happened. Suddenly, an image of my mother repairing clothing flooded my memory and, just as quickly, despair surged through every part of my being once again.

I sat up to take my bearings, blinking back tears. The car was parked outside Archie Cargo’s place of employment: L’Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey. It appeared that the demonstrating students had not returned from their protest at Pont Kennedy and, despite the sound of distant traffic, an unnatural stillness hung in the listless air. The green doors would swing open occasionally to allow someone to enter or exit but there was not the bustle one might generally expect at such a place. I wondered how long I had slept for and how long Abdelkrim and Archie had been inside.

It was well after midday, for sure; the sun had peaked some time earlier and already the shadows were beginning to lengthen.

The concierge who had spoken to us earlier emerged from the building and looked up and down the road, then stretched his thin arms slowly towards the silvery sky.

I put my head out of the window and waved towards him.

‘Monsieur. Have you seen my brother and Monsieur Archie Cargo?’

At first he did not answer, a look of puzzlement on his bony face. ‘Ah!

Mademoiselle!’ he said at last. ‘Monsieur Archie and his friend have gone to the workshops.’

I thanked him and considered whether I should stay in the car or venture into the building.

The concierge had his hand on the door and was about to go back inside when he paused. ‘Would you like me to show you where they are?’

‘
Oui. Merci
, Monsieur.’ I stepped out of the car and followed him into the foyer of the college.

He pointed down a long, grey, dimly lit corridor. ‘Just keep going down that hallway until you get to the end,’ he said. ‘It’s the last door on the right. You can’t miss it.’I thanked him again and set off down the corridor, a strange, acrid smell filling my nostrils. Despite the shiny, grey walls and the gloomy light, I decided that this building was a good deal more cheery than the hospital. Each of the large, wooden doors I passed had a wire mesh, glass-encased panel, which allowed pockets of natural light from the rooms beyond to seep into the corridor. Door signs boldly announced:
Laboratoires de Sciences, Mathématiques, Métallurgie.
Still more leaflets announced student activities: lectures, dominoes championships, bus schedules, a Vietnamese Restaurant, a visiting hypnotist from France, movies at Cinéma Vox; pamphlets calling for wages from the civil servants’ unions and posters demanding immediate payment of allowances for students fluttered from a cork pin-board as I breezed past a long, recessed area. On the floor, at regular intervals, buckets filled with sand had been placed beneath bright red, wall-mounted fire extinguishers. At the end of the corridor, just below the yellowed ceiling, a single dormant bell seemed to lie in wait to break that eerie silence unbefitting any school.

The last door on the right was, sure enough, the wood workshop. Through the meshed window panel I could see Abdelkrim and Archie Cargo moving busily. I tapped at the glass but they did not hear me, so I pushed open the heavy door and entered the room. It was dusty, but there was a fresh, sappy scent in the air, that I liked. Four or five large benches stood in line, and at one of these my brother and Archie Cargo were putting the finishing touches to the rough casket which was to bear my poor mother to her grave. I swallowed hard and forced myself to smile when the two men looked up at me from their work. Archie was daubing a square piece of board with thick, white glue while, at the other end of this chilling construction, my brother was busy with a hammer and tacks.

Archie finished his job and then inspected Abdelkrim’s work. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I had planned to glue that first.’

Abdelkrim slid a dirty fingernail into the joint and made a half-hearted attempt at prising it open. ‘It will be fine. We’d best get going.’

Archie chewed at his lip, then nodded. ‘I’ll just lock these tools away again.’

I walked over to the coffin and ran my hand along its lid. I did not speak.

Somehow I felt part of some great betrayal of my mother.

Abdelkrim came and put his hand on my shoulder and I turned and buried my face in his tunic, concentrating on the sounds of cupboard doors opening and locks turning and trying to hold back my tears.

‘You have a lot of fine machinery here,’ I heard my brother say.

Archie’s voice moved towards us. ‘Yes. Pity most of it doesn’t work. They sent us thousands of dollars worth of equipment and we don’t have the correct wiring facilities installed. It’s a scandal!’

