Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [45]
“Who is that?” I shouted. Whoever it was didn’t seem to hear and continued ringing the alarm and banging on the door. Well, I wasn’t going to budge either and continued screaming who? This went on literally for minutes and I was getting scared when he either heard me or else it occurred to him independendy to use his voice instead of his fists. And I caught it in one of those brief spells when a storm pauses to take a deep breath. I unchained the iron grill and unlocked the door.
“It wasn’t raining in my place,” he shouted sheepishly as he came in. “I ran full tilt into it just there around the Secretariat. It was literally like barging into a pillar of rain, you know. You could stand there with the forward foot wet and the other dry.”
“Come on in. We’ll go hoarse shouting out here.”
He left his dripping umbrella with my potted plants on the landing and followed me into the parlour. Once inside, with door and window-louvres tightly shut, the noise of the rain receded dramatically to a distant background leaving us in muffled cosiness.
“When we were children,” Ikem said as he threw himself into the sofa and began to remove his wet shoes and tuck his socks inside them, “August used to be a dry month. August Break we called it. The geography textbooks explained it, the farmer in the village expected it. The August Break never failed in those days.”
“Really?”
“What’s happened to the days of my youth, BB?”
“Wasted, squandered, Ikem. Lost for ever, I’m afraid.”
“I hoped you would not say that. Not today. Oh, well.”
“What’s wrong with today. Your birthday or something?”
“I have no birthdays. There was no registration of births and deaths in my village when I was born. Signed Notary Public.” I laughed and he joined me… “I wasn’t one of your spoilt maternity births. I arrived on banana leaves behind the thatched house, not on white bed sheets… Those are lovely flowers, what are they?”
“I have never known you to notice flowers or women’s clothes and rubbish like that before. What’s the matter.”
“I’m sorry, BB, that’s a lovely dress. And lovely flowers, what are they?”
“Agatha is roasting corn and ube. Would you like some. Or with coconut if you prefer…”
“I prefer both ube and coconut.”
“Glutton!”
“That’s right! Terminal stage when it attacks your grammar! You still haven’t told me what these flowers are. I may not have noticed flowers before but I do now. It’s never too late, is it?”
“No. It’s called hydrangea.”
As I went into the kitchen to open the store for Agatha to get a coconut out I kept asking myself what Ikem might be up to. Was it Chris? Had their relationship, dangerously bumpy in recent months, taken a nose-dive now for the crash? Ikem always avoided complaining about Chris to me. Was he going to break his own scrupulous practice for once? When I returned to the parlour he had lifted the vase of flowers to his nose and was sniffing it.
I ate my corn with ube and he his with ube and coconut in alternate mouthfuls. Outside, the storm raged the way I like my storms —far away, its violent thunder and lightning distanced and muted as in a movie. I would have felt completely comfortable if Ikem had not been behaving a little strangely. Let’s hope it’s the storm, I prayed. Tropical storms can do so many different things to different creatures. That I have known from childhood. My older sister Alice always ran around the yard, if our father happened to be out, singing a childish rain song:
ogwogwo mmili
takumei ayolo!
Finally exhausted she would come indoors shivering, eyes red and popping out, teeth clattering away and make for the kitchen fire. As for me whom she nicknamed salt, or less kindly Miss Goat, on account of my distaste for getting wet, my preference was to roll myself in a mat on the floor and inside my dark, cylindrical capsule play my silent game of modulating the storm’s song by pressing my palms against my ears and taking them off, rhythmically. There was for me no greater luxury in those days than