Americanah

CHAPTER 23

In London, night came too soon, it hung in the morning air like a threat, and then in the afternoon a blue-gray dusk descended, and the Victorian buildings all wore a mournful air. In those first weeks, the cold startled Obinze with its weightless menace, drying his nostrils, deepening his anxieties, making him urinate too often. He would walk fast on the pavement, turned tightly into himself, hands deep in the coat his cousin had lent him, a gray wool coat whose sleeves nearly swallowed his fingers. Sometimes he would stop outside a tube station, often by a flower or a newspaper vendor, and watch the people brushing past him. They walked so quickly, these people, as though they had an urgent destination, a purpose to their lives, while he did not. His eyes would follow them, with a lost longing, and he would think: You can work, you are legal, you are visible, and you don’t even know how fortunate you are.

It was at a tube station that he met the Angolans who would arrange his marriage, exactly two years and three days after he arrived in England; he kept count.

“We’ll talk in the car,” one of them had said earlier over the phone. Their old model black Mercedes was fussily maintained, the floor mats wavy from vacuuming, the leather seats shiny with polish. The two men looked alike, with thick eyebrows that almost touched, although they had told him they were just friends, and they were dressed alike, too, in leather jackets and long gold chains. Their tabletop haircuts that sat on their heads like tall hats surprised him, but perhaps it was part of their hip image, to have retro haircuts. They spoke to him with the authority of people who had done this before, and also with a slight condescension; his fate was, after all, in their hands.

“We decided on Newcastle because we know people there and London is too hot right now, too many marriages happening in London, yeah, so we don’t want trouble,” one of them said. “Everything is going to work out. Just make sure you keep a low profile, yeah? Don’t attract any attention to yourself until the marriage is done. Don’t fight in the pub, yeah?”

“I’ve never been a very good fighter,” Obinze said drily, but the Angolans did not smile.

“You have the money?” the other one asked.

Obinze handed over two hundred pounds, all in twenty-pound notes that he had taken out of the cash machine over two days. It was a deposit, to prove he was serious. Later, after he met the girl, he would pay two thousand pounds.

“The rest has to be up front, yeah? We’ll use some of it to do the running around and the rest goes to the girl. Man, you know we’re not making anything from this. We usually ask for much more but we’re doing this for Iloba,” the first one said.

Obinze did not believe them, even then. He met the girl, Cleotilde, a few days later, at a shopping center, in a McDonald’s whose windows looked out onto the dank entrance of a tube station across the street. He sat at a table with the Angolans, watching people hurry past, and wondering which of them was her, while the Angolans both whispered into their phones; perhaps they were arranging other marriages.

“Hello there!” she said.

She surprised him. He had expected somebody with pockmarks smothered under heavy makeup, somebody tough and knowing. But here she was, dewy and fresh, bespectacled, olive-skinned, almost childlike, smiling shyly at him and sucking a milkshake through a straw. She looked like a university freshman who was innocent or dumb, or both.

“I just want to know that you’re sure about doing this,” he told her, and then, worried that he might frighten her away, he added, “I’m very grateful, and it won’t take too much from you — in a year I’ll have my papers and we’ll do the divorce. But I just wanted to meet you first and make sure you are okay to do this.”

“Yes,” she said.

He watched her, expecting more. She played with her straw, shyly, not meeting his eyes, and it took him a while to realize that she was reacting more to him than to the situation. She was attracted to him.

“I want to help my mom out. Things are tight at home,” she said, a trace of a non-British accent underlining her words.

“She’s with us, yeah,” one of the Angolans said, impatiently, as though Obinze had dared to question what they had already told him.

“Show him your details, Cleo,” the other Angolan said.

His calling her Cleo rang false: Obinze sensed this from the way he said it, and from the way she heard it, the slight surprise on her face. It was a forced intimacy; the Angolan had never called her Cleo before. Perhaps he had never even called her anything before. Obinze wondered how the Angolans knew her. Did they have a list of young women with European Union passports who needed money? Cleotilde pushed at her hair, a mass of tight coils, and adjusted her glasses, as though first preparing herself before she presented her passport and license. Obinze examined them. He would have thought her younger than twenty-three.

“Can I have your number?” Obinze asked.

“Just call us for anything,” the Angolans said, almost at the same time. But Obinze wrote his number on a napkin and pushed it across to her. The Angolans gave him a sly look. Later, on the phone, she told him that she had been living in London for six years and was saving money to go to fashion school, even though the Angolans had told him she lived in Portugal.

“Would you like to meet?” he asked. “It will be much easier if we try to get to know each other a little.”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation.

They ate fish and chips in a pub, a thin crust of grime on the sides of the wood table, while she talked about her love of fashion and asked him about Nigerian traditional dress. She seemed a little more mature; he noticed the shimmer on her cheeks, the more defined curl of her hair, and knew she had made an effort with her appearance.

“What will you do after you get your papers?” she asked him. “Will you bring your girlfriend from Nigeria?”

He was touched by her obviousness. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“I’ve never been to Africa. I’d love to go.” She said “Africa” wistfully, like an admiring foreigner, loading the word with exotic excitement. Her black Angolan father had left her white Portuguese mother when she was only three years old, she told him, and she had not seen him since, nor had she ever been to Angola. She said this with a shrug and a cynical raise of her eyebrows, as though it had not bothered her, an effort so out of character, so jarring, that it showed him just how deeply it did bother her. There were difficulties in her life that he wanted to know more about, parts of her thick shapely body that he longed to touch, but he was wary of complicating things. He would wait until after the marriage, until the business side of their relationship was finished. She seemed to understand this without their talking about it. And so as they met and talked in the following weeks, sometimes practicing how they would answer questions during their immigration interview and other times just talking about football, there was, between them, the growing urgency of restrained desire. It was there in their standing close to each other, not touching, as they waited at the tube station, in their teasing each other about his support of Arsenal and her support of Manchester United, in their lingering gazes. After he had paid the Angolans two thousand pounds in cash, she told him that they had given her only five hundred pounds.

“I’m just telling you. I know you don’t have any more money. I want to do this for you,” she said.

She was looking at him, her eyes liquid with things unsaid, and she made him feel whole again, made him remember how starved he was for something simple and pure. He wanted to kiss her, her upper lip pinker and shinier with lip gloss than the lower, to hold her, to tell her how deeply, irrepressibly grateful he was. She would never stir his cauldron of worries, never wave her power in his face. One Eastern European woman, Iloba had told him, had asked the Nigerian man, an hour before their court wedding, to give her a thousand pounds extra or she would walk away. In panic, the man had begun to call all his friends, to raise the money.

“Man, we gave you a good deal” was all one of the Angolans said when Obinze asked how much they had given Cleotilde, in that tone of theirs, the tone of people who knew how much they were needed. It was they, after all, who took him to a lawyer’s office, a low-voiced Nigerian in a swivel chair, sliding backwards to reach a file cabinet as he said, “You can still get married even though your visa is expired. In fact, getting married is now your only choice.” It was they who provided water and gas bills, going back six months, with his name and a Newcastle address, they who found a man who would “sort out” his driving license, a man cryptically called Brown. Obinze met Brown at the train station in Barking; he stood near the gate as agreed, amid the bustle of people, looking around and waiting for his phone to ring because Brown had refused to give him a phone number.

“Are you waiting for somebody?” Brown stood there, a slight man, his winter hat pulled down to his eyebrows.

“Yes. I’m Obinze,” he said, feeling like a character in a spy novel who had to speak in silly code. Brown led him to a quiet corner, handed over an envelope, and there it was, his license, with his photo and the genuine, slightly worn look of something owned for a year. A slight plastic card, but it weighed down his pocket. A few days later, he walked with it into a London building which, from the outside, looked like a church, steepled and grave, but inside was shabby, harried, knotted with people. Signs were scrawled on whiteboards: BIRTHS AND DEATHS THIS WAY. MARRIAGE REGISTRATION THIS WAY. Obinze, his expression carefully frozen in neutrality, handed the license over to the registrar behind the desk.

A woman was walking towards the door, talking loudly to her companion. “Look how crowded this place is. It’s all sham marriages, all of them, now that Blunkett is after them.”

Perhaps she had come to register a death, and her words merely the lonely lashings-out of grief, but he felt the familiar tightening of panic in his chest. The registrar was examining his license, taking too long. The seconds lengthened and curdled. All sham marriages, all of them rang in Obinze’s head. Finally the registrar looked up and pushed across a form.

“Getting married, are we? Congratulations!” The words came out with the mechanical good cheer of frequent repetition.

“Thank you,” Obinze said, and tried to unfreeze his face.

Behind the desk, a whiteboard was propped on a wall, venues and dates of intended marriages written on it in blue; a name at the bottom caught his eye. Okoli Okafor and Crystal Smith. Okoli Okafor was his classmate from secondary school and university, a quiet boy who had been teased for having a surname for a first name, who later joined a vicious cult in university, and then left Nigeria during one of the long strikes. Now here he was, a ghost of a name, about to get married in England. Perhaps it was also a marriage for papers. Okoli Okafor. Everyone called him Okoli Paparazzi in university. On the day Princess Diana died, a group of students had gathered before a lecture, talking about what they had heard on the radio that morning, repeating “paparazzi” over and over, all sounding knowing and cocksure, until, in a lull, Okoli Okafor quietly asked, “But who exactly are the paparazzi? Are they motorcyclists?” and instantly earned himself the nickname Okoli Paparazzi.

The memory, clear as a light beam, took Obinze back to a time when he still believed the universe would bend according to his will. Melancholy descended on him as he left the building. Once, during his final year in the university, the year that people danced in the streets because General Abacha had died, his mother had said, “One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad.” She had spoken wearily, as they sat in the living room, eating boiled corn and ube. He sensed, in her voice, the sadness of defeat, as though her friends who were leaving for teaching positions in Canada and America had confirmed to her a great personal failure. For a moment he felt as if he, too, had betrayed her by having his own plan: to get a postgraduate degree in America, to work in America, to live in America. It was a plan he had had for a long time. Of course he knew how unreasonable the American embassy could be — the vice chancellor, of all people, had once been refused a visa to attend a conference — but he had never doubted his plan. He would wonder, later, why he had been so sure. Perhaps it was because he had never simply wanted to go abroad, as many others did; some people were now going to South Africa, which amused him. It had always been America, only America. A longing nurtured and nursed over many years. The advertisement on NTA for Andrew Checking Out, which he had watched as a child, had given shape to his longings. “Men, I’m checkin’ out,” the character Andrew had said, staring cockily at the camera. “No good roads, no light, no water. Men, you can’t even get a bottle of soft drink!” While Andrew was checking out, General Buhari’s soldiers were flogging adults in the streets, lecturers were striking for better pay, and his mother had decided that he could no longer have Fanta whenever he wanted but only on Sundays, with permission. And so, America became a place where bottles and bottles of Fanta were to be had, without permission. He would stand in front of the mirror and repeat Andrew’s words: “Men, I’m checkin’ out!” Later, seeking out magazines and books and films and secondhand stories about America, his longing took on a minor mystical quality and America became where he was destined to be. He saw himself walking the streets of Harlem, discussing the merits of Mark Twain with his American friends, gazing at Mount Rushmore. Days after he graduated from university, bloated with knowledge about America, he applied for a visa at the American embassy in Lagos.

He already knew that the best interviewer was the blond-bearded man, and as he moved in the line, he hoped he would not be interviewed by the horror story, a pretty white woman famous for screaming into her microphone and insulting even grandmothers. Finally, it was his turn and the blond-bearded man said, “Next person!” Obinze walked up and slid his forms underneath the glass. The man glanced at the forms and said, kindly, “Sorry, you don’t qualify. Next person!” Obinze was stunned. He went three more times over the next few months. Each time he was told, without a glance at his documents, “Sorry, you don’t qualify,” and each time he emerged from the air-conditioned cool of the embassy building and into the harsh sunlight, stunned and unbelieving.

“It’s the terrorism fears,” his mother said. “The Americans are now averse to foreign young men.”

