Blackass: A Novel

by A. Igoni Barrett

  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 shou
ldn’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.