Welcome to Lagos

by Chibundu Onuzo

  “I know you don’t believe I can do something like this.”

  “No. You’ve misunderstood my silence. I am very grateful. We are all grateful.”

  62

  WHEN CHIEF SANDAYỌ WAS shown to the small room with two camp beds on either side, one already occupied, he complained immediately.

  “As the minister of education, I demand a single room.”

  “Please come with me.”

  He followed the orderly down a passage with cells on either side, putting his wrist to his nostrils, breathing through the perfumed cotton of his sleeve. A flashlight was shone into a cell. Rows and rows of bald heads shone back. Most of the prisoners were sitting, dozing in that position, their heads hanging between their knees.

  “Nah who dey shine that light?”

  “God punish dem.”

  “This is the standard accommodation here. There are no more single rooms available. If you don’t want that place, you stay here. This is not a hotel.”

  As if sensing the presence of another human being, Sandayọ’s neighbor began speaking soon after he returned to the room. He spoke conversationally, not as a sleeptalker but like a madman, stringing topic to topic: football, women, the cost of onions in Mile 12. He must be relatively important to have secured such quarters: a 419er, a drug lord, or perhaps a politician whose face he would recognize in the morning.

  The room smelled: a warm fecal smell. Not long after he lay down, his neighbor farted, a moist burp of gas. The window was fastened with a padlock. Death by asphyxiation. Outside, a light went on, streaming through the bars and onto a calendar, laminated and waxy, the days of the year numbered and accounted for.

  He faced the wall, head cradled in his arm. How had it come to this? His in-laws had always said he would end up in jail, the parvenu whose suspenders matched his red shoes and who traveled abroad for the first time as an adult, exclaiming at snow and the London Underground.

  He wondered how long it would take for his son to hear of his arrest. Gbenga was his sole next of kin, his only legally recognized child. He hoped the boy would not be foolish and come to Nigeria. He would be of no use here. All he could do was follow him to court, trailing a step behind his handcuffed father, his soft, confused face on the cover of every daily the next morning. Assuming he had a trial. Resisted arrest: it was not too late for those words to become an excuse for his discreet murder. Nobody knew he was here except Chike, Yẹmi, Fineboy, Oma, and Isoken. It pleased him to say their names out loud, adding his voice to his roommate’s briefly.

  Already he was doubting his “experience,” if you could call the promptings of his conscience that. There was no mystery to what had happened outside the flat. Ruthless as he was, he had principles and they had guided him from within. He had always known that, if necessary, he would rise to some sacrifice, some greatness that others, glossing over him and plumbing him superficially, would be amazed at.

  63

  CHIEF SANDAYỌ HAD BEEN in prison for five days now. Everyone connected with the story was ending up in jail, except Ahmed, safely ensconced in South Kensington.

  “Very ornate,” Farida said when she visited last weekend, without the girls because they were with their father. He could not have Farida without this ex-husband and his rota of scheduled visits and drop-offs. It was like a supermarket deal. She had been playful when she came, sitting cross-legged on the sofa, leaning forward to pinch him once, a delicate nip of pain on his upper arm. And then a kiss so brief when she was leaving, he was not certain it had happened, or if the fact his lips had half covered hers meant she had only wished to offer her cheek.

  He had not been good company. He was still disappointed with the lack of media interest over the principals, from the BBC and other channels. Their incarceration had coincided with the engagement announcement of a royal.

  “There’s no space for foreign news in the media right now unless it’s a terrorist attack. Especially since she’s marrying a black man,” Farida had said to him.

  “Yes. We all have tails.”

  He had seen a headline three days ago: WE’RE BLACK AND BLUE, with the photo of the couple, the woman a smiling, undistinguished brunette, the man a mixed-race strain that could hardly be called black, with his green eyes and curly blond hair framing his handsome face. Tucked away in a small paragraph in a minor newspaper, he had seen news of the principals, a still of a woman beaming in front of a row of computers.