She told him to find a job and try again in a year. His job applications yielded nothing. He traveled to Lagos and to Port Harcourt and to Abuja to take assessment tests, which he found easy, and he attended interviews, answering questions fluidly, but then a long empty silence would follow. Some friends were getting jobs, people who did not have his second-class upper degree and did not speak as well as he did. He wondered whether employers could smell his America-pining on his breath, or sense how obsessively he still looked at the websites of American universities. He was living with his mother, driving her car, sleeping with impressionable young students, browsing overnight at Internet cafés with all-night specials, and sometimes spending days in his room reading and avoiding his mother. He disliked her calm good cheer, how hard she tried to be positive, telling him that now President Obasanjo was in power, things were changing, the mobile phone companies and banks were growing and recruiting, even giving young people car loans. Most of the time, though, she left him alone. She did not knock on his door. She simply asked the house help, Agnes, to leave some food in the pot for him and to clear away dirty plates from his room. One day, she left him a note on the bathroom sink: I have been invited to an academic conference in London. We should speak. He was puzzled. When she came home from her lecture, he was in the living room waiting for her.

“Mummy, nno,” he said.

She acknowledged his greeting with a nod and put down her bag on the center table. “I’m going to put your name on my British visa application as my research assistant,” she said quietly. “That should get you a six-month visa. You can stay with Nicholas in London. See what you can do with your life. Maybe you can get to America from there. I know that your mind is no longer here.”

He stared at her.

“I understand this sort of thing is done nowadays,” she said, sitting down on the sofa beside him, trying to sound offhand, but he sensed her discomfort in the uncommon briskness of her words. She was from the generation of the bewildered, who did not understand what had happened to Nigeria but allowed themselves to be swept along. She was a woman who kept to herself and asked no favors, who would not lie, who would not accept even a Christmas card from her students because it might compromise her, who accounted for every single kobo spent on any committee she was on, and here she was, behaving as though truth telling had become a luxury that they could no longer afford. It went against everything she had taught him, yet he knew that truth had indeed, in their circumstance, become a luxury. She lied for him. If anybody else had lied for him, it would not have mattered as much or even at all, but she lied for him and he got the six-month visa to the United Kingdom and he felt, even before he left, like a failure. He did not contact her for months. He did not contact her because there was nothing to tell her and he wanted to wait until he had something to tell her. He was in England for three years and spoke to her only a few times, strained conversations during which he imagined she was wondering why he had made nothing of himself. But she never asked for details; she only waited to hear what he was willing to tell. Later, when he returned home, he would feel disgusted with his own entitlement, his blindness to her, and he spent a lot of time with her, determined to make amends, to return to their former relationship, but first to attempt to map the boundaries of their estrangement.

CHAPTER 24

Everyone joked about people who went abroad to clean toilets, and so Obinze approached his first job with irony: he was indeed abroad cleaning toilets, wearing rubber gloves and carrying a pail, in an estate agent’s office on the second floor of a London building. Each time he opened the swinging door of a stall, it seemed to sigh. The beautiful woman who cleaned the ladies’ toilet was Ghanaian, about his age, with the shiniest dark skin he had ever seen. He sensed, in the way she spoke and carried herself, a background similar to his, a childhood cushioned by family, by regular meals, by dreams in which there was no conception of cleaning toilets in London. She ignored his friendly gestures, saying only “Good evening” as formally as she could, but she was friendly with the white woman who cleaned the offices upstairs, and once he saw them in the deserted café, drinking tea and talking in low tones. He stood watching them for a while, a great grievance exploding in his mind. It was not that she did not want friendship, it was rather that she did not want his. Perhaps friendship in their present circumstances was impossible because she was Ghanaian and he, a Nigerian, was too close to what she was; he knew her nuances, while she was free to reinvent herself with the Polish woman, to be whoever she wanted to be.

The toilets were not bad, some urine outside the urinal, some unfinished flushing; cleaning them was much easier than it must have been for the cleaners of the campus toilets back in Nsukka, with the streaks of shit smeared on the walls that had always made him wonder why anybody would go to all that trouble. And so, he was shocked, one evening, to walk into a stall and discover a mound of shit on the toilet lid, solid, tapering, centered as though it had been carefully arranged and the exact spot had been measured. It looked like a puppy curled on a mat. It was a performance. He thought about the famed repression of the English. His cousin’s wife, Ojiugo, had once said, “English people will live next to you for years but they will never greet you. It is as if they have buttoned themselves up.” There was, in this performance, something of an unbuttoning. A person who had been fired? Denied a promotion? Obinze stared at that mound of shit for a long time, feeling smaller and smaller as he did so, until it became a personal affront, a punch on his jaw. And all for three quid an hour. He took off his gloves, placed them next to the mound of shit, and left the building. That evening, he received an e-mail from Ifemelu. Ceiling, I don’t even know how to start. I ran into Kayode today at the mall. Saying sorry for my silence sounds stupid even to me but I am so sorry and I feel so stupid. I will tell you everything that happened. I have missed you and I miss you.

He stared at the e-mail. This was what he had longed for, for so long. To hear from her. When she first stopped contacting him, he had worried himself into weeks of insomnia, roaming the house in the middle of the night, wondering what had happened to her. They had not fought, their love was as sparkling as always, their plan intact, and suddenly there was silence from her, a silence so brutal and complete. He had called and called until she changed her phone number, he had sent e-mails, he had contacted her mother, Aunty Uju, Ginika. Ginika’s tone, when she said, “Ifem needs some time, I think she has depression,” had felt like ice pressed against his body. Ifemelu was not crippled or blinded from an accident, not suddenly suffering amnesia. She was in touch with Ginika and other people but not with him. She did not want to keep in touch with him. He wrote her e-mails, asking that she at least tell him why, what had happened. Soon, his e-mails bounced back, undeliverable; she had closed the account. He missed her, a longing that tore deep into him. He resented her. He wondered endlessly what might have happened. He changed, curled more inwardly into himself. He was, by turns, inflamed by anger, twisted by confusion, withered by sadness.

And now here was her e-mail. Her tone the same, as though she had not wounded him, left him bleeding for more than five years. Why was she writing him now? What was there to tell her, that he cleaned toilets and had only just today encountered a curled turd? How did she know he was still alive? He could have died during their silence and she would not have known. An angry sense of betrayal overwhelmed him. He clicked Delete and Empty Trash.

HIS COUSIN NICHOLAS HAD the jowly face of a bulldog, yet still somehow managed to be very attractive, or perhaps it was not his features but his aura that appealed, the tall, broad-shouldered, striding masculinity of him. In Nsukka, he had been the most popular student on campus; his beat-up Volkswagen Beetle parked outside a beer parlor lent the drinkers there an immediate cachet. Two Big Chicks once famously fought over him in Bello Hostel, tearing each other’s blouses, but he remained roguishly unattached until he met Ojiugo. She was Obinze’s mother’s favorite student, the only one good enough to be a research assistant, and had stopped by their house one Sunday to discuss a book. Nicholas had stopped by, too, on his weekly ritual, to eat Sunday rice. Ojiugo wore orange lipstick and ripped jeans, spoke bluntly, and smoked in public, provoking vicious gossip and dislike from other girls, not because she did these things but because she dared to without having lived abroad, or having a foreign parent, those qualities that would have made them forgive her lack of conformity. Obinze remembered how dismissive she first was of Nicholas, ignoring him while he, unused to a girl’s indifference, talked more and more loudly. But in the end, they left together in his Volkswagen. They would speed around campus in that Volkswagen, Ojiugo driving and Nicholas’s arm hanging from the front window, music blaring, bends taken sharply, and once with a friend lodged in the open front boot. They smoked and drank publicly together. They created glamorous myths. Once they were seen at a beer parlor, Ojiugo wearing Nicholas’s large white shirt and nothing below, and Nicholas wearing a pair of jeans and nothing above. “Things are hard, so we are sharing one outfit,” they said nonchalantly to friends.

That Nicholas had lost his youthful outrageousness did not surprise Obinze; what surprised him was the loss of even the smallest memory of it. Nicholas, husband and father, homeowner in England, spoke with a soberness so forbidding that it was almost comical. “If you come to England with a visa that does not allow you to work,” Nicholas told him, “the first thing to look for is not food or water, it is an NI number so you can work. Take all the jobs you can. Spend nothing. Marry an EU citizen and get your papers. Then your life can begin.” Nicholas seemed to feel that he had done his part, delivered words of wisdom, and in the following months, he hardly spoke to Obinze at all. It was as if he was no longer the big cousin who had offered Obinze, at fifteen, a cigarette to try, who had drawn diagrams on a piece of paper to show Obinze what to do when his fingers were between a girl’s legs. On weekends Nicholas walked around the house in a tense cloud of silence, nursing his worries. Only during Arsenal matches did he relax a little, a can of Stella Artois in hand, shouting “Go, Arsenal!” with Ojiugo and their children, Nna and Nne. After the game, his face would congeal once again. He would come home from work, hug his children and Ojiugo, and ask, “How are you? What did you people do today?” Ojiugo would list what they had done. Cello. Piano. Violin. Homework. Kumon. “Nne is really improving her sight reading,” she would add. Or “Nna was careless with his Kumon and he got two wrong.” Nicholas would praise or reprimand each child, Nna who had a chubby bulldog-like face and Nne who had her mother’s dark broad-faced beauty. He spoke to them only in English, careful English, as though he thought that the Igbo he shared with their mother would infect them, perhaps make them lose their precious British accents. Then he would say, “Ojiugo, well done. I’m hungry.”

“Yes, Nicholas.”

She would serve his food, a plate on a tray taken to him in his study or in front of the TV in the kitchen. Obinze sometimes wondered if she bowed while putting it down or whether the bowing was merely in her demeanor, in the slump of her shoulders and curve of her neck. Nicholas spoke to her in the same tone as he spoke to his children. Once Obinze heard him say to her, “You people have scattered my study. Now please leave my study, all of you.”

“Yes, Nicholas,” she said, and took the children out. “Yes, Nicholas” was her response to almost everything he said. Sometimes, from behind Nicholas, she would catch Obinze’s eye and make a funny face, inflating her cheeks into small balloons, or pushing her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. It reminded Obinze of the gaudy theatrics of Nollywood films.

“I keep thinking of how you and Nicholas were in Nsukka,” Obinze said one afternoon as he helped her cut up a chicken.

“Ahn-ahn! Do you know we used to fuck in public? We did it at the Arts Theater. Even in the engineering building one afternoon, in a quiet corner of the corridor!” She laughed. “Marriage changes things. But this country is not easy. I got my papers because I did postgraduate school here, but you know he only got his papers two years ago and so for so long he was living in fear, working under other people’s names. That thing can do wonders to your head, eziokwu. It has not been easy at all for him. This job he has now is very good but he’s on contract. He never knows if they will renew. He got a good offer in Ireland, you know Ireland is seriously booming now and computer programmers do well there, but he doesn’t want us to move there. Education for the kids is much better here.”

Obinze selected some spice bottles from the cupboard, sprinkled them on the chicken, and put the pot on the stove.

“You put nutmeg in chicken?” Ojiugo asked.

“Yes,” Obinze said. “Don’t you?”

“Me, what do I know? Whoever marries you will win a lottery, honestly. By the way, what did you say happened to you and Ifemelu? I so liked her.”

“She went to America and her eyes opened and she forgot me.”

Ojiugo laughed.

The phone rang. Because Obinze was all the time willing a call from his job agency, each time the phone did ring, a mild panic would seize his chest, and Ojiugo would say, “Don’t worry, The Zed, things will work out for you. Look at my friend Bose. Do you know she applied for asylum, was denied, and went through hell before she finally got her papers? Now she owns two nurseries and has a holiday home in Spain. It will happen for you, don’t worry, rapuba.” There was a certain vapidity to her reassurance, an automatic way of expressing goodwill, which did not require any concrete efforts on her part to help him. Sometimes he wondered, not resentfully, whether she truly wanted him to find a job, because he would no longer be able to watch the children while she popped out to Tesco to buy milk, no longer be able to make their breakfast while she supervised their practice before school, Nne on the piano or violin and Nna on the cello. There was something about those days that Obinze would come to miss, buttering toast in the weak light of morning while the sounds of music floated through the house, and sometimes, too, Ojiugo’s voice, raised in praise or impatience, saying, “Well done! Try once more!” or “What rubbish are you doing?”

