Chairman’s boys were having a party on the far side of the bridge and he was almost certain Fineboy was with them. Their bonfire threw grim shadows, monstrous shapes that danced up and down the pillars. He sat up and inched forward until he was sitting with his back to the group. Their “neighbors” were also stretched out in sleep around them.
There were Yusuf and Mahmud, brothers from Kano, refugees after their home was destroyed in a religious riot, teenagers and already working in an abattoir carting chunks of bloody meat to a fridge. Or Clement the welder, with his wife and child, asleep on a bed salvaged from the dump, decadent luxury in these surroundings. The bridge-dwellers spoke different languages, worshipped different gods, supported different Premiership teams; but every single one Chike had spoken to was moving out soon, even those who had lived there for years.
It was the Lagos delusion. Each morning he watched workers clamber into danfos, pushing, shoving, crushing against one another, struggling to make it inside, where they would sit thigh to thigh, heads drooping out of windows, desperate for fresh air. He envied their energy, the illusion of progress as they kicked and struck out, vigorously treading water. He was too smart and too foolish for Lagos.
He lit a match from the box Oma kept for lighting candles. The flame raced down the matchstick, almost at his fingers before he shook it out.
“What are you doing?” It was Isoken crouched by his side. She smelled of the oil she worked with all day as she plaited, twisted, braided, threaded her customers’ hair under the bridge. It was a basic salon: a stool, a hand mirror, some combs tucked into her jeans, but at least she had a job.
Isoken had not initiated a conversation with him since they arrived in Lagos, let alone sought him out. He felt that if he turned, if he even glanced at her, she would skitter off.
“I can’t sleep with all that noise,” he said.
“Me, too. Bestial swine.”
“Madam, grammar.”
“Bestial boisterous bothersome swine.”
“Walking dictionary,” Chike said.
“My father used to call me that.”
Chike struck another match and another.
“Can I try?”
He gave her the box. The flame tapered like a gold leaf and then sped to the curve of her fingertips.
“Drop it,” Chike said.
“Not yet.”
She grasped the charred match head with her other hand and let go of the burning end. The fire ate to the bottom of the matchstick and was gone.
“The trick is to hold on till the last possible moment. Do you want to try?”
“Another time. Let’s go and sleep before we burn this place down.”
19
We regret to announce the passing of the dancing traffic policeman at Junction 5 Ojuẹlẹgba. Michael Ọbafẹmi (or “MJ of Ojuẹlẹgba,” as he was popularly known) was hit by a speeding vehicle on Friday morning. Eyewitnesses reported that the driver of the red Toyota Corolla did not stop.
Ọbafẹmi was loved by pedestrians and motorists alike. Many a dull traffic hour was livened watching his makossa moves, his breakdance spins, or his trademark moonwalk. Whenever Ọbafẹmi was asked what he was dancing to, he would smile and say, “Celestial music.”
Ọbafẹmi never failed in his duties, controlling the long lines of traffic even as he executed the most complex of dance moves. He is survived by a wife and two children. May the soul of MJ of Ojuẹlẹgba dance in eternity to the music of the stars.
—obituaries page, Nigerian Journal
CHIKE AND YẸMI HAD found work in the end. Not work that would turn them into laborers nor work that was particularly challenging, but it was work nonetheless, and close enough to a military nature to be familiar.
They had been at a crossroads, waiting for a gap for pedestrians, when the traffic warden fell to the ground. Her colleague ran out of their rest hut shouting, “Bianca o!”
Chike approached. He had a smattering of first-aid knowledge from military school, basic skills in wound dressing and artificial respiration. The male warden waved him away. “Abeg, help us control traffic.”
He stepped into the center of the road, self-conscious in his civilian clothes. In Ibadan every morning, at the crossroads near their flat, you would see sacrificial calabashes, spherical and mysterious, dark eggs laid overnight. Once he had kicked one open and seen in its smooth hollow a shriveling cockscomb, a molting chick, part down, part feathers, and a heron foot with string knotted to its pectinate claw.
