Welcome to Lagos Read online

  Isoken glanced at Fineboy, who was still standing outside the compound.

  “Pay him no attention. Just walk with me,” Chike said.

  They moved in silence, her head drooping on the slim stalk of her neck. Yẹmi and the militant walked a few paces behind. At the top of the road they stopped.

  “How well do you know your uncle?”

  “I— When we were going to my mother’s village we stayed here overnight from Lagos. That was my first time of meeting him.”

  “Fineboy. He heard something your uncle said to his business partner. Something like what happened to you in the bush. Is there any way you can reach your parents?”

  “They have one GSM they are using but I don’t know the number. It’s new. Uncle Festus has it.”

  “Is there anyone else who would have the number?” Chike asked.

  “They live in Lagos.”

  “Don’t cry. We’ll go there and drop you.”

  “Say wetin? Who tell you I wan’ go Lagos?” Yẹmi said.

  “We can go our separate ways, then.”

  “Na who tell you I no wan’ go?”

  “You,” Chike said to Fineboy, “the drama is over. You can be on your way once you give us directions to a motor park that will get us to Lagos.”

  7

  ISOKEN DID NOT SPEAK until they reached Edepie Motor Park. It was a large trampled field with vehicles of all sizes coming and going, small, dusty minivans, large, sleek, luxurious buses, trailers with art twisting all over their bodies, movement and noise and dust rising from the spinning tires. A market had sprung up for the human traffic, clothes, books, food, toys on display for the discerning traveler.

  “Please can I go to a call center,” Isoken said to Chike when they arrived. “Maybe I’ll remember my parents’ number with a phone in my hand.”

  The owner of the kiosk stood by Isoken as she dialed wrong number after wrong number. With each try she grew more flustered.

  “There are others waiting,” the kiosk owner said after her sixth attempt. She cried out when the phone was taken from her, a harsh, bleating sound.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t charge you,” the owner said, beckoning to the next customer.

  Chike would have preferred tears to Isoken’s twitchy silence. Her hand rose to her hair, then her collarbone, then her elbow as if she were counting her body parts, checking nothing was missing.

  “So we’ll have to go to Lagos, then,” Chike said to her when her fingers were resting on her ear.

  “My mum used to say that if we ever got separated we should meet at home. The first time it happened was when I was a child. I ran off in the market after an orange and when I caught it, she was gone. I clutched so many strangers that looked like her from behind and then I got tired of disappointment and decided to go home. She came home that night with dust in her hair. She was already planning how she would tell my father that she had lost their only child.”

  “So you think they’ll be in Lagos.”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t stay here.”

  She stared away from him when she spoke. There was swelling on her cheekbone, the skin puffed and raised, encroaching on her eye. The cut on her temple had formed a deep purple scab, the shade of an onion. He had not asked for this new responsibility. He hoped there would be someone to help her in Lagos.

  Yẹmi and Chike bought trousers from a stall and went behind a tree to change. They emerged civilians, their muddy boots the only sign of their former life. Their dinner was a simple meal of beans and stew, eaten on the same bench with Isoken as far from him and Yẹmi as possible.

  They found a Lagos-bound bus and waited for it to fill up. It would not depart until all its seats were taken. Chike paid for three spaces and climbed into the front seat. His knees touched the dashboard riddled with stickers preaching platitudes. GOD’S TIME IS BEST. NO FOOD FOR LAZY MAN. A silver Christ dangled crucified from the rearview mirror.

  He and his mother had always sat in the front seats when she accompanied him to his military school in Zaria.

  All through the journey from Ibadan to Zaria, his mother would hold his hand and he would look out the window, Ogbomoso, to Jebba, to Kutiwenji, to Machuchi, breathing in the changing air, and the landscape changing, and the people changing, growing leaner and more dignified, calmer and more reposed. It was years later, reading the memoirs of a colonial officer, that he realized he had seen the north like a white man, looking for differences: thinner noses, taller grass, different God.

