“Atmosphere.”
THE NIGHT WEST PRESENTS aired, Ahmed was invited to the Strand and introduced to the crew. The cameraman he thought affectedly uncouth. His beard grew up his face and into his locked hair but his shoes were leather tapers that spoke of Italy. Tito he would have guessed was Nigerian until she spoke in the singsong accents of the north of England.
“Are you from Manchester?” Ahmed asked.
“Essex.”
He found David West unpleasant. His manner in person was as it was on screen, didactic relieved by bouts of bonhomie.
“How did you find Lagos?” Ahmed asked him.
“Intriguing. In a way it hasn’t moved on from its colonial past.”
“How so?”
“The city has expanded on the grid left by empire. It makes the place terribly overcrowded.”
“I see. The planning is colonial.”
“What else? The people seem to bear no memory of having been British. That’s the best thing about your country.”
“After one trip, the man’s an expert,” Ahmed said, when he was beside Farida again.
“Who, West? It’s his job to be an expert.”
“Even to people from the country.”
“Especially to you.”
“It’s on.”
The lights went off and Isoken came on screen, laying out bottles and glasses in graceful, balletic movements.
“You know her?”
“Yes.”
“She’s very beautiful,” Farida said when Isoken bent to pick up an ice tray.
“More so in person.”
Chief Sandayọ came on next, volumes of white agbada swirling around him like the crisp waves of a meringue.
“I think you’re more beautiful,” he whispered to Farida.
“Watch the interview.”
Even though most of the room must have watched it, there was a murmur of excitement when Chief Sandayọ said, “I took it.”
His candor was insulting. When Ahmed had pressed him about the money, Chief Sandayọ had blustered into anger and threatened to end the interview. At the time, half a story had seemed better than none, so he had done sloppy work this pompous foreigner had gone to finish for him.
“I took it but not for myself,” the Chief said.
There was some brief footage of secondhand computers, then Fineboy’s garbled American voice explaining why he joined Chief Sandayọ’s “team,” and then the principals, effusive in their praise of the mystery benefactor. The last head teacher, staring earnestly down the lens, said, “Every day I thank God for our helper. She has saved us from the education minister, who took the money meant for our children.”
The rascal had landed on his feet.
57
“ARRESTED TODAY” WAS ALL Principal Amadi’s text said. Each time Chike called, a cold, remote woman would say, “I’m sorry. The number you are trying to call is presently unreachable.”
He went and saw the desolation for himself. They had drawn red X’s on the fresh walls and pushed over the swing set, its seats smashed to wood chips. The effort it must have taken to carry out that act of vandalism. Had they come with axes or had they gone through the neighborhood looking for a firewood cutter to lend them his tools? At the gates he had once walked through freely, a single armed policeman stood guard, holding his rifle against his body like a spear.
“Yes, what are you looking for here?”
“I came to see the principal.”
“What for?”
“My son,” Chike faltered. “My son attends this school.”
“You can’t see her. She’s been arrested.”
“Please can you take a message for me?”
“Do I look like a houseboy? My friend, leave this place before I arrest you.”
When he got home, Chief Sandayọ was in his favorite gallery pose, his hands behind his back, his face close to a painted sunrise, dawn spreading over brown huts and green fields.
“It’s you, Chike. Why are you coming down the stairs like a wild animal?”
“Principal Amadi has been arrested. Along with the other principals.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
“I’m not going to play riddles with you.”
The Chief turned back to the Arcadian canvas world, dark, upright figures walking to and fro, masters of their own land. The painting slid off its hook easily and when Chike threw it, it flew like a missile, crashing into the wall and landing on the ground, facedown.
“My wife bought that,” Sandayọ said, running and kneeling by its side. “You tore it!”
Sandayọ lifted it from the ground gently, like the dead wooden frame could feel his touch. “It was for our fifth anniversary. Every year, a new anniversary painting. Even when we had stopped living as man and wife, the painting must come on the eighteenth of March. Twenty-seven of these I have.”
The Chief put it back in its place. The rent slit through the sun, a gash in the sky.
“I suppose you think it’s my fault. But it was my money we used to fix those schools. How could I know where it would lead?”
The space suddenly felt too small, the room contracting until he felt he would have to kill Sandayọ just to breathe.
Chike left the flat and went aboveground. The principals would be sitting in jail now, trying to describe the man who had lured them with his story of a mystery benefactor. If Chike found them and visited them, would they shout as he approached their cells? “This is the man that brought us the stolen money. This is the man to be locked up.” He was no Christ to give himself for the sins of others. Sandayọ had stolen the money and Sandayọ should be in jail.
The principals would not be released unless Sandayọ was arrested. They were being used as bait to draw him out, and were the Chief a more principled man, he would hand himself in. And were pigs a lighter species with hinged wings, they would fly.
58
AHMED SAT OPPOSITE FARIDA in a private booth in Jade Garden, a yellow paper lantern hanging over their heads. There was a shimmer of metal on her eyelids and she was wearing lipstick. It was almost a date.
