Dangerous Love (11 page)

Ifeyiwa did not know Omovo's brothers. What she had come to know had been picked up, sifted from gossip and from what he had told her. Some time ago, in the backyard, he had shown her photographs of them. Since then he spoke about them to her as if she had met them in the flesh.

They were both silent. The cocoon they had woven about themselves did not protect them from the compound. People jostled past, quarrelling, shouting, cursing. Music blared through open windows. Children cried. Some of the compound men glanced somewhat enviously at the two of them. The men winked when they caught Omovo's eye. The air was shot through with curiosity and conspiracy.

Ifeyiwa's eyes swept round the compound. Her posture became defiant. Her eyes hardened. She stared at a spot of paint in the hollow of Omovo's neck. He became uneasy. He felt the eyes of the compound boring into them. He could feel himself and Ifeyiwa becoming a theme of the next gossip session.

‘Have you had trouble with Blackie again?'

He looked at her, thinking: ‘How is she able to sense these things so accurately?'

‘Just a little misunderstanding,' he said.

There was silence. He continued: ‘Don't you think you should be going with the water now? He might be waiting for you.'

Her face underwent a transformation. It changed from brightness into hardness, became a mask. Omovo, agitated, said: ‘No... I... I didn't mean...'

‘It's all right,' she said, her voice cool. Her face was expressionless. Then her lips began to tremble. In that moment he glimpsed her dilemmas and her terrors. As he watched her he remembered her dream. The images passed through his mind and mingled with elements of his own dreams. He thought: ‘What a love of life she has. What a gift!'

‘Omovo,' she said, gently.

He nodded. Her face lightened. He smiled. He knew.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes, let's meet afterwards. You have something to tell me.'

Her eyes lit up. He went on. ‘And thank you for washing my clothes. It's really lovely of you.'

‘I like doing it.'

‘But you are spoiling me.'

‘I don't mind.'

‘I'm so lazy. I'm ashamed that I keep leaving my clothes to soak in the backyard.'

‘I'd like to do more for you.'

‘But you wash them so clean.'

‘They could be cleaner.' After a short silence, she said: ‘So we will meet later in the evening.'

He nodded.

‘How did you know that's what I wanted to ask?'

‘I wonder,' he said, not without an air of mystery. He was in a fine mood. There wasn't a cloud within him. He fairly trembled with the promise of the moment. He felt that he had unexpectedly touched a pulse of sweet and vibrant life.

‘So where shall we meet?' she asked, bending down to pick up the bucket.

‘Don't worry. I will be outside. When you see me just start walking. I will follow.'

She lifted the aluminium bucket. Her eyes shone. ‘Take it easy, Omovo. You make me worry when you look at the sky that way.'

She started to move. Then she came back. With her eyes fixed on his, she said: ‘That was exactly what my elder brother used to do before he killed himself.'

Then she left the compound. She strained with the bucket. Water spilt over and left splashes in her trail. He watched her as she went through the gate, and round the water tanks that gleamed outside. He noticed the sweat on her neck. Her blouse was stuck to her back. Still full of sadness in the last thing she had said, he felt a little guilty that he had been watching the shape of her gently moving backside.

When she disappeared from sight he noticed that Tuwo had been staring at him. When their eyes met, Tuwo waved. Omovo nodded. Tuwo always seemed to be following him. Whenever he was with Ifeyiwa in the backyard Tuwo would keep turning up for one reason or another. He would talk to Ifeyiwa, he would ask after her husband, and was generally irritating.

Tuwo had an infamous reputation with the women of the compound. He was always involved with someone's wife, or daughter, or sister. The compound men were wary of him in this respect. He had been married once. But the woman, stronger than he was, very nearly ruined him, nearly ‘scraped his heada', as they say.

Omovo noticed that the men were beginning their fortnightly cleaning of the compound. They made clanging noises with buckets and shovels. They waved ropes around and brandished cutlasses. They sang traditional work songs and performed impromptu barefoot dances. They stopped outside Tuwo's room and shouted at him to come and join in the cleaning. They sang his numerous nicknames. His face darkened. He got up, went inside, and came out wearing a long pair of dirty khaki shorts, which greatly amused the men.

