Desire woke up the following day, amused that she slept through the heaviness in her mind. She hurried through the normal things that readied her for campus, locking the door in a flurry of activity: slipped on her sandals, ensured the lock on the door keyed in, said goodbye to neighbours who greeted and then rushed down the stairs.
Outside, the harmattan haze courted dried mud on the stretch of untarred road and when vehicles sped past, it formed clouds of dust that painted houses, signposts and billboards in a rusty, red hue. Desire walked fast despite the dry harmattan wind lashing at her face, and the burden of the secret that she bore. She tried to make her strides longer but ended up stepping in potholes. She drew close to the retail market road with her bag hanging loosely over her left arm and three hardback notebooks in the fold of her right arm. At first, she walked hurriedly towards the junction; approaching the stalls and branded tarpaulin umbrellas studded by the roadside. There was a canteen just after the road junction which led onto the main road. Her nostrils picked up the smell of fried plantain set against the stinging odour of stale piss in the open drain.
She suffered the visual fuss of faded paint, coated and bright colours contrasted on the low cost government houses, dust drifting from the dried clay by the side of a recently open drain which was now swamped with garbage; nylon sachets and broken plastic. This was mixed with the Ipaja smell of the fetid roadside take-outs bragging for recognition; that coalescence of fried plantain and yam, prepared over mobile kitchens that stood over drains harbouring faeces and urine, which meant that many seconds usually passed before a breath of fresh air. This smell was not permanent, it floated from one end of the area to the other, hopeful. A few steps away, smoke filtered into her nose from a burning bush. Above her, the colours of the sky mingled with the unsettled ashes drifting in the wind like a condensed swarm of fleas. Under this sky, the sun wandered across like a lord.
The temperature was rising, and what should have come as the eager bustle of morning risers, expectant workers and school children, could be compared to workers returning home at night after hectic traffic. Desire turned around to check how far she had come, and as she turned, her first step landed in an unobserved pothole.
‘Hey!’ the scream of the man in front of her and the struggle not to fall shook her. The lanky man, whose foul breath almost knocked her over when he drew closer, helped her up and she staggered backwards to escape the odour coming from his mouth.
‘Sorry-o. De road too bad. Even we wey dey waka, our leg no even free from dis potholes.’
The man picked up and handed back a copy of a newspaper cut-out which had fallen from between her books. It was the picture of Prof. The one she had carried in her bra for many years. She had only moved it to her purse recently. The picture, if it could talk, would tell the maturity of her areolae. It was a miracle that she had never developed some horrible breast rash or infection during those teenage years. It was only recently, when her visits to Prof began, that she stopped slipping it into her bra. Instead, she made copies of the cut-outs and put them between the pages of diaries, books and in purses. She felt a sudden shame as the man picked up the paper and handed it to her. She did not raise her eyes to acknowledge the man’s own, as he held out what she considered her major secret—which even Remilekun did not know about—to her. How would anyone understand why she had carried the same picture of one man for about fifteen years?
‘Thank you, sir,’ she mumbled to him without smiling. In this state of walking in and out of the stench in Ipaja, she arrived at the block with Prof’s flat. She stopped a few metres away and stared. She was oblivious to the people setting up their shops, the feet hurrying past her and the honking cars that slowed down as they approached the potholes on the road. Around the three-storey building were wood stalls, covered with rusted zinc roofing sheets which leaned against heaps of garbage in jute bags. She wondered if it would make any difference if all these people knew she came to see him at nine and left at midnight.
The longer she stood in front of the building, the odder it felt being there. Prof’s windows were shut, yet she felt like she was being watched. She wondered if he would be able to recognise her outside the room—would he be confused by her features and guess endlessly as he looked out from the window?
Like many other buildings in the neighbourhood, his had sash windows, and a net. The other flats, with louvres, had their curtains tied up in a bunch forming the letter M. His flat was the only one in a building of twelve flats with its louvres closed. From where she stood, one could almost assume it was a single slab of glass. She looked at his window; just a calm row of shut slabs. This reminded her of the stuffiness and silence that reigned each time the laughter stopped, and silence settled between her and Prof.
