The Famished Road (16 page)

They had small heads and eyes that were so tiny that it was only when they came near me that I could perceive their pin-point brightness. They came over, stood perfectly straight for a moment, and then, like bizarre actors, they leant over to me, keeping their legs and top halves straight, and said, in voices that could only have come from children:

‘We want some peppersoup, please.’

I ran out and told Madame Koto.

‘Leave me alone, I’m coming!’ she said.

I went back in. The tall couple had seated themselves at my table. They sat straight and their knees were awkward underneath the table and I noticed that they had the longest necks I had yet seen on any human being.

‘Are you politicians?’ I asked.

‘What?’ asked the man, in his child’s voice.

‘Politicians.’

‘What is that?’

‘You’re not politicians,’ I said, closing the conversation.

They kept glancing at me and I found their faces very disconcerting. I tried to sit there without noticing them when the woman brought out a feather from her wrapper and offered it to me.

‘No, thank you,’ I said.

She smiled and put it back. Madame Koto came in with the gourds of palm-wine and voices erupted in weird jubilation. I fetched glasses and cups and distributed them round. When I gave the cups to the men with dark glasses they grabbed my hand and said:

‘What’s your name?’ ‘Why?’

‘We like you. We want to take you with us.’

‘Where?’

‘Wherever.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

I tried to wrench my hand free but their grips were very strong and their bony fingers bit into my flesh.

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

I pulled again but my flesh bruised and began to bleed. I screamed, but the voices in the room were so loud they cut off my screaming. I kicked, missed, and hurt my toes on the foot of the table. Then I scratched one of them in the face, and snatched off his glasses. Both of his eyes were totally white. They could have been made of milk.

They were white and blank and unmoving, as if they had been stuck there, malformed, in the empty sockets.

I opened my mouth to shout, but the man laughed so powerfully and his mouth was so black that I froze in my attempt. I couldn’t move. I felt transfixed, as if I were suffering a living rigor mortis. Then a searing pain went up my spine, ended in my brain, and I woke up to find myself in my usual corner, with the tall, small-eyed couple staring at me. Everyone else was drinking. Steaming bowls of peppersoup were in front of all the customers. They drank steadily and talked in curious voices.

The two albino men kept twisting and jerking as if their bodies were uncomfortable.

They were silent. The toothless man was also silent. They all kept looking at me.

More customers came into the bar. There was a man with a head like that of a camel, a woman with a terrible hip deformation, another man with white hair, and a midget.

The woman had a large sack on her back, which she gave to the albinos. The albinos unfurled the sack, shook it out, sending dust clouds into the air. They glanced at me furtively, and hid the sack under the table.

The four people who had come in looked for places to sit and then crowded my table.

I had to get up for them. I fetched a little stool and sat near the earthenware pot and watched the bar become overcrowded.

Amidst all this Madame Koto was radiant with her necklace of white beads. As the evening progressed she got darker, more dignified, while the clientele got rowdier.

She was untouched by it all, even when the men teased her. The original man with the big eye, which got more bloated as he drank, as if his eye were a stomach all to itself, said:

‘Madame, come and sit on my lap.’

‘Let’s see if you can carry your wine first, before you carry me,’ she replied, with great dignity.

‘This madame is too proud,’ said another man in the identical group.

‘Proud and strong,’ she said.

‘Come and sit with me, let’s talk about marriage,’ said the man whose head was like a tuber of yam.

‘Marry yourself.’

‘So you don’t think I am man enough?’ asked the original man, waving his three fingers for more wine.

‘No,’ she said.

The bar rocked with the oddest sounds of ironic laughter. The men with dark glasses laughed very hard and banged away at the table.

‘Maybe that boy is her husband,’ said one of them, taking off his glasses and polishing them.

His white eyes didn’t move. They were so birdlike, so ghostly, that I couldn’t tell what or where they were looking at.

‘That’s my son,’ she said.

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you sell him to us?’

The bar suddenly became very quiet. Madame Koto stared at the two men with dark glasses. All the other customers watched her carefully. Then she turned to me, a curious gleam in her eyes.

