Dangerous Love (20 page)

‘Where did you learn to dance to this music?'

‘By watching,' she said, and danced round him.

Staring at her, dancing stiffly, he was struck by how odd it was that he felt more familiar with disco music than with traditional movements. Ifeyiwa seemed at home with both. She dazzled with vitality. She danced so beautifully, with such ease and grace, that she began to attract the attention of the men around. They danced around her. One of the men richly attired in lace and beads, a fan of blue feathers in one hand, came forward and pasted a twenty Naira note on her forehead. The crowd cheered. Ifeyiwa was obliged to dance with more vigour, to surpass herself. She did, and more men came forward, and danced suggestively around her, pasted Naira notes on her sweating face. Omovo watched her with a mixture of amazement and uneasiness. She had begun to attract too much attention. The musicians on the stand sang to her, describing her curves, her movements and the fantasy of her body. The wind rose. Omovo drew closer to her and said:

‘Let's go.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know.'

She giggled joyfully. She held his arms and twirled and he caught her. He held her in his arms and felt the heat and the palpitations of her heart. They stayed still. People danced round them. Omovo looked up and said: ‘Let's get something to drink.'

‘Okay.'

But as they turned towards their table, Omovo caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd near the stand.

‘Oh no!'

‘What?'

‘I think Tuwo's here. Let's go.'

At that moment Tuwo looked in their direction. He wore a red agbada and a blue hat. Omovo, not sure if Tuwo had seen them, ducked. They crouched low, mingled with the crowd, and left the party. As they went they kept to the shadows. A cat with glowing eyes followed them.

They walked for a long while without speaking. They passed a bungalow with all the lights off and from one of the rooms they heard a woman scream ecstatically. They came to a huge tree. Birds rustled in the branches. They stopped under the shadows. Omovo turned and caught Ifeyiwa's neck and pulled her to him. They kissed passionately as if, at any moment, the world was going to tear them apart. Omovo tasted her lipstick and the sweetness of her mouth. When they stopped, Ifeyiwa uttered a curious sound and said, almost wretchedly: ‘I have never been in love before.'

Omovo buried his face in her hair. Ifeyiwa pushed him away gently. He misunderstood the gesture. He went a short way up, came back, and leant on the tree. He breathed in the scent of bark and leaves. Ifeyiwa struggled with her pocket and brought out a ring. She gave it to Omovo. He received it in his palm, went into the light, and looked at the silver-painted ring. He came back to her with his palm still open.

‘It's for you,' she said.

Omovo was silent. He stared into the distance. Nothing was clear anymore.

‘My mother gave it to me when I was leaving home.'

He felt mists rise to his eyes. He tried to be hard. ‘I don't want it,' he said.

‘Why not?'

‘I don't know.'

‘It's a good-luck ring and I'm giving it to you.'

He looked into the distance again. All he could see was the sky over the ghetto, oppressive and beautiful. He felt a lump in his throat.

‘Thank you, Ifi, but I lose things.'

Ifeyiwa made her curious sound. It wrung his heart. He took the ring from his palm. He tried it on a finger. It fitted. He removed it, put it in his side pocket, then took it out again. When he put on the ring she said:

‘How is your painting coming on?'

‘It's not coming on at all,' he said.

Then he told her about his dream of the girl. With barely controlled passion, waving his hands despairingly into the air, he told Ifeyiwa that he knew he had no choice but to do the painting. He said he had no idea what it should be like, he had no visual images. All he had was the mood, the spirit of the painting floating about inside him on waves that wouldn't go away.

‘But what will it be about?' she asked.

‘I'll have to tell you a story first. Do you remember the last painting I showed you?'

‘Yes. It frightened me.'

‘Well, the government seized it.'

‘What?'

‘The government seized it. They said I was mocking our country.'

Ifeyiwa was silent for a while. Then coming closer to him, till he was almost leaning against the rough bark of the tree, she said: ‘They, too, were frightened.'

Then Omovo told her about how he and Keme went to the park afterwards and how they stumbled on the mutilated body of the girl.

‘Something happened inside me,' he said. ‘It was something beyond fear. I don't know what it was.'

