‘Meet the amazing Ms Amao,’ Arinze said as they reached the reception desk. ‘Tosin has been with me from the very beginning … she and I opened this office together as the only staff. You could say she’s the face and voice of Haba! Anything you need to know about the business, about how we started, or where to get ink for the printer, or how to requisition books from the store, Tosin’s the person to ask.’ And to Tosin he said, ‘This is—’
‘I know, Furo Wariboko,’ Tosin interjected.
‘Oh yes,’ Arinze said with a low chuckle, and then nibbled his lower lip. Finally he spoke. ‘From now on he will be known only as Frank Whyte.’
During their meeting in Arinze’s office, Arinze had expressed astonishment at Furo’s decision to change his name. In response to his cautious questions, Furo explained that Frank was his Christian name and Whyte was his
furo ere
, his family name, the English version of his family’s compound name. Many Kalabari families still retained this legacy of the slave-trading days when the chieftains answered one name in the clan and another to the white customer, the European sailors, who had no interest in learning their names and thus, partly in mockery and partly from necessity, addressed them by English nicknames. Hence it became that Fyneface was Karibo, Yellowe was Iyalla, Black-Duke was Oweredaba, Bobmanuel was Ekine, Georgewill was Otagi, Harry was Idoniboye-Obu, and, according to Furo, Whyte was Wariboko.
But Whyte was not Wariboko. Furo wasn’t worried about this fabrication, his first to his boss. He had no fear he would be caught out. Ayo Abu Arinze was Yoruba or more likely Igbo, or even of mixed ethnicity, with some Hausa thrown in somewhere – his three names together were confusing, but his surname was Igbo – and more to the point, he wasn’t Kalabari, so it was unlikely he would know the secret history of Kalabari names. Yet Arinze was Nigerian enough to know that the whitest names in the country came from Furo’s parts, the Niger Delta. Besides, he was pleased at the reason Furo gave for making the change. Because, as Furo said, Whyte would be easier for Haba! customers to pronounce and memorise, and, furthermore, it would remove the distraction of a white man bearing a black name. Such dedication to duty boded well, Arinze said, and he agreed with Furo that no one in the office need be informed of his old name.
From the lobby Furo and Arinze went back upstairs to Obata’s office. Obata was typing on his laptop, and he looked up from the screen as they entered, then pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. He greeted Arinze in a genial tone and nodded at Furo like an old enemy, and then, apart from a sidelong glance at Furo’s face, he showed no emotion as Arinze informed him of the name change. When Arinze finished speaking, he asked:
‘What name should I use in his employment file?’
‘Frank Whyte, of course,’ Arinze answered.
‘And his salary account? Will that be opened under this name?’
‘That’s a good point,’ Arinze said. He turned to Furo. ‘What do you suggest? Your new passport bears your old name. We’ll need new ID to open a bank account.’
Furo pondered on this snag before he said at last, ‘I’ll make the change official. I’ll get a new passport. Is it possible to pay me in cash until I bring the passport?’
‘That we can do,’ Arinze said. ‘Tell you what, Obata. Don’t open a file for him, not yet. For tax purposes let the records show that he’s on a three-month internship in marketing, and put down his salary as marketing expenses. Frank, you’ll have to bring your passport before the end of three months, by the end of September. Then we’ll make your position permanent.’
‘I’ll get the passport this month,’ Furo said. And he added: ‘Thank you, Abu.’
‘Perfect,’ Arinze said. ‘Now let me show you to your office.’
After Arinze left him alone, Furo strode around his office, acquainting himself with his new status. The austere, white-walled room was furnished with a wood-laminate desk, a steel-legged plastic chair, a foot-flip trash can, an air conditioner whose remote control was the only item on the desk’s surface, and a single-tiered pinewood shelf that was affixed to the wall across from the desk. The shelf was lined with books whose spines bore titles such as
The Rules of Wealth
and
Defying the Odds
and
The Leader Who Had No Title.
Adjacent to the shelf was the room’s only window, underneath which stood two cardboard boxes, and when Furo opened their flaps, he found that both were packed full of new-smelling books. After closing the boxes, he rose from his squat, then raised his hand to the window and wedged open the slats of the venetian blind. He gazed through the glass into the front of the compound, where he saw that four cars were parked, a black Mercedes jeep and three sedans. The jeep had to be Arinze’s, and since he couldn’t hope for that, Furo imagined that the least punished-looking of the sedans, a red Kia, was his.
