Bredren

The first thing AJ learned about Kingston was that he was asleep on AJ's floor.

It was AJ's fourth night in Room 3 of Iloro House. He had spent the day at the bush as a ball boy, chasing a football for ₦1,000 a break, and he came down the corridor after dark with sand in his shoes and every muscle he owned filing a complaint. He had left the door on the latch that morning. There was nothing in Room 3 worth stealing, unless you counted the mattress, and nobody would.

He pushed the door open, and his candle found a man on the floor.

The man lay on a raffia mat that AJ had seen rolled up behind the door and taken for rubbish. He was on his back with his hands folded on his chest, and his hair was spread around his head on the mat like the roots of a tree: long locks, dozens of them, each as long as an arm.

AJ did not move. His body did it for him. It went cold and very still, the way it had learned to in a cell full of strangers, where the men on the floor beside you are the thing to be afraid of at night. His hand was shaking. The candle flame shook with it.

The man on the floor opened his eyes. He did not sit up fast. He did not do anything fast. He looked at AJ for a long moment, at the candle and the shaking and the bruise still yellow on his arm, and something in his face settled, as though he had read a whole page in one look.

"Peace, bredren," he said. His voice was low and easy and in no hurry at all. "Forgive I and I. The mat and I are old friends, and the door was open."

Bredren, AJ would learn, means brothers. I and I means I, and you, and everybody, all at once. Nobody in Lagos had called him a brother yet, except Chuks.

The man rolled up the mat, slowly, the way you would fold a flag, and got to his feet.

"Who are you?" said AJ.

"Kingston."

"Kingston what?"

"Only Kingston." At the door, with the mat under his arm, he stopped. "A man who has slept among strangers needs his own floor for a while. Sleep, bredren. The bench and I and I are old friends too."

He went out to the veranda. AJ shut the door and stood with his back against it until the candle had stopped shaking. Then he lay down. He did not sleep much. But in the gray before dawn he heard a broom going slowly down the corridor, from Room 1 to the back door, and somebody singing under his breath along with it, too low to catch the words, and somewhere in the middle of it he slept.

The power cut

The next night NEPA took the light at eight, as it does most nights. NEPA is what everybody still calls the power company, though it has changed its name more than once. In a face-me-I-face-you, which is what Lagos calls a rooming house where every door looks across a corridor at another door, a power cut empties the rooms onto the veranda, which is just as dark but at least has a breeze.

Mr. Akin took the end of the bench with his tea, as he has every night for years. Mama Ronke's children sat in a row on the step. Tara was braiding a wig on her knee by her rechargeable lamp. Tiny was in his white shirt, between visitors. Danger and Benny, the area boys from Room 8 (area boys being Lagos for young men who make their living on the street), had the top of the steps: Benny counting the day by flashlight, Danger with his other notebook, the one with the cracked blue cover, open on his knee.

Kingston came up the footpath from the beach at half past eight, in no hurry, and sat on the boards at the far end of the veranda with his back to the post. Nobody said hello, and nobody needed to. It was like the tide coming in.

Chuks came up the path a few minutes later with a covered pot and a stack of plates. He fed the step first, then the bench, then AJ, who tried to say he wasn't hungry and was ignored. The last plate he carried to the end of the veranda. "No meat," he said. "Your corner."

"Jah bless the cook," said Kingston. Jah is his name for God. He is a Rasta, and he preaches it.

"Jah can bless the cook by sending pepper," said Chuks. "The Afternoon Store has none."

Benny had been watching Kingston eat with the face of a man watching money walk past, and he could not hold it in. "Kingston. A candle. It's dark. Fifty naira."

"I and I can see, bredren."

"A fan, then. Battery. Original."

"Jah sends the breeze off the sea."

Benny shut his money notebook. "Three years," he told AJ. "There is a page in this book with his name at the top, and nothing under it. Not one match. You know what that does to a businessman?"

The poet and the prophet

Then Danger opened his notebook properly, and the veranda went quiet, because it always does.

He read low, with the candle on the step beside him, and even Mama Ronke's children stopped elbowing each other.

NEPA took the light and left us the stars,

the cheap ones. The ones Prizm can't sell.

Down at the far end of the street, under its purple sign, Prizm was lit up on its own generator, loud and bright, the one house on June 12 Street that never seemed to lose the light. Everybody looked at it. Then everybody looked up.

