'. . . Aha, so you acknowledge the concept of G.o.d, but––'

'I have given no impression of acknowledgment of any such b.o.l.l.o.c.ks concept; instead, I subscribe to the more rational, openminded suggestion of a "controlling" force, or as Einstein put it, a "synthesis of the laws or regularities that determine the occurrence of phenomena," a sort of divine centrifugal ent.i.ty that directs, not necessarily presiding over in a biblical totalitarian way, the affairs of men; the hypothesis of a supreme being which, not knowing all as has been pentecostally propounded, is subject to the fickleness and volatility of the human psychology, as any mortal man.'

'A hypothesis, you say – a statement of logical guess . . .'

'Yes, a "guessed" existence, not yet established, not yet

proven . . .'

'The problem with you scholars is your propensity to academicize every bit of––'

'Academicize, no – but as scholars it is our obligation to search for the truth, to question––'

'The truth! Haha – there is only one Truth; Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one cometh to––'

'Somebody please pluggeth this spokesman-of-G.o.d's mouth with another bottle!' This was the third man who hadn't contributed anything to the conversation hitherto. He sounded playfully exasperated. 'He is spoiling our jolliment . . . Abi na by force to do born again?'

The 'spokesman', who had hardly gone halfway with his first bottle, replied, in equally playful defence, 'I am not asking you to be born again, Cletus, or born anyhow, which would be a Herculean, if not futile, feat, seeing as you do not believe in the existence of the Father through whose Son this rebirth would be guaranteed . . .'

The other man slipped back into position, 'Father, son, daughter . . . See? That is another problem I have with you people: you will say one thing with one side of your mouth – "Oh, there are three people!" – and use the same mouth to say, "Oh it is one person, these three people." How many people is it, or are there; how many mouths do you people have!'

'It is not about the number of our mouths, sir; for the Word is not of our mouths; it is established, the Word that––'

'My friend, drink your beer and leave all this talk of word for Jesus.'

'Amen, my brother,' Cletus chimed in, with a tinkling childish chuckle. 'Make we drink.'

'Yes,' the other man agreed with him, with a friendly smile, 'Let us drink, in peace.'

They drank in silence, for a while. It was during this their brief silence that I began to pay attention to their looks: the spokesman one was dressed in that near-shabby state of a person whose house was nearby and had only come out to walk his friend halfway up the street in farewell; the threadbare Google t-s.h.i.+rt that stretched into amoebic shapelessness on him hung above elderly jeans whose blue had been washed down to white in front and a very pale sky-blue in other places, and his rubber Dunlop slippers only confirmed the proximity of residence, or otherwise his open-sore penury; the least loquacious of the trio whose name had been established as Cletus wore an old flat cap over permanently impish eyes which stared too pensively into his beer as if trying, by this scholarly contemplation, to separate the dark liquid into its individual chemical components; his clothes spoke of a man who, because he couldn't afford new clothes, spent a good portion of his time pressing the worn ones he had into some semblance of newness – the creases stood out against his shoulders, arms, torso and thighs in symmetrical razor-sharp lines. The last man was dressed like any other man – a s.h.i.+rt, trousers, and shoes . . . When he spoke I noticed that he did not raise his voice like those rural parvenus sprouting all over town, but lifted it in that graceful manner of cultivated gentility; a man of good breeding enhanced by vast learning. He spoke with the gentle, but firm, authority of a man accustomed to footing bills. 'We are going to Abeke's place from here,' he announced, with an almost imperceptible wink at the spokesman. 'You should come.' 'I won't.'

'If you follow us you will.'

Oblivious to this ejaculatory pun, the man repeated, 'I won't.'

'Oh you will, Igna, trust me.'

The man referred to as Igna – which I a.s.sumed was short for Ignatius – sighed, in resignation which one could see was not concession to the other, but emotional weariness. The argument had worn him out, especially since he considered it lost, himself the loser, the foundation of his faith having been confuted by his infidel friend's polemic tenacity.

'I will take this pensive silence to mean acquiescence . . .' 'It is not; it is nothing.'

'Then I take it you are praying?' the man mocked. 'Asking your G.o.d for guidance. For direction . . . Let it go, man, and come with us!'

'Hmm, Abeke, Abeke,' Cletus mused, lasciviously, into his beer.

'Yes, Igna, Abeke, that Abeke; you have heard about her, haven't you – we are giving you a chance to see her, to touch her, feel her . . . be with her, let her fill you, fill you with joy, laughter, happiness . . .'

