The Famished Road (34 page)

Mum got out of bed.

‘Where did you find those rats?’

I sat up. All around the mat, under the centre table, by the door, on top of the cupboard, near the bed, were the bristling corpses of rats. I screamed. The room was a Calvary of rats, a battleground of them. They had died in every conceivable position.

There were rats near my pillow, clinging on to the mat with their bared yellow teeth.

There were rats all over my cover cloth. Some had died beside me, died beneath the cloth, perished on the centre table, their long tails hanging over the edge. Some had clawed their way up the window curtain and had died at the foot of the wall, leaving long rips on the cloth. They had died in Dad’s boot, their tails mistakable for his shoelace.

They had died with their yellow eyes open, gazing at us with a solemn vacant threat of vengeance. A few of them were still struggling, still alive, and Dad put them out of their misery, crushing their heads expertly with his boots. The rats, in dying, squirted yellow and blue liquids from their mouths. Big furry rats with long thin tails writhed among the bodies of their companions, kicking with their little paws. Dad picked one up to add to his pendular collection and it made a sudden motion of rip and snag, catching Dad on the cuff of his shirt, and tearing it, and Dad slung the creature against the wall, and it left its imprint there as it collapsed to the floor, clinging on to a piece of sacking with its jagged teeth, refusing to die. Dad stood ankle-deep in the corpses of rats. I was too scared to move.

Dad came over to me, mischief on his face, and waved the six rats over me like an obscene pendulum. I ran to Mum.

‘They are only rats,’ she said, having obviously recovered from her own horror.

‘So many!’ Dad said.

‘I will count them,’ I said.

‘But what happened to them?’

‘They had bad dreams,’ Dad suggested.

‘What bad dreams?’

‘About the landlord’s party. When they heard his speech they decided to commit suicide.’

‘What is suicide?’ I asked.

‘What happened to the rats?’ Mum wondered.

‘The photographer killed them.’

‘Flow?’

‘With a special moon poison. It works.’

‘Works too well,’ Mum said, getting out of bed.

She fetched the broom. When she moved the cupboard she gasped. The number of rats that had died there was frightening. It was impossible to imagine that we had been sharing our lives with so many rats. They had eaten the sacking, the wood of the table, had eaten their way through clothes, shoes, materials. There were crumbs of food and ratshit. Lying in a thousand different positions—tails entwined, pale bellies showing, teeth bared, snarling in their death-throes—was an unholy horde of rats.

‘Don’t touch anything!’ Mum said.

She swept ever corner. She swept beneath the bed, under the cupboard. She moved her hole-ridden sacks and basins behind the door, gasping in horror all the while. The sacks had been more or less devoured, and rats had died amongst her provisions.

Mum swept them to the door and made a pile out of their corpses. I went searching for a carton. I found a big one used for the packing of chocolate drinks. The rats filled the carton. The creepy mass of them nearly made me throw up. Mum went and dumped the carton of rats on the growing rubbish heap at the back of the burnt van. Then she came back and drenched the room in disinfectant. She made us practically bathe in the stuff. Then she made us wash our hands in a concentrated solution. Then she made food, while Dad prepared for work.

While we were eating there was a knock on the door.

‘Come in,’ Dad said.

It was too early for visitors. We were struck by the sight of the man in ragged clothes who came in, looking around furtively, his eyes yellow, his complexion pale, his mouth bitter. He was from the landlord. He was the bearer of a message. We were informed that our rent had been increased. Apparently we were the only ones to suffer an increment in the compound. After he had delivered the message, which included an option to move out if we didn’t like the new rent, and after he had gone, Dad sat in front of the table of food like a man who had been kicked in the ribs. He betrayed no pain, but sat still, his eyes a little bewildered. When he moved it was to creak his neck and his knuckles. Then he moved restlessly, fidgeting, his face contorted.

‘I don’t feel like eating any more,’ he said after some time. But he picked up his spoon, continued with his food, and cleaned up everything on the plate. Then he sent me to buy some ogogoro. The woman who sold it wasn’t awake and Dad lost his temper when I came back without any. So I went and woke up the woman, banging on her door, and she got up and abused me while measuring out the amount Dad wanted.

