Blackass (12 page)

The lady smiled at him again, a mouth-and-eyes smile whose genuineness was almost telepathic, and then she raised her hand and patted the air before her chest in a soothing motion. ‘Take it easy,’ she said with assurance. ‘I’ll help you stop a cab.’ Feeling his anger ebb at the flow of her voice, Furo aimed a long look at her, took in her youth, the cheerful spirit reflected in her face, and he returned her smile at last and said, ‘That’s sweet of you. Thanks.’ He was about to ask her name when she spoke. ‘Don’t mention. You’ll have to move away though. We can’t let these drivers know we’re together. Go now, quickly, a cab is coming.’

Furo hurried over to a Toyota Tundra parked about three yards away. He leaned against the driver’s door, folded his arms across his chest, and tried to look bored. From where he stood he heard the lady speaking to the taxi driver in Yoruba. When she gave a low whistle, he glanced in her direction to confirm it was OK to abandon his owner’s stance, then pushed away from the Tundra and walked towards the yellow taxi, an ancient Datsun saloon. The lady straightened up from the passenger window at his approach, rolled her eyes at him and gave a playful shake of her head, then opened the door. He slipped into the car, and as she pushed the door closed, he looked at the driver, a long-necked man with wrinkles almost as deep as the tribal marks in his cheeks. He wore pink cutwork trousers, a fishnet singlet, a white skullcap, and he met Furo’s gaze with the most astonished look his sun-leathered face could manage. Furo swung his eyes to the window when he felt the lady’s hand on his shoulder. ‘You’ll give him one thousand naira,’ she said. Then to the driver, ‘Baba, this is my friend, please treat him well.
E se, e le lo.
’ She stepped back from the window, returned Furo’s wave, and resumed her stroll to sainthood.

As the taxi sheered away from the curb, Furo strapped on his seatbelt and prepared his mind for a rough ride ahead. The driver was transmitting his unhappiness to the car through his rough jabbing of the gearstick. He was aware he had been tricked into asking an honest fare, and if he could find a way that left his self-respect some wriggle room, he would renegotiate. Furo had already made up his mind to resist the move that, sure enough, barely a minute after they set off, the driver made. ‘The go-slow today is bad, very bad.’ This said in a sociable tone and followed by a sidelong glance at Furo, who remained silent. As weather was for Londoners, traffic for Lagosians was the conversation starter. The taxi driver tried again. ‘You speak English?’ The question was asked this time with a fixed stare. Furo, not wanting to be rude to the older man, nodded yes. ‘That’s good,’ said the driver. ‘You like Lagos?’ At Furo’s indifferent shrug, the driver grew voluble. ‘Lagos is a good place, enjoyment plenty. Nowhere in Africa is good like Lagos. Money plenty, fine women dey, and me I know all the places where white people are enjoying. Like Bar Beach. And Fela shrine – you know Fela?’ When Furo made no reply, the driver began searching through the cassette tapes scattered on the dashboard. ‘Let me play Fela music for you.’

‘No, please,’ Furo said. ‘I know Fela.’

‘Maybe next time,’ the driver said as he braked the car. Catching Furo’s eye, he jerked his head at the stalled cars ahead. ‘See what I was telling you. And we never even reach where the main go-slow go dey.’

Furo snorted with amusement, but when he spoke his voice showed irritation. ‘Baba, this is not go-slow. The traffic light is showing red. See, the cars are moving already.’

The driver grabbed the gearstick, the chassis grumbled, the car jerked forwards, and the ensuing silence lasted for several minutes of rally racing. Finally he raised one hand from the steering wheel and scratched his nose, then wiped his fingers on his trousers, and said, ‘Abeg, excuse me o, I’m very sorry for asking, but how come your voice is sounding like a Nigerian?’

‘I’ve lived in Lagos a long time,’ Furo said. ‘Watch that okada!’

The taxi swerved to the driver’s startled yell and the front bumper only just missed the motorcyclist’s knee. The taxi swerved again as the driver leaned out the window to shout back angry insults. After retracting his head, he turned to Furo, his eyes glinting with excitement.

‘
Okaaay
,’ he drawled, nodding his head. ‘So you are a Lagos person. That is how come you and your girlfriend played me wayo.’

It took Furo a second to catch the man’s meaning, and then he said with a laugh, ‘She’s not my girlfriend.’

‘But you played me trick, talk true?’

