‘Mummy, I came to let you know that I’m travelling abroad next week. I’m going to London for a meeting.’
‘Is it with Boniface you’re going?’
‘Yes.’
She sighed.
‘How long are you going for?’
‘About a week.’
‘So how do we contact you if there’s something urgent?’
I told her that I would ring Aunty Dimma to check in. My mother had also refused a land phone.
‘Kings, whatever it is you people are doing, please be very careful. Be very, very careful.’
Aha! We were making progress. If she wanted me to be careful, that meant she accepted I was in the speed lane. It was only a matter of time before she completely came around.
‘Of course, Mummy,’ I said.
She sighed the world’s deepest sigh.
Twenty-five
It was my first trip on a plane. I waited for Cash Daddy to settle down into his first class seat and left him with Protocol Officer. Then I walked towards the back to find my own place.
‘Don’t worry,’ Cash Daddy said as I left. ‘Very soon, you’ll be able to join other big boys and fly in style.’
Had I not already seen what first class looked like, I might have thought nothing of it. But when I swept the separating curtain aside, I was startled. The people in economy were packed tight together, like a set of false teeth. After much probing, I found my seat in between two men and settled down to enjoy this new experience. But one of my neighbours refused me the enjoyment. Every few minutes, he would release a silent dose of effluvium, powerful enough to disperse a civil rights protest march. It became worse after the elegant, blond air hostess served minor portions of rice with a suspicious-looking green sauce that tasted like nothing I had ever eaten before. Bland, raw, and chalky. Could this really be the sort of Western diet that my father preferred over African food?
At Heathrow Airport, the immigration queue did not recognise first class or economy so, once again, I was reunited with Cash Daddy and Protocol Officer. The stern immigration officers were scrutinising passports, interrogating coldly, and whispering amongst themselves. Some from our queue were asked to stand aside and wait while an immigration officer took their passports and disappeared. I wondered what they had done wrong. I had heard all sorts of gory stories about desperate immigrants who had their hopes demolished right here at Heathrow - escorted onto the next plane back to Nigeria without even as much as a glimpse of the greener pastures beyond the airport. What if the same thing happened to us? What if they suspected that we were 419ers? I shuddered.
Finally, it was our turn. Protocol Officer quickly stepped forward and handed over Cash Daddy’s passport.
‘How long do you plan to stay in the United Kingdom?’ the officer asked. His teeth were brown and misaligned.
‘Two weeks,’ Protocol Officer replied on Cash Daddy’s behalf. ‘He’s here on holiday.’
The immigration officer stared back into Cash Daddy’s passport. Then he stared directly into Cash Daddy’s face. Cash Daddy glared back. The man shrank and took his stare away. He looked back at the passport and flipped the pages. He cleared his throat, brought out a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket, and looked through his glasses and over them. He cleared his throat again and looked over his glasses again, then through them once more.
He opened his mouth to ask another question.
Cash Daddy stared right into his face.
The man withered.
‘Welcome to the United Kingdom,’ he said.
Cash Daddy ignored him and strode past. The man spent some extra time staring at Protocol Officer’s passport and asking questions. Many of Protocol Officer’s answers missed the truth by about five kilometres. For some reason, the officer did not think I deserved too much scrutiny. He welcomed me without much ado.
‘Nonsense,’ Cash Daddy said, when I caught up with him. ‘Witches and wizards fly in and out of any country they want to without going through immigration. Why should I be harassed?’
The important thing was that we had made it through.
‘Anyway, by the time I become governor,’ he continued, ‘I’ll have a diplomatic passport so nobody will be able to talk to me anyhow.’
I knew that we were in the white man’s land. Still, I felt a slight shock at seeing so many white people walking about in one place at the same time. It was extremely rare to see a white person on the streets of the average, small Nigerian town. So rare, in fact, that sometimes in Umuahia, people would stop and stare at a white person, some chanting ‘Oyibo’, hoping that the white person would turn and wave.
