Blackass: A Novel

by A. Igoni Barrett

  ‘You should call that person back, it must be important,’ Syreeta whispered as the movie started.

  On the drive back to Oniru Estate, while waiting at a red light on Ozumba Mbadiwe Avenue, Furo was startled by a pained moan from Syreeta, who, when he looked, was doubled over the steering wheel but straightened up as soon as the amber flashed. After the Honda darted forwards, she responded to his queries by saying it was her period and she had forgotten to buy tampons and so would make a stop at a pharmacy in The Palms. ‘I’ll be quick, wait here for me,’ she told him after she parked, and leaving the engine running and the air conditioning blowing, she set off for the Rubik’s Cube building of the mall. When Furo lost track of her pink blouse in the rainbow crowd that swarmed the mall’s entrance, he took out his phone and powered it on. The start-up tone was interrupted by the beep of an incoming message and, tapping the keypad with cold sweaty fingers, he saw that the SMS was indeed from the same number that had been SOS-ing him. As he read and reread the words, ‘I know who you are & I’ll tell everyone the truth soon, just wait and see!’ the suspicion he had been suppressing ever since his pizza breakfast was ruined by the persistent ringing rose from his belly in seafood-smelling waves of nausea.

  The message was clear. No doubt about it, someone had found out the truth about him. Thirty green blinks of the dashboard clock were all Furo could bear of the eternity of suspense, and in that time he cursed Obata, he ruled out Tosin, absolved Arinze and dismissed Headstrong, so in the end, with his heart beating in his fingertips, he took up the phone, dialled the malignant number, and was still waiting for it to ring when a female android voice uttered into his ear, ‘The number you have dialled is unavailable at the moment. Please try again later. The number you have dialled is unavailable …’ He dialled again and again, all the while hoping the automated response was the usual falsehood from network providers to conceal their shoddy service, but at last, on sighting Syreeta in the distance, he gave up trying and accepted that his fate was that of a crying child whose mother couldn’t sleep. No rest for him until he cut off all ties with his former life.

  Monday night in bed, during a lover’s quarrel over nothing, Syreeta said to Furo, ‘Why are you such a big dictator?’ to which he replied smirking, ‘Because you’re a small country.’

  They laughed together.

  Night, Tuesday, alone at home, sprawled on his back in Syreeta’s bed, surrounded by the ghosts of her woman smell, a book – Are You Ready to Succeed? – clutched in his hands, eyes smarting from the friction of reading, Furo looked up and sighed, ‘Igoni.’

  He had been thinking of her lately.

  On Wednesday morning, Headstrong drove Furo and Arinze to the airport in Arinze’s Mercedes jeep, and when they arrived at MMA2, after alighting with his pigskin suitcase, Arinze told Headstrong, ‘Head straight back to the office and hand over my key to Tosin.’ The sternness in Arinze’s voice caught Furo’s attention as he lifted out his borrowed carpetbag, and the driver’s response, in a grovelling tone, ‘Yes, sir – journey mercies, sir,’ made him wonder what he was missing in the exchange. Then Arinze led the way into the bustling terminal, where long lines of people waited at the airline counters, and Furo nodded yes at his boss’s suggestion that they check in at separate counters to halve the chances of both missing the flight due to encounters with glitchy computers or bungling personnel. Before parting they agreed to meet afterwards in the departure lounge. Furo joined a queue, and after long minutes of watching in fuming silence as cowards in front of him yielded to incursions by bullies from behind, he got his chance at the counter. He handed his passport to the neckscarved ticketing agent, who shot him a searching look and stared down at the passport, but looked up again at his face, and then called over a colleague, a man. Furo’s cheek muscles suffered to uphold his mask of unconcern as the two agents consulted in whispers while glancing from the passport to him, and at last the male agent laughed, gave Furo a cheery thumbs-up, and walked away shaking his head. After checking Furo in, the woman passed him his passport and boarding pass before saying by way of apology:

  ‘I’ve never seen a white man with a Nigerian name before.’

