The Claw

Twenty-one

They seemed to have been trudging through the shanty town for hours, peering out from beneath their umbrellas as they picked their way through the narrow makeshift random lanes, when Isaac halted suddenly. Rain shrilled on the corrugated tin roofs and awnings, water rushed down the open sewer channel which cut through the mud of the lane, and he had to shout to be heard. 'You ought to know this,' he said, and took Alan's hand. 'It may help.'

For a moment Alan thought he was going to give him a charm. But Isaac was shaking his hand, running a second finger across Alan's palm as he did so, and rolling his eyes. Here they were, standing in the maze of rickety shacks and propped-up shelters of tin and cloth, ankle-deep in the sucking mud and shaking hands like freemasons, blocking the way of three women with sodden cartons balanced on their heads. Beyond the shacks, palm trees nodded in the rain. Alan wondered if both he and Isaac were mad. But Isaac leaned his head close to Alan's beneath the umbrellas while the women grumbled past. 'That is the secret sign of the Leopard Men,' he said.

One handshake and the Leopard Men would take him for one of them, Alan thought sardonically – at least, if he hadn't died of pneumonia by then. Warm mud squeezed between his toes as he stumbled after Isaac, shoes in one hand, umbrella in the other. Each leaning shelter seemed more ramshackle than the last. An overpowering smell of marijuana drifted through the rain. He didn't blame them for smoking, whoever they were. How on earth could people live like this? They had crowded onto Lagos Island from the farms, lured by the big city, only to be cleared onto the mainland. It was their choice to live here, and

God knows, he had worries enough of his own – but then he saw the child. She was gazing out of a shelter through a gap in the hanging canvas that served as a front door, which was so sodden that it was impossible to see what colour it had originally been. She was brushing away flies automatically, as a horse flicks its tail, and gazing at him with great brown eyes. She couldn't have been more than eight years old. All at once he felt his eyes moisten and he was unable to move.

'Nearly there,' Isaac said, then he saw where Alan was looking. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'We'll have you back with your family if it's within my power.'

Isaac obviously assumed that he was just homesick and yearning for his own child. Nevertheless, as they squelched onward, Alan heard the child coughing, dryly and painfully, and his own muddy discomfort suddenly seemed shamefully trivial, especially now that Isaac seemed to feel the need to state a limit on how much he could help.

Just then Isaac stepped delicately aside into yet another lane of mud, and halted almost at once. 'Ah, I thought I'd come the right way,' he said. 'Here we are.'

At least the building in front of which he'd halted had four walls and a front door, though the door had obviously been made for a larger frame. The window-panes were cellophane, billowing in the downpour. 'Perhaps it will be best if you wait while I speak to them,' Isaac said, and stepped onto the plank which served as a bridge across the overflowing channel.

Before Isaac pounded on the front door, Alan saw a black smudge peer out through cellophane. Isaac knocked several times and eventually the door was opened by a large woman in a dress and matching head-dress, bright as parrots. Alan could see that she recognized Isaac from when Marlowe had brought him along to translate. Was that why she stood in his way and wouldn't let him inside?

Finally, after a prolonged discussion, a man appeared in the doorway and gestured Isaac within. Alan watched the door being heaved back into place, and then he waited in the rain, with the water and waste streaming past his feet. He stared dully into the channel, watching the edges crumble.

Suddenly the door of the house laboured open, and Isaac stood there. 'All right,' he said, with a grimace that meant it had been a struggle. Alan strode across the plank, which bowed in the middle until it was touching the miniature flood, its ends sinking in the mud and threatening to make him slip – 'and into the house. One step inside, and he halted, dismayed.

There was only one room, and it was full of children and basins and crippled furniture. He had to peer, because the room was dim with steaming clothes, spread over ropes strung between the walls. Basins were everywhere, catching drips from the roof, ringing like beggars' cups – one dud coin after another. The few chairs looked as if they had been rescued from a dump and repaired with bent nails. At the foot of the large lumpy bed stood several wooden boxes containing scraps of blankets. For pets, Alan thought – but how could there be room for animals? With a shock he realized that the boxes served as beds for some of the children. All the children, five of them, were staring at him.

He couldn't meet their eyes. He felt accused, as though it was Anna who was staring. So he'd thought he could write about Nigeria on the basis of a tourist's visit, had he? He felt utterly fake. If he ever returned home, he would tear his Nigerian plot to bits. But the children's father blocked his view and stretched out his upturned hand.

Alan pulled out a wad of brown ten-naira notes. Ten, twenty, thirty, fifty – divide by two and you had pounds. Thirty pounds, forty, and the hand was still outstretched. By the time it closed on the notes, Alan felt he had paid a good deal, but wasn't Anna's safety worth infinitely more? The man was stuffing the notes into a Coca-Cola bottle, which already looked almost full. Perhaps in time he'd be able to buy his family's way out of all this. Alan hoped so.

