A. Barrett - Blackass

Furo couldn’t help admitting that some part of his gratefulness was due to his new appearance. Syreeta was helpful to him because he looked like he did. He was almost sure of that, because why else would she do all she had for him? She had paid his bill at the cafe, allowed him into her bed, massaged him to sleep last night, and now, at some risk to her relationship (odd affair though that was, one where she made her man jealous by sending him a staged photo of herself in the arms of another man), she had solved his problem of a place to stay. He was grateful to her, and yet he was also mindful of who she thought he was and why women like her usually moved with men like him. Her big new jeep, her well-furnished apartment in Lekki, her living alone in style and among gadgets, her ease with money and trendy places, her apparent lack of an office job or a homerun business, all of these pointed to her status as woman who knew what was what. A woman who knew how to handle men. Who knew how to live off them. Who knew the going value of a white man in Lagos. And Furo, for all the street savvy and survivor skills he prided himself on, had no idea where Syreeta was leading him.

The sky had faded into a seashell blue. Birdsong assailed the air. Voices shouting in greeting filled the streets. A nearby car vroomed into life. A new day rising.

Syreeta rose with the day, strolled across to her cluttered vanity table, and stooped beside it to open a cabinet fridge. She straightened up and turned around to face the bed with a Five Alive carton clutched in her hand. Left arm akimbo, she threw back her head and gulped from the carton. Red juice spilled down her chin, flowed between her breasts and into the trimmed V below her belly. With an ‘Ah’ of pleasure she pulled the carton from her lips, and looking at Furo, she raised it to him in question. When he nodded yes, she said: ‘Come and get it.’

She watched with a knowing smile as Furo searched through the rumpled bedclothes for his boxer shorts. Giving up, he swung his legs to the rug and stood up, his hands hanging down by his sides. Her smile widened to reveal teeth as he walked towards her. He reached for the juice carton, but at the last moment she whipped it behind her back. ‘I have some rules in this house,’ she said. ‘You’ll wash your own plates. You won’t drop rubbish on my floor or leave your clothes scattered about. You’ll do your own share of the housework. You must inform me whenever you plan to stay out late. And if you ever bring a woman into this house—’ She left the threat hanging and stared him in the eye. ‘I hope we’re clear?’

‘Very clear,’ he said.

‘It’s just better for you to know my rules from the start,’ she said, holding his gaze, ‘so we don’t have trouble later.’ She glanced down at his crotch and gave a soft laugh. ‘As for that one, I don’t know o. It’s now complicated. We’ll see how it goes. Here, have some juice, maybe it will cool you down.’ Still laughing, she brushed past him as he raised the carton to his lips.

Furo’s eyes avoided the vanity table in front of him, the tall mirror affixed to it. Through the window above the fridge he saw the morning face of the sun suspended in the cold-coloured sky, and behind him he heard Syreeta tumble into bed. Then a muffled scream punched the air, and Furo, coughing up juice, whirled around to find Syreeta staring. She raised her hand, pointed a stiffened finger at his groin, her movements slow, her eyes rounded as she said:

‘What happened?’

He glanced down in fear. ‘What?’

‘Your ass, your ass! I mean your ass!’

Furo spun around, saw his reflection; then turned again and looked over his shoulder.

‘Your ass is black!’ Syreeta cried, and as Furo stared in the mirror, frozen in shock, she flung up her arms, flopped on her back, and wailed with laughter.

Furo Wariboko persisted in my thoughts after I left him at the mall, and so I did what everyone does these days: I Googled him. The search results pointed me to either Facebook or Twitter, and since I was no longer on Facebook (I deleted my account after I started receiving homophobic messages over my personal essay on wanting to be a girl), I followed the Twitter links. Now is the time to admit this: from the first moment I saw Furo I suspected I’d found a story, but it was when I heard him speak that I finally knew. A white man with a strong Nigerian accent, stranded in Lagos without a place to stay, without any friends to turn to, and with a job as a bookseller for a company so small I hadn’t heard of it? Even if I hadn’t met the hero myself, hadn’t gleaned the details directly from the source, and even if I had plucked the whole fiction out of the air, there was no way in hell the writer in me was going to miss the rat smell of the story. What I didn’t know though was the scale of the story. For that discovery I have Twitter to thank. It was there that I found out about the Furo who had gone missing in Lagos one day before I met my Furo. And it was from the tweeted photos of that lost Furo that I realised my own Furo used to be black.

Furo’s story didn’t emerge abracadabra-quick. It took me some time to weave the fragments I gathered from Twitter into any sort of narrative. (The thing with Twitter is: to get what you want from it, you first have to give it what it wants. As with most social networking platforms, the currency on Twitter is the users who sign up and the content they generate. Every currency holds value for someone somewhere, whether that value is based on gold or the stock market or, in the case of Twitter, popularity; that blanket word, which, for the pinpoint purpose of metaphor, I will now proceed to formularise as P = U x C x T. Extrapolating this to Twitter, popularity equals ‘500 million users’ multiplied by ‘content generated by users’ multiplied by ‘time spent on Twitter by users’. Yes, time — the terminus of all rigmaroles.) And so I, @_igoni, spent bundles of time on Twitter. Hours spent lurking on the timelines of virtual strangers. Hours spent snooping through megabytes of diarrhoeic data. But my investment paid off, I got what I wanted, I found @pweetychic_tk, whom I realised was Furo’s sister as I read this tweet of hers:

Pls help RT. This is my missing bro Furo Wariboko in the pic. He left home Monday morn & no news of him since. pic.twitter.com/0J9xt5WaW

I followed her on Twitter, of course, and going through her timeline hour after hour and day by day, reading her tweets for hidden meanings in her abbreviations and punctuation choices, and searching for mood flaggers like what news stories she retweeted and favorited, and monitoring her movements from the geotagging of her shared photos and videos, I began to get some insight into a part of Furo’s story that cannot be told better than by the family he left behind.

@pweetychic_tk: Wednesday, 20 June

09:08 | Hello Twitter! #myfirstTweet

09:10 | Pls help RT. This is my missing bro Furo Wariboko in the pic. He left home Monday morn & no news of him since. pic.twitter.com/0J9xt5WaW

09:26 | RT ‘@RubyOsa: My cousin @pweetychic_tk has just joined Twitter. #Follow her. Her big bro got lost in Eko 2 days ago!’ Thanks Ruby.

10:14 | @RubyOsa Furo is also on Twitter. His handle is @efyouaruoh

10:31 | Thanks! RT ‘@lazyeyedben: Hello @pweetychic_tk. I dig your pic. I’m now #ffing.’

11:01 | I’m fed up with this ASUU strike. 2 whole months without school!

14:37 | I’m hungry.

14:59 | Without @efyouaruoh the house is lonely. Mum & Dad are looking for him. I’m getting afraid. Maybe something has really happened.