Igna seemed to be panting, as his chest rose and fell, like one whose imagination, running crazily all over the place, had set his heart to racing wildly in his chest.

'See, Ignatius, if you have rid her of her wrapper in your mind, which I reckon you have, then you have set your foot on the path of the sin, or isn't that what your book says, the "good book" – your rule book.'

'It is not a rule book . . .'

'Well, if Abeke has happened to appear in her naked glory inside your thoughts you have successfully embarked upon the journey of the sin; just follow us, to reach the destination, to conclude the process. Because, what is the use of torturing your thoughts with such images if you won't let your hands and . . . and leg be involved in the enjoyment . . .'

'Enjoyment! Enjoyment, you say . . . d.a.m.nation, I say. Eternal d.a.m.nation!'

'd.a.m.n you then!' screamed the erstwhile taciturn Cletus, banging on the table with his fist, causing bottles and gla.s.ses to hop to the force of his fury. 'd.a.m.n you, man. d.a.m.n you to h.e.l.l! Get out of here!'

'I will,' Ignatius declared solemnly, accepting defeat. 'I will. I have sat in the seat of scoffers enough; I will not walk with them, in their counsel, nor stand in their midst anymore . . . I will leave . . .'

He tried to stand up, tottered forward and fell back into his seat heavily.

'Ignatius are you sure you can stand on your own, without support, or even walk home without help . . . Risi! Risi! Come and help this man to his feet.'

The barmaid appeared; a shy smile, which belied the amount of s.h.i.+ny cleavage on display, played on her luscious, liberally lipglossed lips.

'Come on!' the man urged, when she hesitated. 'Come on.'

The girl grabbed Ignatius under the arm, with the skill of a person who has helped many a drunk to their feet, and, after a moment of feeble struggle from the drunken man, steered him towards the door, shuffling and smiling. . .

'Take care of him o, Risi!' Cletus called after them. 'Take gooooood care of him; his wife is away on a mountain visiting with G.o.d, or is it the man-of-G.o.d, I don't know . . . Sha take care of him wellwell.'

'Yessah . . .'

'Good girl,' Cletus concluded, proud of himself.

He turned his smile on me then; I had been watching the unfolding scene, my pepper soup bowl empty, but for the cold bones in it, and my only bottle of beer almost empty, losing its chill. Then he turned away. 'Sade! Sade!'

The other barmaid – an older, less desirable one whose incessant curtsying made her look like a dancing puppet – appeared.

'Knack that good man over there one more bottle.' Then to me, he added, 'We're was.h.i.+ng my friend Richard's promotion. To Reader. a.s.sistant Professor.'

His tongue seemed to be loosening considerably and growing lighter under the weight of the alcohol.

'Ah, congrats,' I said, to the now quiet Reader, feigning admiration, and ignoring his increasingly irritating mouthpiece.

'Thank you, my man,' the Richard replied, in a tone that was coldly civil almost to a point of condescension; his "my man" sounding like a pat on a servile houseboy's head.

I almost asked Sade to take the beer back, but I was thirsty.

His friend, Cletus, had seen my hesitation. 'Or are you a man of G.o.d too, like our friend?' he asked.

I managed a shadow of a smile. 'I am a man of myself,' I told them.

'Hmm,' he nodded. 'Ah, good man. Good man! Another beer for the man!'

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Sade hadn't even opened the new one; but she scurried away to fetch another, as ordered.

'Do you live around here?' the quiet Reader fellow asked, warily.

'No. I'm just pa.s.sing . . .'

'Oh, pa.s.s well, my friend,' Cletus recovered the reins of the conversation as they rose to their feet, then added, in cloying jauntiness, 'And we, Richard and I, are pa.s.sing the night at Abeke's, in sin.' He enunciated that last word with such an uncanny triumph that unsettled me somewhat, and which made me glad to see their exit. 'Sin well,' I wished them.

The sudden staccato of Cletus' laughter scattered throughout the night air like shards of gla.s.s, shattering the nocturnal stillness. 'HAHAHAHAHAHA! I like this man!' he boomed. 'Come with us, you'll like Abeke! She'll like him, won't she?' The Reader did not answer.

'Go on and enjoy yourselves,' I said.

'Sin well!' Cletus roared. 'Hahahahahahahaha . . . Good man. Good, man.'