His fantasies were interrupted by a knock on the door. He edged away from the window before calling out, ‘Come in,’ and the door swung open to reveal Tetsola, the IT man, at full size. He looked seven feet tall. When seated in his office he had appeared uncommonly large, but then Furo had also felt Brobdingnagian in the cramped space. What he now felt was embarrassment at his own puniness; and some confusion over his gut-deep stirrings of inadequacy. Everything about Tetsola – his basketballer limbs and those heroic shoulders, but also the commando jut of his chin – were exaggerations of the human form.
The stares he must draw
, Furo thought with a rush of resentment as unexpected as it was strong. He knew very well how it was to be stared at by everyone; he knew the price he paid for the loss of his anonymity. Yet he still envied Tetsola for standing out from the crowd. Or, nearer the truth, standing above it.
‘Come in,’ Furo said again, to break the cycle of his thoughts.
Tetsola ducked into the doorway and loped forwards. Standing closer, he towered over Furo like a father figure. In his raised palm was balanced a black Zinox. Furo guessed that the laptop was the reason for the visit, and he waited for Tetsola, who was glancing around the room with a smile that showed his bovine teeth, to confirm this, and just as he began to speculate that his visitor might be mute, Tetsola confounded him by saying in the wrong voice, a voice right for an eunuch but too feeble, too squeak-squeak, for a giant’s maw: ‘I’ve brought your lappy.’
For the next half-hour, while seated at his desk and facing the laptop screen, Furo listened in mute wonder to that nasal tone as Tetsola ran him through all his improvements to the laptop. He had upgraded functions, partitioned hard discs, and installed the latest versions of the best programs for any task Furo would ever need to perform on a machine of such limited processing power, limited not because the Zinox was bad, but because, didn’t Furo agree, Mac was the greatest. Much of this geeky lecture, on account of the terminology as well as the R2-D2 inflections of Tetsola’s voice, was unintelligible to Furo, and the torrent of information only succeeded in making his buttocks sweat. He kept adjusting himself to find a less pinching position in the chair, but he kept on listening, he kept on looking, he wanted to understand everything there was to know about the first computer he could call his own.
At long last Tetsola announced his duty ended and exited the office. Alone with the laptop, Furo opened a browser and signed into his Yahoo mailbox. It was over two weeks since he’d last been online, and though he suspected – or, rather, knew – what awaited him there, he still had to see for himself that he was right. He was, of course: there was indeed something to see: a digital influx of panic and grief. His mailbox had three hundred and seventeen unread emails, many of them newsletters from the job-listing websites he was subscribed to; but he noted one email from his mother, several from his father and his sister, and countless Facebook and Twitter notifications from friends, relatives, and total strangers. He was tempted to dip into all these messages addressed to someone he no longer was, but he realised the cruel folly of that action, as already he could feel his resolve crumbling under the weight of the subject line of his mother’s email, sent on 22 June, which read: ‘MY SON WHERE ARE YOU???’ Furo’s struggle with himself was rife with sighs, and in the end, by the simple trick of averting his eyes from the screaming caps, the hook-like question marks, the words fatted on desperation, he succeeded in withstanding the Pandora pull of his mailbox. He did not succumb to his mother’s email nor to any of the others, not a single one. Instead, upon returning his gaze to the screen, he opened the mailbox settings, scrolled down until he found the option he sought, and deleted his account.
Logging into Facebook, he found the message icon red with alerts. As for the friend requests, they ran into hundreds. His wall was taken over by postings about his disappearance, ladders of comments in unreadable net lingo, sunny emoticons depicting horror, and video clips of green pastures and floating clouds set to cantatas. Also photos. It seemed every group photo he had ever appeared in was tagged on to his wall. By long-forgotten relatives, unrecognisable childhood playmates, and unknown people whose names he found impossible to pronounce. Chinese names with their Xs, Russian names spelled in Cyrillic; and the trendy idiocy of misspelled Nigerian names, those Yehmeesees and Kaylaychees; and also names that seemed like
noms de guerre
for child stalkers. It was alarming: the scale of the uproar, the scope of his celebrity. All this time the whole of Facebook was searching for him and yet he had no idea, he hadn’t heard a thing.