He screwed the cap into the bottle and dragged the bed aside, then he lifted a floorboard and hid the bottle in the mud beneath the floor. Still frowning, he beckoned Alan and Isaac to follow him out of the house. One of the children scampered after them, but he gestured her back, shouting, 'I told you to stay away from him.'

He led them around the house to the back, walking with exaggerated dignity, ignoring the mud and the downpour, even though his outsize multicoloured shirt immediately grew darker with rain. Behind the house was a hut like a large privy, fashioned out of corrugated metal. There were a few footprints in the mud outside the door, but not many. The man wrenched back the bolt, and Alan saw the old man who was shut in there, lying on a camp bed.

He oughtn't to be shocked. If it weren't for the Nigerian respect for the family, the old man would probably be dead. The frowning man could hardly be blamed for locking his father away from the grandchildren, under the circumstances – and anyway he was housing him as close to the family as he possibly could. At least the hut looked watertight, and the old man had a flashlight by the bed and a couple of basins for washing and relieving himself. Alan forced himself to step into the hut, to see exactly what a Leopard Man looked like.

He looked very much like a withered old black man who was waiting to die. He couldn't have been active for years. He was stirring, gripping both sides of the mattress with his skinny hands and sitting himself up in a series of jerks, tiny timid movements that showed how fragile he felt. His face and bald head were covered with wrinkles,. like fingertips that had been soaking for hours. Isaac stepped forward to question him.

The son followed, and there no longer seemed to be room in the hut for light. The old man groped for the flashlight and switched it on, but its glow was so feeble that it merely oudined a few glimpses: the old man's broken yellow nails, his fleshless arm, his glistening toothless gums, his dimming eyes. If he meant to direct the glow at his visitors, he was too weak; the flashlight rolled out of his hand, onto the blanket. Alan wished he had let Isaac come here by himself: their only purpose in coming was to find out the name the old man had given Marlowe, which Isaac had forgotten. But he mustn't allow himself to feel qualms at this early stage, for there would be worse than the old man to be faced. All the same, nothing could have induced Alan to give the handshake to the old man; nothing could have made him touch him.

Isaac was speaking. The old man's son stood close to him, a warder at visiting time. The old eyes glimmered at Isaac, the dry lips gaped and closed and gaped. Alan could hear flies buzzing in the hut; they were either large or numerous, or both. He felt lost and helpless; he couldn't understand a word Isaac was saying.

He mustn't feel like that. Isaac was helping him, he could trust Isaac; Isaac knew what he was doing. All the same, standing there uselessly gave Alan far too much time to think, to realize how far he was from Liz and Anna, how long it had been since he'd spoken to them, let alone seen them. His eyes were growing used to the dimness; he could see the flies, or some of them. They were crawling on the old man, whose son made no move to brush them off.

Isaac was asking a question; that much was clear from the tone of his voice. That must mean he was nearly finished – there was only one question he needed to ask. But the old man gazed emptily at him and pressed his lips together. Perhaps he felt that having answered once was enough. The buzzing of flies seemed so loud that Alan felt as if they were crawling inside his skull.

Isaac stooped to the old man and repeated his question. He looked ready to pick up the old man and shake him. The son stepped forward, and Alan wondered if he was going to drag Isaac away from his father. Certainly violence was in the air. The toothless mouth was opening, down there in the dark. Perhaps the old man would answer after all.

Then Alan shuddered and turned away. Isaac or the son must have jarred the bed, for the flashlight moved and flared. The light glistened on a large fly swelling like a boil on the old man's cheek. But that wasn't why Alan stumbled out of the hut. As the flashlight beam lit up the old man's eyes, they had been gazing straight at him.

He stood in the downpour, mud hissing all around him, as if it were full of snakes. Rain flooded down corrugated walls, clattered on roofs. Isaac emerged from the hut almost at once, and Alan hurried toward the marshy street. As he glanced back at the hut, he saw the son ramming the bolt into its socket with immense force, as if to make sure the door would never open again. Alan turned his face up to the rain. After the suffocating hut, even the downpour seemed refreshing.

'We must go to Port Harcourt,' Isaac said. 'I know where now.' Of course, he'd only needed reminding. He sounded triumphant, Alan wished he could share his optimism, but he was still seeing the eyes of the old man in the hut and remembering what lay ahead. As the old man had gazed at him, Alan had glimpsed in those eyes something hungry and inhuman, something that was far older and more dangerous than the old man himself. They had looked very much like the spidery eyes in his dream.