'Corruption'.
'What a terrible, dirty word.' Chuckle.
'Nigeria,' he says, 'is a dirty word.' Laughter all round.
'Nigeria,' he repeats, 'is synonymous with corruption.' Panning the room, 'there are big people and there are little people. The big people trample; the little people are there to be trampled.' And the woman opposite winces, embarrassed for him as he ambles through the red tape and into a minefield of political taboos.
'Corruption throughout the ranks, and the irony is that no one wins; not at the top, not at the bottom. The rich men lose. The rest just don't have anything to start with.'
There is a boy crying on the television. The camera has zoomed in so that the sides of the screen now hug his head and you wonder whether there is actually a real head in that box in the corner of the room. Whether glass eyes are pressed up against glass. Whether they fly flicking about against his forehead - would hiss away to freedom if someone wrenched open the lid. And the sound tendrils out into the room, thin and limp and grasping so that it can only scratch at people's eardrums. They shuffle uncomfortably. They are unable to squeeze it out without lifting hand to ear or to control, and that would be wrong. 'We must be concerned.' They must be concerned. They must not appear unconcerned at the image of a black boy projected from a country thousands of miles away who is crying because his parents have brought it upon themselves and because he will one day be corrupt. 'Please', prays the man in the paisley armchair, 'please can we switch to Channel Four.' How sad to be hemmed in by convention. To be strapped into an armchair and forced to cope with that tiny square of light flicked from the lamp in the corner of the room into his eye. The poor man cannot say that he doesn't care, that he is just irritated because Brookside started ten minutes ago and its not their problem anyway if Nigerian people kill themselves off. God, we've got enough problems here already (daring to cross and uncross legs) - look at the people in cardboard boxes on the streets (hand more confident now and edging towards teacup on table). How are we going to get rid of them? (Lifting to mouth.) How are we going to get them jobs and out of the doorways where they interrupt the commuter flow? And a tramp sits on the cold stone outside a shop like the boy held in the television and watches another coat blurring into the crowd. 'Move them by force so that they cannot obstruct'. He sits with his empty beer bottle leaning against the glass because sitting is better than standing. 'So that they cannot be seen.' Because sitting is better than standing in his cold, cold world. And with everything but a tepid puddle of the tea slipping into his stomach, and pleasantly satisfied that he can now move freely again and reach for the control and change to Channel Four, the man sits back in his paisley armchair and exhales.
It was twelve o'clock. A Nigerian twelve o'clock. A twelve o'clock so humid that we could have been wading through boiled blood. And I am coughing because of a gritty flicking tickle in my throat and can feel the surface of my body where it is moving sliding against sweaty leather. The car is also coughing. Choking out shimmering fumes that twist away into the air, clinging like a second skin to shiny faces and hands, wrapped like a joke present at Christmas. The car judders, shimmering and glimmering and caked in streaky oppressive sweat and dust and sunlight, aching to a halt because of congestion. Indigestion. 'How peculiar,' comments the pathologist, 'someone seems to have slipped cyanide into the tea'. Indeed how peculiar. That the life of a man in a paisley armchair who just wanted freedom is beginning to resemble a Hitchcock or an Agatha Christie novel. Oh no. We can see scratchily out of the front window and we can see dirt (perhaps from the window or from air outside or perhaps from air outside on other windows). In between dirt we can see the rustle of gritty leaves on ground as the tail of the snaking shuddering tailback twitches. Like an animal almost dead it heaves over the horizon, sighs and sinks into the drainage basin or valley or cyanide-tinted cup of tea that is on the other side of the hill. The jam is slithering, and wheels kick up more sand and dust and dirt to add to everything else that is clogging the air.
'The government defence building.'
'What?'
'The building. Over there.'
