“Enough!” I said in my own counterfeit outrage, my index finger against my lips. “All I asked you was where your friend packs his wife.”
“There is no wife, my dear. So you can rest easy.”
“Me! Wetin concern me there.”
“Plenty plenty. I been see am long time, my dear.”
“See what? I beg commot for road,” and I made to push my trolley past him to the cashier but he grabbed my arm and pulled me back and proceeded to give me in loud whispers accompanied by conspiratorial backward glances a long and completely absurd account of all the actions and reactions he had meticulously observed between Chris and me in the last few months which could only have one meaning—his friend, Chris, done catch!
“You de craze well, well… I beg make you commot for road.”
That was the year I got back from England. I had known Ikem for years—right from my London University days. How he did it I can’t tell but he became instantly like a brother to me. He had completed his studies two or three years earlier and was just knocking about London doing odd jobs for publishers, reading his poetry at the Africa Centre and such places and writing for Third World journals, before his friends at home finally persuaded him to return and join them in nation-building. “Such crap!” he would say later in remembrance.
When he finally left for home I was just getting into my degree year at Queen Mary College and we had become very close indeed. There was a short period when the relationship veered and teetered on the brink of romance but we got it back to safety and I went on with Guy, my regular boyfriend and he with his breathless succession of girlfriends.
I have sat and talked and argued with Ikem on more things serious and unserious than I can remember doing with any other living soul. Naturally I think he is a fantastic writer and it has given me such wonderful encouragement to have him praise the odd short story and poem I have scribbled from time to time. I don’t even mind too much that his way of praising my style was to call it muscular on one occasion and masculine on another! When I pointed this out to him jokingly as a sure sign of his chauvinism he was at first startled and then he smiled one of those total smiles of his that revealed the innocent child behind the mask of beard and learned fierceness.
In the last couple of years we have argued a lot about what I have called the chink in his armoury of brilliant and original ideas. I tell him he has no clear role for women in his political thinking; and he doesn’t seem to be able to understand it. Or didn’t until near the end.
“How can you say that BB?” he would cry, almost in despair. And I understand the meaning of his despair too. For here’s a man, who has written a full-length novel and a play on the Women’s War of 1929 which stopped the British administration cold in its tracks, being accused of giving no clear political role to women. But the way I see it is that giving women today the same role which traditional society gave them of intervening only when everything else has failed is not enough, you know, like the women in the Sembene film who pick up the spears abandoned by their defeated menfolk. It is not enough that women should be the court of last resort because the last resort is a damn sight too far and too late!
That was about the only serious reservation I had about Ikem’s political position. I have to admit that, although he tended to be somewhat cavalier with his girlfriends and has even been called unprincipled by no less a friend than Chris, he did in fact have the most profound respect for three kinds of women: peasants, market women and intellectual women.
He could be considerate to a fault and I have known him to go to great lengths of personal inconvenience to help a lady in distress. I still have goose-flesh just thinking of one bitterly cold winter night he got himself stranded on the last train in London and nearly caught his death on my account.
I had been foolish enough to telephone him after I had suffered one of the most humiliating evenings of my life in the hands of my boyfriend, Guy, at a Nigerian Christmas dance at the St. Pancras Town Hall. I wasn’t really asking Ikem to set out for my place at that hour but just needed to talk to someone like him, someone different from that noisy, ragtag crowd of illiterate and insensitive young men our country was exporting as plentifully at the time as its crude oil. But apparently I sounded so out of my mind on the telephone that Ikem donned his wool cap and muffler and his coat and headed into the snow and caught the last train in a South London station well after midnight. When he finally made it to my door, after an extended adventure on night buses, it was half-past three in the morning. I felt so bad I didn’t need any further comfort for myself. I was ready to start cooking whatever meal would make him warm. Rice? Semolina? Plantain? He shook his head, his lips too frozen to speak. In the end all I could persuade him to take was a cup of coffee without cream or sugar; and he doffed his coat, slumped on the bed-sitter and went to sleep instantly. I stripped my bed of the last blanket and piled it on him.
Of all the absurd things people have found to say about us lately the most ridiculous was to portray Ikem as one of my trio of lovers. Damn it, the fellow was a brother to me!
In the last year I didn’t see too much of him—a couple of times at Mad Medico’s, a few times at parties and one or two visits to my house. He was never a great one for home visits but every one he made left a lasting impression.
The final one was in August. I remember it was August because he walked into my flat out of a huge and unseasonal tropical storm. The doorbell screeched in the kitchen followed by loud, panic bangs on the front door. I sprang up not to answer it but to bar the way to my maid, Agatha, who had dashed out of the kitchen like a rabbit smoked out of its hole and was making for the front door. No matter how I tried to explain it with details of multiple rape and murder, Agatha remained blissfully impervious to the peril of armed robbers surrounding us. She simply says yesmah and nosemah to everything you tell her and goes right ahead doing whatever she was doing before.
“Go back to the kitchen!” I thundered at her and with the same voice turned to the presence outside my door. I had been feeling somewhat more protected lately since I had all doors and windows in the flat reinforced with iron grills so that even if the fellow outside did manage to knock down the outer wooden door he would still have to face the iron, all of which gave you some time to plan your escape. Even so I stood well away from the front door with one eye on the kitchen exit and the fire-escape beyond it.
“Who is that?” I shouted. Whoever it was didn’t seem to hear and continued ringing the alarm and banging on the door. Well, I wasn’t going to budge either and continued screaming who? This went on literally for minutes and I was getting scared when he either heard me or else it occurred to him independendy to use his voice instead of his fists. And I caught it in one of those brief spells when a storm pauses to take a deep breath. I unchained the iron grill and unlocked the door.
“It wasn’t raining in my place,” he shouted sheepishly as he came in. “I ran full tilt into it just there around the Secretariat. It was literally like barging into a pillar of rain, you know
. You could stand there with the forward foot wet and the other dry.”
“Come on in. We’ll go hoarse shouting out here.”
He left his dripping umbrella with my potted plants on the landing and followed me into the parlour. Once inside, with door and window-louvres tightly shut, the noise of the rain receded dramatically to a distant background leaving us in muffled cosiness.
“When we were children,” Ikem said as he threw himself into the sofa and began to remove his wet shoes and tuck his socks inside them, “August used to be a dry month. August Break we called it. The geography textbooks explained it, the farmer in the village expected it. The August Break never failed in those days.”
“Really?”
“What’s happened to the days of my youth, BB?”
“Wasted, squandered, Ikem. Lost for ever, I’m afraid.”
“I hoped you would not say that. Not today. Oh, well.”
“What’s wrong with today. Your birthday or something?”
“I have no birthdays. There was no registration of births and deaths in my village when I was born. Signed Notary Public.” I laughed and he joined me… “I wasn’t one of your spoilt maternity births. I arrived on banana leaves behind the thatched house, not on white bed sheets… Those are lovely flowers, what are they?”