The Chair

The chair at the Palmline Unisex Salon is red, mostly. It is red where nobody sits and a tired pink where everybody does, and it spins all the way round if you push it, which Tara does not allow. "This chair is not a ride," she tells the small boys who try. "It is a place of business."

It is the only chair in the shop, and Tara rents it.

The shop belongs to a woman everyone calls Madam Palmline, who has not set foot in it for three years. On the last Friday of every month she sends a nephew to collect ₦60,000 for the chair. The sign over the door is hers as well: PALMLINE UNISEX SALON in green letters, a painted woman with long braids on one side and a painted man with a sharp haircut on the other. The painted man is cross-eyed. Tara has asked for him to be repainted every month for three years. The nephew always says he will mention it.

"Unisex," Tara tells anyone who reads the sign aloud with a question in their voice. "It means I don't care what is on your head. I care what it looks like when you leave."

Braids, cornrows, weaves and wigs for the women. Clippers and line-ups for the men. A line-up is the clean, sharp edge cut along the hairline and the beard, the part that turns a cheap haircut into an expensive decision. Tara's line-ups are straight enough to rule paper with. She is proud of most of what her hands do, and quiet about the rest.

Abeokuta

She learned on her sisters' heads.

In Abeokuta, a couple of hours up the road from Lagos when the road is in a good mood, her mother sold adire, the indigo tie-dyed cloth the town is famous for, and braided hair on the veranda on Sunday afternoons for anyone who brought a stool. Omotara was the eldest of three girls, and the eldest girl in a Yoruba house becomes a second mother whether she applies for the job or not. By ten she was doing Yewande's cornrows before school. By twelve she was doing Bimpe's, which was harder, because Bimpe screamed.

"If you can braid Bimpe," her mother said, "you can braid a lion."

She came to Lagos at nineteen with a bag, a wide-tooth comb and one instruction. "Send something home every month," her mother said at the motor park. "Even if it is small. Small money that comes is better than big money that is coming."

She has sent something home every month for thirteen years. Some months it was very small. It has always come.

Six of those years she spent in a big, loud salon on the mainland, doing the difficult heads nobody else would take. That was where she learned speed, and where she learned the other thing. A stylist at the next chair repeated something a customer had said about her husband. By the end of the month the marriage was over, the customer and all her sisters had stopped coming, and soon after, so had the stylist's job. Tara watched it all from three feet away, comb in hand, and made herself a rule.

When she heard that a chair was going at a little salon outside a police gate on the edge of Ajegunle, her friends told her she was mad. Tara thought about it for one evening. "A gate is a queue," she said. "And a queue is a customer who can't leave."

The gate

She was right. The Palmline sits outside the main gate of the Abraham Adesyan Estate, next to the waiting area and its benches, and there is nearly always somebody on those benches with an hour to kill and hair that could be better.

Guests waiting to be let in. Off-duty officers, who sit in circles outside gisting, which is Lagos for gossiping, and who come in one at a time for a line-up and keep gisting from the chair. On party nights, the hostesses and bar staff from Prizm, the purple club at the end of June 12 Street, arrive at four o'clock in a group to have their braids touched up and talk about which guests tipped and which ones only promised to. Natasha, who runs Prizm's floor, comes once a fortnight, says almost nothing, looks at the result for a long time, says "Neat," and pays the exact amount. Tara likes her very much. Funke, the medical student from No. 5, comes once a month for her church braids and falls asleep in the chair with a textbook open on her knee.

And on party nights at six, the Warden's boys in black, two or three at a time, for line-ups, because the Warden inspects them before the doors open like a sergeant inspecting a parade.

Next door, at his window shop in the gatehouse, Mallam Garba, whom everyone calls Sarge, sells biscuits, mosquito coils and painkillers, and on Saturday nights he passes two tablets through the hatch to Tara before she asks. On the other side, Bode at Gatefold Clothing sells shirts to guests who have just discovered the dress code.

Everybody talks in the chair. Something about the cape around the neck and a stranger's hands on your head makes people confess. Tara has heard about debts and affairs, deals at the ports and who owes the Warden. She has heard grown men plan their whole lives at one ear and plan them again, differently, by the time she reached the other.

She repeats almost none of it.

Blessing

Her apprentice does not yet understand this.

Blessing is sixteen, quick with a comb, quicker with her mouth, and convinced that every piece of news is a gift that must be passed on before it goes bad. She sweeps, she washes, and she listens to everything like a radio station with no off switch.

"Aunty," she said one afternoon, after an officer had left. Aunty is what a Lagos girl calls any woman older than her, and some women older than her mother. "Did you hear what he said about Leye's..."

"No."

"But he said..."

"Blessing." Tara pointed her comb at the big mirror on the wall, the one with a crack in the corner shaped like the River Niger. "What the mirror hears, the mirror keeps."

Blessing looked at the mirror. "But the mirror can't hear."

"Exactly," said Tara. "Be like the mirror."

Blessing thought about this for almost a full minute, which for Blessing was a personal record, and then asked whether the mirror at least got lunch.

On Sunday nights Tara counts the week's money in Room 7 at Iloro House, the rooming house where she lives, just inside the gate on June 12 Street. The chair rent goes in one envelope and food in another, and the biggest share goes home to her mother and the two girls, who are not girls any more. Yewande is training to be a nurse. Bimpe wants to study law, and already argues like it.

It was an ordinary afternoon when the man with the London voice came to the gate.

She was finishing a woman's cornrows, and Blessing was at the door, and they both heard him before they saw him: a thin young man with one bag and no laces in his shoes, standing in front of the officer with the clipboard and telling his whole story very fast. London. A raid. A plane. A cell. And a name at the end of it, like a key: Chuks, who cooks.

"Oyinbo," Blessing whispered, delighted. Oyinbo: a foreigner, a white person, anybody who sounds like they come from somewhere else.

Tara watched him through the glass. She watched the way he stood, like a man trying not to look as hungry as he was. She watched him say thank you to an officer who had not done anything for him yet.

"That one isn't oyinbo," she said. "Listen to how he says thank you. Somebody's mother raised him." She went back to the cornrows. "Somebody's mother is worried about him, too."

The officer waved him through. The gate closed behind him. Tara did not think about him again until that night, when she walked home in the dark and found him sitting on her veranda.