Songs of Enchantment (3 page)

For the first time Helen acknowledged his persistence. She stopped. Dad’s face broke into a triumphant smile. Turning to the rest of the beggars, he told them to wait for him. Then he seized Helen’s hand and set off with her towards Sami’s shop. Pestered by the moths, he strode defiantly through the rumour-making stares of the street.

Just as we were going past our house, mum emerged with her tattered wig on and her ancient box under her arm. Dad didn’t notice her. She looked so unlike herself, so wretched and haggard, as if she were a tramp, or as if she were fleeing the compound in shame, that even I nearly didn’t recognise her. She followed us a short way and then, loud enough for the whole street to hear, she shouted:

‘So you want me to go, eh? So you are throwing me out because of that stinking beggar girl with a goat’s eye, eh?’

Dad looked back, saw her through the eyes of the demon sitting comfortably inside him, made a dismissive irritated movement of his hand, and carried on, dragging the unwilling but mesmerised beggar girl with him. The demon that had entered my father had moved in for good. The occupation was complete. I could see his spirit whirling with grand dreams of love. For, as he went, oblivious to the terrible changes he was bringing into our lives, I realised how much
dad was brimming over with love, possessed by its secret madness, bursting with love for everything, a wild unholy indiscriminate love, a love so powerful that it made him feel like a god, so vast that he didn’t know how to contain it or express it. The love in him had become a double demon and it propelled him towards chaos.

Mum began weeping bitterly, cursing all the years of her privation and suffering, cursing the day she set eyes on dad in the village, during the most beautiful years of her life, swearing at dad for having drained the life out of her in so profitless a marriage. And between them both I didn’t know who to choose. Mum went off, wailing, in the direction of Madame Koto’s fabulous bar. Dad marched on to Sami’s place, unmindful of the destruction he was sowing behind him. I started after mum, but she screamed at me, as if she perceived that I was in alliance with dad. And it may have been because of the moths (which I alone saw as moths), because of Helen and her tattered yellow dress, her emerald eye, or because of dad’s polished boots and his bristling demonic love, or because I didn’t really believe mum would disappear from our lives, that I chose to go after dad – for with his mad passion lay the greater magnetic adventure, the curiosity and the rage.

And so, watching mum grow smaller in the distance, a slouching figure, wailing and rending her wig, I reluctantly stuck with dad’s story, and suffered the choice I made for many nights to come.

W
HEN WE GOT
to Sami’s betting shop we were alarmed to find that his signboard was no longer posted outside. The main door was padlocked and two planks had been nailed across it. Dad knocked and got no answers. The beggar girl watched from a short distance away, the moths swirling round her head in perpetual motion. Dad banged on the door. Then he kicked it and ran against it with his shoulder. The wood splintered. He raised such a racket with his banging and shouting that the compound people came rushing out with sticks and machetes, fearing that they were being robbed, or that the political thugs had returned to wreak greater oppression on their lives. When dad saw them he asked in an angry voice where Sami had gone.

‘He has left, packed away,’ one of the neighbours said.

‘Packed away? To where?’

‘Black Tyger, why are you asking us? He’s gone, that’s all we know.’

‘Gone? Gone? What about my money?’

‘Do I owe you money? Why are you asking me about your money, eh?’

‘My fight money, my money, where’s my money?’ dad kept screaming, kicking the door, ripping off the planks, lashing out, foaming at the lips, his rage conquering him.

Such energy and fury swirled round him that he staggered, quivering, under the blind intensity of the demon’s gift.

‘You are all hiding him! This is a plot! You are all trying to keep the money I nearly died winning,’ he yelled, rushing at the compound people.

The men fell on him and hammered him with their clubs and sticks. I screamed. Dad threw punches in every direction, flooring two of the men. The women, howling, pounced on him with brooms and firewood. The other men went to get reinforcements. Soon the landlord came rushing out, clad only in his wrapper, holding a cocked dane gun in his hands, demanding to know the cause of the commotion. But the reinforcements jumped on dad. There was much hollering. A crowd gathered. Dad disappeared under the tumble of bodies. The men hit out indiscriminately, lashing their own. Children cried around their mothers. A little girl was accidentally clubbed on the head by an over-enthusiastic neighbour. The girl’s mother clubbed the neighbour back, and the fight widened.

