The Flood

The rains came in the second week of the month, and they did not come politely.

On the edge of Ajegunle the ground is low and swampy, close to the creeks and the sea, and the open drains along June 12 Street are dug for ordinary rain. This was not ordinary rain. It fell for three days without stopping to breathe. On the third evening the big drain on the street ran over, brown and fast, and by the time the light went at eight, June 12 Street was a river up to the shin, and rising.

NEPA took the light anyway. NEPA, which is what everybody still calls the power company, has never once been stopped by a flood. Up and down the street the generators coughed into life, and at the far end, under its purple sign, Prizm blazed on its own generator as if the weather were happening to somebody else. Joe-Izzy's set came down the street from inside, loud and untroubled.

Kingston stood on the veranda of Iloro House and looked at it for a while.

"Babylon keeps its lights on," he said, to nobody. Babylon, in his faith, is the world of money and power. On June 12 Street, it is mostly that house.

The water

At half past eight the water came under the back door.

Iloro House is a face-me-I-face-you, a rooming house where every door looks across one corridor at another, and the corridor runs from the front of the house to the back. So the water came in at the back and went looking, the way water does, for the lowest room. It found the box room first.

Tiny came out holding his one good shirt above his head, like a man crossing a river with the only thing that mattered. "Everything else," he announced, "can swim."

After that the whole house moved at once. Tara stood in the kitchen doorway with her rechargeable lamp and gave out jobs, because somebody had to and she had the roster. Danger lifted Sade's sewing machine out of Room 4 and onto the kitchen table as if it were a loaf of bread, then Mr. Akin's trunk, then Mr. Akin, who protested the whole way. Benny went out to the gate with an armful of umbrellas and sold three to people who were already soaked to the waist. "They're wet now," he explained on the way back. "They don't want to be wetter." AJ bailed the corridor with a bucket, which was exactly as useful as it sounds, and kept doing it, because it was something to do.

Chuks came wading up from No. 1 with a pot of rice on his head, cooked at noon, because his mama taught him that rain is when people get hungry. "Eat it on your feet," he said. "There's nowhere left to sit."

Kingston carried. Mama Ronke's mattress, Tayo's books, the sack of rice off the kitchen floor: he moved all of it at the same pace he does everything, so that in the middle of all that running he seemed to be the one thing in the house standing still. Somehow he carried more than anybody.

The count

It was a little after nine when Mama Ronke counted her children on the kitchen table, where Tara had put them, up out of the water among the rescued pots.

She counted again.

"Where is Jimi?"

Jimi is her youngest. He is seven, small for it, and the one who delivers the plates. Nobody had seen him since the water came under the door.

Then everybody was shouting.

The rain on the zinc roof, like gravel poured on a drum. The generators all down the street, roaring. The music from Prizm coming over the water. The drain outside, running like a road. And now a dozen people in a dark house, all shouting one small boy's name in every direction, with flashlights swinging across the walls.

Mama Ronke was at the front door, screaming his name into the street. Danger had already gone past her, down the steps and into the water, toward the open drain, because the open drain was the worst place on June 12 Street for a small boy to be on a night like this, and Danger always goes straight at the worst thing. He was in up to his waist and shouting louder than anybody.

Kingston put down the sack of rice.

He walked to the front door. He did not hurry. He did not push past anyone; people moved for him without knowing they had. He stopped at the top of the steps and said one word, at about the volume of a man asking for salt at the table.

"Danger."

Danger turned round in the water.

"Sit down."

And the most dangerous man on June 12 Street, waist-deep in a flood with a child lost somewhere in the dark, looked up at the man on the steps for one long second. Then he waded back and sat down on the bottom step, in the water.

The house went quiet. Not because anybody told it to. Because nobody in Iloro House had ever heard anybody tell Danger to sit down, and nobody had ever seen Danger do it.

"Everybody," said Kingston. "Hush now. Babylon is loud tonight. The child is not."

He lifted one hand, palm down, slowly, the way you would calm a frightened animal, and one by one the flashlights stopped swinging. Mama Ronke put both hands over her mouth. Even Benny closed his.

The rain kept on. The generators kept on. But inside the house there was, for the first time that night, a silence, and in it, very faint, something else.

A small voice saying Mama, over and over, to itself, the way a child does when he has given up on anybody hearing.

It was coming from the back yard.

"Now," said Kingston to Danger, gently. "Now go, bredren." Bredren: brothers. It is what he calls the men he loves.

Danger was already gone.

The wall

Jimi was on top of the back wall of the yard.