  “Don’t sit at the back,” he said when he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw again that Isoken was as far from him and Yẹmi as possible. In his last year in Zaria, on his way home for the holidays, there had been an accident. A bus hit them from behind and the whole back row died instantly, spines snapped. He had bled from a few surface wounds but he had made the trip back to Zaria when the holiday was over. He would be an officer and a gentleman before he let the vagaries of an expressway stop him. And now he was an officer and a deserter.

  Even at sixteen, he had known it was partly rubbish, the dross of an empire, the dregs of a martial philosophy that had led countless Africans to fight for “King and Country.” But there had been something seductive about it, something about these military principles, stated like the first principles that governed the world: honor, chivalry, duty.

  Evening was falling. The bus was filling. A couple boarded, the man’s frayed Bible held to his chest, the woman in a skirt that covered her ankles, her earlobes smooth and unpierced, her neck and wrists bare of jewelry. A man was moving from bus to bus, peering inside and then darting to the next one. He disappeared into one of the luxurious buses, behemoth American imports as large as whales. A moment later, like Jonah spat out, the man came rushing down.

  Their trail had been picked up from the guns abandoned in the bush, their movements traced to this motor park. Were they so important? Would the colonel expend so much energy to find him and Yẹmi? The man was only a few buses away. Chike recognized the brown singlet he had spent the morning walking behind.

  “Brother Chike!”

  When had Fineboy picked up his name? He was knocking on the side of the bus now.

  “You know him?” the driver asked.

  “Brother Chike, please, I need to talk to you.”

  Brother. Such respect. The boy had put his hand through the window, stopping just short of touching his arm.

  “I know him,” he said, opening the bus door.

  “Na why you dey answer this boy?”

  “Don’t let anyone take my seat,” Chike said to Yẹmi.

  Chike climbed down and faced him.

  “Yes. What do you want?”

  “Please can we move away?”

  There was the carcass of a trailer truck stripped to its frame, resting on its side and waiting for the resurrection to rise again. A rubbish heap grew like a shrub beside it, emptying the area of passersby. Fineboy led him there.

  “I need to get out of Yenagoa tonight.”

  “Your affairs do not concern me.”

  “Please. I take God beg you. Soldier is looking for me. I could not go home. I saw my friend Amos on the way. He said there are people watching my house. I don’t have the money to leave.”

  “What about your family?”

  “They have my picture. They will kill me. They have already killed one of the boys who came home on my street.”

  “I should put you and the girl you tried to rape in the same bus?”

  “I wasn’t even there. It was a story they told me when they came back to camp. Nobody raped her. That’s what she said. I got the story wrong. Let thunder strike me if I am lying. Let thunder kill my whole family.”

  He touched his index finger to his lip and raised it to the sky.

  “You can come with us to Lagos. Stand up. What’s that your name again?”

  “Fineboy.”

  “Fineboy, stand up. It’s a loan you’ll pay back when you find your feet.
Make sure you don’t sit next to her.”

  He paid Fineboy’s fare and the boy climbed into the back. The last space in the bus was next to Chike. Whoever sat there would feel the driver’s hand each time he reached down to change gears, his knuckles brushing against legs and knees. Women in particular hated this seat.

  “This driver is too greedy,” a passenger said.

  “So because of one seat, we will leave Bayelsa so late.”

  “Driver, make we dey go o.”

  “Look, I can’t take this anymore. Do you know who I am? I’m coming down from this bus.”

  “Lagos?” a woman asked, running and out of breath.

  “Yes.” She paid and he got down for her to enter. She smelled expensive, like the clear alcohol perfumes his mother sprayed for special events, crushed flowers and party stew, the scent of an occasion. The driver started the bus.

  “Wait!” the man carrying the large Bible said.

  “Mr. Man, I have an appointment tomorrow morning. Let’s be going.”

