Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [43]
Even when I found myself begin to pick and choose what dress or what make-up to wear whenever I thought I might run into him I simply dismissed it as a little harmless excitement I was entided to indulge in as long as I remembered to keep a sharp look-out.
It was in a supermarket one Saturday morning, I think, that Ikem gave me an opening to ask about Chris’s wife. I don’t remember the exact details now but I think it was a vague invitation to go with him, his girlfriend and Chris to some friend of their’s birthday party. I said no for one reason or the other but also managed to ask as offhandedly as I could where Chris’s wife was anyway; or was he one of those who will pack their wife conveniently away to her mother and the village midwife as soon as she misses her period?
“BB!” he screamed in mock outrage, his large eyes beaming with wicked pleasure. “Looking at your demure lips…”
“I know, I know. You couldn’t tell, could you? Like looking at a king’s mouth you couldn’t tell, could you?”
“Or looking at a lady’s gait, you couldn’t tell, could you?”
“Enough!” I said in my own counterfeit outrage, my index finger against my lips. “All I asked you was where your friend packs his wife.”
“There is no wife, my dear. So you can rest easy.”
“Me! Wetin concern me there.”
“Plenty plenty. I been see am long time, my dear.”
“See what? I beg commot for road,” and I made to push my trolley past him to the cashier but he grabbed my arm and pulled me back and proceeded to give me in loud whispers accompanied by conspiratorial backward glances a long and completely absurd account of all the actions and reactions he had meticulously observed between Chris and me in the last few months which could only have one meaning—his friend, Chris, done catch!
“You de craze well, well… I beg make you commot for road.”
That was the year I got back from England. I had known Ikem for years—right from my London University days. How he did it I can’t tell but he became instantly like a brother to me. He had completed his studies two or three years earlier and was just knocking about London doing odd jobs for publishers, reading his poetry at the Africa Centre and such places and writing for Third World journals, before his friends at home finally persuaded him to return and join them in nation-building. “Such crap!” he would say later in remembrance.
When he finally left for home I was just getting into my degree year at Queen Mary College and we had become very close indeed. There was a short period when the relationship veered and teetered on the brink of romance but we got it back to safety and I went on with Guy, my regular boyfriend and he with his breathless succession of girlfriends.
I have sat and talked and argued with Ikem on more things serious and unserious than I can remember doing with any other living soul. Naturally I think he is a fantastic writer and it has given me such wonderful encouragement to have him praise the odd short story and poem I have scribbled from time to time. I don’t even mind too much that his way of praising my style was to call it muscular on one occasion and masculine on another! When I pointed this out to him jokingly as a sure sign of his chauvinism he was at first startled and then he smiled one of those total smiles of his that revealed the innocent child behind the mask of beard and learned fierceness.
In the last couple of years we have argued a lot about what I have called the chink in his armoury of brilliant and original ideas. I tell him he has no clear role for women in his political thinking; and he doesn’t seem to be able to understand it. Or didn’t until near the end.
“How can you say that