Pat Kavanagh Prize

The Pat Kavanagh prize is awarded each year for 'outstanding students' on the Goldsmiths MA and presented by United Agents. With a reputation for supporting 'great writing,' Pat Kavanagh was famously encouraging of emerging writers and I was flattered and amazed to have been shortlisted for the prize. Last night I read at the awards ceremony and was stunned again to be awarded second place - I did not expect that one bit! I didn't even know they gave a second prize. Such a confidence boost - brilliant brilliant, brilliant!!

Below is a short extract from my portfolio which I read on the night. The novel is set on the Niger Delta in West Africa and follows the fate of a community on the brink of potentially catastrophic change as a foreign company moves in to drill for oil. It is told from two points of view: a young Nigerian man who is dragged into the conflict that erupts over control of resources, and a British aid worker who observes what's going on from the sidelines initially but who slowly, inevitably becomes implicated in some of the betrayals and violent events that take place. Here's Frankie, the aid worker, when she first arrives off the red-eye from London and has her first glimpse of the country. The Africa of her mind is not the Africa that begins to confront her here...

She must have slept.  Startled by the boom of men’s voices demanding documents from the driver and some payment or other, Frankie raised her body up in the car seat with the heels of her hands and blinked until her vision cleared. Faces loomed at her through the glass. The driver looked straight ahead.

There was a group of five, maybe six, men.  A wooden pole attached to a rope and stuck with nails had been thrown into the road. A Policeman stepped forward and bent down to peer through the driver’s window, the loop of a whip strung at his belt.

‘Morning Madame,’ he said, the sour smell of old liquor wafting from his pores, as he made a show of asking for her papers.

Frankie eyed the rifle that hung at his shoulder, thought of the shock in its barrel, of what might be seen through its sights. A thick vein at the centre of his forehead pulsed as he searched for something to say. Everything was in order, she knew that much, so she pressed herself back in the seat and forced a smile.

Two appeared at the window to her left, eyes crawling over the open lip of her bag. One of them was wrapping a piece of cotton around his finger. Winding it very slowly and tightly, around and around. The officer barked at them over the roof of the taxi, his shirt buttons clicking against the glass as he leaned into the window, fist thumping on the metal above. The men shuffled backwards and the Policeman relented, muttering something about a good impression for ‘our foreign visitors.’ He returned her passport and waved them on.

The driver fingered a clutch of grubby notes through the window as they pulled away.

‘These sticker boys!’ he exclaimed. ‘Always 419ing, sitting in the pockets of the Mopol! You know these Mobile Police?’

Frankie shook her head and caught his eye in the rear view mirror. Seeing herself reflected there, she looked more drained than she’d realised. Her skin had been withered by the flight, fuzz haloed the dark shine of her hair. She’d taken Valium to help her rest on the plane, but the anticipation of arrival had her lapsing in and out of wakefulness all night.

‘They call themselves Police. But thief and go - That’s what they do. And they don’t even care.’ He spat that last word from his mouth and into the windscreen.  ‘All this chopping-chopping, stealing small-small money from men who have nothing. They will spoil your tyres and scatter your papers and demand your money in tax that will line their pockets and keep their bellies full.’

Frankie watched a badge spin from the mirror – an oval of red embossed with gold letters: Jesus is the Reason for the Season. Slowly, she sank down into the scratchy velour of the seat with its faint smell of mildew and the driver’s voice seemed to fade. Her eyes drifted to the world outside as it revealed itself in the light of morning.

There was no big red sunrise like she’d seen in the guidebooks. Instead, a feeble sun staggered into the pale morning sky. People were on the move, coursing down the roadside at the edge of town. Kids wearing only their pants carried water in yellow jerry cans. Women sauntered in bright fabrics bearing wide enamel head-pans brimming with pawpaw and dried fish heads. Ragged chains of teenagers scuffed along in their school uniforms – they ­could have been anywhere.

The taxi passed through shanties: chaotic, dirty jumbles of corroded iron roofs and timber poles festooned with loose cables. Not a mud hut to be seen. Goats skittered in the muck and filth and men beat out scrap metal panels in makeshift roadside workshops. She’d not expected to see litter in Africa, but there it was – scraps of packaging, cans and plastic bags – crushed into the ground and banked up against the brick walls.

‘It’s very colourful,’ Frankie said to the driver, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

They arrived at a junction where a nightclub was kicking out and tall palms swayed overhead in a gathering wind. A young woman, dressed in western clothes with a bottle of brandy in hand, stumbled to the roundabout and slumped down in the lap of a weathered statue that had its arms outstretched in welcome. The woman caught her eye and made her flinch.

She shifted her weight, trying to yield some space between the springs that punched through the cushion beneath her. On the verge, there were two half-built petrol stations on either side of the road, lorry loads of sand parked up out front.

‘To build anything, even roads, the land here must first be filled,’ the driver chuckled to himself. ‘We are raising our own Atlantis.’

A yellow digger chugged off down a track that had been cut into the bush, puffing black plumes into a corner of flat white sky. Female construction workers gathered by a line of trucks. Dressed in t-shirts and flip flops, they made ready to carry heavy loads of cement and hard-core and bricks and sand, winding small crowns of cloth in their hands.  The driver pointed beyond the women to a mansion set back from the road, surrounded by perfect lawns and piles of mud. The building was palatial – all marble and columns and broad stone steps. 

The driver asked if she’d be taking one of the new homes herself and seemed disappointed when she said she didn’t think so.

‘Your company – they will prepare this for you. Wait and see.’

‘No. I’ll be not be living here. I’m going to Akassa,’ she said. ‘Do you know it?’

He pulled his chin into his neck. ‘Akassa? That place down on the Delta at the beachside?’

Frankie nodded.

‘I see.  You are an oil worker.’

‘No,’ Frankie held out the flat of her hand to push back that idea. ‘No – I’m an aid worker. I’ve come here to help.’ As soon as the words came out, she wished she hadn’t said them.

The driver let out a long ‘Ohhhh,’ sound.

‘Now that is a backwater,’ he said gravely. ‘A serious one. And there is too much trouble in that place. You’ll find no fortune there, Auntie. No fortune at all.’