Lagos was too sophisticated for such appeals to the supernatural, it seemed. Only noise and grit at the center of this crossroads, the impatience of the queuing cars reaching him in an endless sequence of horning. He showed his palm to the moving stream. They obeyed him.
Behind him, the warden was hoisting his colleague into their rest hut. The woman was conscious but she let herself be dragged inside.
“This your uniform too tight.”
“Godwin wetin? You wan’ naked me?”
“Wetin concern me with your breast? You dey squash this pikin for inside your stomach.”
“Abeg, leave my cloth.”
“I’ve been telling you, Bianca, pregnant woman is no suppose to be doing this work.”
“You nkọ? See your stomach. You no be pregnant man?”
“Bianca, go home to your husband house.”
“Abeg, leave me jo. Nah who dey control traffic?”
The woman, Bianca, sat up and called to Chike, “Oga, well done o.”
He turned to acknowledge her greeting. She would have been pretty if her eyes had not been crossed, gazing at each other over her shapely nose. Either she or Godwin had freed her stomach from her uniform and now it rested taut on her knees, her belly button protruding like a small fruit.
“You’re doing this work well. If to say you be policeman, you can just continue make I go home and rest.”
“Tomorrow nkọ?” Godwin asked. “If you faint again?”
“I could come tomorrow as well,” Chike said, halting one flow and beginning another. “Or my friend over there could come.”
“Oh, you are two,” Godwin said. “What’s your name?”
“Yẹmi.”
“And you?”
“Chike.”
“O bu Igbo. Which side are you from?”
“Mbaise.”
“My wife is from there,” Godwin said.
Chike had lost track of how long the right stream had been moving. He put up a hand to halt them.
“Not yet. No, they cannot come again. Just that next time, you will give them chance for longer. Oya, make those other people dey come. What work are you doing right now?” Godwin asked.
“We are job searching.”
“If person say you should come do our work, you go ’gree? We go share the salary at the end of the month. Fifty-fifty.”
“What will you do instead?”
“Business plenty for Lagos. Today, I suppose go port pick something but I dey here. I get wife for house. No be only yellow fever money she go use rub pancake.”
“Hmmm. Godwin! You dey give your wife money to rub pancake?”
“If I get the money, why I no go give her? My broda, you go ’gree?”
Destinies were exchanged at crossroads. This was why his mother had washed his feet in holy water and anointed them with oil when Chike told her about kicking open the calabash. You could take another man’s frustrations that way. There was a thirty-five-year-old man in their block still living with his parents; it was a man like that who would fill a bowl with bird parts and place it at a crossroads. And what if the person that touched it was even worse off, Chike had asked his mother. What if he were a leper or a beggar with two stumps for arms?
“Are you a beggar?” she asked as she broke the seal of the bottle of anointing oil.
Godwin spent two hours going through the hand signals and basic tenets of their new trade. They must never step aside for a car. If the car was old, its h
ood could be banged to slow it down. New cars must never be touched. “You touch big man car, he can come down and shoot you.”
When they heard a siren convoy, the stream must move until it passed. If they saluted the most impressive car, money might fall from its tinted windows.
“If okada no stop for you, no use force stop him. If you injure okada man, the other ones fit kill you.” Godwin hailed one of the motorcycles and climbed on its saddle.
“So what should we do to stop them?”
“If them no ’gree, comot for road. Unless you wan’ die.”
20
A new report by the Lagos State Government has revealed that armed robbery has fallen by 20 percent in the state. While met with rejoicing in many quarters, some human rights groups have blamed this drop on severe police crackdowns, with illegal arrests and suspected armed robbers kept in custody without trial. Other groups argue that the most effective form of crime fighting is job creation. One resident of the Mushin area said, “Yes, crime has decrease [sic] but we need jobs. The boys in our area have reduced their stealing, so it’s time for the government to increase their employment.”
