It is impractical to eat danwake with a spear
It was interesting, Reza thought, watching the daybreak in Leila’s prison. There was no sunlight streaking through the window. There was merely a sensation of lightness that could only come with the dissipation of darkness. He watched the outline of Leila’s body stretched out on the mat, shades of contours standing out against the shadows, her breathing even, almost soothing.
When she began to stir, he reached out and turned on the LED lamp and flooded the room with white light. Leila scrambled up and retreated against the wall. She gathered her clothes about her and, certain there had not been any noticeable attempt to violate her, looked relieved. But her frightened eyes searched the chamber, her breathing rapid.
‘I’m not going to touch you, kin gane ko?’ His husky voice filled the room.
She mumbled. ‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’
‘Heard you were sick yesterday.’
She drew herself together, trying to moderate her breath with her hands placed over her heart.
‘Is it some kind of disease you have or something?’
‘Please, let me go. Just let me go.’
‘Leila. You know I can’t do that.’
‘I am ill; I need to see the doctor. I’m going to die here.’
‘Could it be menstrual cramps? I mean, I hear women have such … issues. Not that I know much about it, you understand?’
She peered through the darkness at his masked face and started gnawing at the cuff of her kaftan. Then she startled the awakening day with the sounds of her crying. He stood up, dusted the seat of his trousers and unlocked the door.
He came back an hour later with her breakfast and some pills in a blister pack, which he placed gingerly at the edge of the mat. The sun was fully up now and the room was brighter but the lamp was still on. He removed a book from under his arm and put it beside the food.
‘I found this on my way back yesterday at a second-hand bookseller’s. I thought you could do with something to read. Keep you company, you understand?’
She leaned forward and looked at the book cover, then leaned back again.
‘What? You’ve read this before?’
‘Everyone has read Life of Pi.’
He chuckled. ‘Not me. I have little patience for reading novels.’
‘That’s obvious, isn’t it?’ She spoke in English.
‘Is he famous, this writer? Never heard of him.’
‘I don’t expect you would have.’
His eyebrows arched when he noted the curtness in her tone. Disregarding her attitude, which he concluded was not without cause since women in the red zone were given to such eccentricities, he smiled and shook his head. ‘So, is it an interesting story? What is it about?’
She took time arranging herself into a dignified pose, shaking her head to flick her hair away from her face.
‘Can you tell me about the ransom negotiations, please?’
Reza cleared his throat. ‘The negotiations, yes. Still … ongoing, you understand?’
‘What did my uncle say? Is he paying?’
Reza turned and headed to the door. When he unlocked it, he paused, ‘The drugs are for your cramps. I got them from a pharmacy.’
He turned and left, locking the door behind him.
He sat down with Gattuso and Joe on the balcony, smoking pot and looking at their feet dangling off the balustrade. Dogo was sleeping on the floor of the living room, having quenched the fire of his lust for a hawking girl – who had caught his fancy at Jabi Park when he had gone for lunch – with the heady fumes of ganja.
They smoked the first rolls in silence, revelling in the miasma, in the tenuous peace it bred in them, in the journeys on which the wavering smoke took their tormented minds. By the time they were into their second rolls, Joe waved his hand before his face, as if suddenly irritated by the languid bands of smoke that lingered before him. ‘Reza, what exactly is happening to payday?’
Reza looked away.
‘Look, man, I want to know what’s happening. I thought her father agreed to pay.’
‘Her uncle, not her father,’ Gattuso corrected.
‘Yeah, whatever. Ten mills, man. That was three days ago.’
‘Four.’ Gattuso cracked his knuckles. ‘Four days.’
‘Whatever, man. That’s like forever ago, you know.’
‘What’s going on, Reza?’
‘We get paid, when the time is right, you understand?’
Joe pulled out a bottle of gin from his pocket, took a swig and wiped his mouth with his arm. ‘You know, man, let’s arrange the drop. Ten mills, man. Ten mills!’
‘Joe, we get paid when the time is right.’
Joe jumped off the balustrade. He puffed on his joint and blew the smoke out with an impatient gesture. ‘This girl is going to die on us, man.’ He looked Reza in the face. ‘And then we get nothing. Nothing!’
He stormed away, leaving a vague, foreboding cloud in his wake.
They smoked in silence, the two men left. But from the way Gattuso smoked, pausing every now and then to torment any bone in his body that would make a cracking sound with unusual brusqueness, Reza knew that he, too, was suppressing some concerns itching to be voiced.