Later that afternoon, after Ojiugo brought the children home from school, she told Nna, “Your Uncle Obinze cooked the chicken.”

“Thank you for helping Mummy, Uncle, but I don’t think I’ll be having any chicken.” He had his mother’s playful manner.

“Look at this boy,” Ojiugo said. “Your uncle is a better cook than I am.”

Nna rolled his eyes. “Okay, Mummy, if you say so. Can I watch TV? Just for ten minutes?”

“Okay, ten minutes.”

It was the half-hour break after their homework and before their French tutor arrived, and Ojiugo was making jam sandwiches, carefully cutting off the crusts. Nna turned on the television, to a music performance by a man wearing many large shiny chains around his neck.

“Mummy, I’ve been thinking about this,” Nna said. “I want to be a rapper.”

“You can’t be a rapper, Nna.”

“But I want to, Mummy.”

“You are not going to be a rapper, sweetheart. We did not come to London for you to become a rapper.” She turned to Obinze, stifling laughter. “You see this boy?”

Nne came into the kitchen, a Capri-Sun in hand. “Mummy? May I have one please?”

“Yes, Nne,” she said, and, turning to Obinze, repeated her daughter’s words in an exaggerated British accent. “Mummy, may I have one please? You see how she sounds so posh? Ha! My daughter will go places. That is why all our money is going to Brentwood School.” Ojiugo gave Nne a loud kiss on her forehead and Obinze realized, watching her idly straighten a stray braid on Nne’s head, that Ojiugo was a wholly contented person. Another kiss on Nne’s forehead. “How are you feeling, Oyinneya?” she asked.

“Fine, Mummy.”

“Tomorrow, remember not to read only the line they ask you to read. Go further, okay?”

“Okay, Mummy.” Nne had the solemn demeanor of a child determined to please the adults in her life.

“You know her violin exam is tomorrow, and she struggles with sight reading,” Ojiugo said, as though Obinze could possibly have forgotten, as though it were possible to forget when Ojiugo had been talking about it for so long. The past weekend, he had gone with Ojiugo and the children to a birthday party in an echo-filled rented hall, Indian and Nigerian children running around, while Ojiugo whispered to him about some of the children, who was clever at math but could not spell, who was Nne’s biggest rival. She knew the recent test scores of all the clever children. When she could not remember what an Indian child, Nne’s close friend, had scored on a recent test, she called Nne to ask her.

“Ahn-ahn, Ojiugo, let her play,” Obinze said.

Now, Ojiugo planted a third loud kiss on Nne’s forehead. “My precious. We still have to get a dress for the party.”

“Yes, Mummy. Something red, no, burgundy.”

“Her friend is having a party, this Russian girl, they became friends because they have the same violin tutor. The first time I met the girl’s mother, I think she was wearing something illegal, like the fur of an extinct animal, and she was trying to pretend that she did not have a Russian accent, being more British than the British!”

“She’s nice, Mummy,” Nne said.

“I didn’t say she wasn’t nice, my precious,” Ojiugo said.

Nna had increased the television volume.

“Turn that down, Nna,” Ojiugo said.

“Mummy!”

“Turn down the volume right now!”

“But I can’t hear anything, Mummy!”

He didn’t turn down the volume and she didn’t say anything else to him; instead she turned to Obinze to continue talking.

“Speaking of accents,” Obinze said. “Would Nna get away with that if he didn’t have a foreign accent?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know last Saturday when Chika and Bose brought their children, I was just thinking that Nigerians here really forgive so much from their children because they have foreign accents. The rules are different.”

“Mba, it is not about accents. It is because in Nigeria, people teach their children fear instead of respect. We don’t want them to fear us but that does not mean we take rubbish from them. We punish them. The boy knows I will slap him if he does any nonsense. Seriously slap him.”

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

“Oh, but she’ll keep her word.” Ojiugo smiled. “You know I haven’t read a book in ages. No time.”

“My mother used to say you would become a leading literary critic.”

“Yes. Before her brother’s son got me pregnant.” Ojiugo paused, still smiling. “Now it is just these children. I want Nna to go to the City of London School. And then by God’s grace to Marlborough or Eton. Nne is already an academic star, and I know she’ll get scholarships to all the good schools. Everything is about them now.”

“One day they will be grown and leave home and you will just be a source of embarrassment or exasperation for them and they won’t take your phone calls or won’t call you for weeks,” Obinze said, and as soon as he said it, he wished he had not. It was petty, it had not come out as he intended. But Ojiugo was not offended. She shrugged and said, “Then I will just carry my bag and go and stand in front of their house.”

It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money.

One day, after she had rushed off to take Nna to his piano lesson, she called Obinze to say, laughing, “Can you believe I forgot to brush my teeth?” She came home from Weight Watchers meetings to tell him how much she had lost or gained, hiding Twix bars in her handbag and then asking him, with laughter, if he wanted one. Later she joined another weight-loss program, attended two morning meetings, and came home to tell him, “I’m not going there again. They treat you as if you have a mental problem. I said no, I don’t have any internal issues, please, I just like the taste of food, and the smug woman tells me that I have something internal that I am repressing. Rubbish. These white people think that everybody has their mental problems.” She was twice the size she had been in university, and while her clothes back then had never been polished, they had the edge of a calculated style, jeans folded away from her ankles, slouchy blouses pulled off one shoulder. Now, they merely looked sloppy. Her jeans left a mound of pulpy flesh above her waist that disfigured her T-shirts, as though something alien were growing underneath.

Sometimes, her friends visited and they would sit in the kitchen talking until they all dashed off to pick up their children. In those weeks of willing the phone to ring, Obinze came to know their voices well. He could hear clearly from the tiny bedroom upstairs where he lay in bed reading.

“I met this man recently,” Chika said. “He is nice o, but he is so bush. He grew up in Onitsha and so you can imagine what kind of bush accent he has. He mixes up ch and sh. I want to go to the chopping center. Sit down on a sheer.”

They laughed.

“Anyway, he told me he was willing to marry me and adopt Charles. Willing! As if he was doing charity work. Willing! Imagine that. But it’s not his fault, it’s because we are in London. He is the kind of man I would never even look at in Nigeria, not to talk of going out with. The problem is that water never finds its different levels here in London.”

“London is a leveler. We are now all in London and we are now all the same, what nonsense,” Bose said.

“Maybe he should go and find a Jamaican woman,” Amara said. Her husband had left her for a Jamaican woman, with whom it turned out he had a secret four-year-old child, and she somehow managed to veer every conversation towards the subject of Jamaicans. “These West Indian women are taking our men and our men are stupid enough to follow them. Next thing, they will have a baby and they don’t want the men to marry them o, they just want child support. All they do is spend their money doing their hair and nails.”

“Yes,” Bose, Chika, and Ojiugo all agreed. A routine, automatic agreement: Amara’s emotional well-being was more important than what they actually believed.

The phone rang. Ojiugo took the call and came back to say, “This woman who just called, she is a character. Her daughter and Nne belong to the same orchestra. I met her when Nne took her first exam. She came in her Bentley, a black woman, with a driver and everything. She asked me where we lived and when I told her, I just knew what was on her mind: how can somebody in Essex be thinking of the National Children’s Orchestra? So I decided to look for trouble and I told her, My daughter goes to Brentwood, and you should have seen her face! You know people like us are not supposed to be talking about private school and music. The most we should want is a good grammar school. I just looked at the woman and I was laughing inside. Then she started telling me that music for children is very expensive. She kept telling me how expensive it is, as if she had seen my empty bank account. Imagine o! She is one of those black people who want to be the only black person in the room, so any other black person is an immediate threat to her. She just called now to tell me that she read online about an eleven-year-old girl who got grade five distinction and did not get into the National Children’s Orchestra. Why would she call just to tell me that negative story?”

“Enemy of progress!” Bose said.

“Is she a Jamaican?” Amara asked.

“She is Black British. I don’t know where her people came from.”

“It must be Jamaica,” Amara said.

CHAPTER 25

Sharp, the word everyone used to describe Emenike in secondary school. Sharp, full of the poisoned admiration they felt for him. Sharp Guy. Sharp Man. If exam questions leaked, Emenike knew how to get them. He knew, too, which girl had had an abortion, what property the parents of the wealthy students owned, which teachers were sleeping together. He always spoke quickly, pugnaciously, as though every conversation was an argument, the speed and force of his words suggesting authority and discouraging dissent. He knew, and he was full of an eagerness to know. Whenever Kayode returned from a London vacation, flush with relevance, Emenike would ask him about the latest music and films, and then examine his shoes and clothes. “Is this one designer? What is the name of this one?” Emenike would ask, his eyes feral with longing. He had told everyone that his father was the igwe of his hometown, and had sent him to Lagos to live with an uncle until he turned twenty-one, to avoid the pressures of princely life. But one day, an old man arrived at school, wearing trousers with a mended patch near the knee, his face gaunt, his body bowed with the humility that poverty had forced on him. All the boys laughed after they discovered that he was really Emenike’s father. The laughter was soon forgotten, perhaps because nobody had ever fully believed the prince story — Kayode, after all, always called Emenike Bush Boy behind his back. Or perhaps because they needed Emenike, who had information that nobody else did. This, the audacity of him, had drawn Obinze. Emenike was one of the few people for whom “to read” did not mean “to study,” and so they would spend hours talking about books, bartering knowledge for knowledge, and playing Scrabble. Their friendship grew. At university, when Emenike lived with him in the boys’ quarters of his mother’s house, people had sometimes mistaken him for a relative. “What of your brother?” people would ask Obinze. And Obinze would say, “He’s fine,” without bothering to explain that he and Emenike were not related at all. But there were many things he did not know about Emenike, things he knew not to ask about. Emenike often left school for weeks, only vaguely saying that he had “gone home,” and he spoke endlessly of people who were “making it” abroad. His was the coiled, urgent restlessness of a person who believed that fate had mistakenly allotted him a place below his true destiny. When he left for England during a strike in their second year, Obinze never knew how he got a visa. Still, he was pleased for him. Emenike was ripe, bursting, with his ambition, and Obinze thought of his visa as a mercy: that ambition would finally find a release. It seemed to, quite quickly, as Emenike sent news only of progress: his postgraduate work completed, his job at the housing authority, his marriage to an Englishwoman who was a solicitor in the city.

Emenike was the first person Obinze called after he arrived in England.

“The Zed! Good to hear from you. Let me call you back, I’m just going into a managerial meeting,” Emenike said. The second time Obinze called, Emenike sounded a little harried. “I’m at Heathrow. Georgina and I are going to Brussels for a week. I’ll call you when I get back. I can’t wait to catch up, man!” Emenike’s e-mail response to Obinze had been similar: So happy you are coming this way, man, can’t wait to see you! Obinze had imagined, foolishly, that Emenike would take him in, show him the way. He knew of the many stories of friends and relatives who, in the harsh glare of life abroad, became unreliable, even hostile, versions of their former selves. But what was it about the stubbornness of hope, the need to believe in your own exceptionality, that these things happened to other people whose friends were not like yours? He called other friends. Nosa, who had left right after graduation, picked him up at the tube station and drove him to a pub where other friends soon gathered. They shook hands and slapped backs and drank draft beer. They laughed about memories from school. They said little about the details of their present lives. When Obinze said he needed to get a National Insurance number, and asked, “Guys, how I go take do?” they all shook their heads vaguely.

“Just keep your ear to the ground, man,” Chidi said.

“The thing is to come closer to central London. You’re too far away from things, in Essex,” Wale said.

As Nosa drove him back to the station later, Obinze asked, “So where do you work, guy?”

“Underground. A serious hustle, but things will get better,” Nosa said. Although Obinze knew he meant the tube, the word “underground” made him think of doomed tunnels that fed into the earth and went on forever, ending nowhere.

