Blackass: A Novel

by A. Igoni Barrett

  As Furo saw it, his black behind was a problem to be solved. The step he was about to take was better than doing nothing. Better than sitting around hoping. His failure or success would come through his own hands, and if he failed, at least he would know he tried. He had no choice in the decision that had got him where he was, but now that he was here, he would steer his own course. On this thought, he stood up from the bed, strode to the vanity table, sat on the stool before it, and picking up cosmetic bottles one at a time, he read their labels. He wasn’t sure what he was searching for, but he knew when he found it.

  The cheapest-looking of the skin-whitening creams was a pink-and-green tube called Lovate Cream. Hydroquinone and octyl methoxycinnamate, and other exotic chemicals only meant that it burned when Furo squeezed out a smidgen and rubbed it on to his wrist. The other whitening creams he found, which were branded more overtly (in one plastic tube, Pale & Lovely Winter Fairness, and in the other ampoule-type bottle, Daudalie Radiance Serum Skin Correction), both left his skin with no sensation more unpleasant than a cool slickness. The descriptions on all three labels promised what he wanted, and he decided against using the facial scrubs and alcohol cleansers he had piled to one side during his search. These strong-smelling potions made no claims to bleaching skin, and the risk of discovery he ran using them seemed much greater than any rewards. He couldn’t imagine what explanation he would give Syreeta as to why his buttocks smelled like her face.

  Pale & Lovely was the largest of the creams, the one that Syreeta was least likely to notice being depleted, and Furo decided he would apply that every morning after his bath, followed by Lovate in the afternoons, and then the smallest bottle, Daudalie, at night. He would be careful with everything, from the amounts of cream he applied to the replacement of the bottles on the vanity table, because he couldn’t let Syreeta find out he was using her whitening creams, as that would only end in the conversation he was avoiding. At the thought of her catching him with his finger in her jars, Furo quickly arranged the table as he had found it, then he took up the Pale & Lovely and squeezed the pinkish cream on to his palm. After he returned the tube, he stood up from the stool and hurried out of the bedroom. In the bathroom he could hear Syreeta singing.

  At Ikoyi passport office, Syreeta waited in the Honda as Furo went in. When he returned with his new passport grasped in his hand, she reached out for it, and after reading the identification page, she handed it back and asked how come his surname was Nigerian. Furo’s answer:

  ‘I’ve already told you I’m Nigerian.’

  ‘But you’re white!’ exclaimed Syreeta.

  ‘So you mean I can’t be white and Nigerian?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying. I’m asking how it happened.’

  This question had been expected by Furo for some time, and over the long weekend he had thought through his answer. He’d considered saying he was mixed race with a Nigerian father and a white American mother, but while that explained his name and his black buttocks, it raised other questions, the most irksome being a white extended family and his lack of ties to the US embassy in Nigeria. The second story he’d considered was that his white family had settled a long time ago in Nigeria and along the line had changed their name, but on further thought that idea seemed absurd and so he discarded it. Nigerians readily adopted European and Arab and Hebrew names. It never happened the other way around.

  The story he settled on appeared to him the most plausible, the least open to rebuttal – it answered every question except that of his buttocks. But then, he told himself, nothing in life is perfect. To Syreeta he said:

  ‘I don’t like talking about it so I’ll just say this quickly. My parents are Nigerians. They lived in America for many years, my father was born there, and while they were over there they adopted me. My mother couldn’t have children. They returned to Lagos while I was still a baby, and they quarrelled when my father married a second wife. My mother took me away, we moved to Port Harcourt, and I haven’t heard from my father in nearly twenty years. My mother passed away last year. I came to Lagos and got stranded. Then I met you. That’s why I have this name. That’s why I have nobody. Now I’m hungry. Can we stop somewhere to eat?’

  ‘Of course,’ Syreeta said, and after she faced forwards and guided the Honda on to the road, she added in a voice hoarsened with awe:

  ‘I didn’t know it was possible for black people to adopt white people.’

  And so it happened that Syreeta stopped over at The Palms to buy lunch at the cafe where she and Furo had met six days ago, and by three o’clock they were back on the Lekki–Ajah highway, in after-work traffic, headed towards her friend’s house in Victoria Garden City.

