Furo sat as still as a photograph: Syreeta looked like an explosion waiting to happen. Whatever was going on between her and her boyfriend wasn’t his business. Especially as Syreeta seemed intent on involving him. He hoped she knew where she was taking this game of hers.
There was a loaded silence as the other man did all the talking, and he seemed to be saying the right words, because Syreeta’s face began shedding its tension – her mouth, at some point, parted in a reluctant smile – and when she spoke her tone was calm. ‘I’m not at home.’ She listened and then retorted: ‘You should have thought of that before you stood me up. I have to go back to my friend. Call me tomorrow if you want.’ Ending the call on that dagger thrust, she tossed the phone on to the settee, but after a moment’s thought she snatched it up, pressed down the power button until the screen went blank, and then slipped it into her handbag. She yawned and stretched, throwing her arms wide and her legs forwards. Her yawn morphed into a grin. ‘Let’s get ready for your massage,’ she said to Furo. And in a serious tone: ‘But you have to bathe first. You smell of Lagos.’ Gathering up her handbag and the plastic bag of food, she rose to her feet and strode to a door, nudged it open, flicked a switch, and then spoke from the lighted doorway. ‘Give me a few minutes to dress the bedroom. You can start removing your clothes.’
With Syreeta out of sight, Furo cast a look around him, hoping to get a sense of this creature from her den. Her house seemed clean enough, there were no cobwebs in the ceiling corners and the paint job was unsmirched under the light switches. He also noticed that the parlour was furnished with mismatched items, none of which seemed handed down. The settee on which he sat was upholstered in blue corduroy, and the rest of the sitting arrangements, two armchairs, were vermilion chintz. The chairs were cardinal points to the magnetic centre of a round black table, with the settee taken as south and the armchairs as east and west; and due north, up against the facing wall, stood a pinewood cabinet stacked with electronics: glossy black widescreen TV, ceramic-white DVD player, green-and-silver stereo, and a DSTV decoder in metallic plastic. Everything spoke of new money and no eye for colour planning.
Reconnaissance finished, Furo bent down, undid his laces, and removed his shoes. Wrinkling his nose at their fungal stink, he dropped the shoes out of sight behind the settee. Then he gathered all the banknotes in his pockets (two thousand and ninety naira, as Syreeta had paid his bill at the cafe and let him keep Igoni’s money) and folded the lot into his wallet. He stood up to undress, and then piled his shirt and trousers on the rug along with his soiled handkerchief. After placing his wallet and folder on the centre table, he sat down again in his boxer shorts and singlet and resumed inspection of the apartment. The floor from wall to wall was covered in a thick fawn rug. The ceiling was white plaster, the walls were painted blue, and he counted four doors leading out of the parlour. One opened to the kitchen, another to Syreeta’s bedroom, and the third bore a sticker that announced: In this house the toilet seat stays down! The fourth door he assumed led to another bedroom, which meant that Syreeta either had a flatmate or the space for one. He was sucking his teeth over this discovery when a movement caught his eye from the lighted doorway, and he turned his head to see Syreeta standing there, unclothed except for sheer black panties. Her breasts were smaller than he’d imagined. Her areolas were the darkest part of her. Her navel was a deep hole from which no light escaped. Her voice broke his concentration.
‘Don’t tell me you plan to bathe in your underwear.’ She stepped forwards and tossed a towel at him. ‘Wrap that if you’re feeling shy.’ Walking towards the bathroom, she said over her shoulder, ‘I hope you don’t mind cold water,’ and after the bathroom light came on, Furo heard the splash of running water, followed by her voice: ‘Come in when you’re ready.’ She was brushing her teeth over the washbasin, her braids swinging to the fierce motion of her hand. Furo watched her with sidelong glances from the doorway, until he saw she didn’t mind, and then he looked openly, his eyes stopping at the twin dimples above the swell of her buttocks, like a creator’s finger marks. From slender ankles to straight calves to the deep curve of her back she had the carriage of an athlete, but in her hips she was as soft as a mother.
