In the corner, a man’s shadow rose above him while he hunched low. He washed his hands in a metallic bowl, feverishly muttering to himself. This continued for a few moments as he muttered “Iz not clean, never clean again.”
I walked into his shadow, touched his shoulder gently, driven by instinct and adrenalin. He uncurled slowly, his native wear covered in sweat marks. His protruding gut revealed a man with a very healthy appetite, wild eyes blinked at me.
My voice seemed to come from somewhere else. “What happened?” I asked
The whites of his eyes grew bigger. A red ant clung to a hair on my arm. An army of ants scurried into cracks on the floor and in our speech. He curled his hands into fists, knuckles straining.
“Nothing can be done.” He held up his palms, red from vigorous washing. “My enemies are no longer of this world. Are you one of them?” He pointed a finger accusingly. There was madness in his eyes.
“Nnnno, of course not!” I stammered.
“Why are you dressed in those clothes? Are you trying to mock me?” His voice bellowed.
“I found them in my room; I don’t know where they came from.” I managed a sincere expression, tugged at my baggy boyfriend jeans and loose Ren and Stimpy t-shirt.
“I will have whoever is responsible for this flogged! They may lose three fingers.”
“No need, it’s just a bad joke done in poor taste; I put them on out of curiosity.” I placed both hands on his rising shoulders to steady them. The sound of something dripping caught my attention. He drew me closer, wrapped one trembling arm around me and pointed to the ceiling. A ring of red appeared in the centre. The ceiling talked in a language of blood. It dripped onto our heads. Fat drops fell into my right eye as I looked up. I rubbed urgently, alarmed by the sight.
“What have you done?” I asked.
He threw his back and laughed dementedly, crawled into the unmade bed and assumed the foetal position.
I left the palace with my vision partially blurred. The guards lay slumped back into sleep. At the palace gates I remembered the key in my pocket, an invisible hand guided me again. Relief surged in my chest as I inserted it into the lock and turned. It opened. I thanked the dead fish that brought it to me and shrouded it in luck. Now the road felt cooler on my bare feet. The singing crickets had half whistles inside them; their sound grazed the night. An even paler moon morphed into a broken plate and its red dust disappeared back into the ground. Hovering in the air behind me was the sprawling red palace, somehow uprooted by my visit. Beside me the riverbanks arched, water rippled.
In the distance the sound of static beckoned me. I walked till my feet ached and the sound became a wall close enough to touch, twitching like the instances we change our minds. I couldn’t tell when I was swallowed into the other side.
In the morning, I rolled off the sofa and landed with a thump on the floor. Red ants crawled out of my pockets and made a trail. Anon sat opposite me laughing, more ants spilled from her mouth. I traced the cut on the side of my head, a morning alarm. I stood still for minutes, covered in a cold blanket, rubbing an optical illusion that had landed in my hands. Turn it one way and you had a lady with a cut on her head that would change location. Turn it the opposite way and a woman with blood becoming a small, red country in her eye appeared.
Part 2. Modern London, Lagos 1950s & 19th Century Benin. Tales of Kin
Tandem
Three months after I picked up the diary from Mervyn, I woke up one morning needing to know more. I fished the leather bound journal from my handbag. Inside the front cover the name Peter Lowon was scrawled on the page. The diary was teeming with paragraphs. A grey margin line became a needle sowing a stitch into my side. I saw ink arrows morphing into real arrows, hurling themselves at words, the wounded words would escape with letters lost from injuries, limping off the papers, leaving a trail of blue black ink to drip onto my palms. I could hear the chants of kids playing easing through my letterbox and the screech of impatient car tires. My phone began to ring, but I licked my finger and turned the first page of the journal into another life. I glimpsed a sketch on the back cover. It was a drawing of the brass head with words orbiting around it. I didn’t run my finger over it, in case it came to life.
Crying Fins
Adesua did not report Filo to the Oba. Instead the wall of anger she’d erected against her, crumbled on seeing the lost, vulnerable woman clinging to the brass head as though it held the answer to her problems. Adesua grabbed her arms and gently shook her. “Filo, ah ah, what has happened? Tell me, has somebody done something?” She’d pried Filo’s fingers off the warm brass.
But Filo would not speak. Adesua crouched down further till there was only the space between teeth separating them. She snaked an arm around Filo’s back in support, held Filo’s body while she slowly stopped shaking and the sniffling subsided. Outside in the distance the laughter of the palace inhabitants was heard. Adesua didn’t know it but the birds that had been repeatedly circling above Filo’s chamber, listened too. They heard Adesua’s anger, noted the confusion in her voice and still they did not move.
Finally when her concern burst through the roof and touched their heavy wings, they huddled their heads together, and waited. One bird fluttering down to the doorway would have seen the two women sitting with their knees raised to their chins, holding hands as if they were little girls on a farm rather than young women in a palace, their bottoms against the soft, weather-beaten earth, providing a temporary ceiling for the bugs and worms that scurried and slid layers beneath.
Meanwhile Adesua and Filo clung together listening to the sounds of the palace, bearing the weight of a silent thing, cloaked in a comfortable peace. Somehow within that chaos the two women had found a temporary relief. The silence crooned its intent, and unspoken words were exchanged through the small space between their raised knees and entangled fingers. They ignored the comings and goings outside the fragile bubble they were in, the noise from the rest of the palace that at times threatened to burst it. Adesua listening to Filo’s breathing even out again continued to hold her hand and waited. Not because she thought Filo would confide in her, but because she knew she wouldn’t.
Eventually, Adesua dragged her feet up to leave. By then Filo was staring blankly at her walls, but the corners of her lips were no longer pulled down and by the time Adesua walked away with the brass head tucked under her arm, Filo’s shoulders had ceased to hunch up. For the first time Adesua felt as if it wasn’t just a piece of art that belonged to her, but it was a real, live human trophy.
She left Filo’s quarters with a new, slick, uncomfortable knowledge. Of the darkness of Filo’s bedchamber, from the brown cloth she’d hung over the window to stop light flooding through. The wooden platter of days old half-eaten cassava and stew rotting in the far corner and the pungent, rotten smell that filled the room loitering just beneath their nostrils. Of the garments strewn across the floor, leaving a rainbow-coloured mess of materials you navigated your feet through to find a space. Next to the window, a once beautiful, wooden chair sat, chipped and worn. Bits of its top layer had been scraped off, leaving an awkward, bruised thing. It looked lonely, in a jumbled room where the mouth of the green bed mat grazed the terracotta walls.