‘See what they have done to him! God will pay them back!’ Auntie Rosa cried. Uncle Bode got up and walked out to pace the verandah.

They had beaten him all night, shouting questions at his bewildered, whimpering face. Finally they had realized that something was wrong with him. Disgusted, they had dumped him at the psychiatric hospital.

I didn’t stay long with them. I couldn’t continue to stare at that silent, blinking form on the bed any longer. I told them I was going back to school. They said they’d take him to Ibadan for traditional treatment. They said they’d let me know when to come for the burial. But now I had no address. I was simply walking down this deserted road with nowhere to go.

Alice

The last time Lomba had seen Alice, she had been walking away from him towards the cancer ward where her mother lay dying. Now she was right here before him, smiling happily up at him in a bridal dress. Someone had placed a full-page notice to announce the happy event – only Alice didn’t look that happy. He brought the newspaper closer to his face and peered into the eyes, the lips, the bouquet. The smile from this close was a grimace, the edges of the petals were curling, drying – but it was the eyes that gave him more hope. They told him all he needed to know: that Alice still loved him. They weren’t looking at the camera, nor at the groom beside her; they were looking past the camera, beyond it, at the congregation in the church hall, and he had no doubt that it was him she sought.

And when you looked and hoped and waited and finally realized that I was never going to come, that you had just made a final, irrevocable choice – ‘I do’ – did you not break down and cry?

Like that day when she had walked away from him in the evening gloom towards the cancer ward – she had had tears in her eyes. One thing he knew of her: she wasn’t scared of making hard decisions, even if they caused her tears. Was that what had made him want her in the first place? He could not remember now – there was her sheer overpowering beauty, of course, but that was not it. If you knew Alice for an hour you’d know that the beauty wasn’t just it. There was something else. What makes art collectors pine and ache with longing the moment they see a rare work they just have to have? But even that, Lomba knew, was a poor analogy. This was soul calling to soul. A tired, trapped lock at last meeting the key that unlocks it.