“What of Mr. Sharp Guy Emenike?” Nosa asked, his tone alive with malice. “He’s doing very well and he lives in Islington, with his oyinbo wife who is old enough to be his mother. He has become posh o. He doesn’t talk to ordinary people anymore. He can help sort you out.”

“He’s been traveling a lot, we haven’t yet seen,” Obinze said, hearing too clearly the limpness of his own words.

“How is your cousin Iloba?” Nosa asked. “I saw him last year at Emeka’s brother’s wedding.”

Obinze had not even remembered that Iloba now lived in London; he had last seen him days before graduation. Iloba was merely from his mother’s hometown, but he had been so enthusiastic about their kinship that everyone on campus assumed they were cousins. Iloba would often pull up a chair, smiling and uninvited, and join Obinze and his friends at a roadside bar, or appear at Obinze’s door on Sunday afternoons when Obinze was tired from the languor of Sunday afternoons. Once, Iloba had stopped Obinze at the General Studies quad, cheerfully calling out “Kinsman!” and then giving him a rundown of marriages and deaths of people from his mother’s hometown whom he hardly knew. “Udoakpuanyi died some weeks ago. Don’t you know him? Their homestead is next to your mother’s.” Obinze nodded and made appropriate sounds, humoring Iloba, because Iloba’s manner was always so pleasant and oblivious, his trousers always too tight and too short, showing his bony ankles; they had earned him the nickname “Iloba Jump Up,” which soon morphed to “Loba Jay You.”

Obinze got his phone number from Nicholas and called him.

“The Zed! Kinsman! You did not tell me you were coming to London!” Iloba said. “How is your mother? What of your uncle, the one who married from Abagana? How is Nicholas?” Iloba sounded full of a simple happiness. There were people who were born with an inability to be tangled up in dark emotions, in complications, and Iloba was one of them. For such people, Obinze felt both admiration and boredom. When Obinze asked if Iloba might be able to help him find a National Insurance number, he would have understood a little resentment, a little churlishness — after all, he was contacting Iloba only because he needed something — but it surprised him how sincerely eager to help Iloba was.

“I would let you use mine but I am working with it and it is risky,” Iloba said.

“Where do you work?”

“In central London. Security. It’s not easy, this country is not easy, but we are managing. I like the night shifts because it gives me time to read for my course. I’m doing a master’s in management at Birkbeck College.” Iloba paused. “The Zed, don’t worry, we will put our heads together. Let me ask around and let you know.”

Iloba called back two weeks later to say he had found somebody. “His name is Vincent Obi. He is from Abia State. A friend of mine did the connection. He wants to meet you tomorrow evening.”

They met in Iloba’s flat. A claustrophobic feel pervaded the flat, the concrete neighborhood with no trees, the scarred walls of the building. Everything seemed too small, too tight.

“Nice place, Loba Jay You,” Obinze said, not because the flat was nice but because Iloba had a flat in London.

“I would have told you to come and stay with me, The Zed, but I live with two of my cousins.” Iloba placed bottles of beer and a small plate of fried chin-chin on the table. It seared a sharp homesickness in Obinze, this ritual of hospitality. He was reminded of going back to the village with his mother at Christmas, aunties offering him plates of chin-chin.

Vincent Obi was a small round man submerged in a large pair of jeans and an ungainly coat. As Obinze shook hands with him, they sized each other up. In the set of Vincent’s shoulders, in the abrasiveness of his demeanor, Obinze sensed that Vincent had learned very early on, as a matter of necessity, to solve his own problems. Obinze imagined his Nigerian life: a community secondary school full of barefoot children, a polytechnic paid for with help from a number of uncles, a family of many children and a crowd of dependents in his hometown who, whenever he visited, would expect large loaves of bread and pocket money carefully distributed to each of them. Obinze saw himself through Vincent’s eyes: a university staff child who grew up eating butter and now needed his help. At first Vincent affected a British accent, saying “innit” too many times.

“This is business, innit, but I’m helping you. You can use my NI number and pay me forty percent of what you make,” Vincent said. “It’s business, innit. If I don’t get what we agree on, I will report you.”

“My brother,” Obinze said. “That’s a little too much. You know my situation. I don’t have anything. Please try and come down.”

“Thirty-five percent is the best I can do. This is business.” He had lost his accent and now spoke Nigerian English. “Let me tell you, there are many people in your situation.”

Iloba spoke up in Igbo. “Vincent, my brother here is trying to save money and do his papers. Thirty-five is too much, o rika, biko. Please just try and help us.”

“You know that some people take half. Yes, he is in a situation but all of us are in a situation. I am helping him but this is business.” Vincent’s Igbo had a rural accent. He put the National Insurance card on the table and was already writing his bank account number on a piece of paper. Iloba’s cell phone began to ring. That evening, as dusk fell, the sky muting to a pale violet, Obinze became Vincent.

CHAPTER 26

Obinze-as-Vincent informed his agency, after his experience with the curled shit on the toilet lid, that he would not be returning to that job. He scoured the newspaper job pages, made calls, and hoped, until the agency offered him another job, cleaning wide passages in a detergent-packing warehouse. A Brazilian man, sallow and dark-haired, cleaned the building next to his. “I’m Vincent,” Obinze said, when they met in the back room.

“I’m Dee.” A pause. “No, you’re not English. You can pronounce it. My real name is Duerdinhito, but the English, they cannot pronounce, so they call me Dee.”

“Duerdinhito,” Obinze repeated.

“Yes!” A delighted smile. A small bond of foreignness. They talked, while emptying their vacuum cleaners, about the 1996 Olympics, Obinze gloating about Nigeria beating Brazil and then Argentina.

“Kanu was good, I give him that,” Duerdinhito said. “But Nigeria had luck.”

Every evening, Obinze was covered in white chemical dust. Gritty things lodged in his ears. He tried not to breathe too deeply as he cleaned, wary of dangers floating in the air, until his manager told him he was being fired because of a downsizing. The next job was a temporary replacement with a company that delivered kitchens, week after week of sitting beside white drivers who called him “laborer,” of endless construction sites full of noises and helmets, of carrying wood planks up long stairs, unaided and unsung. In the silence with which they drove, and the tone with which they said “laborer!” Obinze sensed the drivers’ dislike. Once, when he tripped and landed on his knee, a fall so heavy that he limped back to the truck, the driver told the others at the warehouse, “His knee is bad because he’s a knee-grow!” They laughed. Their hostility rankled, but only slightly; what mattered to him was that he earned four pounds an hour, more with overtime, and when he was sent to a new delivery warehouse in West Thurrock, he worried that he might not have opportunities for overtime.

The new warehouse chief looked like the Englishman archetype Obinze carried in his mind, tall and spare, sandy-haired and blue-eyed. But he was a smiling man, and in Obinze’s imagination, Englishmen were not smiling men. His name was Roy Snell. He vigorously shook Obinze’s hand.

“So, Vincent, you’re from Africa?” he asked, as he took Obinze around the warehouse, the size of a football field, much bigger than the last one, and alive with trucks being loaded, flattened cardboard boxes being folded into a deep pit, men talking.

“Yes. I was born in Birmingham and went back to Nigeria when I was six.” It was the story he and Iloba had agreed was most convincing.

“Why did you come back? How bad are things in Nigeria?”

“I just wanted to see if I could have a better life here.”

Roy Snell nodded. He seemed like a person for whom the word “jolly” would always be apt. “You’ll work with Nigel today, he’s our youngest,” he said, gesturing towards a man with a pale doughy body, spiky dark hair, and an almost cherubic face. “I think you’ll like working here, Vinny Boy!” It had taken him five minutes to go from Vincent to Vinny Boy and, in the following months, when they played table tennis during lunch break, Roy would tell the men, “I’ve got to beat Vinny Boy for once!” And they would titter and repeat “Vinny Boy.”

It amused Obinze, how keenly the men flipped through their newspapers every morning, stopping at the photo of the big-breasted woman, examining it as though it were an article of great interest, and were any different from the photo on that same page the previous day, the previous week. Their conversations, as they waited for their trucks to be loaded up, were always about cars and football and, most of all, women, each man telling stories that sounded too apocryphal and too similar to a story told the day before, the week before, and each time they mentioned knickers—the bird flashed her knickers—Obinze was even more amused, because knickers were, in Nigerian English, shorts rather than underwear, and he imagined these nubile women in ill-fitting khaki shorts, the kind he had worn as a junior student in secondary school.

Roy Snell’s morning greeting to him was a jab on his belly. “Vinny Boy! You all right? You all right?” he would ask. He always put Obinze’s name up for the outside work that paid better, always asked if he wanted to work weekends, which was double time, always asked about girls. It was as if Roy held a special affection for him, which was both protective and kind.

“You haven’t had a shag since you came to the UK, have you, Vinny Boy? I could give you this bird’s number,” he said once.

“I have a girlfriend back home,” Obinze said.

“So what’s wrong with a little shag then?”

A few men nearby laughed.

“My girlfriend has magical powers,” Obinze said.

Roy found this funnier than Obinze thought it was. He laughed and laughed. “She’s into witchcraft, is she? All right then, no shags for you. I’ve always wanted to go to Africa, Vinny Boy. I think I’ll take a holiday and go to Nigeria when you’re back there for a visit. You can show me around, find me some Nigerian birds, Vinny Boy, but no witchcraft!”

“Yes, I could do that.”

“Oh, I know you could! You look like you know what to do with the birds,” Roy said, with another jab at Obinze’s belly.

Roy often assigned Obinze to work with Nigel, perhaps because they were the youngest men in the warehouse. That first morning, Obinze noticed that the other men, drinking coffee from paper cups and checking the board to see who would be working with whom, were laughing at Nigel. Nigel had no eyebrows; the patches of slightly pink skin where his eyebrows should have been gave his plump face an unfinished, ghostly look.

“I got pissed at the pub and my mates shaved off my eyebrows,” Nigel told Obinze, almost apologetically, as they shook hands.

“No shagging for you until you grow your eyebrows back, mate,” one of the men called out as Nigel and Obinze headed for the truck. Obinze secured the washing machines at the back, tightening the straps until they were snug, and then climbed in and studied the map to find the shortest routes to their delivery addresses. Nigel took bends sharply and muttered about how people drove these days. At a traffic light, Nigel brought out a bottle of cologne from the bag he placed at his feet, sprayed it on his neck and then offered it to Obinze.

“No thanks,” Obinze said. Nigel shrugged. Days later, he offered it again. The truck interior was dense with the scent of his cologne and Obinze would, from time to time, take deep gulps of fresh air through the open window.

“You’re just new from Africa. You haven’t seen the London sights, have you, mate?” Nigel asked.

“No,” Obinze said.

And so, after early deliveries in central London, Nigel would take him for a drive, showing him Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge, all the while talking about his mother’s arthritis, and about his girlfriend Haley’s knockers. It took a while to completely understand what Nigel said, because of his accent, which was only a deeper version of the accents of the people Obinze had worked with, each word twisted and stretched until it came out of their mouths having become something else. Once Nigel said “male” and Obinze thought he had said “mile,” and when Obinze finally understood what Nigel meant, Nigel laughed and said, “You talk kind of posh, don’t you? African posh.”

One day, months into his job, after they delivered a new fridge to an address in Kensington, Nigel said, about the elderly man who had come into the kitchen, “He’s a real gent, he is.” Nigel’s tone was admiring, slightly cowed. The man had looked disheveled and hung over, his hair tousled, his robe open at the chest, and he had said archly, “You do know how to put it all together,” as though he did not think they did. It amazed Obinze that, because Nigel thought the man was a “real gent,” he did not complain about the dirty kitchen, as he ordinarily would have done. And if the man had spoken with a different accent, Nigel would have called him miserly for not giving them a tip.

They were approaching their next delivery address in South London, and Obinze had just called the homeowner to say that they were almost there, when Nigel blurted out, “What do you say to a girl you like?”

“What do you mean?” Obinze asked.