Sickening. The hungry angry fire of last night has clawed its way into every nook and cranny and left it just an empty sorrowful shell of a matchbox building, jittering in the breeze. Bricks now reduced to shrivelled black scabs that manage to cling together because of the prayers of the stall-holders beneath the government building who must keep on selling despite the shaky blackness. But the windows. They have gone, gouged out except for the glints of jagged glass in the edge of the frame. It is like the skull of a monster with a thousand eyes sitting in the middle of this creaking city and ants are crawling around beneath it and around it and even in through the eye sockets, and most grotesque is the flap of an exhausted paisley curtain through the hissing window. 'Why,' they will ask, 'did the building burn down?' 'Corruption,' some fat wise politician sitting in front of the News with a cup of tea will answer. 'Someone was paid off to destroy valuable incriminating documents, and that is why everything has gone.' It is you see, only the papers and the valuable incriminating documents that matter. We do not, should not, care about the twelve janitors toasted alive in the blazing shell of a matchbox building, or some little black boy trapped inside the television while a fat wise politician chuckles and rubs his fat hands together.
He happened right beside the scene of the crime - why I remember the incident. Nothing really; so small, so irrelevant, devoid of words or contact or even the tiniest of cogs that would somewhere slot in to the Great Eternal Scheme of Things. Nothing at all. Except that it twinged at my conscience for a long time afterwards; affected the way I look at other people and at myself and at myself looking at other people. Awolowo Road; midday (or was it one?) - 'be precise', the chief inspector would say, 'this is evidence'; the day the defence building had burnt down. In a shuddering sweaty grid-locked traffic jam that refused to move even when dripping yellow-coloured businessmen slammed and shouted and pushed up the air with their hands. We apologise for the congestion but the government can't bloody be bothered to pay the builders to sew up that rip in the road where a man on a gasping motorbike stupidly forgot to brake and is now responsible for clogging the commuter flow. So we sat, cocooned into a car that felt like a gilded prison, breathing in and out and trying not to think of what was in the air that we were breathing. And on the far side, faces framed by slick wood panelling, black knuckles rapping desperately in a foreign morse code, hawkers pushed cigarettes and battered loaves of bread up against the glass. They need. It is the worst kind; not silent, pleading, hoping, but angry like they want to kill you or need to kill you for turning away and tracing grooves in the puckered leather upholstery; like they want to tear you apart because they know there is no other hope and no need to be silent. Like the paisley Brookside man who begs like they beg for a Hitchcock or cyanide. And a silent prayer for them to go, looking down at fingernails and the raw red mosquito patches on legs, not because we don't want to give but because we just don't know how. Someone must be up there, because they slide away in between the grit and dust and black swirling fumes and don't look back; magical avenging genies or angels or prison warders who disappear in an angry exhausted puff. Only then the boy. He is young - eight or nine ('precision!' Sorry. Evidence must be precise) and therefore my brother's age at the time. He is wearing a pair of shorts and one trainer, and his face is not like the face of other hawkers and he does not, like them, want to dissolve the glass barrier and snatch money and luck and love - it is blank. It is a picture pressed up against glass. Trapped in a box because he does not have the energy to care or cry, and so he has sealed himself away. He is carrying a red bowl. A plastic bowl. A red, plastic, empty, glaring bowl that contains scratches and anger and hopes that have long shrivelled and that jiggle around in the bottom like teeth or grains of sand. I must fill up his bowl. Leap out of the car and fill it with golden coins and watch that panel slide back and the painting bulge into a real human face and the eyes flick on and laugh. And laugh. I want to laugh with him, laugh with everybody. Wheels now scratching on ground, now churning vigorously so that everything snaps back into place as engines wheeze. I must jump out now. But I have no golden coins. I must open the door, flick the switch and jump. But the car is moving too fast. Smash the window and stretch out. But I am afraid to give, remember? I am afraid to give.
And the boy is swallowed up by the smoke and filth and dust. Swallowed up holding that red bowl and still not moving. Swallowed up by the hawkers jogging, sprinting desperately besides the mad churning machines. And I can see the curtain closing between us, and although I can no longer see his face or his feet or his red, angry bowl, I can feel the betrayal in his eyes. It has managed to reach me through his panel and the dirt and my panel, and I want to weep.
