Irregular Verbs (19 page)

“Please excuse me, noble officials,” Gao said, dropping to the floor and bowing low. “I forgot the most important part of the mourning party.”

A few seconds of silence passed as the guests watched him curiously, wondering what he was going to produce that might top the Yellow Lantern Fish. Finally his father said, “What a glum group. Reminds me of my father the day our prize rooster died, the one who would crow every time a rich customer was coming—” The guests looked at the chatty ghost in amazement, but Gao’s father made straight for the Emperor’s uncle. “Did he try to feed you that Temple Style Duck? I only ask because you’re looking a little thin. The first time I met one of those Southerners I thought they were crazy, won’t eat meat, won’t eat fowl, not even fish. But I met one who was a wizard with rice—learned a few tricks from him . . .”

By the time dawn came Doi Thiviei and the Emperor’s uncle were chatting like old friends. The royal ghost was looking much more substantial and even accepted one of the sesame balls with hot lotus paste Gao had made for breakfast.

“Gao, I think I’ll stay here a while,” his father said. “I hope it won’t disappoint my mourners, but I’ve gotten a little tired of hearing my own voice. Take good care of my restaurant, will you?”

“Of course,” Gao answered, ladling out the clear soup he had made from chicken stock and the last of the qinshon leaves.

“And I suppose you’ll be marrying that Southerner girl and changing the name your mother and I gave you. I know you’ve never liked it, though it’s a good story how you got it.”

Gao frowned. “I always thought it was because—well, my face—and I always had to make it for the customers who couldn’t afford anything else.”

“No, no,” his father said. “It wasn’t like that at all. You see, when I first met your mother—but I suppose you don’t have time to hear this story.”

Gao sat down and took a sip of the soup, enjoying the fragile flavour of the qinshon. He only allowed himself one bowl a year, to be sure he would appreciate it. “I have plenty of time, father,” he said. “Only please, let me go get Mienme so she can hear it as well. We will both need to know this story so we can tell it to our children.”

It turned out his father had lots of stories he had never told; or maybe Gao had just never heard them before.

Safrat liked being a vacuum cleaner. Of all the jobs she might be given, it was her favourite: she liked to see in the rich peoples’ homes, even if her point of view was only three inches off the ground. It was light work, too, not like digging earth or handling barrels of toxic waste. That shouldn’t have made a difference but it did, at the end of the day when the motor-muscles she didn’t have ached beyond words.

The amber warning lit up: only half an hour left in her shift. She switched to light suction and began moving more swiftly around the floor, scanning for any spots she might have missed or where dust might have settled since she started. The foreman, Adegoke, had said that a house could never be clean enough for the rich people. If they were not satisfied then there would be no more demand for workers from Lagos, and the telepresence booths the government had built with World Bank money would sit idle. It was up to workers like her, he had said, to do a good enough job that even the rich white people would be satisfied.

She had just finished her inspection when the red warning lit, and she started to disengage from the vacuum and return to full wakefulness. You could not work the machines, even the very simple ones like vacuum cleaners, when you were entirely awake: you shuddered and jolted and made stupid mistakes, as if you were thinking about every step while you walked. Many of the workers drank palm wine or smoked India hemp before their shifts to get into the proper state of mind, but Safrat found it came naturally to her if she chose one simple task to start with and did it slowly and rhythmically. Like the others, though, she was always muzzy after a shift, and she was glad her brother Paul was able to meet her and guide her home.

It was only five months they had been in Lagos. The city was for the ambitious, and neither of them was that: they had been happy to tend battery trees in the country, up north of Ilorin, until the state energy company had chosen their village as the site of the new transmission station. After that there was no choice for either of them but to go to the city like all the rest, try to find a relation who would help with a job and a place to live. They had found a cousin, an
oga
named Tinubu, who had quickly gotten Safrat the telepresence job—they preferred to hire women for some reason—but could only find casual work for Paul, hustling and running for him. This meant that while Safrat gave Tinubu only a quarter of her salary, Paul had to give half of whatever he made since he could not be relied on to bring in anything at all.

Now Paul led Safrat back to their home, past the market crowded with stalls with sheet-metal roofs, where medicines, bicycle parts and DVDs were sold; the sound of the hawkers and the car horns came to her like distant music, barely penetrating the haze that surrounded her. It would take them more than an hour to get back to Isale Eko on foot, but that was all right. They paid only for night rights in their room, and if they got there before nine o’clock they would have to wait around outside the building. Instead they stopped for a meal of
fufu
and groundnuts and then arrived just as the people who slept there during the day were leaving, found the mattresses still warm on the floor.