He had gone out to save his football when the water first came in, and the water in the yard had come up faster than he could get back, so he had done what a small boy on June 12 Street does when the ground is not safe. He had climbed. He was lying along the top of the wall in the rain, holding on with both arms, and on the far side of the wall was the long drain behind the houses, full and fast.

Danger, who as a boy fell off every wall in Ajegunle and walked away from all of them, knew exactly how to bring a child down from one. He did not grab. He talked the whole way across the yard, low, about nothing at all: football, Chuks's rice, the umbrella Benny once sold to a man who already had one. When he reached the wall he lifted both arms and said, "Jump, small man. I've got you."

Jimi jumped, and Danger had him.

He carried him in through the back door with the boy's arms locked round his neck and handed him to his mother, and Mama Ronke held him so hard he complained about it, which everybody agreed was a good sign.

No room here

He was not hurt. Tara checked, and then Mama Ronke checked, and then Tara checked again. But he would not stop shaking, and every time he looked at the back door, where the water was still coming in, he began to cry again.

Kingston sat down on the kitchen floor, in the water, with his back against the cupboard where the boy could see him. He looked at the back door and the water sliding under it, and he began to sing to it, low and slow, the way he sings to the sea in the mornings, as if he were telling the water something it ought to know already.

Water, go home to the sea. You have no room here.

Every small head in this house is counted.

Go back, go back, go back down to your drain.

Jah knows the name of every child on this street.

Jah is Kingston's name for God. He sang it again, and again. Jimi stopped crying to listen. Then his eyes began to close, there on his mother's shoulder, in a kitchen full of rescued pots and a sewing machine and Mr. Akin's trunk, and Mr. Akin, who had fallen asleep on it.

The water began to go down a little after midnight, because the rain stopped, because rain does. Jimi is seven, and he believes, and will believe for the rest of his life, that it was told to.

Nobody in Iloro House has corrected him.

When the boy was asleep, Mama Ronke looked at Kingston across the kitchen for a long time.

"The kitchen," she said. "Any night you want it. Every night."

"Only when you allow it, Mama," said Kingston. "A kitchen needs a door somebody can close."

Later, when the house had gone quiet at last, Danger came and sat beside him on the wet veranda step, still soaked to the chest.

"Nobody tells me to sit down," he said.

"Nobody did, bredren. You sat down because you were listening." Kingston looked out at the water going down the street. "I and I only told you where to listen." I and I, in Kingston's faith, means me and we at once, because Jah is in everybody.

Danger was quiet for a long time. Then he went into Room 8 and came back with the blue notebook, which had spent the flood on top of the fan, and he wrote something in it by the light of the prison towers. He tore the page out, folded it twice and held it out.

"The one you asked for," he said. "With gray hair in it. Don't read it till I'm old."

Kingston did not read it. He tucked it into the green cloth that ties his locks, and nodded once, the way you do when somebody has made you a promise.

Dawn

In the morning the street was mud, and the corridor of Iloro House was mud, and the sun came up over the port cranes as if nothing had happened.

At a quarter to six Kingston began to sweep, with the palm-spine broom, from Room 1 to the back door, singing under his breath. This time he was not alone. Mr. Akin came out with a second broom, then Tara with a bucket, then Tiny with his trousers rolled to the knee, complaining, then everybody else, and last of all Mama Ronke's children, the youngest in front, with a broom twice his size.

Benny swept for a while. Then he stopped and opened his money notebook to the page headed KINGSTON. It was still empty. He looked at it for a long time, then closed it and put the rubber band back on.

"You're not going to write anything?" said AJ.

"Some pages," said Benny, "you leave empty on purpose."

When the corridor was clean, Kingston leaned the broom by the back door and set off down the footpath toward the beach, with his locks tied up in the green cloth and Danger's folded page tucked inside it.

AJ walked with him as far as the edge of the bush.

"Kingston. Where are you actually from?"

Kingston stopped and looked back up June 12 Street, at Iloro House with every door and window open to dry, the mattresses out on the veranda in the sun, and a small boy sweeping the step.

"From the place before this one, bredren," he said. "Same as you."

Then he went on down the path, and AJ heard him singing before the trees took him.

I and I have no door to lock and no key to lose.

Every floor that holds me, Jah, hold it up.

Back on the veranda, Mr. Akin was in his place at the end of the bench with his tea, as though there had never been a flood in the history of Lagos.

"Mr. Akin," said AJ. "Where's Kingston from? Really?"

Mr. Akin considered the question with the seriousness of a man who has watched most things come up that footpath sooner or later.

"Here," he said at last. "Lately."