Dad drank half of it in one gulp. Mum cleared the table. Then she went to the backyard, singing a song from the village. In the room Dad sat and stared straight ahead.

‘You see what life does to you?’ he asked. ‘Yes.’

‘You see how wicked people can be?’ ‘Yes.’

‘That’s how they make you commit murder.’ He cracked his knuckles again. He sighed.

‘Where am I going to find that kind of money every month, eh?’

‘I don’t know.’

He stared at me. So intensely did he stare at me I felt that I was the enemy.

‘Do you see how they force a man to become an armed robber?’

‘Yes.’

He sighed again. He lit a cigarette. He smoked in silence. Then, as if he had hit upon a most brilliant idea, he put out his cigarette, and put on his work-clothes. I was disappointed when he said:

‘When I come back I will go and see Madame Koto.’

‘She is mad,’ I told him.

He stared at me in that curious fashion again.

‘Maybe she can loan us some money,’ he said, ignoringmy piece of information.

He got into his shoes, stamped them on the ground, touched me on the head, and went out to work.

After a while Mum came in, her wrapper wet. She had been washing clothes in the backyard. Washing and thinking. Washing and singing. The compound had awoken.

A stray dogwandered up the passage. It was a dull morning. The sky was grey as if it might rain. The noise of metal buckets clanking at the well, the sound of water being poured, a woman raising her voice, grew on the morning air. The school-children were in their uniforms. A cock crowed repeatedly. Mum got her tray together. I was ready for school. Mum went down the street, swaying, moving a little sleepily, with one more burden added to her life. Soon she was merely a detail in the poverty of our area.

I TRIED TO sneak past Madame Koto’s place but she saw me, and said very loudly:

‘Are you running from me again?’

She looked different. She wore a new lace blouse, an expensive wrapper, coral beads round her neck, and copper bangles round her wrists. She wore eye-shadow, which darkened her eyes, and powder on her face, beneath which her sweat ran. The day had become hotter. It seemed impossible to avoid the sun. I was thirsty.

‘Come and have some palm-wine,’ she offered.

The bar had changed again. There were two almanacs of the Rich Party on the walls. It was surprisingly crowded for that time of the afternoon. There were normal, decent-looking people, as well as men with scars, women with bracelets that weighed down their arms, men with dark glasses. Arguments reverberated in the heated place.

They discussed politics and scandals in loud, passionate voices. Some of them had thunderous faces, gleaming with sweat, and when they talked their mouths opened to astonishing degrees. Some of them were thin and bony, with ragged hungry beards and furtive eyes. The women had long painted fingers. They waved their hands violently when they spoke. They fanned themselves with newspapers Their noises mingled with the incessant buzz of the flies.

There was a hammer on the counter. I thought the carpenter was around, but upon looking, I found he wasn’t. There were several gourds of palm-wine on the tables, and flies jostled on their rims. The plates empty of peppersoup were also a little busy with the flies. At one corner of the room a man lay on the bench, his mouth and eyes open.

He was fast asleep. A wall-gecko ran across his face and got caught in his hair and he woke up screaming. The others burst into laughter.

In the midst of all the noise sat a man with a chief’s cap on his head. He sat straight, with inherited dignity, and there was a boy next to him who fanned him. He had great orange beads round his neck and wore a dazzling blue agbada. He drank as if he owned the place. He looked familiar. I looked hard at him. Then I remembered him as one of the men on the van who had been overseeing the distribution of poisoned milk.

His lips were large for his face and the colour of his lower lip was a curious mixture of red and black. There was more red than black and it seemed he had been burnt there as a child. He had the eyes of a rat. He caught me staring at him.

‘What are you looking at?’ he asked. The voices in the bar stopped.

‘You,’ I said.

‘Why? Are you mad?’

‘No.’

He gave me a vicious stare. One of the men in the bar got up, came over, and cracked me on the head.

‘You are mad,’ he said.

