Free The Famished Road by Ben Okri

climbed into bed and put his arm round me, as if I were a woman. Dad dragged him out into the passage and left him to his devices. In the room the bearded man woke up and wondered if the feast had begun yet and asked why he hadn’t been served any boar’s meat. One of the children started crying. When Dad came back into the room the bearded man asked for some beer. Dad drove him out. It was only after they had gone that we saw the debris of the feast. Our clothes were scattered everywhere. Two chairs were broken. Glasses had been shattered on the floor and it was a wonder that no one had cut themselves. Someone had vomited half out of the window and half in. The place stank of the children who had wet themselves in their sleep.
    Mosquitoes whined. Dad lit a coil. Mum swept the floor, arranged the clothes, cleared out the plates, cutlery, and bones. Then she disinfected the room. Dad sat on his chair, drinking and smoking quietly. Mum spread out the mat. Then she blew out the candle and went to sleep.
    Dad sat alone in the dark. Every now and again he said:
    ‘We have kept our promise.’
    The only points of light were the mosquito coil, its smoke spiralling to the ceiling, and his cigarette. In a way I came to think of Dad as a cigarette smoked alone in the dark.
    I watched him that night as if he were a fabled being. Sometimes he got up and paced the room, perfectly avoiding Mum’s sleeping form, his cigarette vanishing and reappearing. I watched him go back and forth. As I watched him, the darkness expanded. I saw Dad’s cigarette at one end of the room and heard him pacing at the other end. It seemed he had become separate from his action. Then I saw multiples of him smoking at different corners of the room. I shut my eyes. When I opened them it was morning and Dad was in his chair, asleep. I turned over. I heard him creaking his joints. When I turned round again, Mum was up, the mat was gone, the room was clean, the mosquito coil was just an aluminium stand and a spiral of ash on the centre table, and Dad was no longer asleep in his chair.
Thirteen
    I LEARNT THAT Dad had gone out early to look for a job. Mum was exhausted from the search, the feast, all the walking, the worrying and the cooking.
    That morning she brought out her little table of provisions to the housefront. She sat on a stool, with me beside her, and dispiritedly crooned out her wares. The dust blew into our eyes. The sun was merciless on our flesh. We didn’t sell a single item.
    In the afternoon, the people that Dad had borrowed from to buy drinks came to collect their money. They threatened to seize Mum’s goods. They hung around till evening. Mum begged them to wait for Dad to get back, but they wouldn’t listen.
    What annoyed Mum the most was the fact that the creditors were people from our compound, who were at the feast, who had gotten drunk on our wine and had thrown up on our window-sill. The loudest amongst them was actually responsible for breaking the back of the chair and destroying two glasses. Another of our creditors, as we learned later, was Madame Koto. She was the only one who did not come to drag for her money. But the others hung around Mum’s stall and spoiled her prospects of business.
    By the evening Mum had begun to cough. Her eyes were inflamed from all the dust and whenever she stood up she staggered. When she went to the backyard she weaved about a little as if her failure to attract customers and shake off the creditors had made her drunk. Then I noticed, when she returned, that her eyes had gone strange. Every once in a while, after crooning despairingly to the indifferent potential customers of the world, her eyes would roll round in their sockets. As the evening wore on, when the winds changed, and a chill insinuated itself into the passing of the sun, Mum began to quiver on her stool, her teeth chattering. She went on stubbornly trying to sell her provisions, quivering under the bad wind, her face taut, her nose