—Nigerian Journal
FINEBOY LAY SPRAWLED IN a shed with seven youths the state government would have classified as prone to crime. Cigarette smoke drifted from their midst and rap music crackled from a silver radio. His new friends were menacing enough to the skirt-suit women who clutched their handbags when they saw them but no one who had been in the creeks could take these boys seriously. Their fights were primitive, waged with knives and broken bottles. Fineboy slipped away whenever territorial disputes were brewing. He had not emerged from the Delta unscarred to have his face cut up by some amateur gangsters.
The Lagos boys had a radio. That was why he had joined them. It was radio that had led him into the creeks. Nine months ago he was sitting in a bar when he saw the CNN headline. nigerian militants take AMERICANS HOSTAGE. A video played of rebels pointing guns at two white men, kneeling with their heads bowed like Catholics at mass. A man in a balaclava stepped forward and began to list demands in a gruff voice as if unaware the tape would be broadcast to the world. The group needed a spokesperson. Someone with an accent white people could understand.
That was when he had the idea. He would go to the creeks and offer a commander his services on the condition he be identified as Golden Voice each time he spoke, no foolish militant name like Foodbasket or Breadboy. After a few months of gaining global notoriety, he would seek amnesty, renounce militancy, and become a radio star.
How was he to know that in his entire time in the bush, there would be a drought of kidnappable white oil workers? Instead days in the creeks with little food, running from a Nigerian Army whose size seemed to have doubled overnight. They had managed to kidnap a Nigerian engineer but when no one showed interest, they released him.
Fineboy had seen the disbelief on Chike’s face when he said he was a presenter and yet he had worked for free in a radio station, had sat in a booth with headphones pressed tightly on his ears, a foam-padded mic before him, a producer behind a glass window, counting down silently with his fingers.
He had been looking for job vacancy signs when he heard the major key of a jingle and saw the group crowded around the radio. He asked for directions to a made-up street and then squatted to hear what the airwaves in Lagos had to offer. The format was basic. Phone in and narrate a story about a bad date. Caller fifteen would win cinema tickets for two.
The boys were trying their luck, passing a small Nokia around, the owner of the phone whining, “Don’t finish my credit.”
“We’ve got a caller on the line. Hello. It’s D.Y. on Flavor FM’s Have Your Say. To whom am I speaking?”
“’Ello, am I on hair?”
“Yes, you are. Tell us your name and where you’re calling from.”
“My name is Wasiu and I am calling from Onigbongbo.”
“So, Wasiu, please tell our listeners about your bad date.”
“Yes, one girl I am dating, her name is Ramota. I took her to restaurant and she want to order everything on the menu. So I tell her, Ramota, please, I am not a millionaire. That is how she look me up and down—”
“Hello? Hello? I think we lost Wasiu. Just when I was looking forward to hearing what Ramota had to say. Guys, if there’s anything I’ve learned about a Lagos babe, it’s: don’t tell her what to order. We’ve got another caller on the line.”
They never got through. If Lagos was anything like Bayelsa, the fifteenth caller was a friend of the presenter, maybe a girl this D.Y. wanted to impress or a cousin he owed a favor.
The leader of the group was a quiet boy who asked why he was back two days later.
“I came to listen to the radio.”
“You are sounding like an Americanah today. How come?”
“I’m training to be a radio presenter. I used to do some studio work back home in Port Harcourt.”
“Oya, present for us.”
“Good evening. You’re listening to Rivers Radio at five p.m. The one-stop station for cool, smooth, relaxing tunes.”
It was a flawed demonstration. He had overly stressed the first syllable of “Rivers” and the tunes had come out as “toons” but the boys were easily impressed.
“My guy, you for go radio.”
“Shet. It’s like Dan Davies is here.”
“Abeg, teach me.”
After that he had no problem dropping in for research. They let him flick through stations undisturbed, unless there was a match. Many of them wanted to be entertainers of some sort: rappers, singers, comedians. Sometimes he helped with their diction. The lessons had not progressed beyond swear words.
