I. The Conductor
The dreadlocked conductor was chief of the universe, spending the transit perched on the edge of a seat in the open bus, half–outside, half–pressing into some frowning passenger beside him, or dangling from the door, screaming, with his hand of rumpled cash outstretched to some prospective passenger, tapping the bus to signal a stop if they agreed, and more usually, waving them off with a remark about their grotesque head if they refused.
He was high on life, or whatever it was Port Harcourt conductors smoked. Teetering there at the bus’ edge with his unshy, hoarse voice, he was one with the Nigerian fray; so in charge of his trade, so in danger of falling off and being ground to a bloody paste by the vehicles speeding all around him; his stern face unsmiling, now smiling, now vacant, and almost as soon, morphing into a canvas of fury the instant a zealous agbero planked the bus, his dear bus.
“Your papa!” he cursed, pushing his widespread palm in the direction of the agbero.
“Your own papa!” the agbero screamed back, returning his gesture.
They were all alike. There appeared to be no disparity or misalignment between him and all the others around him: the plain-faced passengers, the sun-beaten pedestrians, the drivers, the fellow conductors, the okada riders, even the angry agberos varying in age and degree of madness, the poorly-paid school teachers in threadbare cotton shirts, the roadside vulcanizers with black hands and oil-smeared singlets, the tide of hawkers running about with their trays of Clorets, Gala, bottled water, adulterated Coca-Cola, and the street beggars, too, made up of some lame who were not really lame and some blind who were not really blind, and the little girls with curly hair and dusty brown skin whose tiny, restless fingers poked and tugged at passersby, the angry motorists and the policemen at which they cursed—all screwed by some unseen hand into one dismal republic. They all aligned with the conductor like neat cornrows on a lavishly oiled head.
But he was different. Or so he thought.
In his heart, taut beneath his oversized tank tops, even as he hung there on that lethal edge, was a brute conviction of his difference. That he was more, that he was only a conductor because some fate had dealt him a bad hand. Fate, that trickster. He had once been a boy of charm, a boy of spring. That was a long time ago, before an agbero pummelled his father’s civil servant head at Eleme Junction just where the big Coaster buses load, before the landlord threw him and his younger brother out of their flat at Iriebe, into the street, that is, into the arms of gamblers and pickpockets and drunkards, to a shack precisely, conveniently close to the BetNaija shops where his get-rich fantasies were peddled and his dreams were smashed, and more tragically, before a drunk opponent tore his cheek with a broken Star Radler bottle at Luciano Bar, relieving him of a generous chunk of flesh along with his spring and charm.
Thus, he emerged from the theatres of his mutation a defaced phoenix. The only remedy his conductor head could conceive was to assume an identity alien from the one who lived that idyll, to shake off that bliss and the memory of it, like a serpent shedding old skin, to become one with the sea of sinners, to go along with the fray of street demons—because to be an angel in Hell was very inconvenient. And that was what he did. The first point of that change, he told himself, was to lock his hair.
He had walked into a salon with blue lights and swivel chairs.
“4,5?”
He walked out.
So, he resorted, as boys of his new station did, to utilizing chunks of foam from discarded, lice–infested mattresses. After they were perforated and scrubbed on his head, his hair took to tiny pointy twists. Viola! Our dearly beloved dreadlocked conductor was born, a ghastly chick from a ghastly hen.
His days sizzled and passed. They register in his mind as vivid pictures between the static of a faulty screen—fleeting pockets of spirited episodes: cursing-bribing-brawling-yelling-beseeching-insulting. When the day was over, he skipped off the bus, turned around to the driver, and stretched his hand for his due. The fat hands of the driver retrieved some money—a sumptuous mix of crumpled and freshly minted notes. He counted, his index finger making a moisturising pilgrimage to his tongue. He cut a slim slice.
“Oga na,” the conductor protested without counting the money—whatever it was, it was too small.
The driver started the ignition and retrieved a thinner slice, somewhat absent-mindedly, but conscious enough not to withdraw it from the cabinet with the higher denominations. He handed it over and zoomed off, leaving the conductor to himself.
***
Because he was different, the conductor let a lofty hope bud within him, a hope too high for his type: love.
Her name was Constance. She was one of those beautiful girls who were unfortunate to be poor—or poor girls who were fortunate to be beautiful.