  Seated beside Syreeta as she steered the Honda through traffic, Furo realised why radio DJs were superstars in Lagos. The car radio was tuned to Cool FM, and many times on the drive from Lekki to Ikoyi to pick up Furo’s passport and back to Lekki for lunch and on to Ajah to visit her friend, Syreeta had danced in her seat and squealed with laughter at the music selections and the banter of a host of DJs who seemed never to run out of something to say. With the Honda now stuck in a monster traffic jam on the outskirts of Ajah, Furo began to think that for the millions of commuters who spent hour after hour and day after day in Lagos traffic with only their car radios for company, these feigned accents and invented personalities became as dear as confidantes. The more he thought about it, the more he was struck by blinding flashes of the obvious, a whole rash of ideas marching into his head to the beats from the car radio. Persistent power cuts in Lagos, in the whole of Nigeria, meant that battery-operated radios were the entertainment appliance of necessity for both rich and poor, young and old, the city-based and the village-trapped, everyone. Radios were cheap to buy and free to use, no data bundles or subscription packages or credit plans, and they were also long-lasting, easy to carry around, available in private cars and commercial buses, and most important, they were independent of the undependable power grid. Mobile phones even came with radios, as did MP3 players; and computers had applications that live-streamed radio; and thinking of it, the rechargeable lamps that everyone owned also had radios built into them. Then again there were those new Chinese toys for the tech-starved: radio headphones, radio sunglasses, radio caps, radio wristwatches. It was endless. Radio was deathless. Radio DJs were superstars.

  Furo lost interest in this line of thinking when the DJ cut the music to announce that it was time to pay the bills so don’t touch that dial. After several minutes of jolly-sounding jingles, most of which seemed aimed at schoolchildren and petty traders, a spanking-new Tuface single was introduced by the DJ, and as the song sprang from the speakers Syreeta threw up her arms and hooted with joy, and then glanced over at Furo with a lopsided grin.

  Syreeta showed a clear fondness for local music. Pidgin hip-hop, Afrobeat electronica, Ajegunle reggae, highlife-flavoured R & B, even oldies disco crooned to a lover named Ifeoma. Nigerian music dominated the Lagos airwaves, and Syreeta seemed to know the lyrics to every song. Rihanna’s anthems might be enjoyed, and Drake’s rap acknowledged with sporadic nods of approval, but when P-Square warbled, Syreeta hollered back. Furo also listened to Nigerian pop – he had two P-Square albums on his old phone – though he couldn’t say he had a particular taste for it. But now, hearing Syreeta sing along to lyrics that preached money and marriage and little else, he found himself hating P-Square a little.

  The song ended, the DJ resumed his adenoidal chatter, and Syreeta said, pointing with a finger straight ahead, ‘See where those buses are turning – and that LASTMA man is just sitting there looking! OK now, I’m going to follow them.’

  Furo stared through the windscreen at the congested road: in the confusion that met his eyes he couldn’t find what Syreeta was pointing at. The road should have resembled a Mumbai train station at rush hour – lines and lines of stilled cars stretching into the distance, armies of hawkers darting about in rag uniforms, the air sluggish with exhaust fumes an
d exhausted breaths – but it didn’t, it had a chaos all of its own. It looked exactly like after-work traffic in Lagos was supposed to look. A sprawling coastal city that had no ferry system, no commuter trains, no underground tunnels or overhead tramlines, where hordes of people leaving work poured on to the roads at the same time as the freight trucks carting petroleum products and food produce and all manner of manufacture from all corners of Nigeria. The roads were overburdened and under-policed, and even in select areas where road-expansion projects were under way, the contracted engineers worked at a pace that betrayed their lack of confidence in the usefulness of their labour. They knew as well as the politicians that Lagos was exploding at a rate its road network could never keep up with.

