The Cell

The van had no writing on it that anybody could read, and neither, as far as AJ could tell, did the reason he was in it.

It was his fourth evening in Lagos. He had changed his forty pounds with a man under a bridge who heard his accent and quietly doubled his commission, and with the naira he had rented a room in a guesthouse whose ceiling fan turned only when it felt appreciated. He carried his bag everywhere, because he did not trust the door. That evening he had walked out to buy phone credit and stood at a bus stop with a mechanic, two schoolboys and a woman selling plantain chips, all of them looking the same direction for a bus that was not coming.

The van came instead.

"Sweep," the mechanic muttered, and AJ, who did not know the word yet, learned it in the next ten seconds: men in uniform jumping down, hands on collars, everybody standing in one place picked up together, to be sorted out later or never. The woman and the schoolboys talked their way out. The mechanic and AJ went in the van.

"Papers," said the officer in the front seat.

"I'm Nigerian. I was born here."

The officer turned all the way around to look at him. "With that mouth?"

They took his phone "for safekeeping." They took the naira out of his pocket for reasons nobody explained. They took his shoelaces, which seemed personal.

"Can I get a receipt?" said AJ.

The whole van laughed, the officers loudest of all. It was his second joke in Lagos. It got a much bigger laugh than the first, and it did him no good whatsoever.

Night

He never learned the name of the building, and he has since decided he does not want to.

The cell was a concrete room built for eight and holding twenty-three. There was one barred window up near the ceiling, a bucket in the corner that everyone pretended was not there, and a heat that did not leave at night but simply sat down and made itself at home.

And the mosquitoes. AJ had heard about Lagos mosquitoes the way you hear about a cousin's terrible husband, as a story. The story undersold it. They came at dusk in clouds. They whined in his ears like tiny motorbikes looking for parking. He slapped at his own face all night and woke up, if that was the word, with his arms and neck covered in bumps, red and raised, so many that they joined up into lines.

On the second night an officer came to the bars and asked for "the London boy."

It did not last long. It did not need to. It was the kind of beating that is mostly a lesson about who is allowed to talk, and AJ, who had always talked, learned it quickly. When the officer left, AJ sat down against the wall and the cell was quiet for a moment, considering him.

Then a broad man everybody called Chairman stood up and stretched.

"Oyinbo," said Chairman.

Oyinbo: a foreigner, a white man, somebody who does not belong here. AJ had been called many things in London. Never that.

What followed was worse than the officer, because it was so lazy. Men who had not even been awake joined in, the way people join a line without asking what it is for. A slap, a kick, somebody's elbow. Then they got bored and sat down again, and that was somehow the most humiliating part.

In the corner an old man with a cough was watching. When the others had settled, he reached over and pressed a little plastic sachet of water into AJ's hand. In Lagos, AJ would learn, drinking water comes in sachets like that, and people call it "pure water," which is optimistic.

"Don't fight them," the old man said quietly. "Laugh small. They will get tired."

"I was born in Lagos," AJ said. "I was born here."

"Then why are you talking like a newsreader?"

From across the room, Chairman heard. "Oyinbo! Say water."

AJ looked at the old man, who raised one eyebrow.

"Water," said AJ.

The cell erupted. Men who had been asleep sat up. "Again!" "Say it again!" "Wo-ah!" Chairman did the accent back at him, terribly, and the whole cell roared, and for the next six days AJ was the radio. He said "water." He said "bottle." He said "I'll have a cup of tea, please, mate," which nearly started a riot of joy. It was humiliating. It was also much better than the alternative, and every time, from the corner, the old man winked.

Out

On the ninth morning the door opened and an officer said, "London. Go."

That was all. No charge, no apology, no paperwork. His phone had been kept so safely that nobody could find it. His money had gone wherever money goes. They gave him back the black holdall, and when he looked inside there was nothing in it but the phone charger, which was now a joke with no phone, and the photograph of his mother squinting into the sun.

He walked out into a white-hot morning with no laces in his shoes.

At the corner a woman sat under a big faded umbrella with a table of phone credit cards and two old phones chained to it, selling calls by the minute. AJ stood in front of her for a long time. Then he did something he had learned in the cell. He put his palms together and said, "Abeg." Please, the Lagos way, with your whole body.

She looked at his arms. She looked at his shoes. "My son is in London," she said finally, pushing a phone toward him. "One call. If anybody asks, I did not do this."

His uncle's number was written on the back of the photograph, in his mother's handwriting. It rang four times.

"Who is this?"

"Uncle. It's me. It's AJ."

"AJ? AJ! Praise the Lord! Hallelujah! Where are you? Are you well? Are you free?"

"Sort of. Listen, Uncle, I need..."

"Wait. Wait. Before anything, we must thank God." His uncle's voice dropped into the deep, rolling register of a man who had preached to large rooms. "Father Lord, we lift up this boy before You. As You brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, out of the land of bondage..."

AJ closed his eyes. His uncle was crossing the Red Sea. His uncle was in the wilderness. His uncle had reached the part with the manna when the phone beeped three times and went dead.

The woman took it back and looked at the screen. "Your uncle is a pastor," she said. It was not a question.

"How can you tell?"

"That was my last credit. Only pastors finish credit like that."

He had not asked for money. He had not asked for a bed. He stood there with his empty bag, and the traffic went past, and somewhere a generator coughed into life. Then he remembered his mother's voice on the airport curb. Ajegunle. Near Kirikiri. June 12 Street.

"Which way is Ajegunle?" he asked.

The woman pointed east, toward the cranes on the skyline and the long, angry horns of the container trucks crawling to the ports. "Follow the trucks," she said. "When you see a prison wall, you are close."

"Brilliant," said AJ. "Just what I need. More walls."

But he thanked her properly, twice, and he started walking. Somewhere at the end of all those trucks was a boy who used to give him the bigger half of the puff-puff. He hoped Chuks still cooked. He hoped June 12 Street was real. Mostly, he hoped somebody there would have food.