  Furo passed through immigration without incident, without so much as a curious glance from the bored-looking female officer who thumbed through his passport, and without the body scanner detecting his metal buckle. A male officer, green-bereted and rubber-gloved, noticed the buckle while conducting a body search of the spread-eagled Furo, and then told him in a listless tone that he should have removed it, but when Furo apologised and dropped his hands to his belt, the man waved him through. Smiling with relief at this casual confirmation that he had passed all the tests, that his passport was authentic and so was he, the passport holder, Furo strode to the conveyor belt, picked up his property, and after putting his shoes back on, he ambled off in search of Arinze, whose waving hand he shortly spotted from a seat row beside their boarding gate.

  Their flight was two hours late, and yet Arinze was unbothered by the wait. He reassured Furo by reminding him that the meeting with Yuguda was set for five o’clock, and he disclosed that the only reason they were catching a morning flight for a forty-five minute trip was because he had expected the delay. As he and Furo rose from their seats and joined the surge towards the boarding gate, he said to Furo, ‘Trust our airlines too much and you’ll be late. Fly them long enough and you’ll be dead.’

  After the plane landed, as Furo followed the press of bodies down the aisle towards the exit, he passed by a first-class-seated woman in Bob Marley braids who clasped a mixed-race toddler in her arms. The child, on catching sight of Furo, stretched her toy arms in welcome and cried out in a tone of rapture, ‘Dah-dah!’ Furo was startled, but the mother more so. ‘Jeez!’ she exclaimed with a shamed expression, and tightened her grasp on the squirming child.

  Even a baby, when surrounded by people of identical skin colour, is prone to the error that one slight difference constitutes an individual.

  This was Furo’s first visit to Abuja. Arinze, though, was a recurrent visitor, a frequent flyer to Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport. This showed in the confidence with which he navigated the domestic terminal and ignored its patches of happy-green synthetic turf scattered with gold-painted stones and forested with mirrored pillars. Holding his gaze away from the funhouse glitz, Furo walked beside Arinze with mimicked poise. Arinze’s regular driver was waiting for them outside the terminal building. On the long drive to their hotel, he indulged the man’s talkativeness, while Furo, alone in the back seat, stared out the taxi’s windows at the broad avenues of the Federal Capital Territory, the brutalist architecture of the government buildings, the unfamiliar Sahel skyline, the swathes of greenery awash in sizzling sunlight, the roadside cameras which the driver pointed out as the latest effort against the machinations of those fanatic murderers who hated books. After the driver ran out of Boko Haram bombings to report, Arinze craned his neck over the seat back and asked Furo what he thought of Abuja.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Furo responded. ‘It’s different from Lagos.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Arinze said. ‘Lagos was built from blood and sweat and raw ambition. Abuja was designed as a playground for the rich. I’m sure some will argue that there’s nothing wrong with that, but when the rest of your country is populated with desperate people, your dream city hasn’t much chance of retaining its character. Some of the worst slums in Nigeria can be found on Abuja’s outskirts.’

  ‘Just like where I live!’ the driver exclaimed. ‘I’ve done taxi business in Port Harcourt and Lagos, and I’ve driven buses in Ghana, in Liberia, but Daki Biu is the worst place I’ve ever lived. They don’t have water anywhere.’

  On that topic the taxi driver took off again, as he described his experiences in the fantastical shanty towns of the West African coast – Makoko in Lagos, Rainbow Town in Port Harcourt, Old Fadama in Accra, and West Point in Monrovia, all of which existed by waterways, unlike the dustbowl of D
aki Biu – and he didn’t exhaust his nostalgia or empty his windbag of stories until the car drew to a stop at their destination, a multi-storey hotel in the upmarket district of Wuse II. There was no time to dawdle as their meeting at Yuguda’s residence was drawing near, and so Furo and Arinze dropped off their luggage in their rooms, then sat down to a quick lunch with the driver in the hotel restaurant. In Furo’s hurry to finish his outsized meal, he spilled banga soup on his pearl-grey necktie, his favourite, the only one he had brought along on the trip, but Arinze said in response to his muttered apologies, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you.’ They left the restaurant, Arinze and the driver heading for the car, while Furo ran to the elevator and rode up to his sixth-floor quarters. His equilibrium restored by the wet patch on his tie, he joined them in the car, and they set off for Asokoro just after four. All through the drive Furo faced the open window so the car’s draught would dry his tie.

