Blackass

FURO WARIBOKO

Furo Wariboko awoke this morning to find that dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep. He was lying nude in bed, and when he raised his head a fraction he could see his alabaster belly, and his pale legs beyond, covered with fuzz that glinted bronze in the cold daylight pouring in through the open window. He sat up with a sudden motion that swilled the panic in his stomach and spilled his hands into his lap. He stared at his hands, the pink life lines in his palms, the shellfish-coloured cuticles, the network of blue veins that ran from knuckle to wrist, more veins than he had ever noticed before. His hands were not black but white … same as his legs, his belly, all of him. He clenched his fists, squeezed his eyes shut, and sank on to the bed. Outside, a bird chirruped short piercing cries, like mocking laughter.

When he opened his eyes again the air was silent, the bird was flown. Turning on his side, his gaze roved the familiar corners of his bedroom and rested on his going-out shoes, their brown leather polished to a dull lustre, placed at attention beside the door. His blue T.M. Lewin shirt and his favourite black cotton trousers (which he had stayed awake till after midnight, when power returned, to iron) were hanging from the chair at his desk. His plastic folder, packed tight with documents, was on the desk. He stared at the folder till his eyeballs itched with dryness, and then he rolled to the bed’s edge and blinked at the screen of his BlackBerry lying on the floor. He grimaced with relief: the alarm hadn’t gone off: he had sixteen minutes until it rang at eight. On account of Lagos traffic he planned to leave the house at half past eight. A bath, get dressed, eat breakfast, and then he would be off.

Furo heaved on to his back and fixed his gaze on the white ceiling squares festooned with fragments of old cobwebs. He tried to corral his thoughts into the path of logic, but his efforts were brushed aside by his panicked heartbeats. Through the window and far away he heard the unruffled buzz of traffic, the whale honks of trailers, the urgent beeping of a reversing Coaster bus, the same school bus that arrived every weekday around this time. The accustomed sounds of Monday morning. It appeared a normal day for everyone else, and that thought brought Furo no succour, it only confirmed what he already knew, that he was alone in this lingering dream. But what he knew did not explain the how, the why, or the why today. I shouldn’t have stayed up late, he said to himself, no wonder I had such nightmares — I, who never dream! He tried to remember what he had dreamed of, but all he recalled was climbing into bed with the same dread he had slept with since he received the email notifying him of his job interview.

He was startled back to alertness by his phone alarm. He reached forwards to turn it off, then pushed his legs off the bed, and sat at the edge with his feet pressed into the rug. The pallor of his feet was stark against the rug’s crimson. He was white, full oyibo, no doubt about it — and, with his knees swinging, the flesh of his thighs jiggling, his mind following these bone-and-flesh motions for bewildered seconds before moving its attention to other details of his physiology, he began to comprehend the extent of his transformation. He stilled his knees and, calming himself with a deep suck of air, raised his hand to his cramped neck. As he massaged, his mouth hung open and gastric gasses washed over his tongue in quiet hiccups.

Then, without telltale footsteps, three knocks sounded on the bedroom door. Furo caught his breath and glared, thinking, I locked it, didn’t I? I hope I locked it! ‘Furo,’ his mother called, tapping again. ‘Are you awake?’ The handle turned. The door was locked.

‘I’m awake!’ Furo cried out. The relief in his voice made it sound strange to his ears, but otherwise it was his, unchanged. ‘Good morning, Mummy.’

‘Morning, dear,’ his mother said, and rattled the handle. ‘Come and open the door.’

‘I’m not dressed, I’m getting ready,’ Furo said in a rush, and bit his lip at the quaver in his voice. But his mother it seemed had noticed nothing abnormal. ‘I’m off to work,’ she said. ‘Remember, today is Monday, traffic will be bad. You should leave soon.’

‘Yes, Mummy.’

‘Your father’s awake. I asked him to drop you off.’

‘OK, Mummy.’

‘I’ve told Tekena to fix you breakfast, but you know how your sister is, she won’t get out of bed unless she’s dragged. Remind her before you enter the bathroom.’

‘Let her sleep. I can take care of myself.’

In the ensuing silence, the back of Furo’s neck ached, the hairs on his arms prickled, and he moved his hands to his groin, cupped it from view. When his mother spoke again, her tone sounded like it came from a troubled place.

‘Don’t worry too much, ehn. Just do your best at the interview. If that job is yours, I’m sure you’ll get it. Everything will be OK.’

‘Thank you, Mummy,’ Furo said. ‘Have a good day.’

At the sound of the front door closing, Furo raised both hands to stroke the sweat from his bristled scalp, and after dropping his hands to the bed to dry them, he tried to focus his mind on the problems that swelled before him. His father and his sister were obstacles he had to elude. Another hurdle was money. He had no money, not a kobo on him. He’d planned to ask his mother for the bus fare to the interview, but even if he’d dared to speak about it through the closed door, his father’s offer of a ride had quashed any chances of that succeeding. (It was impossible to accept, absurd to even think it, but there it was before his eyes, this skin colour that others were born into but he, Furo, had awoken to.) There was his sister, and he could try borrowing from her, but how to collect the money without facing her? No, too risky — he would have to walk. There was no time to eat, to bathe, to take chances. He had to leave now. There was no more denying what he was experiencing at this moment: he, Furo, son of a mother who knew his voice, was now a white man.

Furo rose from the bed, pattered across the cold floor tiles to the bedroom door and grabbed his towel from the hook. With the towel he scrubbed his armpits, wiped the sweat from his torso and back, rubbed down his legs, and then he straightened up and turned, turned, kept turning, his eyes scanning the room. A sachet of pure water lay on his desk. Beside it, the hand mirror. His gaze moved to the bed with its rumpled sheet, and the louvred window above it, the dust-clogged mosquito netting that sieved the morning light, the old rainwater blotches on the window ledge: everything familiar, as it should be. His eyelashes were stiff with sleep crust, and his breath stank of last night’s meal: noodles and fried egg garnished with raw onions. He ran his tongue along his crud-caked teeth. A large, reddish-brown cockroach emerged at that instant from under the bed and, waving its antennae furiously, skittered across the floor and into the darkened wardrobe. Furo stopped turning, strode to the desk, grabbed the hand mirror, and with a quick glance at his face, he flung it after the cockroach. Picking up the water sachet, he tore open the edge, and after rubbing his teeth and tongue with a finger, he squirted water into his mouth, gargled, and swallowed. He squeezed the last drops of water on to the towel, mopped his face with it and cleaned the crust from his eyes, then put on his clothes.

Getting from his bedroom to the front door was easy. There was no one about — his father and his sister were still in their bedrooms — and he reached the front door in a soft-stepping dash. Getting to the gate was easier. He sprinted across the yard, shoe heels smacking the concrete. He breathed a sigh as the gate swung closed behind him, and then reached into his trouser pocket for his BlackBerry to check the time, but his pocket was empty, he had left the phone behind. He hesitated a moment, and then, with a brusque shake of his head, he stuck his plastic folder under his arm and set off at a trot for his job interview.

The first person Furo met was the stocky Adamawa man who had the monopoly on garbage collection in the quarter of Egbeda where Furo lived. He was pushing his garbage cart down Furo’s street, and he drummed the cart’s side with a hooked metal rod to announce his presence to the gated houses. But on catching sight of Furo, the rod slipped from his grasp and dangled on a string from the cart’s handle, and then he averted his gaze to the shambles in the cart’s bed, but kept on advancing, his steps growing slower, the cart trundling before him with its bold stench. Furo usually delivered the house garbage to him, and they had bantered several times over the haphazard costing of his seller’s market service, so Furo, out of habit, greeted him as they drew abreast, and at once regretted the appearance of his voice. The man’s silence only sharpened the bite of Furo’s blunder. They pulled past each other, and Furo reached the bend in the road before casting back a nervous, salt-pillar look. The cart was abandoned in the middle of the street, and the man stood several paces in front of it, one hand shading his eyes and the other slapping at blowflies, and stared at Furo with festering intensity.

On the next street Furo approached the Isoko woman who ran a buka in front of a tenement building for navy personnel and their families. She was frying hunks of pork in a cauldron of seething oil that straddled a coal fire. Her naked toddler — a girl, her round tight belly accentuated by strings of coloured plastic beads looped around her waist — sat on the ground a short distance from the fire. The child played with fistfuls of charred wood chippings and coconut shell; she babbled to herself — or her imaginary friend — through popping bubbles of spit. As Furo drew near, she looked up with fat-cheeked wonder and caught her breath. He was expecting it, but when the howl came it startled him nonetheless. Hearing the rush of the mother’s footsteps, he glanced around to see her picking up the child, and after turning back, he heard her say with a laugh, ‘No fear, no cry again, my pikin. No be ojuju, nah oyibo man.’

And so it went: stares followed him everywhere. Pedestrians stopped and stared, or stared as they walked. Motorists slowed their cars and stared, and on occasion honked their horns to draw his face so they could stare into it. School-bound children hushed their mates and poked their fingers in his direction, wrapper-clad women paused in their front-yard duties and gazed after him, and stick-chewing men leaned over balcony railings to peer down at him. As he passed by the corner store where his mother got her emergency groceries, a hubbub of voices burst out, and when he looked over he saw the attendants, Peace, Tope and Eze, crowded in the doorway, gawping at him. A radio jingle — Mortein! Kills insects dead! — blared from the barbershop where he got a shave every weekend and his hair cut every month, and when he hurried past the front, Osaze, the Bini barber, who was bent over a smouldering pile of hair, froze in that position, only his head moving through thickening smoke as he followed Furo with his eyes.

No one had called out his name. He’d passed houses he wasn’t a stranger to, and he’d been stared at by several people he knew, people whom he had lived beside for many years, joked with, been rude to, borrowed money from — and yet no one had recognised him.

Lagos, they say, is a city of twenty million people. Certainly no less than fifteen million. The economic capital of Nigeria and its most cosmopolitan city, Lagos hosts the highest numbers of foreigners in the country. Construction workers from China mainly; restaurateurs, hoteliers and import dealers from India and the Middle East; tailors, drivers, domestics and technicians from West and Central Africa; expat employees of Western multinationals and global bureaucracies; sojourning journalists and religious crusaders; few exchange scholars; fewer tourists. In some parts of the city it is not unusual to see a white person walking the streets on a sunny day. Ikoyi, Victoria Island, and Lekki Peninsula. That’s where oyibos — light-skinned people — live, work, play, and are buried. In private cemeteries. In Apapa, Oshodi, Ikeja, and other business districts of Lagos, the sight of a white man passing through in a chauffeured car is by no means a rarity. But if in traffic his car were bumped by another motorist and he came down to demand insurance details, it is likely that a Lagos-sized crowd would gather to stare, drawn by this curious display of courage. As for the outlying — economically as well as geographically — areas of Lagos, places such as Agege, Egbeda, Ikorodu: a good number of the inhabitants of these neighbourhoods have never held a conversation with an oyibo, never considered white people as anything more or less than historical opportunists or gullible victims, never seen red hair, green eyes, or pink nipples except on screen and on paper. And so an oyibo strolling down their street is an incidence of some thrill. Not quite the excitement decibels of seeing a celebrity, but close.

One anxious step after another and Furo finally reached the stretch of roadside marked out by collective memory — the script on the metal signpost had since rusted away — as Egbeda Bus Stop. It was mid-June, the flood-bearing rains had arrived, and the road drainage, which was clogged with market litter, was undergoing expansion by the municipal authorities. Half of the sidewalk was dug up, the excavated soil heaped on the other half, and these hillocks of red mud had been colonised for commerce, turned into a stage for stalls, kiosks, display cases, impromptu drama. In this roadside market stood food sellers with huge pots of steaming food, fish sellers with open basins of live catfish and dead crayfish, hawkers with wooden trays of factory-line snacks, iceboxes of mineral sodas, and armloads of pirated music CDs, Nollywood VCDs, telenovela DVDs. Then there was the noise, the raw sound of money, of haggling and wheedling and haranguing, the rise and rise of voices against the roar of traffic. The bus stop was crowded with heads and limbs in a swirl of motion, and jostling for space on the motorway were all types of vehicles, from rusted pushcarts to candy-coloured mopeds to sauropod-sized freight trucks, all of them vying with pedestrians for right of way.

Lone white face in a sea of black, Furo learned fast. To walk with his shoulders up and his steps steady. To keep his gaze lowered and his face blank. To ignore the fixed stares, the pointed whispers, the blatant curiosity. And he learnt how it felt to be seen as a freak: exposed to wonder, invisible to comprehension.

About two hours into his trek, just as he sighted in the skyline the straggly multi-storey buildings of Computer Village, Furo realised he had misjudged the distance. His interview was at Kudirat Abiola Way, on the other side of Ikeja, at least an hour’s walk from Computer Village. A long way still to go. His face smarted from the sun’s heat, the underarms of his shirt were moist with sweat, and thinking of the road he had to cover, he pulled out his handkerchief and scrubbed his face. The cambric came away browned with grime. He fisted the handkerchief into a wad, adjusted the folder under his arm, and quickened his pace. He hadn’t come this far to be defeated. This was the time to find a solution. But first he had to find out the time.

