The Famished Road (22 page)

People had gathered all around. People had stopped what they were doing, just to see if this man who wasn’t really a giant could manage all that weight. They watched the spectacle of that squat, thick-set man, and it was the only moment I saw people in stillness. And when the man, wobbling and weaving, got to where he was supposed to be relieved of the bags, the unloaders weren’t there. He turned, calling for them; they came running out of a bukka, and arrived too late; for he suddenly threw down the three mountainous bags all at once; one of them spilled open; and he stood perfectly still for a moment, blinking, while people all around cheered him and sang out his nicknames; and then he fell in slow motion on to the sacks and did not stir till he had been dragged to the roadside and revived with a bucket of water and a tumbler full of palm-wine.

After a while he got up, his knees knocking, and went back to the truck and took to carrying only two bags. People still kept watching him, to see if he would do something extraordinary with the bags. But the only thing he did, after a few trips, was go into a bukka, put away a great bowl of pounded yam, swallowing handfuls that would have choked a bull. The spectators who left, resuming their busy lives, missed seeing him perform an impromptu fandango with the madame of the bukka and then run off without paying, the madame hot on his heels waving a frying pan.

The garage was the most confusing place I’d ever seen: people shouting everywhere, lorries revving, truck-pullers yelling, music blaring from new record shops and drinking houses, cars screeching, women screaming at pickpockets, and men fighting over who would carry the suitcases of travellers. Across the road a woman was whipping a madman with a broom. Behind me a thief was caught and set upon by traders.

There were boys all over the place, roaming around with hungry and cunning eyes.

Outside a run-down shed the old bicycle-repairer sat on a chair, smoking a cigarette, surveying the whole confusion. A bus had broken down and people were pushing it. A woman, fat and rich-looking in expensive lace, was ordering a lot of men around. She looked very powerful and had an expression of distilled scorn on her face as she commanded the men to take her baggage from the boot of a taxi. There was so much to see, so much to listen to, with clashing sounds and voices pulling the attention this way and that, with everything happening in frantic simultaneity, that it was impossible to walk straight. I kept bumping into people, stumbling into potholes of mud, tripping over the rubbish that was soggy on the ground. I would be watching one thing, a girl washing a baby’s bottom at the roadside, when a car horn would blast noisily behind me, startling the life out of me. Or I would be wary of the cars behind me, driving by so close that it seemed they were slowly and deliberately trying to run me over, when someone would shout:

‘Get out of my way, you rat!’

I would jump out of the way and a truck-puller, dragging behind him the entire contents of a modest household, or a load-carrier, straining under a monstrous weight of yams, would storm past. I became dizzy, hungry, and confused. No one paid much attention to anyone else. On one side of the street a man would suddenly bolt off with a trader’s tinbox of money. On the other side a woman would be arguing with a customer about the price of breadfruit, while her child was crawling under a stationary lorry. I was going towards the lorry to get the child out when a great cry started all around me. The woman had just realised that her child was missing. The cry was so piercing that other women instantly gathered around, holding their breasts and agitating the air with their hands. The lorry driver started his engine, the child screamed, the women rushed towards me, shoved me out of the way, and some of them went under the lorry, while others pounced on the driver and harassed him for parking his ugly vehicle in front of their stalls. The driver didn’t stand for it and insulted them back and a frightening din of abuse ensued, the women getting so involved that they forgot the child they were concerned about in the first place. I was by now quite obliterated with mud and dirt and I went on further, looking for a waterpump.

I couldn’t find one and I came to a place where men were offloading cement bags from the back of a trailer. Again there was a multitude of load-carriers, their faces obscured by cement-dust, with cement on their sweating eyebrows and on their hair. I wondered how they managed to comb it in the mornings. Some of the load-carriers were boys a little taller than me. I watched the boys buckling under the cement bags, staggering off, dumping them down, coming back, till their supervisor called for a break, and they all went and sat around the outdoor table of a bukka and washed their hands and sweated into their food, eating voraciously.

