Ннеди Окорафор - Lagos Noir

“N3,500, aunty. Traffic go plenty at this time. Where is the address?”

So I sit in the back, listening to the engine rattle and the sound of him hacking up phlegm between coughs, and I wonder if he recognized me too. Probably not, because he’s chattering away about the traffic and the new fuel price, and for the first time I’m happy that I chose to pay the police for a car tint permit that was supposed to be free.

“Now I have to work nights because of this fuel increase,” he’s saying. “Good thing I finished praying and saw you. After evening prayers now I carry one more passenger, then I go home to Iya Hafusa.”

I don’t know what it is about me that invites monologues from stangers, but there’s no point getting angry or saying I don’t want to talk. I just nod, hmm , and eeyah from time to time.

I’m leaning back so the chair is rocking on its hind legs. He flips through my file and then stares at the prescription pad.

“Are you sleeping these days?”

“Not without the diazepam.”

“Did you try breaking the pills in half like I told you to?”

“No.”

“What about the dreams?”

“They’re still there. Very vivid.”

“Still sci-fi themed?”

“Yes, and I still wake with a heavy head.”

The nurse smiles when she sees me on my way out. “You’re adding some weight. That’s very good.”

I smile back at her, but as soon as I get outside I turn to look at my reflection in the glass door. I’ve put on three kilos since I started using epilim, that’s three kilos more than I’ve gained in the last ten years, since I hit my last growth spurt at fourteen. I know I’ll obsess about it again but I tell myself not to panic.

I go to the canteen to eat amala and ewedu before heading to the pharmacy. I’ve developed a rhythm around my visits and I have to do everything in the same order. The last time I came, there was no ewedu soup and I found myself tearing up later at the pharmacy.

Today, to make up for that last time, I order an extra portion and tell my past self that everything will be all right at the end of the day.

I hate waiting, but I find that often I have to wait for others to arrive. So now I’m sitting here nursing a lukewarm bottle of Coke, waiting for the taxi driver to get here. I hate driving to the mainland, but that’s not why I’m waiting for him. I’ve been driving less and less these days, and finding myself at the taxi stand more often. Some days they say he’s out, but I wait for him to come back and drive me home from work. Today, I took a taxi to Yaba from home, then I called and told him to meet me here at three p.m. Yet now it’s 3:32 and I’m still waiting.

Lucy has barely been eating for weeks, and I’m tired of my apartment smelling like dead mice. I moved her cage to the spare bedroom two weeks ago, but I can’t avoid taking her to the vet anymore. I put her in the shift box and latch it.

At work, whenever anyone asks me what’s inside the box, I say that it’s toys for my nephews.

“I didn’t know you had nephews,” Kaz says, grinding his hips into my desk and shifting my papers to make space for himself. “In fact, I thought you were an only child.”

“Yeah.” The box shakes and I raise my voice: “There are rattles in there. I should take out the batteries.”

“Have lunch with me today,” Kaz says. “You play hard to get.”

I smile.

“You see? I’ve never seen you smile. Your eyes are prettier when you smile.”

“I have to run a quick errand to VI at lunch,” I say, pointing at the box. “Is it okay if I go?”

“Okay, but you can’t escape me. Clear it with HR and go. You must have lunch with me soon, Tola. But before you go, please make me some coffee.”

I smile and widen my eyes as he walks out.

I go to the kitchen to make him a cup of coffee. Three cubes of sugar this time, with eight ten-milligram diazepam tablets and no cream.

When I give it to him, he looks at me and says, “When you come back, please remind me to call my doctor. The man says my drugs haven’t been working well.”

“It must be all the coffee you drink,” I remark.

“Hey, Steph.” I drop by her office before my lunch break. These days I call her Steph — it makes her eager to do what I want. She smiles. Her smile is pretty, unlike her laugh.

“What’s up, girl?”

I tell myself not to cringe, so I smile and widen my eyes. I’ve learned that it makes my eyes brighter and my smile seem more genuine.

“I have to run a quick errand and I don’t know how long it’ll take. Cover for me?”

“Sure, girl.”

“You’re the best.”

I hold the shift box in front of me and walk to the taxi stand on Broad Street. All the cabbies know me by this point.

“Baba Hafusa,” one of them calls out, “come and carry your customer-o.”

But he’s busy arguing in front of the hospital gate. The young lady he’s talking to has a phone in her hand and is not paying him mind.

“I be taxi driver nor mean say I nor fit born you. I get your type at home. I have child your age. Mo ni e nile nau.”

“Oga, story niyen, please give me my change.”

And this is the point where he flips and threatens to slap her.

“Try it,” she says, typing on her phone.

“What are you going to do?” he yells at her.

The other men are laughing and telling him to leave her alone.

“You get customer wey dey wait for you-o,” the taxi park chairman calls out to him.

The driver sees me and walks over. “Don’t mind this Ashewo girl,” he says. “All these small, small girls are following big men, and because of that she thinks she can be talking rude to me.”

I stare at him, willing him to shut up. My phone beeps. It’s a message from Stephanie: Babes! Kaz just collapsed in the office. They’re taking him to the hospital. Poor guy.

I smile and my eyes widen.

“All these Lagos girls,” the taxi driver says as he jimmies open his door. “You close early?”

I get in the back. “No, I’m going to VI.”

As he turns onto Marina Road, I say to him, “Did you know that girl you were fighting with?”

“No-o. I drove the yeye girl to the hospital and she’s talking rude because of N200.”

“So why did you call her a prostitute?”

“All these Lagos girls, that’s what they are,” he replies. “God save us from them. Few responsible girls with job like you.”

I smile. “But why must woman exist for man to be closer to God?”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“I guess man always needs a woman to blame.” I twist the latch on Lucy’s shift box and let her slither onto my lap and down my legs.

“Are you talking to me, aunty?”

“Stop at the beginning of Ahmadu Bello,” I tell him, handing him money.

“I go carry you home for evening?”

“We’ll see,” I say, clutching the empty box to my chest.

Yaba

Right there, at the street corner by the roundabout that circumscribed the faded statue of the army general in a marshaling pose, stood Bisola’s food shed. It was an old shed, built from corrugated zinc, cardboard flaps, and an oversized sun umbrella to protect her burning coal embers from the frequent lashes of gritty breeze. Bisola’s Power Joint, everyone called it — for it was here you could buy the best roasted corn and coconuts, when in season, or the juiciest chicken gizzards dunked in pepper sauce and garnished with onion rings. Even better — this was like legend — her akara was made from properly processed, unadulterated bean paste fried in properly purchased, unadulterated vegetable oil. When the bean balls emerged from her pan of hot oil, they remained golden brown with a soft simmering dent in the middle, so abounding with freshness that people lined up for meters to fill their stomachs with these spheres of delight. For her regular customers, Bisola dusted a spice mixture of pepper and groundnuts into the dents in the center, then smiled a dimpled smile when the non-regulars protested the unfairness of her selective service. Pretending to point out that the added spice would cost them more, she would sprinkle the pepper and groundnuts anyway, talking in her slurred, deep voice and working her large, veiny hands. Her laugh sounded like a drum roll from the marching drill at the army barracks not far away, a laugh that might have tumbled from something strong, like the chest of the statue of the army general perpetually striding toward her shed, observing her as she sat basting gizzards, roasting corn, and molding bean cakes six days a week from noon till a little after ten p.m.