‘Hey!' one of them exclaimed. ‘Were you a headmaster in the olden days?'

The other men laughed. One of them pulled at the long flaring shorts.

‘Where did you get dis colonial short man's trouser?' said the chief assistant deputy bachelor.

‘His grandfather gave it to him.'

The men laughed again.

‘I bought it at a jumbo sale in England,' Tuwo replied with unassailable dignity.

‘He doesn't even know where the airport is,' someone said, and the men fell about in robust laughter, slapping their thighs, tears rolling down their faces.

Soon the laughter died down and they turned to the serious business of cleaning. The cleaning day had a story of its own. It began when the women revolted against having to do all the dirty jobs in the compound, sweeping the corridor and the backyard, unblocking the bathroom drainholes, cleaning out the toilets. They had a meeting and decided to ask the men either to contribute to the work or to pay them for their labours. But the men laughed at the idea. It was simply inconceivable. The next Saturday, however, the women refused to do any cleaning. The bathroom began to stink. The water that couldn't flow from the bathroom into the gutter soon flowed through the compound and gave off an infernal smell. The toilet became unusable. The men were furious. They too held a meeting and came up with the decision to prove that they could do the jobs without grumbling or asking to be paid. They did, and it became a compound tradition. It also became a social event. Every second Saturday, while they cleaned up, they told one another outrageous jokes and improbable stories, they made a lot of noise, they chattered and laughed and sorted out the little quarrels of the week. And after the cleaning was over one of the men would invite the others to his room for an evening's session of drinking and mantalk.

Omovo watched the men and knew that they would be coming to rouse his father next. They just might draft him too, if the mood took them. He came down from the wall and ducked into the sitting room. He heard one of the men say: ‘Hey painter, are you running away?'

Omovo fled into his room and locked the door behind him. He heard the noises of the men as they clanged the cutlasses against the buckets, and called his father, who was the ‘captain' of the compound, to come out and join them. Blackie went outside and they teased her with insinuations:

‘So it's you who doesn't allow our captain to come out, eh?' said one.

‘You and your husband can do the thing at night, habah!'

Blackie laughed and said she would go and get her husband. Soon he joined them and they carried their noises with them to the backyard.

Omovo felt relatively peaceful. He sat down on the only chair in the room and began to contemplate his life. Where was he going? Where was this mixed-up road leading him? His life seemed aimless. He had nothing to show for his existence. He had done well at school. But just when he was about to sit for his school certificate his father fell on hard times and couldn't pay the school fees. What made it worse was that he kept deceiving Omovo's mother. He said there were no problems, that he had seen to everything. The principal of Omovo's school was a bald, severe Igbo man. He prevented Omovo from sitting six papers in the finals, because the fees hadn't been paid. The principal had long concluded that all the students of the school, without exception, were rotten, and that Omovo must have ‘squashed' his fees on a spending spree, or lost them gambling. Omovo's result was incomplete. The final grade was failure. All he needed was a chance. But the chance never came. With his mother's death his whole life turned into a maze of insecurities.

The only thing that sustained him was the vague, mystical certainty that he would gain unique heights, paint works that might last, and that he would live an unusual life. It helped that his brothers believed in his potential as an artist. He treasured the fact that his mother was quietly proud of the beadworks, wood sculptings and paintings he had done as a child. It also helped that his father encouraged his interest in art from when he was six years old. His father used to go over his work painstakingly. He made Omovo enter for a competition which he won when he was twelve years old. And he used to read aloud from books on great artists which he had bought for his son.

Omovo did a quiet stocktaking. He had lost his mother. His brothers had gone out into the world and were destroying themselves. He loved Ifeyiwa, but she was married. He was alienated from his father. He had a bad school certificate result. He had a mindless job in a hostile office. He thought: ‘Aha. There we are.'

