“Someone is asking for you,” Mrs. James said, an hour after we came back from the restaurant. We came back for Esther to pack her things so we can go to the hotel. “She has two police officers with her,” Mrs. James added. “That must be Talatu,” I said. “What does she want?” Esther and she got up and walked out of the house. I ran after her, holding her hand. Mr. and Mrs. James came after us. I wondered where Dorathy was, because I knew would have taken over the fight. We found Talatu standing between the two policemen and behind them stood a police Jeep. They came prepared, I thought. They came to arrest me. But for what?” I looked at Talatu and saw that her eyes were bigger than they originally were. She was staring at Esther as if she had seen an alligator’s ghost. “What’s going on Talatu?” I asked. “Why are you here?” Talatu kept staring at Esther as if I had not spoken. I turned to the officers. “Sir, why are you here?” I asked. “She said you assaulted her,” the officer
I looked into Talatu’s big round eyes as we stood in front of her father’s house on Tinna Street in the city of Jos and my heart bleed. ‘Don’t do this,’ I said. ‘Please, don’t do this.’ Talatu sighed and rolled her eyes in a way that says, you just don't get it, do you? ‘There is no point going over this again,’ she said. ‘It’s out of my hands. His parents have met mine and they have agreed to go ahead with the wedding. There is nothing I can do about it.’ ‘But you love me,’ I said, my voice shaking. ‘Why do you want to marry him?’ ‘You don’t have a job,’ Talatu said, her voice rising. ‘How many times do we have talk about this? It’s over two years and you keep telling me the same thing. How do we get married if you don’t have a job? How do we afford a wedding? And you know my parents’ stand on this: we can’t get married if none of us has a job. So don’t blame me—’ ‘We are soul mates! We share the same birthdays, same genotype...and nobody can love you the way I do. You know that
I had the dream again that night, and, like the rest, I was caught in the middle of it. The snake coiled around the door’s handle and hissed. Then it slithered downward from the handle, its unblinking eyes fixed on me. I looked around the room; there was no window in the room and the snake blocked the only way out of the room. How I allowed myself to be cornered in a room with no window and one inaccessible door remained a mystery that the dream did not care to reveal. Talatu stood behind me and I felt a new burden to get out of the room overtook me. She whimpered from behind me and I guessed she had just seen the snake. The snake reached the floor and coiled up, the head pointed towards me. It hissed angrily. ‘I want to go to London,’ Talatu screamed at my back. ‘I want to go to London. Take me out of this place. Take me out, please.’ I turned to the white wall on my left and scratched the surface. My fingers met bricks, solid as the ones used on the pyramids of Egypt. I turne
The call met me at breakfast, and Eric’s name showed up on the phone’s screen. I spoke to Eric two days ago and our conversation had held little of my interest and I wasn’t in the mood to continue from where we stopped. What does he want? I thought, looking at the phone. I wasn’t ready to hear about his successes with Lagos girls. My relationship problem was already too big for me to handle. Besides, my heart was as broken as a politician’s promise, and was in no mood for other people’s issues. I sat back and allowed the phone to ring through. If it’s important—and there is hardly anything important coming from Eric apart from girls’ issues and his plans to get abroad—he will call again. The phone began to ring again. I took another bite of the bread in my hand and quickly poured the black tea into my mouth. I shot straight up and spilled the contents of my mouth out, spraying it over the dining table. I had forgotten that the tea just came out of the pot and still very hot. I st
I returned home that afternoon and found mom waiting for me in the sitting room. I smelled trouble even before she opened her mouth. It was on her face, in her posture, and on the rest of her body. I had a feeling my plan had fail before I put it into action. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked. She sat on the old faded settee, changed into her night gown. ‘Why don’t you find something productive to do with your life instead of wasting it on that stupid game?’ I stood against the door. I didn’t go to play chess. I went to Talatu’s house to tell her I was travelling to Lagos to get a job. I wanted to assure her that everything was going to be fine. But when I got to the house, I found the doctor’s Mercedes Benz parked in front of the house. I stood opposite the house for close to ten minutes, devoid of the courage to meet her in the doctor’s presence. They came out together later and drove out in the car. Talatu had a dress I had never seen her in, and she had a smile on her face. I wa
Mom and I left home before my two brothers, Jasper and Yusuf, got home. Mom insisted on following me to the park as if I was a teenager, giving the excuse she wanted to get greens in Terminus. I had the feeling she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going somewhere else from Lagos. We got into a tricycle at Fototech Junction and I send a text to Eric telling him I was taking off that night and that he should pick me up the next morning. I got an instant reply: Great! See you tomorrow. I felt a tinge of uncertainty again and I wondered if I was doing the right thing. But the thought of Talatu and the doctor getting married ran across my mind and pushed every doubt out. This was the only hope I had left to counter the doctor from taking Talatu to the UK. Mom and I sat in silence like strangers while the tricycle sped toward Tafawa Balewa Street. ‘Did you pick your credentials?’ mom asked. ‘Yes.’ We sat in another silence listening to the tricycle’s engine until we got to the motor park.
We got to Lagos a couple of minutes after six the following morning and I stared through the window, seeing the cars trailing each other like coaches on an unending train. People moved in a hurry like ants in a disturbed colony and hawkers ran along the sides of cars and buses selling their wares. Yoruba music, loud and piercing, rose from music stores, probably to soothe the chaotic scene, but ended up enhancing the frenzy. I felt exhilaration and dismay at the same time—like a man on a plane for the first time. The bus crawled through the traffic at a 2G internet pace. My mouth yearned to be brushed, and my stomach grumbled for food. We stopped at Ojota and some of the passengers got down. Another bunch dropped at Maryland later and eventually we reached the park in Ijora. The bus gave a loud hiss and the engine died and everyone got up to carry or drag their luggage down. I came down with my bag clamped to my shoulder, looking around. Eric was not in sight. I pulled my phone out,
We got to Eric’s house on Alpha Beach on the Lagos Island about an hour later. It was a one room apartment attached to a huge uncompleted building that looked like a warehouse. A settee lined the wall of the little room while a gigantic, old TV sat facing it. A mattress lay on the carpet to the left-hand side of the room. Two bags lined the bottom of the unmade mattress and a couple of trousers and shirts hung by the window pane; no wardrobe was in sight. I looked up and saw two huge spiders hanging on the ceiling, their well-established webs giving away the secret that they had not been disturbed for the last one year. The smell of dirty socks and unaired shoes hovered over the room. ‘Welcome to my bunk,’ Eric said, pulling his shoes off before stepping on the carpet. ‘Make yourself comfortable. The toilet and the kitchen are the doors you saw outside before we got in.’ He pointed to the bottom of the mattress. ‘Keep your bag at the bag station over there.’ He sat on the settee and p