Welcome to Lagos

by Chibundu Onuzo

  “You sit at home and do nothing. At least you can make sure this place doesn’t turn into a pigsty.”

  As he walked towards her, she thought, He’ll be late to work and in the evening, that’ll be my fault too. When he was gone, she spat out the blood, a red trickle she rinsed carefully from the basin. Then she arranged her possessions in the bag that now sat on her lap, brushing against the stranger from last night.

  “Brother Chike, good morning,” a young girl said when they disembarked. She was filthy, almost deliberately ungroomed. I.K. would have sniggered at her matted hair and clothes smeared with dirt. There were two other men with this Chike.

  “Good morning. I hope you slept well. I didn’t introduce myself yesterday. I’m Chike.”

  “Ifeoma. But everyone calls me Oma. What are you doing now?”

  “Taking my friend Isoken home.”

  “You know what. My cousin may not be awake yet. Maybe . . . I was thinking that . . . I said that I would help you find somewhere to stay. How about I follow you to drop Isoken, if the place is not too far, then I’ll show you a good area.”

  “I don’t want to disturb your plans.”

  “Not at all. I need to be doing something while I’m waiting for my cousin.”

  On the strength of a midnight conversation, Oma trusted this man who did not know enough of Lagos to threaten her. Better to walk with Chike than remain in the bus park until touts began to circle her.

  They boarded a bus, a metal carcass on wheels with a floor like a grater, coin-size holes through which you could see the road streaking by. She would find a space for herself in this city. Even if her cousin should turn her away, Lagos was big enough.

  “Owa,” the girl said. The bus slowed for them to disembark.

  I AM AN ORPHAN. The thought came unbidden to Isoken as she stood in front of her apartment. The door was worn with age and termites. Termites were of the

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Arthropoda

  Class: Insecta

  Subclass: Pterygota

  The syllabus had not demanded you know past phylum but she had crammed it all anyway. Isoken: the virgin geek, sat with her legs crossed because she wanted to marry a suit man, read her textbooks because she wanted to be a pharmacist, invent drugs, and name them after herself, Edwina, her Christian name.

  “Is this the place?” Chike asked.

  “Yes.”

  She was still wearing the jeans that the villagers thought an abomination, that her mother said made her bum shoot out, that she wasn’t going to change because some dunces felt a woman shouldn’t wear men’s clothes. If ever men set upon you, you would want to be wearing the tightest trousers in your wardrobe, trousers that stuck to you and cut off your circulation, trousers that neither you nor a stranger could slide off without a struggle.

  “Won’t you knock?” Chike said.

  Knocking: a colloquial term for the introduction of the groom’s family to the bride’s. She did not know the origins of the practice. Only that virgins were preferred, fresh ground where no one else had trod. Knocking: present continuous verb for the repeat application of one’s knuckle to a hard surface to produce a rapping sound. The door shuddered, termites scuttling, alarmed and incensed by this assault on their food.

  “Who is making noise?”

  It was her landlord running down the stairs in his singlet and boxers. He had made a pass at her once, lunging for her chest, missing and squeezing the flesh over her rib cage.

  “My parents’ number, Mr. Alabi.”

  “Is that why you’re disturbing everyone? And you can’t greet? You see somebody in the morning and is that the first thing you say?”

  “Good morning, sir,” Chike said. “As you can see, the girl is in distress. She’s been unable to locate her parents.”

  “And who are you?”

  “A friend of the family.”

  “You said her parents are missing. I thought they all traveled together. Wait, I will bring my phone. You will find them. Stop crying.”

  Her parents’ number did not go through on Mr. Alabi’s phone. If they were alive, they would be crying too, secreting salt water from their lachrymal glands. Her parents did not know the word “gland” nor “lachrymal” nor “didactic” nor “encyclopedic.” With her mother, she wore her education loosely, but her father reveled in her vocabulary.

  “Your English can break rocks,” he would say when she dropped a word of five syllables or longer into a sentence. She would imagine a sledgehammer joined to her tongue by a thick artery, grinding anything that stood in its way.

