Traffic built up at the Lagos end of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway as vehicles heading into the city were funnelled into the last police checkpoint. Street-food hawkers and beggars darted between cars to beat rivals to anyone who looked at them from the windows of cramped buses. Impatient drivers held down car horns and revved engines, spurting smoke, amid a cacophony of voices.
An Innoson 23-seater bus was in the long queue of cars. The made-in-Nigeria vehicle had been retro-fitted with tinted windows, and inside, the driver, a rotund man in knee-length trousers and a white singlet, had beads of sweat along his hairline despite the air conditioning. He moved his head from side to side like an anxious chicken, and reacted with a jolt, followed by cursing, any time another motorist in the holdup felt the need to use their horn near his bus.
Two police officers in riot-gear had strayed from their checkpoint and were making their way between the immobile vehicles. They kept their eyes on the bus. The driver scanned ahead and looked nervously in his mirrors. The sight of police officers had never worried him before when his bus was filled with girls, all dressed up, all made up, and the cab would be scented with a heady mix of their perfumes. It would be dark and he would be delivering his cargo to a party thrown for a senator, or a governor, or a general, or just some wealthy man somewhere, and an escort would ride in front with him – a police officer, a soldier, an SSS man, even an Army Colonel once.
It would be the job of the escort to turn inquisitive police officers away. But today he had no escort, and when he rushed to the house as his boss had instructed him to, the girls had run into the van, many of them undressed and clutching their clothes, as if pursued by ghosts that had finally descended upon the house in the middle of the forest. The building always made him uneasy; a mansion in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by forest and the spirits that live in forests.
Most of girls that hurried into his bus were white, and they were the ones who had on the least clothes, or no clothes at all. He had watched in the mirror as the girls shared pieces of surplus clothing with those who had nothing to cover their nakedness, but still the clothes were not enough to go around. Now, stuck in traffic in daylight on the express, two police officers were approaching his vehicle.
The girls looked scared. He was scared. It had to be the tinted windows that had attracted the officers. Even if he was not the original focus of the police officers’ attention, the windows had given them an excuse to shake him down for a bribe. And when they looked inside, they would see all the girls looking scared like he was going to use them for rituals, white girls among them, and they would ask him who the girls were and where he was taking them, and he would not be able to answer because he was more afraid of his boss than he was of the police.
The two police officers got closer. The driver kept staring at them. The officer in front looked up and locked eyes with him through the windscreen. The driver switched off the engine, left the key in the ignition, unclasped his seatbelt, and opened his door. Then, he jumped onto the road and ran.
For a moment the girls sat still in their seats, then one of them stood, opened the door, and disappeared as fast as she could in the same direction as the driver. The other girls hurried to the door, rushed out onto the road and ran in different directions between idling cars, beggars, and hawkers.