‘Where’s the riot? Where’s my camera?’

Dad laughed. The photographer shook his head, groped for his camera among Dad’s shoes, couldn’t find it, and cried out. He eventually found the camera in the empty pot of stew, amongst the bones of the boar. He snatched it out, cleaned it with his shirt, and staggered off to his studio.

When the landlord was woken up he jerked his head, looked around suspiciously, and said:

‘Where’s my rent?’

Then he climbed into bed and put his arm round me, as if I were a woman. Dad dragged him out into the passage and left him to his devices. In the room the bearded man woke up and wondered if the feast had begun yet and asked why he hadn’t been served any boar’s meat. One of the children started crying. When Dad came back into the room the bearded man asked for some beer. Dad drove him out. It was only after they had gone that we saw the debris of the feast. Our clothes were scattered everywhere. Two chairs were broken. Glasses had been shattered on the floor and it was a wonder that no one had cut themselves. Someone had vomited half out of the window and half in. The place stank of the children who had wet themselves in their sleep.

Mosquitoes whined. Dad lit a coil. Mum swept the floor, arranged the clothes, cleared out the plates, cutlery, and bones. Then she disinfected the room. Dad sat on his chair, drinking and smoking quietly. Mum spread out the mat. Then she blew out the candle and went to sleep.

Dad sat alone in the dark. Every now and again he said:

‘We have kept our promise.’

Theonly pointsoflight werethemosquitocoil,itssmokespirallingtotheceiling, and his cigarette. In a way I came to think of Dad as a cigarette smoked alone in the dark.

I watched him that night as if he were a fabled being. Sometimes he got up and paced the room, perfectly avoiding Mum’s sleeping form, his cigarette vanishingand reappearing. I watched him go back and forth. As I watched him, the darkness expanded. I saw Dad’s cigarette at one end of the room and heard him pacing at the other end. It seemed he had become separate from his action. Then I saw multiples of him smoking at different corners of the room. I shut my eyes. When I opened them it was morningand Dad was in his chair, asleep. I turned over.Iheardhimcreakinghis joints. When I turned round again, Mum was up, the mat was gone, the room was clean, the mosquito coil was just an aluminium stand and a spiral of ash on the centre table, and Dad was no longer asleep in his chair.

THIRTEEN

I LEARNT THAT Dad had gone out early to look for a job. Mum was exhausted from the search, the feast, all the walking, the worrying and the cooking. That morning she brought out her little table of provisions to the housefront. She sat on a stool, with me beside her, and dispiritedly crooned out her wares. The dust blew into our eyes. The sun was merciless on our flesh. We didn’t sell a single item.

In the afternoon, the people that Dad had borrowed from to buy drinks came to collect their money. They threatened to seize Mum’s goods. They hung around till evening. Mum begged them to wait for Dad to get back, but they wouldn’t listen. What annoyed Mum the most was the fact that the creditors were people from our compound, who were at the feast, who had gotten drunk on our wine and had thrown up on our window-sill. The loudest amongst them was actually responsible for breakingtheback of thechairanddestroyingtwoglasses.Anotherofourcreditors,as we learned later, was Madame Koto. She was the only one who did not come to drag for her money. But the others hung around Mum’s stall and spoiled her prospects of business.

By the evening Mum had begun to cough. Her eyes were inflamed from all the dust and whenever she stood up she staggered. When she went to the backyard she weaved about a little as if her failure to attract customers and shake off the creditors had made her drunk. Then I noticed, when she returned, that her eyes had gone strange. Every once in a while, after crooning despairingly to the indifferent potential customers of the world, her eyes would roll round in their sockets. As the evening wore on, when the winds changed, and a chill insinuated itself into the passing of the sun, Mum began to quiver on her stool, her teeth chattering. She went on stubbornly trying to sell her provisions, quivering under the bad wind, her face taut, her nose sweating, her eyes a little distracted. The other compound women who noticed the change told her to rest, but she didn’t move. We sat there, with our wares on the table, in the dark, covered in dust. When Mum finally packed up her table, the evening had deepened, and the wind had begun to whistle in the tall trees. Trembling, determined, and silent, she washed all our clothes in the backyard. She cleaned the room, made a fresh pot of stew, and pounded yam for Dad’s dinner. And then, battered by exhaustion, she went to sleep. But the creditors allowed her no rest. In a renewed effort, they kept turning up outside our room, whispering about the money we owed them, exaggerating the amounts to each new gossip-monger, and knocking on our door. When Mum reached the limit of her tolerance she shouted at them. They vowed loudly never to sell anythingoncreditagain.They wentondemandingtheirmoney tillnightfell.

We began to worry about Dad. It got darker and darker, the night birds began their songs, and still he hadn’t returned. When we had exhausted ourselves with worry, when Mum was asleep on the bed, and I was dozing on the floor, Dad stamped into the room, bringing angry shadows with him. His bad temper stank from his alcoholic breath. He lit a candle, saw Mum asleep on the bed, and burst into rage.

‘I have been everywhere in the world, looking for a job to feed us, and you are asleep? Wicked woman that you are!’

Dad fumed and shouted for thirty minutes, without listening, without usinghis eyes. Mumgot out of bed, tremblingviolently, and went to thekitchen.

‘Mum is not well,’ I said.

‘There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just wicked, that’s all.’

‘She’s not well,’ I said again.

He didn’t hear me. Mum came in with his tray of food. The plates clattered because of her trembling, which she tried to control. Dad, in his fury, didn’t look up at her. He ate noisily and with a mighty appetite. He didn’t even give me pieces of fish or invite me to join him as he often did. After he had finished eating every single morsel on the plates, his mood calmed, and he told us about how he had walked the entire city, under the blistering heat-waves, looking for a job, and had found none. During the silence which followed, Mum told him about the creditors, and Dad found fresh reasons to be angry. He threatened that he was going to beat them up for harassing Mum. He said he would scatter their teeth all over the forest. He said he would beat them so thoroughly that they would become old men overnight.

‘I will feed their brains to the wind!’ he shouted.

Mum expended a great deal of energy trying to dissuade him from such violent measures. But a demon of anger had got into Dad and he fumed and cursed all through the night. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, creaking his joints, striding up and down, filling the room with his restless temper. He grumbled about how much he had helped people and how they had always let him down, about all the creditors who came to our feast, polished off our boar’s meat and beer, and turned round to harass Mum at the first opportunity. He complained bitterly about how people ate off him and then stabbed him in the back. I had heard these complaints all my life. His cigarette burned angrily as he dredged up a fresh variation. Mum would wake up suddenly. His blistering tirade was aimed at everything. I fell asleep with Dad cursing the treachery of the world way into my dreams.