‘Stop staring at my ass,’ she said as she finished gargling. She picked out a cellophane-wrapped airline toothbrush from a tumbler on the washbasin ledge and handed it to Furo. While he squeezed out toothpaste, she climbed into the shower stall and ran water from the tap into a bucket. Then she watched him in turn until the bucket ran over. She closed the tap, stepped out of the stall, and on reaching the bathroom door, she gave a final instruction:
‘Hurry up. I don’t like waiting.’
There was no light in the parlour when Furo emerged from his wash. Treading the darkness, he arrived at the bedroom door and knocked before opening. The bedroom was also unlit and the hum of an air conditioner tickled the silence. Furo stood in front of the door, unsure of where to turn, and he shivered in that spot until Syreeta said, ‘You don’t talk much, do you?’
Turning in the direction of her disembodied voice, he moved forwards till his leg struck wood. He bent down and felt around in pit-bottom darkness: his hand found a mattress before touching skin. ‘Lie down,’ Syreeta said, the bed swaying as she moved aside. He climbed in and lay on his back, and her hand brushed his scalp, bumped his nose, and clasped his chin. When she said, ‘Turn over,’ he rolled on to his belly. He felt her fingers searching around his waistline. With a sure-handed pull she removed his boxers, and throwing her thigh across him, straddled his back. Through the shock of her weight on him he heard the rasp of a bottle cap before his senses were sent scattering by a perfume so strong, so sweet that a mournful sigh eased from his lips at the same instant he felt the splash of liquid on his back. And then Syreeta’s hands – rubbing, spreading the oil into his skin. He groaned when her fingers gripped his neck.
‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’ she said as her hands worked. ‘Just relax.’ She began to hum.
Furo lost count of all the times he gasped and grunted as she squeezed and thumped his neck and shoulders. The dig of her fingers, the scratch of her pubis, the grip of her knees on his ribcage, every sensation pinpricked his nerves. When she lay down on him – her tender-skinned breasts squashed against his back, her oil-slicked legs entangled with his, her breath brushing his nape – the pleasure grew so intense that it squeezed from his eye corners. He pressed his face into the pillow and caught his breath, but still the sobs burst out, each one racking his shoulders.
Syreeta halted all movement when she realised Furo was crying. She remained quiet awhile, as if uncertain for the first time how to respond to his foreignness; and then, bringing her lips close to his ear, she whispered, ‘Let it out.’ She pushed her arms under him, linked her hands around his chest, and in that position they were both soon rocked to sleep.
It was still dark when Furo awoke. The bedroom curtains were parted, the air conditioner no longer sounded, and the world was swathed in that bottomless silence particular to wildernesses and power cuts. Furo realised what had roused him when Syreeta shook him again.
‘I’m awake.’ He pushed aside the bedcover and sat up. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘You sleep like a dead man.’ Her voice was sleep-husky. ‘It’s almost six. Don’t you have to get ready for work?’
It took him a moment to realise she didn’t mean sex. ‘No.’
‘You don’t have a job?’
‘I do. But I start in two weeks.’
‘Oops, sorry,’ and her yawn drifted into his face. After she lay down, he asked, ‘Do you want to go back to sleep?’
‘Not really. Why?’
‘Can we talk?’
‘Uh-huh.’ She rolled around to face him in the darkness. ‘I’m listening.’
‘How many bedrooms are in this house?’
‘Two.’
‘Do you live alone?’
She hesitated before saying, ‘Yes.’
‘What of your boyfriend? Doesn’t he—’
She cut him short. ‘That’s none of your business.’
‘I’m sorry, I just meant …’ His voice trailed off. He took a deep breath and tried again. ‘What I meant to ask was: does anyone use the second bedroom?’
‘No. It’s my guest room.’
Through the window, the sky’s edges were turning mauve. The darkness was lifting.
‘Why are you asking? Do you want to live with me?’
Furo jumped on the chance. ‘Well, yes,’ he said. Syreeta said nothing; he wished he could see what she was thinking. ‘Please,’ he continued. ‘I don’t have anyone else to ask for help. I just need somewhere to stay for a few days, till I start work.’ And still she remained silent. In the distance Furo could hear the highway, the honks that marked its trail. He began to count time, his lips moving in silent prayer. Ten seconds, twenty – time was going too fast, so he slowed his keeping – eighty-four seconds by his tally before she spoke.