He picked the nearest person in front of him, a young lady in a tank top and tight jeans, and slowing his steps as he drew up to her, he said, ‘Excuse me.’ The lady glanced around without stopping, her expression puzzled, but as Furo raised his hand in greeting, she halted and turned to face him. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said to her, and when she gave a smile of accommodation, he asked: ‘Can you please tell me the time?’

She glanced at her wrist. ‘It’s twelve past ten.’

‘Ah,’ Furo said, blowing out his cheeks. ‘Thank you very much.’

The lady waited as he mopped his neck with his handkerchief. She seemed oblivious to the attention they attracted from passersby. After he folded the handkerchief and put it away, she said, ‘How come you speak like a Nigerian? Have you lived here long?’

‘Yes,’ Furo answered.

She made no move to continue on her way, and as Furo tried to step backwards so he could go around her, she reached out and grabbed his elbow. His muscles tensed at her touch, and he resisted at first as she tugged his arm, but then he realised she was only guiding him out of the path of a motorcycle that was bearing down the sidewalk from behind. ‘That’s interesting, that your accent is so Nigerian,’ she said when the danger was past. She released his arm. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

‘I’m Nigerian.’

She squawked with laughter. Astonished faces turned to gawk, and seeing Furo’s embarrassment, she caught herself. ‘Sorry for laughing. But how is it possible that you’re Nigerian?’

Furo’s eyes lingered on her face. Her smile showed small white teeth and health-shined gums, and the dimples in her cheeks were signifiers of a merry disposition. Any other day, in a less pressing position, in his old skin, he would have asked her name. But there was no need for that, as she now offered, ‘My name is Ekemini,’ to which he responded, ‘I’m Furo.’

Her face pulled a look of doubt. ‘As in, Furo? Isn’t that a Niger Delta name?’

‘Yes.’ Furo cast an impatient glance past her. ‘Actually, I’m in a—’ He fell silent, distracted by the idea forming in his head.

‘Yes?’ Ekemini prompted.

‘Hurry,’ Furo said. ‘I’m in a hurry.’ He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. ‘I’m going for a job interview that starts at eleven, but I just realised there’s no way I can make it in time.’

‘Oh no, that’s bad,’ Ekemini said, and checked her wristwatch. ‘Where’s the interview?’

‘It’s here in Ikeja, near Ogba side. Kudirat Abiola Way.’

‘What!’ Ekemini cried, and grasped Furo’s arm again, this time in excitement. ‘But that’s not far from here. If you take a bike you’ll get there in twenty, twenty-five minutes max. But you have to go now.’ Dragging him along, she crossed to the sidewalk’s edge. As she raised her hand to flag down a motorcycle, Furo spoke.

‘That’s the problem. I don’t have money on me.’

‘No money?’ Her tone was startled. ‘I see.’ She freed his arm and drew away from him. Her eyes glinted with suspicion, and it seemed clear to Furo that any moment she would mutter something rude and whirl away, convinced he was some sort of confidence trickster. To forestall this, Furo took the offensive. ‘Yes, no money, that’s why I’m walking.’ His confidence mounted along with her curiosity. ‘It’s not like I chose to trek to my interview, you know,’ he said, and held her gaze. Settling deeper into character, he softened his tone: ‘I was attacked by robbers this morning. They took my car, my wallet … and my phone. I was lucky to get away with my documents.’ He tapped the folder under his arm.

In the silence that followed, Furo and Ekemini were jostled together by a flash wave of pedestrians. With her chest pressed against him and her breath in his face, Furo almost regretted lying to her. But he had no choice, he told himself, no choice at all. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ekemini now said to him, and after pulling back from his body, she continued, ‘So what will you do? Do you need to call someone?’ She reached into her handbag. ‘Here, you can use my phone.’

‘I’ve called already. My people will meet me at the interview venue.’

‘Oh yes, of course — your interview. You really must get going.’ She waited a beat, and then spoke in a rush, her tone embarrassed. ‘Can I give you some money for the bike fare?’

Furo’s grin was truthful. ‘That would be nice of you. It’s just a loan, of course.’

Ekemini pulled a thousand naira note out of her handbag, and her face was pleased as she handed it over. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ Furo said, tucking the note in his breast pocket. He opened his folder, took out a pen, passed it to her and said, ‘Can I have your number? I’ll call you tomorrow so we can meet. To return the money.’ He watched with growing impatience as she wrote down three sets of numbers on the back of a business card. After she passed the card to him, he swivelled to face the curb, held his arm aloft, and a swarm of motorcycles shrieked towards him. He climbed aboard the first to arrive and, blocking out the shouted banter from the disappointed riders, gave the man directions. After the okada jumped forwards and weaved into the rush of traffic, Furo turned sideways in his seat to wave goodbye to Ekemini. He got a shock when he saw her running along the sidewalk after him with a raised arm and her face twisted with effort. ‘Your pen! You forgot your pen!’ she shouted against the wind, and the rider heard her and slowed, but Furo leaned forwards, said in his ear: ‘Abeg keep going.’

Arriving at the interview venue, Furo realised with a sinking feeling that even if he had walked over he would still have got there on time. Through the grilled gate — from which hung a white signboard announcing in green block letters: HABA! NIGERIA LTD — he could see a mass of people standing in single file in the bright sunlight, all dressed in formal clothes, all clutching folders, briefcases, shoulder bags. It was obvious who they were, why they were there, what they were dressed up for. He had heard of them. He had seen their faces under newspaper banners that screamed ‘50 % Youth Unemployment in Nigeria!’ He was one of them. And yet, despite his own desperation for a job, despite the worst scenarios he had conjured up in the days since he got his interview invitation, he had never imagined that so many people would turn up for the same job he wanted. As far as he knew there was only one position on offer. And for that at least forty people were standing in line.

After he paid the okada rider and collected eight hundred naira in change, Furo hurried to the gate to find it unlocked. Inside the compound stood a whitewashed, gable-roofed, two-storey vintage building with a residential aura. The expansive compound was unpaved, the red clay soil spotted with clumps of weed, and several cars were parked close to the building. By the back fence, a Mikano generator squatted on concrete pilings. The only other structure in the compound was the yellow-painted gatehouse, which Furo approached. News in Hausa blasted at full volume from a small radio perched in a rocking chair facing the doorway, and even before Furo stuck his head in, his nose was greeted by the smell of incense. He saw a wooden table on which was balanced the incense stick, smoke spiralling from its tip, the floor beneath it sprinkled with ash. Prominent in the room was a longbow and quiver of arrows, and there were clothes hanging from nails in the walls, as well as a kerosene stove, cooking utensils, and other domestic trappings. The gatehouse looked lived-in, but there was no one there.

Rather than wait for the guard’s return to enquire about a process that seemed apparent, Furo decided to join the queue. Stares he expected, and got as he approached the waiting group, and when he stopped behind the last person in line, the long row of heads began all at once to chatter. Furo dropped his eyes to his shoes, powdered with dust from his trek, and shut his ears to the grumblings. He had as much right as anyone to be here. He had probably suffered the most to get to this place, and all for a chance to be treated the same as everyone. He, too, needed a job, and come anything, despite everything, he would stand his ground. He ignored the rising voices.

‘I’m talking to you!’

A sharp-toed pair of shoes — oxblood leather finely cracked, the uppers lopsided from long wear, black laces untidily knotted — appeared in Furo’s line of sight. He raised his head.

‘Yes, you, don’t act as if you didn’t hear me. Or you don’t like black people?’

Tall man, lean and dark, with a round small head from which his cheekbones stuck out. In the corners of his mouth white flecks of saliva showed.

‘I don’t understand,’ Furo said, and took a step backwards.

The man barked with laughter, a false laugh, showering spittle. Furo gave a start as he was strafed in the face; he fought the urge to raise his hand as a shield. Scattered titters drifted along the queue, and when he stole a look, a gang of eyes confronted him.

‘My elder brother lives in Poland.’ The man stared at Furo as if awaiting a reply. Furo took another step backwards. ‘Where are you going?’ The man’s tone was surprised, and striding forwards to close the gap between them, he crowded Furo with his height and sun-beaten odour. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ he demanded, his Adam’s apple jumping.

Furo managed in a calm voice, ‘What does that have to do with me?’

Sadness suffused the man’s face. ‘Your people have refused to give me a visa. I’ve applied four times. My brother is getting tired of inviting me.’

‘I’m not from Poland,’ Furo said.

‘Did I say you were from Poland?’ At Furo’s silence, the man added in a softened tone, ‘You came for the job interview?’

Furo’s nod set off a flurry of exclamations from the queue. The person ahead in line, a Deeper Life-looking woman — hair banished into a scarf, no earrings on, and dressed in a polyester skirt suit of baggy cut — glared at him with fuck-you intensity. The animosity in the air was so noxious that for an instant he thought of leaving. For an instant only. He needed the job more than he feared a lynching. Lucky then that he didn’t have to face his convictions, because the tension eased when the mob leader — this idiot who wants to get me in trouble, Furo thought with a flash of hatred — raised his voice: ‘It’s a nonsense job anyway.’ He turned his attention back to Furo. ‘You have to go inside and write down your name, then collect a number from Tosin, the woman at the front desk. She will call you in by your number.’

Relief flooded Furo’s guts. ‘Thank you,’ he said quickly, and then stood waiting, uncertain of how to take his leave. He wondered if he should shake hands to show his gratitude and dispense the man’s assumptions about his feelings towards black people, but the handshake it turned out wasn’t needed, as the man seemed to have forgotten the grudge he held. He grinned at Furo, placed a hand on his shoulder in a gesture of affability, then bent his face close and said, ‘I like you. You don’t talk through your nose like other oyibo.’

Furo forced a smile. His face itched from the flying spittle.

‘Black and white, we are all brothers,’ the man continued. ‘We should support each other, you know, like Bob Marley, one love.’ He held up his free hand with the middle and index fingers entwined, and waved these under Furo’s nose. ‘We should be like one. I plan to marry oyibo when I reach your country. My brother’s wife is oyibo. She’s the one inviting me—’

Furo interrupted him. ‘I have to go and put my name down.’

‘Yes, go and write your name,’ the man agreed, and nodded vigorously, but did not release his grip on Furo’s shoulder. ‘You will get the job, for sure. Me and you have plenty things to talk about.’ His eyes bored into Furo’s, and his face hardened, shed its friendliness, twisted into a scowl. ‘Watch out for Obata!’

The vehemence of his words spattered Furo with spit, and this time he couldn’t help it, he raised a hand to wipe his face before muttering, ‘OK, thanks.’ He shrugged off the man’s hold, drew away from him, and ran the gauntlet of hostile faces towards the building entrance.

The receptionist smiled at Furo from her chair. The push-button phone on her desk had started ringing as Furo entered, but she ignored it. She gave him her full attention.

‘Are you Tosin?’ Furo asked.

‘Yes, I am. How may I help you, sir?’

‘Someone told me to come in here and collect a number from you.’

The puzzled expression that leapt into the oval of Tosin’s face was quickly replaced by a smile of apology. ‘I’m sorry about the mix up,’ she said. ‘You must have spoken to one of the applicants. We’re interviewing for a vacancy.’ She flipped open the visitors notepad on her desk and picked up a biro. ‘Who are you here to see?’

The phone had fallen silent, but the air vibrated with anticipation of its next ring. The Haba! — branded clock on the wall above Tosin’s head pointed to nine minutes past eleven.

Furo said, ‘I’m here for the eleven o’clock interview. I’m really sorry I’m late, but I’ve been here — I’ve been outside for the past fifteen minutes. My name is Furo Wariboko.’

Tosin’s eyes widened. ‘You mean the interview for the salesperson job?’

‘Yes,’ Furo said.

The biro slipped from Tosin’s fingers, clattered on the desk, and as if to complete her embarrassment, it evaded her scrabbling hands and rolled to the floor. She was bending to pick it up when the phone rang. She jerked upright in her seat, snatched the receiver from its cradle, and pressed it to her ear. Her eyes avoided Furo all through her low-voiced conversation, and by the time she replaced the receiver, she had regained composure. ‘OK,’ she said with a light clap of her hands, and rising to her feet, she looked at Furo. ‘Please come with me.’

He followed her up a staircase that ended in a hallway lined on one side with doors. Each door was fitted with a copper-coloured plaque announcing function. SALES. MARKETING. IT. LAVATORY. The last office, the door closing the hallway, bore a plaque that read, AYO ABU ARINZE. Tosin halted in front of the second-to-last door. HUMAN RESOURCES.

‘Yes?’ a surly voice responded to her knock, and she cracked the door open. ‘I’ve brought one of the candidates for the salesperson job. I think you—’ A cough cut off her words, followed by the abrupt clatter of cutlery. The man spoke, his angry words slurring through a mouthful of food. ‘But I told you to wait! Is something wrong with your ears?’ Tosin shot back, ‘Just stop there, Obata, I don’t have time for your rudeness this morning.’ Throwing open the door, she waved Furo in. As he stepped forwards there was a gasp, and the man seated behind the desk leapt to his feet and spilled his plate of stewed beans. ‘See now!’ he snarled, staring down at his shirt, and then he looked up at Furo and stammered out, ‘My apologies, sir, but … surely …’ he swung his gaze to Tosin and a furious note entered his voice, ‘you’ve made a mistake!’

‘No mistake,’ Tosin replied, her tone impassive. ‘His name is Furo Wariboko and he’s here for the salesperson job.’ Without another word, she pulled the door shut behind her.

