The story
Six people, one street, one gate. Each story is told in chapters and meets the others along the way. Read them in any order; AJ's is the place to start.
Deported from London with one bag and an accent Lagos will not forgive, AJ washes up on June 12 Street with nothing but an old friend and a cooking pot. Now the gate police want ₦2,500,000, and the man who owns the purple club wants a favor.
Funke studies medicine at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital by day and talks to the new man at No. 3 from her window by night. Then the owner of Prizm offers her a gift she knows better than to take.
Chuks cooks for the whole of June 12 Street and saves every spare naira for a restaurant of his own. When his childhood friend AJ comes home broken, Chuks feeds him first, and then the owner of Prizm offers him the money he has always needed.
Tara rents the one chair at the Palmline Unisex Salon outside the estate's main gate, sends money home to Abeokuta every month, and repeats almost nothing she hears. Then the Warden's boys start talking in her chair about the young man from London who lives down her corridor.
Danger is the most dangerous man on June 12 Street and the one it loves most, a street poet with a notebook of verses. Benny can sell anything to anyone. Together they hustle at the gate and take any odd job going, no questions asked. Then a man with a London accent moves into Room 3, and the Warden's boys hand them a bag.
Babatunde Olaoye, the tallest man on June 12 Street, lives in its smallest room, so the street calls him Tiny. He came from Ilesa with a smile and no plan. He owes everybody in Iloro House, and still has a visitor every day. Then the money runs out, and somebody at Prizm starts asking what he hears.
Kingston is the only name anybody has for him. He sleeps a night or two in every room of Iloro House, pays no rent, sweeps the corridor at dawn and preaches to the sea. Nobody knows where he comes from. Then the rains flood June 12 Street, a child goes missing in the dark, and the house finds out why it keeps him.
Mallam Garba spent his life in uniform and came to a Lagos gatehouse looking for peace. He sells snacks, gives advice, and remembers a man from the old days whom he hoped never to see again.
The police who guard the Abraham Adesyan Estate are funny, tired, underpaid and sometimes greedy. Three chapters from inside the gate, out in the bush and in the party-night queue.
Chief Lazarus Ekanem retired from the prison across the road and bought the club at No. 1145. Now he hosts, introduces, witnesses and takes ten percent for the table, and he has just heard about a young man with a London accent.
AJ Cities