  “Sometimes a story just sinks,” Farida had said, taking his hand. “It’s nobody’s fault. All we can do is hope that some civil society groups will take up their cause in Nigeria.”

  She had left soon after that, the handhold, then the half kiss. He could not enter lightly with Farida. These small displays of affection meant more with her than any woman he had been with. To kiss her properly, with his arms around her waist and her body pressed close to his, would be a proposal, a declaration of intent that would include Adla and Afaafa and even Mukhtar, their absent father.

  He turned on the TV and found himself watching a live music show with a short, excitable presenter introducing guests like he was calling up circus acts. The bands were passable, the steady dub of average music, the stylized leads blandly good-looking and white.

  He had had enough when the presenter said, “And, ladies and gentlemen, to close the show, we have the one, the only, the legendary Ọla. But first, a break. Don’t touch that remote control.”

  He wanted to see what Ola looked like now, this hero of his adolescence, held up as proof that Nigeria was not irrelevant since it could produce such a star. She had discovered her heritage in her last two albums, spelling her name with a dot under the o, speaking often of her Yoruba roots, tendrils floating across the Atlantic and joining her to the ancient city of Ile-Ifẹ. It was good for the music if managed well, this cosmetic mysticism.

  The presenter returned to the screen, more solemn now. They had dimmed the lights and there was a shimmer of smoke onstage, preparation for communion with the ancestors. The camera panned the audience, handpicked it seemed for the fresh, healthy glow they gave off under the yellow studio lighting.

  She had aged well, he saw when she walked on with her guitar, loping to the lone stool set out for her. She was still as thin as the Africans on Oxfam appeals, her veins rising like little green bridges over the backs of her hands. Her loose brown curls fell down her shoulders.

  She strummed the first chord of her song and the audience cheered. They had not whooped so loudly for the other acts. Ahmed felt pride, that curious immigrant pride for the successful whose names twinned yours with their strange consonants, their pasts as obscure as yours.

  Ola or Ọla strummed her opening chord again. Was she nervous? He could not tell from her expression, the relaxed, open look of a face used to being followed by paparazzi.

  He imagined the producer fidgeting as she played the same chord, wondering whether to scream “Adverts” before she upset their strictly rehearsed show. He willed her not to disappoint, to pour out the voice that lifted you on currents of air, floating you into oblivion.

  “I dedicate my first song to Rẹmi Sandayọ, a man imprisoned for trying to do good in my fatherland, Nigeria.”

  Give me freedom,

  Pay my ransom,

  Take my kingdom,

  For you.

  Break my chains,

  So I can run again,

  I want to walk on water,

  With you.

  Set me free,

  For eternity,

  I want to plumb the oceans,

  With you.

  Give me freedom,

  Pay my ransom,

  Give me your kingdom,

  Give me you.

  I’ll follow you, deep into the sun,

  I’ll fly with you, to where the ends of the stars have begun,

  I’ll float with you, over the edge of the world,

  If you’ll let me

  Come with you.

  Give me f
reedom,

  Pay my ransom,

  Take my kingdom,

  For you.

  64

  THE BRIDGE WAS NOW a strange place. They had lost the rhythms of the space, the art of sleeping amid the nightly disturbances. They had forgotten the crude privations, the indignities of furtive squatting, the embarrassment of a buttock exposed. They had forgotten that day was always shaded, sunlight blocked out by the bridge, and night was never night, carousing fires burning till the morning. It did not leave time to think of Chief Sandayọ or wonder how he was faring in prison.

  They were absorbed by their resumed hardship, embittered by it, Chike the most so. He could no longer concentrate, take a thought and run it through his mind for hours. All he could feel was that an injustice had been done. He had known contentment in this city. He had found a place and purpose and he had lost it, cast out into chaos, an urban Adam with no garden to tend. The gnawing was back, the longing, the grasping for basic things. He could not look at Oma and Isoken. He had failed them, led them around the wilderness, back to Egypt.