‘I don’t know anything about you. Except that you’re white. And that you say you’re Nigerian.’ In a gentler tone: ‘And that you’re a softie. Lagos will kill you.’ She raised her hand, ran her fingers through her braids, and the scent of sleep-tousled hair drifted to Furo. ‘I went and sent your picture to my man last night,’ she said with a sigh. ‘What will I say when he finds out you’re staying with me?’ She sighed again. ‘I knew you would ask. I heard you asking that guy in the cafe last night.’ The bed shifted as she adjusted. ‘OK, you can stay.’
‘Thank you,’ Furo said, his voice breaking from the weight of his gratitude. ‘Thank you,’ he repeated, ‘thank you, Syreeta.’
Furo couldn’t help admitting that some part of his gratefulness was due to his new appearance. Syreeta was helpful to him because he looked like he did. He was almost sure of that, because why else would she do all she had for him? She had paid his bill at the cafe, allowed him into her bed, massaged him to sleep last night, and now, at some risk to her relationship (odd affair though that was, one where she made her man jealous by sending him a staged photo of herself in the arms of another man), she had solved his problem of a place to stay. He was grateful to her, and yet he was also mindful of who she thought he was and why women like her usually moved with men like him. Her big new jeep, her well-furnished apartment in Lekki, her living alone in style and among gadgets, her ease with money and trendy places, her apparent lack of an office job or a homerun business, all of these pointed to her status as woman who knew what was what. A woman who knew how to handle men. Who knew how to live off them. Who knew the going value of a white man in Lagos. And Furo, for all the street savvy and survivor skills he prided himself on, had no idea where Syreeta was leading him.
The sky had faded into a seashell blue. Birdsong assailed the air. Voices shouting in greeting filled the streets. A nearby car vroomed into life. A new day rising.
Syreeta rose with the day, strolled across to her cluttered vanity table, and stooped beside it to open a cabinet fridge. She straightened up and turned around to face the bed with a Five Alive carton clutched in her hand. Left arm akimbo, she threw back her head and gulped from the carton. Red juice spilled down her chin, flowed between her breasts and into the trimmed V below her belly. With an ‘Ah’ of pleasure she pulled the carton from her lips, and looking at Furo, she raised it to him in question. When he nodded yes, she said: ‘Come and get it.’
She watched with a knowing smile as Furo searched through the rumpled bedclothes for his boxer shorts. Giving up, he swung his legs to the rug and stood up, his hands hanging down by his sides. Her smile widened to reveal teeth as he walked towards her. He reached for the juice carton, but at the last moment she whipped it behind her back. ‘I have some rules in this house,’ she said. ‘You’ll wash your own plates. You won’t drop rubbish on my floor or leave your clothes scattered about. You’ll do your own share of the housework. You must inform me whenever you plan to stay out late. And if you ever bring a woman into this house—’ She left the threat hanging and stared him in the eye. ‘I hope we’re clear?’
‘Very clear,’ he said.
‘It’s just better for you to know my rules from the start,’ she said, holding his gaze, ‘so we don’t have trouble later.’ She glanced down at his crotch and gave a soft laugh. ‘As for that one, I don’t know o. It’s now complicated. We’ll see how it goes. Here, have some juice, maybe it will cool you down.’ Still laughing, she brushed past him as he raised the carton to his lips.
Furo’s eyes avoided the vanity table in front of him, the tall mirror affixed to it. Through the window above the fridge he saw the morning face of the sun suspended in the cold-coloured sky, and behind him he heard Syreeta tumble into bed. Then a muffled scream punched the air, and Furo, coughing up juice, whirled around to find Syreeta staring. She raised her hand, pointed a stiffened finger at his groin, her movements slow, her eyes rounded as she said:
‘What happened?’
He glanced down in fear. ‘What?’
‘Your ass, your ass! I mean your ass!’
Furo spun around, saw his reflection; then turned again and looked over his shoulder.
‘Your ass is black!’ Syreeta cried, and as Furo stared in the mirror, frozen in shock, she flung up her arms, flopped on her back, and wailed with laughter.
@_IGONI
The ice cream you see in TV commercials is actually mashed potatoes.
