Sent Home

The party had a theme, and the theme was money nobody could explain.

It was in a flat above a closed-down chicken shop in south London, three rooms of bass and borrowed perfume, and AJ had been there since nine because somebody had to fetch the ice. That was his job in that crowd, mostly. He fetched things. He laughed at the right moment. He knew whose cousin had a car and whose aunt had a sofa, and in return he got to stand near men who wore new sneakers every week and talked about "moves" without ever saying what the moves were.

He knew, of course. Everyone in that flat knew. There were laptops open on the kitchen counter with other people's names on the screens. There were small bags that went from hand to hand in the bathroom line and never seemed to make anybody happy for long. AJ told himself he was only there for the music, which is the kind of thing you tell yourself at twenty-eight, when you have stopped asking where your life is going because you are afraid it will answer.

"AJ, my guy. Ice," somebody shouted.

"I'm literally holding the ice."

"Then hold it closer to me."

At twenty to two, the door came in.

Not a knock. The door simply stopped being a door. The bass cut out in the middle of a bar, and in the silence AJ heard a sound he would remember for months: forty people trying to put things in their pockets at the same time. Then flashlights, and shouting, and a voice saying nobody move in the tone of a man who had said it so often it had gone flat, like soda left open overnight.

AJ did not run. He was holding a bag of ice. There is no way to run with a bag of ice that does not look guilty.

The police took the kitchen, the laptops and two of the men in new sneakers. Then immigration officers came up the stairs with clipboards and went through the room one by one: name, date of birth, status. That was when AJ understood that tonight was not going to be about the laptops at all. Not for him.

He had been seven when his mother brought him over from Lagos. He had grown up on drizzle and night buses and school dinners. He supported a football club that broke his heart every season, and he said "innit" without thinking. But his papers had never been sorted. There had been letters, brown envelopes his mother read twice and put in the drawer under the cutlery, where problems went to wait. There had been a lawyer once, and then no money for the lawyer. Then he was eighteen, and twenty-one, and twenty-five, and the drawer stayed shut.

"So you're not British," said the officer, who was very young and very tired.

"I'm from south London."

"That's not a nationality."

"Tell that to south London."

Nobody laughed. It was the first joke in a long time that had not worked, and he would have to get used to that.

Departures

The detention center had a window that did not open and a clock that did not seem to move. AJ spent five weeks there learning the difference between waiting and hoping, which is that waiting does not hurt as much. His mother visited twice. The first time she shouted at him. The second time she held his hand across the table and did not say anything, which was worse.

The flight left at night. He sat in the back row between two escorts who were polite in the way of people being paid by the hour, and the one on his left ate both of their bread rolls without asking. Below the window, London turned into a scatter of orange lights, and then into nothing, and AJ thought: that's it, then. Twenty-one years, and the city did not even blink.

Lagos met him at the aircraft door.

The heat came in first, wet and heavy, like a relative who had been waiting a very long time and had opinions about it. Then the smell: jet fuel, rain on hot concrete, somebody's cooking somewhere, always somebody's cooking. He came down the steps with one bag, a black holdall containing two pairs of jeans, three T-shirts, a phone charger, forty pounds in British money and a photograph of his mother squinting into the sun at somebody's wedding. Everything else he owned was in the drawer under the cutlery, waiting with the problems.

Outside the terminal, the noise was a wall. Taxi drivers called him "brother," "my oga" (boss), "London," all before he had opened his mouth. He wondered how they knew. Later he would realize it was the walk.

His phone buzzed. Nine percent.

"Have you eaten?" said his mother. She did not say hello. She had never said hello on the phone in her life.

"Mum. I've been in Lagos four minutes."

"That is four minutes without food." Her voice did something, and she covered the phone, and he waited, watching a man sell cold water from a cooler balanced on his head with the calm of a head waiter. When she came back she was all business. "Call your uncle in Benin City. He is a pastor now. A proper one, with a church and a car."

"He'll want to pray over me."

"Then let him pray. Prayer is free. And listen. You remember Chuks? Mama Chuks's boy, from our old street?"

He did. A round, solemn boy who used to split a puff-puff, the sweet fried dough everybody's mother made, exactly in half and then give AJ the bigger half anyway.

"His mother says he is in Lagos now. Ajegunle, near Kirikiri, a place called June 12 Street. He cooks for the whole street, she says. If anything happens, you go there."

"Nothing's going to happen, Mum."

There was a long pause on the line, long enough for a container truck to crawl past, horn blaring, toward the ports.

"That," said his mother, "is what you said about the party."

He had forty pounds, one bag, a phone at nine percent, and an accent he had not yet learned was a price tag.

He hung up and stepped out into Lagos. The generators were starting up for the evening, a hundred of them, a thousand, a whole city humming to itself. Lagos had waited twenty-one years for him to come back. It was in no hurry now. It gave him four days.