There is a baby, a boy, a black boy with a red bowl hemmed in by corruption and cyanide and paisley armchairs crying on the television. He obstructs, he interrupts the commuter flow, he can be seen. And people want to snuff him out because of the pain and panic and sheer desperation in that cry. In those eyes. In his red bowl. And I know I will have to live with him - a picture that was almost not a picture in its glass box - for the rest of my life. Accept that the door is closed, that no one can wrench off the lid, that I was afraid of giving. That I sealed myself off from his desperate, pleading poverty.
'Corruption' the man says. 'Corruption.' And he chokes on the word as he reads of twelve dead janitors in the shell of a dead matchbox building in the middle of Lagos.
He decides to turn on the radio despite himself. He hates the radio and its crackling mass of hypocrisies and contradictions. Its sole purpose seems to be to wind him up, to 'soothe' him with the classical music he enjoys in public and detests in private, or to 'educate' him by allowing politicians their spot in the airwaves, sales pitch after sales pitch, followed by another commercial break. Worst of all is the teenybop garbage he occasionally forces down his own ears, vapid meaningless pop music that only serves to remind him of the spotty little consumers at the public school. If he already hates that generation for their stupidity, arrogance and idleness, he finds his feelings for them never improve after a dose of the junk they pass for music. He turns it off and walks down the stairs.
He remembers a time when he could see a wife and a few children beyond the top of The Daily Telegraph, hearing their whinging and whining as he perused the back pages. But now he sits in solitude at the breakfast table, sipping the sharp grapefruit juice as his teeth crush the last morsel of burnt toast. He sits back and appreciates the sound of the early morning traffic filtering through the walls of the damp, yet functional, kitchen.
Arriving at the common room a little before eight, he sits in his little chair at his little table and shuffles through the marking he could not complete the night before, the result of some school event or other in the evening. He spends much of the morning there, speed reading a set book and finishing someone else's crossword. Occasionally he recognises the other teachers as they pass, here a closet lesbian, there an ageing alcoholic; a young teacher in his first year makes blue jokes about another royal love affair - his voice fades as the eyes of Mr... meet with his own.
The sound of heels clacking against a thin carpet.
'Good morning Mr...'
'Oh, hello, Miss...'
Before they had begun teaching at the same institution, Mr... and Miss... had met before, a few intimate moments spent together after a Cream concert in '67. Miss..., her flower-child eyes now framed by wrinkles, and her long blond hippie chick hair balding in places, never discusses their former association, through either poor memory or deep embarrassment, Mr... despises Miss..., and yet he does not quite know why.
Another afternoon is spent teaching. Mr... appears in the classroom with his instant coffee, a bitter taste of Hermeseta, polystyrene and limescale all burning into the back of his throat. The timing of these lessons, Mr... believes, is something of a statistical triumph. Because of various pupils arriving late, falling ill, swearing at one another, falling asleep, arguing over late homework, arguing over new homework, eating, farting and leaving early, Mr... is left with fifteen minutes to do... what? He dreads these nerve wracking moments. For a moment he engages in argument with one of the bespectacled bags of testosterone and pus sitting in the front row. Mr... goes into auto pilot: he picks up on one subject, recommends some books, he does all the things he thinks a 'Master' should do.
He begins to wonder whether he really feels like a 'Master' at all. He sees the pupils, their smiling, laughing, their excruciating little 'grown up' comments, and he smirks at their Clearasil stained faces. Here they are, the lawyers, doctors, businessmen, maybe even teachers of the future, all growing, developing, progressing on... to nothing, nothing, at least, which Mr... could ever have aspired to be, no authority figure to whom he would ever willingly submit. Mr... does not utter a word on the subject in public; it is in his interests, after all - he will be paid to educate their children to the same high standard.