Obata was still on his feet, one hand gripping the desk and the other his plate. His mouth hung open, and in his face irritation and disbelief mixed like the mess of beans in his cheeks. He noticed the direction of Furo’s gaze, and closed his mouth, then bent down and pushed his plate under the desk. Straightening back up, he swiped his hand across his lips. With the same hand he jabbed a finger at Furo and said in a voice gruff with challenge, ‘You are Furo Wariboko?’

Furo nodded yes. In the wall behind Obata an ancient air conditioner hummed, rattled, regained its rhythm, and dripped water into an empty paint tub placed underneath.

‘That’s impossible!’ Obata burst out, and dropped into his seat. ‘I saw that CV with my own eyes, I have it here.’ He swept his hands through the papers on his desk, plucked up two stapled sheets, held them close to his face and ran his finger along the script. ‘See here, it says that Wariboko is Nigerian! And … and … attended Ambrose Alli University!’ He flung down the résumé and glared at Furo. ‘Come on, you — a white Nigerian? That is just not possible!’

‘But it’s my CV—’

Obata cut him off with a shout. ‘I say that is not possible!’

Despite the chill in the room, Furo felt his palms grow moist with heat, and he resisted the urge to wipe them against his trousers. His eyes roamed the walls, the ceiling … on the ceiling above Obata’s head, a tiny green moth was flinging itself against the glow of the fluorescent tube, over and over again. Obata’s breathing sounded like beating wings.

‘I say that is not possible!’ Obata repeated.

In a cowed voice, Furo started, ‘Excuse me, sir,’ but Obata interposed with a raised arm and flattened hand. ‘Hold on,’ he said, and took his own advice. Arranging his features into a parody of calmness, he inhaled deeply and exhaled through his mouth. ‘Listen carefully before you say anything,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what your mission is, but I advise you to give it up. We’re a respectable company. You can’t just walk in here and tell me some cock-and-bull story. I will investigate everything to the very last! Secondary school, university, even youth service, all those places have records. I will personally contact the registrar at Ekpoma—’ He picked up the résumé and waved it at Furo. ‘So just think very well before you talk.’

As Obata spoke, Furo began to see that he had no past as he was and no future as he had been. His folder of documents now felt useful only as fuel for Obata’s anger. He had no hope of getting this job, any job at all, not as long as his own credentials proved him a liar. He felt bone-tired, hope-weary. He had wasted his efforts chasing after the same thing he was running from. There was nothing left to do but turn back home. It was time to face his family with the truth.

And yet he said, his voice shaking with conviction, ‘I am Furo Wariboko.’

Fury contorted Obata’s face. ‘Look here,’ he said in a voice as deep as a shout in a well, ‘do I look like a fool?’ He stood up and strode around the desk towards Furo. The résumé, folded in his hand, was raised above his head as if to swat an insect. ‘Do I look stupid?’

The squeak of hinges stopped Obata in his tracks, and after he lowered his arm, Furo looked around. Standing in the doorway was a man of average height. His frail shoulders, slim arms, and small feet — which were laced up in blue canvas sneakers — gave him the look of a bully’s punching bag. But his forceful features put the lie to first impressions: bushy eyebrows set in a straight line over big-balled eyes, his forehead broad and high-domed. Between wide nose and pointed chin, a thin-lipped, stubborn mouth. And an aura of power that he wore as lightly as his stonewashed jeans and green-striped batakari.

Obata found his tongue. ‘Good morning, Arinze,’ he said in a civil tone. The man nodded acknowledgement, and striding into the office, he held out his hand to Furo. His grip was strong. ‘I’m Ayo Abu Arinze,’ he said.

‘Good morning, sir,’ Furo dipped his head in respect.

‘Please, call me Abu,’ Arinze said with a quick smile. Breaking the handshake, he turned to Obata. ‘I thought I heard shouting.’

Unease flickered in Obata’s face. ‘It’s just a small matter, a misunderstanding,’ he said, and cleared his throat. ‘I’m handling it.’

Arinze nibbled on his bottom lip, and stared steadily at Obata, a speculative light in his eyes. ‘What happened to your shirt?’

Obata glanced down, and began brushing off his shirt with his left hand. ‘I spilled some food,’ he muttered without looking up.

Arinze turned back to Furo. ‘If you don’t mind my asking, why are you here?’

‘I came for the job interview.’

With a lift of his eyebrows, Arinze asked, ‘The salesperson job?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ Arinze’s gaze was directed at Obata.

‘This man is lying. He’s an impersonator. He claims his name is Wariboko!’ Obata’s tone was affronted. He drew closer to Arinze and extended the résumé to him. ‘See the CV he sent.’

Arinze scanned the sheets in silence, and then he said, ‘Mr Wariboko?’

‘Yes,’ Furo answered.

‘What’s your date of birth?’

‘Sixth of May, 1979.’

‘Your secondary school?’

‘Baptist High School.’

‘Where?’

Furo stared at Arinze. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What town is the school in?’

‘Oh,’ Furo said, relief washing through his voice. ‘Port Harcourt.’

‘What are your hobbies?’

Furo thought a moment. ‘Swimming, travelling and reading.’

‘And your mother’s maiden name?’

‘Osagiede.’

‘That’s not what it says here.’

Furo’s brow creased in perplexity; he raised his hand to massage his nape. ‘My mother’s maiden name is not on my CV,’ he said at last.

‘It’s not,’ Arinze agreed, and lowered the résumé. He spoke to Obata. ‘I would like to interview Mr Wariboko myself. Is that OK?’

The stain on Obata’s shirt rose and fell with his breathing. ‘I guess,’ he said, and averting his face, he added tonelessly, ‘What about the others? Do you still want me to interview them?’

‘By all means do,’ Arinze said. ‘We still need a salesperson.’ He walked to the door, pulled it open, and stood to one side. ‘After you, Mr Wariboko. Let’s finish this in my office.’

The stuffiness of Human Resources had left its impression on Furo’s mind. So much so that when Arinze opened the door to his office, Furo, disoriented by the burst of daylight that lit up the room like a terrarium, hesitated so long on the threshold that Arinze touched his elbow to urge him forwards. Leading Furo to a glass-top desk the size of a ping-pong table, Arinze said, ‘Please have a seat,’ and inclined his head at two soft-leather chairs arranged in front. ‘Coffee?’ he asked after Furo was seated, but Furo shook his head no. While Furo cast furtive glances at the room’s decor — the window ledges decorated with a plethora of bric-a-brac, the white walls adorned with colour-splashed paintings and brooding masks and a samurai sword in its wooden sheath: ornaments announcing a moneyed, well-travelled life — Arinze strode to the coffee table beside the open French windows and poured a mug of coffee, its woodlands aroma rising with clouds of steam. Returning to the desk, he set down the mug and sank into his swivel chair. A shellacked bookcase covered the wall behind the desk from floor to ceiling. To Furo’s bemused gaze it seemed about to topple from the weight of books.

‘Mr Wariboko,’ Arinze began, and rested his elbows on the desk with his hands cupping his mug. He pinned Furo under the force of his stare. ‘I’ll be frank with you — we need a man like you on the team.’ He paused for his meaning to sink in, and then said, ‘I’m about to offer you a job. But first of all, I need you to answer three questions. And I expect the truth.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Furo responded in a too-loud voice. He struggled to keep a straight face, tried not to grin with pleasure, and failed. His mouth felt full of teeth.

‘Another thing,’ Arinze said, smiling back. ‘Please don’t call me “sir”.’ He took a sip from his mug, set it down, and rubbed his palms. ‘First question. Is your name really—’ he glanced down at the résumé on his desk, ‘Furo Wariboko?’

‘Yes,’ Furo said fiercely. ‘Yes, it is.’

Arinze gave a slight shrug as he spoke his next words. ‘Second question then. Do you have any ID that confirms you’re Nigerian? Like a passport or driving license?’

‘I don’t,’ Furo said, relieved it was the truth, and as Arinze watched him in silence, he added, ‘Actually, I have an old passport, but I left it in a place I can’t go back to.’

Arinze took a long drink of coffee. ‘We can’t risk any allegations of illegally employing a foreigner, so you’ll need to get a passport before you start with us. Is that OK?’

‘Yes,’ Furo answered. He hadn’t the faintest idea of how to go about getting a passport, but his joy would not be spoiled by a predicament in his future. A future that hadn’t existed just minutes before. A strong breeze from the open French windows fanned his excitement, gave him the courage to ask, ‘And your third question?’

Sip, replace mug, and rub hands together. Arinze was a creature of methodical action, Furo could tell. Already he felt his heart filling with respect for the man he would soon call boss.

‘When was the last time you read a book?’

At this question, Furo’s heart skipped, and he strained to keep his disappointment from showing. The truth had served him thus far in answering Arinze’s questions, but the truth this time was inimical to him. And what was the truth? He read newspapers for job announcements. And on his smartphone he read Facebook and Twitter, blogs and news websites, ephemera of the World Wide Web … and not forgetting the countless rejection emails from all the companies he had applied to for jobs. The whole truth and nothing else was that he’d read no books since 2007, not since he got the pain in his neck from studying for his final examinations.

Furo had dreaded this question ever since he saw the newspaper advert announcing a salesperson position with a company that sold business books. He had applied for the job despite his misgivings, after first altering his résumé to add ‘reading’ to his hobbies, and he was ecstatic when he received the email inviting him for an interview. It was only his second invitation in three-plus years of submitting job applications. On the same day he got the email, he decided on the book he would use as his cover. I love Things Fall Apart, he’d planned to say, it teaches us about our culture, where we as Africans are coming from. But in fact he chose that book because he was forced to read it in junior secondary and still remembered the storyline. Even the opening line: Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. And in his head the voice of Mr Zikiye, his English Literature teacher, still droned: The white man in this book is a symbol of progress. Okonkwo fought against the white man and lost. Progress always wins, that’s why it’s progress. Now tear out a sheet of paper, you have a test.

The test that now faced him was as difficult as any he’d encountered in school. He was almost certain he wouldn’t get the job if he spoke the truth. For how could he, when the last book he’d read was a biochemistry textbook for his BIC 406 exam? But if he told a lie and was caught out by Arinze, forget the almost, he was certain he would lose the job. Suddenly oppressed by a full bladder, Furo wriggled his sweating toes in his shoes, and soon began to think not only of what to answer but also of how to explain why it took him so long to answer. When Arinze’s chair squeaked, Furo looked up, his thoughts in a whirligig, his body tensed for disappointment. He saw Arinze put down his mug, and after rubbing his hands together, he heard him say:

‘But will you read the books we sell?’

‘Oh yes, I will!’ Furo responded, his voice cracking with eagerness. ‘I promise I will.’

‘Good man,’ Arinze said. ‘So let’s get down to details. The position I’m offering you is Marketing Executive. You’ll be my point man, my big gun, the person I send out to bring in important clients. It’s high-level marketing — you’ll have to dress formally for meetings. The company will provide you with an official car and a driver. How does that sound so far?’

Speechless, Furo nodded, and Arinze continued.

‘The marketing office is empty, so you’ll have it to yourself. Do you own a laptop?’

Furo shook his head no.

‘But you know how to use one?’

He nodded yes.

‘It’s company policy that all employees must own their own laptops. We’ll buy you one, but you’ll have to pay back from your salary over six months. Is that OK?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perfect. Now your salary. Executive pay at Haba! starts at eighty thousand a month. That’s what you’ll earn at first. But you’ll also get a percentage on your sales. For sales of up to five hundred books, you get two point five per cent. For sales of five hundred to a thousand, you get …’

While Arinze reeled off percentages, Furo was calculating his good fortune in decimals. This offer of employment was the first he’d ever got, and a salary of eighty thousand naira was eighty thousand times better than nothing. It was also fifty thousand more than he’d expected, as the vacancy he’d applied for, the salesperson job, paid thirty thousand naira. Even better, this position came with a car and driver, free transportation, meaning more money for him. With all that money in his hands he wouldn’t need anyone. He could feed himself, buy new clothes, start his life for real, and still have enough left over to save towards renting an apartment. Eighty thousand naira wasn’t just money, it was freedom. For the first time since waking that morning, Furo had no doubts about the path to take.

Arinze had fallen silent, and now Furo could ask the question burning his tongue.

‘When do I start?’

Arinze reached for his open laptop, then tapped the keypad and stared at the screen, his eyes reflecting the plasma glow. ‘Today’s the eighteenth,’ he said. ‘How about the first Monday in July? That’s July second. You can start then.’

‘I’ll be here,’ Furo said. And in a voice hoarsened by emotion: ‘Thank you.’ On impulse he jumped to his feet and stretched his hand across the desk, and his eyes, catching a movement, swung to the glass below. He was still staring at the white face staring back at him when Arinze took his hand. ‘I like that, a businesslike approach to business,’ he said, nodding with approval. ‘I have a strong feeling I made the right decision. I’m looking forward to you proving me right.’ He walked round the table, placed his hand on Furo’s shoulder, steered him to the door, and threw it open. ‘Go well, Mr Wariboko.’