  “What if you die before then? Can a dead body attend a meeting?”

  “God forbid.”

  “Then let us pray. Father, in the name of Jesus, we commit this bus journey into your hands. We command that no accident shall befall us.”

  “Amen,” the other passengers said.

  “We declare that we have not set out on a night when the road is hungry.”

  “Amen.”

  “I cover each and every one of us with the blood of Jesus.”

  “Blood of Jesus,” the passengers intoned.

  “I wash the wheels of the bus with the blood of Jesus.”

  “Blood of Jesus.”

  “I soak the driver’s eyes with the blood of Jesus.”

  “Blood of Jesus.”

  “He will see clearly and by your grace, tomorrow morning we will arrive safely in Lagos. We thank you, Father.”

  “Thank you, Lord.”

  “We give you all the glory for in Jesus’ name we have prayed.”

  “Amen.”

  “And all God’s people said?”

  “Amen!”

  8

  Lagos

  “REPORTS ARE COMING IN that the army has destroyed a whole village in Bayelsa State. We need someone to go down there and find out what happened,” Ahmed Bakare said to the senior editorial staff of the Nigerian Journal, the paper he had founded and run for the past five years.

  They sat in the boardroom, the windows and doors flung open, the output of the generator too low for air-conditioning. Ties had come undone, buttons were following suit, a moist triangle of chest flesh visible on most of his employees. Ahmed had taken off his jacket but the knot of his tie still pressed against his throat.

  “You must see why it’s so important that we send somebody down there?” he said.

  It was not the first time Ahmed had tried to get one of his journalists to go to the Niger Delta. They felt the shame of reporting what they had not seen, news of oil spills and militants, fleshed out from the dry summaries on Reuters. Yet shame was not enough to risk their lives.

  “The men from BBC, CNN, any sign of trouble, they’ll send a helicopter to fly them out,” his political editor said to him. “Can you guarantee that? Can you even afford it?”

  “I’ll send you a speedboat.”

  “With Rambo inside?”

  The meeting ended in laughter as the group filed out of the boardroom. They were competent staff, diligent with deadlines and precise in their prose, but they were more interested in the business of newspapers, in ink and paper quality, distribution channels and advert space, than in the ideas that could be read between the lines of the text, the very principles that had propelled him to found this newspaper.

  Nigerian news, by Nigerian people, for Nigerian people. Telling our own stories, creating our narratives, emphasizing our truths. They were tired mantras but they would have been sparks to people with imagination. Meeting with his staff was like holding a flame to a wet rag. Port Harcourt was only an hour’s flight away. He could go and see for himself: charter a boat, take a recorder, a notepad, a toothbrush, and some gin. Surely the militants would welcome him. They must grow tired of these white journalists who mistook their bravado for real menace, missing the irony of the stylized war paint, branding the movement something atavistic. Or they might use him as target practice.

  He was an only child: a caution that had sounded in his ears since his sister’s death. For his eighteenth birthday, he had wanted to jump out of a plane over the English countryside, a billowing nylon cloud the only barrier between himself and death. His mother had spent two NITEL calling cards crying down a bad phone line. He was indispensable to her. And what of his reporters? To whom were they indispensable? Their wives, their husbands, daughters, elderly parents, younger siblings still in school.

  He returned to his office to sift through tomorrow’s leaders. He had committed to publishing at least one anticorruption piece in each issue of the paper, and in the five years the Nigerian Journal had been open, he had not failed.

  The intercom rang.

  “Good morning, Mr. Bakare. There are some men here to see you from Chief Momoh’s office.”

  “Show them in,” Ahmed said to his receptionist.

  Chief Momoh was a former minister of petroleum and a billionaire, two facts that Momoh insisted were unrelated. A few days ago the Journal had run a piece on an oil rig that the chief was alleged to own by proxy. Ahmed had been expecting a visit. He picked up a feature on a former Miss Nigeria and stared at the gap in her front teeth, a dark slit in her wide smile. The men knocked and entered before he said, “Come in.”