I spat at him, but it didn’t travel very far.

‘Look at this bad boy,’ he said, and cracked me a second time.

I spat again. It landed on my shirt. Madame Koto came into the bar. The man slapped me with two thick fingers and I shouted and rushed for the hammer on the counter. I tore at the man, who for some reason fled. Madame Koto grabbed my arms and took the hammer from me.

‘Don’t be a bad boy! Do you see that man there?’ she said, pointing. ‘He’s a chief.

He is going to rule our area. He will swallow you.’

The chief, satisfied with the tribute, smiled, and went on drinking. The noises resumed. Some of the people commented on my behaviour and lamented the way children no longer respected their elders and blamed it all on the white man’s way of life which was spoiling the values of Africa.

Then one of the men suggested to Madame Koto that she would be better off with girls as waiters and servants than with boys. A woman amongst them said that if Madame Koto wanted some girls to work for her, and to help her serve the customers, she could arrange it.

‘That ugly boy will destroy your business for you,’ said the man who had knocked me twice on the head. ‘Who wants to be drunk on your excellent palm-wine and see that terrible face?’

‘You will die!’ I said to the man.

The voices stopped. The man rose from his bench, his face quivering under the superstitious fear of a child’s curse.

‘Say I won’t die!’ he demanded.

‘No!’

He came towards me. Madame Koto was counting money behind her counter. She was too engrossed to be aware of what was happening.

‘Take it back!’

‘No!’

He strode towards me. Only the flies made any noises.

‘Flog him till he pisses on himself,’ said the chief. ‘That’s how to train a child.’

I watched the man without moving. He raised his hand to hit me and I ran neatly between his legs and everyone laughed. I stopped and made faces at the chief and the painted women. When the man dashed at me, enraged by the trick, I fled out of the bar and went on fleeing and didn’t stop till I was in the forest. I looked back. The man was panting. He gave up and turned back. I went deeper into the forest and sat on the mighty tree that had been cut down. I looked over the great pit from which they had been dredging sand to build the roads of the world.

And then I wandered. I wandered for a long time in the forest. The earth gave off a potent aroma and in the heat the palm trees released alcoholic fumes deep in their trunks which I breathed in with the smell of their barks and their wine-sap evaporating into the quivering air. I listened to the curlews in the groves of wild pine trees.

Intoxicated with the alcoholic fumes of sun on earth I broke through a remote section of the forest, where sunbirds clustered in baobab branches, and I emerged in another reality, a strange world, a path which had completed its transition into a road. The surface of the road was uneven with bumps. The tarmac melted under the sun and my soles turned black. The smell of melting tarmac was heady and I saw the mirage of a trailer, quivering in its frightening speed, coursing down the road towards me. The mirage shot right through the road construction machines that stood at the intersection. It ground its way over the women who sold iced water and oranges, over the beggars and the workers and shacks within which the eternal arguments about pay and strikes raged. And then the great mirage of the trailer went on, plunging forward, right into the forest and I did not see it any more.

I came to another half-constructed road. Workers stood around the hulks of machinery, abusing those who were working. They waved sticks with words written on them. I gathered that those who cursed had been sacked. They shouted slogans at the white engineers. I did not see any white engineers. It might have been the sun. I passed them and when I looked back I saw figures setting upon the protesting workers. The sun was remorseless. Shadows were deep. Where the sun was brightest, objects were blackest. Antagonists and protesters twisted in an extraordinary dance and all I could make out were the confusing shapes of glistening bodies moving in and out of visibility. The lights made everything unreal.

Birds cawed overhead, flying around in widening circles. I reentered the forest. The sun’s rays were sharp like glass. The blue shadows of green trees blinded me for a moment. The shade was cooling and the air smelt of fine aromatic herbs and bark.

Patterns of light and colours danced on the forest floor. Flowers which I didn’t see scented the dense and tender breeze. I listened to the fluted sound of birds, the murmurings of a distant stream, the wind in the somnolent trees, and the pervasive concert of insects. And then, suddenly, that part of the forest was over.