  Yuguda’s residence, from outside the towering fence with its gate of armoured steel, looked like a wartime castle. But once the gate opened, the property took on the splendour of a summer palace frozen in time. Royal palms lined a driveway the length of a small-town main street, and shimmering beyond the trees were landscaped gardens. The terrain climbed from the gate in a natural slope, at the crest of which stood a two-storey Greek-columned house. It was built of marble blocks, floored with marble-chip, and a marble frieze of Arabic script circled the salon that Furo and Arinze were led into by a liveried old man – who told them to wait standing up. An instant after the double doors closed behind him, a lady emerged through a gauzy portière on the far side of the room and padded towards them, her sari swishing. Halting in front of Furo, she exchanged glances with him in mutual appraisal, and his eyes locked on her thin lips as she said, ‘How do you do?’ Her Ivy League accent bore the faintest trace of a Hausa intonation.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Furo replied. He waited for her to greet Arinze in turn, but she again addressed her words to him. ‘My father will join you soon. Do you want your assistant to be present at the meeting?’

  Furo reddened in embarrassed silence, which he finally broke with the stammered words, ‘He’s not – this – Mr Arinze is my boss.’

  ‘I see,’ the woman said, her tone unruffled. ‘Please have a seat, both of you.’

  The two men sat down, and then Yuguda’s daughter, with no sign of her thoughts on her haughty face, rang an electric bell. It was answered by a boy-child who was clad in the house colours, and after she gave some instructions in Hausa, he left and soon returned carrying a tray bearing two glasses, a bottle of orange juice, and a jug of iced water. Yuguda’s daughter waited till the guests had been served drinks before taking her leave, and as the portière fluttered into place, Furo whirled to face Arinze and started to apologise for the lady’s slight, but Arinze cut him short. ‘Forget about it. We came here for a reason. Let’s focus on that.’

  The meeting with Yuguda lasted half an hour; the agenda was hammer-on-nail straightforward. Upon Yuguda’s arrival, he exchanged quick greetings with both men before shooting Furo some questions about his accent and where in Nigeria he was from, and then he switched his attention to Arinze and asked for twenty titles on how to start a business. At a nod from Arinze, Furo pulled out the prepared booklet Arinze had given him the previous day, and holding it steady on his knees, he read out the information in a loud clear voice. The instant he finished, Yuguda said: ‘There are no Nigerian books on that list.’ The truth of this observation startled Furo into uncertainty, but Arinze’s tone was assured as he replied, ‘You’re quite correct. We only sell world-class books. None of the Nigerian titles were good enough to make this list.’ Yuguda riposted with: ‘How are my people supposed to run businesses in this country when all the books you’re putting forward are based on foreign models?’ The combative phrasing of Yuguda’s question convinced Furo the deal was lost, déjà vu Umukoro all over again, and yet his disappointment took nothing away from his admiration for the fighting spirit displayed by Arinze’s answer. ‘I strongly believe, sir, that the best business practices, like the best books, are universal. I have nothing against business books by Nigerians. But until they measure up, my company will never sell them.’ Yuguda’s comeback was swift: ‘Measure up to what – whose standards?’ ‘Yours,’ Arinze said. ‘The Yuguda Group deserves only the best.’

  When Furo and Arinze stood up to leave, Haba! Nigeria Limited was nine million naira richer. Yuguda approached and shook their hands for the first time, first Arinze’s then Furo’s, and while holding Furo’s hand, he asked for his business card. Furo handed it over with an apology for forgetting to do so earlier, and after Yuguda glanced at it, he rang for an attendant to show them out.

  On arrival at the hotel, before Arinze dismissed the driver for the night, he instructed him to pick them up at six o’clock the following morning for the drive to the airport. Entering the hotel lobby, Arinze invited Furo for a drink at the lounge bar, and though he ordered soda water for himself, he gave Furo leave to drink the bar dry of alcohol if he so wanted. ‘You’ve earned it,’ he said. ‘You did a fantastic job today. We both did.’ Furo thanked him for the compliment, and then told the barman he wanted soda water, too. The drinks came, Arinze rushed his down, and after spending a few more minutes chitchatting with Furo, he retired at five minutes to eight. He had to tuck in his four-year-old daughter by telephone, he told Furo.

