Welcome to Lagos. Chibundu Onuzo

      THE UNCLE’S HAND STILL rested on Isoken’s stomach when they returned to the compound. Chike swung his arms stiffly as he walked towards them, a reminder of his military status. The chickens scattered at their second entrance, darting behind the old car in a streak of clucking feathers.

      “Please, sir, will you allow your niece to escort us to the end of the road?”

      They could take the girl by force but he preferred to try a ruse first. He did not know how many “business partners” this uncle might have.

      “Officer, my niece is tired.”

      “Please, Uncle, my parents would want me to see off these people that helped me.”

      “It would only be to the end of the road,” Chike added.

      “OK. But don’t be too long. You need to rest.”

      Isoken glanced at Fineboy, who was still standing outside the compound.

      “Pay him no attention. Just walk with me,” Chike said.

      They moved in silence, her head drooping on the slim stalk of her neck. Yẹmi and the militant walked a few paces behind. At the top of the road they stopped.

      “How well do you know your uncle?”

      “I— When we were going to my mother’s village we stayed here overnight from Lagos. That was my first time of meeting him.”

      “Fineboy. He heard something your uncle said to his business partner. Something like what happened to you in the bush. Is there any way you can reach your parents?”

      “They have one GSM they are using but I don’t know the number. It’s new. Uncle Festus has it.”

      “Is there anyone else who would have the number?” Chike asked.

      “They live in Lagos.”

      “Don’t cry. We’ll go there and drop you.”

      “Say wetin? Who tell you I wan’ go Lagos?” Yẹmi said.

      “We can go our separate ways, then.”

      “Na who tell you I no wan’ go?”

      “You,” Chike said to Fineboy, “the drama is over. You can be on your way once you give us directions to a motor park that will get us to Lagos.”

       7

      ISOKEN DID NOT SPEAK until they reached Edepie Motor Park. It was a large trampled field with vehicles of all sizes coming and going, small, dusty minivans, large, sleek, luxurious buses, trailers with art twisting all over their bodies, movement and noise and dust rising from the spinning tires. A market had sprung up for the human traffic, clothes, books, food, toys on display for the discerning traveler.

      “Please can I go to a call center,” Isoken said to Chike when they arrived. “Maybe I’ll remember my parents’ number with a phone in my hand.”

      The owner of the kiosk stood by Isoken as she dialed wrong number after wrong number. With each try she grew more flustered.

      “There are others waiting,” the kiosk owner said after her sixth attempt. She cried out when the phone was taken from her, a harsh, bleating sound.

      “Don’t worry. I won’t charge you,” the owner said, beckoning to the next customer.

      Chike would have preferred tears to Isoken’s twitchy silence. Her hand rose to her hair, then her collarbone, then her elbow as if she were counting her body parts, checking nothing was missing.

      “So we’ll have to go to Lagos, then,” Chike said to her when her fingers were resting on her ear.

      “My mum used to say that if we ever got separated we should meet at home. The first time it happened was when I was a child. I ran off in the market after an orange and when I caught it, she was gone. I clutched so many strangers that looked like her from behind and then I got tired of disappointment and decided to go home. She came home that night with dust in her hair. She was already planning how she would tell my father that she had lost their only child.”

      “So you think they’ll be in Lagos.”

      “I don’t know, but I can’t stay here.”

      She stared away from him when she spoke. There was swelling on her cheekbone, the skin puffed and raised, encroaching on her eye. The cut on her temple had formed a deep purple scab, the shade of an onion. He had not asked for this new responsibility. He hoped there would be someone to help her in Lagos.

      Yẹmi and Chike bought trousers from a stall and went behind a tree to change. They emerged civilians, their muddy boots the only sign of their former life. Their dinner was a simple meal of beans and stew, eaten on the same bench with Isoken as far from him and Yẹmi as possible.

      They found a Lagos-bound bus and waited for it to fill up. It would not depart until all its seats were taken. Chike paid for three spaces and climbed into the front seat. His knees touched the dashboard riddled with stickers preaching platitudes. GOD’S TIME IS BEST. NO FOOD FOR LAZY MAN. A silver Christ dangled crucified from the rearview mirror.

      He and his mother had always sat in the front seats when she accompanied him to his military school in Zaria.

      All through the journey from Ibadan to Zaria, his mother would hold his hand and he would look out the window, Ogbomoso, to Jebba, to Kutiwenji, to Machuchi, breathing in the changing air, and the landscape changing, and the people changing, growing leaner and more dignified, calmer and more reposed. It was years later, reading the memoirs of a colonial officer, that he realized he had seen the north like a white man, looking for differences: thinner noses, taller grass, different God.

      “Don’t sit at the back,” he said when he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw again that Isoken was as far from him and Yẹmi as possible. In his last year in Zaria, on his way home for the holidays, there had been an accident. A bus hit them from behind and the whole back row died instantly, spines snapped. He had bled from a few surface wounds but he had made the trip back to Zaria when the holiday was over. He would be an officer and a gentleman before he let the vagaries of an expressway stop him. And now he was an officer and a deserter.

      Even at sixteen, he had known it was partly rubbish, the dross of an empire, the dregs of a martial philosophy that had led countless Africans to fight for “King and Country.” But there had been something seductive about it, something about these military principles, stated like the first principles that governed the world: honor, chivalry, duty.

      Evening was falling. The bus was filling. A couple boarded, the man’s frayed Bible held to his chest, the woman in a skirt that covered her ankles, her earlobes smooth and unpierced, her neck and wrists bare of jewelry. A man was moving from bus to bus, peering inside and then darting to the next one. He disappeared into one of the luxurious buses, behemoth American imports as large as whales. A moment later, like Jonah spat out, the man came rushing down.

      Their trail had been picked up from the guns abandoned in the bush, their movements traced to this motor park. Were they so important? Would the colonel expend so much energy to find him and Yẹmi? The man was only a few buses away. Chike recognized the brown singlet he had spent the morning walking behind.

      “Brother Chike!”

      When had Fineboy picked up his name? He was knocking on the side of the bus now.

      “You know him?” the driver asked.

      “Brother