When they resumed work again I noticed that amongst them was an old man, his son, and his grandchildren, who could not have been much older than me. Among the grandchildren was one who had just started carrying loads that day. He kept crying about his neck and his back and he cried all through the carrying but his father wouldn’t let him stop and drove him on with his tongue, saying he must learn to be a man, and that there were boys younger than him who were a pride to their families, and at that moment he pointed at me. Fearing that the supervisor might notice me as well and take it into his head to order me to break my neck carrying cement bags, I hurried on, searching for a water-pump, till I came to another lorry where men were offloading bags of salt. And I was staring at the strange number plate of the lorry when I heard the protestations of a familiar voice.

I heard the voice briefly and I sought the face. And then I saw Dad amongst the load-carriers. He looked completely different. His hair was white and his face was mask-like with engrained cement. He was almost naked except for a very disgusting pair of tattered shorts which I had never seen before. They loaded two bags of salt on his head and he cried ‘GOD, SAVE ME!’ and he wobbled and the bag on top fell back into the lorry. The men loading him insulted his ancestry, wounding me, and Dad kept blinking as the sweat and salt poured into his eyes. The men loading him shouted about how he had been giving them a lot of trouble and behaving like a woman and if he couldn’t carry mere bags of salt he should crawl back into his wife’s bed. Dad was still staggering, like a boxer under the onslaught of too many blows, when the loaders dumped the second bag on his head for the second time. For a moment Dad stood perfectly still. Then he wobbled. His muscles twitched erratically.

The bags were very huge and compact, like boulders of rock, and salt poured out of one of them on to Dad’s shoulder.

‘MOVE! MOVE ON!’ said one of the loaders.

‘OR YOU WANT ANOTHER BAG, EH?’ said the other.

For a moment I thought Dad was going to succumb to the dare and be forced deeper into the earth by the sheer weight of bags that could have been pillars of stone. And I couldn’t bear the thought of it and in a voice so thin in the midst of the chaos all around, I cried:

‘Dad! No!’

Several eyes turned towards me. Dad swungmany ways, trying to locate the source of the cry, and when he faced my direction he stopped. His face kept twitching and his neck muscles kept palpitating, as if he was suffering a cramp. One of the loaders said:

‘MOVE ON, MAN!’

And as the salt poured on his shoulder, tears streamed from his eyes, and there was shame on his face as he staggered right past me, almost crushing me with his mighty buckling feet. He appeared not to have seen me and he struggled on, trying to bear the load with dignity, weaving in the compensating direction of the load’s gravity. He weaved uncontrollably, women and children scattering before his advance as if he were an insane animal. Sweat poured down his back and I followed him at a distance, grieving for the cuts and wounds on his arms. As he was turning a corner he tripped, regained his balance, wobbled, and then slid on the mud and rubbish on the road, and fell. The salt bags dropped slowly from his head, and I thought, shuttingmy eyes and screaming, that they would crush him. But when I opened my eyes I saw the bags in the mud. One of them had rolled over the gutter. Dad stayed on the ground, covered in mud, not moving, as if dead, while his blood trickled from his back and mixed with the rubbish of the earth. And then the supervisor came running towards him, shouting; and a truck-pusher went past him, growling; and Dad suddenly got up, rolling and sliding on the mud, losing grip and standing again, and then he ran in two directions before shooting across the road. A lorry almost knocked him over, but he went on running, and I could see him fleeing into the labyrinth of stalls, ducking under the eaves of kiosks, till he disappeared into the confusion of the garage market, with people tearing after him because they thought he was a thief. I didn’t stay and I didn’t want a water-pump any more. I half-ran, half-walked the distance home. And I was unhappy. My wanderings had at last betrayed me, because for the first time in my life I had seen one of the secret sources of my father’s misery.

WHEN I GOT home I sat outside and didn’t play with any of the children.I felt very wretched and didn’t notice the daylight pass into evening. Mosquitoes and fireflies appeared. Lamps were lit inside rooms. The men of the compound talked about politics, about the Party of the Poor. They too had come with loudhailers and leaflets and had promised a lot of things and had won considerable support because they said they would never poison the people.