  The cars ahead revved and spat out smoke, the Honda rolled forwards a few inches, and finally Furo saw the reason this section of the road was gridlocked. Metres ahead, in the middle of the highway, an excavator was breaking blacktop and scooping earth, and at the spot where it heaved and clanged, a new roundabout had been partitioned out with concrete barriers that narrowed the road into a bottleneck. A small band of touts, led by a cap-wearing man, whose white goatee caught the sunlight, had pushed aside one of the barriers, opened a path to the other side of the road – which was free of traffic – and they collected money from any car that squeezed through the breach. It was mostly minibuses that turned off to disgorge passengers and rush back into town, but a few private cars also took the opening. A state traffic warden sat on the tailgate of a patrol wagon adjacent to the breach and calmly watched proceedings. His crisp uniform shirt, the yellow of spoiled milk, was tucked into his beef-red trousers, and his black boots gleamed as he swung his feet back and forth. Heavy-shouldered and round-bellied, he appeared too comfortable in his position, too dapper for roadside work.

  Furo turned to Syreeta. ‘I’ve seen the opening. Do you want to turn around? Aren’t we going to see your friend any more?’

  ‘We are,’ Syreeta replied. ‘See where the petrol station is? VGC gate is right beside it. I’ll cross over and drive by the side of the road till we reach the gate. If I stay here I’ll have to go too far ahead, I’ll have to follow this traffic till after Ajah Junction, then turn around and start coming back. With this go-slow, that will take us at least another thirty minutes.’

  Furo was tired of sitting, his buttocks ached, and yet he wasn’t eager for Syreeta to take the shortcut. He felt too conspicuous to break laws openly.

  He spoke. ‘I don’t trust that LASTMA guy.’

  ‘He won’t try anything,’ Syreeta responded, and turning to smile at Furo, she added in a teasing tone: ‘You white people fear too much.’

  Furo didn’t return her smile. ‘I think it’s safer to stay on the road.’

  Of course Syreeta ignored his warning, and after she forked out two hundred naira for the illegal toll – special fee for special people, white goatee said with a brooding glance at Furo – and drove through the breach, of course the traffic warden jumped down from his perch and bolted forwards to accost the car. Syreeta tried to drive around him, but the man was nimble despite his paunch and he also seemed to have no regard for his life. When he leapt on to the bonnet and bumped his forehead against the windscreen, smearing the glass with sweat, Syreeta braked the car to a stop, pressed the control button for her side window, and yelled out through the opening, ‘Are you crazy? Do you want to break my windshield?’

  The traffic warden made no response as he slid off the bonnet on his belly, this action soiling his shirtfront and dishevelling his tucked-in hemline. Then he dashed to Syreeta’s side and tugged at the door handle, but finding it locked, he squeezed his arm through the window crack and grasped the top rim of the steering wheel with some difficulty. ‘Your key,’ he puffed, and his eyes darted towards the ignition. He blinked as he realised it was out of his reach. Unless Syreeta lowered the glass for him to lean in and grab the key, she was out of his power. The only option open to him was to coerce her into ceding control. These machinations were exposed by the whole range of expressions that played across the man’s features in the instant before he raised his gaze, and as he glowered at Syreeta with his sun-darkened face only inches from hers, his chest rose and sank with each baleful breath that clouded the glass barrier between them. His knuckles bunched on the steering wheel; the edge of the glass dug into the flesh of his upper arm. In a voice whose threatening tone had jumped several notches, he repeated his demand:

  ‘Give me your key, madam.’

  Syreeta gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Are you joking? I’m not giving you anything,’ she said and shook her head in emphasis, then leaned back in her seat, calmly returning his stare.

  ‘You this woman, I’m warning you o, give me the key!’

  ‘Why?’ Syreeta shouted back. ‘Oya, tell me first, what did I do?’

  ‘You don’t know what you did, ehn? OK, I will tell you after you give me the key. Just do as I order. Obey before complaint.’

  ‘No fucking way,’ Syreeta said.

  ‘You’re looking for trouble.’ This said quietly, his tensed forearm trembling through the window. Vapours of cold air wafted out of the car into his shiny face.

  ‘You’re the one looking for trouble,’ Syreeta said. ‘Didn’t you see other cars passing? How come it’s me you want to stop? You think you’ve seen awoof? You better get out of my way if you know what’s good for you!’