“Truth is, I’m not really shagging Haley. I like her, but I don’t know how to tell her. The other day I went round her house and there was another bloke there.” Nigel paused. Obinze tried to keep his face expressionless. “You look like you know what to say to the birds, mate,” Nigel added.

“Just tell her you like her,” Obinze said, thinking how seamlessly Nigel, at the warehouse with other men, often contributed stories of his shagging Haley, and once of shagging her friend while Haley was away on holiday. “No games and no lines. Just say, Look, I like you and I think you’re beautiful.”

Nigel gave him a wounded glance. It was as if he had convinced himself that Obinze was skilled in the art of women and expected some profundity, which Obinze wished, as he loaded the dishwasher onto a trolley and wheeled it to the door, that he had. An Indian woman opened the door, a portly, kindly housewife who offered them tea. Many people offered tea or water. Once, a sad-looking woman had offered Obinze a small pot of homemade jam, and he had hesitated, but he sensed that whatever deep unhappiness she had would be compounded if he said no, and so he had taken the jam home and it was still languishing in the fridge, unopened.

“Thank you, thank you,” the Indian woman said as Obinze and Nigel installed the new dishwasher and rolled away the old.

At the door, she gave Nigel a tip. Nigel was the only driver who split the tips down the middle with Obinze; the others pretended not to remember to share. Once, when Obinze was working with another driver, an old Jamaican woman had pushed ten pounds into his pocket when the driver was not looking. “Thank you, brother,” she said, and it made him want to call his mother in Nsukka and tell her about it.

CHAPTER 27

A glum dusk was settling over London when Obinze walked into the bookshop café and sat down to a mocha and a blueberry scone. The soles of his feet ached pleasantly. It was not very cold; he had been sweating in Nicholas’s wool coat, which now hung on the back of his chair. This was his weekly treat: to visit the bookshop, buy an overpriced caffeinated drink, read as much as he could for free, and become Obinze again. Sometimes he asked to be dropped off in central London after a delivery and he would wander about and end up in a bookshop and sink to the floor at a corner, away from the clusters of people. He read contemporary American fiction, because he hoped to find a resonance, a shaping of his longings, a sense of the America that he had imagined himself a part of. He wanted to know about day-to-day life in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them and what attracted them, but he read novel after novel and was disappointed: nothing was grave, nothing serious, nothing urgent, and most dissolved into ironic nothingness. He read American newspapers and magazines, but only skimmed the British newspapers, because there were more and more articles about immigration, and each one stoked new panic in his chest. Schools Swamped by Asylum Seekers. He still hadn’t found someone. Last week, he had met two Nigerian men, distant friends of a friend, who said they knew an Eastern European woman, and he had paid them a hundred pounds. Now, they did not return his calls and their mobile phones went directly to voice mail. His scone was half-eaten. He did not realize how quickly the café had filled up. He was comfortable, cozy even, and absorbed in a magazine article when a woman and a little boy came up to ask if they could share his table. They were nut-colored and dark-haired. He imagined that they were Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan.

“Of course,” he said, and shifted his pile of books and magazines, even though it had not been on the side of the table that they would use. The boy looked eight or nine years old, wearing a Mickey Mouse sweater and clutching a blue Game Boy. The woman was wearing a nose ring, a tiny glasslike thing that glittered as she moved her head this way and that. She asked if he had enough room for his magazines, if he wanted her to move her chair a little. Then she told her son, in a laughing tone that was clearly intended for Obinze, that she had never been very sure if those narrow wooden sticks next to the packets of sugar were for stirring.

“I’m not a baby!” her son said when she wanted to cut his muffin.

“I just thought it would be easier for you.”

Obinze looked up and saw that she was talking to her son but she was watching him, with something wistful in her eyes. It filled him with possibility, this chance meeting with a stranger, and the thought of the paths on which it might lead him.

The little boy had a delightful curious face. “Do you live in London?” he asked Obinze.

“Yes,” Obinze said, but that yes did not tell his story, that he lived in London indeed but invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch; each time he saw a policeman, or anyone in a uniform, anyone with the faintest scent of authority, he would fight the urge to run.

“His father passed away last year,” the woman said, in a lower voice. “This is our first vacation in London without him. We used to do it every year before Christmas.” The woman nodded continuously as she spoke and the boy looked annoyed, as if he had not wanted Obinze to know that.

“I’m sorry,” Obinze said.

“We went to the Tate,” the boy said.

“Did you like it?” Obinze asked.

He scowled. “It was boring.”

His mother stood up. “We should go. We’re going to see a play.”

She turned to her son and added, “You’re not taking that Game Boy in, you know that.”

The boy ignored her, said “Bye” to Obinze, and turned towards the door. The mother gave Obinze a long look, even more wistful than before. Perhaps she had deeply loved her husband and this, her first awareness of feeling attraction again, was a startling revelation. He watched them leave, wondering whether to get up and ask for her contact information and yet knowing he would not. There was something about the woman that made him think of love, and, as always, Ifemelu came to his mind when he thought of love. Then, quite suddenly, a sexual urge overcame him. A tide of lust. He wanted to fuck somebody. He would text Tendai. They had met at a party Nosa took him to, and he ended up, that night, in her bed. Wise and large-hipped and Zimbabwean Tendai who had a habit of soaking in baths for too long. She stared at him in shock the first time he cleaned her flat and cooked jollof rice for her. She was so unused to being treated well by a man that she watched him endlessly, anxiously, her eyes veiled, as though holding her breath and waiting for the abuse to emerge. She knew he didn’t have his papers. “Or you would be the kind of Nigerian working in IT and driving a BMW,” she said. She had a British stay, and would have a passport in a year, and she hinted that she might be willing to help him. But he did not want the complication of marrying her for his papers; one day she would wake up and convince herself that it had never been merely for papers.

Before he left the bookshop, he sent Tendai a text: Are you home? Was thinking of stopping by. A freezing drizzle was falling as he walked to the tube station, tiny raindrops spattering his coat, and when he got there, he was absorbed by how many blobs of saliva were on the stairs. Why did people not wait until they left the station to spit? He sat on the stained seat of the noisy train, opposite a woman reading the evening paper. Speak English at home, Blunkett tells immigrants. He imagined the article she was reading. There were so many of them now published in the newspapers, and they echoed the radio and television, even the chatter of some of the men in the warehouse. The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. Yet he understood. It had to be comforting, this denial of history. The woman closed the newspaper and looked at him. She had stringy brown hair and hard, suspicious eyes. He wondered what she was thinking. Was she wondering whether he was one of those illegal immigrants who were overcrowding an already crowded island? Later, on the train to Essex, he noticed that all the people around him were Nigerians, loud conversations in Yoruba and Pidgin filled the carriage, and for a moment he saw the unfettered non-white foreignness of this scene through the suspicious eyes of the white woman on the tube. He thought again of the Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi woman and the shadow of grief from which she was only just emerging, and he thought of his mother and of Ifemelu, and the life he had imagined for himself, and the life he now had, lacquered as it was by work and reading, by panic and hope. He had never felt so lonely.

CHAPTER 28

One morning in early summer, a renewing warmth in the air, Obinze arrived at the warehouse and knew right away that something was amiss. The men avoided his eyes, an unnatural stiffness in their movements, and Nigel turned swiftly, too swiftly, towards the toilet when he saw Obinze. They knew. It had to be that they had somehow found out. They saw the headlines about asylum seekers draining the National Health Service, they knew of the hordes further crowding a crowded island, and now they knew that he was one of the damned, working with a name that was not his. Where was Roy Snell? Had he gone to call the police? Was it the police that one called? Obinze tried to remember details from the stories of people who had been caught and deported but his mind was numb. He felt naked. He wanted to turn and run but his body kept moving, against his will, toward the loading area. Then he sensed a movement behind him, quick and violent and too close, and before he could turn around, a paper hat had been pushed onto his head. It was Nigel, and with him a gathering of grinning men.

“Happy birthday, Vinny Boy!” they all said.

Obinze froze, frightened by the complete blankness of his mind. Then he realized what it was. Vincent’s birthday. Roy must have told the men. Even he had not remembered to remember Vincent’s date of birth.

“Oh!” was all he said, nauseous from relief.

Nigel asked him to come into the coffee room, where all the men were trooping in, and as Obinze sat with them, all of them white except for Patrick from Jamaica, passing around the muffins and Coke they had bought with their own money in honor of a birthday they believed was his, a realization brought tears to his eyes: he felt safe.

Vincent called him that evening, and Obinze was mildly surprised, because Vincent had called him only once, months ago, when he changed his bank and wanted to give him the new account number. He wondered whether to say “Happy birthday” to Vincent, whether indeed the call was somehow related to the occasion of the birthday.

“Vincent, kedu?” he said.

“I want a raise.”

Had Vincent learned that from a film? Those words “I want a raise” sounded contrived and comical. “I want forty-five percent. I know you are working more now.”

“Vincent, ahn-ahn. How much am I making? You know I am saving money to do this marriage thing.”

“Forty-five percent,” Vincent said, and hung up.

Obinze decided to ignore him. He knew Vincent’s type; they would push to see how far they could go and then they would step back. If he called and tried to negotiate, it might embolden Vincent to make more demands. That he walked in every week to Vincent’s bank to deposit money into his account was something Vincent would not risk losing entirely. And so when, a week later, in the morning bustle of drivers and trucks, Roy said, “Vinny Boy, step into my office for a minute,” Obinze thought nothing of it. On Roy’s desk was a newspaper, folded at the page with the photo of the big-breasted woman. Roy slowly put his cup of coffee on top of the newspaper. He seemed uncomfortable, not looking directly at Obinze.

“Somebody called yesterday. Said you’re not who you say you are, that you’re illegal and working with a Brit’s name.” There was a pause. Obinze was stung with surprise. Roy picked up the coffee cup again. “Why don’t you just bring in your passport tomorrow and we’ll clear it up, all right?”

Obinze mumbled the first words that came to him. “Okay. I’ll bring my passport tomorrow.” He walked out of the office knowing that he would never remember what he had felt moments ago. Was Roy merely asking him to bring his passport to make the dismissal easier for him, to give him an exit, or did Roy really believe that the caller had been wrong? Why would anybody call about such a thing unless it was true? Obinze had never made as much of an effort as he did the rest of the day to seem normal, to tame the rage that was engulfing him. It was not the thought of the power that Vincent had over him that infuriated him, but the recklessness with which Vincent had exercised it. He left the warehouse that evening, for the final time, wishing more than anything that he had told Nigel and Roy his real name.

Some years later in Lagos, after Chief told him to find a white man whom he could present as his General Manager, Obinze called Nigel. His mobile number had not changed.

“This is Vinny Boy.”

“Vincent! Are you all right, mate?”

“I’m fine, how are you?” Obinze said. Then, later, he said, “Vincent is not my real name, Nigel. My name is Obinze. I have a job offer for you in Nigeria.”

CHAPTER 29

The Angolans told him how things had “gone up,” or were more “tough,” opaque words that were supposed to explain each new request for more money.

“This is not what we agreed to,” Obinze would say, or “I don’t have any extra cash right now,” and they would reply, “Things have gone up, yeah,” in a tone that he imagined was accompanied by a shrug. A silence would follow, a wordlessness over the phone line that told him that it was his problem, not theirs. “I’ll pay it in by Friday,” he would say finally, before hanging up.

Cleotilde’s gentle sympathy assuaged him. She told him, “They’ve got my passport,” and he thought this vaguely sinister, almost a hostage holding.

“Otherwise we could just do this on our own,” she added. But he did not want to do it on his own, with Cleotilde. It was too important and he needed the weight of the Angolans’ expertise, their experience, to make sure all went well. Nicholas had already lent him some money, he had been loath enough to ask at all, because of the judgment in Nicholas’s unsmiling eyes, as though he was thinking that Obinze was soft, spoiled, and many people did not have a cousin who could lend them money. Emenike was the only other person he could ask. The last time they spoke, Emenike had told him, “I don’t know if you’ve seen this play in the West End, but Georgina and I have just been and we loved it,” as though Obinze, in his delivery job, saving austerely, consumed by immigration worries, would ever even think of seeing a West End play. Emenike’s obliviousness had upset him, because it suggested a disregard, and, even worse, an indifference to him, and to his present life. He called Emenike and said, speaking quickly, pushing the words out, that he needed five hundred pounds, which he would pay back as soon as he could find another job, and then, more slowly, he told Emenike about the Angolans, and how close he was to finally doing the marriage ceremony, but there were so many extra costs that he had not budgeted for.