Ifeyiwa drew back from him.

‘Then afterwards I dreamt about this dead girl. In my dream she didn't have a face. She only had eyes.'

Ifeyiwa let out a sharp breath. The wind rose and blew and rustled the leaves of the tree. Omovo shivered. For a moment he felt as if he had been talking in his sleep. Ifeyiwa drew further away from him. She walked a short way up. He heard her coming back. Only her yellow dress was visible in the darkness. The yellow dress and her eyes.

‘But why would anyone want to kill a girl?' she said. ‘Why?'

‘I don't know.'

‘But why? Why did they mutilate her?'

‘I don't know. For sacrifice, maybe?' Then after a short silence, he said: ‘When I think about it, even in broad daylight, the whole thing scares me.'

‘But why?' she kept saying, almost as if Omovo should know, as if he were in some way responsible.

They fell silent. Ifeyiwa moved towards him. She stopped. She threw her arms in the air. Then she made that strange noise of hers. Then, in a low voice, almost as if she didn't want the wind to hear it, she said: ‘This world is so wicked.'

She said it with great bitterness. Omovo searched for her face in the darkness and found it had taken on the hardness of rock. She was strangely immobile. The wind blew, rustling the stiffness of her dress. The leaves on the tree were in a frenzy. Omovo looked up. Then he looked around. In the distance from the forest round the marsh, he heard cries and cultic chants. He heard the irregular beating of drums. He heard animal cries that could have been human. It was very dark. He heard the wind in the leaves and he heard the tree breathing near them. He breathed in the darkness and the ghetto smells. He seemed to be seeing his surroundings for the first time. As he turned to Ifeyiwa a yellow light flashed in his eyes. He caught a glimpse of Ifeyiwa, half enclosed in darkness. For a moment he saw the dead girl's face in Ifeyiwa's features. The wind made him shiver. He shook his head.

‘Omovo, what's wrong?'

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.'

Then he reached out, took her hands and pulled her to him. He held her as if he didn't want her ever to go away. He held her for a long time. It was his way of dispelling his sense of terror. Omovo held her so tightly she had difficulty breathing. He soaked in the full reality of her being, breathed in the lightness of her perfume and the earthy aroma of her body. He felt her hair and touched her face and her arms as if he had never touched her before. It seemed the only way to drive the horrible transposition from his mind.

After he got over the shock of seeing the dead girl on Ifeyiwa's face, he said: ‘Let's go. It's so dark under this tree.'

The real reason that he wanted to go was because he suddenly couldn't remember what the dead girl looked like.

They made their way home silently. Ifeyiwa led them back through a maze of streets, unfinished roads, dirt-tracks, bushpaths and short cuts. They came to the stall of a fruit-seller. The stall-owner was a woman. She was asleep and her head was resting on her basin of oranges. Ifeyiwa bought some tangerines. As they paid the wind blew out the oil lamp.

‘It's going to rain,' the woman said, and hurriedly began to pack her things.

When they got to the street where the party was taking place a strong wind blew over the chairs and paper plates. Omovo watched as a businessman draped in a glowing white agbada, with elegant scarifications on his fat face, sprayed money on the women who danced. The more the women trembled their enormous backsides to the music the more money the businessman plastered on them. The wind blew some of the Naira notes into the air and the children ran to catch them, screaming. The musicians blasted out their praise-songs through the loudspeakers. Then quite suddenly the rain began to pelt down. The party became riotous with outrage. The celebrants shouted. The men in their fluttering agbadas, which the wind threatened to wrap around them completely, ran in all directions. Some of the men ran straight to their cars. Others ran into houses for protection. People stumbled over chairs and tables. The businessman who had been spraying money on the wind tripped over his voluminous clothing and fell face forward into a basin of fried goat. Children screamed everywhere. The women, with much more presence of mind, dismantled the chairs and tables, carried off basins of food and the crates of drink. The musicians hurriedly packed up their equipment, carried in the loudspeakers, and stumbled over their instruments. The chaos was extraordinary. The rain became a downpour, torrential and unrelenting. The light went out round the arena of the party.