“Have dinner with me tomorrow,” he had said the evening before. Her acceptance surprised him.
“You will? OK. Where is best for you?”
“I can’t come into central London. The girls.”
“I’ll come to you, then.”
“But it’s too late to find a sitter. Maybe another time.”
This was her way of saying no gently. Her earlier refusals had been curter.
“They can come with us.”
“That would be asking too much.”
“I want to.”
She held the line, breathing so softly he thought she had gone.
“Farida?”
“There is a Chinese restaurant they love and it’s very close to our house. But who would I tell them you are?”
“A friend from university.”
Adla, the elder, was Farida. Small with features geometrically precise. Afaafa must look like her father, Farida’s ex-husband. They were divorced, legally, although Mukhtar had not seen the need. If he wanted to remarry, a traditional ceremony would suffice.
“He just assumed I would never have another husband.”
“Would you?”
“I don’t know.”
All this was said hurriedly while the girls filled their plates. When she drank, her lipstick left the shape of her lower lip on the glass, a full crimson curve. The girls returned and their conversation moved on. They were engaging but not attention-seeking, leaving him and Farida to discuss how West’s episode had been received.
Apart from a poorly punctuated letter asking the BBC to cooperate in apprehending Chief Sandayọ, the Nigerian government had mostly been silent. The story had spurred debate on the Internet and comment pieces in national papers, with clips of the interview played and analyzed on some other news agencies.
“We’ll wait and see where
it goes,” Farida said as he helped her into her coat.
He walked them home, glad to amble despite the cold. They could almost have been a family. He hugged her on the doorstep. Their cheeks touched and he felt a slight pressure from her body before she pulled away.
He could be a father, he thought as he walked to the station. He could imagine dropping the girls at school, driving them to away games, teaching them how to eat ẹba with their hands. He was getting ahead of himself. One almost date and he was planning a wedding. His phone thrummed in his pocket. A text from Chike. “Principal Amadi arrested this afternoon,” he read. Ahmed turned and began to make his way back to Farida.
“AHMED, WHAT ARE YOU doing here? Did you forget something?” Farida had changed into pajamas and she pulled her dressing gown closer. Nothing in the evening had suggested sex.
“They’ve arrested one of the principals David West interviewed. I just got a text from Nigeria. Apparently it happened this afternoon.”
“Please come in.”
He walked in through her narrow hallway, his arm brushing against her satin thigh as he edged past her. The house was in that state of accumulated disarray that showed she did not have many guests. The girls’ toys were out, half-clothed dolls with their naked legs splayed, their heads stuck in the crevices of the sofa, books on the floor, washing out to dry, the empty cups of a bra dangling pertly from a radiator. She stood in front of the lacy B cup, still pitifully small after two children.
“Please, sit down. Would you like anything to drink? Some juice or a cup of tea?”
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”
She called her boss, who was still at his desk, monitoring a protest in Albania. Ahmed, noting her self-consciousness, sat on the arm of the sofa and looked down at the carpet or her bare, swollen ankles. The bra was squashed under her armpit when she dropped the phone.
“He wants me to come to the office. What am I going to do with the girls?”
“Take them with you.”
“They need watching. Adla has asthma and Afaafa doesn’t sit still.”
“I’ll watch them. We can all go to the BBC and I’ll stay in the lobby with them while you do what you have to do.”
“You’ve already been too kind today.”
The only other option was to drop them at Mukhtar’s house. To stand on his doorstep and wait for him to look at her like she had just looked at Ahmed. Perhaps his new wife would come to the door instead, carrying her son on her hip.
“Thank you. I’ll just go and get us ready.”
The girls were in bed but still awake. She paused at their door. Sometimes a quarter of an hour would pass while she eavesdropped but there was no time for that now.
“Adla, Afaafa, we’re going into my office tonight. Ahmed will look after you. I want you dressed in five minutes.”
In her room, her clothes from that evening were still spread out on her bed in the outline of a person, like a flat scarecrow. The black cardigan and black jeans had seemed appropriate for a casual meeting with a university friend. The red lipstick was not, but it had been a while since she sat opposite a man in a restaurant and he paid for what she ate. She changed and went back to the living room.
“Mum, your hair.”
There was a time she had gone without her hijab, just after the separation from Mukhtar when every week was a new change: new flat, new school for the girls, so why not a new look. She did not think God minded her afro, combed out every morning until it stood up straight, swaying only with heavy gusts of wind. But she had minded. Minded rushing to mirrors to see if resting against a wall had flattened the back, minded the knots the hair tangled into, minded the community she had stumbled into by not chemically straightening her hair. Adla and Afaafa could choose what to do with their hair but she was too old for new habits.
59
OVER THE NEXT WEEK, the arrest of the principals made the front page of every national newspaper in Nigeria. One by one, each was taken into a custody that did not permit bail or allow visitors. One anonymous teacher recounted how her principal had been dragged out of a lesson at gunpoint, terrifying the class of six-year-olds. THIS IS NOT LIBERIA, the headline had run, causing one Mrs. Ene, Liberian wife of Mr. Ene, to e-mail a six-page letter of complaint to the editor.