In the morning Safrat rose, picked up the two plastic buckets that sat at the foot of her mattress and went to the borehole to buy water. As she did she passed one of the sleeping alleys, where plastic sheets were laid on the ground as beds: she and Paul had slept in one of those when they first arrived, and it was only Tinubu and the job he had found for her that had brought them indoors. Water from the borehole was trickling down the alley, creeping over the plastic sheets, but one of the people there still slept anyway.

She paid twenty naira to fill both buckets, waiting for a long time behind a woman with a foot-washing business who was filling ten, loading each one onto a pushcart; then she carefully trudged back to the apartment building, willing herself to ignore the calls of the touts and hawkers that offered her cell phones, watches, anything. The wind was blowing from the east, bringing sawdust from the great mills on the mainland, and by the time she got back she was coughing white phlegm.

“How did you sleep?” Paul asked as she joined him on the stoop. He was holding two wooden bowls full of
fufu
, handed one to her.

“I never remember,” Safrat said. “Why do you ask?”

“You were talking,” he said. “In English.”

Safrat frowned. Both of them spoke English well enough to get by in Lagos, but their first language was Yoruba. She didn’t suppose she had ever thought in English, never mind dreaming in it. “What did I say?”

Paul shrugged. He was concentrating on pouring the water she had bought into the dozen or so clear plastic bottles he had collected, which he would then strap on his back under a vest of cargo netting: a few hours in the sun would kill off whatever evils lurked within. “I didn’t follow it,” he said, not taking his eyes off the bottle’s mouth. “Something about a vacation, I think.”

She put down her bowl and laughed. “A vacation in English,” she said. “That sounds good.”

He laughed too, though he did not look up. “I’ll bring you water at two, unless Tinubu has a job for me.”

Safrat nodded. “Thank you,” she said, then stood and patted him on the shoulder, careful not to disrupt his concentration. It was hot already, and by the time she got to the telepresence station she wished she had brought one of Paul’s water bottles. On a day like today, though, each bottle might bring three times what it had cost.

The other women were starting to arrive, either on foot like her or by the rattling
danfo
. They were all early: without a watch—one that worked, and kept working, which was not something to be found in Lagos—it was the only way to be sure of being on time. That was something the rich white people who had built the booths insisted on.

“Smoke?” one of the other workers asked, an Ibo girl named Janet. She held out a rolled cigarette, double-stuffed with tobacco and India hemp.

Safrat held up her hand in polite refusal, but a moment later changed her mind and accepted it. The taste was bitter and harsh as she drew in the smoke, and she felt light-headed; she did not much like the effect that smoking had on her, but today she felt a need to join in the morning rituals of the other women.

“My husband says I was keeping him up all night,” said one of them, a Lagos-born woman everyone called Victoria; she was careful to note, in every conversation, that she and her husband lived on Victoria Island. She took a swig from a plastic milk jug full of palm wine, passed it to the woman next to her.

“Were you talking?” Safrat asked.

Victoria’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. Among the workers there were lines rarely crossed. There were those who came by foot and those who came by
danfo
, and Safrat came by foot; there were those who drank palm wine and those who smoked India hemp, and on most days Safrat did neither. “Why do you ask?” Victoria said.

Safrat coughed, the smoke from Janet’s cigarette still burning her throat. “My brother said I was talking in my sleep last night,” she said. “In English.”

“I only speak in English,” Victoria said pointedly.

“But were you talking? In your sleep?”

Before Victoria could speak Janet said, “I think I was. When I woke this morning all the people in my room were looking at me.”

Victoria raised an eyebrow and looked Safrat in the eye, ignoring Janet. “Yes,” she said. “He said I was talking.”

“What is this, what is going on?” Adegoke asked. The foreman, a tall, thin man in his twenties, had stepped out of the station as he did every morning, brandishing his wrist with the gold watch at the women. “You are all nearly late. What is this, palm wine and hemp? Is this going to help you do careful work?”

Normally this was the cue for the women to put these things away and file into their telepresence booths, but today Victoria turned to face Adegoke directly. “Your machines are making us sick,” she said. “Why should we go in?”

Adegoke put his hands on his hips. “What are you saying?” he asked. “There is nothing wrong with the machines. They are brand new.”

“Ask Safrat,” Victoria said, pointing to her and stepping aside. “She knows what’s going on.”

“Safrat?” Adegoke asked. “Are you causing trouble here?”

The air was gone from her lungs; if she lost this job Safrat would have to give Tinubu everything she had saved so far as compensation, and his take from the next job would be higher.

“Well?” Adegoke said. “Can’t you speak?”

“I was—I was just noticing many of us seem to be talking in our sleep,” she said, keeping her eyes on Adegoke’s leather shoes.