The rain thrashed down. Ifeyiwa and Omovo began running. They ran through the wetness and found nowhere to hide, no eaves under which to shelter. They ran aimlessly. After a while Ifeyiwa stopped.

‘The mud is getting on my dress,' she said.

They stopped running and picked their way serenely through the rain. They were soon completely wet. Omovo noticed that Ifeyiwa's face glowed with a wonderful radiance. He held her and she stopped and looked into his eyes. Her face was wild and her eyes were intense. He kissed her. Then they began walking again. They walked through the passions of the season.

Then Ifeyiwa stopped again. Omovo looked round and realised that they had broken through the dream maze into a familiar place. They had arrived at their street. Ifeyiwa was drenched with rain. Her clothes stuck to her body and her hair dripped water. She looked oddly defiant.

‘I will always remember this,' she said.

Omovo smiled. He felt as if he had undergone a numinous ritual. He felt as if they had passed through an invisible door which opened only in one direction.

‘What will you tell him when you get home?'

Ifeyiwa stared into his face as if she was reading a script with tiny letters.

‘Don't worry. He went out to a meeting of his townspeople. He'll be back late.' She paused. Then she said: ‘I am so happy. I won't let anyone take it from me.'

Omovo stared into the distance. Then he looked at her and said: ‘If you come round tomorrow I will draw you.'

‘I will meet you in the backyard,' she said.

There was a half-smile on her face. Her eyes were sad. They were sad in a way that only a deformed kind of beauty can be. At first he didn't understand the sadness. Then he noticed that the rain had washed off her mascara and eye-shadow and powder, giving her an almost ghoulish look. He touched her face. She lowered her head. When she looked up she became the girl in plain blouses and soup-stained wrappers that Omovo had always known. She looked as if she had stepped out of her enchantment, and into her reality.

‘Thanks, Omovo,' she said simply.

Then she half walked, half ran down the drenched street. He watched her as she went past abandoned stalls, record shops, provision stores, all shut for the night. The rain had stopped falling. Calmness reigned over the land for a moment. He watched her cautiously approach the patch of bushes. He tried to see beyond the bushes but couldn't. And as she vanished from sight, walking hurriedly, she made the darkness yellow. Omovo felt as if a gift had been snatched from him.

He stood still for a long time. Rainwater collected round his feet. There were no insects around. As he stood there, pondering the collective haze of the light above the houses, something happened. Darkness fell over everything like a mighty cloak. There had been another power failure. Disorientated by its suddenness, he shivered. It was as if the light had gone out in his head. The wind rose and the silence hummed for a moment before he plucked up enough courage to make his way home. As he neared the bushes he thought: ‘When the darkness is recent there is almost nothing to guide you.' The compound front was empty. The men who had been talking about infidelity had all gone. He went into the compound without looking at Ifeyiwa's house front. He did not do any painting that night.

When Ifeyiwa got home she was surprised to find the lights on in their room. When she went in he was just draining a tumbler that was a quarter filled with ogogoro. He had been to a meeting, but because it had ended in quarrels, and because the lights had been seized earlier in that area, he had returned sooner than expected.

He was sitting bolt upright on a chair. His eyes were raw and red. His face had darkened. He looked as if waiting for her had exhausted him. He had bags under his eyes. He looked ravaged. His hands quivered. Ifeyiwa stood at the door, uncertain of what to do. Then, without looking up, he made for the belt which had been lying on the bed. His voice was loud with barely concealed anger when he asked:

‘Ifi, where have you been?'

Words failed her. She braced herself.

‘Where have you been?'

‘I went to see my friend, Mary. On my way back the rain beat me.'

He looked up at her. His hands quivered more noticeably. ‘Why didn't you tell me where you were going?'

‘You were out.'

‘So whenever I go out you go out, eh?'

‘No.'

There was an awful tension in the room. She stood shivering in her yellow dress. Her hair was all over the place. He looked at her a long time. It may have been because she was so well dressed, because she had worn her best clothes which he had never seen on her, because she wore her white shoes, her white scarf, and looked like a bright young girl returning from a party that he felt so bad, so excluded. She had obviously not dressed up so well on account of him. It may have been for all these reasons that he got up and shouted: