Area Boys

In Lagos they are called area boys, and if you ask ten people what that means, you will get eleven answers.

The short version: area boys are the young men who make their living on the street, with no shop, no salary and no boss anybody can point to. They sell things. They carry things. They fix things, find things, direct traffic nobody asked them to direct, and know where everything in their area is and who it belongs to. Some of them do worse, and the name has a bad smell because of it. Ask the area boys themselves and they will tell you they are simply businessmen whose office has no roof.

On June 12 Street, the area boys are Danger and Benny, and the office has no roof, no walls and, in a bad week, no stock.

The names

Danger is Daniel Eze, and he is the most dangerous man on the street. He is also the one the street loves most. On June 12 Street, nobody finds that strange.

The name began in Ajegunle, where he grew up, as a boy who fell off things. He fell off the roof of his uncle's kiosk. He fell off the church wall during a wedding, into the wedding. He fell out of a mango tree so tall that the whole street came running, and found him sitting in the mud, eating the mango. Every time, the neighbors said the same thing: that boy is a danger to himself. Every time, he got up. His mother raised him alone on what she made selling pepper at the market, and by the time he was ten she had stopped running when people shouted the name. She would only ask, "What did he fall off this time?"

The name stuck later, for other reasons.

There were the fights. Nobody can remember Danger starting one, and nobody can remember him losing one. He finished them quickly, and without any joy, and then he went home. There was the cell, at nineteen, after a fight he finished but did not start, and the weeks he spent in it. He went in a loud boy and came out a quieter man, angrier and more careful, and he has never said one word about what happened inside. And there is the thing people notice now, which is simply what happens when he walks up. The waiting area at the gate goes quiet. The boys on the corner stand up straighter. Officers who shout at everybody suddenly find something interesting on their phones.

He grew up big, with a laugh you can hear from the gate and a grin that can turn cold between one word and the next. Women like him. Children follow him down the street in a line, like ducklings looking for a fight. Officers watch him. He does not lower his eyes to a uniform or a big man, and he will say out loud, calmly, the thing everybody else in the queue is only thinking. His hands can carry a sack of rice on each shoulder or bring a dead generator back to life with a screwdriver and a few words he would not say in church.

The selling, though, is Benny's department.

Benny is Benedict Adebisi. He is small and quick, and he talks the way water comes out of a burst pipe: all at once, in every direction, and somehow it always ends up exactly where it was going. He made his first sale at eight years old, when he sold his mother's neighbor a plastic chair. It was the neighbor's own chair. She had left it outside. She paid for it before she noticed, and when she noticed, she bought a cushion for it from him as well.

The two of them met when Danger fell off a wall onto Benny's tray of roasted groundnuts. Groundnuts are peanuts by their Lagos name, and Benny, who was eleven, was selling them by the cup at a bus stop. The tray went flat. The groundnuts went everywhere. Danger sat in the middle of the wreckage, apologizing, and Benny looked at the crushed nuts for a long moment. Then he picked up the tray and started shouting, "Groundnut powder! Fresh groundnut powder! Ground by hand!" He sold the lot at double the price before Danger had finished standing up.

Danger looked at him with something close to religion. "How did you do that?"

"I didn't," said Benny. "We did. You fell, I sold. That's a business."

It has been a business for fifteen years.

A day at the office

A working day for Danger and Benny starts at the main gate of the Abraham Adesyan Estate, because that is where the people are.

In the morning they sell phone credit and data, the little scratch cards that keep Lagos talking, to the people waiting on the benches under the canopy. Benny sells. Danger stands behind him looking like the end of the argument, which Benny calls customer service. By ten they have moved on to chargers, because by ten somebody's phone is always dying, and Benny can tell from across the waiting area which face belongs to a battery at four percent.

When the fuel stations run dry, which in Lagos happens the way weather happens, without warning and all at once, Danger is already out on the road with jerrycans, and by noon there is fuel for sale outside the gate to anybody whose generator is about to cough. When the power goes, which on June 12 Street happens most nights around eight, they have a cooler of cold water, iced while there was still light to freeze it. NEPA is what everybody still calls the power company, and Benny says NEPA is the best business partner he has ever had. "Every night, same time. Never late. Never asks for a cut."

And when it rains, Benny has umbrellas.

Nobody knows where he keeps them. He has no shop, and he lives in one room. But the minute the first fat drops hit the dust, Benny is walking down the queue at the gate with an armful of umbrellas, and the price goes up with every drop.

"Nobody buys an umbrella," he explained to Danger once. "They buy the minute it starts raining. I'm only selling the minute."

That afternoon he sold one to a man who was already holding an umbrella. "That one is for going," Benny told him. "This one is for coming back." The man thought about it, and paid.

On party nights, when the queue for Prizm starts early and the sun is still hot, they rent out plastic chairs in the shade by the gate, by the hour, to guests in good shoes. Danger carries the chairs. Benny carries the conversation. The parked patrol car plays Joe-Izzy on its radio with the windows down, and Benny likes to point out that the music is free but the chair under it is not.

In between, they do odd jobs. Danger carries loads for the market women, pushes dead cars off the road and fixes the generators their owners have given up on. Benny queues for people at the bank, runs messages and finds things: a part for a car, a tailor who can finish by Sunday, a man who owes another man money. He keeps all of it in a notebook with a rubber band around it: who owes, who paid, what is moving this week. He also keeps the money. Danger has never once asked to see the notebook, and Benny considers this the highest compliment of his life.

There is one page in it Benny did not plan. It is headed DANGER, and under it, most days, there is a small amount and no explanation. Benny knows the explanations anyway. An old woman had been sitting on the gate bench since morning with nothing to drink, and now she had a cold water and a ₦1,000 note folded into her hand. A boy with no shoes had been standing downwind of the suya smoke for an hour, and now he was eating. Benny writes every one of them down and never complains. He does underline them.

Danger keeps the other notebook. It is a school exercise book with a cracked blue cover, and it is full of verses, written at night by candle while Benny counts. He shows it to nobody. But when NEPA takes the light, he sometimes reads from it on the veranda, low, and the whole house goes quiet in the dark to listen. Most of the verses are about the street. A lot of them are about his mother, who sold pepper at the market for thirty years and would not take a day off for anybody, and who gets an envelope from her son every Friday whether his week was good or not.

My mother sold pepper till it burned her eyes,

and called it the cost of a son staying alive.

Every week I send her what the gate let me keep.

Every week she sends back one word: sleep.

There is one more thing they sell, quietly: a little smoke, cannabis. Tara in the room next door will not have it in the house, they will not sell it to anybody in a school uniform, and it is the line Benny would most like to be out of. "It's the only page in the notebook that can put us in a cell," he says, and turns the page.

The quiet

People who have only heard of Danger expect shouting. There is never any shouting. That same afternoon, a taxi driver at the gate leaned out of his window, called Benny "this small boy" and told him to get his water out of the road.

Danger set down a jerrycan. He did not hurry. He walked over to the taxi the way the tide comes in on the beach past the bush, slowly and then all at once, and he leaned down to the driver's window and said something so low that nobody else heard it. The whole waiting area froze. The officers under the canopy stopped gisting, which is Lagos for gossiping, in the middle of a sentence. The only sound was Joe-Izzy singing on the patrol car radio, because nobody had told the radio.

The driver looked at Danger. Then he looked at Benny, and swallowed. "Sorry, sir," he said. Nobody had ever called Benny sir before. Benny wrote it down.

Then the taxi's engine coughed and died, and the driver turned the key, and turned it again, and nothing happened at all.

Danger looked at the car for about four seconds. Then he sighed, rolled up his sleeves, lifted the hood and had the engine running again in ten minutes. The driver paid him ₦2,000 without a word of argument. While he waited, Benny sold him a cold water and a charger.

"He insulted me," Benny explained afterward. "So I charged him the insult price."

On the walk home, Benny asked him what he had said to the man. Danger thought about it. "I told him the small boy is my brother," he said. "The rest he worked out by himself."

They got home to Iloro House, the face-me-I-face-you at No. 3 where they rent Room 8, a little after ten that night. A face-me-I-face-you is a rooming house where every door looks across a corridor at another door. The light had been gone for two hours.

Benny sat on the veranda bench and counted the day by flashlight. Danger stretched out beside him with the exercise book open on his chest and a pen in his teeth, and he was nearly asleep when he noticed something down the corridor: a thin line of candlelight under the door of Room 3, which had been empty for months.

"Somebody's in Room 3," he said.

Benny did not look up from the notebook. He was already writing.

"Then somebody," he said, "is going to need a charger."