Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [86]
“I am sorry. I’m looking for my car key.”
“There is no car key here,” said the man angrily as he wrenched the door from her hand, shut it firmly and resumed his conversation, after a hissing sound longer than men generally could manage. She returned dejectedly to the car after she had retraced her steps with mounting hopelessness through the various stops she had made inside the shop and the different cashiers’ stations where she had brought out her wallet from her handbag and made payments. Everyone, especially the perfumery girls, remembered her, but not her bunch of keys.
She was tired; hugely tired. The sun’s routine oppression had changed all at once into a special act of vindictiveness against her in reprisal perhaps for the nervous energy she had just displayed instead of the languor decreed from above. All around her in the parking-lot she saw vaguely in slow motion hundreds, more wise than she, who obeyed and prospered.
She turned around for no apparent reason and took a look inside the car, and saw the keys dangling from the key-hole. Transports of joy! Now she could go home and even if she failed to locate her spares—which had become a major fear since she had begun considering strategies—she could bring a mechanic, even a car-thief, and force the door-lock or do something with the glass, and move the car.
Smiling, she went in search of a taxi. Was it happiness about the keys or something deeper, a response called up by the crisis in which she and her friends were enmeshed? Whatever it was, she struck up a conversation with the taxi-driver and very soon she was learning things she didn’t know, about the death of Ikem, about the missing Commissioner for Information and about the planned meeting tomorrow of the Taxi Drivers Union “to put their mouth into this nonsense story” of Ikem’s death.
“If you get somewhere to go make you go today. Tomorrow no taxi go run.”
By the time they got to her flat the rapport between Beatrice and the driver was such that although she took a little time finding her spare keys he did not mind in the least. The beer she offered him to make the time pass more pleasantly he put away under his dashboard until his break-time. He promised to bring the empty bottle back tomorrow on his way to the meeting.
“Don’t worry about the bottle,” said Beatrice.
“Why I no go worry? I be monkey wey dem say to give im water no hard but to get your tumbler back?”
Beatrice burst into laughter as she climbed back into the car for the return journey to the parking-lot. Even the joker had to laugh then at his own joke.
CHRIS’S LAST HIDEOUT had been raided as promised at midnight. Beatrice had got ready quite early but had had to wait until there was adequate traffic on the roads before venturing out to put a call through to the house. The conversation was brief and undetailed, without proper names.
“Any visitors?”
“Yes they came at twelve.”
“Any problems?”
“None so far.”
“So far?”
“Well, none really. Nothing at all.
“Thank God.”
Click!
She went into her flat as she sometimes did, quietly by the kitchen entrance. Elewa was at the table dipping dry bread in a mug of Ovaltine while Agatha watched her leaning on the doorway between the kitchen and the dining-annexe.
“What are you watching her for? And what sort of breakfast is this? No eggs… no margarine…”
“But she no ask me for egg or margarine.”
“She no ask you?”
“Make you no worry, BB. This one done do.”
“Agatha, you are a very stupid girl and a very wicked girl… Get out of my way!”
She pushed past her back into the kitchen, broke and whisked three eggs for an omelette. While it simmered she brought breakfast things out of the refrigerator to the table—margarine, marmalade, honey, orange juice, milk. Then she sat down and insisted that Elewa eat the egg and drink the fresh orange juice. She literally waited on her not just because her grief entitled her to it but she