When I was in primary four, there was a German girl in my class whose father was an engineer with the Golden Guinea Breweries. Several children spent their spare time surreptitiously running their fingers through her hair just to taste the straight, blond strands. Being the cleverest pupil, I was assigned by my teacher the prized sitting position right next to her. Standing up to answer a difficult question one day, I pressed the heel of my shoe against her toes. I just wanted to hear what it sounded like when she screamed.
The driver of the hired limousine also had brown and misaligned teeth. And so did the hotel concierge. My father had not mentioned any such anomaly in his traveller’s tales. How could English people have such bad teeth? Or perhaps these were just immigrants, and not real English people.
After settling into our different rooms, we converged in Cash Daddy’s suite for a final briefing. I and Protocol Officer stood by the bathroom door while Cash Daddy addressed us from the bathtub.
‘Like I told you people, this one is not the type of job that you chop and clean your mouth and shit and it ends there.’
He shot one leg out of the soapy water and draped it over the tub.
‘We have to package this mugu very well so that we can keep chopping him for a very long time. Once things start off well, Kings can just be talking and meeting with him regularly. That’s all.’
Sometime ago, Cash Daddy had instructed Protocol Officer to send letters to foreign businessmen who might be interested in investing in Nigeria. Protocol Officer wrote that, as the CEO of Ozu High Seas Construction Company, he had a strong government contact who could guarantee access to juicy contracts. All he needed was a foreign partner with a muscular bank account to act as guarantor. Mr Winterbottom had responded. He was the director of Hector Bank International and the CEO of Changeling Development Cooperation, Argentina. Because he had partnered extensively with South African businessmen, Mr Winterbottom was willing to peep into Nigeria. He and Protocol Officer had had several discussions over the phone before agreeing on this meeting in London. Protocol Officer told him that the current Nigerian minister for aviation was attending an economic summit in London over the next two days. The minister was, he said, his former boss, and Protocol Officer wanted both men to meet. Because of his limited time, the minister had asked them to join him for breakfast at his hotel tomorrow morning.
I nodded calmly as Cash Daddy went through each person’s script line by line, also giving instructions about body language and general demeanour.
‘Kings,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘all that big grammar they taught you in school, this is the time to speak all of it.’
But a riot had begun in my endocrine, nervous, and digestive systems. Not only was tomorrow going to be my first, real, live episode with a mugu, I had a few other worries. For example, the real Nigerian minister of aviation was actually attending an economic summit in London. It had been on the news.
‘Cash Daddy,’ I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other to conceal some embarrassment I felt at my cowardice, ‘what if he sees the real minister on TV?’
Both men laughed as if I had just cracked a splendid joke. Cash Daddy cleared his throat and wriggled the toes of the foot dangling over the tub.
‘Let me tell you something,’ he said. ‘Me, I really like these oyibo people. They’re very, very nice people. See how they came and showed us that the ground where we’ve been dancing Atilogwu has crude oil under it. If not for them, we might never have found out. But Kings,’ he dragged in his dangling foot and sat up in the tub, ‘white man doesn’t understand black man’s face. Do you know that I can give you my passport to travel with? Even if your nose is ten times bigger than my own, they won’t even notice.’
It was my turn to laugh.
Twenty-six
Despite the plush beddings of my five-star hotel room, I had a turbulent night. My slumber was besieged with nightmares about officers from Scotland Yard chasing me in and out of dark alleys. Most of the officers were female. All of them knew my name. One who had a striking resemblance to Margaret Thatcher had just made a wild leap at me, when I woke and saw that it was morning. My heart was throbbing like a drum warning a village against danger. I sat up in bed and pondered.
What was the best way to break the news to Cash Daddy that I had changed my mind? Should I tell him the truth or just lie in bed, pretending that the airplane diet had turned my digestive system upside down?
Slowly, I threw the bed covers aside and went to the bathroom. After a cold shower, I dressed in the Armani suit and Thomas Pink shirt that Wizard had accompanied me to purchase from an Aba ‘Big Boys’ boutique. It would be idiotic and cowardly for me to back out now. Plus, my uncle would be enraged.
When we stopped by his room, Cash Daddy swept his eyes over every inch of my body.
‘Keep it up, keep it up,’ he said, nodding.
