Free Dangerous Love by Ben Okri Page B

letter several times, hoping to perceive the light he had failed to reach in his dream, hoping to see a portent of life that Umeh had hinted at on the day they were leaving. But Omovo only saw self-destruction. When he put down the letter he knew that his brothers’ lives out there would always be hidden from him, and what he perceived as their degradation would always haunt him. But when he read his brother’s poem Omovo felt something else: a quickening intelligence of possibilities.
    When I was a little boy
    Down the expansive beach I used to roam
    Searching for strange corals
    And bright pebbles
    But I found sketches on the sand
    While voices in the wind
    Chanted the codes of secret ways
    Through the boundless seas.
    The poem spoke to Omovo: and he spoke to the poem. Reaching back in memory in an attempt to connect the scattered threads of their lives and to weave a pattern, he thought: ‘Life has no pattern and no threads. Is it futile trying to weave something through this maze?’
    Unable to answer the question he got up, and went to the kitchen and dug out his food that had been placed indifferently on the top shelf of the filthy cupboard. He moved as if in a daze. He ate his breakfast absent-mindedly. His food was eba, and it was rather too heavy for the morning. It was full of lumps which crumbled into grains of uncooked garri when he took a handful. The soup was cold and the oil had congealed. The breakfast was tasteless but it was manageable. He swallowed the eba with difficulty.
    As he ate without pleasure, he thought about his last dream. He remembered it only as dislodged images and as words he had written in his notebook. His mind turned round on its hazy axis and soon he felt the throb of an impending headache.
    He brought his mind reluctantly to the immediate realities of his life. He looked down and saw the cracks on the eba plate. The white coating of the soup bowl had peeled off and its metal was rusted. Omovo picked up the only piece of meat in the soup and threw it into his mouth. It could easily have been a hard piece of rubber. He looked around the sitting room. It served also as a dining room and was partitioned by a little bookshelf. His mother had bought it a long time ago when they were in Yaba, and now it was the only piece of furniture in the room which had any distinction.
    The sitting room was scantily furnished. There were four cushion chairs. Their bodywork was multi-coloured with age and use. They creaked like barely suppressed farts whenever anyone sat down. The coverings of the cushions were a faded red. They were washed every fortnight by Blackie. Omovo made out a couple of holes on one of the cushions. The holes, dark green, revealed the colour of the original cloth beneath the faded covering.
    Between the two sets of chairs was an over-large centre table. The one that used to be there was broken the day Umeh and Okur left home. Omovo wasn’t sure if it was Umeh who had stumbled backwards and fallen on the table when his father whipped him. But Omovo remembered the day his father brought home the new over-large centrepiece. There was an ‘I-have-managed-and-I-can-damn-well-manage-alone’ expression on his face. When he placed the centre table between the chairs it shrank the available space. It was hilariously large. The expression on his face changed. He shrugged his shoulders and said, in a manner of adjustment: ‘Well, it’s big... Good. We need some big things in this house. Yes.’
    Omovo later found out that his father had acquired it second-hand from a carpenter near the Alba market. The surface had now acquired multiple scratches, burns and stains; the brunt of indifferent usage. One of the legs was now shorter than the others. It was broken during one of his father’s parties when a drunken visitor stumbled upon it. But the carpenter, rather crooked in his measurements, fitted a shorter leg and requested more money if the right size was