‘All right,’ Tosin replied in a tone that sounded preoccupied, and Furo was about to ask what she was thinking when she pre-empted him with the question, ‘Do you want to come in?’
During their conversation while waiting for Kasumu, Tosin had told him that the house she was going to was her older sister’s, who along with her husband and their toddler son had travelled to Dubai on vacation, and so she would be alone. She didn’t like being alone, she said, especially in a house without electricity. That was when it crossed Furo’s mind that he could, if he wanted, spend the night with Tosin. But did he want to?
‘I do,’ Furo said.
It was the weekend. Knowing Syreeta, she wouldn’t be home, but he would keep to the rules she had enforced on him. He would call her to say he wasn’t returning tonight.
There was only Headstrong to get rid of.
Staring at Tosin through the gloom, Furo said, ‘What about Headstrong?’
Tosin caught his meaning. ‘He can leave. You can stay the night.’
But the First Lady, Arinze’s warning, Haba! property. He had forgotten about that. It was getting too complicated. The more he had to strategise, the less he felt like starting this romance. Besides, under and beneath all, he wasn’t ready to show his black buttocks to anyone.
Furo said, ‘Arinze warned me not to let Headstrong keep the car overnight. I can give him money to take a taxi home, but I can’t drive. If he parks here, how do I move it tomorrow?’ Tosin was silent long enough for him to make up his mind, and when she said at last, ‘Do you really want to stay?’ he voiced his decision: ‘Of course I do. But maybe not tonight.’
The drive to Lekki was swift. It was minutes to midnight when Headstrong eased the First Lady into its usual parking spot in Oniru Estate. While Furo waited by the roadside for Headstrong to lock up, he looked around to confirm that Syreeta’s Honda was missing among those parked. Headstrong approached, and as Furo held out his hand for the car key, the driver said, ‘I think you know Tosin likes you.’
‘Goodnight,’ Furo responded, and they parted, back on good terms.
Upon entering the house, Furo headed straight to his bedroom, dumped his laptop bag on the bed, and was shedding his clothes when the lights blinked out. Standing in the dark with his trousers in his hand, the deep silence before the storm of generators stirred in him a bitter loneliness, so he reached for his phone, and suppressing his misgivings about the line he was about to cross, he dialled Syreeta’s number. The ringing was cut off by a blast of dancehall music. ‘Hello, hello,’ he said without getting a response, and then he raised his voice to a shout, ‘
Syreeta!
’
Her cheerful tones broke through the din. ‘Hey sweetie, are you home?’
‘Where are you?’
‘I can’t hear – I’m in a club.’
‘With Bola?’ Furo announced with the clairvoyance of jealousy, and Syreeta’s loud laughter only enraged him further. Her laughter fizzled out as she caught the whiplash of menace in his answering silence, and when she said in a cautious tone, ‘You know his name?’ Furo swatted aside her question with his own:
‘Are you with him?’
A teasing note slithered into her voice as she retorted, ‘Are you jealous?’
‘Just answer me!’
‘No,’ she said, and through the percussive music he caught her sniff of derision. ‘The weekends are for his wives.’ She paused. ‘I only see him on Tuesdays.’
‘But you go out every weekend.’
‘I go clubbing with friends. I thought you knew that.’
‘Friends?’
‘My friends,’ she said sharply. Then she relented. ‘Anyway, Baby’s here.’
‘How come you’ve never invited me?’
‘But I have. Think well. The day rain fell.’
‘I don’t remember.’
Her sigh retained its force over the distance. ‘Why are we discussing this now?’
‘You’re too busy to talk to me?’
‘Come on, Furo.’
‘
Don’t call me Furo!
’
He, too, was shocked by his yell.
Syreeta spoke. ‘Something’s wrong. I’m leaving right now. I’m coming home.’
‘No, no, don’t. I’m sorry I shouted at you. You can stay.’
‘Thank you, lord and master,’ Syreeta said with a strained laugh. The bass of a hip-hop tune filled the interlude. ‘But I’ll come back early, tomorrow morning. I’ll take you out. We’ll go watch a movie. Would you like that?’
‘I guess,’ Furo said. ‘Sorry again I shouted at you.’
‘That’s OK. You’re just a big baby. My—’ Her words got drowned out as a male voice shouted above the partying noises,
Oi, Sy, get off the bleedin’ phone
, and then she said hurriedly, ‘I have to go now, see you tomorrow,’ and ended the call.
