Dangerous Love (33 page)

He nearly stepped on it. Whatever it was had been half wrapped up in cloth and left by the bushpath. At first, because it wriggled and moved like a strange animal, he was afraid. Then the baby's cry rose up to him, feeble and desolate. In the space of that moment everything became clear.

He gave chase. He bounded through the undergrowth, stumbled over protruding tree roots, and nearly disappeared into a well that was at ground level by the bushpath. Laboured breathing and confused footfalls sounded just in front of him. At a curve he saw the harassed silhouette of the fleeing woman. He called to her. She looked back and then she tripped over the exposed root of a tree. When he reached her she began cursing him. She screamed at him, making wild motions with her long fingers. Then she blew her nose into one end of her wrapper and became silent. She wore an open-necked blouse. From what he could see of her she looked lean and ill. Her hair was uncombed. Her mouth jerked in ugly spasms. She sniffed, spat in his direction, blew her nose again and wiped her face. She kept looking up at him, her body convulsing. She slapped at a mosquito on her bare arm. He said nothing and stayed still.

The wind moaned softly. There was a flurry amidst the leaves and undergrowth. When the wind died down she began to speak. Her voice was rough, defiant. It kept rising to the pitch of aggression and falling into barely audible whispers. She spoke about her husband, who was an armed robber. She said she had been returning from the market one evening when she saw him dead by the side of the road with a gaping hole in his neck. She spoke of how they had no money and how his creditors came that night to seize their property. She said she had no parents, no brothers, or sisters, and what could she do in the world? Should she die because of an armed robber's baby? Her voice dropped. There was another man, she said, who wanted to marry her, but the baby was in the way, it was a weight round her neck, she had no money to feed it, and she had lied to everyone that it wasn't hers anyway. She said she didn't care if the baby died and it was nearly dead anyway and she went on and on, speaking feverishly, breaking down to cry, talking as if she were replying to different voices that kept interrupting her. Then suddenly her tone changed. She began to rail against everything, and asked a long series of ‘whys', and began to hammer her fists on the ground, as if it were a door that wouldn't open. Then she flung herself down and tore at her clothes and pulled at her hair. A line of blood flowed down her forehead, past her eyes and mouth.

He gave her a handkerchief to wipe the blood, but she knocked his hand away. He talked gently to her, trying to soothe her, to persuade her to go and take up her child. The wind rose again. She shivered.

Up in the sky the moon emerged from behind a cloud and conferred a silvery haze upon the trees and bushes. In the new silence the baby's disembodied cry came over the air, amplified by the stillness around. The woman got up, as if she had suddenly woken from a dream. She pushed past him and went stiffly towards the abandoned child.

The cry sounded again, but this time it was lonelier than ever. The woman ran with unbelievable speed through the forest. Omovo followed her. When the woman got there the bundle had fallen over on its side. A black cat stood near it and it fled when the woman snatched up the bundle and hugged it tightly to her, cradling it, dancing sadly, her face suffused with a transformed light. Then she freed the child from its wrapping and brushed away the dirt and ants that had crawled on its body and began to sing a traditional song about the hardships of the world.

Suddenly he heard her catch her breath. She held out the baby. It was utterly still. Its legs were deformed and it had a weird face and its hands dangled. She looked at Omovo with wild eyes and she opened her mouth and let out a piercing wail that resounded its terror-stricken vibrations through the forest. Then she ran off screaming into the nightspaces as if she meant to wake up the dead and all those who slept peacefully in their beds.

He knew it. He knew it so strongly that something arched within him and all kinds of voices babbled in his mind and he had a sudden vision of a bird falling and hitting the earth with a complete absence of sound. He felt exhausted. The bushes and the darkness passed through his mind. And when he broke out of the forest there was just the ghetto and the sky, clear, open, and dream-like.

