Ннеди Окорафор - Lagos Noir

In today’s Lagos, without money to buy your way, ideals of comfort are impossible to find. The man admitted this to himself after he had suffered enough of the landlady’s smell. She kept him waiting sixteen days into the contractual start of his tenancy before handing over the key to his apartment. During that fretful period he traveled over from Surulere to pay her five separate visits, none lasting less than two hours of one-sided chatter and remorseless bruising of his olfactory senses. The first time she insulted him was on the second of these visits. He had interrupted the rerun of her life story around nine o’clock to say he needed to start heading back to Surulere because he had work tomorrow, upon which her tone sharpened into anger as she called him a disrespectful Igbo man. That night his sole response was, “I am not Igbo,” but even such anodyne assertions of fact were enough to tip her into boiling rages, as he experienced on every visit afterward until he gained his key. Whenever the spirit moved her, her mouth became as offensive as her odor.

In the early weeks of his occupancy the man thought he was the problem, that something he did or didn’t do had turned her off him, some cultural blindness on his part perhaps, like not bowing his head when he greeted her in his stilted Yoruba; or calling her Alhaja (the honorific the agent had addressed her by) rather than Mama as most people did; or not offering to carry her shopping bag the evening they met at the gate as she returned from buying smoked fish around the corner. He ceased overcompensating in his attitude toward her (mainly by surrendering his time to the black hole of her loneliness) only after the first furtive visit from his neighbor, the woman who lived in the front upstairs apartment. Before she showed up at his door he saw her every weekday morning for six weeks as she drove off with her two children — she dressed for work, they for school — in her beat-up Nissan sedan, and yet, without fail, every time he greeted her, she only nodded, never spoke. But that night in his apartment, with the louvers closed for privacy, she apologized for her seeming rudeness. It was because of the landlady, who would accuse them of gossiping about her if she saw them together. It was a pattern the neighbor said had played out countless times in the nine months she had resided in this building, and now that she was counting down to the end of her tenancy, she hoped to avoid repeats until she moved out. As penance for her cowardice she told the man everything she knew about the old woman, filling in the missing parts of the life story he had heard over and over from a source whose sincerity he had always sniffed at. The neighbor spoke about the landlady’s instant mood changes, her paranoia about everything, her deceitfulness over anything, her gaping lapses in logic, her willingness to employ aggression in word and action at any chance she got — most of which the man already knew through hard-won experience, though what he didn’t know was that everybody knew. When the neighbor confirmed she had gotten her apartment through the same agent who led him into this trap, the man realized he had before him all he needed to answer his own questions about how he found what he was looking for in Egbeda. There was nothing left to talk about, end of story; and so the landlady’s prisoners wished each other good night.

That same night, as the man was taking out the garbage after frying sweet potatoes and egg sauce for a late dinner, he saw the big brown rat on his doorstep for the first time.

Victoria Island

Luke Adewale, president and CEO of Competent Communications, died suddenly and unexpectedly after a tragic fall at his home residence on Friday. He was sixty years old, and expired after sustaining severe injuries. In addition to his dedication to his beloved wife, daughter, and the rest of his family, he was also an avid gardener, amateur swimmer, and self-made house designer. In his limited free time, he enjoyed evening strolls, table tennis, and watching sports, in particular Chelsea F.C. He was a dedicated and humble church member and was passionate about supporting causes that improved the lives of young girls and women. An ocean of condolences immediately began to pour in as soon as his passing was announced.

Speaking of oceans, Victoria Island is slipping into the Atlantic, but nobody wants to know. People have other, more pressing things to worry about. Take Mr. Adewale, for example, who, on his last day, while having breakfast, complains most vociferously about the neighbors. Would he have done so had he known that the next day these same neighbors would be wailing at the news of his death? But in that moment, as in every moment of his life, his own death fails to cross his mind. His audience, Mrs. Adewale, gently reminds him that where they live is still considered the crème de la crème of Lagos, which brings Mr. Adewale no comfort. He built his Victoria Island mansion in 1991, and deems every house constructed thereafter an encroachment — a mass of higgledy-piggledy dwellings conspiring to block his ocean view. So no, Victoria Island is not the crème de la crème. Not anymore.

“Listen,” he says, opening the sliding doors so that the wife might better hear the roar of the neighbor’s pneumatic drill and the drone of generators.

“Yes, dear. Please close it,” she sighs, slapping about her legs in expectation of mosquitoes let in from outside.

“You see what I mean?” he presses, impatiently kissing his teeth. “All of this random construction with no zoning laws, no building codes, and no thought for aesthetics! Is this the sort of legacy we want to leave for our children?” He believes he’s made his case, oblivious to the fact that his wife is bored with the topic and especially bored with him.

Mrs. Adewale finds her husband’s ramblings tiresome and pedantic, and the reference to children irritating. She sometimes wishes he’d just hurry up and die. He’s grown fat in recent years and prone to wheezing. One would think that in such a state... and yet the man lives on. Things might have been more tolerable if only she had someone to complain to, but her friends are jealous. They wonder why she isn’t content with her wealthy husband. Who cares if she’s never been able to bear the man a child, or that the inherited daughter from the man’s first marriage is trouble? The girl is away at boarding school most of the time, so what’s the problem? But never mind these friends. She’ll soon put all of this behind her.

The inheritance now joins them for breakfast, to which Mrs. Adewale reacts with her habitual withering glance, envious of the ease with which the girl wears her low-rise jeans and sequined tank top. It’s not a look meant for middle-aged women, but Mrs. Adewale has occasionally tried squeezing herself into such things, maddened that her youth and beauty are slipping away just when the new pastor has taken an interest in her. Why these sudden blotches on the face, the threads of gray hair, and worst of all, the deep fleshy rings encircling her neck like Indian bangles — dozens of them!

“Look at you!” Mr. Adewale exclaims, seeing how his daughter is dressed. “Who told you to dress like Jezebel?

“Go and change!” chimes Mrs. Adewale.

“Didn’t you hear your mother? Go and change!”

“She’s not my mother,” Tinuke mutters, seething at being shamed in front of the wicked witch.

“Go!” he shouts, loud enough for Cecilia to hear from the kitchen.

Cecilia lifts the frying pan off the stove and listens. She’s worked for this family long enough to know when to be quiet, but now that she’s decided to leave, she wonders why she bothers. She thinks again of the petroleum minister whose cook, the papers say, stole millions from the minister’s vault. What she intends to take is just pocket change in comparison.