“Shit not shet.”
“It’s not ferk you. The ‘u’ is sounded like the ‘u’ in umbrella.”
“Not humbrella. Um-brella.”
One day he had come to their meeting place and the shack with its bare earth floor and wooden poles was empty. It had taken patience and a pack of cigarettes to discover their other base, an incomplete building on a cul-de-sac: a roofed bungalow with spaces cut out for doors and windows. Plastic sheets were tacked to the empty squares and raffia mats were spread on the floor. It was surprisingly neat, their small stash of illegal material piled in one corner and covered with a blanket. Knives, a polyethylene bag of marijuana, and a brief glimpse of what seemed to be the butt of a pistol, before their leader twitched the blanket over it.
From then, he had begun seeing the abandoned buildings, his eyes now opened to the unfinished structures that lay all over the city. They were run down, their walls crumbling into grit, but they would be better than living under the bridge. Most were already occupied. He came upon a madman sleeping in one, stark naked, his locks reaching down to his thighs. The dry walls and sturdy roof were almost worth chasing him away for. Yet, even if he succeeded, the man would return. Mad people in Nigeria were lucidly territorial. When he found a suitable place, he and the others would move there. They did not trust him, he knew, but they were his last connection to refinement. Without the soldiers, Oma, and even Isoken when she could be coaxed into talking, he would sink to the level of these youths, his accent making him a one-eyed king in their toutdom.
21
For sale, four-bedroom, four-toilet detached house in Gbagada. Starting price N20,000,000. For details call Aliu, 080236578991.
—classified advertisement, Nigerian Journal
THE OTHERS DID NOT know what Fineboy did with his time. He left in the morning and returned at night. Not even the soldiers would ask. There was a recklessness that clung to him, a swagger of an old militant life that dulled curiosity. “Just don’t bring trouble here,” Chike heard Oma mutter one evening when the boy came back reeking of smoke.
If only they could find a small place to live. Just one room would suffice but rent was pegged at mocking prices. For a few square feet in a slum, fifty thousand a year and a payment of at least six months in advance. Where would he fin
d that on his halved salary? Chike felt Godwin had cheated him that day. He felt it strongly enough to challenge him over the seven thousand naira he had placed in his hand at the end of his first month as a traffic warden.
“The money is not complete. It should be ten thousand, half of twenty.”
“My brother, it’s twenty they write on the paper but it’s only fourteen they give me yesterday. Sometimes they can give you the complete salary. Sometimes they’ll remove some money, add it to next month’s own. That’s why it’s so difficult to live in this Lagos. You always have to be doing something on the side.”
He had wanted to squeeze Godwin’s neck and feel his trachea crumple under his grip. Instead, an hour later, he held up a queue until the driver who had beeped at him slid down his window and began to scream abuse.
“Keep shouting,” Chike said. “You’ll get where you’re going on time.”
It was the aggression of the downtrodden, petty but briefly satisfying.
He had a taxonomical tree he was always adding branches to, detailed mental classifications for the other road users, an urban Linnaeus, ordering the world. Pedestrians and motorists were migratory, passing briefly to destinations unknown, delineated by their wealth, the comfort in which they traveled, their relations with the fixtures on the road. Fixtures like the beggars who dealt in blessings, mumbling prayers at their customers as they shuffled through traffic. Hustlers who sold all that was conceivable and some things that were not. The gawkers, waiting for an incident, on hand to form a crowd and proffer expertise on every calamity possible.
The road always smelled of exhaust, a lace of petrol on the atmosphere, smog in each breath. Standing in the open, sometimes Chike would grow afraid. Whenever soldiers drove down his road, casually armed with rifles, clad from head to toe in the uniform he had worn for so long, he would turn his face, breathing shallowly until they were gone. Until, tired of his fear, he had saluted a general’s convoy. The jeeps, the sedans, the vans, they all drove past and no one returned his salute. He was far beneath their notice. The transformation was complete.
Welcome to Lagos Page 8
