13 The Colour Of Darkness (1/2)

When you are as old as Mmmma is, and you can feel the life smouldering underneath your skin, there is nothing left to do but wait for Death to visit. She usually waits in the backyard every day, where she can feel the sun's warmth on her face and heart, listen to the birds and leaves exchange gossip in whispers, where she can smell the rain from a distance, before it arrives, and inhale the heavenly perfume that rises from the soil after the sky has emptied its fury upon the earth.

This backyard is nothing but red earth; no flowers, no vegetables, no life, no colours, just the brownish-red, and the orange tree beneath which Mmmma's rocking chair sits. This is where she sits all day, not rocking, not breathing, just sitting still – a casual observer wouldn't know what side of the darkness she was on behind those closed eyes; whether she was still floating along on the gentle current of sleep, or had slipped into the eternal abyss of death. Her face would just be the same, set solid, a death mask – unmoving, unsmiling, unknowable . . .

She had known a different shade of darkness all her life – blindness – so she considered all darkness the same – empty – whether of sleep or of death; they had no effect on her. So if you happened to pa.s.s by, you wouldn't know if she was asleep or dead, the way she looked.

But there were no pa.s.sers-by here. There was only one man. He was not a pa.s.ser-by.

He was Helmet.

One look at the metallic s.h.i.+ne and shape of his bald head and you would agree.

He was the only one. He would come early in the morning, just as the blanket of night was being rolled away from the face of the heavens and people were still silhouettes against the grey dawn, faceless, shadowless. He would go upstairs to Mmmma's room, with feathery footfalls, so as not to wake her, but she would be up already, sitting up in her bed, back against the headboard, her head bent forward as if in prayer, waiting – not for Death – for him.

'Why don't you just lie in today,' he would suggest.

'The worst position for Death to meet you is on your back,' she would reply, in that thin voice that was so strong, so firm, that you couldn't argue against it. 'Let Death meet me sitting, waiting, outside . . .'

He knew about Death, intimately; he saw it every day – in people's eyes, in the dark corners of rooms he entered; he worked with it, slept with it . . . He knew Death like that, like a lover.

* * *

She knew.

The first time he had come to her house he was dying, bleeding profusely, from gunshot wounds on his back. He had only managed to crawl into her backyard, and lay there dying, slowly, the red earth absorbing his leaking blood in sips.

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She had been sitting there, in her chair, between sleep and death, when she heard his dying – the low moans of anguish seeping from his lips . . .

'How bad is it?' she had asked, calmly, almost casually.

'V . . . v . . . verrrr . . . y . . .'

He couldn't move. She rose.

'Wait', she said.

She had lived in this house all her life; was born in its cavernous darkness, and knew every corner, every crevice . . .

In the dim days that followed, while he recuperated, in the deathly silence of her sequestered house, in her father's bed, while the shooters hunted for him outside, they forged an uncanny bond – she, blind and bent with age; he, bandaged and bed-ridden; she taught him about ancient medicine and herbs, and he confided in her his dark relations.h.i.+p with Death, and the black patches of his life. They would talk for hours, into the night, through the day; he would read to her – Freud, Pope – unknown men; she would cook for him – lafun, ojojo, agidi – local delicacies. He would stare at her while she worked – she was not blind. He was. Blinded by blood, by Hate, dark hate; living in the blackness of depths of sins, a man of the night. A feared man.

She had never had a man in her life; no husband, no son, no brother – only her father, who had been a feared witch doctor. She hadn't known any real men, or what their lives were like. So when this one said he had to go back into his world of wars, she just said, ”Go.”

* * *

But he came back every morning, climbed upstairs, softly, like a ghost, tried to talk her into lying in, held her hand, gently, carefully, as if it would crumble, read her a pa.s.sage, put a little less brandy than she usually did in her tea . . . Then he would tell her about his last ”hit” as he led her by the hand outside to her waiting chair, where she would wait all day, for Death, for him . . .