Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the Savannah

'Yes and I'll be damned if I should ever join your ridiculous Excellency charade. I would sooner be deported!'

' Sam is even more ridiculous, you know. It's a name that no longer fits the object. But then you have never been a good judge of what fits or doesn't… which is your great attraction.'

'Thank you,' he says with an embarrassed, boyish smile. At such moments the mischievous lad living inside him peers through his eyes. Beatrice who has said very little up to now asks pointedly: 'Tell me, would you walk up to your Queen and say, "Hi, Elizabeth"?'

'To hell, I wouldn't. But why are all you fellows so bent on turning this sunshine paradise into bleak Little England? Sam is no bloody queen. I tell you he was such a nice fellow in those days. He had a wholesome kind of innocence about him. He was… what shall I say? He was morally and intellectually intact — a kind of virgin, if you get my meaning. Not in its prudish sense, of course. He was more assured, knew a lot more than his fellow English officers and damn well spoke better English, I tell you. And yet he could still be pleasantly surprised by things… I found that so healthy and so attractive… You know I found him a girl once…'

'Who?' asks Elewa shifting sideways on her bar-stool to join our group and bringing Ikem and his poetry friend in tow — the last ostensibly unwilling.

'His Very Excellency, your ladyship,' says Mad Medico bowing. 'I found him this girl after he left the Camberley hospital.'

'I had no idea you had a procuring past,' says Dick with a solemnity that seems surprising even for him.

'Well, you might call it that,' says Mad Medico. 'You must look at it this way, though. A nice young fellow comes all the way from the warmth of Africa to the inhospitable climate of an English hospital — no pun intended, by the way. And he is recovering miserably from double pneumonia. The least I could do was fix him up with a warm friendly girl to cheer him up. Nothing serious. A reasonable magistrate would let me off, I'm sure.'

'But woman done suffer for dis world-o,' says Elewa.

'A modern Desdemona, I see. Did she cheer him up?' asks Beatrice totally ignoring Elewa's more basic solidarity call.

'Did she indeed! He couldn't get her out of his system for years. He called me up the next morning. "Uncle John," he said, "you wicked old soul". And the way he laughed and seemed happy with the world after that! I shouldn't be in the least surprised if he also called long distance to Chris at the London School of Economics… Did he?'

'Well, almost. That was a famous story. He didn't wait too long to tell me, I can tell you.'

'What did he tell you?' From Beatrice.

'NTBB.'

'NT what?'

'BB. You've just been told, BB. That's what my friends at the radio station write in bold yellow letters across the face of records too dirty to play on the air.'

'It means Not To Be Broadcast,' explains Ikem again. 'Chris might have added though that it doesn't now apply to dirty records alone. Anything inconvenient to those in government is NTBB.'

'Quite right. I should have added that. My primary duty as Commissioner for Information, you see, is to decide what is inconvenient and inform Ikem who promptly rejects the information… But going back to the more interesting subject, I confess I broke the code later and divulged the secret to BB.'

'To me?' asked Beatrice, wide-eyed. 'My own Beatrice?'

'Yes, I told you, didn't I, of the girl with the… how shall I call it… the invigorating tongue.'

'Oh! It's the same girl? Oh my God!' We burst into a laugh which left everyone in the cold as it were.

'You two seem to know something that even the procurer here doesn't appear to have heard;' said MM, 'but never mind.'

The poetry editor has been trying for some time to recapture his lost little audience disrupted by Elewa's defection at the prospects of low talk. He makes one last bold bid and takes the entire company. The expression on his face has been quite funny for some time too. Actually he has an extremely expressive face if by expressive one means a constant procession of shadowy grimaces all of them indeterminate. You cannot look at him and say: now he is sad, or he is enjoying himself now. You always have to wait and figure it out and still you are not entirely sure. And then all of a sudden you are angry with yourself for letting your mind engage with so much trouble on something so inconsequential. He is that kind of infuriating person. His expression now is a puritanic scowl without the moral gravity of a puritan.

'We were so successful,' he is saying, as though unaware that his story was ever interrupted, 'that it became difficult to be sure that all the stuff that came in was bona fide Reject. We did insist on the rejection slip accompanying every manuscript but anybody can make up a rejection slip. You know what I mean. Most magazines are pretty sloppy about their slips… Like some girls, you know. Present company of course excepted… They don't print them at the Royal Mint… So there was really no way we could be absolutely certain that what we were getting was always genuine Reject. But as I was telling you…' It seems that having got everyone again to listen to him his one desire now is to show his indifference to the rest of us by pretending to talk still to Ikem alone. Some people have nerve. '… our biggest problem was our success. We were soon printing no more than a fraction, a tiny fraction, of the manuscripts that came in. For a while I even toyed with the idea of a companion magazine to be called Reject Two or Double Reject which, I can tell you, would have been just as successful as Reject . But in the end I had to decide against it. Spreading yourself too thin, you know.'

'Fascinating,' says Ikem. 'When Chris fires me here perhaps I could hop across and run Double Reject for you. I'm totally taken with the idea.'

'You're the editor of the local…'

'Rag called the National Gazette ,' says Mad Medico. 'Ikem is a fine journalist… But shit! Who am I to be awarding him marks? Anyway, his brilliant editorials did as much as anything else to save me from the just consequences of my indiscretion. But what I want to say really is that he is an even finer poet, in my opinion one of the finest in the entire English language.'

'Yes, John told me what a fine poet you are. I'm ashamed to say I haven't yet read anything of yours but I certainly will now.'

'Take your time,' says Ikem. 'And remember MM is not a disinterested witness. I did him a good turn.'

'And I didn't tell you either,' said MM, 'that girl there sitting meekly and called Beatrice took a walloping honours degree in English from London University. She is better at it than either of us, I can assure you.'

'That doesn't surprise me in the least. I understand that the best English these days is written either by Africans or Indians. And that the Japanese and the Chinese may not be too far behind,' said Dick with somewhat dubious enthusiasm.

Perhaps MM had a point when he said Beatrice waited too long to meet me. Sometimes I wonder myself whether our relationship is not too sedate, whether we are not too much like a couple of tired swimmers resting at the railing. An early scene returns to my memory, a scene from two years ago and more, stored away in incredible detail and freshness yet, as I think of it, suffused also with ethereality.

I offered to take Beatrice to the Restaurant Cathay and she said no. Chez Antoine? Still no. They were her two favourite places — not too large, no glaring lights and good food. What would she like to do then?

'Can I come home with you?'

'But of course,' was all I could find to say right away. I was still not sure that I had heard right. She divined the puzzlement in my mind and offered something like an explanation. 'We've both had a long day. All I want to do now is sit still somewhere and listen to records.'