The Claw

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It took Joanna Marlowe almost an hour to cross from the mainland to Lagos. Beneath a sky the colour of sandy mud the bridge was jammed with cars and bicycles, blaring and ringing and hooting. A few canoes sprouting umbrellas glided across the lagoon, past a lone bedraggled yacht stranded in the drizzle without a hope of wind. Joanna's car was boxed in by a bus called God Save Us and a boastfully shiny black car, driven by a Yoruba man who kept leaning on his horn and chewing a cigar almost as fat as the exhaust pipe. She felt trapped by the thick, muggy heat and the traffic, yet she wasn't anxious to move. Her talk with Isaac had made her afraid to go home.

Beside her, Helen was sulking because she'd been slapped for trying to sound the horn. The little girl crossed and uncrossed her long bare legs, tugged restlessly at her shorts, rolled the window up and down. Now she was snapping the glove compartment, over and over again. Joanna was about to slap her when the bus in front lurched forward. The driver of the shiny car leaned on his horn at once, and Joanna barely restrained herself from walking back and screaming obscenities at him. She no longer felt at all like an anthropologist's wife from Oxford. She wasn't even sure whose wife she was.

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