Welcome to Lagos

by Chibundu Onuzo

  SOMEONE WAS PATTING HIM awake. Her face was so close, it seemed she would lunge forward and kiss him. Her irises, thin blue rims around very large pupils, stared at him. “Sir, do you need a landing card?”

  “Are you from Manchester?”

  “No, I’m an Essex lass. Do you need a landing card, sir?”

  “No, thank you.”

  He had a British passport, his reward for ten years of international fees.

  His seatmate stretched over him. “Excuse my hand,” she said as she collected the navy-blue-and-white piece of paper. “Can you borrow me a pen?”

  He gave her the one in his breast pocket.

  “My son has a British passport. He and his wife and their two children. I’m the only one without one.”

  Again he made a sympathetic noise then closed his eyes. He wondered how he would fill his time in London. He had worked on the sales desk in a bank before his master’s in journalism, and there was a chance he could resume work. Stanton and Chaney was one of the few still making profits. He checked from time to time. If they asked him about the last five years, he would not mention the Nigerian Journal. It was a failed experiment that had eaten away almost all his savings, a cautionary tale for his children.

  “Sir, we’re approaching landing. Please return your seat to an upright position.”

  He watched the air hostess walk away for the last time. With every step, her calves seemed to be sinking further into her ankles. What would become of him in England? What would he do?

  41

  CHIKE WATCHED THE CHILDREN walk down the middle of the corridor, careful of the walls that still smelled of fresh paint. Eventually their hands would brush the pale stucco. They would leave dark prints that would be attacked with soapy water the first few times and then left to form new patterns of rounded palms and long fingers.

  The school grounds were pleasing, the slides and swing sets shooting out of the earth like metal trees, the beginning of a landscape beneath their feet, saplings planted, grass sprouting. It was insignificant in the grand scheme of derelict schools that crisscrossed the country but it was everything for these children who switched on a computer for the first time, marveling at the light trapped under the screen, lifting their hands to the glass and drawing them back at a sharp warning from their teacher.

  Sandayọ seemed as invested in the work as the rest of them now. If the Chief was acting, he was very committed to his role, staying up till midnight, drawing up detailed timetables for delivery and installation. Perhaps even Sandayọ could not remain unmoved by this work they had done, this creation from nothing. In the beginning was the Word.

  That night Chike returned to the basement flexing his shoulders. Oma noticed. She was sensitive to him in the manner of a spouse used to watching for another’s needs.

  “It’s hurting?” she asked after their evening meal.

  “Yes. We were stacking shelves.”

  “Where? Here?”

  She prodded a muscle in his back and he flinched.

  “Sit down. Let me give you a massage.”

  She sat on the sofa and he sat on the floor in the space between her legs.

  “Take off your shirt.”

  The others were around and the words were said casually but still his fingers trembled as he undid the buttons. When he was left in his singlet, she began, kneading the nape of his neck, moving around and around on the same spot.

  “You’re too tense. Relax.”

  The parlor flickered into darkness.

  “Down NEPA,” Fineboy said.

  “Great. We’re not going to finish the movie.”

  The first time her finger slid under his shirt and brushed his nipple, he thought it was an accident. Then she pinched the rubbery flesh until it grew firm under the ball of her thumb.

  “Relax.”

  She tugged painfully, almost viciously, until all his senses centered on that narrow diameter of skin. Her tongue was a surprise, hot and moist on the back of his neck, traveling until it reached his earlobe, sucking on the dangling fat, nibbling like it was a delicacy.

  “Sister Oma, please where did you put your torch? I can’t find it.”

  “Sorry, no battery. I forgot to buy.”

  She put her hands on his trousers, fumbling with the button, and then the zip until there was only one layer of clothing left. She hesitated at the band, toying with the elastic, running her finger along it, snapping it this way and that.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t,” she whispered.

  She retreated, running up the cords of his spine and onto the neutrality of his neck, turning his head left and then right.

  “I’ve never been so forward. I’ve only ever . . . with my husband.”

  He said nothing. He was impatient for her to be done.

  “Finished,” Oma announced loudly. “Your back should feel better.”

  “It does,” he replied, matching her volume. “Thank you.”

  He got up and walked to his room in the dark, following the wall with his hand. He heard Fineboy say to her, “Me nkọ? I want a massage too, or is it only for Chike?”

  “You’ve found work for me, abi? Abeg, face front.”

  Chike shut the door of his room and changed his underwear. She was a flirt, like the most beautiful girls he had known at university, always out of his reach, reserved for the richer boys and their fathers, arousing and withdrawing, teasing and then feigning ignorance.

  And yet as he lay stretched out in a clean set of pants, he knew this description did not match what he knew of Oma. She would need divorce papers to feel free of her husband. And not only that, until she had walked down another aisle and made new oaths before God and man, intimacy with him would be impossible. Hers was an ordered world, behavior fixed into iron channels that he must learn to run in if there were to be any future.