  THE ATTACK ON THE bridge took them by surprise. Chairman and his boys had made enemies or perhaps the enemies had always been there, only their battles had been fought farther afield. A single gunshot woke them. Chike’s reflexes were intact.

  “Lie down and stay still.”

  Chike counted fifteen, not more than Chairman’s boys but with surprise on their side. He could see sticks and cutlasses; at least two rifles.

  “One by one, we are going to walk slowly until we reach the main road. Nobody stop. Nobody look back. Oma.”

  “I can’t.”

  She was in a panic. Not the heavy-breathing, limb-jerking type that you could coax a man out of with words. It was quiet, leaden, soldered-to-the-ground terror. Isoken was no better. She had covered her face with her hands. Self-defense would not help her here. Not against guns. He could not ask Isoken to go first.

  “Oma, please.”

  “I’m too afraid to stand up.”

  He could not hit her as he had done once or twice to a soldier who would not move, a sharp, stinging blow to bring him out of his paralysis.

  “Just think there’s a pot of soup on the other side, about to burn if you don’t get there now,” Fineboy said.

  “As if I would leave soup on fire unattended.”

  She was crying, like the first time they met, full circle in her tears. Chike could not think of what could reach her, only that he could use no force, not even to pull her to her feet. He knew too much of her history to lay his hands recklessly on her.

  “Make you sing that song for am,” Yẹmi said.

  “Which one?”

  “Nah for your Igbo language. Aturu something.”

  Aturu was “sheep.” Sing to Oma of sheep? A nursery rhyme? He could not understand the private. And then he remembered his mother’s anthem, sung as she cut through life in the lonely, rocking boat of single motherhood, her son clinging to her, a barnacle she could not scrape off.

  “Atulegwu. Nwoke atulegwu.”

  Oma had left her husband with only a bag and a few sets of clothes, left him for Lagos, a carnivore of a city that swallowed even bones, and yet she had survived, had adapted, had discovered fat in this lean land and thrived.

  “Atulegwu. Nwanyi atulegwu.”

  This woman whom he loved deeply, anxiously, who could make him grow timid with a glance, whose hands had fed them since they came to Lagos, turning oil and leaves into soup, bruised tomatoes into stew, old yams into pottage, their daily miracle worker.

  “Atulegwu. Nwenu okwukwe.”

  He closed his eyes as he sang, willing into his voice a courage that would strengthen Oma’s calves, strong and shapely, muscular and slender, legs for walking, for taking life in her stride.

  “Your voice is croaking,” she said finally, standing like a toddler, pushing herself up from the ground with her hands. “Just keep singing for me. Even when you think I can’t hear it.”

  But there was no time to indulge this romance of the singing lover. Any moment now they might be seen. “Isoken,” he said when Oma was about to disappear from sight. The girl made no fuss now someone else had done it. She walked with her head down and her elbows out like he had taught her, in ramming position. She was as tough as a seed, seemingly dead for months, yet put in the right soil she would shoot up, reaching for the world.

  “Fineboy.”

  The boy was the most blasé, almost drawing attention with his casual saunter. And yet where would they be without him? There was always a way with Fineboy, always a road where others saw the smooth, concrete bricking of a wall.

  “Yẹmi.”

  “I dey go last.”

  “Private, don’t question my orders.”

  “We no dey for army again.”

  “Yẹmi, please.”

  When he was alone, Chike waited a few minutes, watching the clashing of sticks and steel, the pop of glass bottles shattering like fireworks over dazed heads. Perhaps they should have joined the fight for their bridge, thrown themselves into the melee with nothing but their fists. It was not a place to risk dying for, this patch of cold cement.

  He walked slowly to the others. Oma was still singing. He took her hand and she took Yẹmi’s and he took Isoken’s and she took Fineboy’s and Chike led them down an empty road lit by streetlamps, standing guard like tall metal sentries. The city was empty, an architect’s model of a place, the pavement stretching barren for miles. Every once in a while, a car would speed by, the driver’s eyes flicking anxiously to their group. Only thieves gathered at this hour.