  “Open the door, let me take my things,” she said to Mr. Alabi.

  “I would have said you should stay in the house and wait for them, but you know your rent is due.”

  Her clothes were in a metal chest. She left all her skirts, flimsy things that would betray you. She took her mother’s shoes, worn in the heels but still glamorous. She took her father’s workbox, full of tongs and combs and bright plastic rollers. She slid her hand into the pillow foam and felt the empty space. They had taken all their money to Bayelsa.

  CHIKE DID NOT KNOW how he had come to exchange the command of one platoon for another. There was Yẹmi, constantly running his mouth, and the girl, on the verge of crying into her rice, and the boy who had somehow attached himself to them, asking to borrow money for his meal. Oma was the only person he did not feel responsible for. She had gone to meet her cousin, promising to return and show them a place to stay. She shook his hand when she said goodbye and it had felt permanent, a small panic rising in him as she walked away.

  When he saw her on the other side of the road, loose skirt billowing from the rushing cars, he felt the kind of gratitude he had not known since his childhood when his mother shook him from his dreams.

  “Oma, welcome. If you can just give us directions, we’ll find our way.”

  “The place is called Tamara Inn. I’m going there too.”

  “But your cousin—”

  “She doesn’t live there again. I don’t know her new address.”

  “A number?”

  “I foolishly left my phone behind.”

  They passed through a neighborhood of small businesses and modest houses, the industrial rumble of generators filling the air. Roadside food was there for the foraging, suya skewered and grilling, meat pies trapped in lit-up glass cages, golden nuggets of puffpuff bobbing in vats of hot oil, boli and groundnut to be mashed together in one mouthful.

  The hotel’s electronic sign flashed from afar, the letters expanding and contracting, restless on the building’s facade. There was no one else in Tamara Inn. The dining room was empty, the TV tuned to CNN at odds with the shabby cloth napkins, folded into collapsing shapes, waiting for guests to shake them free. They would all share one room. Chike and Oma would split the cost. Yẹmi took him aside before he paid.

  “Which kain thing be this? Maybe she wan’ use us for ritual o.”

  “She can’t kill all of us at the same time.”

  “No be joke matter.”

  They were led to their room by flashlight, single file down the corridor, Chike last in the column, stumbling in the dark. Their room lights were working, thankfully. He noticed the room’s curtains first: a pale yellow that showed the dirt from the countless fingers that had twitched them aside. A concrete view lay behind the mesh of mosquito netting nailed to the wooden window frames. The bed was large enough for three, four with imagination, not that Oma or Isoken would imagine such a thing.

  Isoken went to the bathroom and locked the door. They heard the gush of running water and then the sound of bathing, rain crashing on zinc. Oma stripped the pillows, baring their lumpy foam bodies. She turned their cases inside out and began to dress them again, stuffing them into their sacks.

  “Are you going to do that for the sheets as well?” Chike asked.

  “Should I?”

  “I don’t know. I was joking.”

  In the bathro
om, Isoken was crying, the sound passing through the door and into the room.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Oma asked, holding a pillow to her body like a baby.

  “A difficult time recently,” Chike said.

  “Well, whatever the matter is, there’s no use crying for so long. We’ve all had difficult times.”

  She grasped the edge of the sheet and tore it off the bed.

  “Difficult times are made better with good music,” Fineboy sang.

  “That’s one of the jingles from Bayelsa Beats, isn’t it?” Oma said.

  “Yup. I used to work there.”

  “Really? I’ve never heard of any presenter called Fineboy.”

  “I did the opening lines. Like: ‘You’re listening to High Life Monday on Bayelsa Beats FM. Don’t touch that dial.’”

  “Chineke! It’s like the radio is inside the room. Isn’t that marvelous,” she said, turning to Chike.

  “Yes,” he said. “There are many marvelous things about Fineboy.”

  “How do you know each other?”

  “We met while we were working,” Chike said.

  “You worked in radio as well?”

