‘That insect looks like my relative,’ Dad said, laughing.

‘It came from the milk.’

‘What?’

‘The insect.’

‘When?’

‘Last night. Everyone was asleep. Then the insect flew out of the milk.’‘The milk!’ Dad cried, in a moment’s comprehension. He rushed out into thecompound, shouting:

‘THE MILK! IT’S THE MILK!’ Mum picked up a slipper and stalked the dragonfly and stunned it against the wall and smashed it so hard it became an obscene greenish smear. With a look of supreme indifference, she flicked down the bulbous bits of the dragonfly and swept it out into the passage. After she had washed off the smear with a rag, she went to the creditor’s room. She demanded that they clear their vomit from our roomfront and wash my stained clothes. In the meantime Dad was banging on doors, rousing everyone, overcome by the exhilaration of his drunken discovery, shouting:

‘They have poisoned us with the milk!’

Dad’s statement became a cry of understanding that was carried from one mouth to another, almost a rallying call, till the words gained ascendance over the ugly noises of vomiting. The women got out their containers and basins of the politicians’ milk and emptied them on the street. The heaps of rotten milk grew. Other compounds also had their heaps and as I looked along the street I saw the pilings of powdered milk like mirror-images in front of stalls. The inhabitants of the area gathered and held a longpublicmeetingabout therotten milk of politics.

The photographer hobbled about, from housefront to housefront, holding his stomach, his face wretched and pale. Bravely, he took pictures of the milk-heaps and vomit outside the houses, and got the women and children to pose round them. He took shots of sick children, men in contorted forms of agony, women in attitudes of hungry outrage.

The meeting went on for hours. The street was angry and someone suggested burning down the local offices of the rich people’s party. They were angry but they were also helpless and they couldn’t decide on the best course of action. They talked, could find no solutions, and as night fell they dispersed to their rooms, hobbling, wracked by spasms, exhausted of anythingto vomit.

The compound became a little friendlier towards us that night. Everyone thanked Dad for his rallying cry, for finding the cause of the malaise. The creditor’s wife cleared her undigested ill-feeling from our roomfront, and the creditor himself did not ask us to pay for his broken window. All through the night children went on weeping. But therefrainofvomitinglessened,asifknowingtheproblemhadsomehowreduced the condition. The toilet was unusable.

Dad madelibations to hisancestorslongintothenight.Heprayedformany things, so many that I lost track of the details, and it occurred to me that his ancestors might also be confused by them. We went to sleep in fine spirits, bonded by prayer, and glad that we had survived what became known as The Day of the Politicians’ Milk. That night I slept on the mat. As darkness passed into dreams I heard them again on the bed, moving gently with the music of the springs. The movements stopped. And then a voice, out of the darkness, said:

‘I wonder if the rats are awake.’

SEVEN

THE NEXT TIME I went to Madame Koto’s bar the place was full of big blue flies. The smell of animal skin and sweat and fresh turned earth assailed me. It was hot and stuffy, crowded with total strangers. All of them looked as freakish as the people who were there the last time.

The difference was that there had been a grotesque interchange among the clientele. There was an albino, but he was tall and had a head like a tuber of yam. The man who was bulbous in one eye was white and blank like a polished moonstone in the other. The two men who were sinister in dark glasses now had white hair and curious hip deformations. The youth who had no teeth was now a woman. I recognised them all beneath their transformed appearances. There were others I hadn’t seen before. One of them looked like a lizard with small, fixed green eyes. And amongst these strange people were others who seemed normal, who had stopped off on their way home from their jobs for an evening’s drink. The place was so crowded that I had to struggle through the tight-jammed bodies, all of them raucous, all of them singing, passing abuses and bad jokes across the bar. I heard voices that were unearthly, languages that were nasal and alien, laughter that could only have come from dead tree trunks at night or from hollow graves. I began to feel ill again just pushing my way through their bodies which smelt bloodless and looked pale.

The mutant customers made the bar feel entirely different. They conferred on everything a dull yellow light. The bar itself gave the impression that it had been transported from its familiar environs of our area to somewhere under the road, under the sea, to a dimly remembered and unwanted landscape. Their laughter made the lights lurid. Their merged voices made me twitch. And the toothless woman, breaking suddenly intoahigh-pitchedsquealofpleasure,unleashedonmeasurprisingrushof fear. I managed to make my way to my position near the earthenware pot. All the seats were taken, and two midgets shared a stool, drinking serenely. I did not recognise either of them, but they both smiled at me. The toothless woman turned towards me, staring hard, and then, very slowly, pulled out something from beneath the table. I watched, fascinated by her magician’s gesture. When she had pulled it out completely, I saw that it was a sack. I screamed and tried to get out of the door, but every availablespacewaspacked.Thecrowdjostledme,blockingmyway,asthough they were deliberately trying to prevent my escape, while not seeming to do so. I shouted and a deep-throated laughter drowned my voice. I pushed and the harder I tried the more completely I was surrounded.

Then I realised that more people were pouring in from the doorway, materialising, it seemed, from the night air. The clientele kept multiplying, filling out the spaces. They stood over me, giant figures with hair that fell off in clumps on my face. Their multiplication frightened me. The woman with no teeth became two. The midgets became four. The two men with dark glasses and white hair became three. The man with a bulbous eye acquired a double, and the double had a bulbous eye on the other side of his face. I calmed down. I had no weapon against their multiplication. The noise lowered. Everything quivered. I moved slowly, as if under water, towards the edge of a bench. I sat down. The people who surrounded me kept glancing in my direction every now and again, as if discreetly trying to make sure I was still in the bar. I became aware of being watched by everyone, even when they were not looking at me. I became convinced that they all had hidden and invisible eyes at the sides and the backs of their heads. And it was only when I looked up at one of the men who was so tall his head seemed to almost touch the cobweb-infested rafters that I knew the purity of fear.

The man had a wide mouth, prominent nostrils that flared unnaturally when he breathed, and two big disproportionate ears. And to my horror he had no eyes. I screamed very loud and I kicked the man’s shin and he leant over to me and opened his mouth wide as if he were going to swallow me. Then he stayed like that, in apparent contemplation. I found myself staring into the horror of his mouth. It was very dark and ugly and at the back of his mouth there was a single luminous disc, like a flattened moonstone, and I was horrified to see the disc blinking. Then I realised I was staring at an eye. I drew back in my shock and the eye elongated towards me and then moved around like a bright marble stuck in his throat. I spat at the eye and struggled away from him, kicking and raving. The man made a cawing sound and leant over again, his mouth open, and he looked for me, but I had made it across the room.