Room 7

Iloro House is a face-me-I-face-you, which is what Lagos calls a rooming house where every door looks straight across a corridor at another door. Eight rooms, one kitchen, one bathroom, one veranda bench and one roster.

The roster is Tara's.

It hangs on the kitchen wall on a sheet of exercise-book paper, held up by four pieces of tape and Tara's personality. Down one side, the eight rooms. Across the top, the times. Mr. Akin of Room 5, the elder, goes before six and has opinions about everyone who goes after. Mama Ronke's children from Room 1 go all at once, like a fire drill. Sade the tailor, in Room 4, goes late, because her sewing machine runs until midnight. Room 7 is at a quarter past five, because Room 7 opens a salon at seven, and Room 7 wrote the roster.

Room 8 is written in red. Room 8 has been written in red since the week Room 8 moved in.

Room 7 sits between Room 6 and Room 8, across the corridor from Tayo, so most nights Tara falls asleep with a business plan coming through one wall and an argument about a fan through the other.

Room 8

Room 8 is Danger and Benny.

They are area boys, which is Lagos for young men who make their living on the street, hustling and selling whatever the moment needs. When the pumps run dry, they have fuel in jerrycans. When NEPA takes the light (NEPA is what everyone still calls the power company), they have cold water. The minute it rains, they have umbrellas. Nobody has ever seen them buy an umbrella.

Danger, whose real name is Daniel, is the most dangerous man on June 12 Street and the one it loves most. He got the name as a small boy in Ajegunle by falling off every roof, wall and mango tree in the neighborhood and getting up from all of them; it stuck later, for reasons the street does not say out loud. He has a huge laugh, a stare that can empty a bench, and a notebook of verses he reads on the veranda when the light goes, and he does the lifting. Benny, Benedict on Sundays, is small and fast and talks like a man selling the last ticket to heaven. He keeps the money. Between them they own one mattress, one fan and a rota for who sleeps on the side nearest the fan.

She cuts their hair for free, every two weeks, on the veranda, and every two weeks she threatens to stop.

"You walk around this street with my work on your head," she told them the first time. "If you embarrass my work, I will take it back."

"How can you take back a haircut?" said Benny.

"Try me."

They have not tried her. She has made them one other rule: whatever little smoke they sell out at the gate stays out there, not in this house, not in this corridor, not near Mama Ronke's children. They keep that rule better than they keep the roster.

Room 6, on her other side, is Dozie, who calls himself Big Break and whom Tara calls Mr. Opportunity, because in two years she has never heard him describe anything as a job. He has offered her a share in a generator that runs on water. Then forex signals from a man in Dubai. Then BreakCoin. "The only coin I take," Tara told him, "is naira. Paper. The kind you can count." He has not given up.

The bench

NEPA took the light at eight, as usual, on the night the London man arrived. Tara closed the Palmline at half past and walked home through the gate. The officers do not charge her. Nobody charges the woman who cuts their hair.

She had her rechargeable lamp in one hand and her clipper bag over her shoulder, and the first thing the lamp found when she came up the path was the man from the gate, sitting on the veranda bench in the dark, slapping at mosquitoes.

The second thing it found was Benny, already crouched in front of him, and Danger behind Benny, holding a carton.

"London," Benny was saying, "you need a phone charger. Look at this one. Original."

"I've got a charger," said the man. "I haven't got a phone."

"We have a phone," said Benny.

"To go with the charger," said Danger, as if it were obvious.

"And a SIM to go in the phone. And," Benny glanced at the man's waist, where his jeans were being held up by nothing but hope, "a belt. Second-hand, but the first hand was very gentle."

"Speak the English, AJ," said Danger. "Say belt. The oyinbo price goes up." Oyinbo: foreigner, and in Danger's mouth, money.

So his name was AJ. Tara set her lamp down on the bench, hard.

"Benedict. Daniel."

Both of them stood up straight, the way small boys do when their full names arrive.

"This man has been on this street for six hours," said Tara. "He has no laces, no phone and no belt. You think it's because he doesn't know the price? Go inside. Do your fan rota. Abeg." Abeg means please, though not, the way Tara said it, as a request.

They went. At the door, Benny turned back. "Day three," he told AJ. "By day three, you'll buy something. Everybody does."

"Ignore them," said Tara. "They're harmless. Mostly. I'm Tara, Room 7. I cut hair at the Palmline, outside the gate."

"I saw it. The man on the sign is cross-eyed."

"Don't start."

She lifted the lamp and looked at him properly. Detention and then a cell had not been kind to his head. The hair had grown out uneven, flattened on one side from a concrete floor: a shape with no plan.

"Who cut this?"

"A barber in south London. About two months ago." He touched it. "Then nobody."

"I can see the nobody." She was already unzipping her bag. The clippers were the battery kind; she charged them at the salon, because the generator at Iloro House existed mainly in theory. "Sit straight. Face the road."

"I can't pay you," said AJ. "Chuks gave me two thousand naira this afternoon. It's gone. Five hundred of it went to a man who's launching a currency."

"Mr. Opportunity." Tara snapped a guard onto the clippers. "Then you have learned the most expensive lesson on this street on your first night. Well done. Head down."

She cut by lamplight, with Joe-Izzy coming down the street from somebody's radio. She did not ask about the cell. She could see the cell on his arms, the mosquito bites joined up into lines, and in the careful way he breathed around his ribs. Some things you ask about. Some things you cut around.

He talked instead, a little. About his mum. About his barber in south London, who played music so loud that nobody could talk, which AJ had always thought was the point of a barber.

"Here, people talk," said Tara. "That's the point of a barber."

"And what do you do with it all?"

"Nothing." She tilted his head with two fingers and started on the line-up. "Keep still. This is the part that matters."

When she was done she held up her hand mirror, and AJ looked at himself for a long time in the yellow light of the lamp.

"I look like someone," he said.

"You look like somebody's son. That's a start." She brushed the hair off his neck. "Two thousand naira. That's the price."

"I told you, I haven't got..."

"I know." She packed the clippers away. "Pay me when the gate opens."

He did not know yet what the north gate would cost a man who talked like him. Tara had a fair idea. Half the gate had already sat in her chair that afternoon, laughing about the London man who must have walked home from Libya.

"Thank you," said AJ. He said it properly, the whole word, looking at her.

"There it is again," said Tara.

"There what is?"

"Nothing. Go to bed. I'm in the bathroom at a quarter past five, so you're half past, and if you're late, Mr. Akin will deliver a speech." She picked up her lamp. "I'll put you on the roster."

She did, that night, in pencil: ROOM 3, AJ. The next morning she noticed him standing in front of the kitchen wall for a while, looking at the roster. It was the first thing in Lagos with his name on it.