The Famished Road (12 page)

She kicked something and cursed and sat down and I lit a match and saw blood pouring out of the big toe of her right foot.

‘The right foot is supposed to be lucky,’ she said.

The blood dripped to the floor and I said:

‘Shall I boil water?’

She said nothing. The match burnt down to my fingers. Her blood became the colour of the darkness. I couldn’t hear her breath, couldn’t see her. And before I could light another match she got up and limped to the backyard. When she came back she had washed the cut and I asked her what she had put on it.

‘Poverty,’ she said.

I lit another match and studied the toe.

‘Don’t waste the matches,’ she said sharply.

The cut still bled through the black stuff she had covered it with.

‘Ash,’ she said.

The light went out. We didn’t move. The rats began to chew and the cockchafers began to stir in the cupboard.

‘Time for you to sleep,’ she said.

I didn’t move. I wanted to stay awake till Dad returned. It grew late and dark. After a while I heard Mum say:

‘I’m going to warm the food.’

We hadn’t eaten since the morning. We had been going to sleep on empty stomachs for days.

‘I’m comingwith you.’

‘Go to sleep or a ghost will grab you.’

‘Let it try.’

She moved in the dark and I heard her at the door. Light came in and Mum went out. I sat in the darkness, listening. I tried to get up but something held me down. I tried to move but the darkness had become a resistant force. I lowered myself to the floor and crawled around on my hands and knees. Something crawled up my arm. I made to get up, frightened, and hit my head against the sharp edge of the centre table and I stayed like that till the darkness stopped dancing. Then I searched for Dad’s chair and sat down. I could see the outline of things. I stayed there till Mum came back in.

‘You’re still up?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘I’m hungry.’

She was silent. Then after a while she said:

‘Wait for your father. We will all share his food.’

I thanked her. She found me in the darkness and held my head to her and I heard her crying gently and then she said, in a lighter voice:

‘Let me tell you the story about the stomach.’

‘Tell me a story,’ I said, expectantly.

She went back to the bed. I couldn’t see her. The rats ate and the cockchafers fretted. She began.

‘Powerful people eat very little,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because they are powerful. There was once a great medicine man in my village who would fly to the moon at night and then would walk across the mighty ocean to visit spirits in the country of white people . .

‘Why?’

‘Because he went to attend an important meeting concerning the future of the whole world. And to be able to attend the meeting he must do something great. So he flew to the moon and to many planets. After he had done that he went to the country of white people and before they allowed him in they asked him one question.’

‘What?’

‘They said: “Mr Medicine Man from the village of Otu, what did you eat before you went to the moon?”’

‘And what did he say?’

‘A cricket.’

‘Only a cricket?’

‘Yes, a small roasted cricket.’

We were silent for a while. I pondered the story with my feet not touching the floor.

‘Is that the story of the stomach?’

‘No,’ Mum said in the darkness.

We were silent again. Then Mum began, saying:

‘Once upon a time . . .

I sat back in Dad’s chair and folded up my feet.

there was a man without a stomach. Every year he used to worship at a great shrine. One day he met a stomach without a body. The stomach said: “I have been looking for you. What are you doing without me?” And then the stomach jumped on the man and became part of him. The man carried on with his journey to the shrine.

But before he got there he became very hungry. The stomach said: “Feed me.” “I will not,” said the man. “When I didn’t have you I travelled far, was never hungry, was always happy and contented, and I was strong. You can either leave me now or be quiet.” . .’

Somewhere around that point in the story I fell through the back of the chair and I flew on the back of a cricket and I was the man without a stomach, heading for a feast on the moon.

And then I found my eyes open and there was a candle lit on the table. Dad was standing above me, swaying. He looked both crushed and stunned.

‘My brain has been pressed down, my son,’ he said.

I quickly got down from his chair. He paced up and down the room, holding his head. And then he sat down heavily and was still.

‘I found the candle at the market,’ he said, and fell asleep.