From beneath the crush of bodies I heard a mighty cry, and when the cry reached its frightening pitch the wind cracked a tree branch near us. Helen started to retreat. The crowd swelled, and somehow became included in the scuffle. The rest of the beggars arrived. Seeing that dad was being beaten, they fell in and clawed away at every moving body. They kicked and bit and punched whatever was in their way, till the mountainous tumble became a frenzied hybridous animal of many limbs tortured by its own insanity. The moths flew everywhere, circling the fighting men. And then suddenly dad emerged, his head crowned with mutinous lights, his suit in complete tatters. The beggars were sprawled around him like gigantic insects in mid-transformation. The women groaned about their broken limbs and the men about their battered heads. The landlord stood in the midst of all this, his wrapper torn from round his waist. He was completely naked. His eyes surveyed the chaotic events with controlled disdain. His dane gun was pointed at the writhing centre of bodies. One of the beggars saw his imperious and terrifying stance, and released a strange cry. The landlord,
without changing his expression, trained his gun on the beggar; dad jumped in front of him; a child began yelling; and when the moths rushed upwards, surrounding the landlord, when the landlord directed the muzzle of the gun at dad’s chest, the lights changed, everyone screamed, the air darkened, a sulphurous tiger of light leapt out into the new darkness, transfiguring the beggars, and a dreadful noise exploded in our ears. Everyone dived for cover and when the noise cleared there was a curious silence punctuated by the clicking sounds of the multitudinous moths. We looked up and saw only the landlord standing, his eyes crossed in dementia, his gun smoking. Totally naked, and hirsute, his head was framed by the distant stars in the dark blue sky, and by the nimbus of angry moths. It was only when a beggar broke the silence with his wailing that we realised what had happened.

I got up and frantically began looking for dad. I could not find him amongst all the bodies. Meanwhile the compound men jumped on the stupefied landlord, disarmed him, tied his wrapper round his waist, and led him back into the house. The women were yelling everywhere. Children were crying. The rest of the crowd rose slowly from their cowering prostrate positions. I turned and noticed Helen a long way up the street. Behind her the beggars were carrying the body of their companion. I watched their departure while still searching for dad. They were almost out of sight when I stumbled over a man lying on the ground. He raised his head, and then stood up, snorting like a wild bull. With bewildered eyes he looked one way and another, muttering something about being in the land of the dead. His clothes were all muddy, sand and leaves were in his hair, his eyes were bulbous, there was an ugly cut on his face, and it was only when I smelt his body-breath of a maddened frustrated man that I realised he was my father.

‘Dad!’ I cried.

‘Where am I?’ he asked in a subdued voice.

‘The beggars are going. The landlord shot you,’ I said.

Then he remembered. With a new agitation he inspected himself. He checked every bone in his body. He felt his neck, his chest, his stomach, frantically searching for a hole the size of a cow’s foot. He asked me to look all over him. He suddenly imagined a hot wind blowing through his lower back, and blood pouring from his neck. He howled at the thought of a pain that had opened up at the base of his skull. I looked, and found nothing. And when it became clear that he was all right he promptly forgot about the hot wind and the pain and his money, and ran after the beggars. His arms were jittery at his side.

He caught up with them just as they entered the mysterious darkness of the forest. Helen was weeping. The beggars bravely bore the body of their wounded companion. Shuffling along on the rough earth, with their missing limbs, their soft-wax legs, their bulbous goitres, their monstrous faces of diseased vegetables, they were all of them wailing in a funereal monotone. Dad was distraught at the trouble he had brought them. He kept apologising to Helen, clinging to her hands, trying to hold her back, begging for a chance to make up to them in some way, but she refused to listen, and she did not stop. She led her companions into the deep mysteries of the forest.

The wounded beggar kept twitching. The moths were thick around his wound. Dad tried to help bear his weight, but the others wouldn’t allow it. So dad, crouching and walking alongside them, poured consolations into the ear of the beggar. It was a relief to dad that the poor man had only been shot in his bad arm. The arm dangled, and thick blood flowed steadily along the forest path. Dad tried to get the beggars to stop so he could staunch the bleeding. He went on pestering them with his unwanted solicitations till they could bear it no longer. Suddenly they stopped. With her eerie grace, Helen went on steadily into the forest, where the moths were more populous, covering her, propelling her deeper into a haze of green self-illuminating wings.