His is the world of the academic, of facts, of argument. Paper and ink sandwiched together in piles - truths in one tray, answers in another. The cosy booklined bureau with a pot of recently sharpened pencils and a half empty bottle of whisky in the drawer. The instinctive knowledge that one is always at least partially right.
The last few moments are usually the most fraught. Mr... feels he must provide a comprehensive definition of the moral and educational value of the next homework, how important this particular piece of work really is. Then he must find the question.
When he finds a question he must make sure the whole class have heard it, and when he repeats it he must make sure he does not, by accident, change it. Such mental acrobatics have kept Mr... wide eyed and alert for all the years he has taught in that dark, stuffy classroom. He has been lied to so many times by so many people.
He recognises his ex-pupils in the newspaper, beckoning the reader to vote for them, to watch their TV show, to buy their shares, and he weeps with the pride that is the benefit of many years spent teaching. He turns to the letters page, acknowledges the printing of his latest effort. Mr... wonders what it would be like if, someday, he could pluck up the courage to use his real name.
Play flute, or piccolo or harp,Joanne Goulbourne (Purcell's)
Maraccas or the zither.
Join a Javan gamelan
Or take up the marimba.
You can 'ting' upon a timbrel
If that sort of sound's your style,
But I really must implore, dear,
That you don't consort with viols.
Dearest Pa,
By the time you read this, most likely, I will no longer be in these parts in which we were raised; for tomorrow morn we leave and head off for Bristol where we will go to the New World: to Australia, being precise. They say it's a whole new experience, with countless opportunities for everyone; we could get us a farm, as we'd always wanted.
Martha and I, and the young lad of course, feel fearful sad not only to leave you, but the country in which our family was born and bred, lived and worked through ups and downs, but here we simply can no longer support ourselves even with our modest needs and wants. Lead mining just ain't what it used to be, Dad.
Ever since the day I first set foot in the old mine, working for that London Lead Company, not nine summers old, crushing the ore - terrible hard work - I assuredly knew that my station in life was to be a good old-fashioned miner, just like you and Granda. The pay was poor at best, but it helped you and Mam support the kids, and to get by even in the recessions. It wasn't until I was gone fourteen that I could start to mine proper, yet still it only paid six shillings a week at most, hardly nothing and those were considered good times!
I don't know what started it, but then there became less and less wanting to buy our lead - those darn Londoners always lowering the price, like; giving some silly excuse like that new-fangled rifles were replacing the good old muskets (don't ask me why!). And this peace may be well and good for the Government, not paying the army, but it certainly is no good for us. This all added up to mean that no one wanted our lead, so that means pay cuts for the workers.
Now I'm a partner in a large mining partnership (we get paid depending on how much we can mine). That means for six days a week I'm made to rise before dusk and mine near on till dusk, and I find that all that powder is dreadful bad for my wheezy lungs (which I fear will kill me like Granda) I find that even with Martha's sewing and Jack starting work now we've scarce enough to pay for our daily watery soup and bread that I've come to hate so much.
I thought I might never have to say this, Father, I believe that while I've still got life left in me, we must move - it would be nigh on impossible to stay here, most likely we'd all starve to death, Martha is already weak.
Anyway, their Government is offering free land to all that ask, just think; our own farm, fresh air and good food for our children to grow up in and an agreeable climate for the wife and I to grow old in. To be sure, Dad, it's for the best.
The first few years will be a struggle all right - but no more than here, we must pray for good soil, understanding natives, and a safe crossing to give my venture a hope of success. I have heard many a foul tale - of cannibalism, wild animals and famine - but I just sincerely hope these aren't true.
My greatest loss however is not material, however, it is the effectual loss of my only Father - sure enough I will write as often as possible, but it will take six months to reach you, God willing, and by then we may have fallen on tough times, or you may have important news for me.
So, however much it grieves me, Dad, this has to be goodbye at least until we are rich enough to visit you! I may never see you again, but you will always have a special place in my heart.
Jack, Martha and I send our best wishes for the future, whatever it holds.