On the side of a five-storey apartment building he saw a fire escape. He ran for it, began to climb. As he passed the third floor, he saw a dark room with three air conditioners piled on the floor. A store room. Empty, unused. He tried the lip of the window with the tips of his fingers. It opened. He tumbled himself into the musty, quiet space. He pulled the window closed. He groped in the dark until he found what he was looking for. An electrical socket. He plugged his phone in.
The little two-note sound of it starting up was like the sound of his own key in the lock of his front door back at home in Lagos. There. It’s over now. The screen was bright. He pressed the warm light of it to his lips, inhaled. In his mind, he was home already and all the cars and trains and aeroplanes and lines and security that would be needed between here and there were imaginary and unimportant.
He sent an email quickly: to Nina, and to Temi, and to three different editors he’d worked with recently. He told them where he was, that he was safe, that he needed them to contact the embassy to get him out.
While he waited for the reply, he looked at the news. More and more ‘skirmishes’, without anyone being willing to call this an outright war. The price of oil on the up again. And there was Nina’s name, too, on an essay about what’s happening here, inside Bessapara. He smiled. Nina had only ever been here for a long weekend press junket a few months ago. What would she have to say about this place? And then, as he read, he frowned. Something felt familiar about her words.
He was interrupted by the comforting, warm, musical ping of an email arriving.
It was from one of the editors.
It said, ‘I don’t find this funny. Tunde Edo was my friend. If you’ve hacked this account, we will find you, you sick fuck.’
Another ping, another reply. Not dissimilar to the first.
Tunde felt panic rising in his chest. He said to himself, It’ll be OK, there has been a misunderstanding, something has happened.
He looked up his own name in the paper. There was an obituary. His obituary. It was long and full of slightly back-handed praise for his work in bringing news to a younger generation. The precise phrases implied very subtly that he’d made current affairs appear simple and trivial. There were a couple of minor mistakes. They named five famous women he’d influenced. The piece called him well-loved. It named his parents, his sister. He died, they recorded, in Bessapara; he had been, unfortunately, involved in a car crash which left his body a charred wreck, identifiable only by the name on his suitcase.
Tunde started to breathe more quickly.
He’d left the suitcase in the hotel room.
Someone had taken the suitcase.
He flipped back to Nina’s story about Bessapara. It was an extract from a longer book that she’d be bringing out later in the year with a major international publishing house. The newspaper called the book an instant classic. It was a global assessment of the Great Change, based on reporting and interviews from around the world. The stand-first compared the book to De Tocqueville, to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
It was his essay. His photographs. Stills from his footage. His words and his ideas and his analysis. It was paragraphs from the book he’d left with Nina for safekeeping, along with parts of the journals he’d posted to her. Her name was on the photographs, and her name was on the writing. Tunde was mentioned nowhere. She had stolen it from him entirely.
Tunde let out a noise he had not known was in him. A bellow from the back of the throat. The sound of grieving. Deeper than sobs.
And then there was a sound from the corridor outside. A call. Then a shout. A woman’s voice.
He didn’t know what she was shouting. To his exhausted, terrified brain, it sounded like, ‘He’s in here! Open this door!’
He grabbed his bag, scrambled to his feet, pushed open the window and ran up on to the low, flat roof.
From the street, he heard calls. If they weren’t looking for him before, they were looking at him now. Women in the street were pointing and shouting.
He kept running. He would be all right. Across this roof. Jump to the next. Across that roof, down the fire escape. It was only when he was into the forest again that he realized he’d left his phone still plugged in, in that empty store room.
When he remembered, and knew he could not go back for it, he thought his despair would destroy him. He climbed a tree, lashed himself to a branch and tried to sleep, thinking things might look better in the morning.
That night, he thought he saw a ceremony in the woods.
He thought that from his high perch in the tree; he was awakened by the sound of crackling flame and felt a momentary terror that the women had set the trees on fire again, that he would burn alive up here.
He opened his eyes. The fire was not near at hand but a little way off, glimmering in a forest clearing. Around the fire there were figures dancing, men and women stripped naked and painted with the symbol of the eye in the centre of an outstretched palm, the lines of power emanating sinuously around their bodies.
At times, one of the women would push a man to the ground with a blue-bright jolt, placing her hand on the painted symbol on his chest, both of them whooping and crying out as she showed her power on him. She would mount him then, her hand still in the centre of him, still holding him down, the frenzy of it showing on his face, urging her to hurt him again, harder, more.
It had been months since Tunde had held a woman, or been held by one. He began to yearn to climb down from his perch, to walk into the centre of the rock-circle, to allow himself to be used as those men were used. He grew hard, watching. He rubbed himself absently through the fabric of his jeans.
There was the sound of a great drumming. Can there have been drums? Would it not have attracted attention? It must have been a dream.
Four young men crawled on all fours in front of a woman in a scarlet robe. Her eye sockets were empty, red and raw. There was a grandeur to her step, a certainty in her blindness. The other women prostrated themselves, kneeling and full body, before her.
She began to speak, and they to respond.
As in a dream, he understood their words, although his Romanian was not good and it was impossible they were speaking English. And yet he understood.
She said, ‘Is one prepared?’
They said, ‘Yes.’
She said, ‘Bring him forward.’
A young man walked into the centre of the circle. He wore a crown of branches in his hair and a white cloth tied at his waist. His face was peaceful. He was the willing sacrifice that would atone for all the others.
She said, ‘You are weak and we are strong. You are the gift and we are the owners.
‘You are the victim and we are the victors. You are the slave and we are the masters.
‘You are the sacrifice and we are the recipients.
‘You are the son and we are the Mother.
‘Do you acknowledge that it is so?’
All the men in the circle looked on eagerly.
‘Yes,’ they whispered. ‘Yes, yes, please, yes, now, yes.’
And Tunde found himself muttering it with them. ‘Yes.’
The young man held out his wrists to the blind woman, and she found them with one sure motion, gripping one in each hand.