Furo’s tone was mock aggrieved. ‘How can you say I tricked you, ehn, Baba? My friend asked you how much to Lekki and you told her your price. Where is the trick in that?’

‘Lagos oyibo!’ the driver said with a hacking laugh. ‘You funny sha. I like you.’

This old baba was a wily one, Furo thought, and turned his face aside to hide his smile. But the man was wise enough to know when to ease up, as it turned out. Silence followed their arrival in Victoria Island and the journey down Ozumba Mbadiwe Way, but as the car drew up to heavy traffic by the fence of the Lagos Law School, the driver spoke again.

‘So you are living in Lekki?’

‘Yes,’ Furo answered.

‘Ehen!’ the driver said, and then waited for Furo’s curiosity to show itself. When Furo looked his way, he said, his tone imploring, ‘You that are living in Lekki, if you are taking taxi every time, you know this is the truth. That price I charged your friend is not the correct one. I called little money because she is my Yoruba sister. I am not complaining o, nothing like that. I just leave it for you to add something for me.’

‘I hear you, Baba.’

‘That’s OK. We are nearing Shoprite. Where is the exact place I will drop you?’

‘Oniru Estate.’

‘Oba Oniru. I know there well. Which side are you going? Is it first or second gate?’

When the taxi pulled to a stop at the second gate of the estate, Furo handed the baba two thousand naira. Effusive blessings, an offer of marriage to one of his daughters named Bilikisu, and finally Furo was out of the car.
All in all not a bad day
, he thought as he ambled towards the gate, and turned around at the driver’s shout to wave back at the departing taxi.

The apartment was empty when Furo entered. After a few quiet minutes of lying on the guest-room bed, he shook off his torpor and sent Syreeta an SMS. She responded at once with a phone call to say she was spending the weekend at a friend’s and that she would return early on Monday. ‘There’s fried chicken in the fridge, cook something,’ she said, ‘but please don’t burn down the house,’ and because her pause seemed to call for it, Furo laughed before saying, ‘I’ve heard you,’ then ended the call. Realising he had to be careful not to wear out his clothes before he acquired new ones, he rose from the bed and began to undress. He stripped down to his boxer shorts, hung his shirt and trousers in the wardrobe, then padded barefooted across the guest room, his bedroom now – after two nights it didn’t yet feel like his, but he loved the thick Vitafoam mattress, the ingenuity of mankind’s small comforts that it represented – and threw open the door. He made a beeline for Syreeta’s bedroom and halted in the doorway. The unmade bed, the electronic hum of the fridge, the gauzy curtains stirring in the breeze, the imposing vanity table – its surface piled with cosmetic jars, gaudy bottles, squeezed tubes: all in doubles, twinned in the mirror – and in the corner the raffia basket of used underwear, like an outsized potpourri. He pulled the door closed and crossed the parlour, the TV following his movements with a dull grey stare. On the centre table rested two remote controls. He picked, pointed, pressed, the TV screen blinked blue, and as the DSTV decoder scanned for signals, he sank on to the settee.

He had the house to himself for the weekend.

A bed, two even.

And food, TV, anything he wanted.

Furo locked his mind on the TV, which showed a Nollywood movie, and in the scene a weeping woman sat in jail with a bloodied, shirtless man. The woman’s crying sounded strained, the movie jail was a real garage – motor oil spots on the floor, filigreed grille for a door – and the make-up blood looked like make-up blood. Furo changed the channel, and kept on changing, his thumb tapping the keys, the remote wedged against his belly, his knees spread apart and his shoulders slouched, his eyes blinking as the TV flickered and switched voices in mid-sentence: here’s some peri peri, a much stronger bite, dominate the headlines, nothing but Allah’s favour, love potting around,
Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!
, cocoa boom era, hungry man size, avoid Gaddafi’s fate, last scrap of hope, her majesty the queen, we make our own beef, terrible for tennis,
stadium crowd chanting
, still capable in spurts, battle to reach each level,
xylophone tinkling
, accused of phone hacking, can withstand his might, right to be proved wrong,
hit you like ooh baby
, off the starboard bow, what happened elsewhere, love can save the universe,
loud audience laughter
—

His phone rang: he could hear its plaintive jangling below the TV’s barrage. He jumped up from the settee and ran into the bedroom and grabbed the phone from the bed. It was Syreeta calling. ‘Phone was in the bedroom,’ was the first thing he said. And then, ‘I was watching TV.’