  “No. I was a government worker.”

  “I hope I’m not asking too many questions.”

  The mattress lay exposed. In its center was a large brown stain, some waste product excreted or blood released, the mark too spread out to be ordinary menses. Blood from a deflowering perhaps, a quaking teenager and his girlfriend, fumbling until they soiled the sheets. Oma began to lift the mattress.

  “Please come and help me. It’s heavy.”

  Chike and Yẹmi joined her. Only Fineboy remained aloof on the floor.

  “Don’t bother,” the boy said when the mattress stood straight, needing only a push to be flipped over.

  “Why?”

  “The other side is worse.”

  Chike walked around and saw the green growth, spiraling in all directions.

  “You don’t want to see,” he said to Oma. “Let’s just put it back the way it was.”

  Isoken came out of the bathroom in cleaner, freer clothes and they took their sleeping positions. Women on the bed, men on the floor, Fineboy as far away from the women as possible.

  CHIKE WOKE UP AT three in the morning, the time ticking on his watch face. His platoon would be on night patrol, creeping through the Delta.

  “Yẹmi. Are you sleeping?”

  “Wetin?”

  “Your family nkọ?” Chike asked.

  “My mother is dead. My father dey for Ijẹbu.”

  “Why didn’t you go there?”

  “I no fit stay for his house. I have junior ones at home he is feeding and work plenty in Lagos pass Ijẹbu. I even get family members for this Lagos. They are useless people. If I visit them, they go say they wan’ help me, that make I come do houseboy work. How I go dey wash toilet for person wey get the same surname as me.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “Maybe driver. You nkọ?”

  “I don’t know.”

  When the army had offered to sponsor his university degree, so certain had he been that he would always be a soldier, he had chosen zoology out of his interest in animals. And now of what use was his knowledge of the migratory patterns of West African birds? Who would hire him for being able to distinguish a dolphin from a porpoise? Most important, the certificate that could prove his higher education was locked in his trunk in Bayelsa.

  “I’ll find something,” Chike said. “I’m not worried.”

  16

  With the UK charity Jobs Plus estimating that more than two million people are unemployed in Lagos, the jobless of this city outnumber the populations of Gabon, Luxembourg, and Kiribati combined. The Lagos State Commissioner for Job Creation, Wasiu Balogun, stated that these new figures were “rubbish lies.”

  “Jobs Extra, or whatever their name is, should go back to the UK and face their own problems,” he said in an interview granted to the Nigerian Journal. “In their country, jobless people will just sit down at home and be collecting money from government. We don’t have that dangerous system here. Who is really unemployed in Lagos? You might not wear suit and tie but no matter how small, our people will always find something doing. Go to Mile 12 Market; you’ll see boys there washing mud from your feet as you’re leaving. They’re collecting money for that, you know? So they, too, are they unemployed? If a female graduate can’t find any work, she can begin to make jewelries, do makeup, tie gele, and all that stuff. The only thing is all these people are making money and not paying taxes. Maybe that’s why those people are saying they are unemployed. There’s no record of their money.”

  —Nigerian Journal

  SOMEONE HAD LEFT HAIRS in the drain. Oma picked out the curly, possibly pubic strands, stark against the white tissue. A bucket stood in the cracked zinc tub. She had grown accustomed to hotels with continental breakfasts and satellite TV, to service on silver trays and in-house dry cleaning. On her honeymoon in Dubai, there had been a king-size bed strewn with dark rose petals, a clichéd touch she had secretly relished.

  She bathed quickly but carefully, not wanting water to splash back from the walls. She dried her body with her nightie, disdaining the threadbare towels the men had left unused. Her toilette remained unchanged. She had packed lotion, roll-on, face cream, toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of perfume, three shaving sticks, changes of underwear, six sets of clothes, and yet no phone. It was a fastidious show of impracticality.

  She strode out into the room with the scent of lemon under her arms. The men had left but the girl still lay on the bed, the covers pulled over her head.