They were barely outside when I heard Richard growl in rebuke, 'You didn't have to invite him.'

His friend replied with the rush of guttural vomiting . . .

* * *

She vomits into my pepper soup just as she bends to place it on the table, her vomit the brown-green of gutter-slime splashes all over my trousers.

'Yeeeeeeee!' Madam Caro wails from her place behind the counter. 'Dis girl don kill me oh!' She flies towards us, with a violent speed that belies the burden of her bosom and bottom, landing on Risi with a slap whose force drives the poor girl's body into the ground, taking the table with it in a mighty crash.

'Madam!' I cry.

'Ah, oga, di girl don get belle! She don carry belle under me! I don dey ask am since, she no answer. I tell am say I go catch am . . . I never catch you now? G.o.d don catch you today!'

Belle? The woman seems to be more incensed at the thought of the girl's pregnancy than at the horrifying fact that she has just puked into a customer's bowl of soup. What was so insanely infuriating about a barmaid's pregnancy anyway, I wonder, that would make vomit in a patron's bowl of soup become inconsequential.

It takes almost a whole village to prise the deranged proprietress off her girl who is now bleeding from the mouth and nose and writhing on the floor in agony and fear.

Finally subdued in a corner, panting, Madam Caro asks Risi

the inevitable question: 'So na who give you di belle, ashawo girl?'

The answer can't make it through the girl's gurgling and sniffing, and it is only after a few feints from Madam Caro and the clamour of pleas from the crowd – Ansa na! You wan' may she kill you! You nor get mout'? Na who be di papa? – that the answer comes in a barely discernible whisper:

'Broda Igna . . .'

'Ehn?'

A silence falls upon the crowd, followed quickly by a murmur that grows into various degrees of exclamatory wails, from astonishment to disgust to raw ire; the largest of the interjections coming from a woman who has stepped forward out of the throng to accost the battered barmaid.

'Ehn? What did you say? Who? Who gave you belle?'

Risi, recognizing the woman and the growing blaze in her

eyes, recoils in terror.

'I say who did you say got you pregnant?'

It is not until someone kicks her that she repeats, 'Igna. Broda

Ignatius . . .'

'Heyyyyyyyy . . .'

At the moment that terrifying keening rent the air, I cast my mind back to a few months ago – I can't recall how many exactly – and try to recollect the face of the drunk man that had been helped home by this girl. . . Is this his wife who had gone visiting on a mountain? Oh Lord Jesus . . . Poor woman.

Tears have quickly sprung to the surface of her eyes, while a baleful blaze burns beneath. Her delicately pretty face is marred by the heat of the malicious wrath it is presently wreathed with . . . She is like a flash of lightning when she pounces – one minute she is standing there looking as if she is about to drop dead, like one in a spiritual trance; the next minute she is upon the cowering barmaid, biting and tearing, spitting and scratching, with savage bloodcurdling screams to accompany the battery, as she flies rabidly out of control. She has taken everyone by surprise; this is not what anyone had expected, at least not to this extent; even the vicious Madam Caro is shocked into motionlessness. What would make an erstwhile good Christian woman snap so suddenly and go completely carnivorously berserk; what kind of dark demon could have possessed such a good, pure heart so abruptly.

It takes more pa.s.sers-by, stronger ones, to remove her from the almost dead pregnant girl . . . If the girl could have been beaten to such a state of sogginess, I wonder, the foetus must have turned to liquid.

I want to help the girl – clean her up, bandage her, give her a bed . . . But the way her panting a.s.sailant is glaring from the corner where she is being held down by big men with strong arms, I stay put. It is that dark demon still in possession of her heart that is glaring out through her eyes, it is not her; I can see it, I recognize it.

Confronted with evil in such corporeal Stygian form, one's milk of kindness dries up instantly and the intention to do a good deed takes leave of the person . . . Besides, I had never been a good Samaritan; I am just a man in pa.s.sing. I usually just stop here for the goat-meat pepper soup on my way from town to town as an itinerant labourer, in search of houses to be built, farms to be tilled, graves to be dug, and such . . . Just for the pepper soup. . . There will be none here today; only blood and tears . . . and maybe death.

I look down at the mangled body on the floor lying still in the slime of pepper soup, pregnancy vomit and blood . . . And somehow the greatest portion of my mourning is for the loss of my evening's pepper soup.