‘Enjoy,’ Syreeta said. ‘I just remembered I hadn’t asked you how it went. Your passport.’

‘Oh yes, it went very well. I’m supposed to collect it on Monday.’

‘We should celebrate. Do you plan to go out tonight?’

‘No.’

‘What of tomorrow?’

‘No plans for tomorrow.’

A teasing note entered her voice. ‘Don’t you do clubs? Come on, it’s the weekend!’

‘No clubbing for me,’ Furo said with a forced laugh. ‘I can’t afford it.’

‘OK then,’ Syreeta said. Her voice had reached a decision. ‘I’ll return on Sunday, in the evening. I’ll take you out, my treat. We must wash your passport.’

‘I’d like that,’ Furo said, to which Syreeta responded with a quick ‘Cheers,’ and then, as he began to express his thanks, the line went dead. Lowering the phone from his ear, he stared at it without seeing, thinking about Syreeta and her puzzling kindnesses. He knew she felt sorry for him, and he suspected she even liked him in her own hard-boiled way, but now it also seemed she trusted him, at least enough to leave her bedroom unlocked. But all of that didn’t explain why a Lagos big girl was so free with her favours, especially as she knew he had no money. He had nothing she could want, nothing at all. After all, she had seen everything, even his buttocks.

That morning, when she and he discovered his buttocks together, was branded on to the underside of his consciousness. He had awoken several times in a fright on Wednesday night, her laughter ringing in his mind. But the bigger terror was that the blackness on his buttocks would spread into sight, would creep outwards to engulf everything, to show him up as an impostor. That it hadn’t yet happened didn’t mean it wouldn’t still. That he didn’t have a hand in what he was didn’t mean he wasn’t culpable. No one asks to be born, to be black or white or any colour in between, and yet the identity a person is born into becomes the hardest to explain to the world. Furo’s dilemma was this: he was born black, and had lived in that skin for thirty-odd years, only to be born again on Monday morning as white, and while he was still toddling the curves of his new existence, he realised he had been mistaken in assuming his new identity had overthrown the old. His idea of what he was, of who the world saw him as, was shaken by the blemish on his backside. He knew that so long as the vestiges of his old self remained with him, his new self would never be safe from ridicule and incomprehension. Syreeta, clearly, had shown him that.

Thinking these troubling thoughts, Furo spent the rest of Friday with his eyes stuck to the TV screen until he tumbled off the cliff edge of his mental fatigue. He awoke what felt like mere minutes later to the human noises of Saturday morning, and after he freshened up with a quick bath and a light breakfast, after the power went and the wild clatter of generators swelled in all corners of his mind and the housing estate, after he stared at the dead TV for so long that his eyes stung from the rub of the thick-as-mud air, and then, after he fiddled with his phone until he figured out how to turn off the Caller ID, he called his old phone. It rang on the first try, and before he could recover from the shock of the expected, that voice he recognised even better than his own jolted him awake to the horror of his mistake, a mistake he only salvaged by biting down on his tongue to control the urge to reply to his mother’s hopeful hello. He cut the call, switched off the phone, removed the battery, and then bowed his head to the pounding of the generators, the machine rumble of the world.

Later, when he’d calmed himself enough to breathe easy, he made every effort to close back the portal from which the past was leaking into his head.

Saturday passed slowly, but it passed.

He rose with the sun on Sunday and washed his clothes, then wrapped his towel like a sarong and stepped out of the apartment for the first time since Friday. The yard was empty, as were the estate streets, because sunny Sundays were bumper days for churches. After hanging his washing on the clothesline, he went back inside and swept the floor, dusted the furniture, beat the hollows out of the settee, and washed his piled-up dishes. The sun’s face was sunk in a mass of thunderclouds by the time he was done with housework. He gathered in the sun-scented laundry, ironed his shirt and trousers, and took a bath. By four o’clock he was ready for Syreeta’s return.

The rainstorm struck at five. From afar the rain approached like a crashing airliner. At this sound, a rising whine that left the curtains curiously still, Furo hurried into his bedroom and stared from the window above the bed, which gave the clearest view of the sky. He smelled the raindrops before he saw them. A lash of thunder roused the wind, which rose from the dust and began to swing wildly at treetops and roof edges and flocks of plastic bags ballooning out to sea. Raindrops swirled like dancing schools of silver fish and scattered in all directions, splattering the earth and the shaded walls of houses. Furo sprinted around the apartment shutting windows.