Having stopped, the other beggars stared at dad
ominously. He was confused by the emerald fire in their eyes. As dad reached out to touch the wounded beggar’s arm, a guttural noise rose from the group. And then the wounded beggar turned his twisted head, and spat into dad’s face. As if it were a cue, the others joined in. We were stunned. They carried on into the deep forest, shuffling along on the dark earth, singing a nasal lamentation.

For a long moment dad didn’t seem to know what to do. Then, wiping their anger off his face, galvanised by the desire to redeem the suffering he had caused, dad went after Helen. She led us deeper and deeper into the darkness. There were whispers and murmurs everywhere. The trees resounded with the chorus of the beggars’ lamentation. I saw butterflies with red wings appear from the thick bushes. Long-legged insects leapt across my face. An owl flew over dad’s head. Cobwebs became wrinkles on my forehead. The forest was changing. The air turned black. A formation of white bats descended on us and we ducked in terror. By the time we had recovered, the beggars were nowhere in sight. We couldn’t even hear their song. The world turned on an inscrutable axis and plunged us into an alien terrain. We heard a tree groaning deep in the forest. Then a fantastic noise shook the earth. Dad rushed on ahead and the next thing I knew I was alone. The darkness bristled. I felt disembodied forms jostling me, whispering numinous words into the pores of my body, as if all my pores were undiscovered ears. I went forward cautiously, feeling the air like a blind man, when a white wind swooped up into my face. And when I looked down I found myself staring into an abyss, a pit of darkness.

Dad was clinging on to the roots of a tree. I could hear his feet kicking the earth and the empty spaces.

‘Help me,’ he said.

I did my best and after a while dad managed to climb out from the hole. When he regained firm ground he held on to me. We were still. Much more cautiously now, we felt our way through the darkness. I climbed a tree. Dad walked round in circles. I couldn’t see anything, and climbed back
down. To our terrified astonishment, much as we tramped through the bushes looking for Helen and the beggars, much as we tried, we could not find them. It seemed another realm had swallowed them up. It seemed as if they had stepped out of this reality, and into another. Maybe we need to keep looking at the world with new eyes.

‘T
HEY’VE VANISHED,’ DAD
said.

‘The world has changed,’ I said.

Dad was in a frenzy. My head kept spinning. We sat on the forest floor. All around us in the dark everything was still, and yet everything was moving. I listened to the night, and heard the whispering wind. The leaves rustled and insects were in secret conversation everywhere. I listened to the silence of the moon as it cut a shimmering path through the branches. A rubber tree dripped sap not far from us. The air was sweet-smelling.

‘The forest is dreaming,’ dad said, lighting a cigarette.

Then he was silent. I couldn’t see his face. After he had finished the cigarette, he said:

‘Let’s go home.’

‘There is a river coming,’ I said.

The mighty sound of flowing waters, each wave murmuring with human laughter, gathered behind us, deep in the forest. The insect noises became more tumultuous. Birds flew wildly from the invisible trees and shot past us. Dad jumped up.

‘Let’s run,’ he said.

Seizing my hand, he broke into a canter. We ran for a long time. The air turned green. A hyena laughed in the dark. An owl called. Ritual noises surfaced among the bushes. Suddenly, everything was alive. The air crackled with resinous electricity.

‘I can’t breathe,’ I said. ‘The air is turning to fire.’

‘Just keeping on running,’ dad said, ‘and don’t close your eyes.’

We ran into a quivering universe, into resplendent and secret worlds. We ran through an abode of spirits, through the disconsolate forms of homeless ghosts. We hurried through the mesmeric dreams of hidden gods, through a sepia fog thick with hybrid beings, through the yellow village of invisible crows, past susurrant marketplaces of the unborn, and into the sprawling ghommid-infested alabaster landscapes of the recently dead. We kept pushing on through the inscrutable resistance of the moon-scented air, trying to find the road back into our familiar reality. But the road eluded us and we troubled the invisible forms of great trees with our breathing, and the spirits of extinct animals with our fear. Our heads pulsated with an infernal violet heat.