She walked briskly up the corridor and through the backyards into a secret passageway. When she got to her street she slowed down. The night was alive all around her. She felt outside it all, condemned by the wetness between her legs. She passed the stalls of the bean-cake sellers and the ogogoro traders. She passed the bustling hotel and the record stores blasting out the latest highlife tunes. Confused by her feeling of having been interrupted in lovemaking, she stopped beneath the eaves of the shed and rearranged her wrapper. The shadows hid her face from the street. She tried to recollect herself, to calm down her anxieties.

A car turned into the street and its headlights exposed her briefly. When the glaring lights passed away from her she broke down and cried. Everything washed back to her distorted by nausea. Things had been accumulating so much in her lately that when she watched her husband undress at night, when she watched him dress in the mornings, when she listened to his sickening endearments, she wanted to scream and throw herself through the window. But as she remembered him banging on the door, remembered his threats, the way Omovo froze, the silence afterwards, a feeling of emptiness crept over her. Something about the musty spaces of the room had opened up all the other things she had been hiding from in her life. Another car turned into the street and she covered her face with her arms and cringed as if from an ugliness she couldn't escape.

The moment passed. A Hausa-trader walked past, swaying with every bandy-legged step. Children raced round the corner. She heard the prostitutes calling to men in cracked voices:

‘Sweet time man.'

‘I'll give you a quick sweet time.'

‘Where are you hurrying to, handsome man?'

Ifeyiwa edged from the shadows and stumbled into the street. Her legs were weak. She felt queasy and wet. She felt old in a bodiless way. Forcing herself on, she came to the dark patch of bushes where abandoned babies were reported to have been found, where people had been attacked and robbed, where women had been molested. She found the darkness there calming. She stood for a while and the wind blew through her hair. She heard a strange whimper from the bushes but she was not afraid. She moved towards the noise, parted the bushes, and saw nothing. People hurried past the dark patch, singing as they went. She remembered a song from school and sang it sadly to herself.

I'm working for my life

I'm working for my life

If anyone comes

And asks about me

Just tell them and say

I'm working for my life.

The song made her nostalgic for her brief schooldays. It filled her with indolent images of companionship, of church services, of wide open fields, the athletics season, and of her friends in their starched uniforms singing with smiles at the morning assemblies. The whimper sounded again. She stepped back and saw a flower on a stalk amongst the bushes. It looked black in the shadows. She plucked the flower, smelt it, and sneezed. It did not smell good at all. She laughed quietly to herself and went on. In the dull light that reached her from the kerosene lamps around she saw that the flower was diseased, streaked with browns, eaten by insects, and it was not black at all but a washed-out pink. She took it with her.

Startled by loud rustling behind her, she turned to find a little dog limping out of the bushes. Hanging up a broken paw, it limped towards the stall of a bean-cake seller. The dog made pathetic noises and attracted the attention of the woman whose stall it was. The woman cursed the dog's ancestors and threw a spoonful of hot oil at its back. The dog howled and ran across the street, its head held low, its paw dangling. Some children who had been playing football and fighting amongst themselves noticed the dog. They laughed at its awkward movement. One of the kids, in an attempt to score a goal, missed the ball and kicked the dog. Ifeyiwa screamed. The dog was sent flying. It landed and rolled over like a grotesque football and began to utter plaintive sounds.

Ifeyiwa rushed to the dog. It still breathed. Its forefoot twitched. Ifeyiwa picked up the animal and found it was bleeding. She hurried away with the dog in her arms and the boys taunted her.

Without thinking she went into their room and put on the lights. Her husband was sitting on a chair. He was a solitary, pathetic figure. There was a half-empty bottle of ogogoro on the table. He had obviously been getting drunk, alone, in the dark. In a hoarse voice he said: ‘Put out the light. And get rid of that animal.'

His eyes were red. Apart from pouring himself another drink he made no motion. She put the light out and went into the corridor. As she went she noticed that the dog was breathing strangely and its tongue hung out.

The backyard was deserted. There were unwashed plates, babies' potties, dirty buckets, everywhere. She laid the dog near the kitchen to rest. Then she took up a bucket with some water, went to the bathroom, and washed herself. She had to suffer the indignity of drying herself with a neighbour's towel that hung on the mucus-covered zinc walls. Then she went back to the room.