His head throbbed. The room was dark. The curtains had not been drawn. A solitary mosquito whined above him. He felt empty. He remained in that state, motionless, for a long time. He thought of the painting he had to do. He felt a moment of excitement. In doing the painting he felt he may begin to feel his way towards some sort of orientation, of meaning. The impulse swept softly through him. He thought about the mutilated girl in the park. He wondered what Keme had done so far. He wondered if the police, notoriously slow in their duties, had begun to investigate the horrible crime. As he thought about the girl, he felt guilty. He felt that he should be doing something about it. But he was powerless. He felt in curious need of redemption. He felt that his powerlessness, and the powerlessness of all the people without voices, needed to be redeemed, to be transformed. With this feeling his urge to do the painting reached fever pitch.

He remembered a drawing he had done when he was thirteen years old. It was composed of jagged lines that suggested the obscure shapes of pyramids, rock-faces with the eyes of birds, mountain ranges inseparable from sea and sky. The ends of the lines were lost in the maze of entanglements. His father saw the drawing and praised it. His teacher pondered it and pinned it to his office wall. Their interest had baffled Omovo: he had simply taken up a pencil and made movements on paper. When his teacher saw the drawing he said:

‘Omovo, do you know what you have done?'

‘No,' Omovo had said.

‘Well, this is life. But you are too small to understand. One day, if you are lucky, you will understand. Give this drawing to your father. When you are older he will give it to you. Then you will see the things that you did in innocence.'

Later, Omovo drew other lines, which were lost in themselves, in their formation of obscure shapes. But his father shook his head gravely and stayed silent. And his teacher smiled indulgently and also shook his head. Omovo understood wordlessly that he had done it once and could not do it again until he really knew how. And as if life were leaving him no option, the drawings got lost when they were moving from one house to another.

Omovo, sitting in the darkness of the room, wasn't sure why he remembered these incidents. He felt his deeper mind was trying to tell him something. He didn't know what.

Then he remembered he was going to meet Ifeyiwa later in the evening. It made him feel happy. He got up, drew the curtain, and reached for his sketchbook and pencil. He drew lines that became the obscure shapes of crowds at the markets, mother and child on the edge of a precipice, clouds full of faces. He drew the lines without trying to interpret the emerging shapes, nor to will their destinations. And the ends of the lines were always lost in themselves. When he got tired he stopped. He had done ten different drawings. He wrote ‘Lifelines' boldly on the top of the first sheet. Then suddenly, as he looked through them, he thought: ‘Nonsense.' He ripped the pages from the sketchbook, and tore them into shreds.

His head throbbed. The noises from the compound became strangely muted. He knew that the lights had been seized. He got into bed and tried to sleep off his confusion.

As Ifeyiwa passed the wooden window of their apartment she saw her husband sitting on the bed. His legs were sprawled carelessly apart. His mouth formed the beginnings of a yawn. She hurried on with her bucket of water.

‘Ifeyiwa!' he called loudly. ‘What have you been doing, eh? Why did you take so long?'

When she heard his rasping voice her legs weakened with fear. Her heart beat faster. Quickening her steps, she went past the apartment without answering his queries. She went through the scurvy backyard and into the stinking bathroom. She dropped the bucket on one of those stones people stood on while having a bath. Then she shut the door. The bathroom, for that moment, was her only refuge. The zinc roof was low and the compartment was small. The cracks on the walls widened at night and looked snake-like in the day. Slats of grey light filtered into the murky darkness. Slimy substances clung to the walls. The floor was covered in a stagnant pool of filthy water. As she stood there she was suddenly startled by the noise of something thrashing about in the water. It was a rat. She opened the door and watched the rat as it kicked and swam in the bathroom scum. When it scurried out through the drainhole, she withdrew to the kitchen and sat on a stool.

The compound was quiet. A fowl strolled through the backyard. A woman came out of one of the rooms, hurried past the kitchen and rushed into the toilet. Ifeyiwa heard sounds. Then after a while the rusted zinc door of the toilet creaked open and the woman went leisurely back to her room.