The Window

At eight o'clock, the way it did most nights, the power went.

It did not flicker. It simply left, like a guest who has decided the party is over, and for one breath June 12 Street was completely dark and almost completely silent. Then the generators began, one after another down the street, coughing and catching and settling into what Funke privately called the evening choir. Nobody had asked them to sing. They sang anyway.

Downstairs, her father locked the front door. Then he checked it. Then, because he was her father, he checked it again.

The rule at No. 5 was older than Funke's memory of it. After eight o'clock the door stayed shut. Not for friends, not for neighbors, not for the pastor, not for anyone who had forgotten something. "A house that keeps its door shut at night," her father said, "keeps its good name in the day." He had said it so many times it had become part of the furniture, like the clock that ran four minutes fast and the framed certificate from the ministry.

Funke did not argue with the rule. She just noticed that it was about the door.

She studied by the light of a rechargeable lamp that gave her about two and a half hours before it sulked. On the third night after her ward round, she was halfway through a chapter on kidney failure when a small stone tapped the window frame. Then another.

She looked down. AJ was standing in the street below, hands in his pockets, face lit orange by a neighbor's security bulb.

"AJ? Keep your voice down. Dad is home, and the window is as far as you are coming tonight."

"I only came to see how your day went."

She considered him. "Better now," she said. "Do not let that go to your head."

He did, a little. She could see it from upstairs.

The first night, before he had learned, he had knocked on the front door like an ordinary person. Funke had heard her father's slippers cross the hall, the chain stay on, and her father's voice, courteous as a closing letter: "Who is there? AJ, it is late. Funke is home, and this door stays closed. Good night."

He had gone. Then he had worked it out.

Night talk

They talked in low voices, her elbows on the sill, him leaning on the wall across the narrow gap, both of them aware of the man downstairs who listened to the house the way a doctor listens to a chest. She told him about Mr. Adigun and the cranes. He listened properly, which surprised her; most men she knew listened only for the gap where they could start talking.

When she asked about London, he talked about the weather and the buses and a chicken shop in Peckham with excellent chips and a terrible name. When she asked about why he left, he talked about the weather again. She noticed. She let it go. There is a kind of history you only get by not asking for it.

"Officer Sola told me you came back across the desert from Libya," she said.

AJ sighed the sigh of a man who had heard this story told about himself many times, each version longer. "I have never been to Libya."

"He says you walked."

"The desert took plenty," AJ said gravely. "These shoes are doing their best."

She had to put her hand over her mouth.

He told her about the gate police, about the officers who would open the north gate for him only when he had paid them two and a half million naira, a little at a time. "Settle us," they called it, which meant pay us off. "Little by little is fine," he said, in an excellent imitation of Officer Tunde's lean. "Settle us."

"₦2,500,000," Funke said. "For a gate."

"For that gate."

"That is three years of my medical books."

"Then I'll have to study harder than you."

The next night she heard the stone and was at the window before the second one. She pretended she had been there already.

"You found my window again," she said. "Are you checking on me or collecting reasons to smile?"

"Can it be both?"

"Maybe. Quietly, though. Dad is listening for the front door."

The promise

At nine o'clock the music started at Prizm. It came over the rooftops in pieces: a bass line, a crowd noise, the bright edge of a voice. Joe-Izzy played the club every night from nine until one, and on a still night you could hear the first notes of "High On Life" all the way down June 12 Street. Funke hummed along before she could stop herself.

"Fan?" AJ said.

"Joe-Izzy at No. 1145 tonight? I would like a VIP ticket and a good view of the stage, please."

"One day," AJ said, looking at the purple glow over the roofs, "I'll throw my own parties in there."

"One day you will greet my father in daylight without him having to tell you. Start there."

On the fourth night he was quieter. Chuks, he said, was teaching him his way around the estate: the paths, the map, the corners. Tomorrow they were going down the south footpath to the bush, where the officers on their smoke break let people shoot bottles at the unfinished building with a borrowed shotgun.

Funke was quiet for a moment. She thought of the boy at the clinic listening to his own heart. She thought of how many things in a ward begin with someone being careless for one minute.

"That borrowed shotgun belongs back with the officers, AJ," she said. "Keep your promise; I would like to see you here safely."

"I haven't even borrowed it yet."

"Then you have time to practice the promise."

He looked up at her for a long moment, without the London grin. "I'll give it back," he said. "I always give things back."

The next night he did not throw a stone. He just stood under the window until she noticed him, and then he held up both hands, empty, like a magician at the end of a trick.

"Returned," he said. "One officer said I was a good man. The other one asked if I'd brought food."

"Biscuit," said Funke, who had heard of Biscuit.

"Biscuit."

She found she was smiling at the dark. Over the rooftops, the Kirikiri watchtower light turned and turned. Joe-Izzy's crowd roared, faint and far away, as if from another, happier country.

When she finally closed the window and went downstairs for water, her father was sitting in the dark living room in his reading chair, not reading.

"That young man," he said. "Does he go to church?"

"His uncle is a pastor, Daddy. In Benin City."

"Hm." The word was neither approval nor its opposite. Then, as she reached the stairs: "Chief Ekanem stopped me at the gate today. The one with the club. He asked what you are studying, and how your fees are paid."

Funke turned. "What did you tell him?"

"The truth," her father said. He looked at the locked front door for a while. "I am beginning to wonder whether that was wise."