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MADAME KOTO GREW distant. Her frame became bigger. Her voice became arrogant. She wore a lot of bangles and necklaces and seemed weighed down by the sheer quantity of decoration she carried on her body. She walked slowly, like one who has recently acquired power. Her face had taken on a new seriousness, and her eyes were harder than ever. I didn’t go to Madame Koto’s bar so much any more.

Dad spoke badly of her, though at first he did not prevent me going to sit in her bar. I would sit there amongst the flies which increased with the customers. When the thugs came in I would slip out and wander. Afterwards I would play in front of our house.

On some afternoons, after the first visitation of the thugs, it seemed that nothing ever happened in the world. In the mornings Mum went hawking. On some evenings she returned early. She often had a vacant look on her face, as though the market had disappeared.

In the afternoons the heat was humid. The shadows were sharp as knives. And the air was still. The boiling air made even the birdcalls sound like something heard in a stifling dream. The sweat of those afternoons became vapours in the brain. It became possible to sleep with eyes wide open. It was so hot that sleepwalking seemed natural. Time did not move at all.

I would sit on the platform in front of our house and watch the rubbish along the roadside reduced to crust by the flies and the sun. A flock of egrets, flying past overhead, always made the children jump up and down in the street, singing:

‘Leke Leke

Give me one

White finger.’

The children would flap their fingers, palms-down, to the flight of the birds. When the birds had gone, white dots in golden-furnace sky, the children would look at their fingernails and find one or two of them miraculously speckled with whiteness.

Time moved slower than the hot air. In the distance, from the forest, came the unending crack of axes on trees. The sound became as familiar as the woodpeckers or the drumming of rain on cocoyam leaves. The noise of machines also became familiar, drilling an insistent beat on the sleep-inducing afternoons.

Sometimes it seemed that the world had stopped moving and the sun would never set. Sometimes it seemed that the brightness of the sun burned people out of reality. I sat one afternoon thinking about the photographer when I saw a boy running down the street, his shorts tattered, his shirt flapping, and he was chasing the metal rim of a bicycle wheel. Three men were behind him, also running. But as he passed the van a terrible light, like the momentous flash of a giant camera, appeared in the sky, blinding me with its brilliance, and I saw the boy’s shadow vanish. I shut my eyes. Luminous colours, like the flames of alcohol, danced in my eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw the metal rim rolling along by itself. The boy had become his own shadow. The three men ran past the metal rim. The boy’s shadow melted and the rim rolled over and fell near the gutter. I screamed. A dog barked. I hurried over and picked up the bicycle rim and went to the burnt van and looked all around and I couldn’t find the boy anywhere. I asked the traders at their stalls if they had seen the boy and they replied that they hadn’t seen anything unusual. I threw the rim on to the back of the burnt van, now bulging with rubbish, and sat in front of our compound, puzzled, annoyed.

That evening I heard that an old man who lived near us had been staring at a lizard, while drinking ogogoro in the afternoon heat, when a flaming-yellow angel flew past his face and blinded him. I did not believe the story.