  Alone at the bar, Furo wondered what to do with the rest of the night. With Syreeta in faraway Lagos, he realised this was the freest he had felt in a long time. The vestiges of his old life still haunted the old city so different from this one where no one knew him, where everything was new, even the mistakes a man could make. Abuja was pioneer land, a frontier city, though the founding fathers were all rich folk and politicians. The bandits here rode Bentleys and settled fights with money blazing. Returning to the thought of what to do, Furo checked his wallet and saw that he had only three thousand naira left from the ten thousand he’d borrowed from Syreeta the previous week. Without money he couldn’t afford the freedom Abuja offered, he admitted to himself as he put away the wallet. He couldn’t even afford the only leisure that came to mind.

  In Abuja after dark, the ladies of the night were everywhere. Or so it had seemed to Furo on the return journey from Yuguda’s residence. He kept catching glimpses from the car window. Flashes of colour under lightless streetlamps, flickering shadows in the shades of trees, the glow of cigarettes at the mouths of lonely streets, and gathered in fearless packs by the gates of noisy nightspots: the shapes slouching, prancing, gesturing, the painted faces turned to passing cars with a longing that tugged the purse strings. Even at the hotel, as the taxi slowed in front of the gate, Furo saw the women staring at him.

  Furo struggled awake to the ringing of his mobile phone, and reaching across to the bedside table, he answered it blind.

  It was Yuguda.

  ‘Hello, sir,’ Furo stuttered, and sat up in bed, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

  Yuguda was waiting at the Piano Bar in the Transcorp Hilton. ‘Come alone,’ he said before hanging up.

  Furo checked the time. 11:43. Night.

  He dressed and dashed from his room. Six floors down, the hotel lobby was empty except for the concierge, who Furo asked for a taxi, only to be informed that he would find many in the car park. Crossing the lobby, he remembered with dismay that he had only three thousand naira on him, besides having no idea where the Transcorp Hilton was or how much it would cost to get there. The one thing he was certain of was that the taxi drivers would charge outrageous fares, especially from a white person at midnight in a city as expensive as Abuja. He arrived in the car park without yet having found a way out of this quandary. After identifying the oldest taxi, a Mitsubishi Galant with a new paint job, he drew up to the car and saw that the driver was asleep on the bonnet. He roused the man with a soft tap on the knee, stated his destination, and, bracing himself for the haggling to come, as
ked what the fare was. ‘Maitama, abi?’ the driver said, rubbing his eyes with both hands. ‘Your money is five hundred.’ Without a change of expression or the slightest pause to give the man the chance to regain his senses, Furo said, ‘Let’s go, I’m in hurry,’ and climbed into the front seat. The driver slipped in and told Furo to wear his seatbelt, then started the engine. As the car nosed through the gate, several streetwalkers straggled into view. One of them whistled at Furo, and on impulse, he whistled back.

  He was beginning to like this city.

  Arriving at the Transcorp Hilton, Furo entered the lobby to find it as crowded as a crocodile watering hole in drought season. Jostling in the electric atmosphere were Senegalese kaftans, gold-braided military dress, European designer rags, and the people who wore these at midnight. Lights poured from the vaulted ceiling, and the mirror-bright floor turned the world upside down. A black automobile, polished to a gloss, was on display near the lobby’s centre. The banner beside it announced to onlookers that they were ogling a BMW Gran Turismo. (The tyre rims clearly impressed more than the zeros on the price tag.) But Furo only had eyes for the Piano Bar, which he found in a recessed wing to the left of the lobby. Walking down the short flight of steps, he looked round at the gathered drinkers, and spotted Yuguda. He was in Furo’s line of sight, seated in one of the tub chairs arranged in ménages à trois around the lounge, and the cocktail table in front of him held a bottle of Irish cream and a martini glass. A woman lounged behind him. Curvaceous in a sleek sequined gown, her crimson lips opened and closed over the microphone in her hand, and her other hand stroked Yuguda’s shoulder as she serenaded him to the plonk of piano music. Yuguda seemed less austere in the jeans and tucked-in T-shirt that had replaced the brocade babariga he’d been wearing at his house. He was almost a different person, this one beaming with catlike pleasure as the chanteuse planted a kiss on his shaven scalp.