From the far end of the veranda, Kingston began to sing.

It was slow and low, nearly a chant, in a voice that seemed to come up out of the boards.

Babylon sells the light and calls it a favor.

Jah gave the sun away for free.

Sit close in the dark, my people.

The morning never sends a bill.

Babylon, in Kingston's faith, is the world of money and power, the big men and their gates. Nobody had to explain it to AJ twice. He was already looking at the purple light.

Danger looked at Kingston over the candle for a long moment. Then he grinned, the big grin. "Prophet."

"Poet," said Kingston, the same way, like two men saluting.

"Your songs are prayers," said Danger. "Mine are receipts."

"A receipt is a prayer, Danger. It says: remember, this was paid."

Danger thought about that, and wrote something in the margin. Watching from the bench, AJ understood for the first time that there were two men on June 12 Street who did not lower their eyes to anybody, and that a long time ago they had agreed not to waste that on each other.

Danger turned a page. Benny, who knew that notebook better than Danger did, saw which page, and began to push himself off the step.

Danger read it anyway.

Old men on this street are a rumor.

I heard about one once.

Nobody could find his house.

"Not that one," said Tara, as she always does, and pointed her comb at him.

Benny was already at the door. Then Kingston spoke from the end of the veranda, and Benny stopped with his hand on the frame.

"Jah did not put that notebook in your hand so you could write your own funeral, Danger." He did not raise his voice. Nobody on the veranda had ever heard him raise it. "Write me one with gray hair in it. I and I will wait."

Danger's face went cold. Everybody on the step knew that look, and the step went very still. He looked down the length of the veranda at Kingston, and Kingston looked back, without moving, with nothing in his face but time.

It lasted perhaps four seconds. Then Danger laughed, the big laugh, the one they can hear at the gate, and closed the notebook.

"Next week," he said.

"Irie," said Kingston. Irie: all right, all good.

Benny came back and sat down. Tara went on braiding, but she looked down the veranda at Kingston for a second, and AJ saw her mouth the words thank you.

A place you carry

Later, when the children had been sent in and the candle was a stub, AJ moved down to the boards at the end of the veranda, beside the post.

"Sorry about last night," he said.

"Nothing to be sorry for, bredren. A man's floor is a man's floor."

"Can I ask you something? Where are you from? Jamaica?"

"Never seen it."

AJ waited. Kingston let him wait, comfortably, the way the sea lets you wait.

"Then where'd you get the accent?"

"Where did you get yours?"

"South London. I grew up there. I was a kid when we went." AJ looked down the street toward the gate. "Here they call me oyinbo." Oyinbo: foreigner, white person, anybody who sounds as if they come from somewhere else. "The police in the cell called me it. The officers at the gate call me it. I was born in Lagos. I'm as Naija as any of them." Naija: Nigerian, in the street's own word.

"Seen," said Kingston, which is how he says I understand, and also you understand?, depending on which way he points it. "They hear the country in your mouth, and they think it is the country in your heart." He touched his lips with two fingers, then his chest. "London is in your mouth, bredren. Jamaica is in mine. Same country. A place you carry in your mouth."

"And what's in here?" said AJ, and tapped his own chest.

"That one," said Kingston, "Jah keeps the address."

AJ laughed. It surprised him. Down the street, the purple sign hummed. "Everybody keeps warning me about that place," he said.

Kingston looked at the purple light for a long time.

"Babylon has a soft voice, bredren," he said. "When it calls you my son, remember whose son you are."

"Whose?"

"Same as I and I."

The light came back after midnight, in the middle of a sentence Mr. Akin was saying about the bathroom. The fans started, the house groaned, and everybody went in.

AJ stopped at his door. Then he went back out to the veranda, where Kingston had already lain down on the bench with his locks over the end.

"The mat," said AJ. "It's yours. Room 3. If you want it. Whenever."

Kingston opened one eye. "Every room in this house is my room, bredren," he said. "That is why I never lock one."

AJ went to bed and left his door on the latch.

In the morning the floor of Room 3 had been swept and the mat was rolled behind the door. Whether anybody had slept on it, AJ never found out. But his shoes, which had had no laces since the cell, had laces: two strips of the same green cloth that tied Kingston's locks, threaded through every hole and knotted twice.

Benny saw them at breakfast and looked like a man who had been robbed.

"Laces," he said, "were on my list."