  42

  ON THE PICCADILLY LINE, Ahmed sat with his suitcase between his knees and his eyes level with a zip that had come undone, revealing nothing lewder than the tail end of a shirt tucked in at the waist. There was no need to tell the slight redhead that her skirt was gaping. No innocence was lost. When he got off at South Kensington, she was still standing unaware, her head swinging to the music in her earphones.

  He had planned on staying in a bed-and-breakfast until he found a modest rental, but in the envelope with his ticket, his father had put a copy of the flat keys. It seemed pointlessly scrupulous to refuse. The money that had bought the flat was already stolen. Whether he slept there or not, it would not return to the treasury.

  Letters were piled on the doormat when he opened the flat door. He wheeled his case over them, staining the white envelopes. His parents seldom came to England these days. The shopping was better in Dubai and enough society Nigerians holidayed there to recognize his father when he walked past them in a mall. “Call us when you arrive.” The last thing his father had said to him at the airport.

  There was no dial tone on the landline. He would sleep first then find a pay phone to call them. His old room smelled stale. No breeze had blown through it for years, and he imagined the dead particles hanging in the air since the last time he slept there. The bed was made. He should strip it and find some clean sheets.

  When he woke it was dark. He switched on all the lights and walked through the apartment. Four bedrooms in Kensington. Not a house to be envied by his Nigerian circle but respectable enough. Somewhere to crash when the mansions in Bishops Avenue were occupied by parents who had suddenly flown in from home. His mother had chosen the furniture. You could not take two steps without running into your reflection in a gilt-edged mirror. It was all dated now but it had been the height of fashion once. New money became old.

  He slipped his key and wallet into his pocket and stepped outside. London was colder than he remembered. The wind blew up his trouser legs, forcing him to almost jog to the store at the end of their road.

  “Do you sell phone cards?”

  “Yes. Which one you want?
”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “Where you calling? Nigeria?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Many Nigerians in this area.”

  New ones, he wondered, or still the same old guard, stretching out the money from the military era.

  “Phone Home is very good.”

  “I’ll have that, please.”

  “Five pounds.”

  “Do you have frozen meals?”

  “Second aisle on the right.”

  He paid and went to the booth near his house. He had forgotten that prostitutes used the space behind the telephone to advertise. They aroused nothing in him. They looked the same, naked and booby with dead, beetle eyes.

  “Hello, Chike. It’s Ahmed. I arrived safely this morning.”

  “Good to hear from you. How is London?”

  “It’s fine. How is everyone?”

  “Is that Ahmed?” he heard Fineboy ask in the background.

  “Let me speak to him. I want to speak to somebody in London.” It was a woman’s voice.

  “Ahmed, this is Isoken speaking.”

  “Wait,” Chike said, taking the phone from her. “Let me put him on speaker.” There was the sound of fumbling, then silence.

  “Hello, Chike, are you there?”

  “Yes, he is here. We are all here.”

  Their voices were soft but emphatic, like people shouting from afar.

  “How is London?”

  “It’s cold.”

  “Nigeria is hot.”

  “Is that Oma?”

  “Yes. How did you know my voice?”

  “How won’t the fella know your voice? You guys spent a whole lotta time together.”

  “Fineboy.”

  “What’s up, man? How’s the United Kingdom?”

  “Cold. What of Chief Sandayọ?”

  “My whereabouts are none of your business.”

  “OK, no finish Ahmed credit with your big grammar.”

  “I’m using a pay phone but, Chike, I’ll call you next week with my number, just in case you need to get in touch with me over that matter we discussed. Good night.”

  “Bye-bye.”

  “We miss you.”

  “Holla at the queen for me.”

  When he got back to the flat, he trampled on the envelopes again, scattering some farther down the hallway. He would call his parents tomorrow when he got a SIM card.

  43

  IT HAD BEEN FOOLISH of Ahmed to think he could slide easily into a job he had left five years ago. His call to his old manager had been embarrassing. Good to hear from you, Alan had said, after having to be reminded which Ahmed Bakare was speaking. There were no openings at the bank. Present conditions, economic climate, you know the forecast.

  “You’re sounding like a weatherman.”

  Alan had not laughed. “We should go out for lunch sometime when I’m free.” Ahmed had declined. Now was not the time to be proud, a glance through the business section in The Times was enough to show him that. Still, things were not so bad that he would, for no foreseeable benefit, lunch with Alan, who condescended as easily as other people said thank you.

  For a few days, he had taken to walking around the area, a suburb in the center of London. One minute, identical houses, door after door, set the same short distance from the street. Then suddenly you would chance on a busy road, with shops and restaurants, then a left turn to take you back to the identical houses and their gated parks. His perambulations had not lasted long. It was too cold to walk slowly and the pace was neither enjoyable nor sustainable.

  It was while he was sitting in the living room, eating another pizza microwaved to rubber, that he thought of his friends from university again. Where had their radical crowd dispersed to? They had tried to keep in touch after graduation, meeting for drinks and barbecues, then struggling to weddings and christenings.