When the mind is at rest the body shouts its demands. Furo Wariboko, back on the streets of Lagos, now realised how hungry he was. Weak with it, his head aching, stomach juices churning, his breath reeking with it. He considered his choices. He had eight hundred naira left over from the money he’d borrowed from Ekemini, and that amount would just about cover a meal at Mr Biggs, the cheapest of the fast food chains. He was reluctant to spend everything. Thus far he had refused to pop his jubilant mood by thinking about where to go next, where to sleep tonight, but somewhere behind the wall of his mind he knew there was no going back.

No choice then. He had to eat in a roadside buka.

The roadway by which he strolled was jammed with traffic, cars crawled along at a pace that turned the drivers’ faces tight with frustration, okadas tore through gaps that even the bravest hawkers hesitated to enter, and petrol fumes from overheated engines thickened the air. Like oases on a desert caravan route, child vulcanisers and apprentice mechanics loitered in roadside lean-tos that offered scant shelter from today’s sunshine and tomorrow’s rainstorms. Exhausted vehicles dotted the roadside, some with bonnets opened to let out steam from gasping radiators. A riot of honking assailed the ears: short warning honks, long angry honks, continuous harrying honks: a language as universal as a scream. But in Lagos, overused. The clamour was deafening.

‘Oyibo!’ a female voice yelled from across the roadway, and Furo, startled out of his fascination with the automotive babel, glanced over. Vivid in her Fanta-bright shirt and white gloves, a traffic warden sat on a tyre under the shade of a neem tree. She was eating a peeled orange that was gripped in her right hand, and when she saw she had Furo’s attention, she grinned and gave him a left-handed wave. Furo moved his gaze along. Beside the neem tree, outside the shadows cast by its leaves, stood a three-legged easel blackboard. Scrawled on its surface in pink chalk were the words FOOD IS READY. Furo reached his decision before he realised he’d reached it, and stepping on to the asphalt, he dodged between trapped bumpers and strode across to the buka, a wood-and-zinc shed backed against a concrete fence and hung on the front and sides with grimy, once-white lace curtains. As he parted the front curtain, he heard the traffic warden exclaim, ‘Where this oyibo man dey go?’ and from the corner of his eye he saw her jump to her feet and fling away her suck-shrivelled orange. He ducked into the buka.

A middle-aged woman with a red hairpiece styled in a bob sat on a bar stool behind a table laden with aluminium pots. Four benches were arranged in front of the table. A man dressed like a construction labourer — blue denim shirt faded grey on the shoulders, mud-spattered jeans scissored off at the knees, and yellow rubber boots — sat astride one of the benches, and in front of him was a sweating bottle of Pepsi, a steaming bowl of okra soup, and three wraps of cold fufu, one opened. The fermented whiff of cassava meal mixed with the aroma of boiled okra and smoked panla fish made Furo lightheaded, and he sat down quickly. After placing his folder on the same bench he straddled, he looked up to catch the food seller staring at him, as was the labourer, his hand stilled in his soup-smeared fufu.

‘Do you have egusi soup?’ Furo said to the food seller, but she stared on in silence. He raised his voice. ‘Madam — do you have egusi soup?’

The labourer recovered first. ‘Answer am, e dey ask you question!’ he said to the food seller in a biting tone. He seemed angered by the reflection he saw in her face.

‘Yes,’ the woman said. She rose from the bar stool and made a clattering show of opening pot lids to check the contents. Then, as if unable to stop herself, she looked up at Furo and said in a rush: ‘Abeg, no vex, but you be albino?’

‘Open your eye, woman,’ the labourer said. ‘No be albino.’

The woman ignored the labourer, she kept her questioning gaze on Furo, and so he shook his head no. ‘I’m not an albino,’ he confirmed.

‘Ewoo!’ the woman exclaimed. ‘You be oyibo true-true.’

The woman fell silent, but her thoughts played across her features, changed her expression from wonder one moment to glee the next. The labourer resumed eating, his face soured with scorn. Seeing as the woman made no move to serve him, Furo asked with a touch of asperity, ‘Do you have eba?’ The woman caught the note in his voice, and she beamed a smile at him as if to say, What can you do, you white man, you barking puppy, but she said nothing, she nodded yes. ‘Give me three wraps of eba with egusi soup,’ Furo said.

The woman placed the eba on a steel plate, and then picked up a soup bowl and her serving ladle. ‘How many meat?’ she asked, and Furo held up one finger. But when she set the food and a bowlful of water before him, he saw two chunks of meat mixed with the shredded vegetable of his soup. He glanced up in surprise to meet the woman’s wide smile. ‘I give you extra meat,’ she said, her voice lowered, conspiratorial, but still overheard by the labourer. At his loud sniff of derision her smile slipped, she shot him the evil eye, and then returned her gaze to Furo with a smile that shone even brighter.

The stiff smile Furo shot back strained his jaw. He was grateful for the extra piece of meat, but he was also wary of the woman’s reason for giving it; he didn’t want to be drawn into conversation about himself on account of the gift, and so he said nothing. In the silence opened up by the missing thank you, the food seller beat the air with her expectant breath, and then, coming to see the futility of waiting, she shuffled her feet on the hard-packed dirt floor. As she moved from Furo’s side, he bent forwards and rinsed his hands in the bowl of water, then began to eat, his hand moving swiftly from eba to soup to mouth.

‘Hah!’ the woman exclaimed from her new spot behind him. ‘See how oyibo dey chop eba. This one nah full Nigerian o.’

The labourer had had enough. ‘You this olofofo woman, I been think sey you get sense,’ he said. ‘As you old reach, why you dey behave like small pikin? You never see oyibo before?’

‘Why you insult me?’ said the woman. Her voice bubbled with outrage.

‘Who insult you?’

‘So you no insult me?’

The labourer clicked his tongue in irritation. ‘Leave me abeg. Make I finish my food.’

‘I no blame you sha. Nah your mama I blame. She no train you well.’

‘No carry my mama enter this talk o,’ the labourer said. He rose to his feet and pointed his finger at the food seller. Long strings of okra soup dripped from his hand on to the bench.

‘Hah!’ the food seller cried with a sharp clap of her hands. ‘You dey point me finger?’

The labourer’s courage didn’t falter and neither did his rude finger. ‘And so?’ he asked the woman in a taunting tone. ‘Wetin you fit do?’

He shouldn’t have asked. Not of a woman who made a living off dealing with hungry men. And especially not of a woman who wore red hair. Furo steeled himself for the explosion.

‘Dirty Yoruba rat!’

‘Old Igbo mumu.’

‘Bastard son of kobo-kobo ashewo!’

‘Useless illiterate woman.’

‘Thunder fire you! See your flat head like Sapele dodo!’

It was now a roaring quarrel. The woman’s curses were more colourful, her delivery more dramatic, and her well of invention ran deeper. The man’s voice was louder. Their yells vied for supremacy with each other and also with the horn blares of the traffic outside, which muffled their words doubtless for passersby, but not for the person trapped between them. Furo rushed through his meal, eager to make his escape before a crowd collected. After he cleaned out the soup bowl with his fingers, he washed both hands, rubbed them dry on his handkerchief, and drew two hundred naira from his breast pocket. Then he sat waiting for the shouting to subside. From the sound of things, it wouldn’t be long before the man realised he had the lost the fight.

‘Nah because of oyibo you dey talk to me anyhow!’ growled the labourer in a final burst, and before the woman could retort he leapt over the benches, slapped aside the lace curtains with his food-smeared hand, and stalked out.

‘Where you dey go — pay me my money!’ the food seller screamed. She made to rush after the man, but Furo, horrified at the thought of a scuffle breaking out at the entrance of the buka while he was still inside, threw out his arm, grabbed the woman’s wrist, and spoke without thinking. ‘Please, madam, I beg you, let him go. I will pay for his food.’

‘Why you go pay?’ the woman demanded, straining against Furo’s grip. ‘That agbero chop my food finish, curse me on top, and e no get money to pay! Hah, no way o. I go show am today sey I be Okpanam woman. Abeg leave my hand!’ With a heave she yanked her arm free, then spun around and bounded through the curtains.

Furo felt a twinge of relief as he returned the two hundred naira to his pocket. After glancing around the buka in search of an exit plan that didn’t involve wasting good money, he reached for the bottle of Pepsi the labourer had left behind. He wiped the bottle mouth clean and drank down the chilled cola as he sat waiting. When he heard sounds of the fight — shouts of many voices and the stampeding of feet — he set down the emptied bottle, picked up his folder, stood up from the bench, then strode to the side curtain and slipped out of the buka.

Late afternoon, the red-faced sun slinking off west: offices shut and the shops shutting, the traffic hawkers multiplied in the frenzy of the day’s dying, the motorways choked with cars and the sidewalks with crowds, the zombie drag of feet drumming the earth. As Furo wondered where to go, he wandered around Ikeja, caught in this surge, the headlong rush of Lagos at the end of day. Inside and outside, from the pull of his thoughts to the push of his surroundings, nowhere was there respite from the muddle of images, sounds, smells.

Inside, he thought:

The streets of Lagos at night were dangerous for anybody, more so for him; and sleeping on the streets was an option only for the insane, the gang-affiliated, or the suicidal.

Outside, he saw:

Surly faces, ferocious stares, armies of swinging legs — a burst pipe in a roadside gutter. It spouted water in a fine spray, the ground for metres around churned into mud by feet.

He thought:

He couldn’t afford a hotel, and police stations were to be avoided. He would most likely be arrested as a foreigner with no papers.

He saw:

Splotches of faeces lining the ground beside a flyover whose concrete sides were plastered with posters of pastors and politicians; and, under the bridge, littered around, their edges fluttered by the draughts from passing cars, were torn newspaper pages, crumpled notebook sheets, discarded lottery tickets, streamers of tissue paper, all stained with shit.

Inside:

He was sure he could find a church, they were scattered around all corners of Lagos, but finding one that left its doors open at night was another matter. Even churches had learned the hard way that robbers in Lagos had no fear of the Lord.

Outside:

Hills of festering garbage at street corners, and mounds of blackish sludge along the edges of gutters from which they were shovelled out, and everywhere rubbish — punctured plastic, shattered glass, mangled metal, rain-pulped paper — covered the ground.

Furo thought: There is nowhere to go.

Near the end of a deserted street Furo had turned into to get reprieve from the stares and the noise, he saw a three-storey apartment block with a collapsed roof. The building was uncompleted, abandoned-looking — it seemed defeated by the ambition of a middling architect — and there was a clandestine gap in its fence of bamboo posts. Furo cast a quick look around to make sure no one was watching, and then he approached the fence, dropped to his hands and knees, and squeezed through the opening. The ground on the other side was thick with elephant grass; through the waving blades he saw islands of stacked concrete blocks, their sides and tops washed by the sun’s rays and dotted with sunbathing lizards. He rose to full height and listened, then picked up a rusted tin that lay at his feet and flung it through the open doorway of the house, and listened again. The house echoed with silence. The lizards raised their bright red heads to gleam at the intruder from motionless eyes, and stiffening their blue-speckled tails in readiness to flee, they communicated their displeasure at the disturbance by doing push ups on the baking blocks.

Wading through the tall grass, which nicked his hands as he slapped the blades aside, Furo approached the building and entered. Desiccated mould, dust-heavy cobwebs, crumbling exoskeletons, flaking rust — the smell of neglect filled the large room he stood in. The floor was covered with cement dust in which insects burrowed; a shovel with a broken haft lay half-buried in the dust; a wheelbarrow missing its wheel was upturned in one corner; an opened cement bag lay under a window, its contents hardened into jagged rock. The holes punched in the walls for scaffolding rods and electrical wires gaped open, and the concrete slab that ceilinged the room was studded with wood chips, tangled wires, glass shards, the wishbone of a bird.

The rest of the ground-floor apartment was in a similar state of incompletion, and Furo, after investigating for signs of recent visitors, mounted the staircase. His footsteps rang eerie in silence, and the creep of his shadow sent smaller shadows scuttling into darkened cracks. As he crossed the first-floor landing, he caught sight of a decayed carcass sprawled in the apartment doorway. Discoloured fur still clung to the bones, and traces of its mouldy odour hung in the air. For as long as the dog had lain there, and likely longer, the house had seen no human visitors, Furo was sure. He decided that the second floor with its fallen roof was too dangerous to explore. After giving the first-floor apartment a cursory once-over, he settled on the master bedroom, which was far enough from the dog’s remains to ignore its lingering presence. With his feet he cleared the ground of debris under the window that opened on to the frontage, and then he set down his folder, sank on to it, and drew up his knees, rested his head on them. He was trying to read the time from the sun’s position when he fell asleep.

It was dark when Furo opened his eyes. He stared at his surroundings, confused about where he was, until he saw his hands, pale in the gloom, and he remembered. Something he hadn’t thought of — mosquitoes. Those Brit-massacring heroes of West Africa’s anti-colonial resistance: the un-acknowledged national insect of Nigeria. The air was thick with the malarial bloodsuckers. Bomber squadrons of them circled over his head, whined past his ears, tickled his cheeks with their wings, and needled his imagination. His skin itched from their strikes, and when he grew tired of slapping himself he stood up, leaned out the window, and stuck his face into the coolness of the night. The grass below swayed and whispered in the breeze; the muted buzzing at the back of his mind rose to the shrill of crickets. The street beyond the bamboo fence had faded into blackness. There was nowhere to go, he thought, the blackness was closing in. By now his parents would be wondering about his absence. His mother must have discovered he had left his phone behind, and first she would whinge to his father about how dangerous Lagos was and how could Furo be so stupid as to go out without his phone, and by ten o’clock, when she had abused his father’s tolerance to her own limits, she would start phoning her bosom friends with the same complaints before contacting his own friends to ask if they knew where he was. Eleven o’clock would surely find her keeping a lookout outside the front gate, and by twelve, while his sister searched through his bedroom for clues of his whereabouts, she would be fixed in front of the TV as she watched the midnight news for announcements of hit-and-run collisions and petrol tanker explosions and motor park insurrections. After that he had no idea what she would do. He had never stayed out this late without informing his family.

