Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle Read Free Book Online Page A

the church and the cemetery. They found him two weeks later, tied to a tree in a place his people called the Forbidden Forest. His luck was that the gang were wrong in assuming he was rich. His family, unable to raise the money demanded, reported to the American Embassy that an American citizen had been kidnapped. The police had to act and act they did. Within days they knew who the inside guy was – the professor’s young nephew studying to become a lawyer, and he, the nephew, fingered the policemen who provided the guns used for the kidnapping of his uncle.
    Let’s face it, I’d got into the car with men who didn’t exactlysay they were the police, didn’t read me my rights, I hadn’t asked for ID, we were racing to God knows where, and no one knew they had me. It would be a perfect kidnap. I thought of my boss getting a ransom demand and replying with a letter telling me I’d been sacked.
    In the dark cabin, I tried to see the face of the man talking to me and I listened to his voice: not to what he was saying, but to how he was saying it. Was he keeping me calm till it was time for the blindfold? Was he weighing up whether I already suspected that I was in the middle of my own abduction? I was alert like I’d never been before – the thought of being kidnapped, I discovered, does that to you. I studied him, and finding nothing on his face to interpret as a clue, I listened to what he had to say.
    He told me that the dual carriageway on which we travelled, Ahmadu Bello Road, was once a beautiful beach dotted with palm trees. Bar Beach, he called it. Over many years, he said, the Atlantic Ocean crept towards the city. Man and water lived in harmony for a period, until a pyramid shaped glasshouse sprouted on the coastal road. ‘We just passed it,’ he said. The ‘sons of the soil’ warned the bank that built it but the architects and the managers had foreign degrees and qualifications, so they disregarded the hocus-pocus stories of those who knew their ocean.
    When the sun rises each day, its rays reflect off the pompous building and gather in a strong beam directed at the water. This dazzles the water goddess’s eyes, the natives warned, which is why even little children know better than to play with mirrors close to the waves.
    The goddess was angry. The bankers wouldn’t tear down their building or replace its splendid glass with sheets of wood. The goddess decided to take the matter into her hands.
    With a regularity that could only be spiritual, the ocean began to flood its shores. Violently. The government hired engineers who called it encroachment. To stop the problem, they replaced what remained of the beach with an unsightly chain of concrete barriers. It didn’t work. Apparently, the water goddess demanded a sacrifice of appeasement, but either someone didn’t pass the message on, or they did but the people that mattered didn’t believe it.
    He finished his tale and stared straight ahead. I didn’t ask if he believed it himself. It sounded like a bullshit story. Exactly the kind of bull crap stuff you’d tell someone to keep their mind off the fact that you were kidnapping them.

10
    The same car had driven past her twice, slowing down to a stop the second time. But when Kevwe smiled at the driver, he looked away and drove off down the road, past all the other girls. When she saw the Toyota Corolla turning onto Sanusi Fafunwa Street again, behind a black Land Cruiser with tinted windows, she turned to Angel, the new girl she had just met that night, and nodded that she could have the SUV. Kevwe left the group of much older girls they had been standing with and walked up the road so that she wasn’t close to anyone. The Corolla pulled up onto the pavement. She looked down, away from the beam of the headlights that the driver had left on full beam and walked to the car.
    She stopped by the passenger door and waited for him to roll down the window. She bent down, giving him a good view of her