‘You have something to say?’
‘Reza, this girl almost died yesterday. She almost fucking died.’
‘Well, we will all die someday.’
‘She was rolling on the ground and we almost took her to the hospital where they would have arrested us promptly. If this deal isn’t going to work out, let’s cut our losses and get the hell out of here.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Get rid of the girl and go. I am missing San Siro. Sitting here in this shitty place listening to this rich girl screaming like a dying witch is not my kind of thing, you know.’
Reza smoked on in silence, nodding his head.
‘What’s stopping this deal from going through? I thought the uncle agreed to pay.’
‘This is not about the money.’
‘What the fuck is it about then?’
Reza looked at him and pondered the question. It occurred to him then that he could not, with certainty, provide an answer.
‘Have you even thought about it, Reza? About what this is all about?’
‘Oh, Gattuso, get the hell out of my face. Don’t be asking me stupid questions.’
‘Stupid questions? What is happening to you? You were not like this before. You took care of everything. Now your shit is falling apart and you don’t even give a damn.’
‘What is falling apart, Gattuso? What are you trying to say?’
Gattuso, emboldened by the excitement of the moment, drew near and looked Reza in the eyes. ‘Look, man, this shit, this thing going down here, we don’t know what it is. We are sitting ducks here. We have an opportunity to make some money and get out but we are holding out. For what?’
‘We were hired to do a job, Gattuso.’
‘And what is that job exactly?’
‘Hold on to the girl. That’s what we are being paid to do.’
‘Yeah, hold on to her? For what? We don’t know shit about what we are doing and we are the ones holding on to this girl because you are never here. You are so into that mamarish Hajiya woman, you’ve got your head so far up her arse, you need to open your eyes—’
Gattuso suddenly found himself on the floor, trying to clear the sparkling little lights blurring his vision and the whistling sound filling his ear. The numbness grew on his jaw and he realised he had been hit.
Reza was standing over him, struggling to contain the rage that had overtaken him. Finally, he walked away.
Gattuso felt his jaw, trying to figure out what damage it had suffered. He worked the bone with his fingers and concluded he would be all right. He looked around and saw the remnant of his joint on the floor. He picked it up and put it to his lips.
‘Yeah?’
‘I need to speak to the senator.’
‘He is in a meeting now. What’s going on?’
‘I need to speak to him now.’
‘Reza, is everything ok? You sound agitated. The senator is in a meeting and you know he can’t talk to you while this thing is on. What’s the problem?’
Reza gripped the phone harder. He could imagine Moses’ face on the other end and felt once more an irrepressible urge to smash a fist into that face. ‘What’s going on? We are in the dark here.’
‘No, you are not. You have your instructions. Keep to them.’
‘We reached an agreement with her uncle days ago for the ransom—’
‘Hold on to the girl until you are told otherwise, that is your instruction.’
‘What if she dies?’
‘Well, you make sure she doesn’t. God! You guys are really amateurs. I wonder why he insisted you should handle this,’ And he ended the call with a hiss, a long drawn-out sound that stung Reza’s ego like the tail of a horsewhip.
Moses slipped the phone into his pocket and placed the file on the table in front of the senator. The senator, who had been reading a document, looked up at the young assistant over the rim of his glasses.
‘Yes, Moses?’
‘It’s those boys, sir. They are getting restless about the job.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes, sir. I was wondering myself, sir, why hold on to the girl when there is nothing to be gained from her?’
Senator Maikudi sat back in his chair and removed his glasses. He rubbed his face and smiled. ‘Do you play chess, Moses?’
‘No, sir.’
‘So you won’t necessarily understand. Politics is like chess, you see. You move your pieces randomly sometimes. Other times you use your pawns to hold down aspects of play. Sometimes you sacrifice the pawns. But you always keep your eye on the big picture. There is a bigger picture here.’
‘Exactly, sir.’
‘Make sure they remain in position until I instruct otherwise.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Now I need to have some tea.’
She was standing by the window when Reza unlocked the door. His immediate thought was that she was trying to prise open the window and attempt an escape, but he saw that she was looking at him expectantly and that the window behind her had suffered no damage from her delicate fingers.
‘Some clothes, for you, you understand.’