‘Toh.’
Abdelkrim patted my back and I moved towards the door while the men lifted the casket off the bench.

‘You can get the doors for us, Haoua,’ Archie said, lifting a bundle of cords from one of the tables.

We must have looked a curious sight: a white man, a black man, a twelve-year-old girl and a coffin, tied upright in the open trunk of a battered Mercedes Benz car, moving slowly across the city through the heat and haze of that awful afternoon.

The city mortuary was situated not far from the main hospital block, a single storey concrete building with a corrugated tin roof in its own little discreet compound on a rise overlooking the river. A pair of metal gates opened into a dusty forecourt and a strip of asphalt allowed vehicles to back right up close to a set of double doors. A small sign inside the hospital’s grounds had led us to this place but the shuttered windows along the façade gave no indication of the building’s purpose: a storage place for the dead. I had never before considered the possibility of there being such a place.

As I sat in that vehicle, looking out over the majestic river below, I was seized by cold fear once again. The sun, still fierce and pulsating, descended steadily through the haze. Marking time. Reminding me of the task ahead. Of the need to be strong. To carry the burden. Help my brothers, my sister, my father. Wadata seemed very far away. My head reeled; a great drop seemed to open before me, a chasm stripped back by these tempestuous, violent events over which I had no control. What would happen to my family? Who would now bind us together? How would we survive?

Try as I might, I could see no way forward. We had lived without my mother for several weeks now but only the hope that things would return to the way they had been before had driven us. We had tended crops and animals, fetched water, cooked, cleaned, washed clothes and bedding, mended fences, woven mats, traded goods in the market, forfeited school and much contact with friends, all the while fending off unkind remarks and cruel looks from the likes of Souley and her gang, and with barely a word of praise from our father. The idea that we should henceforth embrace that existence as our
normal
way of life – possibly even with
Aunt
Alassane in the place of our poor mother – was unbearable.

Archie Cargo turned the engine off. He looked across at my brother and the two men nodded silently at one another.

‘You stay in the car,’ Abdelkrim said, twisting around in his seat to address me. I looked out of the side window, avoiding his eyes. ‘You are going to put her in the box now?’

He nodded, his lips a tight line of sadness.

‘Shouldn’t I help you?’

Abdelkrim sighed, and Archie Cargo sat rigid with his arms folded.

‘No, Little One. You must remember her as she was. Happy. Warm. Kind.

Good-hearted. Loving. Not like this.’ He turned to his friend. ‘
Ça va
?’

In the blink of an eye, Archie was out of the car. Abdelkrim reached out and brushed my cheek with the back of his hand. Then he too was gone. I leaned back into my seat and squeezed my eyes shut. I shuffled my feet, worried at my fingers with my teeth. Tried to ignore the banging and rattling and slapping of cords coming from the open trunk.

At last there was stillness: quiet but for the occasional cheep of the cut-throat finches in the trees above and fragments of the pirogue boatmen’s voices rising up from the great muddy slide of the river below; the torpor of a breathless and terrifying afternoon. I leaned against the car door, trying to drink in this moment of calm. My heart pounded like a pestle. I considered praying again. A bead of sweat snaked its way down my spine. I put my head out through the window and peered up at the now pale, empty sky and wondered if my gentle mother’s spirit was looking down on me; but there were no signs. Nothing. Emptiness.

I looked over my shoulder at the scuffed doors of the mortuary. Inside, my brother and a man I had only just met were taking hold of my mother’s body and laying it in a casket. I would never see my mother’s face again. Panic gripped me. What if I could not remember what she looked like in the weeks, months, years that stretched before me?

I do not remember getting out of the car or pushing my way through the mortuary doors. I was standing in a narrow vestibule, next to a desk on which lay some papers with my mother’s name at the top. On one of them, my brother had printed his name and scrawled his spidery signature at the bottom. A battered metal trolley stood next to a tower of little open-ended compartments, most of which were stuffed with papers similar to the one on the desk. Ahead of me, another set of doors attempted, unsuccessfully, to contain the stench within. I was familiar enough with the smell of death. Animal, human, it was all the same. They could try to lace it with detergents and disinfectants but nothing could truly mask its unsettling, sickly sweet and somehow familiar scent.