  “Isabel, you’re not going to get up today? Isabel, I’m talking to you. You must be awake by now. The bathroom is free for you.”

  She moved closer.

  “Isabel, did you hear me?”

  The girl slid the covering off her face. Her eyes were red and there was dirt on her lashes.

  “My name is Isoken,” she said, and disappeared under the blanket again.

  “Not our class,” I.K. would have said after one glance at this Isoken. And it wasn’t just the girl. Chike’s right-hand man could not speak standard English, and the other young man, despite his pretensions, was not quite authentic. She had seen Fineboy’s feet when he came out of the bathroom. Hard with tough skin around the cuticles, his toes irregularly thick, dirt crowded under cracked nails. She did not know where the boy had acquired his accent, but it was not in America.

  Chike alone did she trust, if only for his strong and gentle manner. He was handsome. I.K., for all his money and expensive clothes, was not. “Monkey in a suit,” her grandmother had said at their wedding, the first time she saw I.K.

  “For a much younger bride,” her brother’s wife said when Oma was zipped into her snow-white wedding dress, tulle frothing around her, paste jewels sparkling in her ears.

  “I’m going to find some food,” she said to the shroud on the bed. No reply. Was she expected to feed Chike’s hangers-on as well? In the empty dining room, she looked through the laminated menu. She had grown used to ignoring prices. Fifty thousand naira was all the cash she had found in the house. She had not bothered to wonder if it was theft. She had only wished for more as she rifled through I.K.’s trousers, looking for the stray naira he always forgot in his pockets.

  “I left something in my room. I’m coming,” she said to the waiter who had appeared by her side with a pen.

  Even in this run-down hotel, she could not afford lunch. She stepped out of the building and into the sun. She spotted a Mr Biggs, the yellow B of its logo blazoned above the traffic. It was an uncomfortable and dangerous distance to walk, no pavement to speak of, her back to traffic; any moment a vehicle might knock her down. The effect of her bath evaporated in minutes. Inside the restaurant, the afternoon retreated under the blast of AC, the lights clinical and fluorescent. It had the feel of a morgue.

  “Who’s next?”
r />   The attendant’s forehead was shiny, like he had just emerged from a deep fryer.

  “One meat pie, one beefburger, and a bottle of water, please.”

  She sat down at a red plastic table, covering her tray with serviettes before she unwrapped her food. The pie looked substantial, the burger less so, a sliver of meat cowering between two hunks of bread. “For what I am about to receive, Lord make me thankful.”

  ISOKEN HAD REFUSED TO get up from her bed that morning. Now was not the time for the girl to have a breakdown, Chike thought as he and Yẹmi left the room. She had reason to pass the white sheet over her head and lie still as a corpse but now was not the time. He, too, wished he could find a flat bed and a blank ceiling with a soft-spoken psychiatrist whom he would tell of his year in the Delta.

  Chike walked with his head down, a posture he was not used to. You were supposed to be able to spot an officer in a crowd, something in his bearing and carriage and the way he lifted his feet that should mark him out like a well-bred horse. But every face he passed might be a classmate from military school or a colleague from Jos. He had not felt so exposed since his last posting. In the Delta, there had always been bush to crouch behind, but in Jos, only the hilly grassland. From a vantage, you could see a checkpoint for miles. They were sent to calm the local population, to stop the cowherds from setting fire to the Christians and the Christians from setting fire to the cowherds.

  It was dull work, flagging down cars at random, opening trunks, looking under vehicles, with moments of acute danger, petrol bombs, gun caches, armed mobs they were ordered to disperse with gunfire. He was made for more than checkpoints, he said to his major. The Delta was the closest he would get to a war, his major had replied, and so he had applied to be reposted to the Niger Delta.

  “Ọgbẹni comot for road,” a motorcycle rider said, swerving around Chike, the passenger’s foot brushing his leg. Lagos would kill you if you wasted time on yesterday. The city was full of a palpable distrust, in the way the bus conductor this morning had counted their fare once, then twice, then thrice.