“No problem. Let’s meet Friday,” Emenike said.

Now, Emenike sat across from Obinze in a dimly lit restaurant, after shrugging off his jacket to reveal a tan cashmere sweater that looked faultless. He had not put on weight like most of his other friends now living abroad, didn’t look different from the last time Obinze had seen him in Nsukka.

“Man, The Zed, you look well!” he said, his words aflame with dishonesty. Of course Obinze did not look well, shoulders hunched from stress, in clothes borrowed from his cousin. “Abeg, sorry I haven’t had time to see you. My work schedule is crazy and we’ve also been traveling a lot. I would have asked you to come and stay with us but it’s not a decision I can take alone. Georgina won’t understand. You know these oyinbo people don’t behave like us.” His lips moved, forming something that looked like a smirk. He was making fun of his wife, but Obinze knew, from the muted awe in his tone, that it was mockery colored by respect, mockery of what he believed, despite himself, to be inherently superior. Obinze remembered how Kayode had often said about Emenike in secondary school: He can read all the books he wants but the bush is still in his blood.

“We’ve just come back from America. Man, you need to go to America. No other country like it in the world. We flew to Denver and then drove to Wyoming. Georgina had just finished a really tough case, you remember I told you when I was going to Hong Kong? She was there for work and I flew over for a long weekend. So I thought we should go to America, she needed the holiday.” Emenike’s phone beeped. He took it out of his pocket, glanced at it and grimaced, as though he wanted to be asked what the text was about, but Obinze did not ask. He was tired; Iloba had given him his own National Insurance card, even though it was risky for both of them to work at the same time, but all the job agencies Obinze had tried so far wanted to see a passport and not just the card. His beer tasted flat, and he wished Emenike would just give him the money. But Emenike resumed talking, gesturing, his movements fluid and sure, his manner still that of a person convinced they knew things that other people would never know. And yet there was something different in him that Obinze could not name. Emenike talked for a long time, often prefacing a story with “The thing you have to understand about this country is this.” Obinze’s mind strayed to Cleotilde. The Angolans said at least two people from her side had to come to Newcastle, to avoid any suspicion, but she had called him yesterday to suggest that she bring only one friend, so he would not have to pay for the train and hotel bills of two extra people. He had found it sweet, but he asked her to bring the two anyway; he would take no chances.

Emenike was talking about something that had happened at work. “I had actually arrived at the meeting first, kept my files, and then I went to the loo, only to come back and for this stupid oyinbo man to tell me, Oh, I see you are keeping to African time. And you know what? I just told him off. Since then he has been sending me e-mails to go for a drink. Drink for what?” Emenike sipped his beer. It was his third and he had become looser and louder. All his stories about work had the same arc: somebody would first underestimate or belittle him, and he would then end up victorious, with the final clever word or action.

“I miss Naija. It’s been so long but I just haven’t had the time to travel back home. Besides, Georgina would not survive a visit to Nigeria!” Emenike said, and laughed. He had cast home as the jungle and himself as interpreter of the jungle.

“Another beer?” Emenike asked.

Obinze shook his head. A man trying to get to the table behind them brushed Emenike’s jacket down from behind his chair.

“Ha, look at this man. He wants to ruin my Aquascutum. It was my last birthday present from Georgina,” Emenike said, hanging the jacket back behind his chair. Obinze did not know the brand but he knew from the stylish smirk on Emenike’s face that he was supposed to be impressed.

“Sure you don’t want another beer?” Emenike asked, looking around for the waitress. “She is ignoring me. Did you notice how rude she was earlier? These Eastern Europeans just don’t like serving black people.”

After the waitress had taken his order, Emenike brought out an envelope from his pocket. “Here it is, man. I know you asked for five hundred but it’s one thousand. You want to count it?”

Count it? Obinze nearly said, but the words did not leave his mouth. To be given money in the Nigerian manner was to have it pushed into your hands, fists closed, eyes averted from yours, your effusive thanks — and it had to be effusive — waved away, and you certainly did not count the money, sometimes did not even look at it until you were alone. But here was Emenike asking him to count the money. And so he did, slowly, deliberately, moving each note from one hand to the other, wondering if Emenike had hated him all those years in secondary school and university. He had not laughed at Emenike as Kayode and the other boys did, but he had not defended Emenike either. Perhaps Emenike had despised his neutrality.

“Thanks, man,” Obinze said. Of course it was a thousand pounds. Did Emenike think a fifty-pound note might have slipped out on his way to the restaurant?

“It’s not a loan,” Emenike said, leaning back on his seat, smiling thinly.

“Thanks, man,” Obinze said again, and despite it all he was grateful and relieved. It had worried him, how many things he still had to pay for before the wedding, and if this was what it took, counting a cash gift while Emenike watched with power in his gaze, then so be it.

Emenike’s phone rang. “Georgina,” he said happily before he took the call. His voice was slightly raised, for Obinze’s benefit. “It’s fantastic to see him again after so long.” Then, after a pause, “Of course, darling, we should do that.”

He put his phone down and told Obinze, “Georgina wants to come and meet us in the next half hour so we can all go to dinner. Is that okay?”

Obinze shrugged. “I never say no to food.”

Just before Georgina arrived, Emenike told him, in a lowered tone, “Don’t mention this marriage thing to Georgina.”

He had imagined Georgina, from the way Emenike spoke of her, as a fragile innocent, a successful lawyer who nonetheless did not truly know the evils of the world, but when she arrived, square-faced with a big square body, brown hair crisply cut, giving her an air of efficiency, he could see right away that she was frank, knowing, even world-weary. He imagined her clients instantly trusting her ability. This was a woman who would check up on the finances of charities she gave to. This was a woman who could certainly survive a visit to Nigeria. Why had Emenike portrayed her as a hapless English rose? She pressed her lips to Emenike’s, then turned to shake Obinze’s hand.

“Do you fancy anything in particular?” she asked Obinze, unbuttoning her brown suede coat. “There’s a nice Indian place nearby.”

“Oh, that’s a bit tatty,” Emenike said. He had changed. His voice had taken on an unfamiliar modulation, his delivery slower, the temperature of his entire being much lower. “We could go to that new place in Kensington, it’s not that far.”

“I’m not sure Obinze will find it very interesting, darling,” Georgina said.

“Oh, I think he’ll like it,” Emenike said. Self-satisfaction, that was the difference in him. He was married to a British woman, lived in a British home, worked at a British job, traveled on a British passport, said “exercise” to refer to a mental rather than a physical activity. He had longed for this life, and never quite believed he would have it. Now his backbone was stiff with self-satisfaction. He was sated. In the restaurant in Kensington, a candle glowed on the table, and the blond waiter, who seemed too tall and handsome to be a waiter, served tiny bowls of what looked like green jelly.

“Our new lemon and thyme aperitif, with the compliments of the chef,” he said.

“Fantastic,” Emenike said, instantly sinking into one of the rituals of his new life: eyebrows furrowed, concentration sharp, sipping sparkling water and studying a restaurant menu. He and Georgina discussed the starters. The waiter was called to answer a question. It struck Obinze, how seriously Emenike took this initiation into the voodoo of fine dining, because when the waiter brought him what looked like three elegant bits of green weed, for which he would pay thirteen pounds, Emenike rubbed his palms together in delight. Obinze’s burger was served in four pieces, arranged in a large martini glass. When Georgina’s order arrived, a pile of red raw beef, an egg sunnily splayed on top of it, Obinze tried not to look at it as he ate, otherwise he might be tempted to vomit.

Emenike did most of the talking, telling Georgina about their time together at school, barely letting Obinze say anything. In the stories he told, he and Obinze were the popular rogues who always got into glamorous trouble. Obinze watched Georgina, only now becoming aware of how much older than Emenike she was. At least eight years. Her manly facial contours were softened by frequent brief smiles, but they were thoughtful smiles, the smiles of a natural skeptic, and he wondered how much she believed of Emenike’s stories, how much love had suspended her reason.

“We’re having a dinner party tomorow, Obinze,” Georgina said. “You must come.”

“Yes, I forgot to mention it,” Emenike said.

“You really must come. We’re having a few friends over and I think you’ll enjoy meeting them,” Georgina said.

“I would love to,” Obinze said.

THEIR TERRACED HOME in Islington, with its short flight of well-preserved steps that led to the green front door, smelled of roasting food when Obinze arrived. Emenike let him in. “The Zed! You’re early, we’re just finishing up in the kitchen. Come and stay in my study until the others come.” Emenike led him upstairs, and into the study, a clean, bright room made brighter by the white bookshelves and white curtains. The windows ate up large chunks of the walls, and Obinze imagined the room in the afternoon, flooded gloriously with light, and himself sunk in the armchair by the door, lost in a book.

“I’ll come and call you in a bit,” Emenike said.

There were, on a window ledge, photos of Emenike squinting in front of the Sistine Chapel, making a peace sign at the Acropolis, standing at the Colosseum, his shirt the same nutmeg color as the wall of the ruin. Obinze imagined him, dutiful and determined, visiting the places he was supposed to visit, thinking, as he did so, not of the things he was seeing but of the photos he would take of them and of the people who would see those photos. The people who would know that he had participated in these triumphs. On the bookshelf, Graham Greene caught his eye. He took The Heart of the Matter down and began to read the first chapter, suddenly nostalgic for his teenage years when his mother would reread it every few months.

Emenike came in. “Is that Waugh?”

“No.” He showed him the book cover. “My mother loves this book She was always trying to get me to love her English novels.”

“Waugh is the best of them. Brideshead is the closest I’ve read to a perfect novel.”

“I think Waugh is cartoonish. I just don’t get those so-called comic English novels. It’s as if they can’t deal with the real and deep complexity of human life and so they resort to doing this comic business. Greene is the other extreme, too morose.”

“No, man, you need to go and read Waugh again. Greene doesn’t really do it for me, but the first part of The End of the Affair is terrific.”

“This study is the dream,” Obinze said.

Emenike shrugged. “Do you want any books? Take anything you want.”

“Thanks, man,” Obinze said, knowing that he would not take any.

Emenike looked around, as though seeing the study through new eyes. “We found this desk in Edinburgh. Georgina already had some good pieces but we found some new things together.”

Obinze wondered if Emenike had so completely absorbed his own disguise that even when they were alone, he could talk about “good furniture,” as though the idea of “good furniture” was not alien in their Nigerian world, where new things were supposed to look new. Obinze might have said something to Emenike about it but not now; too much had already shifted in their relationship. Obinze followed him downstairs. The dining table was a riot of color, bright mismatched ceramic plates, some of them chipped at the edges, red wine goblets, deep blue napkins. In a silver bowl at the center of the table, delicate milky flowers floated in water. Emenike made the introductions.

“This is Georgina’s old friend Mark, and this is his wife, Hannah, who by the way is completing her PhD on the female orgasm, or the Israeli female orgasm.”

“Well, it isn’t quite that singularly focused,” Hannah said, to general laughter, warmly shaking Obinze’s hand. She had a tanned, broad-featured succoring face, the face of a person who could not abide conflict. Mark, pale-skinned and rumpled, squeezed her shoulder but did not laugh along with the others. He said “How do you do” to Obinze in an almost formal manner.

“This is our dear friend Phillip, who is the best solicitor in London, after Georgina of course,” Emenike said.

“Are all the men in Nigeria as gorgeous as you and your friend?” Phillip asked Emenike, swooning mockingly as he shook Obinze’s hand.

“You’ll have to come to Nigeria and see,” Emenike said, and winked, in what seemed to be a continuous flirtatiousness with Phillip.

