Welcome to Lagos. Chibundu Onuzo

      CHIKE DID NOT KNOW how he had come to exchange the command of one platoon for another. There was Yẹmi, constantly running his mouth, and the girl, on the verge of crying into her rice, and the boy who had somehow attached himself to them, asking to borrow money for his meal. Oma was the only person he did not feel responsible for. She had gone to meet her cousin, promising to return and show them a place to stay. She shook his hand when she said goodbye and it had felt permanent, a small panic rising in him as she walked away.

      When he saw her on the other side of the road, loose skirt billowing from the rushing cars, he felt the kind of gratitude he had not known since his childhood when his mother shook him from his dreams.

      “Oma, welcome. If you can just give us directions, we’ll find our way.”

      “The place is called Tamara Inn. I’m going there too.”

      “But your cousin—”

      “She doesn’t live there again. I don’t know her new address.”

      “A number?”

      “I foolishly left my phone behind.”

      They passed through a neighborhood of small businesses and modest houses, the industrial rumble of generators filling the air. Roadside food was there for the foraging, suya skewered and grilling, meat pies trapped in lit-up glass cages, golden nuggets of puffpuff bobbing in vats of hot oil, boli and groundnut to be mashed together in one mouthful.

      The hotel’s electronic sign flashed from afar, the letters expanding and contracting, restless on the building’s facade. There was no one else in Tamara Inn. The dining room was empty, the TV tuned to CNN at odds with the shabby cloth napkins, folded into collapsing shapes, waiting for guests to shake them free. They would all share one room. Chike and Oma would split the cost. Yẹmi took him aside before he paid.

      “Which kain thing be this? Maybe she wan’ use us for ritual o.”

      “She can’t kill all of us at the same time.”

      “No be joke matter.”

      They were led to their room by flashlight, single file down the corridor, Chike last in the column, stumbling in the dark. Their room lights were working, thankfully. He noticed the room’s curtains first: a pale yellow that showed the dirt from the countless fingers that had twitched them aside. A concrete view lay behind the mesh of mosquito netting nailed to the wooden window frames. The bed was large enough for three, four with imagination, not that Oma or Isoken would imagine such a thing.

      Isoken went to the bathroom and locked the door. They heard the gush of running water and then the sound of bathing, rain crashing on zinc. Oma stripped the pillows, baring their lumpy foam bodies. She turned their cases inside out and began to dress them again, stuffing them into their sacks.

      “Are you going to do that for the sheets as well?” Chike asked.

      “Should I?”

      “I don’t know. I was joking.”

      In the bathroom, Isoken was crying, the sound passing through the door and into the room.

      “What’s the matter with her?” Oma asked, holding a pillow to her body like a baby.

      “A difficult time recently,” Chike said.

      “Well, whatever the matter is, there’s no use crying for so long. We’ve all had difficult times.”

      She grasped the edge of the sheet and tore it off the bed.

      “Difficult times are made better with good music,” Fineboy sang.

      “That’s one of the jingles from Bayelsa Beats, isn’t it?” Oma said.

      “Yup. I used to work there.”

      “Really? I’ve never heard of any presenter called Fineboy.”

      “I did the opening lines. Like: ‘You’re listening to High Life Monday on Bayelsa Beats FM. Don’t touch that dial.’”

      “Chineke! It’s like the radio is inside the room. Isn’t that marvelous,” she said, turning to Chike.

      “Yes,” he said. “There are many marvelous things about Fineboy.”

      “How do you know each other?”

      “We met while we were working,” Chike said.

      “You worked in radio as well?”

      “No. I was a government worker.”

      “I hope I’m not asking too many questions.”

      The mattress lay exposed. In its center was a large brown stain, some waste product excreted or blood released, the mark too spread out to be ordinary menses. Blood from a deflowering perhaps, a quaking teenager and his girlfriend, fumbling until they soiled the sheets. Oma began to lift the mattress.

      “Please come and help me. It’s heavy.”

      Chike and Yẹmi joined her. Only Fineboy remained aloof on the floor.

      “Don’t bother,” the boy said when the mattress stood straight, needing only a push to be flipped over.

      “Why?”

      “The other side is worse.”

      Chike walked around and saw the green growth, spiraling in all directions.

      “You don’t want to see,” he said to Oma. “Let’s just put it back the way it was.”

      Isoken came out of the bathroom in cleaner, freer clothes and they took their sleeping positions. Women on the bed, men on the floor, Fineboy as far away from the women as possible.

      CHIKE WOKE UP AT three in the morning, the time ticking on his watch face. His platoon would be on night patrol, creeping through the Delta.

      “Yẹmi. Are you sleeping?”

      “Wetin?”

      “Your family nkọ?” Chike asked.

      “My mother is dead. My father dey for Ijẹbu.”

      “Why didn’t you go there?”

      “I no fit stay for his house. I have junior ones at home he is feeding and work plenty in Lagos pass Ijẹbu. I even get family members for this Lagos. They are useless people. If I visit them, they go say they wan’ help me, that make I come do houseboy work. How I go dey wash toilet for person wey get the same surname as me.”

      “So what will you do?”

      “Maybe driver. You nkọ?”

      “I don’t know.”

      When the army had offered to sponsor his university degree, so certain had he been that he would always be a soldier, he had chosen zoology out of his interest in animals. And now of what use was his knowledge of the migratory patterns of West African birds? Who would hire him for being able to distinguish a dolphin from a porpoise? Most important, the certificate that could prove his higher education was locked in his trunk in Bayelsa.

      “I’ll find something,” Chike said. “I’m not worried.”