Xx
The girlish end to her e-mail emboldened him.
There’s too much to say in one e-mail. Do you want to meet up for lunch sometime this week?
Ahmed
It had taken her a day to reply this time.
Lunch sounds fun. Let’s go to Alfonso’s. It’s this lovely little Italian restaurant on Burleigh Street, just off the Strand. Is Friday at one o’clock any good? I’ll make a table booking for one o’clock if you’re free. The closest tube station is Temple. Call me if you get lost, 079483829416.
F
He penciled this new number into his address book beside her name. The conditions for his calling had been stated. He would wait until he saw her.
Alfonso’s was not hard to find. She was already seated when he arrived.
“Ahmed.” The scarf was still tightly wound, revealing the entire shape of her head, like she was bald and her skin grew in a gold-and-green silk pattern.
“Good to see you, Farida.”
She placed her hand on his shoulder and brushed her cheek against his. Their bodies did not touch.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“Don’t worry. I came early.”
The menu gave him somewhere to look when she spoke to him. For all her hijab, the shy downward glance was alien to Farida.
“Your e-mail implied that you haven’t been in London recently.”
“Yes, I just came in from Nigeria. I moved home five years ago.”
“Good for you. There was an opening recently for a correspondent in Kenya but my girls wouldn’t hear of it. In school, when they’re asked where they’re from, they say Barnet. How can Adla and Afaafa be from Barnet? Stop looking at my left hand. I got divorced three years ago. What about you, Ahmed? I can’t see a ring on your wedding finger.”
“I’ve never been married. Please recommend something for me.”
“The seafood tagliatelle is good.”
He added a glass of wine to his order.
“So what did you do in Nigeria?”
“I owned a newspaper.”
“Owned? Did you sell it and come to London to retire? That would make a fabulous story.”
“No, it was burned down.”
“Really? Why?”
“I ran a piece about some people in government. They weren’t pleased.”
“I think we did a story about that on our website. What was your newspaper called?”
“The Nigerian Journal.”
“Wait, let me check on my phone.”
Her nails clicked over the screen.
“We did run a story on that. My goodness, Ahmed, it’s you. It says you’re in hiding.”
“I suppose I am in hiding. Hiding in Alfonso’s off the Strand.”
“No one would have expected you to stay in Nigeria.”
“My staff is still there. I’m hoping my receptionist who was kidnapped is alive and still there.”
“Our correspondent didn’t tell us about a receptionist.”
“Yes, her name was Chidinma Ezeanyi. My maiguard saw her being pushed into the arsonists’ car before it drove off.”
When their meals came he tried to move away from the topic.
“So how old are your daughters?”
“Four and six. Look, I know the story has gone a little cold but I’m just wondering how you found Remé Sandayọ?”
That’s not how you pronounce his name, he thought. He remembered the note he had signed for Fineboy. “I can’t tell you.”
“Do you think he’d talk to the BBC?”
“I could ask. I thought you’d be more interested in finding my receptionist.”
“That’d be a story more for agencies in Nigeria, I would have thought.”
“I put an advert in tomorrow’s newspaper. With a number to call if anyone’s seen her.”
“That was the right thing to do.”
He ate the last of his meal in silence. The shrimp were small and far between. The clams and mussels tasted raw. Black-and-white photos lined the walls, images of dead Italians from the twenties and thirties, gorging on pasta in settings brighter and more appealing than theirs. When the bill came, as he was fumbling for his wallet, Farida slid her card into the machine and tapped in her PIN.
“You’re my guest.”
“At least let me leave a tip.”
“It was included.”
He threw a five-pound note on the metal tray.
“If you have money to waste, give it to me. I’m a single mother of two.” She laughed and put the note in her bag.
“That was churlish. Thank you for lunch.”
“My pleasure. It was lovely to see you, Ahmed.”
Again their faces pressed against each other, their bodies remaining distant. “I’ll call you tomorrow to find out if there’s any news about Mr. Sandayọ.”
45
SATURDAY MORNING, 6 A.M., the phone by Chike’s pillow rang.
“God punish you,” a woman said. The voice was unknown to him.
He went into the kitchen and shut the door.
“Are you calling about Mr. Bakare’s receptionist?”
“How dare you put my photo in the papers? You think you can mess with me? You don’t know who I am in this Lagos.”
It seemed Ahmed’s receptionist had been found. The missing-person advert had run today with a picture of the receptionist and a number to call with any information. Ahmed had asked Chike to buy a new SIM card for the advert, a number he could use for one day and throw away.
“Your employer informed me that you’d been missing since the Nigerian Journal was burned down.”
“Ahmed is behind this?”
“When calls to your phone were not going through, he assumed the worst.”
He heard her breathing heavily on the other end. Finally, she said at reduced volume, “I didn’t know he was rich enough to run a full-page advert in This Day on a Saturday. He was always saying the newspaper was going bankrupt.”
“He’ll be glad to know you’re safe.”
“They took my phone and said if I tried to get in touch with him, they’d kill me.”
“Of course. Ahmed will understand.”
“So how is he going to make it up to me?”
“I’m afraid he’s not in Nigeria at the moment.”
