A. Barrett - Blackass

Syreeta was standing where Furo had left her but she was no longer alone. A portly Chinese man wearing rumpled cargo shorts and a crocodile-patterned shirt was speaking to her (her face was averted from his fixed, unctuous smile) and indicating with his hands that she follow him. When Furo arrived at the elevator, the man dropped his arms to his sides and fell silent. ‘Done?’ Syreeta asked, and when Furo answered yes, the man veered his face towards him, his smile wiped off. Syreeta poked the elevator button, the doors slid open, and the man backed away.

They rode up in silence, all the while looking down at the spread of the city through the elevator’s glass wall. Reaching the second floor, they emerged into a corridor, and Syreeta led the way across its deep carpet. In the last few feet to the corridor’s end, as Furo saw that the door ahead was inscribed ‘African Bar’, he hastened around her and held the door open. With a quick look at his face, she brushed past him into a dimly lit hall. Spinning disco lights, their gaudy pinpoints ricocheting off swaying silhouettes, showed a path across the dance floor. The moody melody of Bobby Benson’s ‘Taxi Driver’ boomed from speakers in the ceiling. Arranged along the walls were widely spaced tables, many occupied and shimmering with drinks. Near the entrance, a man and woman danced with their arms around each other’s waists, their heads on each other’s shoulders, and their feet scraping the floor in a sleepy harmony that paid no heed to the music.

Syreeta headed straight for the bar, whose long wooden counter was decorated with a pair of imitation elephant tusks stuck upright in pedestals, one at each end. Behind the counter stood a drinks cabinet stacked full of liquor bottles, their cognac browns and campari reds and curaçao blues highlighted by narrow beams of halogen light. As Syreeta climbed on to a bar stool, the barman came forwards with a happy-to-see-you smile and greeted her by name.

‘Evening o, Clement,’ she responded. ‘How work today?’

‘Work dey, my sister. I no fit complain.’ To Furo he said, ‘Good evening, sir,’ and after Furo returned the greeting, he reverted to Syreeta. ‘Make I bring the usual?’

‘No, I’m not staying,’ Syreeta said. ‘I just want you to do something quick-quick for me.’ She opened her handbag, drew out her BlackBerry, and fiddled with the keypad. ‘Abeg take a picture of me and my friend. Come to this side — I want the bar to show behind us.’

‘No problem,’ said the barman as he accepted the phone from Syreeta’s outstretched hand. He walked to the end of the counter, lifted the flap door and passed through, then stopped a yard away from their stools and, holding up the phone, said, ‘Tell me when you ready.’ Syreeta turned to Furo. ‘Put your arm around my shoulder.’ He hesitated, mystified about where she was going with all of this, but spurred on by her stare, he obeyed. She leaned into his embrace before saying: ‘Don’t face the camera, look at me.’ He locked his gaze on the clear skin of her forehead and pulled a tense smile, and when she called out, ‘Ready,’ the camera flashed.

Back in the car, after switching on the engine and adjusting the blow of the vents, Syreeta held her phone two-handed against the steering wheel and tapped the keypad for several minutes. ‘Rubbish!’ she muttered at last. With a hiss of annoyance, she tossed the phone along with her handbag on to the back seat. Then she said to Furo in a composed tone: ‘Time to go home.’

Home was just around the corner from The Palms. The car turned off the highway and sped through a succession of side streets that threw off Furo’s bearings, and then cruised down a stretch of blacktop which ran from end to end of a housing estate. On the left side of the road stood a high fence, beyond which was the rest of the world. On the right, arranged in a barrack sprawl of identical roofs, was Oniru Estate. Syreeta parked by the side of the road, metres away from the second gate and, after climbing down barefooted from the car, she opened the back door and took out her red-blinking phone, her handbag, the plastic bag containing her packed meal, and a pair of rubber slippers, which she slipped her feet into before beeping the car locked. Furo followed her across the road to a plank footbridge balanced over the roadside gully, and then through a pedestrian gate into the residential area. White sand, a deep layer of it, covered the pathways between houses. They trudged through this seabed, her slippers flinging grains back at him, his feet sinking with every step. Sand slipped into his shoes and chafed his ankles, and by the time they arrived at her apartment, there was sand gritting between his teeth.

Like most houses in Oniru Estate, Syreeta’s was as down-to-earth as a concrete bunker. The slapdash architecture only allowed for one design flourish, which was the whitewash on the walls. The front door opened on to the kitchen. Syreeta had switched on the kitchen light when her phone, which had kept ringing during the drive from the hotel, started up again. She didn’t take the call until she led Furo to the parlour and sank down beside him on the settee.

‘What do you want?’ The phone pressed to her ear with her right hand, she inspected the fingernails of her left. Almost a minute passed before she spoke again. ‘I’m not your property. Tell that to your wife.’ As she listened, she dropped her hand in her lap, tugged up her skirt, and scratched the inside of her thigh. Catching Furo’s eye, she stuck out her tongue at him. ‘I met him at The Palms. I was bored and he asked me out. Did you think I would sit there and wait for you all night?’ A pause, and then she yelled, ‘ Don’t shout at me! ’

Furo sat as still as a photograph: Syreeta looked like an explosion waiting to happen. Whatever was going on between her and her boyfriend wasn’t his business. Especially as Syreeta seemed intent on involving him. He hoped she knew where she was taking this game of hers.

There was a loaded silence as the other man did all the talking, and he seemed to be saying the right words, because Syreeta’s face began shedding its tension — her mouth, at some point, parted in a reluctant smile — and when she spoke her tone was calm. ‘I’m not at home.’ She listened and then retorted: ‘You should have thought of that before you stood me up. I have to go back to my friend. Call me tomorrow if you want.’ Ending the call on that dagger thrust, she tossed the phone on to the settee, but after a moment’s thought she snatched it up, pressed down the power button until the screen went blank, and then slipped it into her handbag. She yawned and stretched, throwing her arms wide and her legs forwards. Her yawn morphed into a grin. ‘Let’s get ready for your massage,’ she said to Furo. And in a serious tone: ‘But you have to bathe first. You smell of Lagos.’ Gathering up her handbag and the plastic bag of food, she rose to her feet and strode to a door, nudged it open, flicked a switch, and then spoke from the lighted doorway. ‘Give me a few minutes to dress the bedroom. You can start removing your clothes.’

With Syreeta out of sight, Furo cast a look around him, hoping to get a sense of this creature from her den. Her house seemed clean enough, there were no cobwebs in the ceiling corners and the paint job was unsmirched under the light switches. He also noticed that the parlour was furnished with mismatched items, none of which seemed handed down. The settee on which he sat was upholstered in blue corduroy, and the rest of the sitting arrangements, two armchairs, were vermilion chintz. The chairs were cardinal points to the magnetic centre of a round black table, with the settee taken as south and the armchairs as east and west; and due north, up against the facing wall, stood a pinewood cabinet stacked with electronics: glossy black widescreen TV, ceramic-white DVD player, green-and-silver stereo, and a DSTV decoder in metallic plastic. Everything spoke of new money and no eye for colour planning.