Girls at War by Chinua Achebe Page A

which I told him I assumed was for office (as against family) planning, to the great amusement of my crowd. I bustled in and out of my room gaily with my notepaper saying: “Joost wun wish!”
    Yes, near enemies came too. Like our big man across the road, a one-time Protestant clergyman they said, now unfrocked, a pompous ass if ever there was one, who had early in the war wangled himself into the venal position of controlling and dispensing scarce materials imported by the government, especially women’s fabrics. He came like a Nichodemus as I was about to turn in. I wouldn’t have thought he knew the likes of us existed. But there he came nodding in hiswalk like an emir on horseback and trailing the aroma of his Erinmore tobacco. He wondered if I could buy him two bottles of a special pomade for dying grey hair and held out a five-dollar bill. This was the wretch who once asked my girlfriend when she went to file an application to buy a bra to spend a weekend with him in some remote village!
    By forgoing lunch daily in São Tomé I was able at the end of the week to save up from my miserable allowance enough foreign exchange to buy myself a few things including those antihistamine tablets (for I had abandoned in our hasty retreat the bottle that Father Doherty gave me). For Cletus—and this gave me the greatest happiness of all—I bought a tin of Lipton’s tea and two half-pound packets of sugar. Imagine then my horrified fury when one of the packets was stolen on my arrival home at the airport while (my eyes turned momentarily away from my baggage) I was put through make-believe immigration. Perhaps if that packet had not been stolen Cletus might have been spared the most humiliating defeat that sugar was yet to inflict on him.
    Mercy came to see him (and me) the day I returned from São Tomé. I had a tablet of Lux soap for her and a small tube of hand cream. She was ecstatic.
    “Would you like some tea?” asked Cletus.
    “Oh yes,” she said in her soft, purring voice. “Do you have tea? Great! And sugar too! Great! Great! I must take some.”
    I wasn’t watching but I think she thrust her hand into the opened packet of sugar and grabbed a handful and was about to put it into her handbag. Cletus dropped the kettle of hot water he was bringing in and pounced on her.
That
I saw clearly. For a brief moment she must have thought it was some kind of grotesquejoke. I knew it wasn’t and in that moment I came very near to loathing him. He seized her hand containing the sugar and began to prize it open, his teeth clenched.
    “Stop it, Cletus!” I said.
    “Stop, my arse,” he said. “I am sick and tired of all these grab-grab girls.”
    “Leave me alone,” she cried, sudden tears of anger and shame now running down her face. Somehow she succeeded in wrenching her hand free. Then she stepped back and threw the sugar full in his face, snatched her handbag and ran away, crying. He picked up the sugar, about half-a-dozen cubes.
    “Sam!” shouted Cletus across to his houseboy. “Put some more water on the fire.” And then turning to me he said again, his eyes glazed in crazy reminiscence: “Mike, you must tell them the battle I waged with sugar.”
    “He was called Sugar Baby at school,” I said, dodging again.
    “Oh, Mike, you’re no bloody good with stories. I wonder who ever recommended you for the Propaganda Directorate.” The other two laughed. Beads of perspiration trembled on his forehead. He was desperate. He was on heat begging, pleading, touting for the sumptuous agony of flagellation.
    “And he lost his girlfriend,” I said turning brutal. “Yes, he lost a nice, decent girl because he wouldn’t part with half-a-dozen cubes of the sugar I bought him.”
    “You know that’s not fair,” he said turning on me sharply. “Nice girl indeed! Mercy was just a shameless grabber like all the rest of them.”
    “Like all the rest of us. What interests me, Cletus,is that you didn’t find out all