“What about you? I like your voice. Are you tall?”
“Yes, but not very handsome.”
“I’m not too picky. You’ve seen my picture. Call me.”
He put the phone in his pocket, wondering if this was news Ahmed would want to be woken up with. Good news, yes, that the receptionist was alive, but full-page adverts in This Day did not come cheap.
“You scared me,” Oma said, starting at the door of the kitchen.
“Morning. I had a phone call and I didn’t want to wake anybody.”
They had not spoken much since the night of the massage. She had grown shy of him, skirting away when they met in the corridor, avoiding him like an adolescent.
“I’m glad you found me here,” Chike said. “I wanted to talk about—”
The phone’s ringing cut him off. Oma took up a crate of eggs and went to the other side of the kitchen.
“Hello.”
“Why the fuck did you put my cousin’s picture in This Day? What kind of sick person are—”
He cut the line and switched off the phone.
“Who was that?”
“Wrong number. I’ll chop the onions for you.”
“No, it’s all right, thank you. I’m OK.”
She presented him with the solid wall of her back. He went back to the room he shared with Yẹmi and tried to sleep. On Saturdays the flat emptied. Isoken returned to her salon, Fineboy disappeared into Lagos, and Yẹmi, too, had begun leaving after breakfast, not returning till late. Only he, Chief, and Oma remained but she stayed in her room, refusing to come out.
After breakfast, he dialed Ahmed with his own mobile, letting it ring once befor
e he cut the call. Ahmed phoned back immediately.
“Any news?”
“Chidinma is fine. The men took her phone and told her not to contact you but they let her go.”
“Did they take her e-mail address, too? She could have sent me a short message. Hi, Ahmed, I’m alive. How did you find out?”
“She called this morning. She was quite angry.”
“At least I used a good photo. It’ll be good for her market. Is Chief Sandayọ there?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Please let me speak to him.”
Chike took the phone into the parlor. Chief was clipping his fingernails, letting the yellowish translucent crescents fall to the ground.
“Who is that?” Sandayọ asked when Chike gave him the phone.
“Ahmed. From England.”
Sandayọ took the phone and climbed up the stairs to the entrance door.
“Good morning, Chief Sandayọ.”
“So you’ve learned some manners in England.”
“A friend of mine who works in the BBC would like to interview you.”
“You told her where I am?”
“They ran a story on their website when the Nigerian Journal was burned down. They know about the article that caused the arson.”
“Where would my own interview appear? Just on the website?”
“It could be a leading story on the World Service.”
“What does she want to know?”
“She asked if she can contact you directly.”
The ministers for information and petroleum were always being courted by the foreign press but not even a Middle Eastern broadcaster had asked to speak to Chief Sandayọ. He imagined being broadcast around the world. The BBC would show a color-graded map, white for North Africa, brown in the Sahara, green below the Sahel, with a flag pinpointing Nigeria and his voice playing over the continent. An interview with the BBC would particularly irritate the president, so careful of his precious golden image abroad.
“No. Tell her no and don’t tell her anything else about me.”
He dropped the phone. It was too risky. His life would be worth very little if he spoke to the BBC while he was still within the country.
“What did he say?” Chike asked.
“None of your business.”
“Just make sure you clear up your fingernails,” Chike said. “Nobody is your slave here.”
46
FARIDA HAD DISMISSED AHMED when he called with news of Chief Sandayọ’s refusal.
“Not to worry. If he changes his mind just let me know. Thanks.”
Call me when you’re of use to me, she should have said. It was not outside the realms of her directness. He had begun drafting a CV after their phone call, starting with his academic qualifications. An A and two Bs at A level, a result that had satisfied his parents without inflating them with pride.
He remembered the struggles of boarding school, the trials of boiled food and boys who did not know where Lagos was, who did not care, dismissing his entire past with a shrug. At his graduation his parents had flown in, wearing matching lace, his mother’s gele fanning out and obscuring the view of the parent behind her.
“Excuse me. Please, can you take off your hat?”
With all the dignity of a level-seventeen civil servant’s wife, she had turned to say, “Does this look like a hat to you?” a reply that had made her a hero in her circle that summer.
Ahmed won the sports prize, a biographical detail too remote for his CV. The house had cheered for the first black student to be awarded the trophy with which he would later pose awkwardly on the front steps of the school. At his graduation lunch, his father said in passing, “It would have been good if you had applied yourself more and won a prize.”
“He did, sir,” his guest, the only other Nigerian in the school, had spoken up. “He won the sports prize.”
“I meant an academic prize.”
“Bọla, leave your son alone. He’s done well. I’m proud of his sports prize.”
“I’m not saying he hasn’t done well. As his father, I have the right to tell him where he can do better.”
Three years later, only his mother had come to watch his name being read out with the other upper-second-class graduates’.
“Your father sends his love,” she said, looking shrunken without her husband. “Do you want to have lunch with the Ogunniyis? I don’t want you to feel alone at your graduation celebration.”
“Mummy, you don’t like Mrs. Ogunniyi.”
“I thought you and her daughter were good friends.”
“Not anymore.”
“So who do you want to have lunch with?”