‘Why?’

‘So we can take him with us.’

‘To where?’

‘Many places.’

‘For how much?’

‘As much as you want.’

‘You have plenty of money?’

‘Too much.’

The silence in the bar was incredible. Then the midget laughed. He laughed like a goat. The tall man with small eyes laughed as well. He sounded like a hyena.

‘Name your price, Madame.’

Madame Koto looked at the customers as if seeing them for the first time.

‘Any more palm-wine for anybody?’

‘Palm-wine!’ they cried in unison.

‘And peppersoup!’

And they all burst out laughing and resumed their vociferous conversations as if nothing had happened.

Madame Koto served them and they drank and ate and kept asking for more. They drank a great deal and didn’t get drunk. They sat, all of them, drinking and talking as if the wine were water. It was only the two men in dark glasses who got drunk. They kept polishing their glasses. One of them even brought out an eye and polished it and blew on it and dipped it into his palm-wine and pushed it back into his red eye-socket.

Then he put his glasses back on. They chewed and swallowed their chicken bones.

They ate and drank so much that Madame Koto began to despair. She had run out of wine and food and the night hadn’t even properly set in. As she bustled up and down, starting a new fire, making hurried arrangements for more palm-wine, the midget came up to me. Smiling very expansively, he said:

‘Take this. You might need it.’

It was a little pen-knife. I put it in my pocket and forgot all about it. Then he went to the backyard. I heard him urinating in the bushes. He came back, smiling, and left without a word, and without paying. I told Madame Koto about it and she said:

‘What midget?’

I went back to the bar. I sat down. The tall man said:

‘Come with me.’

‘To where?’

‘I will take you round the world. On foot. I make all my journeys on foot. Like a camel.’

‘No.’

‘If you don’t come with me I will take you by force.’

‘You can’t.’

He smiled. The woman smiled as well. I decided they were more drunk than I had thought and ignored them.

The bar was so full of people that there were no seats left. Some of them sat on the floor. I was nudged off my stool. The smells in the bar became terrible and strange, the smells of corpses and rain and oregano, of mangoes and rotting meat, of incense and goats’ hair. And then, suddenly, I found I could no longer understand what anybody was saying. They all spoke as if they had known one another for a long time.

They spoke in alien languages and occasionally pointed at Madame Koto’s fetish. It seemed to amuse them. Then they glanced at me, made calculations with their fingers, laughed, drank, became solemn, and looked at me again.

Madame Koto came in and announced that her supply of food and wine was finished. She demanded that they pay up and leave her bar. A great chorus of disappointment rose from the clientele.

‘Pay and go,’ Madame Koto said. ‘Pay up and go. I am closing up for the night.’

No one paid her much attention. Her temper rising, she stormed out of the bar. The voices grew rowdier, wilder. Previously I had heard the voices before the people had materialised. Now, I heard the voices but, as I looked round, the customers were vanishing. I shut my eyes in disbelief. When I opened them the bar was completely empty, and completely noisy, except for the two albinos and a beautiful woman whom I hadn’t noticed before. On the far table were the two pairs of dark glasses. The original man with the bloated eye, the group that looked like him, the tall couple, the two white-eyed men, were all gone. The bar was silent and everything was still and the wind whistled faintly on the ceiling, as if a hurricane had passed and hadn’t been noticed.

‘Where is everyone?’ I asked the albinos.

The beautiful woman smiled at me. The albinos twisted, shrugged, stood up, and spread out the sack. The woman distracted me with her smile. And then the albinos sprang at me and covered me with the sack. I struggled and fought, but they expertly bundled me in and tied up the sack as if I were an animal. And as I resisted; kicking, I heard the noises of the world, the voices of all the different people who had been in the bar. They talked in their inhuman languages in leisurely animation, as if they were merely setting out on a pilgrimage to a distant land. Overcome with fear, unable to move, surrounded by darkness and the death-smells of the sack, I cried:

‘Politicians! Politicians are takingme away!’

