Room 8

Room 8 is the last door at the end of the corridor in Iloro House, a face-me-I-face-you: a rooming house where every door looks straight across a narrow corridor at another door, with one kitchen and one bathroom for everybody.

Room 8 has one window, one mattress, one fan and two grown men. The mattress lies against the wall. The fan stands on a plastic chair at one side of it. The side by the fan is the good side. The other side is by the wall, and the wall is where the mosquitoes hold their meetings.

So there is a rota. Benny wrote it, in marker pen, on the back of the door: Monday, Wednesday, Friday: Danger. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday: Benny. Sunday: whoever gets home first. Benny is faster. Danger has not had a Sunday by the fan in three years. Danger does not lower his eyes to a uniform, a big man or the Warden himself, and he has obeyed that rota for three years without once winning an argument with it.

"The rota is the rota," says Benny, as if somebody other than Benny had written it.

When NEPA takes the light (NEPA is what everyone still calls the power company), the fan stops and the rota means nothing, and the two of them lie there sweating equally. Danger says it is the only true justice in Lagos.

The rest of the room is stock. Chargers in a shoebox. SIM cards in a margarine tub. A cooler by the door. And under the mattress, flat, in rows, the umbrellas, which is where Benny keeps them and why Room 8 has the lumpiest mattress in Ajegunle. Danger says he can tell the weather by his back. When the umbrellas are gone, it has been raining.

Room 7

The wall between Room 7 and Room 8 is very thin, and on the other side of it lives Tara, the hairdresser at the Palmline Unisex Salon outside the gate.

Tara keeps the bathroom roster on the kitchen wall and the whole house in order. When Danger and Benny argue about the fan at midnight, she bangs on the wall with the flat of her hand. "Danger! Benny! Some of us have braids at seven!"

"Sorry, Aunty."

She is not their aunty. She is barely older than they are. But in Lagos, "Aunty" is what you call any woman who is entitled to tell you off, and Tara is entitled. She is also the only person on June 12 Street who can make Danger say sorry through a wall.

Every other Sunday evening she cuts their hair on the veranda, for free, with her clippers plugged into whichever extension cord is working, and every time she tells them it is the last time. "This is the last time. You hear me? Next time you pay like everybody."

"Yes, Aunty."

"And that other thing of yours stays out of this house. Not in the room, not in the corridor, not on my veranda. Mama Ronke has children."

"Yes, Aunty," says Benny. Every time he says it, he means it a little more.

When the light goes on those Sunday evenings, Danger takes out the exercise book and reads into the dark: a verse about the gate, a verse about the queue, a verse about Benny's umbrellas that Benny has asked him to stop reading in front of customers. Mama Ronke's children creep out of Room 1 to sit on the step. Tara stops sweeping up the hair to listen. She likes them, though she would never say so to his face. The only ones she will not have are the ones about dying.

Don't waste a coffin with brass handles on me.

Feed the street jollof, let the radio play free.

I was never built for grey hair and a walking stick.

I was built for this street, and the street spends men quick.

"Not that one," says Tara, every time, and points the clippers at him. "Do another one." Benny never says anything. He just goes inside.

Then there is Room 6, and Dozie.

Dozie is an economics graduate who is "in opportunities," and Danger and Benny consider him an amateur. "He sells things that are not there," Benny says. "We sell things that are in your hand. A man can hold my charger. Show me where a man holds BreakCoin." Dozie calls them small-scale. He once spent forty minutes trying to sell Benny shares in a generator that runs on water. Benny listened to the whole pitch, took notes, then offered to sell the pitch back to Dozie at a discount. Danger, who fixes real generators, laughed for a day and a half.

Room 3

That first night, the door of Room 3 opened because Danger was laughing in the corridor, and a thin man looked out with a candle.

His arms were covered in bites. His shoes had no laces. He held up his jeans with one hand. "Sorry," he said. "Is there a party?"

London. You could hear it in two words. Benny's whole face lit up like a shop sign.

"Good evening, my brother! Welcome, welcome. You need a charger."