She looked down at her dirty clothes and then at the new ones he had laid down on the mat. They were the sort sold by rambling roadside traders pushing ware-laden carts. Cheap things. But neat. She remained by the window waiting for him to leave.
‘How are you feeling now?’
‘I’m not dead yet.’
He laughed and stood awkwardly, uncertain how best to position his arms, looking at her as she flattened her hair with her palm and as much grace as her circumstance would allow.
‘So, this course you are studying, this …’ he searched for the word.
‘Palaeontology.’
‘Yes, that. What made you want to study that?’
‘I thought you said it was a stupid course. Why are you asking now?’
Reza caught a glimmer of what he feared she had lost when she first looked into his eyes. Spirit. Passion.
‘Well then, never mind. I was just trying to make small talk. It is not important, you understand.’
She sat down on the mat, and he could see the passion ebbing from her eyes as she brushed back her hair with her hands and sniffled. But she was not crying. ‘You don’t know why you are keeping me here, do you?’
‘What?’
‘It’s not for the ransom, is it? Because my uncle would have paid days ago, I’m sure.’
‘Well, there are some complications, you understand.’
‘What complications?’
‘Just complications.’
For the first time since that first night, she looked into his eyes framed by the mask and saw a glimmer of uncertainty.
‘It’s politics, isn’t it?’ And she proceeded, with the most minimal of gestures, to elaborate her theory of how her uncle’s political adversaries must be behind the kidnap. Not for the ransom, but for some political purpose, to keep her incorrigible uncle focused on her plight, distracting him from some political endgame they were trying to achieve.
She paused and thought of the plausibility of her own theory, not now looking at Reza, who, behind his mask, was gaping.
‘I wasn’t even the target. My cousin was. It all makes sense now.’ And this she muttered, more to herself than to him.
‘Haha! You have your brain pumped full of nonsense.’ His laughter sounded contrived, even to himself.
‘Not nonsense. Can’t you see? You and I are like … let’s say I am your prisoner and you are my jailer and we are on a ship at sea. Let’s say the ship capsizes and we are adrift, clinging on to a log or something. Would you then want to handcuff me to secure me?’
Reza contemplated the scenario she had portrayed and since in his mind, the sea had always been a body of blue-green water travelling to distant shores, lapping them tenderly, he laughed. ‘Whatever. No one escapes me.’
Leila smiled. ‘There is the sea to think about. There is the frigging sea to think about.’
He lit a cigarette and the enthusiastic sound the lighter unleashed in the silence was almost startling. He turned his back to her and puffed for some time. ‘You smoke?’
She shook her head.
‘You must be used to people smoking around you. In England, people smoke a lot, not so?’
‘I had a boyfriend who smoked.’
‘Oh, I see. And you are going to marry this … boyfriend?’
She smiled wryly. ‘I don’t think my mum would have liked that idea. Anyway, I don’t like him enough. Actually we are no longer together.’
‘Ah, the mother.’
‘Yes. The mother.’
Thoughts of his mother, the great whore of Arabia, whose musky fragrance still eddied in his memory, wafted before his mind like the cigarette smoke.
‘And your father? What would he say if you brought this bature boyfriend home?’
‘My father died when I was six.’ She hugged herself. ‘I hardly knew him.’
‘Allah ya jikan shi.’
‘Ameen.’ She leaned back against the wall and stretched her legs before her. ‘What would your mother say if she knew you kidnapped someone?’
‘Ha!’ He restrained himself from declaring her a whore. ‘She won’t know.’ He got up and headed to the door.
‘I would like to see my mother again.’ There were tears, not in her eyes but in her voice, and it made Reza stop and look back at her. ‘I hope you will find it in your heart to let me go so I can see her again and tell her I love her.’
He stood by the door wondering about the bond between mothers and their children, something he knew he would never fully understand.
‘Mallam Audu.’
‘Who? That’s not my name.’
‘So what’s your name then?’
‘Nothing. I don’t have a name.’
‘I have to call you something and since you won’t tell me, Mallam Audu it is.’
He looked at her with his hand still resting on the ornate doorknob. ‘What do you want?’
She sighed. ‘My mother told me something. She often said, Leila, even if you know the world would end tomorrow, plant a tree.’
Reza contemplated what she said and shrugged. When he spoke, it was in English. ‘And what fucking use will that be?’
He opened the door and as he turned the key to lock it from the outside, he heard her voice through the door shouting; ‘Remember the sea, Mallam Audu! Remember the sea.’