My voice was very faint, as if I were shouting in a dream. Even if I had cried out with the voice of thunder, no one would have heard me.

They took me down many roads, rough-handling me in the sack. They swung me round, they changed me from one shoulder to another, and the sack kept tightening about me. I heard the noises of lorries and cars, the tumultuous sounds of a marketplace. All the time I fought and struggled like a trapped animal. The more I strained for freedom, the more they tightened the sack, till I had no room to struggle.

My feet were around my head and my neck was twisted to breaking point. I couldn’t breathe and I fought the panic that washed over me in waves. The blankness of death came upon me. I shut my eyes. It was no different when I opened them. At one point I fell into a strange sleep in which the figure of a king resplendent in gold appeared to me and vanished. My spirit companions began singing in my ears, rejoicing in my captivity and in the fact that I would soon be joining them. I could not shut out their singing and I’m not sure which was worse: being bundled away by unknown people to an unknown destination or hearing my spirit companions orchestrate my passage through torment with their sweet and excruciating voices.

When I had fought and my energy was exhausted and I couldn’t do anything, I called to our great king, and I said:

‘I do not want to die.’

I had hardly finished when the figure of the king appeared to me again and dissolved into the face of the midget. By now I had ceased to hear any sounds outside, except for the rushing of waves, the hissing of water, and the keening of birds.

Suddenly, I remembered the pen-knife the midget had given me and began another struggle to find it. I searched my pockets. I searched the sack, and couldn’t find it. My fear became unbearable. Then a quietness came over me. I gave up. I accepted my destiny.

Water poured into the sack. I became convinced that I was being taken to an underwater kingdom, where they say certain spirits reside. As I tried to keep the water out of my mouth, I felt something metallic like a frozen fish banging against my head.

It was the pen-knife. I wasted no time in cutting my way out. The sack material was very tough but the water had softened it a little and it took some time to cut my way out and when I did the outside world was black like the bottom of a well. I fell out into the water with a splash.

‘The boy has escaped!’ a voice cried.

It was very dark, the river could have been the night, and the water was bitingly cold.

I stayed under without moving. And then very gently I swam back to the shore, serene in my element.

I struggled through the bulrushes and the tiger-lilies of the marsh, over twisted mangrove roots and flickering eels, and when I gained the soft silt-sand I went on running till I got to a main road. It was very dark; I was hungry, wet, lost; and I heard voices all around me, the twittering, vicious voices of my spirit companions wailing in disappointment. I ran till the road became a river of voices, every tree, car, and face talking at me, cats crossing my path, people with odd night faces staring at me knowingly. At crossroads people glared and seemed to float towards me menacingly. I fled all through the night.

The road was endless. One road led to a thousand others, which in turn fed into paths, which fed into dirt tracks, which became streets, which ended in avenues and cul-de-sacs. All around, a new world was being erected amidst the old. Skyscrapers stood high and inscrutable beside huts and zinc abodes. Bridges were being built; flyovers, half-finished, were like passageways into the air, or like future visions of a time when cars would be able to fly. Roads, half-constructed, were crowded with heavy machinery. Here and there nightwatchmen slept under the stars with dull lamps as their only earthly illumination. The moon was round and big and it seemed bright with the face of an awesome king. I was comforted by its presence. I walked on with a terrible hunger for a destination, for Mum’s face, and Dad’s smells. I walked past the kerosine lamps of the somnolent street-traders.

‘Small boy, where are you going at this time?’ they often asked me.

But I replied to no one. I wandered till my bare feet broke into blisters. And then, as I walked about in the darkness of being lost, I saw a disembodied light ahead of me, a tiny moon the shape of a man’s head. I followed the light. And it led me on longer journeys. And when I got to an area I vaguely recognised, my feet gave up on me and I collapsed at the roadside. I crawled to the nearest tree and curled myself up between its great roots which were above the ground and I fell asleep under the safety of the waning moon. The mosquitoes tormented me. The ants bit into my flesh and their stings persisted. But I slept through it all, and dreamt about a panther.