The first time Furo’s phone rang on Saturday, it was Tosin calling. Syreeta was in the bathroom, she was preparing to take him out to get a pizza and catch a movie, and so, despite Tosin’s hints about the freeness of her day, he kept the conversation brief. On the drive to City Mall, his phone rang a second time. ‘Aren’t you answering?’ Syreeta asked, and after he replied that he didn’t know the number therefore it must be work so it could wait till Monday, Syreeta turned the radio volume back up. His phone continued to ring in the restaurant, and in the time between departure from La Pizza and arrival at The Galleria, a trip of twenty minutes, it rang four more times, all of the calls from the same number that had pestered him during his meal. While Syreeta bought tickets for a showing of
The Avengers
, Furo stood in line for popcorn and sodas. In the dim theatre, as they walked up the aisle, his phone rang once more. Hurrying down a middle row to the accompaniment of irate shushes from nearby moviegoers, Furo arrived at the velvet-padded wall, sank into a seat and, after thrusting the popcorn buckets at Syreeta, he finally gave in to the caller’s doggedness by switching off his phone.
‘You should call that person back, it must be important,’ Syreeta whispered as the movie started.
On the drive back to Oniru Estate, while waiting at a red light on Ozumba Mbadiwe Avenue, Furo was startled by a pained moan from Syreeta, who, when he looked, was doubled over the steering wheel but straightened up as soon as the amber flashed. After the Honda darted forwards, she responded to his queries by saying it was her period and she had forgotten to buy tampons and so would make a stop at a pharmacy in The Palms. ‘I’ll be quick, wait here for me,’ she told him after she parked, and leaving the engine running and the air conditioning blowing, she set off for the Rubik’s Cube building of the mall. When Furo lost track of her pink blouse in the rainbow crowd that swarmed the mall’s entrance, he took out his phone and powered it on. The start-up tone was interrupted by the beep of an incoming message and, tapping the keypad with cold sweaty fingers, he saw that the SMS was indeed from the same number that had been SOS-ing him. As he read and reread the words, ‘
I know who you are & I’ll tell everyone the truth soon, just wait and see!
’ the suspicion he had been suppressing ever since his pizza breakfast was ruined by the persistent ringing rose from his belly in seafood-smelling waves of nausea.
The message was clear. No doubt about it, someone had found out the truth about him. Thirty green blinks of the dashboard clock were all Furo could bear of the eternity of suspense, and in that time he cursed Obata, he ruled out Tosin, absolved Arinze and dismissed Headstrong, so in the end, with his heart beating in his fingertips, he took up the phone, dialled the malignant number, and was still waiting for it to ring when a female android voice uttered into his ear, ‘
The number you have dialled is unavailable at the moment. Please try again later. The number you have dialled is unavailable …
’ He dialled again and again, all the while hoping the automated response was the usual falsehood from network providers to conceal their shoddy service, but at last, on sighting Syreeta in the distance, he gave up trying and accepted that his fate was that of a crying child whose mother couldn’t sleep. No rest for him until he cut off all ties with his former life.
Monday night in bed, during a lover’s quarrel over nothing, Syreeta said to Furo, ‘Why are you such a big dictator?’ to which he replied smirking, ‘Because you’re a small country.’
They laughed together.
Night, Tuesday, alone at home, sprawled on his back in Syreeta’s bed, surrounded by the ghosts of her woman smell, a book –
Are You Ready to Succeed?
– clutched in his hands, eyes smarting from the friction of reading, Furo looked up and sighed, ‘Igoni.’
He had been thinking of her lately.
On Wednesday morning, Headstrong drove Furo and Arinze to the airport in Arinze’s Mercedes jeep, and when they arrived at MMA2, after alighting with his pigskin suitcase, Arinze told Headstrong, ‘Head straight back to the office and hand over my key to Tosin.’ The sternness in Arinze’s voice caught Furo’s attention as he lifted out his borrowed carpetbag, and the driver’s response, in a grovelling tone, ‘Yes, sir – journey mercies, sir,’ made him wonder what he was missing in the exchange. Then Arinze led the way into the bustling terminal, where long lines of people waited at the airline counters, and Furo nodded yes at his boss’s suggestion that they check in at separate counters to halve the chances of both missing the flight due to encounters with glitchy computers or bungling personnel. Before parting they agreed to meet afterwards in the departure lounge. Furo joined a queue, and after long minutes of watching in fuming silence as cowards in front of him yielded to incursions by bullies from behind, he got his chance at the counter. He handed his passport to the neckscarved ticketing agent, who shot him a searching look and stared down at the passport, but looked up again at his face, and then called over a colleague, a man. Furo’s cheek muscles suffered to uphold his mask of unconcern as the two agents consulted in whispers while glancing from the passport to him, and at last the male agent laughed, gave Furo a cheery thumbs-up, and walked away shaking his head. After checking Furo in, the woman passed him his passport and boarding pass before saying by way of apology:
‘I’ve never seen a white man with a Nigerian name before.’