  “What now?” Oma said.

  “We can call Ahmed. He’s overseas. He can help us.”

  Chike imagined the world as Fineboy saw it, people lined like instruments in a toolbox, none unusable, not even the ones he had no names for. Why had he not thought to call Ahmed sooner? The man must have a place in Lagos or at least would know people who could house them until they found their feet.

  Ahmed answered on the second ring. “Hello, Chike, what’s the matter? It’s late. Do you want me to call you back?”

  “We need somewhere to stay for a few nights. We’ve had to run away from under the bridge.”

  “You’re staying under the bridge? For how long? You should have told me.”

  “You could have asked. So are you going to help or not? My credit is going.”

  “Sorry. Of course. My place is not safe. Please give me fifteen minutes. I’ll find something. Where exactly are you?”

  Behind them, the bridge was on fire, the flames as tall as a building, new floors rising with each passing breath.

  IF AHMED CALLED HIS father now, he might wake him. But there was no one else he could call, no one whose house would absorb five guests at such short notice. He had grown used to independence from Bọla Bakare. Living in the London flat was bad enough and now he would add this favor to a growing debt.

  “Ahmed, what’s the matter?”

  “Good evening, Dad.”

  “Is everything OK? Are you in trouble?”

  “Not me. Some friends of mine need help.”

  “What kind of help? Is it money? Couldn’t it wait till morning?”

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have called.”

  “Well, you did. I’m awake now. What is it?”

  “They’ve been made homeless.”

  “What kind of people are these?”

  “They helped your son when he was in hiding and had nowhere else to go.”

  “You must be saddle-sore from riding your high horse. I just want to know that we can trust them under our roof. Your mother will want their family histories, I’m sure.”

  “You can trust them.” Except Fineboy perhaps, but Chike would be there to keep an eye on him.

  “Text me the address.”

  “There’s no real address. They’re waiting on the side of the road.”

  “Well, text me what road they’re on. And if any of them has
a phone, put us in touch. Your mother has woken up. Hold on.”

  He could not hear his mother’s end but he could imagine it, fretful and needing to be calmed. When Ahmed was a child, long after he was too old, he would creep into their bedroom and lie in the valley between his parents, scared there by a nightmare. Sometimes his father would tell a story of Ijapa, the tortoise who outwitted his friends and enemies alike. Ijapa who swindled the entire animal kingdom and was wanted in nests and burrows for fraud and embezzlement and theft. When Ahmed was older and he understood more of what had been done with the papers that filled his father’s study, he recognized the workings of Ijapa in their houses in America and Dubai, his father outsmarting the dull system with ease.

  “Can you imagine your mother, wanting to come with me at this time of the night,” his father said, returning to the phone.

  “Will it be safe?”

  “What else can I do? I’ll take the jeep with the tinted windows so no one can see inside. The parked car has left the front of our house but you can’t be too careful.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry to drag you into this.”

  “I have always cleared up your messes, Ahmed. I’ll call you when I’ve found them.”

  WHEN AHMED CALLED TO say they could sleep in his parents’ boys’ quarters, they had expected servant rooms, narrow beds and thin mattresses, rusted bathtubs and a large sink they would all crowd over each morning, jostling for space with cooks and gatemen. They had been at a loss when they saw the cream sheets and felt the cool air blowing from the AC vents: three large rooms among five of them.

  For the first time in years, Chike had a room to himself, the smallest of the three. Their meals came on silver trays, brought by a maid who lived off the premises. Their first evening, they had all crowded into Chike’s room, Oma and Fineboy bundled in the white towel robes they had found folded on their beds. Their communion had dwindled away under the bridge, too disheartened to sit quietly and listen to Chike read. Now they wished to pick up the story again, a few verses from the crucifixion where they had been cut off. The soldiers were sharing Christ’s clothes in the rough, unsentimental manner he imagined Chairman’s boys would have done, when the rap of bones on wood uprooted them from the blood and mud of Golgotha to their clean, airy boys’ quarters.