Songs of Enchantment by Ben Okri Page B

on a bench. I stood beside him, conscious of the disquieting notion that Madame Koto had somehow multiplied in the spaces where we waited. Then the wind shifted in the shop and a big man, draped in a cheap agdada, strode in. He eyed us and went through the back door, leaving behind flashes and hints of indecipherable possibilities. These were intensified a moment later when the woman brought in a tray of food – pounded yam and spinach stew, rich with dried fish, fried chicken and goat meat. She put the traydown on a low table which she dragged out of the shadows. She brought water for us to wash our hands. We didn’t touch the food. The woman watched us. Dad’s face was stony; he registered no bewilderment. After a few moments of silence the woman said:
    ‘Follow me.’
    We rose.
    ‘The boy first,’ she said.
    We followed her through the back door, along a corridor, into another house, up a winding set of stairs, across a landing to the top floor of a two-storeyed building, down another set of winding stairs, and back into the same shop we had originally set out from.
    ‘What’s wrong with you, eh?’ dad growled. ‘Are you playing games with us?’
    The woman smiled. She indicated the bench. Dad sat down. The food was gone. The room was somehow different. The woman left and soon came back with a crying baby. She left the baby on a chair and went out again. The baby shrieked and made us feel quite scared. I went over to the baby and played with it, trying to get it to stop crying. I touched the baby’s face and it stared at me with deep fearful eyes. I realised in an instant that it was not an ordinary baby. I was playing with its tiny hands when, with a sound in my head like the roaring of an enraged lion, it suddenly scratched me, drawing blood. Then it flashed me a radiant toothless grin. I showed dad the scratches.
    ‘Let’s go and get you a plaster,’ he said.
    ‘That baby isn’t human,’ I said.
    ‘All babies are strange,’ dad replied.
    We went out and bought a plaster and when we got back the shop was full. Chairs and benches were packed tight with visitors, traders, hawkers and children. Loud voices made the crowded spaces quiver. There was a perpetual din of heated arguments. The spaces were jammed with all kinds of human beings and the intra-spaces were packed with all kinds of shadows. The goat wandered amongst the strangecrowd and no one seemed to notice. The evening drifted into the shop and everything slowly darkened. The walls yielded up their secret colour of green; the political posters were gone; the screaming baby was no longer there. The people went on arguing, gesticulating, and I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying or what their gestures meant. My head fairly whirled in the changed atmosphere of the airless shop. The goat rubbed its head against the legs of the men. Dad leant against a wall and lit a cigarette. The darkness pressed down on us.
    ‘We are under the sea,’ I said.
    Dad was silent. The goat attempted to walk between dad’s legs, and I drove it away. Standing a short distance from us, the goat suddenly reared on its hind legs and gave vent to a chilling cry, like a woman in agony. The voices stopped. The woman with the bandage over her eye pushed her way over to us and said:
    ‘Follow me. Madame Koto will see you now.’
    Dad crushed out his cigarette. We followed the woman down three long corridors. Animal skin lined the walls. In the third corridor there were drums at intervals next to the closed doors. Mirrors vibrated over the lintels. The corridor seemed endless. We went deeper and deeper, as if into another reality. The air smelt of cloves and river banks. In one room there were many goats. In another room there was a white horse with the heavy-lidded eyes of certain politicians. At the end of the corridor there was a sign which told us to take off our shoes. Dad took his off. I remained barefoot. There was pepper in the air. My eyes watered; I sneezed.