Accra Noir. Группа авторов

       Chop Money

       by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

       Mallam Atta Market

      Limah abruptly lifted her head from the sticky valley of Charles’s chest, stretching to light the wick.

      “My time up already?”

      Limah ignored him, hurriedly reaching for her T-shirt and skirt. Self-consciously, she checked that her head tie was still in place before bending to hand him his uniform and boots. The flame made shadow ghouls of the rubber soles.

      “Do you think I will steal your shoes from your feet?” she half teased, noting his name crudely etched on their inner tongues. Charles thought everyone was out to take something from him. She handed him the boots now, needing him out so she could return the stall to her friend Asana. “I know you have to go back. And I have to clean this place.”

      He wore his rifle like a handbag before retrieving a five-cedi bill. He held the flaccid note over her head. “You said she’s raised the price?”

      “From thirty to fifty thousand.” The Bank of Ghana had moved the decimal point four places over ten years ago because carrying fistfuls of cash, sometimes sacks, in the tens of thousands for groceries or taxi fare had become unwieldy and dangerous. But for Limah, and everyone else who worked in the market, the currency redenomination might as well have never happened. It hadn’t changed the cedi’s value or stemmed inflation.

      “Nothing free in Ghana,” Charles said, almost wistful as he handed her the limp legal tender.

      “No. Nothing.” Limah loosened the padlock at the door, but still Charles lingered.

      “I worry about you here, alone.” He adjusted his beret. The two chevron stripes on his navy shirt’s shoulder band, indicating he was a corporal, were urine yellow in the wick’s light.

      “Didn’t you all catch the rapist?”

      “Is there only one?” He shrugged. “You may see me tomorrow night. Munhwɛ is recording a program here with that comedian Ahmed Razak. The MP has requested extra police presence.”

      She thought of whom she could leave Adama with so she could make more money with Charles. Asana usually watched her son, but tonight her friend wasn’t able to. Adama was with Limah’s fellow kayayei in the storage sheds outside the market, but Limah didn’t like this arrangement: the kayayei were watching the owners’ goods they would pile onto their heads and sell at the market during the day, and watching for armed robbers and rapists with the same eyes that monitored her son. But if she kept making an extra fifty thousand a week—forty after she paid Asana—she could start renting her own stall.

      The thought softened the edges of her impatience. “The Munhwɛ people were here all day giving out flyers for a competition,” she said. “They say the prize is a car and a date with Ahmed Razak.”

      Charles punched diagonal lines into the air and twisted the toe of his boot like he was extinguishing a cigarette, mimicking the azonto dance Razak opened his variety show with. His rifle swayed with the movement. “I hope you’re not entering the contest when you have your own Ahmed Razak right here.”

      She laughed at his poor attempt at azonto, ushering him out. “They want only fat girls to enter. The show is called Am I Your Size?”

      “Heavyweights make the best champions.” It was only Charles’s height that made his massive paunch describable as a boxer’s build. “Let me hear the lock.”

      Limah closed the door and the padlock’s shackle, calculating how long it would take Charles to exit the market before she could return the stall key to Asana and get back to Adama.

      Limah and Asana had an arrangement. On the nights she met Charles, Asana sublet Limah the stall for ten thousand, from ten p.m. to four a.m. But it was the eve of National Sanitation Day and Auntie Muni, Asana’s landlord, would be in early to make a show of cleaning for the Accra Metropolitan Assembly inspectors. They had agreed Limah should be out no later than three a.m. this time.

      Limah quickly folded Asana’s thin foam mattress and pushed it under Auntie Muni’s counter. Then she gathered her pan and the stiff disk of folded cloth she used when carrying it, loaded with customer purchases, on her head. Again, she touched her head tie, feeling through the yellow polyester for the thinning spot in the middle of her pate, remembering how thick her hair had been before she came to Accra last year to kaya.

      Checking for the knife she carried in her handbag—the one she had started sleeping with when Joy FM reported that a rapist was targeting kayayei—she unlocked the stall again. Briskly, she stepped out, her senses sharpened to any presence or sound beyond the ambient snarling of dogs in combat and scampering rats.

      Limah had walked the length of Mallam Atta Market so many times in the last year, she could do it in her sleep. Daily, she shadowed aging madams huffing in the heat, and spry young ones who seemed to stop short at every stall, almost capsizing her pan. Often, she carried for house help dispatched by their madams, some auditioning for a bigger role with insults they believed their bosses would hurl, most drifting too slowly through the rush, shove, and side step of the market, glad to be working remotely. Occasionally, tourists looking for places to stage their vacation selfies gave her a gratuity for carting their personal items on her head. Foreigners tipped the best. Once, one had pressed a ten-cedi note into her hand—one hundred thousand! She was lucky to get more than two thousand from anyone else. With about ten customers a day, she averaged seventy to one hundred thousand a week, most of it going to food, phone credit, and her family back home. Since she had been seeing Charles consistently these past four months, Limah had been able to count on an extra twenty thousand—now forty thousand.

      As she turned the corner, the Adomi Street exit in sight, Limah remembered she had forgotten to blow out the wick. She sucked her teeth and turned back, doubling her pace. When she reached the corner stall, a hand snaked out.

      “You don’t rent this stall.”

      When Limah realized it was Charles who had ambushed her, she had already sunk all but the hilt of her knife into the flesh under his chevrons. With his strong arm, he yanked her by her headscarf. Limah felt the scallop-edged polyester slip past her shoulders as her heart made an uneven rhythm of her breath.

      “I saw you last week, and the week before. You switch places with the one who rents it.”

      Watching Charles pull the knife out of his arm with a pained gurgle, she felt exhausted by her lie. In the beginning, she had hoped their relationship could progress beyond these market nights, but now she realized she had just been deceiving herself.

      Blood spurted from his bicep, surprising them both. “I want the money I’ve been giving you these last four months. Every pesewa.”

      Quickly, she inserted the key and yanked the padlock open, pulling him inside. The flame gyrated with the oxygen the opened door brought in.

      Limah went for the Dettol behind the counter. The bottle held just a splash. She dragged down one of the many pieces of lace packed on the shelf that lined the wall, tore it free from its plastic casing, and soaked a corner of it with the antiseptic. The chemical stench filled the stall.

      Charles whimpered as he struggled to unbutton his shirt. His right sleeve was now dripping rivulets of blood. Limah handed him the Dettol-soaked lace with shaking hands and watched him hurl it across the stall. The wick flickered dangerously.

      “I have to go to hospital,” he said with the weary sobriety of a child forced to admit misbehavior.

      His blood was everywhere. All over his hands. On his trousers. Fat drops on his boots. Smears on Limah’s T-shirt and the scarf that had been on her head. The cracked tile floor, a poor man’s mosaic, was slippery with it.

      “Help me up!” Charles barked.

      Limah was a petite girl, slim and slight. The flame watched her futile attempts to