The Power(19)

He undoes his jeans. Slips them down. There’s a little intake of breath around the crowd of women. He turns in a slow circle.

‘No taser,’ says Tunde, ‘on my calf.’

Noor smiles. Licks her top lip.

‘Then you should come with us, CNN. Put your clothes back on and follow.’

He pulls his clothes on hastily and stumbles behind them. She reaches for him and takes his left hand.

‘In our country, it is forbidden for a man and a woman to hold hands in the street. In our country, a woman is not allowed to drive a car. Women are no good with cars.’

She squeezes his hand more tightly. He can feel the crackle of power across her shoulders, like the feeling in the air before a storm. She does not hurt him; not even a flicker of it leaks into him. She pulls him across the empty road to a shopping mall. Outside the entrance, dozens of cars are parked in orderly rows, marked out by red and green and blue flags.

In the upper floors of the mall, Tunde sees some men and women watching. The young women around him laugh and point at them and make a crackle pass between their fingertips. The men flinch. The women stare hungrily. Their eyes are parched for the sight of it.

Noor laughs as she makes Tunde stand well back from the bonnet of a black jeep parked right outside the entrance. Her smile is wide and confident.

‘Are you recording?’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘They do not let us drive a car here,’ she says, ‘but watch what we can do.’

She puts her palm flat on the bonnet. There is a click and it flicks open.

She grins at him. She places her hand just so upon the engine, next to the battery.

The engine kicks on. The car revs. Higher and higher, louder and louder, the motor thudding and screeching, the whole machine trying to escape from her. Noor is laughing as she does it. The noise becomes louder, the sound of an engine in agony, and then a vast, explosive percussion, a great white light out of the engine block, and the whole thing melts, warps down into the tarmac, dripping with oil and hot steel. She grimaces, grabs Tunde’s hand and shouts, ‘Run!’ in his ear, and they do, they run across the parking lot, while she’s saying, ‘Look, film it, film it,’ and he turns back towards the jeep just at the moment that the hot metal hits the fuel line and the whole thing explodes.

It is so loud and hot that for a moment his camera screen goes white, and then black. And when the picture comes back there are young women advancing across the centre of the screen, each of them backed by the fire, each of them walking with the lightning. They are going from car to car, setting the motors revving and the engine blocks burning into a molten heat. Some of them can do it without touching the cars; they send their lines of power out from their bodies and they are all laughing.

Tunde pans up to look at the people watching from the windows, to see what they are doing. There are men trying to drag their women from the glass. And there are women shrugging off their hands. Not bothering to say a word. Watching and watching. Palms pressed against the glass. He knows then that this thing is going to take the world and everything will be different and he is so glad he shouts for joy, whooping with the others among the flames.

In Manfouha, to the west of the city, an elderly Ethiopian woman walks out of a half-built, scaffold-supported building into the street to greet them, her hands held high, calling out something that none of them can understand. Her back is bent, her shoulders hunched forward, her spine humped between her shoulder blades. Noor takes her palm between her two hands, and the older woman watches her like a patient observing a doctor’s treatment. Noor puts two fingers to her palm and shows her how to use the thing that must always have been in her, must have been waiting all the years of her life to emerge. This is how it works. The younger women can wake it up in the older ones; but from now on all women will have it.

The older woman starts to cry when the gentle force of it wakes up the lines of her nerves and ligaments. You can see it in her face on the footage when she feels it inside her. She does not have much to give. A tiny spark jumps between her fingertips and Noor’s arm. She must be eighty years old, and the tears run down her face as she does it again and again. She holds up her two palms and starts to ululate. The other women take it up and the street is filled with the sound, the city is filled with it; the country – Tunde thinks – must be full of this joyful warning. He is the only man here, the only one filming. This revolution feels like his personal miracle, a thing to overturn the world.

He travels with them through the night and records the things he sees. In the north of the city they see a woman in an upstairs room behind a barred window. She drops a note down through the bars – Tunde cannot get close enough to read it, but there is a ripple through the crowd as the message is passed from person to person. They break down the door and he follows them as they find the man who has been holding her prisoner cowering in a kitchen cupboard. They do not even bother to hurt him; they take the woman with them as they gather and grow. In the campus of the Health Sciences department a man runs towards them, firing an army rifle and shouting in Arabic and English about their offence against their betters. He wounds three of the women in the leg or arm and the others are on him like a tide. There is a sound like eggs frying. When Tunde gets close enough to show what has been done, he is perfectly still, the twisted-vine marks across his face and neck so thick that his features are barely discernible.