The Girl at No. 5

From the upstairs window at No. 5, Funke could see most of what mattered on June 12 Street, and a good deal that did not.

She could see the coal pot across the road from No. 3, a squat iron bucket of embers that had been smoking since before she moved in, and the big man in the apron who fed it. She could see the veranda bench at No. 3, where the tenants of the rooming house sat to argue about football and the price of rice. Past the rooftops to the east she could see the long wall of Kirikiri prison and the watchtower lights that came on at dusk like a second, less friendly set of stars. On a clear evening she could see the cranes of the Apapa port standing over everything, patient as herons. And if she leaned out, which her father did not like, she could see the purple sign of the club at No. 1145 begin to glow.

"Funke. The window will still be there tomorrow."

"I am getting air, Daddy."

"Air is also available in your books."

Her father had spent thirty-four years as a civil servant, and he still spoke as though every sentence would be filed. He was a polite man, a strict man, and a tired one. He had chosen the flat behind the clinic on the edge of the Abraham Adesyan Estate for reasons he listed whenever anyone asked: the rent was fair, the landlord was a church member, and a clinic on the ground floor meant a doctor in the building. "And soon," he liked to add, "two."

Funke was in year five of the six-year medicine course at the University of Lagos. She was not a doctor. She reminded him of this often, and he ignored her often, which was how they showed each other love. Her mother lived abroad with Funke's younger brother and called on Sundays when the network allowed. The flat was quiet in a way that two people make quiet: tidy, careful, a little too much room at the table.

On Saturdays she went downstairs.

The June 12 Community Clinic smelled of methylated spirit and floor polish and, faintly, of whatever Chuks was cooking outside. Treatment was free, so the benches filled early: soldiers from the training camp with blistered feet, a market woman with a stubborn cough, mothers holding hot, heavy toddlers. Nurse Adaeze Okafor ran the room the way a good conductor runs a choir, without ever raising her voice.

"Medical student," she said, handing Funke the blood pressure cuff. "Take this pressure and tell me a number I will like."

Funke wrapped the cuff around the arm of an elderly woman who was not pleased to be there. She pumped, listened, let the needle fall.

"One-sixty over ninety-five, Nurse."

"I did not like that number."

"Neither did I."

The old woman spoke only Yoruba and had no interest in being hurried, so Funke sat with her and translated for Dr. Nwachukwu, turning his careful questions into the kind of questions a grandmother would answer. Do you take the tablets every day? Every day that God gives me money for them. Do you add salt to your food? What kind of question is that? Funke translated the second answer as "Yes."

A small boy with a fever would not let anyone near him until Funke let him hold the stethoscope and listen to his own heart. He listened for a long time, eyes wide, as though somebody inside him were knocking.

"It is saying hello," Funke told him.

"What is it saying after?"

"It is saying, please let the nurse check your temperature."

He let the nurse check his temperature.

By two o'clock the benches were empty and Nurse Adaeze was eating rice from a covered bowl Chuks had sent in without being asked. "One more year," she said, pointing her spoon at Funke, "and they will let you sign things. Then everybody will want to be your friend."

"I will only sign what is true."

"Hm. Write that down and keep it somewhere safe."

The afternoon was the kind of Lagos heat that sits on your chest like a cat. Upstairs, Funke spread her notes across the dining table and tried to make cardiology stay in her head. Below, the street went about its business. The family at No. 8 had their yard radio going, and the bass of a Joe-Izzy song drifted up and through the window, and Funke found she had read the same paragraph about heart valves three times while nodding along.

That was when she saw him.

He came up the street from the gate end slowly, the way people walk when each step has to be negotiated. One bag, a cheap one, half empty. A shirt that had been good once. He was tall and much too thin for his frame, and even from the window she could see the swelling along the left side of his face, the color of an overripe plum. He stopped at Iloro House, looked at the number on the wall as though it might change its mind, and sat down on the veranda bench.

He did not do anything after that. He just sat.

Funke caught herself assessing him. Weight loss, recent. Bruising to the face, a few days old. The way he lowered himself onto the bench, with his right hand braced and his breath held, said ribs. His forearms were speckled with bites, dozens of them, the kind you get from a long night in a room with no net and no window and no choice.

She told herself this was clinical interest. It was mostly clinical interest.

Then the big man in the apron looked up from his coal pot, went very still, and crossed the street faster than Funke had ever seen Chuks move without food at the end of it. He said something she could not hear. The stranger looked up, and something in his face broke open, and Chuks was already putting a plate in his hands.

The stranger ate. He ate like a man who had forgotten food was something you were allowed to finish. Chuks stood over him with his arms folded, nodding, as though the eating were a performance he had paid good money to see.

"Funke." Her father was behind her. "What are you looking at?"

"A patient, Daddy."

He leaned past her and looked down at the bench. He looked for a long, civil-service moment.

"That," he said, "is a young man at Iloro House. Iloro House is not a hospital, and you are not a doctor yet." He drew the curtain halfway, which was his idea of a compromise. "Cardiology."

She went back to the table. She lasted almost four minutes.

When she looked again, the plate was empty and Chuks was laughing at something, and the stranger was laughing too, carefully, one hand pressed to his side. Then, as if he felt it, he lifted his head and looked straight up at No. 5, at the window, at her.

Most people on June 12 Street had learned not to look at that window. The new man did not know the rules yet.

Funke did not wave. She did not look away either. She decided, with the firmness of a woman who has already made a plan without consulting anyone, that if he was awake at half past six on Monday morning, she would introduce herself properly. In daylight. Where her father could see.

Somewhere down the street, someone said a name. She would learn later that it was AJ.