"I've got a charger." The man held it up. It was, it turned out, the only thing left in his bag that was any use. "I haven't got a phone."

Benny did not miss a beat. "Then you need a SIM."

"For what? I haven't got a phone."

"Exactly. So you need a phone to go with the SIM." From somewhere, a pocket or the dark itself, Benny produced a small, heavy phone with buttons and a flashlight on top. "Very strong. Falls off a roof, still works. Ask Danger. He tested it."

"I tested it," said Danger.

The man laughed. It sounded like the first time in a while. "I'm AJ. And I haven't got any money. Chuks gave me two thousand this afternoon, and it lasted about forty minutes."

"Where did it go?"

AJ nodded across the corridor at the door of Room 6.

Danger and Benny looked at each other. "BreakCoin?" said Benny.

"Five hundred."

"Amateur," they said together.

Benny ran the flashlight over AJ, from his hair to his laceless shoes, the way a tailor looks at cloth. "Your trousers are trying to leave you," he said. "Belt. Second-hand, one owner, very honest leather."

"Whose was it?"

"Danger's. Before he grew."

"I didn't grow," said Danger. "The belt shrank."

AJ said no to the charger, the SIM, the phone and the belt, one after another, and said thank you every time. Danger did not say much more. He was looking at AJ's arms in the candlelight, at the bites joined up into lines and the yellow edge of a bruise above the elbow, and his face had gone very still. He knew that map. He had worn it.

When AJ had gone back in, Benny wrote something in the notebook.

"What are you writing?" said Danger.

"He says thank you when he says no," said Benny. "That is a man who will buy later."

"He's been in a cell," said Danger quietly. "Not long ago."

Benny stopped writing. "So what is he?"

"Ours," said Danger, and went to bed on the wall side, with the mosquitoes, because the rota said so.

Day three

The second day they barely saw him. Chuks took him down to the bush, and he came back with wet sneakers and some football money and went straight to the gate to pay the police. By then Tara had given him his first proper haircut since the cell, free ("Pay me when the gate opens"), and Benny had tried to sell him a comb to go with it.

On the third day it rained.

It came down all at once, the way Lagos rain does, and Danger was away pushing a dead truck out of a ditch on the port road, and the queue at the main gate was full of people in good clothes with nothing over their heads. Benny had forty umbrellas and two hands. He saw AJ on the veranda and pushed half of them into his arms.

"Walk with me. Say nothing."

AJ walked. He said nothing for nearly a minute. Then a woman in a church hat stopped him and asked how much, and AJ said, "Erm, I'm not sure, actually, let me just check with my colleague," and the woman looked at him as though a man from a film had walked out of the screen to sell her an umbrella. She paid double without arguing. So did the next one.

Benny pulled him under the canopy, soaked and delighted.

"Speak the English, AJ. The oyinbo price goes up."

Oyinbo: foreigner, white person, somebody from outside. AJ had heard the word in the cell, shouted at him, with fists after it. This was the first time it had ever been worth anything.

"Isn't that a bit of a con?" he said.

"Is the umbrella real?"

"Yes."

"Is the rain real?"

AJ looked up at it. "Very."

"Then it's a market," said Benny.

That evening, on the veranda, Benny took off the rubber band and counted out AJ's share, exactly, to the naira, and wrote it in the notebook. Danger came home soaked to the waist, heard the story twice and laughed until the bench creaked. Then he took out the exercise book, wrote for a minute with the pen in his fist, and read it out, and AJ found out what it was like to be in one of Danger's verses.

Forty umbrellas and one London mouth.

The rain came in from the sea, and the money came out.

Then, without any discussion that AJ could hear, the two of them looked at each other and nodded.

That night the light went at eight, as usual, and when it came back after midnight, AJ was asleep on the side of the mattress in Room 8 nearest the fan, because his own fan in Room 3 had died and Danger had not fixed it yet.

"Just tonight," Benny told him. "It is not on the rota."

"Don't tell anybody," said Danger, from the wall side, with the mosquitoes. "It will destroy the rota."