Felix felicis
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 21/Jun/2011 16:35, 34 days ago
You know that feeling, when anything’s possible?Like when Harry knocks back thefelix felicispotion in the Half Blood Prince?Or when you’ve got half an hour to wait for your train in a major train station with your credit card in your pocket and the knowledge that you could go just about anywhere in the world?When, as Simon Armitage might say,“Sometimes, the sun spangles and we feel alive.”Some days, that’s what walking for a couple of hours in Nigeria is like.I’m staying in a (rather fabulous) hotel in Enugu, in Igbo land, the southeast of Nigeria.(The site of the hotel was actually headquarters for the Biafran army, for those who have readHalf of a Yellow Sun.)However delightful a hotel manages to be, it becomes a little suffocating and terribly expensive, so I went for a wander up the road looking for fruit and gin (man shall not live by bread alone).Along the way I met:Precious and her two charming friends: three, probably late teenage, girls who sit under a piece of corrugated iron taking it in turns to sit on a plastic chair, on the hotel driveway (I,of course, had to sit on it:“JEE-sus, as if a white man can sit on the floor,” as one of them aptly observed).As is only appropriate, they sought to describe my beauty and asked me to buy them something as I walked along.I returned with some bananas for them, apologising for the meagre nature of the gift (their preference was a house each), and we sat and chatted briefly about the UK and Nigeria.I’m planning to travel to Owerri (a bit south of here) over the weekend, and asked for advice on getting to the motor park: Precious is going to meet me on Saturday morning as a guide around the different buses I’ll be catching.An aged fumigator, former Captain in the Biafran army, wandering along the road with his equipment.He was enormously pleased to see me, a little unconvinced that I’m not from Italy (it’s that raw sexuality: the mistake’s easily made), and explained that he knows the UK because he has a son there – an engineer in Canada.So he insisted on dragging me back to a shop (where I think I’d annoyed the lady when I passed it because I didn’t want any of her wares), throwing the woman off her seat so I could sit down, and buying me a Maltina and some gingerbread shortbread biscuits.We talked a little about the violence in the north, about God, and about his time in the army, and he showed me some books which for some reason he carries about with him.He’s illiterate (as in, he told me the wrong names for the books) but they looked well thumbed, the Bible especially so.Half way through my Maltina (seriously, why would anyone drink such a thing for pleasure) he said he had to be getting on and left me there to beonyatcha-ed (the Igbo foroyibo) by all the chaps passing onokkadasand gazed at fearfully by small children.A very, very, very drunk man who I made the mistake of approaching because he was the only one not involved in a conversation and I wanted to find out where the bugger fruit was sold in this town.He pumped my hand for a good three minutes and we hugged several times.He’s going to visit me in the hotel later.I can’t wait.A lovely woman who sold me the gin (sweet nectar of life) and told me that I needed to get a bike for some fruit (everyone up to that point– and I probably spoke with about 10 people) just pointed vaguely up the road in the direction I’d been walking), told me how much it should cost, and got one of her customers to take me.I think he’d been drinking palm wine for a fair part of the day, but I’m hoping his inability to use his right leg is actually the mark of some more permanent damage...otherwise I’ve just been very, very stupid.These are the times I hate to think of leaving behind.