HE IS WEARING A NEW SHIRT, AND A NEW WRISTWATCH, and glossy black shoes. He has started to grow a beard. Memories of the old times come flooding back as Eke and I walk down the road chatting. I tell him briefly about Lagos, about the crowds that are like swarming masses of ants, the cars, and the fights; Lagos and its weird community and speed of light. I edit the parts of the story that are not favourable to me.
“Your Mummy is a very strange woman,” Eke says. “That boy, Ejiro—I should have a little bout with him.” He squares his shoulders. “You shouldn’t have fled.”
I wince with a stab of regret. Eke is one of the people I have failed. Going to Lagos was his idea.
I ask why he is no longer in school.
“I left because my mother spent the money my father had saved for my school fees on my sick sister and told me to drop out,” he says with a sad smile. “I work with Micheletti Limited, a large construction company in Awka.”
The name of the company has a metallic resonance that impresses me. “I am happy you came back. I was going out of my mind with boredom.”
“Let’s go grab a drink at Madam Bridget’s.” He reaches for a wallet in his back pocket. It’s full of cash. He counts crisp notes and hands them to me.
I have seen only Mummy handle this amount of money before. Eke’s cash is sweet-smelling. I imagine a site full of overalled, helmet-wearing construction workers going to and fro.
“I am tired of this village.”
Eke laughs his combustible laugh, fishes out a cigarette, lights it, and takes a draw, not minding the eyes of the passersby. I didn’t know he had started to smoke, and publicly, too.
“I am serious.”
He hisses smoke out. He is still the same lean, dark boy with something melancholic about his looks, something that starts from his innocent dark eyes, brushes past his short nose and high cheekbones, and hides itself in his small mouth.
“We are not eating rice and chicken there, so you know,” he says.
“Am I eating rice and chicken here?”
We laugh as we enter Madam Bridget’s bar, happy strains of a melody that belongs only to our friendship. The place is full as usual. The customers are engrossed in a rowdy argument on issues ranging from politics to Biafra to music. We settle on benches. Eke orders pepper soup and drinks for everyone in the bar. He gets an ovation from the beneficiaries. They praise him loudly before returning to their talk.
“Listening to their music is like eating an unripe mango,” Nichodemus, a bony man with sunken cheeks and a widely travelled panache, says of contemporary musicians. “If you wish to savour the real juice of a ripe mango, then listen to the oldies by Oriental Brothers or Oliver De Coque or Osita Osadebe. Or even Felix Libarty’s hit track ‘Ifeoma.’”
A funny-looking man who probably enjoys being at variance with everyone for nothing insists the best highlife musician is neither Oriental Brothers nor Oliver De Coque nor Osita Osadebe. “It is Paulson Kalu, and if you doubt me, go listen to his hit track ‘Okwudili’ again; it’s not only a song, but meat in a song.”
The room rumbles with argument.
“I don’t care about highlife.” The bar falls silent at the sound of Eke’s voice. He sips his Golden Guinea directly from the bottle and smacks his lips. “But to me GG is the best beer ever.”
I am amazed at how much Eke seems to have matured, how much silence and respect he commands among the customers, many of whom are older, the power in his voice, and how like a bell it at once captures the attention of the house.
“Monarch is the real beer,” a roly-poly little man says. He runs his tongue over his dark lips deliciously after sipping from a glass cup.
I have noticed how Roly-Poly keeps following Madam Bridget with greedy, drunken eyes as she walks in and out, shaking her waist. Madam Bridget is a mother of two, a playful, pliant, and robust young woman. Her bar is the most patronized in the village. I don’t know if men patronize her because her palm wine is better and her pepper soup more delicious and spicy or because of her big, curvy hips. They keep staring as she walks. Occasionally, a man will get drunk and aim a playful smack at her backside, but she never flares up when the smack lands on its target with yummy softness. She simply looks at the man in mock anger, giggles, and then walks away, knotting her wrappa more firmly around her waist. I have never seen her in a bad mood, although I don’t often go to her bar except when my father sends me there to buy palm wine for an important guest.
“GG, Monarch, they are all poison and can’t be compared to palm wine,” says Ogbu, a rock of a man drinking palm wine from a mug.
I imagine him fighting Roly-Poly because Roly-Poly insists Monarch is the better drink, him blowing air at Roly-Poly, and Roly-Poly melting and becoming a soft mass on the floor. I feel so awkward to be the only one drinking Coke. It makes me a little nervous, gives me a sense of déjà vu, but my insecurities seem safely masked by the aura around Eke.
“I was surprised to come home and meet our Biafra detainees still in prison cells.” As always, Eke’s voice throws water on the fire lit by the drunkards.
“That is a high level of impunity,” Nichodemus says with a clear belch. “Don’t we have freedom of association any longer in this country?”
“Most troubling is that the detainees are going to be left there indefinitely in the most inhuman conditions.” Ogbu spoons peppersoup into his mouth.
“Many will be victims of extrajudicial executions,” Nichodemus says, his panache swelling.
Eke and I exchange nervous glances. I know that he is thinking what I am thinking, and Patty Onah and Oluoha are the themes of our overlapping thoughts.
“Can we change the topic, please?” Roly-Poly spoons peppersoup into his mouth, his voice muffled by either the pepperiness of the soup or the hotness of the subject. “I want to enjoy this meal and beer in peace. I do not want to be thrown into jail.”
At home, we talk about my plan to follow Eke to Awka. My father is indifferent to the idea, Machebe seems to be shooing me away with his eyes, and my mother is skeptical.
“I don’t like this idea of you going to live in Agbenuland with all those stories of rituals and blood money there,” my mother says. “I hear that in every household there is an adult with the brains of an infant, an imbecile with saliva running down her mouth, because her brains were offered for a moneymaking ritual in some occultic underworld altar.”
My mother has this impression that most wealthy young people are money ritualists whose mothers or other close relatives are mummified corpses vomiting banknotes in some secret chamber in their mansions. But nothing anyone thinks or says will make me change my mind. I overhear my father speaking to invisible gods alone in his room.
“Ndi nwe ana.” He makes reference to the deities of Igbo pantheon. “My son is about to make a trip to a land where humans eat their fellow humans. Do not let any harm come to your son. Protect your son from danger in a foreign land. Makana nwaeze adi efu n’mba.”
I imagine my father nipping bits from a lobe of kola nut onto the floor as he whispers his prayers in private. My mother asks for the rosary she gave me when I went to Lagos. I haven’t used it since I left. I can recite only a few lines of the litany that I remember because of the poetry of the language describing the Virgin Mary as a Mystical Rose, a Tower of Ivory, an Ark of Covenant, a Morning Star, a Mirror of Justice, a Seat of Wisdom, and a Vessel of Honor.
I lie awake far into the night, musing over Eke’s glittering new life: his packet shirts that bear inside their lines of newness an aura of good living, his shoes that mirror my image and his necklace that catches the light, the power in his voice that drowns all other voices in Madam Bridget’s bar. My desire to follow him to Awka turned into an obsession when he said that he even worked with white men. My eyelids twitch at the prospect of earning the salaries white men earn, in hard currency.