Songs of Enchantment Read Free Page A

want you to be my second wife. Stay and marry me. I will take care of your people.’
    The beggar girl went on as if she hadn’t heard anything. Then dad – his spirit swirling in the new yellow delirium – boldly declared his intention to honour his promises. He said Helen should come with him to Sami’s betting shop, and if all he was saying wasn’t true, if he didn’t have the money to build them a school, to feed and cater for them, then she was free to go. He made a solemn oath, loudly and with dramatic gestures.
    For the first time Helen acknowledged his persistence. She stopped. Dad’s face broke into a triumphant smile. Turning to the rest of the beggars, he told them to wait for him. Then he seized Helen’s hand and set off with her towards Sami’s shop. Pestered by the moths, he strode defiantly through the rumour-making stares of the street.
    Just as we were going past our house, mum emerged with her tattered wig on and her ancient box under her arm. Dad didn’t notice her. She looked so unlike herself, so wretched and haggard, as if she were a tramp, or as if she were fleeing the compound in shame, that even I nearly didn’t recognise her. She followed us a short way and then, loud enough for the whole street to hear, she shouted:
    ‘So you want me to go, eh? So you are throwing me out because of that stinking beggar girl with a goat’s eye, eh?’
    Dad looked back, saw her through the eyes of the demon sitting comfortably inside him, made a dismissive irritated movement of his hand, and carried on, dragging the unwilling but mesmerised beggar girl with him. The demon that had entered my father had moved in for good. The occupation was complete. I could see his spirit whirling with grand dreams of love. For, as he went, oblivious to the terrible changes he was bringing into our lives, I realised how muchdad was brimming over with love, possessed by its secret madness, bursting with love for everything, a wild unholy indiscriminate love, a love so powerful that it made him feel like a god, so vast that he didn’t know how to contain it or express it. The love in him had become a double demon and it propelled him towards chaos.
    Mum began weeping bitterly, cursing all the years of her privation and suffering, cursing the day she set eyes on dad in the village, during the most beautiful years of her life, swearing at dad for having drained the life out of her in so profitless a marriage. And between them both I didn’t know who to choose. Mum went off, wailing, in the direction of Madame Koto’s fabulous bar. Dad marched on to Sami’s place, unmindful of the destruction he was sowing behind him. I started after mum, but she screamed at me, as if she perceived that I was in alliance with dad. And it may have been because of the moths (which I alone saw as moths), because of Helen and her tattered yellow dress, her emerald eye, or because of dad’s polished boots and his bristling demonic love, or because I didn’t really believe mum would disappear from our lives, that I chose to go after dad – for with his mad passion lay the greater magnetic adventure, the curiosity and the rage.
    And so, watching mum grow smaller in the distance, a slouching figure, wailing and rending her wig, I reluctantly stuck with dad’s story, and suffered the choice I made for many nights to come.

5
T HE D EMON’S G IFT
    W HEN WE GOT to Sami’s betting shop we were alarmed to find that his signboard was no longer posted outside. The main door was padlocked and two planks had been nailed across it. Dad knocked and got no answers. The beggar girl watched from a short distance away, the moths swirling round her head in perpetual motion. Dad banged on the door. Then he kicked it and ran against it with his shoulder. The wood splintered. He raised such a racket with his banging and shouting that the compound people came rushing out with sticks and machetes, fearing that they were being robbed, or that the political thugs