It was dark when Mum returned. She looked haggard and sun-blackened. She shuffled into the room, dropped her tray of provisions, fell on the bed, lay there unmoving, and was instantly asleep. I warmed the food and swept the room. When she woke up, she looked better. She sat down and ate. After eating she lay on the bed and I sat on Dad’s chair, watching the door. She was silent. I told her I had seen Dad; she started to work up a temper about my having begun wandering again, but she was too tired to sustain it. She lay there, grumbling in an ancient monotone about how hard life was, and I listened intently, for I had begun to understand something of what she meant. We stayed up till very late, in complete silence, waiting for Dad to return.

‘What did your father say when you saw him?’ she asked eventually.

‘Nothing.’

‘How can he say nothing?’

‘He said nothing.’

‘You didn’t see him.’

‘I did.’

‘Where?’

‘At the garage.’

We went on waiting. We stayed up, dozing fitfully, till dawn faintly lighted up the sky. Mum became very agitated.

‘What has happened to him?’ she asked me.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. She began to weep.

‘Are you sure you saw him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was he well? Did he talk to you?What did he say? I pray nothing has happened to him. What will I do if something bad has happened? How will I live? Who will take care of you?’

She went on like that, talking, asking questions, muttering, breaking down into sobs, till I fell asleep on the chair. When the cocks cracked the egg of dawn with their cries, Mum got out of bed, washed her face, and prepared to go and search for Dad in the police stations and hospitals of the world. She had just put food out for me, when Dad appeared at the door. He looked terrible. He looked like an anguished ghost, a forlorn spirit. His eyes were red, his face white and drawn, cement and yam powder all over his brow, his beard wild. He looked unwashed and I knew instantly that he had been roving the streets all night. He avoided my eyes and Mum rushed to him and flung her arms round his neck. He flinched and Mum said:

‘Where have you been, my husband?We were so worried. .

‘Don’t ask me any questions,’ Dad growled, pushingMum away from him.

He went and sat on the bed, staining it with dried mud. He blinked rapidly. Mum fussed over him, trying to anticipate his needs. She hurried out and prepared food. He didn’t touch it. She boiled water for him to bathe with. He didn’t move. She touched him tenderly and Dad exploded:

‘Don’t trouble me, woman! Don’t bother me!’

‘I don’t want to . .’

‘Leave me alone! Can’t a man do what he wants without a woman troubling him? I have a right to do what I want! So what if I stayed out last night! You think I have been doing nothing? I’ve been thinking, you hear, thinking! So don’t trouble me as if I’ve been with another woman . .’

‘I didn’t say you have been with …’

At that exact moment Dad leapt up into a tidal rage and scattered the plates of food and tossed away the centre table and grabbed the bedclothes and hurled them across the room. They landed on me, coveringmy face. I stayed like that with the bedclothes over my head while Dad raged. Mum cried out and then stifled the cry. I heard Dad hitting her. I looked and Dad was slapping her on the head, kicking the table, shaking Mum, pushing her, muscling her around, and her arms flailed, and then she submitted herself to his anger, and I got up and rushed at him, and he shoved me aside and I fell on his boots and hurt my bottom and I stayed there without moving. And then, quite suddenly, Dad stopped hitting her. He stopped in the middle of a slapping motion, which changed into an embrace. He held her tight while she sobbed, shaking. Dad also shook, and he led her to the bed and held her, and they stayed like that, unmoving, embracing awkwardly, for a long time. Outside I could hear the cocks crowing. The compound people were preparing for work. Children cried. The female prophet of the new churches chanted for the world to repent. The muezzin pierced the dawn with calls to prayer. Dad kept saying:

‘Forgive me, my wife, forgive me.’

And Mum, sobbing, shaking, also kept saying, as if it were a litany:

‘My husband, I was only worried, forgive me...’

I got up and crept out of the room and went to the housefront. I slept on the cement platform till Mum came to wake me. When I went back into the room Dad was asleep on the bed, his mouth open, his nose flaring and softening, an agonised expression on his wrinkled forehead.