“That is normal enough,” Adegoke said. “When you don’t work hard enough in the day your mind keeps going at night.”

“We are all talking in English,” Safrat said.

“And you think this is the booths? No, it is impossible. The wall of fire prevents anything like that.”

The women all looked at him curiously.

“The wall of fire,” Adegoke said. He waved his hands around his head. “When the World Bank men built this station, they built it with a wall of fire around it. It keeps things from coming back to you, to the booths. All right?” There was silence. “All right. Now get to your stations and get to work.”

Safrat went to her booth in silence, sat down and hooked herself up to the machine. As soon as the drugs had relaxed her muscles she got to work, controlling a forklift loading cartons onto and off of a ship; the usual rhythm eluded her, though, and she was glad to have had some of Janet’s cigarette. The work went slowly, and by the end of the day she was too exhausted to think about anything but sleep.

Paul was not waiting for her at the end of her shift: Tinubu must have found him a job, she thought, or at least an errand. She carefully made her way home, forcing herself to concentrate on her surroundings, and finally settled down on the steps of her apartment building to wait for her brother.

She awoke to find him standing over her, two bowls of
fufu
in hand; gratefully she took one, began to eat it in silence.

“How did you do today?” she asked after a few minutes.

Paul smiled. “Tinubu gave me a job, in the Mile Twelve market.”

“A job? For how long?”

“Just for today.” He must have noticed the look that crossed her face, because he quickly added, “But he said he’d get me more, soon.”

“How much did you make?” Safrat asked.

“Two thousand naira.”

“How much did you keep?”

Paul looked away. “Two hundred.”

She shook her head. “You’d have made more selling water.”

“But he said—he promised if I did a good job selling he would find me a regular job—”

“Selling what?”

“Watches today, but it doesn’t matter. . . . Safrat?”

“What?” She blinked, feeling as though some force was pulling her off balance. “What did you say?”

“I asked if you were all right,” Paul said. He leaned close. Glancing away, Safrat saw that almost all of her
fufu
had been eaten. Had she been asleep, or just away from home? “You were talking again, in English. When I told you about the watches Tinubu gave me to sell you started to say something about gold Rolexes.”

“In English?”

“Yes.”

Safrat frowned, shook her head. “Do you have any paper? For writing, I mean?”

Paul nodded.

“Next time you hear me talking like that, write down everything I say. Exactly the words I say, all right?”

Nodding again, Paul said “All right. What do you think this is?”

“I don’t know,” Safrat said.

The next morning Safrat went back to work, clutching the piece of paper on which Paul had written her nighttime speech. Victoria was already there when she arrived, passing the day’s jug of palm wine around with her friends, and after a moment Safrat screwed up the courage to approach her.

“What is it?” Victoria asked, eyeing her suspiciously.

“What your husband said you were saying, in the night,” Safrat asked, thrusting the paper at her. “Was it anything like this?”

Victoria’s eyes narrowed as she took the paper, squinting at Paul’s rough letters. “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose.”

“What is this?” Adegoke asked, snatching the paper from Victoria’s hand.

Victoria threw Safrat a look of fury: to the foreman she was just another worker, and she did not like to be reminded of that. “It’s Safrat’s,” she said. “She brought it.”

“Safrat, I told you—”

“It’s nothing,” Safrat said. She reached out for the paper in Adegoke’s hands, but stopped short of touching it. “Please. It’s nothing.”

“I will keep this,” Adegoke said. “But you all should get to work.”

The other women glared at Safrat as they passed into the station, their wine and India hemp unfinished. There would be nothing to do but sit in their booths until the shift began, but nobody, not even Victoria, was willing to argue with the foreman.

That day Safrat was given her least favourite job, clearing, cleaning and stacking dishes at an automatic restaurant somewhere; it was nervous work, too delicate to ever establish a rhythm, and the unchanging perspective made her feel as though she was trapped in a box. The day crawled by, plate by plate and glass by glass, until finally the amber warning lit. She used the last half-hour of her shift to check the machine she was controlling for wear or glitches, then disconnected as soon as the red warning came up. Today she was wide awake. She looked around at the others emerging dazed from their booths, heard murmured English on their lips. She frowned, saw Paul waiting for her outside.

“No work today?” she asked when she joined him.

He shook his head. “Tinubu says tomorrow.”

“You’ll need to,” Safrat said. “We have to hire a
babalawo
.”

“Safrat—”

“This thing I have, the other women have it too. Some of them, anyway.”

“Did you talk to the foreman?”

She glanced back at the station. “He wouldn’t listen. Not to me.”