Furo could imagine, though, the terror his mother would feel. He could see the look of long-suffering that slackened his father’s jaw and reddened his eyes. He could hear his baby sister’s anguished sobbing as clearly as the swishing of the grass below him.

It was too much.

It was too painful to think about the pain he was causing others.

He turned away from the window and sank down to his haunches. Closing his eyes to the darkness, he made an effort to return to sleep.

But he couldn’t.

He couldn’t replace the lid on the emotions bubbling within him.

He wished he had someone with whom to share his burden. If only he could go to his mother and say, ‘Mummy, something is wrong, look at what happened to me!’ And his mother would take control just like she did when he was seven and caught chickenpox from school. She would pacify his fears with promises of ice-cream binges. She would strip off his clothes and bathe him in warm, Dettol-smelling water, then rub him down with calamine lotion and set him loose to run shrieking around the house, her little war-painted savage. But he was thirty-three, too old now for blind belief in a mother’s healing powers. And, also, the chickenpox only lasted a few days; the calamine lotion soothed him, and the white coating it left on his skin could be washed off. This was the right thing to do, going away, the unselfish path to take, best for all concerned, of that he was sure. For his was not a condition like cancer, where his mother would spend her life savings seeking a cure; or a condition that allowed for denial, say schizophrenia, where she would spend the rest of her life as his carer. At least for cancer his family would know that their misfortune was shared by others across the world, and for schizophrenia there was still the hope that once in while the son they recognised would emerge from behind the phantasmal fog of his mind. What he had was neither physical nor mental, not in a sense that made any sense, and so it was as inexplicable to him as it would be to everyone else.

If Furo were only able to sit across from his family, he would ask forgiveness for not opening the door to his mother. He would tell his parents to not worry too much about him, that things were looking up, that he’d finally found a job, and he would even share any particulars his curious sister might want to know about his adventures; but the one thing he couldn’t tell any of them was how he felt about going back. That was another truth he now admitted to himself, that from the instant he opened his eyes this morning he had felt a momentum building inside him, a feeling of freefalling that had grown stronger with each decision that pointed him away from his family. Alone in the darkness of this abandoned building, and despite the stinging mosquitoes, in spite of everything he had suffered through, the mere thought of a reversion to his former stasis was anathema to him. To make this admission even harder was his awareness of how much his family, and his mother especially, would mourn his absence. He was her son, flesh of her flesh and blood of her womb, and grieve was what mothers did when they lost a child; but beyond that, he knew she also counted him as her second chance to succeed in everything his father had failed at. She had said as much all his life, in roundabout adages and through her straightforward actions. His was the fortune and fulfilment his father had never attained. That was a son’s duty to a mother who had sacrificed her freedom on the labour bed.

It had always been Furo’s duty to achieve for his mother’s sake. He kept his part of this umbilical pact by always giving his best, if not at his studies, then at examinations, and, as the dice rolls in the crapshoot of academic success, his best, for a time, was enough to satisfy her. All through primary school he never took any less than sixth-best position in class, and in the second term of his second year of secondary school, when he came top in class for the first time in his life, he remembered how his mother took him straight from school to her office in Onikan and announced to her colleagues, ‘My small husband has killed me with happiness!’ From that pinnacle there was nowhere left to go but down the hill. He still gave his best, he always did, as he tried to hold the bar of achievement that the small husband had set for him, but for reasons only tangentially related to a flowering interest in girls and their breasts, Furo found that the higher he went in school, the less acceptable his best was for his mother. By the time he got into the third-rate university at Ekpoma (and this after two failures at JAMB) even his mother knew that his employment prospects were too far downhill to ever kill her with happiness again.

It was his mother he feared the most. She lurked in his earliest memories, memories so full of her that they had to be her memories too. Even now he remembered how, as a child in nursery school, she would arrive to pick him up at the clang of the closing bell, and the sound of her voice mingling with the other parents’ in the anteroom always awakened a stiffness in his shorts. Back at home, while she boiled ripe plantains for his lunch — this memory predated his sister’s crying existence — and then asked him, as she scrambled the eggs, to tell her all about his day at school, his chest would swell to tightness from his eagerness to obey. She listened, really listened, because he would later listen to her describe, almost lisp-for-lisp, his playpen escapades to his father when he returned from work at night. Did his father listen? He watched TV. Not the Betamax cartoons that Furo wanted, but the local news. Every day, schooldays and weekends, he would oust Furo from his TV throne and switch to News at 5, News at 7, News at 9. He drank his beer as he watched the droid-voiced newscasters, his face getting sadder and angrier, his haggard eyes stuck to the screen even when he threw back his head to suck from the bottleneck; and now, thirty years later, Furo recalled how he used to wonder why his father watched so much TV when all it did was make him ugly.

Furo couldn’t remember when he began to see his father as a failure. His awareness might have sprouted earlier than 1991, but in that year he knew that something was wrong when his mother, in addition to running the house out of her purse, as she’d done ever since she gave up housewiving and took up a banking job that paid four times more than her husband earned, also took over the paying of her children’s school fees, because, as she explained, his father’s entire salary was being saved up for a major business venture he was on the verge of starting. Several years and many pay cheques later — by which time Furo, in his final year of secondary school, had learned from experience to stop speaking to his father on any matter concerning money — his father resigned from his eighteen-year service at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, handed in his official Peugeot 504 and vacated his government residence in Victoria Island, and after moving with his family into the house his wife had finished building all the way over in Egbeda, he finally embarked on the long-vaunted adventure: his chicken farm.

The farm was an obvious failure from its third month of operation and Furo, who in the meantime had finished secondary school and taken up unpaid employment with his father while awaiting the results of his JAMB examination, was there to see the unravelling of the dream. His father’s troubles started with the ten-thousand-egg incubator he had imported from China. This backbone apparatus, his proudest and most expensive investment in the farm, floated into Apapa port seven weeks later than promised, and after another five weeks of begging for receipts for the paid-up custom duties and arguing over demurrage charges incurred as a result of the withheld receipts and bargaining down the amounts demanded as bribes by custom officials for the release of the receipts, the incubator at last arrived at the farmland in Iyana Ipaja, only to be unpacked from its crates and discovered as an empty shell that would never hatch a chick. On that unlucky day Furo saw his father weep for the second and third times in his life, the second being in the afternoon as he realised he had been duped, and then again at night as he reported the calamity to his wife. While soothing her husband, Furo’s mother had suggested what everyone else was afraid to say to a sinking man seeking straws, that maybe it was just a packing error, but she was wrong, it was not, as every effort his father made to contact the company in Qingdao only proved he was the victim of fraudsters, and in the end he had to give up all hope of ever recovering his money, because, as his wife explained to his children, the NITEL payphone costs were gobbling up his left-over capital and, besides, the woman who always answered his desperate midnight phone calls only responded in Mandarin to his threats of litigation.

The chicken farm never recovered from that blow. Neither did Furo’s father, who kept the business open mainly as an excuse to escape the house every day. By the time Furo gained admission to university and departed for Ekpoma, his father’s business was nothing more than an in-house joke and his mother had accepted her everlasting role as the sole financier of everything Wariboko. She covered Furo’s fees as well as his sister’s; she kept the house in food and settled the utility bills; she bought his father a second-hand Peugeot 405 so he could do the household shopping while she was at work; and every December, when the wild rush for Christmas chicken quickened the hearts of failed farmers across the nation, she granted the loan for the few hundred broiler chicks his father bought and fatted for pocket change. Furo couldn’t remember when it began to dawn on him that his father had settled for defeat in a war he still pretended to fight. He likely knew earlier than 2009, but it was that year, after he returned to his mother’s house upon completion of his youth service, that he realised it was his father he pitied the most.

It was his sister he envied the most. Her confidence in herself had always exasperated her older brother, whose self-esteem was further bruised by his awareness that her self-belief was in no way misplaced. She seemed able to accomplish anything she set her mind to. Even as children she would win her own battles in the playground and then rush forwards to help out with his; she learned to whistle before him, despite being five years younger; from when she was three years old, whenever she and he left the house together, she insisted on crossing motorways without his assistance; even into their teens, whenever they were both caned for some wrongdoing, her tears always dried first. Then again, she had never faced the parental pressure he did — a woman can find a husband to take care of her, but a man must take care of his wife, Furo’s father was fond of saying — and yet she excelled at her studies to the point that even their mother accepted that her daughter was the best chance the family had of producing a success story. Aside from academics, his sister had a ravening appetite for leisure reading, and she was the only one in the family who spent money on magazines and novels. Sometimes it seemed there was nothing she didn’t know. It was from her that Furo learned how to start up and navigate through a computer (this process occurring over the holidays she had spent transcribing his handwritten final-year thesis into digital format), and after he graduated and returned to Lagos to seek a job, it was she who urged him to join Twitter — which she wasn’t on but knew enough about to assist him with opening his account — as it was perfect for self-advertising. She had even appeared on national TV. She did this through her own efforts, and in the face of her brother’s scoffing dismissal of her ambition, by trying for and making the hot seat of ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ — which, by the way, she might have been if her boyfriend Korede, who was her ‘phone-a-friend’ lifeline, hadn’t failed her at the eleventh question. She departed the show with winnings of two hundred and fifty thousand naira and arrived home to a hero’s welcome from her parents, and, from her brother, as ever, adoring envy.

Furo was certain that by leaving he’d escaped the almighty struggle to convince his family that he was still the same person, son and brother. Even if he succeeded in suspending their disbelief, there were then the frantic efforts they would undertake to regain what was lost: the medical investigations, the money it would cost them, the media circus that must follow; and, probably, for his mother, whom he knew would be desperate enough when all else had failed, the recourse to consultations with spiritual healers. Now, with his disappearance, they would expend effort and spend money in attempting to solve the mystery, but at least they would be left with an image of him that they could hold on to.

Yes, he was doing the right thing, he was even surer.

Better his family retain their image of him and he his of them.

Furo awoke to the caress of the early sunlight streaming in through the window above his head. After a quick glance to check that nothing had changed — his colour was the same, as white as night becomes day — he sat unmoving for a long time, his ears tuned to the city. Hunger came, and the harder he resisted the stronger the pangs became. His neck resumed its ache. His palms, when he dropped them from rubbing his nape, were oily with grime. Beneath the dirt, the skin was paler than any hand he’d ever studied, and the lifelines were etched fainter, the palm edges and pads reddened with coursing blood. Not bad-looking as hands go, he said to himself … but owning these, calling them his, that was too much to handle.

Dropping his hands to the ground, Furo pushed up into a crouch, then picked up his folder and slipped it under his arm as he straightened to full height. He stood motionless for some moments inhaling the grass-dew smell of a new day, but when he started brushing off his clothes, the cement dust of abandonment flooded his nostrils, choking him with sadness.

It was time to move forwards.

Again the stares. The hawker from whom he bought a seventy-naira loaf of Agege bread stole glances at him as she knelt beside her wooden tray, sawed open the loaf, and spread ten naira worth of mayonnaise on it. The woman who sold him three sachets of pure water stared with open amusement as he squatted by her icebox and washed his face and his mouth and his hands and drank what was left. And the pedestrians, the sleepy-eyed taxi drivers, the minibus passengers with their work-ready faces, the road sweepers and roadside beggars and policemen standing useless at clogged intersections — all followed him with their eyes as he strode by.

Under the sun’s glare, almost as hard to bear as the stares from which there was no hiding place, Furo trekked from Ikeja to Maryland. He didn’t plan his direction: it was set out for him when he found himself beside the police college’s long-running fence on which was painted at intervals RESTRICTED AREA: KEEP MOVING. He obeyed this instruction until the fence was passed. He kept on moving, past the landscaped grounds of Sheraton Hotel & Towers and the red-and-white facade of the Virgin Atlantic building. He slowed his steps to skirt a cluster of commuters at Onigbongbo Bus Stop and quickened his pace as he approached the thumping roar of a helicopter rising from the bowl of OAS Heliport. Onwards he went, throwing step after step along the sun-cracked sidewalk until he reached the watering-hole bustle of Maryland Junction.

Foremost consequence of Furo’s journey was the burning sensation on the bridge of his nose, which made his eyes water when he mopped his sweating face with his handkerchief. But the gruelling trek, and the unrelenting lash of the sun, the total pointlessness of his fatigue, also bleached his mind of clinging delusions and helped him decide where to go. To Lekki, stamping ground of the Lagos rich. He would go to The Palms, the largest mall in Lagos.

There, at least, the air conditioning was free.

And it was far from Egbeda, as far from his family as he could go in Lagos.

And then again, there would be others who looked like him.