I stumbled forwards. Voices beyond the doors. My brother’s, Archie Cargo’s and another man’s. Suddenly I found myself inside the main chamber – cool, dank, dark and putrid.

Hell itself.

‘What are you doing in here, child?’

Abdelkrim and Archie were crouched over my mother’s casket, fixing the lid in place. Another man, large, fat, stinking of sweat and alcohol, loomed over me, a white surgical mask covering his mouth and nose. ‘What are you doing in here?’ he repeated.

‘Haoua!’ I heard my brother call out, just as the fat man took hold of my forearm and spun me towards the vestibule.

In the corner of my eye I caught sight of more trolleys and shelves laid out with cadavers, some draped with grubby sheets, others waiting, exposed, drained of life and dignity.

‘I want to see my mother again!’ I said, wrenching away from the fat man.

Close to my brother, the grey, tortured face of what looked like a drowned man grimaced pitifully through a rent in the fabric of his shroud. A mother and child, laid out on the same board, had been abandoned carelessly in a rigid knot of diseased limbs.

Rack after rack of the empty husks of humanity lined the dingy room.

‘Get out of here! Now!’ my brother shouted.

The fat man had my arm again and, before I had time to protest further, I found myself standing, blinking in the hazy sunlight next to Archie Cargo’s car, hot tears coursing down my cheeks.

‘It does no good to go in there unless you have to, young mademoiselle,’ the fat man said.

I turned angrily to face him, prepared to hurl a torrent of abuse his way. But something stopped me. I looked up and found that he had removed his mask and that he was smiling at me. His unshaven face was gentler than I had expected.

‘Believe me,’ he continued, ‘I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to!’ He dug his hands into the pocket of his grubby white coat and shrugged. An embroidered label next to a pocket bulging with biro pens, read:
Doctor Mackenzie, Guy’s Hospital
.

‘You’re a doctor?’ I sniffed.

He laughed and shook his head. ‘No, no! This is nothing but an
anasara’s
cast-off.’

He flicked at the label disdainfully. ‘
Doctor Death –
that’s me. Now you just wait there.

These fellows will be right out with…’ Then he turned and disappeared inside.

I leaned against the car and sobbed quietly, my shoulders heaving until there was nothing left and I stood, numb, empty, without even the will to swat away a fly that had landed on my tear-streaked cheek.

My mother’s coffin scuffed against the mortuary doors as Abdelkrim and Archie wrestled it into the open, the thud jolting me to my senses. While the box was being slid onto the roof of the car, I crossed the compound and, sinking to the sand, sat cross-legged against the wall with my head down and my fingers locked behind my neck.

‘We need a blanket or something, to stop it slipping around,’ I heard my brother say.

‘There are some old sheets in the trunk,’ Archie said. ‘I’ll get the ropes too.’

I looked up in time to see the fat mortuary attendant disappearing into his horrific workplace once again.

Abdelkrim was passing a rope to Archie through the rear of the cab.

‘Let’s make sure that the doors will close over before we make it fast,’ Archie said. ‘This is quite sturdy rope.’

I watched them make a loop over the coffin and the roof of the car.

‘I’ll keep some tension on it, Abdel,’ Archie said. ‘You try closing the door.’

Abdelkrim put his hand flat on the panel and tried slamming it over. The door juddered violently and then bounced back towards him.
‘Walayi!’

‘Merde!’
Archie came around to Abdel’s side. ‘You know what we’re going to have to do?’

‘What’s that?’

‘We’re going to have to leave the windows open enough for the rope to pass through with the doors closed.’

‘That means the doors will be tied closed.’

Archie opened his palms and tilted his head. ‘What choice do we have? What we really need is a roof rack.’