Chris Abani - GraceLand

He walked to Madam Caro’s and bought a beer. Bringing it back to where the children slept, he sat watching over them. He pulled the Fulani pouch from under his shirt, unzipped it, took out his mother’s journal and stroked the cover repeatedly. He was lucky that it had survived prison. Next to it was Aunt Felicia’s postcard. Suddenly the idea of America didn’t seem so bad. He lit a cigarette and, looking up, caught the eye of one of the kids. She smiled at him. Her eyes were round and glowed strangely. Her teeth were small, white and even, and he wondered in an abstracted way where or when these children washed. There were no bathrooms, yet their skin glowed with a lovely sheen, and apart from the odd one, they never smelled.

The girl stood up and approached him. She was wearing a loose smock and he could see through it her barely formed breasts, their nipples grazing the material. She was only about twelve, maybe thirteen, and yet when she walked she swayed with knowledge far beyond her years.

She stood before him and he stared at her transfixed. Her lips parted slightly and her tongue darted out to lick her upper lip and he followed her every movement, his tongue licking in sync. She knelt before him and the movement made her sleeve drop, exposing one of her small breasts. His eyes grew big and he fought the spell, but the wave seemed to drown him in its power. She reached out and stroked his sex, and despite himself he felt his lust swell.

She smiled and took his hand and placed it on her breast and he watched while, with no help from him, his fingers began to move, stroking her nipple. It hardened and her breathing grew shallow and hoarse and she stroked him faster and faster and suddenly he let out a strangled cry and staggered up and away from her.

“Stop! Stop!” he yelled.

She stood up, confused and a little afraid. No one stirred except for one child, who glanced in their direction for a moment before looking away, uninterested. He wondered why his body had not cringed, why he had enjoyed it, desired more.

Okon sauntered over from behind the shrubbery in the shadows, which served as a toilet. He had heard Elvis’s cry and thought he was fighting off scavengers. Now he felt irritated because he had cut himself off to come and help and felt the familiar discomfort of unfinished business.

“What’s de matter?” he asked Elvis harshly.

Elvis opened his mouth but no sound came. Speechless, he pointed to the half-naked girl.

Okon understood and laughed. “Don’t start your shit. Different laws apply here. She wants it and dat’s all dat matters,” he said.

“But she is a child,” Elvis stammered.

“You go learn. We call her Oliver Twist because she no fit to get enough. I was her first, you know — did a good job, didn’t I?”

Okon looked past Elvis to the girl, who had developed a coy and seductive manner. Elvis looked from Okon to the girl and back again, something in his gaze causing the girl to drop her eyes. Okon yanked her roughly to him, pressing her close. Although Elvis held his hands over his ears, he could still hear the sounds of their coupling, crude and lusty: her delicate whimpers and his deeper, harsher grunts. He wondered why he sat there with his hands over his ears, his sex throbbing, doing nothing. As they both staggered out into the light, Okon was adjusting his trousers. The sleeve on the girl’s dress was still down, showing her breast. Her eyes held a curious mix of satisfaction, shame and pity when she looked at Elvis.

“You must learn to enjoy more. Dese are de fringe benefits of dis job,” Okon said, reaching out to pat Elvis on the back.

Elvis shrank away from his touch. “How could you?”

“No start your shit. We are who we are because we are who we were made. No forget.”

“Yes, I’ll never forget,” Elvis said softly.

He turned round. The girl was still standing there looking at him. He reached out on impulse and pulled her sleeve up, covering her breast. She smiled, suddenly shy, and hiding her face behind her hand, she giggled.

“You be fool,” she said tenderly.

He smiled. “Yes. A fool.”

Later that evening he felt a chill come upon him. Within days he was ill, his fever raging so hard that he passed out into a place of spasms and hallucinations. When he regained consciousness, the young girl was mopping his brow and Okon was nervously smoking a cigarette. Elvis sat up and wrapped the hole-ridden lappa tighter around himself, cowering away from the thundering rain. It came down in solid sheets, and in minutes the ground under the bridge was flooded.

The beggar children slept standing up, gently swaying with the rhythm of the rain. He had been given the only dry spot there was, on top of a pile of tires, as he was the sick one. Besides, he was the gentlest caretaker, taking only what was actually offered to him and in many cases handing it back when he didn’t actually need it.

Okon looked at him. “You worry us,” he said.

“How long was I unconscious?” Elvis asked.

“Four days.”

“Four days?”

“Yes. But you are back.”

He felt the young girl arranging cardboard boxes around him to fend off the spray carried by the wind, and he looked up and his eyes met hers.

“Go and sleep,” he whispered hoarsely.

“Shh,” she said, and wiped his fevered brow.

“I’ll never leave you,” he promised her rashly. He knew somewhere in him that of all the promises ever made, that was the one most likely to be broken. What circumstance did not steal, time eroded.

“Sleep now,” she said gently.

Her fingers, like butterfly wings, cooled his brow. She then climbed up beside him and, wrapping her little body around him for warmth, she slept, and this time he was not aroused.

The rain came down in one solid, unyielding sheet. It had been like this for days now, and few had been able to leave their homes as the city flooded. Shops closed and everything had slowly ground to a halt. No cars moved, because the streets had become canals. The only people about were the beggar children, who were making a fortune by fetching buckets of clean water to housebound people.

The young girl whispered the news to Elvis. Religious leaders, Muslim and Christian, had come together to urge their followers to pray together for the rain to stop.

Across Lagos, in another slum, Comfort waded through the ankle-deep water that flooded her home. She was lucky that the flooding was minor. The new man she was living with sat in a wicker work chair with his feet on top of a stool, reading a newspaper. He stopped to bawl out that he was hungry and then went back to reading.

Dinner was served in watery silence, broken only by the occasional slosh as some undercurrent disturbed them. Tope, her youngest child, paused in her meal to watch a rat that had just swum into the room. Taking careful aim, she hit it on the nose with a lump of fufu. It shrieked in anger and swam out hurriedly, muttering under its breath about the indignities of mixing with the poor. Tope laughed so much that she dropped her small piece of meat in the water. In a flash she was down on the floor, rooting in the water for it. Her brothers, Tunji and Akin, laughed at her loss, but with a triumphant yelp she held up the piece of meat, inspecting it critically before plopping it into her mouth. Her mother regarded her with a bored stare and went back to her own food.

The storm had not eased up for days. Almost as if they were symbiotically bound, Elvis’s fever still burned. Through the film of rain, hazy and unclear, Elvis saw a young boy standing around at a public tap waiting for his bucket to fill up. The public tap was situated directly below a high-voltage power line. Picking up a thin piece of metal, the boy rapped out a tune on the metal beak of the tap, dancing in the puddles, laughing. Suddenly the girl jerked up. Eyes wide, she reached out a trembling hand and pointed. Elvis saw it too. More than four thousand volts of electricity arced from the overhead cable in a beautiful steel-blue hue, like ice reflecting the sun, and hit the upturned bicycle spoke the boy held with the grace of a cat.