Getting to Lekki from Maryland would involve hopping buses. There was a BRT bus terminus at Maryland Junction, and Furo, opting for the cheaper ride over the faster minibuses, approached one of the ticketing agents. After surprising the woman with his accent, he bought a one-way ticket to Marina. He boarded the bus, chose a window seat near the back, and rested his tired head against the sweat-smudged glass. While the bus was filling up with passengers, Furo avoided looking at his face in the glass, a wasted effort, because by the time the bus set off, he had noticed that his hands were shaking from hunger, and that the spray of hair on his forearms seemed to change colour from red to orange in the slant of sunlight, and that some of the glances he drew from the other passengers were sympathetic, concerned, almost pitying of the plight that was evident in his skin. During the bumpy, unhurried, many-stop ride, he also noticed, always in front of him, the persistent presence of a nose that smarted from sunburn.

He had lunch at Marina. Again eba and egusi soup, and again in a buka, but this time with no incident more remarkable than cheering cries from a gaggle of area boys, motor park hooligans, who gathered outside the buka to watch him eat. After he settled the bill, he strode blank-faced through a swarm of child beggars till he reached the BRT bus stand, and when the last of the beggars, the most determined, a pretty Chadian girl who tugged at her pigtails as she recited her tired script, finally gave up and shuffled off, he settled on to the bench to await the arrival of the bus to Lekki. The skyline ahead of him was the postcard image of Lagos, the agglomeration of high-rises that landmarked the financial district of Broad Street, and averting his eyes from this view in boredom, Furo gazed over the murky waters lapping against the marina behind his bench. On the far shore floated a metropolis of cargo ships and derrick rigs. Canoes and old tugboats crawled across the waterway, their paddles digging and outboard motors chugging. Scavenging egrets soared and squabbled over the sluggish waves of Five Cowrie Creek: that dumpsite for market refuse and road-kill carcasses; that open sewer into which the homeless and the shameless emptied their bowels in public view. Furo could see them now, men mostly, squatted along the marina wall with trousers rucked around their ankles and faces straining from the pleasure of bursting haemorrhoids. The familiar smell of Lagos motor parks, marijuana and tobacco smoke mingled with the stench of petrochemicals and moonshine alcohol and human effluence, blew on a breeze from the water’s edge: a dizzying mix that Furo was happy to turn his back on as his bus pulled up.

He arrived at The Palms with ninety naira in his pocket.

Who did Furo see but a white person striding towards him as he passed through the glass doors of The Palms. A long-haired woman with a large mole on her chin, she wore a lavender summer dress and green oversized Crocs. In both hands she grasped the big yellow bags that boasted of lowest prices. Faced with this test, this face-to-face with a white person, Furo realised he was unprepared for the encounter. He was worried how they would see him. Could they tell by sight that there was something wrong with him? If they could, then why, how, what was it they saw that black people couldn’t? Thinking these thoughts, Furo halted in front of the glass doors, his attention fixed on the woman. She drew close, her gaze flicked over his face, and then she was past, her Crocs clopping and ShopRite bags rustling.

The woman’s lack of reaction to his presence proved nothing, Furo told himself, but he feared that before long he would find out the truth, because in the crowded passage ahead of him were several oyibo people, some Indian- and Lebanese-looking, some Chinese, walking alone or in small groups, laughing, chatting, gesturing at the bright lights in storefront windows: all of them as indifferent to their difference as he wasn’t to his. Then he thought he had stood too long in the same spot, that people must be staring at him and wondering, and he looked around but caught no eyes, they seemed to ignore him in the midst of plenty. Buoyed by this glimmer of a chance at a normal life — one where he wouldn’t always be the cobra in this charmless show of reality, the centre of attention — he started forwards into the chill of the mall.

Furo’s fear came to nothing, as none of the oyibo who looked at him gave the impression that he was something he shouldn’t be. The few glances he attracted came from his own people, and even they seemed more interested in his dusty shoes, his wrinkled trousers, his sweat-grimed shirt, his cheap plastic folder, all the signs showing he wasn’t kosher in the money department. That was a look he was used to from before, and so it didn’t worry him. Better the scorn he knew than the admiration he didn’t. But above all, better the people who ignored him than the ones who didn’t. Moving through the crowd, he began to feel more at ease with the approach of non-blacks. There was no uncertainty about their reaction to sighting him. They would see him and maintain stride, see him and keep on talking, see him and show no surprise, every single time. With the others, the majority, it was hit-and-miss. And after some near misses, a woman hit on him.

He was almost at the entrance of the lavatory when he heard a hiss behind him. He spun around to find her standing there. Though he had never seen her before, he recognised her at once. She was one of those youngish women who dressed not so much to kill but rather to mimic teenagers — which sometimes they claimed they were, rarely truthfully — and spent their days stalking the mall in a hunt for lone white men. In two words, she was a runs girl. In one, a prostitute. She had the worn-out sensuality, the overbearing perfume, and the arsenal of glances. While her mouth said, ‘Hello there,’ her eyes were busy telling Furo, I’ll be good to you, baby. Or something to that effect. Perhaps, on some other day, he might have responded to the promise in her eyes, but today he didn’t even reply to her greeting before whipping back around and striding away from the lavatory.

He arrived at the food court to find it brimming with voices. After-work hours on weekdays were busy periods for The Palms, as commuters killed time there — eating dinner, watching movies, browsing the shops — in a bid to wait out the worst of the traffic. Looking around for somewhere to sit, he saw that most of the tables were occupied by whispering couples or chattering groups of office colleagues, but near the centre of the dining area stood a table with three empty chairs, the fourth taken by a man reading a book. Weaving a path through the jumble of conversations, Furo approached the silent table, and the man raised his head. His dreadlocked hair was neck-length, and his beard stubble was sprinkled with grey, as was the hair on his chest, which showed through the V-neck of his T-shirt. Despite the greying, he was about Furo’s age.

‘Hello,’ Furo said. ‘Can I share this table with you?’

‘Please,’ the man replied, and waited until Furo sat before returning to his book.

After placing his folder on the table, Furo raised both hands to massage his neck, at the same time throwing a look of resentment at all the happy people seated about him. He envied them. Unlike him, they all had homes to return to. He knew that the food court and all the shops in the mall would be closed by ten, and the mall would be emptied of people and locked up after the cinema upstairs finished its last showing around midnight. And then where would he go? He couldn’t risk illness, not when he had no money, and spending another night in an abandoned building full of mosquitoes seemed to beg for malaria. But what choice did he have today, tomorrow, the day after, until he began work at Haba! in a couple of weeks? In an effort to get away from these insoluble worries, Furo returned his gaze to the table, and narrowed his eyes at the book across from him. Fela: This Bitch of a Life — the words on the front cover. The man’s short-nailed hands gripped the book cover, pinning it open. Head cocked to one side, eyelids lowered, face expressionless, his lips moved silently as he read.

This bitch of a life indeed, Furo thought. There he was, living his life, and then this shit happened to him. He had always thought that white people had it easier, in this country anyway, where it seemed that everyone treated them as special, but after everything that he had gone through since yesterday, he wasn’t so sure any more. Everything conspired to make him stand out. This whiteness that separated him from everyone he knew. His nose smarting from the sun. His hands covered with reddened spots, as if mosquito bites were something serious. People pointing at him, staring all the time, shouting “oyibo” at every corner.

And yet his whiteness had landed him a job.

Furo blew out his cheeks in a sigh. Dropping his hands to grasp the table, he pulled in his chair. The metal legs screaked on the floor tiles. At this sound his tablemate looked up, and Furo, seizing the chance, said to him, ‘Sorry to bother you, but can you please tell me the time?’ The man nodded yes, put down the book, reached into his trouser pocket, and pulled out a phone. He said, ‘It’s almost five thirty,’ to which Furo responded, ‘Thanks.’ As the man returned the phone to his pocket, Furo said, ‘Funny how time drags.’

‘When you’re bored,’ the man said. He smiled and added: ‘And when you’re waiting.’

Furo forced a laugh. ‘Also when you’re in trouble.’

‘That too,’ the man agreed. He waited a beat. ‘Do you mind saying what the trouble is?’

‘Ah … no,’ Furo said. ‘It’s not something I can talk about. But thanks for asking.’

The man leaned forwards in his chair and crossed his hands over his book. ‘But we can talk if you want. To pass the time.’ He tapped the book. ‘That’s one good thing about books. You can always pick up from where you left off.’

‘I have to confess I’m not a big fan of books myself,’ Furo said. He thought a moment, and then chuckled. ‘I shouldn’t say that in public. I just got a job selling books.’

‘What sort of books?’

With a glance at the man’s shock of hair, Furo said: ‘Probably not your type. Business books, that’s what the company sells.’

‘What’s the company’s name?’ As Furo hesitated, the man said, ‘I ask because I used to work for a publishing house. I might know your company.’

Furo nodded. ‘Haba!’

‘Excuse me?’ The man’s puzzled expression deepened as Furo raised his hand, but when he drew a line in the air with his forefinger and jabbed a hole under it, saying at the same time, ‘Haba with an exclamation mark, that’s the company’s name,’ the man’s face brightened with comprehension. Furo finished drily: ‘I can see I’ll have trouble telling that name to people.’

The man snorted in laughter. ‘Yah, they’ll be surprised hearing haba from your mouth. Which is a good thing for a bookseller, I suppose. It will leave an impression.’ After a pause, he said, ‘I haven’t heard of that company.’

They relapsed into silence. The air in the food court was thick with aromas from the quick service restaurants, and Furo felt his stomach stirring in response. He’d eaten a large meal barely two hours ago, and his belly was still tight with undigested starch, yet the smell of food, the sound and sight of others eating, tensed him with craving. He was grateful for the distraction when his companion said, ‘I haven’t introduced myself,’ and held out his hand. ‘I’m Igoni.’

Furo’s brow puckered as they shook hands, and he repeated: ‘Igoni?’

Igoni nodded yes.

‘Tobra?’ Furo said.

Igoni’s eyes widened with surprise. ‘Ibim. You speak Kalabari?’

‘Not really. I can understand a few words. My father’s from Abonnema, Briggs compound. I’m Furo Wariboko.’

‘Imagine that,’ Igoni said. His eyes sparkled at Furo. When he smiled, his parted lips revealed a flash of thumb-sucker’s teeth. ‘You must have one hell of a story.’

Furo wanted to ask what Igoni meant, but he thought better of the impulse. He had a sneaking feeling he’d already revealed too much. And so he remained silent as Igoni closed his book, then took up his laptop bag, stuffed the book into it and, rising from his chair, said, ‘I’m going to the cafe round the corner for a smoke. Can I buy you coffee or something?’ Surprised by Igoni’s offer, Furo responded, ‘I’d like that.’ He stood up quickly, picked up his folder, and followed Igoni into the stream of shoppers in the mall’s passageway.

As the first Nigerian mall of indubitably international standard, the unveiling of The Palms was a milestone event not only for the Lagos rich, but also for yuppie teenagers, music video directors, and politicians eager to showcase the investment paradise that was newly democratic Nigeria. At the time of the ribbon-cutting in 2006, Furo was at university in faraway Ekpoma, and so he had to make do with his sister’s recounting of the mall’s abundant pleasures over the telephone. Two warehouse-sized supermarkets, one fancy bookstore, many fast food restaurants, bric-a-brac shops, branded boutiques and jewellery outlets, a sports bar, a bowling-alley-cum-nightclub, a multiplex cinema, and scores of ATMs: any means by which to part the dazzled from their money, The Palms provided. And yet in all these years since he returned to Lagos, despite countless visits to the mall to watch the latest from Hollywood and spend his weekends with girlfriends he wanted to impress, Furo had never entered the mall’s sole cafe.

Approaching the glass facade of the cafe, Furo saw that a majority of the tables were occupied by oyibos. That was the reason he’d never set foot in the place: he assumed that any hangout that drew so many expats was too exclusive for someone unemployed. Which Igoni, going by appearances, was not. They had reached the entrance, and a private guard in visored cap and paramilitary uniform jumped up from his folding chair and eased the door open, then stamped his boot in greeting. Heads turned to watch them enter, and then turned back to pick up their conversations. The interior was lighted by shaded lamps pouring down soft yellow beams, and the floor tiles shone, the metal tables gleamed. From the walls hung flatscreen TVs showing news channels with the sound turned down. One half of the cafe was announced as non-smoking by wedge-shaped signs on the tables, and the other section was overhung by a haze, this fed by trails of smoke from all the hands clutching glowing cigarettes, smouldering cigarillos, sputtering cigars, and, here and there, hookah pipes. Igoni headed for the smoking section, Furo followed, and they settled into a red loveseat backed against the far wall.

The prices were as Furo imagined. Too high for him, now especially, when every naira he spent felt like spurting blood. He read the menu with mounting indignation until a waitress arrived for their orders. ‘Cappuccino, please,’ Igoni said, and when Furo felt his hairs bristle at her attention, he chose, ‘Chocolate milkshake,’ then closed the menu, set it down on the table, and stole a glance at his host. The embarrassment he felt at the price tag of his order, the cost of six full meals in a roadside buka, was nowhere apparent in Igoni’s face. In that instant Furo felt the bump of an idea falling into place, and the tingle that announced it a good one.

The waitress collected the menus and left before Furo spoke. ‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ he said to Igoni, ‘what do you do for a living?’

‘I don’t mind,’ Igoni said. ‘I’m a writer.’

‘Of books?’