Mum laid out his food and woke him up. He blinked.

‘I have been carrying the most terrible loads in my dreams,’ he groaned.

‘You should eat,’ Mum said.

We had gathered round the table. Dad didn’t move. His face was lit by the candle.

All the tendons on his neck showed up thick and tense. His face glistened, and veins throbbed on his temples. He surprised us by suddenly speaking:

‘They have begun to spoil everything with politics,’ he said in a ghostly and exhausted voice. ‘Now they want to know who you will vote for before they let you carry their load.’

He paused. His eyes were bloodshot.

‘If you want to vote for the party that supports the poor, they give you the heaviest load. I am not much better than a donkey.’

‘Eat, you’re tired,’ Mum said.

Dad shut his eyes and began mumbling something which I took to be a prayer. He didn’t open his eyes for a long time. And it was only when he began to snore that we knew he had fallen asleep again. Mum didn’t want to disturb him a second time so we ate half the food and saved the rest for him to eat in the morning. We ate more quietly than the rats did.

Before I woke up in the morningDad had gone and all I had of him were the smells of his boots, of mud, of cigarettes, the mosquito coil, and his sweat. The mood of the room was infected with his exhaustion.

We had cut down our food. That morningwe had pap and bread. Mum went off to the market, went hawking her boxes of matches, sweets, cigarettes and odds and ends down the roads on a quite empty stomach. She looked much leaner and her blouse hung from her and the straps fell over her shoulders as if she had shrunk in her clothes.

As I walked behind her to the junction where we parted I felt very unhappy about the thinness of her voice amongst the noises of the ghetto. As she went off on her arduous journeys she seemed so frail that the slightest wind threatened to blow her away into the molten sky. Before she went she gave me a piece of bread, and told me to behave myself at school. I followed her a short way. She was barefoot. It pained me to see her stumble on the rubbish and stones of the paths. It seemed very harsh not to be able to go hawking with her, not to be able to protect her feet, and help her sell off all her provisions. I followed her and then she turned, saw me, and waved me on to school. I slowed down, turned back, and watched her disappear into the expanding ghetto.

WHEN I WENT TO Madame Koto’s bar after school, the place was empty.

I was hungry. Sitting near the earthenware pot, I kept tellingmyself that I didn’t have a stomach. I slept and woke up. Flies had come into the bar. I went to Madame Koto’s room to ask for food and was about to knock when I heard her chanting. I heard the ringing of a bell. I was about to go back to the bar when two women of the compound saw me and said:

‘What are you doing?’

I said nothing. They held me and I shouted. Madame Koto came out. She had antimony on one side of her face, kaoline on the other, and her mouth was full of the juice of ground tobacco. The women looked at her, then at one another, and hurried on.

‘Why didn’t you knock?’ she asked, her mouth drippingwith the tobacco.

‘You were busy.’

‘Go to the bar.’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘How can you be hungry with that small stomach?’

Then she went back to her room. The bells started up. I went to the bar and the flies played around my nose. It got very humid and I couldn’t breathe and my hunger got unbearable. I went out of the bar and wandered along the paths. It was excruciatingly hot. Trees shimmered in the sun. The shadows were dense. Insects sizzled among the bushes. A lizard half crossed my way and then it stopped, turned towards me, and nodded. A bell rang. Its jangling noise scared me and I jumped out of the path, into the bushes, and a huge man with a wide mouth rode past on a little bicycle. He gave an insane laugh as he shot past. I stayed in the bushes and only came running out when I felt my legs burning with stings. I had trodden on an army of ants. I got them off me and was about to return to the bar when I noticed that the poor lizard was dead in the middle of the path. The bicycle had ridden over it and it had died with its head caught in an exaggerated nod. The ants marched towards it and I picked up the lizard by the tail and took it with me towards the bar, intent on giving it a good burial.