Are the walls painted blue, or green or even grey? Is it a room without paint or one with wallpapers with patterns of flowers on them? she wondered, remembering that the walls felt glossy when she leaned against them. The walls were painted, she concluded.
As she stood in front of his block, she longed to go and see him that instant, so much that a hunger stretched the muscles in her chest that she felt she could tell what it was like to be in the early stages of cardiac arrest. Those nights when she would stop herself from going to see him and she would end up nestled on the bed did not count. There was something she assured herself of—she was not in love. She was inquisitive. Desirous to see a man who was from her past and whom she now felt a duty to connect to his long lost son. Once she was done, she would move on, she thought to herself. Perhaps, she may consider Ireti’s unprofessed attraction. She wanted to believe he was attracted to her. Perhaps.
Desire sighed and made a quiet vow to keep Prof out of her thoughts until evening, when she would insist that the room must be lit, to tell him about Ireti. She felt that once she saw his face, she would not feel this weight of curiosity. First, his face in the light needed to be unveiled. Then she needed to persuade Ireti to come and see him.
She moved a few steps away from the building, and although the thought of being late for her class bothered her again, she found herself stopping once more. It was the first time she had come close to his house during the day since she began to visit him. She watched a little girl bathing by herself in front of the house, splashing water on two boys her age who were laughing gaily, only for her to hurry off as a man who could be her father approached her swiftly. Desire did not know if she was the one making assumptions, but the fear in the girl’s eyes as the man approached mirrored the one she felt for her father as a child, those days in Oshodi, before she and her mother moved to Maroko.
She walked towards the house thinking of how there was no better way to preserve a landscape than in the agonies of a childhood suffering. Just how the memories of Oshodi rested in her head like dew settled in the early morning on leaves. In a way, it was different from Maroko, where she experienced what it was to be homeless. Oshodi, the place she was born in, was soaked in a terror which was beyond the pictures of a street with a panorama of dilapidated tenements, clinging side by side and running into bends.
On Mosafejo Street in Oshodi, when they lived there, there were no recreational parks. The children created their own entertainment. They carved out playing spaces from abandoned sites, or streets with lesser traffic, where they kicked makeshift balls made from rags and broken condoms found on the road. In the mornings, the edges of the open drains were filled with naked children bending over to scoop water with plastic vessels to bathe themselves. They stood against gutters with brackish water flowing with stale food, shit, and urine; with all the odours hanging in the airlessness. Between this, hordes of food sellers hawked past, with the still-naked children running after them, sometimes with soapy heads, and shouting at them to stop and sell. The sellers walked towards them, placed their wares on the ground, close to the drains, and waited for the children to go in and bring bowls for the food, after which their mothers—clad in inches of cotton ankara—brought them money.
The sandwich of houses faced an improvised bus terminus which left the narrow streets perpetually rammed on most days, so that screaming voices of bus conductors called out for passengers going to different areas in Lagos at every hour of the day. Close by, there was the popular Lion Junction, where area boys continued their conversations between puffs of cigarettes and rolls of gbana. She could not forget the screams of women whose bags had been snatched, howling and running with legs scattered like chickens being pursued by dogs. Considering how young she was when they moved, it always amazed her that she remembered names and people and even faces—once or twice, she met people they had lived with in Oshodi—but they rarely ever remembered who she was.
Her eyes moved about and landed on a policeman scratching his crotch with one hand and shouting orders to a motorcyclist with his baton pointed at him. The posture and faded black uniform soiled her thoughts. She and Prof shared one thing in common: they hated Nigerian policemen. Her father was a policeman, Prof suffered torture at their hands, and Remilekun was indecisive about them.
‘Who cares? A bad man is a bad man. A bad man in a uniform is just a consistent badass man,’ a drunken Remilekun had said, in a voice filled with laughter. ‘As long as they fuck, they can be fucked, and they respond to fucking, they must mean some-fucking-thing to somebody.’