Phillip was slender and elegant, his red silk shirt open at the neck. His mannerisms, supple gestures of his wrists, fingers swirling in the air, reminded Obinze of the boy in secondary school — his name was Hadome — who was said to pay junior students to suck his dick. Once, Emenike and two other boys had lured Hadome into the toilet and beat him up, Hadome’s eye swelling so quickly that, just before school was dismissed, it looked grotesque, like a big purple eggplant. Obinze had stood outside the toilet with other boys, boys who did not join in the beating but who laughed along, boys who taunted and goaded, boys who shouted “Homo! Homo!”

“This is our friend Alexa. Alexa’s just moved into a new place in Holland Park, after years in France, and so, lucky us, we’ll be seeing much more of her. She works in music publishing. She’s also a fantastic poet,” Emenike said.

“Oh, stop it,” Alexa said, and then turning to Obinze, she asked, “So where are you from, darling?”

“Nigeria.”

“No, no, I mean in London, darling.”

“I live in Essex, actually,” he said.

“I see,” she said, as though disappointed. She was a small woman with a very pale face and tomato-red hair. “Shall we eat, boys and girls?” She picked up one of the plates and examined it.

“I love these plates. Georgina and Emenike are never boring, are they?” Hannah said.

“We bought them from this bazaar in India,” Emenike said. “Handmade by rural women, just so beautiful. See the detail at the edges?” He raised one of the plates.

“Sublime,” Hannah said, and looked at Obinze.

“Yes, very nice,” Obinze mumbled. Those plates, with their amateur finishing, the slight lumpiness of the edges, would never be shown in the presence of guests in Nigeria. He still was not sure whether Emenike had become a person who believed that something was beautiful because it was handmade by poor people in a foreign country, or whether he had simply learned to pretend so. Georgina poured the drinks. Emenike served the starter, crab with hard-boiled eggs. He had taken on a careful and calibrated charm. He said “Oh dear” often. When Phillip complained about the French couple building a house next to his in Cornwall, Emenike asked, “Are they between you and the sunset?”

Are they between you and the sunset? It would never occur to Obinze, or to anybody he had grown up with, to ask a question like that.

“So how was America?” Phillip asked.

“A fascinating place, really. We spent a few days with Hugo in Jackson, Wyoming. You met Hugo last Christmas, didn’t you, Mark?”

“Yes. So what’s he doing there?” Mark seemed unimpressed by the plates; he had not, like his wife, picked one up to look at it.

“It’s a ski resort, but it’s not pretentious. In Jackson, they say people who go to Aspen expect somebody to tie their ski boots up for them,” Georgina said.

“The thought of skiing in America makes me quite ill,” Alexa said.

“Why?” Hannah asked.

“Have they got a Disney station in the resort, with Mickey Mouse in ski gear?” Alexa asked.

“Alexa has only been to America once, when she was in school, but she loves to hate it from afar,” Georgina said.

“I’ve loved America from afar my whole life,” Obinze said. Alexa turned to him in slight surprise, as though she had not expected him to speak. Under the chandelier light, her red hair took on a strange, unnatural glow.

“What I’ve noticed being here is that many English people are in awe of America but also deeply resent it,” Obinze added.

“Perfectly true,” Phillip said, nodding at Obinze. “Perfectly true. It’s the resentment of a parent whose child has become far more beautiful and with a far more interesting life.”

“But the Americans love us Brits, they love the accent and the Queen and the double decker,” Emenike said. There, it had been said: the man considered himself British.

“And the great revelation Emenike had while we were there?” Georgina said, smiling. “The difference between the American and British ‘bye.’ ”

“Bye?” Alexa asked.

“Yes. He says the Brits draw it out much more, while Americans make it short.”

“That was a great revelation. It explained everything about the difference between both countries,” Emenike said, knowing that they would laugh, and they did. “I was also thinking about the difference in approaching foreignness. Americans will smile at you and be extremely friendly but if your name is not Cory or Chad, they make no effort at saying it properly. The Brits will be surly and will be suspicious if you’re too friendly but they will treat foreign names as though they are actually valid names.”

“That’s interesting,” Hannah said.

Georgina said, “It’s a bit tiresome to talk about America being insular, not that we help that much, since if something major happens in America, it is the headline in Britain; something major happens here, it is on the back page in America, if at all. But I do think the most troubling thing was the garishness of the nationalism, don’t you think so, darling?” Georgina turned to Emenike.

“Absolutely,” Emenike said. “Oh, and we went to a rodeo. Hugo thought we might fancy a bit of culture.”

There was a general, tittering laughter.

“And we saw this quite unbelievable parade of little children with heavily made-up faces and then there was a lot of flag-waving and a lot of ‘God Bless America.’ I was terrified that it was the sort of place where you did not know what might happen to you if you suddenly said, ‘I don’t like America.’ ”

“I found America quite jingoistic, too, when I did my fellowship training there,” Mark said.

“Mark is a pediatric surgeon,” Georgina said to Obinze.

“One got the sense that people — progressive people, that is, because American conservatives come from an entirely different planet, even to this Tory — felt that they could very well criticize their country but they didn’t like it at all when you did,” Mark said.

“Where were you?” Emenike asked, as if he knew America’s smallest corners.

“Philadelphia. A specialty hospital called the Children’s Hospital. It was quite a remarkable place and the training was very good. It might have taken me two years in England to see the rare cases that I had in a month there.”

“But you didn’t stay,” Alexa said, almost triumphantly.

“I hadn’t planned on staying.” Mark’s face never quite dissolved into any expression.

“Speaking of which, I’ve just got involved with this fantastic charity that’s trying to stop the UK from hiring so many African health workers,” Alexa said. “There are simply no doctors and nurses left on that continent. It’s an absolute tragedy! African doctors should stay in Africa.”

“Why shouldn’t they want to practice where there is regular electricity and regular pay?” Mark asked, his tone flat. Obinze sensed that he did not like Alexa at all. “I’m from Grimsby and I certainly don’t want to work in a district hospital there.”

“But it isn’t quite the same thing, is it? We’re speaking of some of the world’s poorest people. The doctors have a responsibility as Africans,” Alexa said. “Life isn’t fair, really. If they have the privilege of that medical degree then it comes with a responsibility to help their people.”

“I see. I don’t suppose any of us should have that responsibility for the blighted towns in the north of England?” Mark said.

Alexa’s face reddened. In the sudden tense silence, the air wrinkling between them all, Georgina got up and said, “Everyone ready for my roast lamb?”

They all praised the meat, which Obinze wished had stayed a little longer in the oven; he carefully cut around his slice, eating the sides that had grayed from cooking and leaving on his plate the bits stained with pinkish blood. Hannah led the conversation, as though to smooth the air, her voice calming, bringing up subjects they would all agree on, changing to something else if she sensed a looming disagreement. Their conversation was symphonic, voices flowing into one another, in agreement: how atrocious to treat those Chinese cockle pickers like that, how absurd, the idea of fees for higher education, how preposterous that fox-hunting supporters had stormed Parliament. They laughed when Obinze said, “I don’t understand why fox hunting is such a big issue in this country. Aren’t there more important things?”

“What could possibly be more important?” Mark asked drily.

“Well, it’s the only way we know how to fight our class warfare,” Alexa said. “The landed gentry and the aristocrats hunt, you see, and we liberal middle classes fume about it. We want to take their silly little toys away.”

“We certainly do,” Phillip said. “It’s monstrous.”

“Did you read about Blunkett saying he doesn’t know how many immigrants there are in the country?” Alexa asked, and Obinze immediately tensed, his chest tightening.

“ ‘Immigrant,’ of course, is code for Muslim,” Mark said.

“If he really wanted to know, he would go to all the construction sites in this country and do a head count,” Phillip said.

“It was quite interesting to see how this plays out in America,” Georgina said. “They’re kicking up a fuss about immigration as well. Although, of course, America has always been kinder to immigrants than Europe.”

“Well, yes, but that is because countries in Europe were based on exclusion and not, as in America, on inclusion,” Mark said.

“But it’s also a different psychology, isn’t it?” Hannah said. “European countries are surrounded by countries that are similar to one another, while America has Mexico, which is really a developing country, and so it creates a different psychology about immigration and borders.”

“But we don’t have immigrants from Denmark. We have immigrants from Eastern Europe, which is our Mexico,” Alexa said.

“Except, of course, for race,” Georgina said. “Eastern Europeans are white. Mexicans are not.”

“How did you see race in America, by the way, Emenike?” Alexa asked. “It’s an iniquitously racist country, isn’t it?”

“He doesn’t have to go to America for that, Alexa,” Georgina said.

“It seemed to me that in America blacks and whites work together but don’t play together, and here blacks and whites play together but don’t work together,” Emenike said.

The others nodded thoughtfully, as though he had said something profound, but Mark said, “I’m not sure I quite understand that.”

“I think class in this country is in the air that people breathe. Everyone knows their place. Even the people who are angry about class have somehow accepted their place,” Obinze said. “A white boy and a black girl who grow up in the same working-class town in this country can get together and race will be secondary, but in America, even if the white boy and black girl grow up in the same neighborhood, race would be primary.”

Alexa gave him another surprised look.

“A bit simplified but yes, that’s sort of what I meant,” Emenike said, slowly, leaning back on his chair, and Obinze sensed a rebuke. He should have been quiet; this, after all, was Emenike’s stage.

“But you haven’t really had to deal with any racism here, have you, Emenike?” Alexa asked, and her tone implied that she already knew the answer to the question was no. “Of course people are prejudiced, but aren’t we all prejudiced?”

“Well, no,” Georgina said firmly. “You should tell the story of the cabbie, darling.”

“Oh, that story,” Emenike said, as he got up to serve the cheese plate, murmuring something in Hannah’s ear that made her smile and touch his arm. How thrilled he was, to live in Georgina’s world.

“Do tell,” Hannah said.

And so Emenike did. He told the story of the taxi that he had hailed one night, on Upper Street; from afar the cab light was on but as the cab approached him, the light went off, and he assumed the driver was not on duty. After the cab passed him by, he looked back idly and saw that the cab light was back on and that, a little way up the street, it stopped for two white women.

Emenike had told Obinze this story before and he was struck now by how differently Emenike told it. He did not mention the rage he had felt standing on that street and looking at the cab. He was shaking, he had told Obinze, his hands trembling for a long time, a little frightened by his own feelings. But now, sipping the last of his red wine, flowers floating in front of him, he spoke in a tone cleansed of anger, thick only with a kind of superior amusement, while Georgina interjected to clarify: Can you believe that?

Alexa, flush with red wine, her eyes red below her scarlet hair, changed the subject. “Blunkett must be sensible and make sure this country remains a refuge. People who have survived frightful wars must absolutely be allowed in!” She turned to Obinze. “Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” he said, and felt alienation run through him like a shiver.

Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.

CHAPTER 30

Nicholas gave Obinze a suit for the wedding. “It’s a good Italian suit,” he said. “It’s small for me so it should fit you.” The trousers were big and bunched up when Obinze tightened his belt, but the jacket, also big, shielded this unsightly pleat of cloth at his waist. Not that he minded. So focused was he on getting through the day, on finally beginning his life, that he would have swaddled his lower parts in a baby’s diaper if that were required. He and Iloba met Cleotilde near Civic Center. She was standing under a tree with her friends, her hair pushed back with a white band, her eyes boldly lined in black; she looked like an older, sexier person. Her ivory dress was tight at her hips. He had paid for the dress. “I haven’t got any proper going-out dress,” she had said in apology when she called to tell him that she had nothing that looked convincingly bridal. She hugged him. She looked nervous, and he tried to deflect his own nervousness by thinking about them together after this, how in less than an hour, he would be free to walk with surer steps on Britain’s streets, and free to kiss her.

“You have the rings?” Iloba asked her.

“Yes,” Cleotilde said.

She and Obinze had bought them the week before, plain matching cheap rings from a side-street shop, and she had looked so delighted, laughingly slipping different rings on and then off her finger, that he wondered if she wished it were a real wedding.