  ‘If you move I will show you!’ the traffic warden growled in warning, at the same time shoving his second hand through the window to grasp the steering wheel. His flexing muscles seemed prepared to wrest out the steering wheel, and his expression showed he would try, but Syreeta, to Furo’s growing wonder, didn’t appear in the slightest bothered by the suppressed violence of those arms in front of her breasts. With a mocking laugh she averted her face from the traffic warden and stared straight through the windscreen. It was a deadlock.

  Furo knew there was nothing he could say to defuse the situation, and nothing he could do in his broke state, but still he felt compelled to act. He leaned across Syreeta, met the traffic warden’s hostile eyes, and said in a beseeching tone, ‘Excuse me, oga,’ but Syreeta whirled around and shushed him with a curt ‘No.’ He settled back in his seat. Syreeta was handling this all wrong. She should be ingratiating herself to the traffic warden, not provoking the man to arrest her. With her car impounded she would pay a fine many times larger than the bribe that had prompted the traffic warden to pick on her, while he, for all his scheming and exertions, would get nothing except paperwork to fill.

  The traffic warden broke the silence. ‘Abeg answer me, madam,’ he said in a voice so rude it could pass for a vulgarity, and Syreeta did, she veered her face around and told the man in haughty tones that she would have his job for the embarrassment he was causing her. Furo rolled his eyes in exasperation at her words. But surely she must know what to do, he thought. Nobody who had been in Lagos more than a few hours could remain ignorant of the survival codes, and yet Syreeta flouted rule after rule. The traffic warden had begun shouting the familiar threat that showed he had reached the end of his routine: he demanded to board the car and lead Syreeta to the nearest LASTMA office. Bureaucratic hellholes, LASTMA offices, and if the traffic warden made good his threat then Syreeta would be lucky to retrieve her car before the month’s end. And only after paying a heavy fine as well as settling the bill for mandatory driving lessons and a psychiatric evaluation, this last a precondition for allowing her back into the madness of Lagos roads. Furo felt he had to warn her, and he opened his mouth to do so, but Syreeta spoke first.

  ‘Furo, I’m sorry, please get down from the car.’

  He tried to catch her eyes. ‘This is not the best way—’

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ she cut him off, her right hand cleaving the air in time to her words. ‘I’ll deal with this idiot my own way. Just get down.’

  Sighing in resignation, Furo reached for the door handle, and as he flicked it unlocked, the
traffic warden released his grip on the steering wheel and sprinted around the car’s front. When the man grabbed the open door and yanked it wider, Furo looked at Syreeta. ‘Should I sit in the back?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mind following you to the LASTMA office.’

  ‘No need,’ Syreeta said. Then she noticed the anxiety on Furo’s face, and her expression softened, she curved her lips in a smile intended to reassure. ‘Don’t worry, I have this under control.’ She cast a look at the surrounding area, which was crowded with roadside stalls and noisy from all the people milling about, spilling their feelings into the air. ‘But there’s no place for you to wait around here,’ she muttered, as if chiding herself. ‘Oh, I know. Why don’t you walk to VGC? Go inside and wait for me near the gate. I won’t be long.’

  Behind Furo the traffic warden snorted with derision, and Syreeta threw him a vicious look. Furo spoke quickly to forestall the attack gathering in her face. ‘If that’s what you want,’ he said, and climbed down from the car, then stood watching as the traffic warden jumped in and slammed the door. He heard the harmonised clicks of the car’s central lock, followed by the whirr of Syreeta’s side window closing. When Syreeta and the traffic warden turned on each other with furious faces, Furo spun around and strode away from their muffled yapping.

  Avoiding the curious stares of the pedestrians he passed, Furo walked quickly to the filling station, then cut across its concrete expanse and approached the double gates of Victoria Garden City. Two lines of cars flowed through the estate gates, entering and leaving. In front of the entry gate, right beside the sleeping policeman, stood a private guard. Hands clasped behind his back and feet spread apart, he eyeballed each car that clambered over the bump. He raised his head as Furo approached, and his shoulders stiffened, his features hardened into a scowl. Furo realised there was someone walking behind him. A man wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt, his hair cornrowed, a rhinestone stud glinting in one ear. Furo turned back around, and slowed his steps to a shuffle, unsure if he should walk past the guard or state his business. Deciding on the action least likely to cause offence, he halted by the guard and said, ‘Hello.’