She owned a shop almost as miserable as its neighbouring shacks. It was flavourless, unpainted, and had a termite-eaten wooden shelf nailed to the wall. It was once a bookshop—but those things rarely sold in the suburbs. The brown-paged novels on the top shelves were covered with dust and cobwebs. So, out of necessity she’d had to add all sort of mundane and unrelated items: car chargers, gigantic Casio calculators, threads, nails, glue, candles, bicycle pumps. It didn’t seem to help because they still did not sell, patriotically holding their ranks beside their predecessors.
The conductor usually stopped at this shop when returning from work, and now he marched in that direction, checking himself from bouncing too eagerly as he passed the shirtless boys playing football.
When he peered inside her shop, she was bent over two giant boxes. The shelves were empty and items were scattered on the floor around her. He watched for a moment as she fiddled blindly and rapturously among them, glancing at whatever her hands caught for only a breath before she flung it into either of the two boxes.
“Knock, knock,” he said finally, though he was already inside, his shadow arching upwards from the floor to the wall.
She turned, startled. And then her eyes lit up.
“Don’t scare me like that you cockroach.”
Yes. Cockroach.
He greeted and stepped forward to hold the hand she’d offered. Her eyes were visibly brown, and he loved them. The worn silk scarf on her head was puffed full of hair.
He looked around. “What’s happening?”
“Oh, yes,” she said and swung as though just becoming aware of the mess around her. “I’ve been wanting to tell you, Anyi.” She pulled his arm. “Let’s go outside.”
There was an unwelcome gravity to this let’s go outside. He had come in anticipation of her playfulness, her banter about his scarred face, and the helpless venom of her tongue. She had once told him that his hair looked like a rat’s. After the duel, too, she had run her long fingers across the lines on his face where the doctor had tried to patch his wound and burst into a cackle that was so malicious and yet heartening to hear.
Outside, she stood away from him and wore a look he had never known.
“Anyi—” she began, but fell silent.
Tick, tick, tick the rickety clock cried from within, supplying noise to fill the suspended air.
“What is it, cutie pie?” he said, a forced smile briefly appeared on his face.
“Nothing,” she said, her nervous fingers betraying her. “O-o. Allow me to talk na, parrot,” she chided, trying to distract him from her hands, trying to enthuse her words with her animus normalcy.
“Tell me already. Wetin happen?”
“I am going,” she said to him. “I am leaving.”
“To where?”
“I don’t know.”
“With him?”
Silence. And the breeze. And the distant scream of sweating boys. Him was a man she’d begun to mention two or three months ago and then more frequently in the past week. Him was rich, his round belly shot out a little, he drove a black Camry. He’d seen Him only once, and even before she conceded, even before she cleared her throat to find the milky words, he knew it was Him.
“Do you love him?”
“Anyiala, he is rich.”
“Does he love you?”
“I hope so.”
She was playing dice with her fate, hanging it all on the uncertain affection of a man who had bellied his way into her eyes. But the dicing was enough for her—it assured a 2-bedroom flat in Trans Amadi where you didn’t have to drink your neighbour’s piss.
“With him,” she said to the air, with a slight, practiced careless wave of hand—like it was not so serious, not as painful as a mallam’s dagger digging into his heart. “To a better place.” She looked around her to the shirtless boys, to boogers on a child’s philtrum. Her eyes returned, and rested on him. “I am going to a better life.”
A bird glided above—wings outspread, beak stretched forward, so easy, so free, so in contrast with the heavy words like slurry in his mouth, refusing to flow, to spew and lash at her and her cooly bowed head, and her restless fingers.
They were both so alien to all the wretchedness around them. He was convinced of his difference, that his presence on this peasant corner of sweat and strife was erroneous, a gross misalignment of his stars. Constance, because her walnut-shaped eyes, the wideness of them; the proportion of her waist and hips put her on the level of the slay queens who spent weekends at Hotel Presidential and Landmark and Golden Tulip with pot-bellied men. And now she was going to where she belonged.
“I wish I had money,” he said.
“Then you’d spoil me, wouldn’t you?”
Her voice was slow, weighty, relying on the wind to carry it to his ears.
“Yes, and you’d not have to follow other men for money.”
“You fool—but no, I wouldn’t.”
A black Lexus was coming down the road. She looked at it, and he followed her eyes, shimmering with a glassy, liquid light.
II. The Conducted
Mr. Conductor wanted his money.
He looked like a thoughtless sketch, one whose entire existence fulfilled the simple and total function of servicing our world—that is, of fulfilling our demands, producing the required 50 or 100 naira change to some snappy passenger among us, like the light-skinned lady with long green fingernails demanding he move his smelly ass away from her.
“Madam, don’t talk to me like that,” he said, looking embarrassed.