Outside the bar there was a man standing barefoot in the heat. He had on only a pair of sad-looking underpants. His hair was rough and covered in a red liquid and bits of rubbish. He had a big sore on his back and a small one on his ear. Flies swarmed around him and he kept twitching. Every now and then he broke into a titter. I tried to go round him but he kept cutting off my path.

‘Madame Koto!’ I called.

The man came towards me. He had one eye higher than the other. His mouth looked like a festering wound. He twitched, stamped, laughed, and suddenly ran into the bar.

I went after him, carrying the dead lizard as if it were a protective fetish. I found him crouched behind the earthenware pot. He snarled at me.

‘Madame Koto!’ I called again.

The madman tittered, baring his red teeth, and then he rushed at me. I threw the dead lizard in his face. He laughed, screamed, and fell on the benches, tittering in demented delight. He got up, walked in every direction, oblivious of objects, knocking over the long wooden tables and the benches. He came after me. I ran in circles. He scuttled round the floor like a monstrous quickened crab. With the exhilarated animation of a child, he discovered the dead lizard and began playingwith it. He sat on an upturned table, his eyes making contradictory journeys round their sockets. Then he began to eat the lizard.

‘MADAME KOTO!’ I screamed, with the full volume of my horror.

She came rushing in, holding a new broom. She saw the confusion in her bar, saw the madman eating the lizard, twitching and tittering, and she pounced on him, hitting him with the head of the long broom, as if he were a cow or a goat. The madman didn’t move. He ate with a weird serenity. Madame Koto knocked the lizard from his hands. Then, tying her wrapper tighter round her waist, she went for his neck with her big hands.

He turned his head towards me, his eyes bulging. White foam frothed from the sides of his mouth. Then, with a sudden burst of energy, and a cry uttered at white heat, he tossed Madame Koto off him, stood up straight like an awakened beast, and charged at everything. He fought and clawed the air, uttering his weird cry.

Then he changed. He brought out his gigantic prick, and pissed in every direction.

Madame Koto hit his prick with her broom. He pissed on her. She rushed out and came back with a burning firewood. She burned his feet and he did a galloping dance and jumped around and tore out of the bar and ran tittering towards the forest.

Madame Koto looked around her wrecked bar. She looked at the burning firewood in her hand and then she stared at me.

‘What sort of child are you?’ she asked.

I began to pick up the benches.

‘Maybe you bring only bad luck,’ she said. ‘Since you have been coming my old customers have gone and there are no new ones.’

‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

‘Attract customers, draw them here, and then you will have food,’ she said, going to the backyard.

Later she took the benches and tables outside and scrubbed them with a special soap. She swept the bar and washed the place with a concentrated disinfectant. She brought the tables and benches back in when the sun had dried them and then went to have the bath she always had before the evening’s customers arrived.

When she finished bathing she came to the bar with a bowl of peppersoup and yam.

She slammed it down and said:

‘Since you’re so hungry you better finish it.’

I thanked her and she went back out. I washed a spoon and settled down to eat. The soup was very hot and I drank a lot of water. The yam was soft and sweet. There were pieces of meat and offal in the soup and I had almost eaten them all before I realised that one of the pieces was actually a chicken’s head. The pepper burned in my brain and I was convinced that the chicken’s head was eyeing me. Madame Koto came in carrying a fetish glistening with palm oil. She dragged a bench under the front door, climbed on it, and hung the fetish on a nail above the door. I noticed for the first time that she had a little beard.

‘I don’t like chicken’s head,’ I told her.

‘Eat it. It’s good for your brain. It makes you clever, and if you eat the eyes you will be able to see in the dark.’

I didn’t eat it. She came down, dragged the bench back to its position, and stood in front of me.

‘Eat it!’ she said.

‘I’m not hungry any more.’

Madame Koto regarded me. She had rubbed pungent oils on her skin. She looked radiant and powerful. The oils smelt badly and I think they were one of the reasons why the spirits were interested in her.

‘So you won’t eat it?’