9

Our ride was a single-cab pickup truck. Its cargo bed had been rigged with a metal bench welded onto the floor. Policemen climbed in from the sides not bothering with the tailgate. I sat in front between the boss and his driver, a dark fellow who responded ‘yesha’ to everything. The smell of stale sweat radiated from him. Thankfully, the windows were down.

I thought ‘Bakare’ was the word for slow down, or watch out, or fuck, or something like that, until the senior officer shouted ‘Sergeant Bakare’ when we were about to clip the rear of a motorcycle ferrying three souls and a black goat slung over the neck of the rearmost passenger.

Bakare swerved with a second to spare. I’d already seen the collision in my mind. I was still pressing down on my non-existent brake when he took his hand off the steering wheel, stretched it out of the window, and spread his fingers at the startled biker zigzagging to regain balance. This apparent rude gesture earned him another ‘Bakare.’ He grinned, floored the throttle, and my body shot back into the hard seat. There were no seatbelts. He attacked a bend without slowing down. Why was he in a hurry?

Perhaps to take my mind – or his – off Bakare, the man who arrested me began to talk. ‘Do you watch EastEnders?’ he asked.

Of all the things, why that? Did he once live in England? Was that where he got his slight London accent? Was he reminiscing? Was it a test? I told him I didn’t, and for the first time I wished that I, like eight million other zombies, followed the damn soap.

But maybe it wasn’t a test. Maybe he really wanted to talk about it, because when he looked at me, I swear, I caught a hint of regret on his face. He switched topics. I don’t recall what to but I do remember that was when Bakare used his brakes – only after the front wheels had gone over a speed bump – then he down-shifted while the truck was still bouncing, and I looked in the mirror to check on the men in the back. That was the moment when a terrifying thought crept into my mind.

You see, when my head hit the roof, and my body rolled into Bakare, and his elbow – without releasing his grip on the steering wheel – shoved me away, I remembered with horror the story a Scotsman I met in the queue at the Nigerian High Commission in London had told me. He’d once lived in Nigeria; he still had a business there: tyres. He made friends with the family of a Nigerian professor of mathematics at MIT. The professor flew home to go to his village to bury his mother and he got snatched from the funeral procession, midway between the church and the cemetery. They found him two weeks later, tied to a tree in a place his people called the Forbidden Forest. His luck was that the gang were wrong in assuming he was rich. His family, unable to raise the money demanded, reported to the American Embassy that an American citizen had been kidnapped. The police had to act and act they did. Within days they knew who the inside guy was – the professor’s young nephew studying to become a lawyer, and he, the nephew, fingered the policemen who provided the guns used for the kidnapping of his uncle.

Let’s face it, I’d got into the car with men who didn’t exactly say they were the police, didn’t read me my rights, I hadn’t asked for ID, we were racing to God knows where, and no one knew they had me. It would be a perfect kidnap. I thought of my boss getting a ransom demand and replying with a letter telling me I’d been sacked.

In the dark cabin, I tried to see the face of the man talking to me and I listened to his voice: not to what he was saying, but to how he was saying it. Was he keeping me calm till it was time for the blindfold? Was he weighing up whether I already suspected that I was in the middle of my own abduction? I was alert like I’d never been before – the thought of being kidnapped, I discovered, does that to you. I studied him, and finding nothing on his face to interpret as a clue, I listened to what he had to say.

He told me that the dual carriageway on which we travelled, Ahmadu Bello Road, was once a beautiful beach dotted with palm trees. Bar Beach, he called it. Over many years, he said, the Atlantic Ocean crept towards the city. Man and water lived in harmony for a period, until a pyramid shaped glasshouse sprouted on the coastal road. ‘We just passed it,’ he said. The ‘sons of the soil’ warned the bank that built it but the architects and the managers had foreign degrees and qualifications, so they disregarded the hocus-pocus stories of those who knew their ocean.

When the sun rises each day, its rays reflect off the pompous building and gather in a strong beam directed at the water. This dazzles the water goddess’s eyes, the natives warned, which is why even little children know better than to play with mirrors close to the waves.

The goddess was angry. The bankers wouldn’t tear down their building or replace its splendid glass with sheets of wood. The goddess decided to take the matter into her hands.

With a regularity that could only be spiritual, the ocean began to flood its shores. Violently. The government hired engineers who called it encroachment. To stop the problem, they replaced what remained of the beach with an unsightly chain of concrete barriers. It didn’t work. Apparently, the water goddess demanded a sacrifice of appeasement, but either someone didn’t pass the message on, or they did but the people that mattered didn’t believe it.

He finished his tale and stared straight ahead. I didn’t ask if he believed it himself. It sounded like a bullshit story. Exactly the kind of bull crap stuff you’d tell someone to keep their mind off the fact that you were kidnapping them.