Highlife

The letter from Lagos came on a Tuesday in August, 1938, in the rainy season, and Elias's father read it aloud at the table under the hurricane lamp while the rain came down on the iron roof like gravel thrown by the handful.

"Dear Brother," he read. "I have spoken to Mr Ogunleye at the shipping agency on the Marina, who is a member of my church and owes me a kindness over some printing, and there is a place for a junior clerk, beginning the first of September, at two pounds ten shillings a month, rising. The young one may lodge with us in Ebute Metta. Morenike says he must bring his own mat. Your brother in Christ, Folarin."

He folded the letter, and laid it beside his plate, and looked across the table at Elias.

Elias had known it was coming. Everybody had known. Elias was seventeen, and had finished at the Grammar School with a good report and a better handwriting, and in Abeokuta, for a young person with a good report and a better handwriting, there was the Church, or the Native Authority office, or the railway, or teaching, or Lagos. And Elias's father, who was a catechist and a schoolmaster and the most respected man on their street, had decided some time ago that it would be Lagos.

"Two pounds ten," said Elias's mother, from the end of the table, where she sat with her hands still faintly blue at the fingertips from the indigo vats in the yard. She had been an adire dyer all her life, as her mother had been, and her hands were never quite clean of it, and Elias had never in his life seen her hands without that faint blue shadow in the creases of the knuckles, like a map of a river. "Rising."

"Rising," said Elias's father firmly. "It is a respectable position. Mr Ogunleye is a respectable man. The agency handles cargo for three steamship lines. In five years, with diligence, there could be a place as a senior clerk. In ten, perhaps, something more." He looked at Elias over his spectacles. "It is a door, Elias. Not every young person in Abeokuta is offered a door."

Elias said, "Yes, Baba," because there was nothing else to say, and looked down at the plate of eba and egusi, and thought about the guitar.

It was under Elias's bed, wrapped in an old wrapper of his mother's, behind a box of schoolbooks. It was not a good guitar. It had been made by a carpenter in Ibadan for a palm-wine player who had died, and it had come to Elias two years ago, by a long road, for three shillings and a promise, from old Gbenga, who played at the palm-wine shed at the bottom of the hill behind the market every evening, and had played there, people said, since before the British came, and who had taught Elias everything Elias knew, three evenings a week, for two years, in secret.

Elias's father did not know about the guitar. Elias's father did not approve of palm-wine music. It was music for drunkards and idlers, he said, played in sheds by men who had nothing better to do, and it led to drinking, and to worse, and a catechist's child had no business being anywhere near it.

So Elias had learned in secret, at the shed. Old Gbenga played with his eyes shut, very softly, a rocking, rolling, two-finger music that went round and round like water going round a stone, and sang in a cracked high voice about women and money and death and the price of kerosene, and every now and then, without opening his eyes, he would stop and reach out and move one of Elias's fingers on the strings a quarter of an inch, and grunt, and go on.

"You have ears," he had said once, at the very beginning, the first time he heard Elias pick out one of his songs on the guitar. "Ears are the only thing nobody can teach. The rest is only work."

And last week, when Elias had told him about Lagos, he had been quiet for a long time, and then said: "Lagos. Good. In Lagos there is music you have not heard yet. New music. From the Gold Coast, from the ships, from the gramophones. Music that has not got a name yet." He had played a few notes, softly, with his eyes shut. "Go and hear it. Then come back and tell me what it sounds like."

Now, at the table, Elias's father picked up the letter again and read it through a second time, as if it might have changed.

"You leave on Saturday," he said. "The morning train. Your mother will pack your box." He paused. "You will take your Bible, and your good shirt, and your school report, and your mat. You will not need anything else."

Elias put down the spoon.

"Baba," said Elias. "There's something else I want to take."

The table went quiet.

"I have a guitar," said Elias.

Elias's father did not move. His face, under the hurricane lamp, did not change at all. It only went still, the way it went still in church during the long silence before the blessing.

"I've had it two years," said Elias, going on before his courage could run out. "Old Gbenga taught me. At the palm-wine shed. I don't drink. I've never drunk. I go for the music. He says I have ears." Elias took a breath. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I knew you wouldn't like it. I'm telling you now because I'm going to Lagos, and I don't want to go with a lie in the box."

The silence went on for a long time. Elias's mother looked down at her blue hands.

At last Elias's father took off his spectacles, and folded them, and laid them beside the letter.

"Two years," he said at last, very evenly. "You will be a clerk on the Marina. You will be at your desk at eight o'clock every morning, sober and in a clean shirt, and you will work as hard as any clerk in Lagos, and you will send your mother five shillings every month without fail. And you will go to church every Sunday with your uncle." He put his spectacles back on. "What you do with your evenings is between you and God. I do not like it. I will not pretend to like it. But I will not have it said that I sent my child to Lagos without the one thing my child loves." He picked up his spoon. "Take the guitar."

Elias's mother, at the end of the table, put her blue hand over her mouth, and her shoulders shook, and Elias could not tell whether she was laughing or crying, and thought, probably, both.

The train left Abeokuta at seven o'clock on Saturday morning, under a low grey sky, with a long blast on its whistle that sent the egrets up out of the trees by the line in a white cloud.

Elias sat by the open window of the third-class carriage, on a wooden bench, with the box at his feet and the mat rolled on the rack overhead and the guitar, wrapped in his mother's old wrapper, held upright between his knees. Through the window, the town went past and fell behind: the great grey hump of Olumo Rock above everything, where the Egba people had hidden from their enemies a hundred years ago; the market, already crowded; the indigo pits behind the houses in Elias's mother's quarter, with the cloths hung out to dry on the lines above them in long blue banners, every shade of blue, from the colour of the sky at noon to the colour of the sky at midnight.

And the rain, starting again, slanting in at the window, so that Elias had to pull the shutter half down and sit in the warm, rattling, crowded gloom of the carriage, among the market women and the soldiers and the clerks and the chickens in baskets, with the wheels going round underneath, and the guitar between his knees, and Lagos ahead.

Somewhere around Agege, a man across the aisle took out a mouth organ and began to play, and a woman began to sing, and then half the carriage was singing, clapping, swaying with the train, a song Elias did not know, about a girl who went to Lagos and came back with a gold tooth and no husband. Elias listened to it for a long time. Then, very carefully, without unwrapping it entirely, Elias found the strings of the guitar under the wrapper with his fingers, and began, very quietly, to play along.