He had invited the scholarship students from their African circle. Njongo, Calvin, and Farida. None particularly close to him, but the others had guardians or parents to celebrate their firsts, reassurance that the exorbitant international fees had not been in vain. Calvin and Njongo had been thankful to be rescued from the sea of flash photography, no lens trained on them. Farida had refused at first.
His mother liked her. She did not cover, claiming in her generation boys did not stare so boldly, but she appreciated the aesthetic of a well-wound hijab. She and Farida sat next to each other while he, Calvin, and Njongo huddled together in a tight triangle. They thought of themselves as men by then and modulated their voices accordingly, roaring when it came to football, dipping low when they spoke of salaries. From a single bank application, hastily sent, he had gotten a job that paid enough to sever all dependency on his parents. The offer letter spread ripples in his plans to start a master’s in journalism and media publishing, a second degree he would have had to take out a loan to pay for.
His screen lit up. One missed call from Chike, who was so expert at flashing that the phone never rang. It was 10 p.m. and he was only three lines into his CV. If Chidinma wanted to sue, it could wait till tomorrow. He returned to the blank sheet of paper.
He had begun softly at Standard Silver, with photocopying and light reading on the Asian markets the bank was trying to break into. The pace had suddenly accelerated. Nine a.m. to twelve to catch the closing hours in Shanghai. Noon to eight working on London time, then for the four hours until midnight, struggling to keep up with the best of the oriental brain, his boss used to say. Those who wished to impress stayed longer. Black hearse-like cabs ferried him to work and ferried him home. He slept in his office clothes, sometimes with his shoes on, sometimes with a container of takeaway still on his lap, the oil on the lid hardened to fat by the next day. He had woken up one morning and realized his twenties were passing in front of a screen monitoring share prices, the colorful, jagged graphs brighter and more varied than his life. He began searching for another job.
Stanton and Chaney, a bank that operated almost exclusively in European markets.
“Why do you want to leave Standard Silver?” his interviewer, Alan MacDonald, had asked.
“They work on Hong Kong time.”
Alan had laughed, lettuce from his lunch still wedged between two teeth. Alan was not overly concerned with individual performance, so his team took it in turns to coast. During Ahmed’s spells of inattention, he took half days and went to seminars on conflict reporting, flinching at the photos of scattered corpses and severed limbs. He read interviews online and rephrased the questions. He e-mailed journalists and newspaper editors in Nigeria and all without affecting the team’s final output, the only quota that mattered to Alan.
There had been women. A pregnancy scare at twenty-seven that shook him into nastiness. Paternity test. He had insisted and felt only unadulterated relief when the results came out. They would have gotten married if the helices in Denise’s daughter had matched his own. He had carried the baby once. Her spine had curved against him, her head resting on his shoulder, her breath leaving a damp patch on his shirt, and he had wished her mother were anyone but Denise. Childless and wifeless, he had been one of the younger students on his one-year master’s prog
ram in journalism and media publishing. It was there he had taken the leap from wanting to be a journalist to wanting to own his own newspaper. Perhaps it was the figures in his account. Two hundred thousand pounds, stowed after a decade in banking, too much capital to go and work under an editor in Nigeria. His editor penpals e-mailed him almost every day. Now was the time. If you ever wanted to get into journalism in Nigeria, now was the time. The military with its stranglehold had been replaced by a democracy that held the press gently by the lapels.
His screen lit up again. Another missed call from Chike. Ten thirty p.m. and he had arrived at the point in his CV where he would either lie or tell the truth. Leaving a five-year gap was unthinkable. No interviewer would overlook the omission.
This time the phone rang for almost a minute, looping the dog bark that was his ringtone into a rabid frenzy. He picked up with apprehension, wondering what could have led Chike to sacrifice his credit.
“Ahmed, this is Chief Sandayọ. Tell your friend to call me right now if she wants her story.”
47
“PUT THE NEWS FOR me.”
Chief Sandayọ missed satellite TV and the suave CNN reporters, both male and female made up to a smooth matt finish. These Nigerian newscasters were overweight and leaned heavily over their desks, reading the headlines in a flat monotone that rendered all news dull. He wished for a more modern TV. This one that curved at the ends into a metal box and phased from black and white into color was from the early nineties. It rendered the newsreader even more unattractive, her lips thick with lipstick that swung from a lurid purple to a deep black. New Speaker of the House selected; ambulance service commissioned in Lagos; former education minister’s house burned down in suspected arson attack. The footage was in sepia, dark brown flames surrounding tan walls, a column of cream water cascading too late over the building. Afterwards they showed the wreckage, smoke still drifting from the ruins.
“That’s my house.”
It was the house he had lived in with his wife and son, their memories now turned to ashes. They seemed to want to comfort him, the members of this assorted group of squatters. They moved around him silently, watching him as he slowly consumed the rest of his dinner. Who had lit the match? The First Lady famously carried snubs from her childhood, slights preserved and unsealed fresh forty years later. Senator Okpara, the governor, Madam Ronkẹ, all the names dropped carelessly to the journalist, any could be behind it.
Welcome to Lagos Page 17