“Fifteen minutes to go,” Iloba said. He had appointed himself the organizer. He took pictures, his digital camera held away from his face, saying, “Move closer! Okay, one more!” His sprightly good spirits annoyed Obinze. On the train up to Newcastle the previous day, while Obinze had spent his time looking out of the window, unable even to read, Iloba had talked and talked, until his voice became a distant murmur, perhaps because he was trying to keep Obinze from worrying too much. Now, he talked to Cleotilde’s friends with an easy friendliness, about the new Chelsea coach, about Big Brother, as if they were all there for something ordinary and normal.

“Time to go,” Iloba said. They walked towards the civic center. The afternoon was bright with sunshine. Obinze opened the door and stood aside for the others to go ahead, into the sterile hallway, where they paused to get their bearings, to be sure which way to go towards the register office. Two policemen stood behind the door, watching them with stony eyes. Obinze quieted his panic. There was nothing to worry about, nothing at all, he told himself, the civic center probably had policemen present as a matter of routine; but he sensed in the sudden smallness of the hallway, the sudden thickening of doom in the air, that something was wrong, before he noticed another man approaching him, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his cheeks so red he looked as though he was wearing terrible makeup.

“Are you Obinze Maduewesi?” the red-cheeked man asked. In his hands was a sheaf of papers and Obinze could see a photocopy of his passport page.

“Yes,” Obinze said quietly, and that word, yes, was an acknowledgment to the red-cheeked immigration officer, to Iloba and to Cleotilde, and to himself that it was over.

“Your visa is expired and you are not allowed to be present in the UK,” the red-cheeked man said.

A policeman clamped handcuffs around his wrists. He felt himself watching the scene from far away, watching himself walk to the police car outside, and sink into the too-soft seat in the back. There had been so many times in the past when he had feared that this would happen, so many moments that had become one single blur of panic, and now it felt like the dull echo of an aftermath. Cleotilde had flung herself on the ground and begun to cry. She might never have visited her father’s country, but he was convinced at that moment of her Africanness; how else would she be able to fling herself to the ground with that perfect dramatic flourish? He wondered if her tears were for him or for herself or for what might have been between them. She had no need to worry, though, since she was a European citizen; the policemen barely glanced at her. It was he who felt the heaviness of the handcuffs during the drive to the police station, who silently handed over his watch and his belt and his wallet, and watched the policeman take his phone and switch it off. Nicholas’s large trousers were slipping down his hips.

“Your shoes too. Take off your shoes,” the policeman said.

He took off his shoes. He was led to a cell. It was small, with brown walls, and the metal bars, so thick his hand could not go around one, reminded him of the chimpanzee’s cage at Nsukka’s dismal, forgotten zoo. From the very high ceilings, a single bulb burned. There was an emptying, echoing vastness in that tiny cell.

“Were you aware that your visa had expired?”

“Yes,” Obinze said.

“Were you about to have a sham marriage?”

“No. Cleotilde and I have been dating for a while.”

“I can arrange for a lawyer for you, but it’s obvious you’ll be deported,” the immigration officer said evenly.

When the lawyer came, puffy-faced, darkened arcs under his eyes, Obinze remembered all the films in which the state lawyer is distracted and exhausted. He came with a bag but did not open it, and he sat across from Obinze, holding nothing, no file, no paper, no pen. His demeanor was pleasant and sympathetic.

“The government has a strong case and we can appeal but to be honest it will only delay the case and you will eventually be removed from the UK,” he said, with the air of a man who had said those same words, in that same tone, more times than he wished to, or could, remember.

“I’m willing to go back to Nigeria,” Obinze said. The last shard of his dignity was like a wrapper slipping off that he was desperate to retie.

The lawyer looked surprised. “Okay, then,” he said, and got up a little too hastily, as though grateful that his job had been made easier. Obinze watched him leave. He was going to tick on a form that his client was willing to be removed. “Removed.” That word made Obinze feel inanimate. A thing to be removed. A thing without breath and mind. A thing.

HE HATED the cold heaviness of the handcuffs, the mark he imagined they left on his wrists, the glint of the interlinking circles of metal that robbed him of movement. There he was, in handcuffs, being led through the hall of Manchester Airport, and in the coolness and din of that airport, men and women and children, travelers and cleaners and security guards, watched him, wondering what evil he had done. He kept his gaze on a tall white woman hurrying ahead, hair flying behind her, knapsack hunched on her back. She would not understand his story, why he was now walking through the airport with metal clamped around his wrists, because people like her did not approach travel with anxiety about visas. She might worry about money, about a place to stay, about safety, perhaps even about visas, but never with an anxiety that wrenched at her spine.

He was led into a room, bunk beds pushed forlornly against the walls. Three men were already there. One, from Djibouti, said little, lying and staring at the ceiling as though retracing the journey of how he had ended up at a holding facility in Manchester Airport. Two were Nigerian. The younger sat up on his bed eternally cracking his fingers. The older paced the small room and would not stop talking.

“Bros, how did they get you?” he asked Obinze, with an instant familiarity that Obinze resented. Something about him reminded Obinze of Vincent. Obinze shrugged and said nothing to him; there was no need for courtesies simply because they shared a cell.

“Is there anything I could have to read, please?” Obinze asked an immigration officer when she came to lead the man from Djibouti out to see a visitor.

“Read,” she repeated, eyebrows raised.

“Yes. A book or a magazine or a newspaper,” Obinze said.

“You want to read,” she said, and on her face, a contemptuous amusement. “Sorry. But we’ve got a TV room and you’re allowed to go there and watch telly after lunchtime.”

In the TV room, there was a group of men, many of them Nigerians, talking loudly. The other men sat around slumped into their own sorrows, listening to the Nigerians trade their stories, sometimes laughing, sometimes self-pitying.

“Ah this na my second time. The first time I come with different passport,” one of them said.

“Na for work wey they get me o.”

“E get one guy wey they deport, him don come back get him paper. Na him wey go help me,” another said.

Obinze envied them for what they were, men who casually changed names and passports, who would plan and come back and do it over again because they had nothing to lose. He didn’t have their savoir faire; he was soft, a boy who had grown up eating corn flakes and reading books, raised by a mother during a time when truth telling was not yet a luxury. He was ashamed to be with them, among them. They did not have his shame and even this, too, he envied.

IN DETENTION, he felt raw, skinned, the outer layers of himself stripped off. His mother’s voice on the phone was almost unfamiliar, a woman speaking a crisp Nigerian English, telling him, calmly, to be strong, that she would be in Lagos to receive him, and he remembered how, years ago, when General Buhari’s government stopped giving essential commodities, and she no longer came home with free tins of milk, she had begun to grind soybeans at home to make milk. She said soy milk was more nutritious than cow milk and although he refused to drink the grainy fluid in the morning, he watched her do so with an uncomplaining common sense. It was what she showed now, over the phone, telling him she would come and pick him up, as though she had always nursed the possibility of this, her son in detention, waiting to be removed from a country overseas.

He thought a lot about Ifemelu, imagining what she was doing, how her life had changed. She had once told him, in university, “You know what I admired most about you in secondary school? That you never had a problem saying ‘I don’t know.’ Other boys pretended to know what they didn’t know. But you just had this confidence and you could always admit that you didn’t know something.” He had thought it an unsual compliment, and had cherished this image of himself, perhaps because he knew it was not entirely true. He wondered what she would think if she knew where he was now. She would be sympathetic, he was sure, but would she also, in a small way, be disappointed? He almost asked Iloba to contact her. It would not be difficult to find her; he already knew she lived in Baltimore. But he did not ask Iloba. When Iloba visited him, he talked about lawyers. They both knew that there was no point, but still Iloba talked about lawyers. He would sit across from Obinze, rest his head on his hand, and talk about lawyers. Obinze wondered if some of the lawyers existed only in Iloba’s mind. “I know one lawyer in London, a Ghanaian, he represented this man with no papers, the man was almost on a plane home, and the next thing we knew, the man was free. He now works in IT.” Other times, Iloba took comfort in stating what was obvious. “If only the marriage was just done before they came,” he said. “You know if they had come even one second after you were pronounced man and wife, they would not touch you?” Obinze nodded. He knew, and Iloba knew that he knew. On Iloba’s last visit, after Obinze told him that he was being moved to Dover the next day, Iloba began to cry. “Zed, this was not supposed to happen like this.”

“Iloba, why are you talking rubbish? Stop crying, my friend,” Obinze said, pleased to be in a position to pretend strength.

And yet when Nicholas and Ojiugo visited, he disliked how strenuously they tried to be positive, to pretend, almost, as though he was merely ill in hospital and they had come to visit him. They sat across from him, the bare cold table between them, and talked about the mundane, Ojiugo speaking a little too quickly, and Nicholas saying more in an hour than Obinze had heard him say in weeks: Nne had been accepted into the National Children’s Orchestra, Nna had won yet another prize. They brought him money, novels, a bag of clothes. Nicholas had shopped for him, and most of the clothes were new and in his size. Ojiugo often asked, “But are they treating you well? Are they treating you well?” as though the treatment was what mattered, rather than the blighted reality of it all, that he was in a holding center, about to be deported. Nobody behaved normally. They were all under the spell of his misfortune.

“They are waiting for seats on a flight to Lagos,” Obinze said. “They’ll keep me in Dover until there’s a seat available.”

Obinze had read about Dover in a newspaper. A former prison. It felt surreal, to be driven past the electronic gates, the high walls, the wires. His cell was smaller, colder, than the cell in Manchester and his cellmate, another Nigerian, told him that he was not going to allow himself to be deported. He had a hardened, fleshless face. “I will take off my shirt and my shoes when they try to board me. I will seek asylum,” he told Obinze. “If you take off your shirt and your shoes, they will not board you.” He repeated this often, like a mantra. From time to time he farted loudly, wordlessly, and from time to time he sank to his knees in the middle of their tiny cell, hands raised up to the heavens, and prayed. “Father Lord, I praise your name! Nothing is too much for you! I bless your name!” His palms were deeply etched with lines. Obinze wondered what atrocities those hands had seen. He felt suffocated in that cell, let out only to exercise and to eat, food that brought to mind a bowl of boiled worms. He could not eat; he felt his body slackening, his flesh disappearing. By the day he was led into a van one early morning, a fuzz of hair, like carpet grass, had covered his entire jaw. It was not yet dawn. He was with two women and five men, all handcuffed, all bound for Nigeria, and they were marched, at Heathrow Airport, through security and immigration and onto the plane, while other passengers stared. They were seated at the very back, in the last row of seats, closest to the toilet. Obinze sat unmoving throughout the flight. He did not want his tray of food. “No, thank you,” he said to the flight attendant.

The woman next to him said eagerly, “Can I have his own?” She had been at Dover too. She had very dark lips and a buoyant, undefeated manner. She would, he was sure, get another passport with another name and try again.

As the plane began its descent into Lagos, a flight attendant stood above them and said loudly, “You cannot leave. An immigration officer will come to take charge of you.” Her face tight with disgust, as though they were all criminals bringing shame on upright Nigerians like her. The plane emptied out. Obinze looked through the window at an old jet standing in the mild late afternoon sun, until a uniformed man came walking down the aisle. His belly was large; it must have been a struggle to button up his shirt.

“Yes, yes, I have come to take charge of you! Welcome home!” he said humorously, and he reminded Obinze of that Nigerian ability to laugh, to so easily reach for amusement. He had missed that. “We laugh too much,” his mother once said. “Maybe we should laugh less and solve our problems more.”

The uniformed man led them to an office, and handed out forms. Name. Age. Country you have come from.

“Did they treat you well?” the man asked Obinze.

“Yes,” Obinze said.

“So do you have anything for the boys?”

Obinze looked at him for a moment, his open face, his simple view of the world; deportations happened every day and the living went on living. Obinze brought from his pocket a ten-pound note, part of the money Nicholas had given him. The man took it with a smile.

Outside, it was like breathing steam; he felt light-headed. A new sadness blanketed him, the sadness of his coming days, when he would feel the world slightly off-kilter, his vision unfocused. At the cordoned-off area near Arrivals, standing apart from the other expectant people, his mother was waiting for him.