Igoni nodded yes, and reaching into his pocket, he drew out a Benson & Hedges packet. Furo waited till the cigarette was lit. ‘What kind of books do you write?’

‘Not business books,’ Igoni said with a quick sly grin, and then leaned back in the loveseat, crossed his legs, and blew out smoke. ‘Fiction, short stories, that sort of thing.’

‘I see,’ Furo muttered in distraction, as his attention was diverted by a passing angel, the sudden dip in the hum of conversation. The cafe door had opened to let in a woman alone. Long seconds ticked while she stood in front of the entrance, her head turning with imperial slowness as she searched through faces. Then she struck for the smoking section. She wore yellow high heels, carried a bright yellow handbag, and the balloon-skirt of her black gown, which bounced at each stride she took, showed off her long legs. To Furo it seemed every eye in the cafe was fixed on her, but she relished the attention, her eyes twinkled with awareness of it, and on her lips played a smile that grew bolder the closer she came. After she slipped into the loveseat beside Furo’s table, the chatter in the cafe picked up again.

The waitress arrived bearing a tray, and after setting down Furo and Igoni’s drinks, she crossed over to the newcomer. Furo glanced around at the first sound of the woman’s voice, but it was her prettiness that kept him looking. He noticed the waitress closing her notebook, his cue to look away before he was caught staring, but he waited till the last moment, the tensing of the woman’s temple as she realised she was being watched, to swing his eyes away from her face to the TV above her head, which showed a crowd of Arabs chanting and waving placards written in English. His neck soon tired of straining upwards to no purpose, and abandoning this ruse, he turned forwards in his seat and reached for his drink.

The first sip of the chocolate milkshake heightened Furo’s hunger. The second cloyed his tongue with sweetness. The third gave him gooseflesh. Each time he sucked on the straw he took care to hold the liquid in his cheeks, to swill it round his mouth, and only when his cheeks were stretched tight and his gullet throbbed from the effort of remaining closed, did he gulp down the drink. It left its sweetness in his mouth and spread its coolness through his skin, and this, added to the cosiness of the cafe, lulled him into a state approaching contentment. Until he glanced to the side, caught the stare of the woman, and felt a flush melting away the pleasure from his face. He dipped his head and sucked furiously on the straw.

Igoni finished his cigarette in silence and picked up his cappuccino. As he drank, Furo watched him openly. Igoni seemed friendly enough, he also appeared to have some money, and he was Kalabari, almost family without the drawbacks. Furo decided it was now time to ask the favour of Igoni that he’d intended since he realised that fate was finally dealing him a good hand. And so he said Igoni’s name, and when Igoni looked at him, he spoke in a halting voice:

‘I know it’s a bit odd, but I want to ask you a favour.’

‘Go ahead,’ Igoni said.

‘I need a place to stay in Lagos. Only for a short time, about two weeks. I’m hoping, if it’s possible, if it’s not too much trouble, that I can stay with you.’

‘Oh,’ Igoni said in a surprised tone. ‘That’s a big one.’

Furo jumped into the opening. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I don’t have anyone else to ask.’

Igoni leaned forwards, rested his elbows on his knees, and cracked his knuckles. He stared at the ground between his feet until he raised his head. ‘I’ll be honest,’ he said, his eyes seeking out Furo’s, and then swinging away as he continued in a voice shaded with regret. ‘Any other time I would be happy to have you over, but I’m in the middle of some writing, so I really can’t, not now.’

Furo’s voice was hoarse as he said, ‘I understand.’

Igoni was about to speak again when his phone rang. After mumbling a few words, he hung up the call, and then reached for his wallet. ‘I have to rush off,’ he said as he flipped it open. ‘The person I was waiting for has arrived.’ He pulled out four crisp five hundreds and placed the notes by his saucer. ‘That will cover the bill.’ Rising to his feet, he slung his laptop bag over his shoulder. ‘It was nice meeting you, Furo. Bye now.’

Furo watched Igoni until he disappeared into the milling throng outside the cafe’s glass front. Returning his gaze to the table, he noted that Igoni hadn’t finished his drink. He picked up the cup, and after swirling around the leftover cappuccino, he drank it down. As he clacked the cup on the saucer, the money caught his eye. Maybe he should have asked Igoni for money instead, he thought, and then heaved a coffee-scented sigh.

‘May I join you?’

Furo whipped his head around. The woman in yellow heels had turned in her seat till her bared knees pointed at him. Her smile did not reach her eyes.

‘Is it OK to join you?’ she asked again.

At his nod, she took up her handbag, rose to her feet and, with a waft of perfume, slid in beside him. Her knee bumped his under the table. ‘Oops,’ she said, and threw him a smile only just warmer than her last. ‘I’m Syreeta.’

‘Furo,’ he said.

‘That’s a Nigerian name.’

‘I’m Nigerian,’ Furo said. Some resentment escaped into his tone, and he met her gaze. Her brown irises were steady pools from which his face stared back. ‘You sound Nigerian for sure,’ she said at last. ‘But you’re the first Nigerian I’ve met who has green eyes.’

Furo blinked in surprise, and to cover his confusion he raised his hand to his nape, where his fingers began to rub. When Syreeta asked, ‘Is your neck paining you?’ he nodded and rubbed harder. ‘Stop rubbing it like that, it won’t help, it will make it worse.’ After he dropped his hand, she said, her tone conversational: ‘What you need is a massage. I can give you one if you want.’ She held up her hands, showed her palms to him. ‘I’m good with my hands. And my house is not far from here.’ She took his silence for agreement. ‘We’ll go after my food comes.’

Head reeling from the speed of things, Furo bent forwards and grabbed hold of his straw. As he slurped the last of his milkshake, his eyes watched Syreeta’s hands, her scarlet fingernails drumming the tabletop. Her offer had caught him unawares, as he hadn’t expected it of someone as well-heeled as her. He understood what she wanted, the same as that other one, the runs girl who had accosted him by the mall’s toilet, had wanted. The white man’s money, that’s what. Appearances had deceived him and her, because he had misjudged her morals as completely as she his pocket. She was loose, he was broke, and the rules of this game were fixed. He had to set her straight. Despite the tinder of hope that her offer had sparked, he had to douse it before the flames overcame his common sense.

Furo straightened up and found his voice. ‘Look, I don’t—’

‘Shush,’ Syreeta said, and Furo followed the direction of her look. The waitress was headed their way with a tray from which steam rose, and as she drew up to them, Syreeta said, ‘Sorry dear, I’ve changed my mind, I’m leaving now. Pack the food for me. And bring our bills.’

Alone again, she said to Furo, ‘You wanted to say something?’

‘I don’t have any money,’ he blurted out.

Her face hardened. ‘Did I ask you for money?’

‘But you want me to go home with you!’

‘And so what?’ she said in a flat voice.

Furo stared wordless, aghast at her shamelessness.

‘Do you want to or not?’

He closed his mouth and nodded yes.

‘Then stop talking plenty and come,’ Syreeta said with a toss of her braids.

In the car park of The Palms, Syreeta beeped open a silver-coloured Honda CR-V. ‘Your belt,’ she said to Furo after he climbed into the passenger seat, and when he was buckled in: ‘I’ll make a quick stop before we go to my place.’ She switched on the ignition. The flash of dashboard lights, a blast of stereo music, streams of air from the vents, and the machine purr of an engine eager to go. The car cruised out of The Palms, and when Syreeta accelerated (even though he couldn’t drive, Furo could tell that she handled the wheel with panache, to which the Honda responded like a dance partner) towards the Lekki highway, the easy motion of the car pulled Furo into a sinkhole of comfort. Every breath he drew, every rub of his tired shoulders on the soft leather seat, every sensation contributed to his need to pee.

Her quick stop was the five-star-looking Oriental Hotel. Furo realised this when the Honda swept through the gateway into a parking lot overflowing with millionaires’ toys, and by the time Syreeta found a spot and reversed into it, he’d convinced himself of the quickie reason for her stopover, the abysmal state of her morality, and the dangerous nature of her daring. She demolished his assumptions by asking him to follow her in. Together, side by side, they walked into the hotel’s lobby. To the right of the entrance was the reception counter, and Syreeta turned left. She clicked past a knot of men dressed in bankers’ suits, and pausing in their conversation, they stared after her, their eyes burning with the fever of acquisition. Furo skidded across the smooth stone floor in his efforts to keep pace with her, and when she halted in front of the elevator, he felt a vicious stab in his bladder. He couldn’t hold it in any more.

‘I need to ease myself,’ he whispered to Syreeta.

‘Let’s get upstairs first,’ she responded, but a quick look at his face changed her mind. ‘Go on, the loo is that way,’ and she pointed. ‘I’ll wait here.’

Furo trotted towards the lavatory, and once he was through the door he hopped from foot to foot and fumbled with his fly before bounding to the nearest urinal. He panted at the first spurt, pungent and steaming, the colour of factory waste, a whole day’s worth topped with a cup of milkshake, which splashed into the glistening ceramic and rattled the coloured mothballs and foamed in the drain. His nerves calmed with his stream, and soon he glanced around to confirm he was alone, and then down at his trousers to ensure he had no reason to be self-conscious. He finished and gave a yawn, closed his zipper, and then, as his eyes caught the brand stamped on to the urinal, he barked with laughter. He hadn’t noticed he was peeing into a Toto — a vagina. Yes, a dirty joke, he thought as he strolled chuckling to the washbasin, but when he saw his face in the mirror, his mirth caught in his throat. A monstrous joke, a monster’s joke: that’s what this is.

Syreeta was standing where Furo had left her but she was no longer alone. A portly Chinese man wearing rumpled cargo shorts and a crocodile-patterned shirt was speaking to her (her face was averted from his fixed, unctuous smile) and indicating with his hands that she follow him. When Furo arrived at the elevator, the man dropped his arms to his sides and fell silent. ‘Done?’ Syreeta asked, and when Furo answered yes, the man veered his face towards him, his smile wiped off. Syreeta poked the elevator button, the doors slid open, and the man backed away.

They rode up in silence, all the while looking down at the spread of the city through the elevator’s glass wall. Reaching the second floor, they emerged into a corridor, and Syreeta led the way across its deep carpet. In the last few feet to the corridor’s end, as Furo saw that the door ahead was inscribed ‘African Bar’, he hastened around her and held the door open. With a quick look at his face, she brushed past him into a dimly lit hall. Spinning disco lights, their gaudy pinpoints ricocheting off swaying silhouettes, showed a path across the dance floor. The moody melody of Bobby Benson’s ‘Taxi Driver’ boomed from speakers in the ceiling. Arranged along the walls were widely spaced tables, many occupied and shimmering with drinks. Near the entrance, a man and woman danced with their arms around each other’s waists, their heads on each other’s shoulders, and their feet scraping the floor in a sleepy harmony that paid no heed to the music.

Syreeta headed straight for the bar, whose long wooden counter was decorated with a pair of imitation elephant tusks stuck upright in pedestals, one at each end. Behind the counter stood a drinks cabinet stacked full of liquor bottles, their cognac browns and campari reds and curaçao blues highlighted by narrow beams of halogen light. As Syreeta climbed on to a bar stool, the barman came forwards with a happy-to-see-you smile and greeted her by name.

‘Evening o, Clement,’ she responded. ‘How work today?’

‘Work dey, my sister. I no fit complain.’ To Furo he said, ‘Good evening, sir,’ and after Furo returned the greeting, he reverted to Syreeta. ‘Make I bring the usual?’

‘No, I’m not staying,’ Syreeta said. ‘I just want you to do something quick-quick for me.’ She opened her handbag, drew out her BlackBerry, and fiddled with the keypad. ‘Abeg take a picture of me and my friend. Come to this side — I want the bar to show behind us.’

‘No problem,’ said the barman as he accepted the phone from Syreeta’s outstretched hand. He walked to the end of the counter, lifted the flap door and passed through, then stopped a yard away from their stools and, holding up the phone, said, ‘Tell me when you ready.’ Syreeta turned to Furo. ‘Put your arm around my shoulder.’ He hesitated, mystified about where she was going with all of this, but spurred on by her stare, he obeyed. She leaned into his embrace before saying: ‘Don’t face the camera, look at me.’ He locked his gaze on the clear skin of her forehead and pulled a tense smile, and when she called out, ‘Ready,’ the camera flashed.

Back in the car, after switching on the engine and adjusting the blow of the vents, Syreeta held her phone two-handed against the steering wheel and tapped the keypad for several minutes. ‘Rubbish!’ she muttered at last. With a hiss of annoyance, she tossed the phone along with her handbag on to the back seat. Then she said to Furo in a composed tone: ‘Time to go home.’

Home was just around the corner from The Palms. The car turned off the highway and sped through a succession of side streets that threw off Furo’s bearings, and then cruised down a stretch of blacktop which ran from end to end of a housing estate. On the left side of the road stood a high fence, beyond which was the rest of the world. On the right, arranged in a barrack sprawl of identical roofs, was Oniru Estate. Syreeta parked by the side of the road, metres away from the second gate and, after climbing down barefooted from the car, she opened the back door and took out her red-blinking phone, her handbag, the plastic bag containing her packed meal, and a pair of rubber slippers, which she slipped her feet into before beeping the car locked. Furo followed her across the road to a plank footbridge balanced over the roadside gully, and then through a pedestrian gate into the residential area. White sand, a deep layer of it, covered the pathways between houses. They trudged through this seabed, her slippers flinging grains back at him, his feet sinking with every step. Sand slipped into his shoes and chafed his ankles, and by the time they arrived at her apartment, there was sand gritting between his teeth.