  He flicked to N in his address book. Njongo Cloete. Living in South Africa now, the shyest member of the group. You would always see him parting his lips like a fish, looking for a moment of quiet to make his point. Ahmed did not know the time in Jo’burg, and to call Njongo from England would give his loneliness too great an urgency. The silence in the flat was not the type to send him charging off a bridge. He moved to C. Calvin Sukama. Blunt to the point of rudeness but always practical in a crisis. The last he knew, he was living in London with his Irish wife.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, is this Calvin?”

  “Yes, Calvin speaking. Who is this?”

  “It’s Ahmed Bakare, from university.”

  If he said “Good to hear from you,” Ahmed would drop the phone.

  “Ahmed. Long time no see. Have you been in England all this while?”

  “I moved to Nigeria for five years but I’m back for now.”

  “Just in time for the recession.”

  “How’s your wife?” He had gone to their wedding. Only he and Farida were present from their university circle and not even on the same table.

  “We’re divorced now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It was bound to happen, statistically speaking.”

  “Are you free sometime?”

  “For a coffee? Yeah, I’m free tomorrow. Whereabouts are you staying?”

  “South Kensington.”

  “You’ve done well for yourself, man. Me, too, I’m thinking of moving back home to make some money. Find myself a well-trained African wife. I’ll meet you at the station at one. There must be plenty of cafés around there.”

  They were predestined to talk about the divorce tomorrow. Calvin could not leave a grievance in the past, but perhaps they would find other things to speak of.

  “I don’t have a job at the moment” was the first thing Calvin said when they sat down at a table in the dark coffee shop. It was one of those places typical of London, miserly with space, the rectangular table too slim to cover your knees, strange conversations spilling into your own, the cloying smell of a cinnamon latte clashing with your clean, bitter coffee. This was the cramped life, of low ceilings and narrow expectations, he had moved to Lagos to escape. Calvin unbuttoned his coat but kept it on, ready to leave if he found Ahmed unsatisfactory.

  “I used to work in insurance. They got rid of the foreigners first. You know how it is in a recession. So which one was it for you: oil or politics?”

  “I run a publication business.”

  “And you live in South Kensington. Come on. We read the news.”

  “It’s more media publishing than books.”

  “Like Hello!”

  “More highbrow, I would hope, but there are similarities.”

  “So where’s your wife? A man living in South Kensington can’t be single.”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Never been?”

  “No.”

  “Clever fellow. I’m not saying marriage is bad. You know some people can make it work, but you need a good African woman to make it work, women like our mothers. Women nowadays are so disrespectful.”

  “Do you have any children?”

  “No, thank God. They’d have been as rude as their mother.”

  And so it went on. It was relatively painless to listen to. Like a preacher, Calvin could talk for hours without response. Hearing him, Ahmed understood why his parents did not visit England often. In Nigeria, he had owned a newspaper, an office building, staff. Here, he was reduced to a sort of agony aunt for this middle-aged man whose belly rested comfortably on his thighs when he sat.

  “Who would have thought you would end up printing trashy magazines. You and Farida were always acting like you were going to save the world.”

  “That was our whole group.”

  “No, you two in particular. Arguing, arguing, back and forth. Like there was nothing in the world to talk about but politics. She asked about you, you know.”

  “Really?”

  “You still fancy her?”

&
nbsp; “I’m just surprised she remembered me.”

  What did she say? You couldn’t ask Calvin that. He changed the topic.

  “So who else do you still talk to?”

  “Not many. I can’t stand the successful people, and who wants to keep in touch with the losers like me. What about you?”

  “No one. I want to start, though.”

  “We should do this again.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I can still stand you. Maybe it’s because you made your money in Nigeria.”

  No newspaper. No building. No staff. If only he knew. Calvin walked him back to the station.

  “Do you think she’d mind if I sent her an e-mail?”

  “Who? Farida?”

  “Yes.”

  “She has two kids.”

  “I just want to see how she is. Meet up with her for coffee or something.”

  “OK, don’t raise your voice. It’s farida dot wagogo at bbc dot co dot uk.”

  “She works for the BBC?”

  “Yeah. One of their World Service programs.” His Oyster card beeped and the barriers clattered open. “See you.”

  44

  “DEAR FARIDA” WAS THE most conventional way to begin, even letters to the Home Office began in this fashion, but it seemed to place their friendship on a more intimate footing than it had ever been. “Hello, Farida” was much too casual after an interval of almost a decade. The final draft he felt dissatisfied with, but the sixty minutes he had paid for were almost up.

  Greetings, Farida,

  It’s Ahmed Bakare from university. I’m in London for a while and have started looking up people from our year. I had coffee with Calvin Sukama the other day. He’s put on weight and lost a little hair (a fate which awaits us all) but is otherwise the same. I got your e-mail off him. I hope you don’t mind. How are you?

  With warm wishes,

  Ahmed

  When he returned the next morning, he saw she had replied a few hours later.

  Hail, Ahmed,

  How lovely to hear from you. I always wish I’d kept in touch with more of the group. I can’t believe Calvin has had my e-mail address and he’s never used it. I work in the BBC, been there for almost six years now. What about you? What have you been up to since the last time we saw?