An unusual combination to find on the roads of Port Harcourt, much less in a hard–faced conductor: courtesy and proper English. But it so happened that this conductor had not always been a conductor. In fact, he was once a son to a civil servant whose head was—
“And if not?” the lady snapped. She kept a palm over her nose in a very vain manner. “Oga shift!”
The conductor bit his lip. He clenched and unclenched his fists and inched away, humbled. Life, and the scar that ran from below his earlobe to his chin, had taught him to be so, to not ball his palms into a fist when silly angry Nigerians spoke, but in the heat of the October sun, and the stifled laughter traversing the bus, it was almost impossible to do. He let it go finally, though, after I told him no vex, that it was just one of those things.
The trip went on in silence. No more loud, unsolicited jokes. No more insults to co-conductors and agberos and pedestrians—he looked away coolly, even when a black Lexus called him a bastard for a silly mistake of his driver that didn’t concern him.
It was time to alight and the light-skinned lady had probably had her purse snatched, or left it at her office desk, or her bedside counter. Whatever it was, it did not matter because she did not have his money. And he wanted his money.
“Madam, my moni,” he barked, standing by the side of the bus that had roared to a halt.
“No de shout for me, oga.”
She steeled her voice, rummaging within her bag, steadying her panicky fingers.
“Wetin be dat?” the driver asked, peering into the rearview mirror.
The conductor ignored his oga. “Madam,” he barked, securing some notes deep into his trouser pockets to free his angry hands. “My moni.” He seized her arm.
“Hey!” she screamed like he was leprous and shrugged him off. “Let go, idiot!”
He bit his lip again.
The roads were bad. The times were hard—be careful, they said. The passengers didn’t want him dead before they got their change. The cars and okadas and kekes travelled the potholed roads, angry and cursing. The conductor mentioned he hadn’t had a bath and couldn’t afford a meal. The meal didn’t concern us, but the bathing did, because he stank greatly and had kept his hand up to hold a bar above. But we said nothing because we all had our own wahala. Tomatoes were costly, onions were costly, matchsticks were costly, water was costly, five–naira was extinct, motorcyclists were charging audacious prices, and the price of petrol was hiking to Everest. Bread was costly, akara was costly, Mama Akara said that the groundnut oil was costly, that the beans sellers were not helping. Nkechi Beans said that it was no fault of hers, that it was the government, that it was Nigeria. NEPA, the bastards. They could change their names but they couldn’t change their blood, green with greed, damn them and their ugly red ladders and their stupid Hiluxes, and their dearly, dearly venerated “estimated bill”!
Still, all these did not account for the vengefulness, the malice and fury in his eyes when he did what he did.
In an instant, a darkness shadowed his face. His balled fists spread and he palmed her onto the busy road, onto, to be precise, the path of an oncoming Lexus.
III. The Conductless
A dead woman. On the ground. Don’t look—too late. A splash of red, a splash of gore. A kneeling man. Hear him supplicate, see his tears. But deaf ears don’t hear and steel hearts don’t care. We will kill him. We are angry, you see. The old king had gone and a new, older one had come. How will you treat us? we asked him. Whereas my boy put a yoke on you, I will put a heavier one, he flogged you with whips, I will scourge you with scorpions. And the king had delivered. With the bruises ripe on our striped backs, we were as bitter as hags, slavish to our vengefulness. We are a vengeful sea, foaming and frothing, so, we will kill him.
Wetin happen?
They push am.
Who push am?
He did.
Who crush am?
He did.
It’s not his fault.
Kill him, for his big belly, kill him.
But there’s already a dead girl on the road?
Let her not die alone.
Our hands raise to scratch, tear, and devour. We come short of a coven of vampires. The women’s mouth are shaped in exclaiming ‘Os’ and hands are going on heads and the feet of idle children pace down the street. See him, the women point at the scarred conductor. He looks as hideous as the devil. Very like the devil, another agrees. See a man with a full beard and Caterpillar boots behind him. March him, sir, march him.
A shout and then shouts; the dreadlocked boys lurking at the street corners and young men in faded Man-U jerseys loitering about Mama puts, flirting for the fun of it, and the more surreptitious hope for a free meal are running to join. They will desist from carnage only when carnage is complete. The conductor is an innocent afterthought of hurried lines on a painter’s canvas, and now he will become a speck of red and ash beautifying the Nigerian canvas.
“Wetin de occur?” a man asks one of the runners.
“What?” The runner pauses, turns for a moment. “They don kpai person o.”
“Another man down, eh?” the inquirer asks, but there is no reply. Already the boy has resumed running, has become one with that sea of running legs. E