Walking with Protocol Officer towards the elevator, I could not help but smile. Cash Daddy had actually given me sartorial approval.
The hotel restaurant was quiet, with just a few people sitting at the dainty tables. Sitting alone, sipping from a teacup and darting his eyes about like a pickpocket, our mugu was easy to identify. He waved his hand shyly and eagerly, like a man who had just spotted his thirteen-year-old bride disembarking at the bus station. He stood as we approached. A chubby, well-dressed man with brown hair, Mr Winterbottom had glittering dollar signs stamped all over him, even his smell.
‘Good morning, Mr Winterbottom,’ Protocol Officer said.
‘Hello, Mr Akpiri-Ogologo,’ the mugu replied.
We shook hands. Protocol Officer introduced me.
‘This is engineer Lomaji Ugorji,’ he said. ‘He’s the liaison officer in charge of our international operations. He’s our point man in all foreign transactions.’
‘It’s my pleasure to meet you,’ he said.
I wondered for how long the pleasure was going to last. We sat and ordered tea. There was something about Mr Winterbottom’s total comfort in our company that made my fear flee.
After we had exhausted the topic of the London weather and completed a comprehensive analysis of the climates in Argentina and Nigeria - apparently, Argentina was at its winter peak in July, while the sun came all out in December - Mr Winterbottom asked us about the minister’s arrival.
‘Why don’t you give him a call to let him know we’re waiting?’ I suggested to Protocol Officer.
‘Yes, why don’t you?’ Mr Winterbottom seconded.
The minister had given us an 8 a.m. appointment. It was 9 a.m. and he had still not appeared. Protocol Officer dialled, spoke briefly and snapped the phone shut.
‘He said he’ll see us in five minutes.’
Mr Winterbottom nodded happily.
Half an hour later, the minister entered. In his flowing, white, embroidered agbada and grey cap, Cash Daddy looked like the man who was in charge of formulating key policies for some major oil-producing economies of Africa. He smiled at us and sat at a different table. We abandoned ours and hurried over to him, with Protocol Officer leading the stampede.
‘Good morning, Alhaji,’ we all said in greeting. I and Protocol Officer genuflected for emphasis.
‘Alhaji, this is Mr Winterbottom,’ Protocol Officer said. ‘Mr Winterbottom, this is Alhaji Mahmud, the Minister of Aviation of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.’
‘I don’t like that place you were sitting because anybody passing can see me,’ Alhaji Mahmud said.
Arriving late, no apologies, it was typical. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a bona fide Nigerian top government official.
‘And once people know I’m in town,’ he continued, ‘they start disturbing me for one favour or the other. Government is a heavy burden. Sometimes one needs to rest.’
When we were all seated, Cash Daddy looked at the menu with disdain.
‘Rubbish,’ he declared.
‘Sorry?’ Mr Winterbottom queried.
‘Rubbish. You white people eat all sorts of rubbish. There’s nothing like Nigerian food. Anywhere I am in the world, I look for a Nigerian restaurant where I can go and eat real food. It’s just because of you people that I agreed to eat here.’
All three of us apologised.
‘It’s not everybody that I can make this sort of sacrifice for,’ the minister said. ‘You know Mr Akpiri-Ogologo here used to work under me in the ministry long ago, before I became Minister of Aviation. He’s very close to me.’
Mr Winterbottom looked at Protocol Officer, his eyes shining with a new kind of respect.
‘Thank you very much, sir,’ Protocol Officer said humbly.
Cash Daddy proceeded to order almost everything on the menu, and shocked me with the genteelness of his feeding process. He took slow, small bites like a well-bred little girl and chewed without enlarging his mouth.
Over breakfast, we chatted about the wind and the waves and about life and times. Throughout, the minister was jolly as a shoe brush. He told anecdotes and cracked jokes and laughed with all his might. The white man consumed several cups of coffee without touching his food. He kept hopping about on his seat and giggling long before the minister’s punch lines. Clearly, he had other things on his mind. At the end of the meal, the mugu offered to pay the bill. Nobody tendered a word of argument.