The lights were on. Her husband stared through her as she stood at the doorway. His mouth was slack and his bared teeth were kola-nut stained. His eyes held the pain of dreadful knowledge. He tried to say something, but he shook his head and sighed. She watched him calmly. He stood up and sat down and then stood up again. He staggered to the window. He opened it and shut it. He seized his bottle by the neck and poured some ogogoro down his throat. The burning liquid ran down the stubble on his face. He grimaced and held his stomach.

She stood watching him carefully, her calm giving way to uncertainty. The more she looked at him the more clearly she saw him. Her pity made her see him, for an instant, as a man that was not entirely ugly. She saw the repressed and twisted goodness on his face, she saw beneath his gruffness and perceived the possibility that he had demons of his own. She knew so little about him, had wanted to know nothing about him. During the marriage ceremony, which had taken place in their village, she had barely looked at him, and had scarcely looked at him since. But for the first time in her married life she saw him as a man capable of being possessed by an inexpressible pain. The fact that he had not pounced on her so far made her feel a little more grateful, more respectful. It made her see his humanity, made her see him for once as one who didn't just threaten her and beat her, didn't just, without explanation, tear down her underpants and feel her roughly to ascertain whether she was wet from contact with another man.

She felt a mixture of kindness and coldness towards him. After what had happened when Tuwo last visited, she more than ever wanted to run away to her village. She had always been afraid she would do something dangerous. But as her wicked dreams ceased she became torn between what she knew and what she couldn't know.

Her husband sat down again. He fretted. He tried to rock the straight-backed chair backwards and forwards like a child. Then he started to cry. It was the first time Ifeyiwa had seen him like that. Seen him so naked. She didn't want to see something forbidden to the eyes of a wife. She began to play with the diseased flower. She heard her husband weeping and she wanted to scream and break valuable things just so that he could vent all his anger by beating her.

Suddenly he was silent. Then he said: ‘What is that you are playing with?'

Ifeyiwa started. The flower fell from her hands and gyrated to the floor. ‘A flower.'

‘Who gave you a flower?'

‘No one. It's a dead flower. I plucked it from a bush.'

‘Who gave you a dead flower?'

She said nothing. His voice changed. ‘I said who gave you a dead flower?'

She remained silent.

‘Did that boy give it to you, eh?'

Silence.

‘I am talking to you. Did
he
give it to you?'

Her face became abstracted. He got up suddenly and stretched his hand towards her. Ifeyiwa ducked, thinking that he was about to hit her. But he wasn't. He reached for his coat hanging by a nail on the door. Then he struggled into the coat with great drunken difficulty.

‘I'm taking you somewhere,' he said

She looked at him quizzically. The pathos had returned to his face. His mind seemed out of synchrony with his movements. His mouth flopped open, and his forehead creased. He looked at her with sly eyes. A curious lecherous expression contorted his mouth. He staggered over to her and with a perverse look in his eyes he grabbed her, his arms trembling, and attempted to kiss her. His breath repulsed her and she recoiled from him. Obscenely, he kissed the air. He held onto her roughly and squeezed her buttocks.

‘You're wounding me,' she said, coldly, gently.

He stopped. Then he grabbed her again and, breathing horribly, squeezed her hard. The only sign of the pain she felt was in the contorting of her face. She pushed him away. He fell on the bed. He stood up, his face suddenly resolute. He went to the door and said:

‘Come. I'm taking you somewhere.'

‘Where?'

‘Somewhere.'

For the first time that night she was afraid. She had an image of unexplained bodies in dark places. He came and seized her hand and pushed her out into the night. He put out the lights and locked the door. Then he pushed her down the street. She was scared, but she couldn't refuse to do his bidding.

He took her on a friend's motorcycle. He rode slowly and with extreme caution down the Badagry express road. They went past the Alaba market and turned off towards Ajegunle. Then he slowed down near the army barracks, turned off onto a bushpath and rode deep into the thick forest.