Idi-Araba Mornings

At half past six on Monday morning the street was still deciding whether to wake up.

The generators had gone quiet. Over the west wall, at the training camp, a sergeant major was already shouting at soldiers who had not done anything wrong yet. Funke stood at her gate in a pressed skirt with her white coat folded over her arm, a stethoscope coiled in her bag, and a stack of flashcards in her hand that said things like furosemide: starting dose?

The door of Iloro House opened, and the new man came out.

He moved better than he had on Saturday. The swelling on his face had gone from plum to something closer to tea. He saw her, hesitated, and then walked over with the deliberate casualness of a man pretending he had not been planning this route for a full day.

"You're the new face at No. 3?" she said, before he could start. "I'm Funke. No. 5."

"AJ. Just got back."

He said it in an accent straight out of south London, and Funke filed that away.

"Welcome to June 12 Street. NEPA takes the light most nights around eight, so keep a flashlight." NEPA was the old name of the power company, and everyone still used it, the way everyone still blamed it. "And if Chuks offers you food, say yes."

"He already did. Twice. I think it might be three times by lunch."

"Then you are learning." She looked down the street toward the north gate. "My ride should be here soon. Ward rounds do not accept Lagos traffic as a fresh excuse every morning."

"I can wait with you."

"A little company would be nice. Just do not make me miss the car."

So he waited with her. He asked what the flashcards were, and she told him, and he tried to pronounce furosemide and gave up halfway. She asked how long he had been in London, and he said, "Long enough to get the accent, not long enough to keep the passport," and smiled as if that were a joke, and she let it be one.

At twenty past eight a teal-grey car came in through the north main gate. Funke watched the officers there lift the barrier for it without even looking up from their phones. Beside her, AJ watched the same thing with a very particular expression, the face of a man watching a door open for somebody else.

"That is my ride," she said. "Wish me a ward round with no questions I cannot answer."

"And a good trip home."

She paused with her hand on the car door. "I like that part. See you later, AJ."

The driver was a quiet man her father paid by the month, and he drove the way he spoke, which was rarely and with great patience. Out through the gate, out past the prison wall, out onto roads that were less roads than negotiations. Container trucks from the ports stood parked two deep along the shoulder, their drivers asleep in the cabs. Yellow danfo minibuses, the city's cheapest and most fearless transport, cut across lanes with their conductors hanging from the doors and shouting destinations like auctioneers. Hawkers moved between the stopped cars selling plantain chips, phone chargers, bottled water, a framed picture of a lion, and, on one occasion, a single shoe.

Funke did flashcards. The driver had the radio on low. When a Joe-Izzy song came on, he turned it up exactly one notch without comment, which was the closest he had ever come to small talk.

The College of Medicine of the University of Lagos sits at Idi-Araba, on the Surulere side of the mainland, in the grounds of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, which everyone calls LUTH. By the time the car turned in, the benches outside the wards were already full of relatives holding flasks and folders and the patience of people who have been told to wait. The air smelled of disinfectant and frying yam from the canteen.

The consultant on the male medical ward was a compact man with reading glasses on a chain, whom the students called Prof behind his back and Sir to his face. He did not shout. He did something worse: he asked questions in a pleasant voice in front of everyone and then waited, with all the time in the world, while you discovered you did not know the answer.

Funke had clerked bed fourteen the afternoon before, which meant she had taken his story, examined him and written it all up, and now she had to present it to a horseshoe of residents, house officers and fellow students.

"Mr. Adigun, sixty-one, retired crane operator from the Apapa ports," she began. "Three weeks of worsening breathlessness. He cannot lie flat; he sleeps on three pillows. Swollen ankles."

"And on examination?"

She told them. The pitting swelling at both ankles. The crackles at the bottom of both lungs. And then, because she had looked carefully and twice, the raised pulse in the neck that she was sure the house officer had missed.

The consultant leaned in, looked, and nodded once.

"Good," he said. "That is a sign people walk past. You did not walk past it."

Funke felt the word land somewhere warm in her chest and decided to keep it there all day.

"And his medications?"

"He takes them regularly, sir."

The consultant turned to the bed and asked the man, in Yoruba, gently, when he had last taken his tablets. Not whether he took them. When.

Mr. Adigun looked at the ceiling. Three weeks, he said. His son had lost his job at the port. The tablets cost what they cost. He had been saving them, one every few days, to make them last.

Funke's face went hot. Yesterday she had asked, "You take your drugs?" and he had said yes, the way you say yes to a young woman in a white coat who is clearly trying her best.

"A history is not a form you fill," the consultant said, not unkindly, to the whole horseshoe. "A patient will tell you exactly what you ask. So ask better." Then he moved to bed fifteen, and nobody looked at Funke, which was its own small mercy.

After the round she went back. She sat on the edge of the plastic chair by bed fourteen and apologized, and Mr. Adigun waved it away.

"You were tired," he said. "I was proud. Two foolish people." He told her about the cranes: how from the cab, more than a hundred feet up, the whole port looked tidy, ships lined up like loaves on a shelf, and how everything was quiet up there. "Down here," he said, "everything costs."

She went to the social welfare office and the pharmacy and a resident who knew which generic was cheapest, and she came back with a plan written on the back of a flashcard. He called her Doctor. She corrected him.

"Not yet."

"Practice answering to it," he said. "Small small. Little by little. It will fit."

The car brought her home at six. From the gate she could see the cranes against the evening, and she thought of a man up in one of them, looking down at a tidy world. Then she saw AJ on the bench at Iloro House, and he lifted a hand, and she found she had been looking for him.

Her friends were waiting. Her father was waiting after that. At eight o'clock the power would go and the door would shut, and that, she would discover, was not quite the end of the day.