Like most houses in Oniru Estate, Syreeta’s was as down-to-earth as a concrete bunker. The slapdash architecture only allowed for one design flourish, which was the whitewash on the walls. The front door opened on to the kitchen. Syreeta had switched on the kitchen light when her phone, which had kept ringing during the drive from the hotel, started up again. She didn’t take the call until she led Furo to the parlour and sank down beside him on the settee.

‘What do you want?’ The phone pressed to her ear with her right hand, she inspected the fingernails of her left. Almost a minute passed before she spoke again. ‘I’m not your property. Tell that to your wife.’ As she listened, she dropped her hand in her lap, tugged up her skirt, and scratched the inside of her thigh. Catching Furo’s eye, she stuck out her tongue at him. ‘I met him at The Palms. I was bored and he asked me out. Did you think I would sit there and wait for you all night?’ A pause, and then she yelled, ‘Don’t shout at me!’

Furo sat as still as a photograph: Syreeta looked like an explosion waiting to happen. Whatever was going on between her and her boyfriend wasn’t his business. Especially as Syreeta seemed intent on involving him. He hoped she knew where she was taking this game of hers.

There was a loaded silence as the other man did all the talking, and he seemed to be saying the right words, because Syreeta’s face began shedding its tension — her mouth, at some point, parted in a reluctant smile — and when she spoke her tone was calm. ‘I’m not at home.’ She listened and then retorted: ‘You should have thought of that before you stood me up. I have to go back to my friend. Call me tomorrow if you want.’ Ending the call on that dagger thrust, she tossed the phone on to the settee, but after a moment’s thought she snatched it up, pressed down the power button until the screen went blank, and then slipped it into her handbag. She yawned and stretched, throwing her arms wide and her legs forwards. Her yawn morphed into a grin. ‘Let’s get ready for your massage,’ she said to Furo. And in a serious tone: ‘But you have to bathe first. You smell of Lagos.’ Gathering up her handbag and the plastic bag of food, she rose to her feet and strode to a door, nudged it open, flicked a switch, and then spoke from the lighted doorway. ‘Give me a few minutes to dress the bedroom. You can start removing your clothes.’

With Syreeta out of sight, Furo cast a look around him, hoping to get a sense of this creature from her den. Her house seemed clean enough, there were no cobwebs in the ceiling corners and the paint job was unsmirched under the light switches. He also noticed that the parlour was furnished with mismatched items, none of which seemed handed down. The settee on which he sat was upholstered in blue corduroy, and the rest of the sitting arrangements, two armchairs, were vermilion chintz. The chairs were cardinal points to the magnetic centre of a round black table, with the settee taken as south and the armchairs as east and west; and due north, up against the facing wall, stood a pinewood cabinet stacked with electronics: glossy black widescreen TV, ceramic-white DVD player, green-and-silver stereo, and a DSTV decoder in metallic plastic. Everything spoke of new money and no eye for colour planning.

Reconnaissance finished, Furo bent down, undid his laces, and removed his shoes. Wrinkling his nose at their fungal stink, he dropped the shoes out of sight behind the settee. Then he gathered all the banknotes in his pockets (two thousand and ninety naira, as Syreeta had paid his bill at the cafe and let him keep Igoni’s money) and folded the lot into his wallet. He stood up to undress, and then piled his shirt and trousers on the rug along with his soiled handkerchief. After placing his wallet and folder on the centre table, he sat down again in his boxer shorts and singlet and resumed inspection of the apartment. The floor from wall to wall was covered in a thick fawn rug. The ceiling was white plaster, the walls were painted blue, and he counted four doors leading out of the parlour. One opened to the kitchen, another to Syreeta’s bedroom, and the third bore a sticker that announced: In this house the toilet seat stays down! The fourth door he assumed led to another bedroom, which meant that Syreeta either had a flatmate or the space for one. He was sucking his teeth over this discovery when a movement caught his eye from the lighted doorway, and he turned his head to see Syreeta standing there, unclothed except for sheer black panties. Her breasts were smaller than he’d imagined. Her areolas were the darkest part of her. Her navel was a deep hole from which no light escaped. Her voice broke his concentration.

‘Don’t tell me you plan to bathe in your underwear.’ She stepped forwards and tossed a towel at him. ‘Wrap that if you’re feeling shy.’ Walking towards the bathroom, she said over her shoulder, ‘I hope you don’t mind cold water,’ and after the bathroom light came on, Furo heard the splash of running water, followed by her voice: ‘Come in when you’re ready.’ She was brushing her teeth over the washbasin, her braids swinging to the fierce motion of her hand. Furo watched her with sidelong glances from the doorway, until he saw she didn’t mind, and then he looked openly, his eyes stopping at the twin dimples above the swell of her buttocks, like a creator’s finger marks. From slender ankles to straight calves to the deep curve of her back she had the carriage of an athlete, but in her hips she was as soft as a mother.

‘Stop staring at my ass,’ she said as she finished gargling. She picked out a cellophane-wrapped airline toothbrush from a tumbler on the washbasin ledge and handed it to Furo. While he squeezed out toothpaste, she climbed into the shower stall and ran water from the tap into a bucket. Then she watched him in turn until the bucket ran over. She closed the tap, stepped out of the stall, and on reaching the bathroom door, she gave a final instruction:

‘Hurry up. I don’t like waiting.’

There was no light in the parlour when Furo emerged from his wash. Treading the darkness, he arrived at the bedroom door and knocked before opening. The bedroom was also unlit and the hum of an air conditioner tickled the silence. Furo stood in front of the door, unsure of where to turn, and he shivered in that spot until Syreeta said, ‘You don’t talk much, do you?’

Turning in the direction of her disembodied voice, he moved forwards till his leg struck wood. He bent down and felt around in pit-bottom darkness: his hand found a mattress before touching skin. ‘Lie down,’ Syreeta said, the bed swaying as she moved aside. He climbed in and lay on his back, and her hand brushed his scalp, bumped his nose, and clasped his chin. When she said, ‘Turn over,’ he rolled on to his belly. He felt her fingers searching around his waistline. With a sure-handed pull she removed his boxers, and throwing her thigh across him, straddled his back. Through the shock of her weight on him he heard the rasp of a bottle cap before his senses were sent scattering by a perfume so strong, so sweet that a mournful sigh eased from his lips at the same instant he felt the splash of liquid on his back. And then Syreeta’s hands — rubbing, spreading the oil into his skin. He groaned when her fingers gripped his neck.

‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’ she said as her hands worked. ‘Just relax.’ She began to hum.

Furo lost count of all the times he gasped and grunted as she squeezed and thumped his neck and shoulders. The dig of her fingers, the scratch of her pubis, the grip of her knees on his ribcage, every sensation pinpricked his nerves. When she lay down on him — her tender-skinned breasts squashed against his back, her oil-slicked legs entangled with his, her breath brushing his nape — the pleasure grew so intense that it squeezed from his eye corners. He pressed his face into the pillow and caught his breath, but still the sobs burst out, each one racking his shoulders.

Syreeta halted all movement when she realised Furo was crying. She remained quiet awhile, as if uncertain for the first time how to respond to his foreignness; and then, bringing her lips close to his ear, she whispered, ‘Let it out.’ She pushed her arms under him, linked her hands around his chest, and in that position they were both soon rocked to sleep.

It was still dark when Furo awoke. The bedroom curtains were parted, the air conditioner no longer sounded, and the world was swathed in that bottomless silence particular to wildernesses and power cuts. Furo realised what had roused him when Syreeta shook him again.

‘I’m awake.’ He pushed aside the bedcover and sat up. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘You sleep like a dead man.’ Her voice was sleep-husky. ‘It’s almost six. Don’t you have to get ready for work?’

It took him a moment to realise she didn’t mean sex. ‘No.’

‘You don’t have a job?’

‘I do. But I start in two weeks.’

‘Oops, sorry,’ and her yawn drifted into his face. After she lay down, he asked, ‘Do you want to go back to sleep?’

‘Not really. Why?’

‘Can we talk?’

‘Uh-huh.’ She rolled around to face him in the darkness. ‘I’m listening.’

‘How many bedrooms are in this house?’

‘Two.’

‘Do you live alone?’

She hesitated before saying, ‘Yes.’

‘What of your boyfriend? Doesn’t he—’

She cut him short. ‘That’s none of your business.’

‘I’m sorry, I just meant …’ His voice trailed off. He took a deep breath and tried again. ‘What I meant to ask was: does anyone use the second bedroom?’

‘No. It’s my guest room.’

Through the window, the sky’s edges were turning mauve. The darkness was lifting.

‘Why are you asking? Do you want to live with me?’

Furo jumped on the chance. ‘Well, yes,’ he said. Syreeta said nothing; he wished he could see what she was thinking. ‘Please,’ he continued. ‘I don’t have anyone else to ask for help. I just need somewhere to stay for a few days, till I start work.’ And still she remained silent. In the distance Furo could hear the highway, the honks that marked its trail. He began to count time, his lips moving in silent prayer. Ten seconds, twenty — time was going too fast, so he slowed his keeping — eighty-four seconds by his tally before she spoke.

‘I don’t know anything about you. Except that you’re white. And that you say you’re Nigerian.’ In a gentler tone: ‘And that you’re a softie. Lagos will kill you.’ She raised her hand, ran her fingers through her braids, and the scent of sleep-tousled hair drifted to Furo. ‘I went and sent your picture to my man last night,’ she said with a sigh. ‘What will I say when he finds out you’re staying with me?’ She sighed again. ‘I knew you would ask. I heard you asking that guy in the cafe last night.’ The bed shifted as she adjusted. ‘OK, you can stay.’

‘Thank you,’ Furo said, his voice breaking from the weight of his gratitude. ‘Thank you,’ he repeated, ‘thank you, Syreeta.’

Furo couldn’t help admitting that some part of his gratefulness was due to his new appearance. Syreeta was helpful to him because he looked like he did. He was almost sure of that, because why else would she do all she had for him? She had paid his bill at the cafe, allowed him into her bed, massaged him to sleep last night, and now, at some risk to her relationship (odd affair though that was, one where she made her man jealous by sending him a staged photo of herself in the arms of another man), she had solved his problem of a place to stay. He was grateful to her, and yet he was also mindful of who she thought he was and why women like her usually moved with men like him. Her big new jeep, her well-furnished apartment in Lekki, her living alone in style and among gadgets, her ease with money and trendy places, her apparent lack of an office job or a homerun business, all of these pointed to her status as woman who knew what was what. A woman who knew how to handle men. Who knew how to live off them. Who knew the going value of a white man in Lagos. And Furo, for all the street savvy and survivor skills he prided himself on, had no idea where Syreeta was leading him.

The sky had faded into a seashell blue. Birdsong assailed the air. Voices shouting in greeting filled the streets. A nearby car vroomed into life. A new day rising.

Syreeta rose with the day, strolled across to her cluttered vanity table, and stooped beside it to open a cabinet fridge. She straightened up and turned around to face the bed with a Five Alive carton clutched in her hand. Left arm akimbo, she threw back her head and gulped from the carton. Red juice spilled down her chin, flowed between her breasts and into the trimmed V below her belly. With an ‘Ah’ of pleasure she pulled the carton from her lips, and looking at Furo, she raised it to him in question. When he nodded yes, she said: ‘Come and get it.’

She watched with a knowing smile as Furo searched through the rumpled bedclothes for his boxer shorts. Giving up, he swung his legs to the rug and stood up, his hands hanging down by his sides. Her smile widened to reveal teeth as he walked towards her. He reached for the juice carton, but at the last moment she whipped it behind her back. ‘I have some rules in this house,’ she said. ‘You’ll wash your own plates. You won’t drop rubbish on my floor or leave your clothes scattered about. You’ll do your own share of the housework. You must inform me whenever you plan to stay out late. And if you ever bring a woman into this house—’ She left the threat hanging and stared him in the eye. ‘I hope we’re clear?’

‘Very clear,’ he said.

‘It’s just better for you to know my rules from the start,’ she said, holding his gaze, ‘so we don’t have trouble later.’ She glanced down at his crotch and gave a soft laugh. ‘As for that one, I don’t know o. It’s now complicated. We’ll see how it goes. Here, have some juice, maybe it will cool you down.’ Still laughing, she brushed past him as he raised the carton to his lips.

Furo’s eyes avoided the vanity table in front of him, the tall mirror affixed to it. Through the window above the fridge he saw the morning face of the sun suspended in the cold-coloured sky, and behind him he heard Syreeta tumble into bed. Then a muffled scream punched the air, and Furo, coughing up juice, whirled around to find Syreeta staring. She raised her hand, pointed a stiffened finger at his groin, her movements slow, her eyes rounded as she said:

‘What happened?’

He glanced down in fear. ‘What?’

‘Your ass, your ass! I mean your ass!’

Furo spun around, saw his reflection; then turned again and looked over his shoulder.

‘Your ass is black!’ Syreeta cried, and as Furo stared in the mirror, frozen in shock, she flung up her arms, flopped on her back, and wailed with laughter.