  There were three, dressed in black, dark caricatures of hired thugs. They filled his office with a sharp, astringent odor.

  “Yes, how may I help you?”

  “Chief Momoh is not happy with the story you published about him.”

  He had gotten phone calls before, but it was the first time anyone had physically been sent to threaten him. He felt a tense excitement as he waited for them to finish their business of intimidation, their presence a validation of his work. There was no place for a gun to hide. Not in their shallow pockets nor in their hands hanging loosely by their sides. They could beat him up but they did not seem inclined to.

  “Chief Momoh has told us to warn you to get your facts straight. You know where his house is. You can come for an interview anytime you want.”

  He did know the mansion in Palmgrove Estate. The chief and Ahmed’s father had rotated in the same circles for a while, and when he was younger, he had swum in the pool that occupied half of Momoh’s massive garden.

  The man closest to the door, his stomach protruding more briefly than the others’, reached into a small briefcase that Ahmed had not noticed. Ahmed gripped the phone but did not lift it to his ear. Sudden movement. That was what always killed people in films.

  “He also said we should give you this.” The man drew out two envelopes and placed them on the table with a small bow. “One is for your parents. Chief has been finding it difficult to reach them.”

  “All right. You have delivered your message. Leave my office.”

  And they left, the envelopes remaining cream and expensive against the stark white paper that cluttered his desk. He opened the one addressed to Chief Mr. and Mrs. Bọla Bakare first. He slid a penknife under the envelope flap, careful that his hands did not touch whatever was inside.

  The families of

  Chief Herbert Momoh

  and

  Admiral Joseph Ọnabanjọ

  kindly request your presence at the union of their children

  Jemima and Akin

  He remembered Jemima. She had been two years his senior in secondary school. She had big breasts that ballooned out of her school uniform and a sharp mouth that teachers and students alike had suffered. He opened the envelope addressed to him with steady hands. It was an invite also, no death threat slipped inside, no warning. He
felt sorry for Akin. He felt sorry for himself. His irrelevance confirmed by a flat, square invitation card.

  His father thought him a fool for moving home to start a newspaper. His mother still loved him, a reassurance she had taken to repeating more often these days. How long before he called it a failure?

  9

  AHMED’S PARENTS’ MARRIAGE WAS strong, incongruously so. His father read widely, understood the foreign stock market, conversed with ease. His mother and her friends wore matching clothes to weddings. His parents were rarely seen outside together but in the domestic space they were courteous, loving even, attentive to how many spoons of sugar and how many cubes of ice. It worked for them, especially after the death of his sister.

  Morenikẹ’s smile sketched outlines on the edges of his memory but he could never recall his sister’s face without the aid of a photograph. From her pictures, he knew she had been angular with bulging eyes, but the presence of those few hanging photos had not been a reproach to his childhood.

  Ahmed wished she were alive, if only to shift the weight of his parents’ disappointment. He had left his good job in England. He was not yet married. He insisted on carrying on with this ridiculous newspaper project.

  “The media mogul has arrived,” his father said as he walked into their living room. “What will he drink?”

  Once a month, for his mother’s sake, he spent a Sunday afternoon with both of them.

  “Bọla, stop teasing him,” his mother said.

  “I’m not. I read the damn paper. I saw the piece on Chief Momoh’s alleged oil rig. Why did it take you so long to get to it?”

  “We were gathering material.”

  “Is that so? Perhaps you should rename yourself The Stale Journal.”

  “Bọla, leave the boy alone.”

  “I’m just giving him some paternal advice. If he’s going to try and embarrass my friends, at least be the first to the story. What are you drinking?”

  “Star.”

  “We only have Guinness.”

  “Guinness, then. I’ll get it.”

  “No. You’re a guest now. We see you once a month, so we have to be on our best behavior or your mother says you’ll stop coming.”