The mood in the flat was growing increasingly oppressive and Yẹmi was glad to escape. Against the statistical odds, he had succeeded in becoming a tourist in Lagos.
First, he paid for his excursions with his savings, and when that ran out, with a hundred-dollar bill taken from Sandayọ’s loot. He was as deserving a recipient as any primary school. He had left school at eight and the government owed him many years of education.
He would enter a bus, not minding the destination the conductor was calling, riding all over the city. He had been to beaches, sinking into loose sand, gathering shells into his pockets; drawing near the worshippers in white garments that fluttered like wings; stepping at last into the ocean and gasping as the cold water surged around his feet. He had walked in a protected forest, plunging into the emerald silence of seventy-eight hectares of undisturbed habitat, his guide pointing out the reserve’s animals: monkeys, snakes, and the half-submerged head of an alligator, lying in wait for its prey. He had visited a small village of artists, cane weavers, painters and sculptors, moving through their exhibitions for free.
It was in this manner he came to see the water city. At first it had looked like any slum. The single-story houses, with corridors that ran from front door to backyard, were of a style common to Lagos. He peered down the shafts that led to the plots of communal living. Naked children stood patiently in buckets while their mothers doused them with water, washed clothes bleached in the sun, and in one lot, he saw a streak of silver grey.
“Good afternoon, Ma. How much?” he asked the trader who sat in front of a pile of bronze roasted fish, each bent in a circle, its tail stuffed into its mouth. He spoke to her in Yoruba.
“Three hundred for one.”
He paid without haggling.
“Does this area flood?”
“Sometimes. You know we are near the water.”
“Where is it?”
“Behind the houses.”
“Do you know somebody that can take me there?”
“Junior,” she said, causing a small boy to slide out from under her table.
“Yes, Ma.”
“Take this man to see the water, and if you see Uncle Sabo, ask him to take him on the canoe.”
They walked down the narrow alleyways squashed between the buildings. Very quickly, they left the sandy ground and came to soggy swamp crisscrossed with wooden planks. The boy stepped on one and it swayed. Yẹmi held back.
“You no go fall.”
He soon saw his first house. It stood high on its stilts, its wooden ankles bathing in salt water. He had seen villages built on the sea in the Delta but nothing of this magnitude. Everywhere he looked, the grey houses and their rusted roofs spread like a sheet. Lightweight canoes moved between the buildings, their owners paddling lightly to steer. They were selling things, drifting from door to door, passing up plates of food and fresh fruit, sliced and wrapped in cellophane.
“You want to take the canoe?”
“Yes.”
“Let me go and find my uncle.”
Some residents had taken to emptying their waste by their houses, and the rubbish drifted together in small islands. The boy had returned with his uncle.
“Afternoon. My name na Sabo.”
“Ẹ káàsan. Yẹmí lorúkọ mi.”
The man switched to Yoruba.
“My son said you want to go on the water. Enter, let me show you around.”
They pushed off slowly, the boy at the front, Yẹmi in the middle, and the uncle rowing at the back.
“How long has this place been here?”
“I don’t know,” Sabo said, “but I came to Lagos twenty years ago and even then it was here.”
Some
houses were squat, with doorsteps almost level with the lagoon. Others were two stories high, relative skyscrapers. Plank bridges ran from building to building and children, adults, even a dog, walked surefootedly across.
“Where do you go to toilet?”
“In the water.”
“Where do you have your bath?”
“In the water. It’s enough for everybody.”
“What work do you do here?”
“Many of us are fishermen. Let me show you.”
They left the traffic of canoes and the houses came fewer and farther between until they came to a part of the lagoon unbroken by stilts. Scattered along the surface were men standing still as silhouettes in their low-sitting boats. Occasionally a net would be thrown, arcing in slow motion before it sank. Some fishermen had rafts and it was these that caught Yẹmi’s eye. They had rigged sails to their platforms and they hovered, cloudlets, above the water.
“What do they use to make them?”
“Plastic bags sewn together.”
The sun was setting and the fishermen were starting to come home. OKACHI RICE, he read off the corner of a sail before the raft moved by.
“It’s time for me to go back to Lagos.”
“Where do you think you are?” Sabo said, turning the canoe around.
When they reached land, Yẹmi offered to pay him but he refused.
“My son told me how much you paid for the fish.”
“What do you call this place?” Yẹmi asked as he stepped out onto a plank.
“Makoko.”
60
AHMED’S PHONE RANG. IT was his father.
“We saw you on BBC. You’re putting on weight in London.”
“Yes. I should leave the flat more.”
“You should have told us you would continue with the story from over there. You would have saved my time. I went to prostrate for you last week. The dust from that man’s shoe entered my mouth for nothing.”
They did not speak for a few moments.
“Come to England,” Ahmed said.
“I have cancer.”
He did not ask how having one meant you could not do the other.
Welcome to Lagos Page 21