WORDS FOLLOW ME: What the ocean hears

It was a Sunday afternoon in November and everyone was getting his hustle on. Riders went back and forth on the boardwalk, eyeing tourist quarry, nudging their horses (brown, dun, albino) all the way down to the tarred lot. “Parking attendants” of every stripe harassed new arrivals.

The late afternoon sun scissored the waves. In the far distance, an armada of container ships, grey in the slant light, lined the horizon, awaiting processing at Apapa Port and Tin Can Island. The heavy waves slammed themselves against Bar Beach. It was a dangerous-looking tide, ill-suited to this country in which most people can’t swim. The Canon was slung across my neck, its single black eye looking for those unseen geometries of everyday life.

I trudged across the sand, towards the familiar waterline. There appeared, on the last large dune before the water, a single red flag on a pole and, under it, a white-garment couple at prayer. They had just finished when I met them. The man, caught at the moment in which his long satin robe was arrested at his torso, its unfilled limbs flapping in the wind, was like a pillar of fire. The woman’s cotton dress was secured with a blue sash. Her white cap set off her coal black face against the sky.

“Mr Photographer, take our picture now,” she said. I smiled, and obliged with a few quick shots. “So, how do we get these ones?” I asked if she had an email address, and she answered with incredulous laughter, and said she thought I had a portable printer with me. The man had finally fit into his robe, and took up his bag and prayer bell. Compared to her, he seemed weirdly shiny, and a touch ostentatious.

As I left them and continued on my way across the dune, a pair of riders approached me. Their horses inched closer, too close for comfort I suddenly realised. “Why you dey snap us?” “What?” “You dey snap us. Why you dey snap us?” A sudden tension was injected into the afternoon. The horses circled. Their hoofs raised little clouds of dust. “You no pay money, and you dey snap.” “My guy, I no snap you now. Na ocean I dey snap.” I gestured to the horizon. “Na my fault say your horse enter the snap?” They regarded me with mute skepticism. They wanted money, and there was none to be had. They tired of the game, turned their horses around, and rode away.

Of course, I’d been shooting them. The horses, the sea, the irresistible lure of shapes and angles: it was the whole point of the exercise. But five minutes later, another man came up to me, another visitor to the beach, and this time there was no question of money. “Why were you taking my picture? I saw you pointing your camera at us?” He’d been sitting with his girlfriend, at some distance from the main crowds on the beach.

“Why would I take a picture of you, for God’s sake?” I was exasperated. Everyone was so brittle, so ready to take offence at anything. In this case, I hadn’t shot him, nor would it have crossed my mind to do so. In fact, I had barely noticed them. “Give me your camera. I want to review the pictures.” I was ready to do so; I had nothing to hide. All he would see would be pictures of horses and sand and the aladura couple.

But I detested the feeling of being commanded. Something in Mr Loverboy’s vehemence made me surmise that the woman with him was someone he didn’t want to be seen with. A mistress, perhaps.

An all-terrain vehicle roared past us, racing down beach, keeping to the far line of the tide where the sand was most compacted. It had wide tyres and an open frame. “Show off,” Mr Loverboy said. “A real idiot,” I added, “Awon ni won ba’lu je.” (They are the ones spoiling the country). The mistress had come up to us. She wore a red tank-top which rose at the waist to reveal the tiny scoop of her navel. She joined the jeers.

Then the all-terrain vehicle stopped. It was about three hundred meters from us, right at the edge of the shore. It was stuck. The driver revved it, but the compacted sand gave way, and the vehicle was mired deeper. By now, there was laughter all around the beach, and people were stopping to watch. Someone shouted, “You see yourself?” A big wave came in and inundated man and car. The man jumped out and grabbed the iron-frame of the vehicle and tried to pull it away from the ocean’s edge. It wouldn’t budge. He struggled for a minute or so, frantic, to the sound of mocking voices. A second wave rammed the shore and, in one of those surreal moments that the eye doubts even as it witnesses it, man and car both rose on the water.

They floated. The man was still holding on to car, still fighting to save it. Both were lofted out on the receding wave.

Laughter ceased. The driver let go of the vehicle and the ocean swallowed it, neat, as one would an appetizing morsel. It was evident the man couldn’t swim. He flailed, fighting for his life. And only then, as the crowd gasped, and as yet another giant wave crested, did a swimmer in black trunks go in after him. The struggle was alarming but brief. In the end, in the space of a minute or so, his limp but still-living body was dragged out of the Atlantic and onto shore. The vehicle was gone without a trace. It was as though it had never even been there.

People had now gathered from all over the beach. The story was passed excitedly from those who’d seen it to those who hadn’t. A man, walking by us, said, “Just ten minutes ago, a child was rescued on the other side of the beach, over there. He chased a ball into the water, and the divers brought him out.” Only then did it occur to me that I had a camera, and might have recorded the whole thing.

Afternoon had deepened and the stain of approaching night was already visible at the eastern edges of the sky. An old man selling trinkets clambered purposefully across the dunes towards me and—as though he had been sent with a message, as though he were indeed the chorus in this callous sport of the gods—cleared his throat and said, “Ocean no dey hear English. Ocean no dey hear Yoruba. Ocean no dey hear Igbo. Ocean no dey hear Edo. Ocean no dey hear Indian.” He raised his rheumy eyes towards the prone figure on the shore. “The thing wey ocean dey hear, him no fit talk.”