Furo passed through immigration without incident, without so much as a curious glance from the bored-looking female officer who thumbed through his passport, and without the body scanner detecting his metal buckle. A male officer, green-bereted and rubber-gloved, noticed the buckle while conducting a body search of the spread-eagled Furo, and then told him in a listless tone that he should have removed it, but when Furo apologised and dropped his hands to his belt, the man waved him through. Smiling with relief at this casual confirmation that he had passed all the tests, that his passport was authentic and so was he, the passport holder, Furo strode to the conveyor belt, picked up his property, and after putting his shoes back on, he ambled off in search of Arinze, whose waving hand he shortly spotted from a seat row beside their boarding gate.
Their flight was two hours late, and yet Arinze was unbothered by the wait. He reassured Furo by reminding him that the meeting with Yuguda was set for five o’clock, and he disclosed that the only reason they were catching a morning flight for a forty-five minute trip was because he had expected the delay. As he and Furo rose from their seats and joined the surge towards the boarding gate, he said to Furo, ‘Trust our airlines too much and you’ll be late. Fly them long enough and you’ll be dead.’
After the plane landed, as Furo followed the press of bodies down the aisle towards the exit, he passed by a first-class-seated woman in Bob Marley braids who clasped a mixed-race toddler in her arms. The child, on catching sight of Furo, stretched her toy arms in welcome and cried out in a tone of rapture, ‘Dah-dah!’ Furo was startled, but the mother more so. ‘Jeez!’ she exclaimed with a shamed expression, and tightened her grasp on the squirming child.
Even a baby, when surrounded by people of identical skin colour, is prone to the error that one slight difference constitutes an individual.
This was Furo’s first visit to Abuja. Arinze, though, was a recurrent visitor, a frequent flyer to Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport. This showed in the confidence with which he navigated the domestic terminal and ignored its patches of happy-green synthetic turf scattered with gold-painted stones and forested with mirrored pillars. Holding his gaze away from the funhouse glitz, Furo walked beside Arinze with mimicked poise. Arinze’s regular driver was waiting for them outside the terminal building. On the long drive to their hotel, he indulged the man’s talkativeness, while Furo, alone in the back seat, stared out the taxi’s windows at the broad avenues of the Federal Capital Territory, the brutalist architecture of the government buildings, the unfamiliar Sahel skyline, the swathes of greenery awash in sizzling sunlight, the roadside cameras which the driver pointed out as the latest effort against the machinations of those fanatic murderers who hated books. After the driver ran out of Boko Haram bombings to report, Arinze craned his neck over the seat back and asked Furo what he thought of Abuja.
‘I don’t know,’ Furo responded. ‘It’s different from Lagos.’
‘That’s true,’ Arinze said. ‘Lagos was built from blood and sweat and raw ambition. Abuja was designed as a playground for the rich. I’m sure some will argue that there’s nothing wrong with that, but when the rest of your country is populated with desperate people, your dream city hasn’t much chance of retaining its character. Some of the worst slums in Nigeria can be found on Abuja’s outskirts.’
‘Just like where I live!’ the driver exclaimed. ‘I’ve done taxi business in Port Harcourt and Lagos, and I’ve driven buses in Ghana, in Liberia, but Daki Biu is the worst place I’ve ever lived. They don’t have water anywhere.’
On that topic the taxi driver took off again, as he described his experiences in the fantastical shanty towns of the West African coast – Makoko in Lagos, Rainbow Town in Port Harcourt, Old Fadama in Accra, and West Point in Monrovia, all of which existed by waterways, unlike the dustbowl of Daki Biu – and he didn’t exhaust his nostalgia or empty his windbag of stories until the car drew to a stop at their destination, a multi-storey hotel in the upmarket district of Wuse II. There was no time to dawdle as their meeting at Yuguda’s residence was drawing near, and so Furo and Arinze dropped off their luggage in their rooms, then sat down to a quick lunch with the driver in the hotel restaurant. In Furo’s hurry to finish his outsized meal, he spilled banga soup on his pearl-grey necktie, his favourite, the only one he had brought along on the trip, but Arinze said in response to his muttered apologies, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you.’ They left the restaurant, Arinze and the driver heading for the car, while Furo ran to the elevator and rode up to his sixth-floor quarters. His equilibrium restored by the wet patch on his tie, he joined them in the car, and they set off for Asokoro just after four. All through the drive Furo faced the open window so the car’s draught would dry his tie.