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103 Killings M y father walks into the room with the radio, turning the antenna this way and that. He’s been listening for days, bent over, smoking cigarettes, twisting the tuning knob. “Ssh,” he says. I hear the tune for the World Service, thin and cheerful in the paraffin heavy air. “Ssh.” This is the BBC world news for the 31st July 1966 at twenty hours Greenwich Mean Time. The announcer’s voice is dry and warm as a wool sweater. He is sitting somewhere watching the wind blow English clouds past the window. Following the military coup in Nigeria on Wednesday in which Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon took power, there have been disturbances in the north of the country. Killings and looting are widely reported. Sources in Lagos say the situation is tense. “Oh God,” says my mother, “I hope we’ll be able to get back to Lagos.” “Benin’s a long way west and south of the trouble spots.” “What’s going to happen? This is the second coup this year.” 104 “I don’t know.” He’s rubbing his forehead back and forth with his long fingers, the knuckles thick and wrinkled. “It’s a vicious cycle once it starts, coup and counter-coup, executions and atrocities to go with each one. There’s no knowing where it will end. The best we can hope for is that Gowon will be strong enough to stay on top, and fair enough not to give the Easterners too much to resent, but it’s a Pandora’s box.” “What’s a Pandora’s box?” I ask. “The kind of box you wish you’d never opened.” “Why?” “Because once you’ve opened it you can’t get everything back inside the way it was. It’s time for you two to go to bed.” “Go on,” says my mother, “brush your teeth first.” I fetch the boiled water from the fridge. I look in the mirror when I’m brushing. It’s really happening. It was in the news all over the world. There’s a killing ghost that’s walking in the land. The killing ghost is white, bone white. She smells of dead animals . Under her fur coat she is naked, behind her dark glasses she is blind. There is no color in her eyes. She is walking across the land in her high heels. Babies are impaled on the spikes of her heels. She has no hair, no eyebrows, no hair down there. She rattles skeletons like keys on a chain and hums, she hums as she walks through the land. C y c l e 2 ...

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