Free Dangerous Love by Ben Okri

themselves sharply. His face was shrivelled and his mouth compressed in a delirious passion. One moment Omovo felt warm and loving. The next moment left him with a soft-hued indifference.
    â€˜Where is Blackie, Dad?’
    â€˜It’s not your business. Leave her out of this. I sent her to buy me some milk.’
    Omovo fell silent. He watched his father pace round and round the dining table. And then he remembered many things: his mother dying while his father ran after other women, his brothers thrown out when they questioned him about the aimlessness of their lives. His father stopped pacing and brought up a fresh complaint about how useless all his children were and how unmerciful God had been to him in this respect. He said it with a sad passionate conviction. And over every one of his actions was that impression of acting out a feverish mania.
    The white documents were still on the table. They were in the same position as when Omovo last saw them. Their presence conjured up in Omovo’s mind overdrafts that had been stretched beyond their limits, court cases, teeming creditors, office notices to quit, and unrealised import deals.
    His father raised an ogogoro bottle to his mouth. Omovo sped on to his room as his father put down the ogogoro bottle with a certain dignity and resumed his raillery to the gloom-etched sitting room.
    In his room the events of the day eddied in his mind. He got out his notebook and wrote:
    Ideas take form and haunt me. My drawing was stolen. Today my painting was seized by government officials. Things happening in vicious circles. The portent has acted itself out: a silent drama of losses. This evening I walked through a landscape of nightmares. The night moved from peace to terror. Keme was very hurt. I have never seen him like that before. Dele is to be an unwilling father; he made a remark about Africa killing her young ones. Poor mutilated girl – why did they do this to you? Sacrifice to an African night? What can I or anybody do? Hide? Be anonymous? It’s lousy.
    He paused. Then went on:
    When we were young our parents often frightened us with the darkness. ‘No go there-o. O-juju dey for there,’ they would say. As we grew older the fear was lost on us. We found we could walk through the alleys without the darkness banging us on the head. The day is bright. Everything seems present. We lost our fear of the darkness. But we have never lost our fear of what it possibly contained, its frightful mystery. The ‘O-juju’ takes different shapes in the mind and in the land. Now the ‘O-juju’ has claimed a soul. The earth claims what is left. The water washes the hands...
    He stopped. The act of writing seemed futile. Waves of nausea poured through him and he flung the notebook towards the ceiling in climatic disgust. Constructing a parabola in the air, it hit the wall and brought down some of the snail shells that were dangling there. The shells hit the ground and shattered. The shattering echoed his mind. When it all stopped, he thought: ‘Good. Something unnecessary has been displaced.’
    He got into bed and went to sleep.
    That night he had a dream. He woke up sweating. He reached for his notebook and wrote down the dream as he remembered it. And throughout the rest of the night he could not sleep, or so he thought. But sleep came. Mercifully.

EXTRACT FROM A NOTEBOOK
    I was walking through a dark forest when it happened. The trees turned into mist. And when I looked back I saw the dead girl. She walked steadily towards me. She didn’t have a nose or a mouth. Only a bright pair of eyes. She followed me everywhere I went. I saw a light at the end of the forest and I made for it. I didn’t get there.

1
    Omovo couldn’t escape from the dead girl. She followed him in his dreams and haunted his memory. She reminded him of an event he had witnessed when he was in Ughelli, his home town, during the civil war. He was nine years old. That