* * *

By the time I'm leaving, the crowd is still swelling, filling Madam Caro's bar to bursting and spilling into the street, all the way down; the news has spread far, and is already taking on the natural form of big juicy towns.h.i.+p gossip, being stretched and embellished as it travels from mouth to ear: Ah, that s.l.u.tty Risi, a mere illiterate barmaid, had infiltrated the tightly Christian home of Brother Ignatius and Sister Charity and had come away with a pregnancy (which Sister Charity hadn't been able to acquire for years), and Sister Charity had beaten her to death and had run mad in the process – naked-in-the-market-square mad o! Sister Charity, the town's model of a good Christian woman and wife, Sister Charity of the most angelic voice in the choir who led choruses at every church meeting and sang sweet solos to the heavens. A demon, a dark ugly demon, has possessed her soul, you have to see it . . .

* * *

At the motor park, on my way to the next town, I run into Ignatius' friends, Reader Richard and the jolly Cletus; they have just returned from a trip. Both of them are stinking drunk; Richard, in his usual sedate manner, managing to portray more composure than his less refined friend.

They recognize me first and, in the state of near-blind inebriation which makes him seem more expansive than usual, Richard cries, 'Ahhh! Our man!'

'Yes!' his friend agrees, a.s.serting this claim by clapping me on the clavicle in what should have been a friendly gesture but sends a shaft of pain down my arm. 'How have you been!' he shouts.

'Quiet,' I reply, 'Which cannot be said of Madam Caro's at the moment.'

'As how?' Cletus asks, his eyes lighting up with the Schadenfreudic prospects of gossip.

'The little fire you people started there has just burst into a

conflagration . . .'

'What nonsense.'

'Madam Caro's barmaid Risi is pregnant, and––'

'And we are the father . . . Or how does this consign us?'

'You set her upon a certain Ignatius friend of yours, didn't you.'

'Oh that funny episode back then . . . hahahahahahaha . . .'

'You people knew fully well that he was drunk and his judgment couldn't be trusted and––'

'We?' Cletus swallows his big laughter abruptly, and takes on a scowl. 'We. We put funnel for him mout' pour di beer for him throat? Or we put him ting for inside di girl?'

'See,' Richard takes over the conversation, with that calm academic tone suited for explaining theories, 'the problem with

Ignatius is that he cannot hold his drink . . .'

'E nor sabi drink!' Cletus translates. 'Only one bottle!'

'Well, that was enough to start the fire raging at the bar right now . . . And if you people knew this you shouldn't have bought him any alcohol at all . . .'

'Forget Ignatius!' Cletus barks.

But the more rational Richard goes on to explain, 'All we were doing was just celebrating a good promotion, and we decided to call up an old friend we hadn't seen since we left school, for a harmless reunion, a few drinks like old times, unaware that he had become this . . . this 'Brother' . . .'

'Even when e no Brother, Igna nor sabi drink! Abeg forget Ignatius . . . come and have a drink with us at the motor park's beer parlour . . .'

Unable to make the blame stick, I contemplate the offer. 'Do they have pepper soup there?'

'Hahahaha! My good man! Better than Madam Caro's own!'

'I'd been made to believe hers is the best in this town.'

'Nonsense! Man wey never chop anoda skele ponmo go tink say na him wife own sweet pa.s.s.'

I find this crudely ribald allusion very offensive, especially in the light of the present situation with Risi and Ignatius of which the drunk duo are too keen to dismiss, but I follow them anyway.

'Forget Igna abeg!' Cletus declares, with finality this time. He is already looking forward to drinking away whatever is left of his friend's new salary.

The friend, seeing the look of worry still on my face, says, 'Seriously, my man, forget Ignatius; a man who has allowed rules, laws, commandments, whatever you want to call them, purportedly laid down by a foreign G.o.d, a Western G.o.d, to restrict him and determine the limits of his liberty deserves whatever troubles come upon his head . . . So, forget Igna, his G.o.d will help him.' 'Amen,' says Cletus, in mock solemnity.

'Just forget him.'

I do – I cast him out my mind, along with his wife, Sister Charity, his G.o.d, the broken Risi, and my lost pepper soup, and dig into this fresh bowl before me. The lecturer and his friend were right – the pepper soup is great, and a man who has chosen spiritual bondage over Self deserved to suffer for his foolishness.

Me, I am a master of my Self; I deserve to enjoy.

We drink and laugh well into the night, Ignatius forgotten, as well as my trip and miscellaneous sorrows.

A man of himself forgets easily, and is free.