Getting off Facebook was a hassle, as the deactivation process was so well hidden that he was forced to Google it and follow the instructions he found in a
Vice
article. Facebook defeated, he turned his avenging fury on the newest and least utilised of his online platforms, his Twitter account. He signed in to find a string of mentions from @pweetychic_tk, whom he suspected was his sister and thus didn’t read her tweets before deleting the account. Then he picked up the notepad sheet on which Tetsola had scribbled ‘[email protected]’ and ‘habanigeria789’, his official email address and his temporary password. He logged into the brand-new mailbox and changed his password without trouble, then read his first email, a welcome from Gmail. He was busy with customising the look of the mailbox when he heard from down the hallway the approach of feet, and sure enough, the footsteps stopped at his door. ‘Come in,’ he said in response to four loud knocks, made with a fist.
He recognised the shoes first. The pointed toes, the age-softened oxblood leather, the carelessly knotted laces. Then the face with its prominent cheekbones and that stuck fruit of an Adam’s apple. It was the man he had met on the day of his interview, the one who spat as he spoke, whose brother was married to a white woman in Romania. Or was it Poland?
‘
You!
’ they burst out together, their gazes meeting across the room. The man broke the look as he turned to close the door, and then, covering the distance to the desk with quick strides, he said with a grin, ‘Didn’t I say you would get the job! So you are my new oga?’
‘You work here?’
‘Yes now, I’m the driver. MD has told me I will be driving you from today.’
And all this time he had assumed that the man was a job seeker whose interview with Obata hadn’t gone well. Now it made sense, the help the man had offered that day. It was also apparent that Obata was a pain not only to him.
He said to the man, ‘So you’re my driver?’
‘Yes o,’ the man replied. ‘See how life is.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Victor Ikhide. But all my friends are calling me Headstrong.’
‘I won’t even ask why they call you that,’ Furo said with a snort of amusement. ‘Ehen, before I forget, now that you’re here—’ He rose from his seat, crossed to the window, and pried open the blind. ‘Come and see. I want to ask you something.’ When Headstrong joined him, he tapped the glass in the direction of the parked cars. ‘Which of those cars is mine?’ he asked, and Headstrong replied, ‘It’s the First Lady.’
The First Lady was a 1989 Toyota Corolla, this one ashcoloured, sagging with age and bruised around the edges, the roof hatch puttied shut. The model, which was popular in the late nineties, was considered a woman’s car, hence the nickname given it by Nigerian mechanics. Of all the cars in the compound, the First Lady was the one Furo least wanted – and now, for the first time, he thought that perhaps Syreeta was right. He deserved better.
Headstrong sensed the disappointment in Furo’s silence, but he misinterpreted it in the best light. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s a strong car, it won’t break down. I’m the one that is servicing all the company cars. The engine of that one is still good. Where do you live?’
‘Lekki,’ Furo muttered, ‘behind The Palms.’
‘Ah, I see! No wonder MD assigned me to be driving you. I live near that side, in Osapa London. It’s a long drive to Lekki, I won’t lie, but the car can handle it. Cool your mind, oyibo!’
Furo turned away from the window. ‘I have to get back to work. I guess I’ll see you at five.’ He walked to his desk but remained standing until Headstrong had opened the door, and then he called out, ‘One more thing. My name is Frank. Don’t call me oyibo.’
‘Yes o, Oga Frank,’ Headstrong said, and laughed as he slammed the door.
The rest of the morning passed in a loop of the new familiar. Knocks on his door, getting-to-know-you chats with Mallam Ahmed (the gatekeeper-cum-storekeeper-qua-handyman) and Iquo (who gushed about his office and special status for so long it became obvious they would never be friendly), and a quick visit from the taciturn Obata, who brought along a camera to take a photo for filing purposes; then the hours he spent alone, pacing the square of the room and staring out the window, through which he witnessed the arrival of the Haba! delivery van, this followed by another knock on the door and the entry of the second driver, Kayode. He was a socks-and-necktie man, a softer-spoken fellow than Headstrong; and no, he had no nickname, he said with a surprised look when Furo enquired. After Kayode left, Furo returned to his desk, where the only work waiting was the task he had set himself to, of browsing the internet in search of book-marketing tips from online experts whose free advice seemed one way or the other to involve the Amazon website. He was still on his laptop at sometime past midday when Tosin knocked on his door and invited him to lunch, but he declined, he wasn’t hungry, he thanked her for asking, and when she turned to leave, he snuck a look at her narrow waist, her flared hips, her musical sway, and said to himself what a great place Haba! was, such beautiful people, so warm, so welcoming. He looked forward to knowing Tosin better.