Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [28]
“Yes and I’ll be damned if I should ever join your ridiculous Excellency charade. I would sooner be deported!”
“Sam is even more ridiculous, you know. It’s a name that no longer fits the object. But then you have never been a good judge of what fits or doesn’t… which is your great attraction.”
“Thank you,” he says with an embarrassed, boyish smile. At such moments the mischievous lad living inside him peers through his eyes. Beatrice who has said very little up to now asks pointedly: “Tell me, would you walk up to your Queen and say, ‘Hi, Elizabeth’?”
“To hell, I wouldn’t. But why are all you fellows so bent on turning this sunshine paradise into bleak Little England? Sam is no bloody queen. I tell you he was such a nice fellow in those days. He had a wholesome kind of innocence about him. He was… what shall I say? He was morally and intellectually intact—a kind of virgin, if you get my meaning. Not in its prudish sense, of course. He was more assured, knew a lot more than his fellow English officers and damn well spoke better English, I tell you. And yet he could still be pleasantly surprised by things… I found that so healthy and so attractive… You know I found him a girl once…”
“Who?” asks Elewa shifting sideways on her bar-stool to join our group and bringing Ikem and his poetry friend in tow—the last ostensibly unwilling.
“His Very Excellency, your ladyship,” says Mad Medico bowing. “I found him this girl after he left the Camberley hospital.”
“I had no idea you had a procuring past,” says Dick with a solemnity that seems surprising even for him.
“Well, you might call it that,” says Mad Medico. “You must look at it this way, though. A nice young fellow comes all the way from the warmth of Africa to the inhospitable climate of an English hospital—no pun intended, by the way. And he is recovering miserably from double pneumonia. The least I could do was fix him up with a warm friendly girl to cheer him up. Nothing serious. A reasonable magistrate would let me off, I’m sure.”
“But woman done suffer for dis world-o,” says Elewa.
“A modern Desdemona, I see. Did she cheer him up?” asks Beatrice totally ignoring Elewa’s more basic solidarity call.
“Did she indeed! He couldn’t get her out of his system for years. He called me up the next morning. ‘Uncle John,’ he said, ‘you wicked old soul.’ And the way he laughed and seemed happy with the world after that! I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if he also called long distance to Chris at the London School of Economics… Did he?”
“Well, almost. That was a famous story. He didn’t wait too long to tell me, I can tell you.”
“What did he tell you?” From Beatrice.
“NTBB.”
“NT what?”
“BB. You’ve just been told, BB. That’s what my friends at the radio station write in bold yellow letters across the face of records too dirty to play on the air.”
“It means Not To Be Broadcast,” explains Ikem again. “Chris might have added though that it doesn’t now apply to dirty records alone. Anything inconvenient to those in government is NTBB.”
“Quite right. I should have added that. My primary duty as Commissioner, you see, is to decide what is inconvenient and inform Ikem who promptly rejects the information… But going back to the more interesting subject, I confess I broke the code later and divulged the secret to BB.”
“To me?” asked Beatrice, wide-eyed. “My own Beatrice?”
“Yes, I told you, didn’t I, of the girl with the… how shall I call it… the invigorating tongue.”
“Oh! It’s the same girl? Oh my God!” We both burst into a laugh which left everyone in the cold as it were.
“You two seem to know something that even the procurer here doesn’t appear to have heard,” said MM, “but never mind.”
The poetry editor has been trying for some time to recapture his lost little audience disrupted by Elewa’s defection at the prospects of low talk. He makes one last bold bid and takes the entire company. The expression on his face has been quite funny for some time too. Actually he has an extremely expressive face if by expressive