—@UberFacts Furo
Furo Wariboko persisted in my thoughts after I left him at the mall, and so I did what everyone does these days: I Googled him. The search results pointed me to either Facebook or Twitter, and since I was no longer on Facebook (I deleted my account after I started receiving homophobic messages over my personal essay on wanting to be a girl), I followed the Twitter links. Now is the time to admit this: from the first moment I saw Furo I suspected I’d found a story, but it was when I heard him speak that I finally knew. A white man with a strong Nigerian accent, stranded in Lagos without a place to stay, without any friends to turn to, and with a job as a bookseller for a company so small I hadn’t heard of it? Even if I hadn’t met the hero myself, hadn’t gleaned the details directly from the source, and even if I had plucked the whole fiction out of the air, there was no way in hell the writer in me was going to miss the rat smell of the story. What I didn’t know though was the scale of the story. For that discovery I have Twitter to thank. It was there that I found out about the Furo who had gone missing in Lagos one day before I met my Furo. And it was from the tweeted photos of that lost Furo that I realised my own Furo used to be black.
Furo’s story didn’t emerge abracadabra-quick. It took me some time to weave the fragments I gathered from Twitter into any sort of narrative. (The thing with Twitter is: to get what you want from it, you first have to give it what it wants. As with most social networking platforms, the currency on Twitter is the users who sign up and the content they generate. Every currency holds value for someone somewhere, whether that value is based on gold or the stock market or, in the case of Twitter, popularity; that blanket word, which, for the pinpoint purpose of metaphor, I will now proceed to formularise as P = U x C x T. Extrapolating this to Twitter, popularity equals ‘500 million users’ multiplied by ‘content generated by users’ multiplied by ‘time spent on Twitter by users’. Yes, time – the terminus of all rigmaroles.) And so I, @_igoni, spent bundles of time on Twitter. Hours spent lurking on the timelines of virtual strangers. Hours spent snooping through megabytes of diarrhoeic data. But my investment paid off, I got what I wanted, I found @pweetychic_tk, whom I realised was Furo’s sister as I read this tweet of hers:
Pls help RT. This is my missing bro Furo Wariboko in the pic. He left home Monday morn & no news of him since. pic.twitter.com/0J9xt5WaW
I followed her on Twitter, of course, and going through her timeline hour after hour and day by day, reading her tweets for hidden meanings in her abbreviations and punctuation choices, and searc
hing for mood flaggers like what news stories she retweeted and favorited, and monitoring her movements from the geotagging of her shared photos and videos, I began to get some insight into a part of Furo’s story that cannot be told better than by the family he left behind.
@pweetychic_tk: Wednesday, 20 June
09:08 | Hello Twitter! #myfirstTweet
09:10 | Pls help RT. This is my missing bro Furo Wariboko in the pic. He left home Monday morn & no news of him since. pic.twitter.com/0J9xt5WaW
09:26 | RT ‘@RubyOsa: My cousin @pweetychic_tk has just joined Twitter. #Follow her. Her big bro got lost in Eko 2 days ago!’ Thanks Ruby.
10:14 | @RubyOsa Furo is also on Twitter. His handle is @efyouaruoh
10:31 | Thanks! RT ‘@lazyeyedben: Hello @pweetychic_tk. I dig your pic. I’m now #ffing.’
11:01 | I’m fed up with this ASUU strike. 2 whole months without school!
14:37 | I’m hungry.
14:59 | Without @efyouaruoh the house is lonely. Mum & Dad are looking for him. I’m getting afraid. Maybe something has really happened.
16:35 | I’m starting a hashtag for my missing bro. See the attached picture for details. #Furo needs us! (RT if you have a heart.) twitpic.com/bz7htc
17:52 | RT ‘@RICHnaijakids: Lord in heaven, you’ve been good to me. Finally found the Air Retro 7s Bordeaux http://tmblr.co/ZX-9nta1U9bm’
17:55 | @RICHnaijakids Enjoy your riches oh. But we KNOW your fathers. #corruptleaders
18:58 | Today is K’s birthday. I should call him. I should be the bigger person. But I won’t.
19:41 | Mum & Dad just got back from the police. They’ve still not heard anything about Furo.
19:59 | I ask Mummy a simple YES or NO question & she gives me a 20-minute speech!
Blackass: A Novel Page 7