Waiting For an Angel by Helon Habila

Author:Helon Habila
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141954806
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

2

Brother’s shop, covered by garbage heaps at the sides and at the back, also served as his house. It was made of corrugated iron, which leaked when it rained and cracked and expanded under the hot sun. In front of the shop was a burst pipe – deliberately axed – which shot out water all day. The jet, redirected by a funnelled zinc sheet, formed a pool in a hollowed-out space beneath the pipe. Women and children gathered there all day to wash piles of dirty clothes, fetch water, and gossip. This was done amidst much fighting and swearing.

Olokun Road was named after the mermaid that was said to come there sometimes in the night, transformed into a beautiful maiden, to wait by the roadside for her human lover. I often imagined her, standing perhaps in a recessed doorway, or in the shadows under a tree, hope and anguish etched on her pretty, delicate face as she waited in the pungent, alien environment in vain. The houses were old and craggy and lichened. The place had the unfinished, abandoned appearance of an underwaterscape. Crouching behind the bigger houses or in their own clusters were hastily built wood and zinc structures that housed incredibly large numbers of families: the fathers were mostly out-of-work drivers, labourers, fugitives convalescing between prison terms. Further in towards University Road were nightclubs and seedy room-for-an-hour lodgings, where girls in black miniskirts hung out in dark alley-mouths, smoking cigarettes and waiting for a car to slow down, for the window to roll down and the finger beckon.

From the open door of his shed, Brother looked out at the fighting women and the refuse heaps and the passing mongrel dogs and sighed, ‘If to say I get money. If only I get money.’

The reclining, recumbent figures before him also sighed in solidarity. They smoked marijuana openly, passing the stick from hand to hand, blowing out smoke, stifling a cough. Brother took a deep drag and sighed again. He pushed the half-finished trousers he was working on into a bamboo basket and raised his good leg on to the cutting board.

‘One day Allah go give me a million, I know it.’

‘Amen,’ his friends murmured, their voices languorous from marijuana. They were mostly drivers and park touts and mechanics back from work and reluctant to go home just yet. Brother, once a driver himself, spoke the same language as them and was their favourite tailor. They’d hang upon every word of his outlandish stories as, outside, the evening grew darker and the shapes of the ever-present women fetching water became blurred. Brother’s words would hover above their faces in the dark, mingled with the smoke haze.

‘To each of una, my friends, I go dash a thousand naira, no, ten thousand naira!’

‘Ah, Brother. You be good man,’ they murmured.

‘No, twenty thousand! Who I get apart from una? I no get wife, I no get pikin. You be the only family I get.’

They nodded. Then they urged him on to their favourite part of the wishful narrative.

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