Room 9

The landlord calls it Room 9. Everybody else in Iloro House calls it the box room, because that is what it was: the old storeroom by the back door, beside the bathroom. The landlord threw out the broken chairs, painted the walls a hopeful green, nailed a 9 to the door and started charging rent. He left the bicycle that belonged to nobody. It hangs on a hook above the mattress, and nobody has ever ridden it.

Stand in the middle of Room 9 and stretch out your arms, and you can touch both walls at once. Lie down, if you are the man who lives there, and your feet are against the door before your head has found the wall. The one window is high up and the size of a schoolbook.

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. Room 9 faces the back door. It is the smallest room in the house and the cheapest, and the only one with a queue outside it every morning, because the queue is for the bathroom next door.

It is also the only room in the house with a visitor every day.

The man who lives there is Babatunde Olaoye, and he is six foot four. June 12 Street calls him Tiny. Mama Ronke's children named him the afternoon he moved in, sitting in a row on the veranda step to watch him fold himself into Room 9 knees first, like a deckchair going back into its bag. The tallest man on the street in the smallest room on the street: in Lagos, a joke like that is a name by sunset.

The inventory

Benny from Room 8, who keeps a notebook of everything anybody owns, owes or might sell, once made a list of Tiny's possessions. It did not take long.

One mattress, thin. One bicycle, not his. One bucket. One plastic chair, which goes outside the door when there is a visitor, because the room cannot hold a visitor and a chair at once. One phone, cracked, usually with no credit. One pair of black shoes, polished nightly with a rag and a great deal of faith. One bottle of cologne, still nearly full after a year, because he uses it one drop at a time, and only when somebody is coming. And one shirt.

The shirt is white, or it was, and Tiny says it still is. Every night he washes it in the bucket and hangs it on the line in the back yard. Every morning he lays it flat under the mattress and lies on top for twenty minutes, which he says is how a man without an iron irons. Nobody in the house has ever seen it dirty, or seen him in another one.

"What happens if it tears?" Benny asked him once.

"Then I will be a man with no shirt," said Tiny, "and they will still come."

Benny wrote that down. He did not know what else to do with it.

Tiny has no job anybody can name. When someone lends him a speaker, he plays music at naming ceremonies, the party a Lagos family throws when a new baby is given its names. He models, he says, "for a brand that is coming." He owes the landlord two months, Benny a whole page, and Chuks, who cooks for the street at his coal pot across the road from Iloro House, more plates of rice than either of them will count. "Family does not pay," says Chuks. "Family also does not stop eating."

Dozie in Room 6 wants him to be the face of BreakCoin. Tiny said no. "My face is the only thing I own outright. I'm not putting it in a coin."

Traffic

The first visitor usually comes before eight.

On Tuesdays it is Toyin, who teaches a primary class of forty-three children and leads the choir at a church on the main road. She brings akara, fried bean cakes, wrapped in newspaper and still hot, and sits with him on the veranda bench for exactly eleven minutes, because her school bell rings at eight. She tells him about her class, and he remembers all of it: the boy who bit another boy, the twins nobody can tell apart except Toyin. Toyin says he is the only man in Lagos who listens to a story about a biting child all the way to the end.

Mr. Akin of Room 5, the elder of the house, sits at the other end of the bench with his tea. He keeps count, in chalk, on the wooden post at the end of the veranda, in little gates of five, the way prisoners count days. Nobody asked him to. Nobody has dared ask him to stop.

"One," says Mr. Akin, at nine minutes to eight, and makes a mark.

At lunchtime it is Zainab. She types shipping papers in a clearing agent's office down by the Apapa port, and on Mondays and Thursdays she spends her whole lunch hour on an okada, a motorbike taxi, coming to argue with Tiny about football. She brings him phone credit so he can text her back, which she calls an investment in her own entertainment.

"Don't think I'm here for your face, Babatunde," she tells him. "I know exactly what you are. But nobody in my office argues properly. They just agree with me and go back to sleep."

"I never agree with you," says Tiny.

"I know," says Zainab happily. "That's why I come."

"Two," says Mr. Akin.

Mama Ronke's children from Room 1 have made a business of it. They wait at the street end of the path. Directions to the box room cost ₦50, though you can see its door from the path if you lean. If she is carrying food, it is ₦100, because food means she is serious. If she asks whether anybody else has visited today, it is ₦200, and the answer is no.

The near miss

On Fridays it is Yemisi, who is from Ilesa like him, sells cloth at the market in Ajegunle, and brings pounded yam, because no Ijesha person believes Lagos can make it properly, with efo riro, the rich stew of greens and palm oil that goes with it. They talk in Ijesha, the Yoruba of home, and even the Yoruba speakers in the house can follow only half of it and none of the jokes.

"E kaale, ma," he says when she arrives, the respectful good evening a younger person gives an elder, and goes down flat on the ground in a full dobale, the prostration a Yoruba son gives his elders, all six foot four of him. Yemisi is two years older than him and pretends to hate it.

"Dide," she says, which means get up, and hits him with the cooler bag.

One Friday, Toyin came up the path at nine o'clock with a hymn book he had asked to borrow, at the exact moment Yemisi was unpacking the pounded yam by lamplight in the back yard. Mama Ronke's eldest ran ahead with the news, because news is a service too.

Tara from Room 7 was on the veranda, just home from the salon, unzipping her clipper bag. Tiny put his head out of the back door.

"Tara. If anybody asks, I've gone to the store."

"If anybody asks," said Tara, without looking up, "I will tell them you are in the back yard with a woman and a pot of efo. I don't lie for you, Tiny. I don't lie for anybody. Some days I'm not even sure I lie for myself."

Toyin reached the veranda. "Good evening, Aunty Tara. Is Babatunde in?"

"Back yard," said Tara.

Toyin went round the side of the house. By the time she reached the yard, Yemisi was walking happily up the other side to the street, having been told the efo was so good he would dream about it, and Tiny was sitting alone on an upturned bucket, singing a hymn quietly to himself.

"I was practicing," he said, and held out his hand for the hymn book.

"I didn't lie," Tara told the house afterward. "He just moves faster than the truth."

"Three," said Mr. Akin, and made a mark, and then, after some thought, a small question mark next to it.

Ilesa

Nobody in Iloro House can explain it. Benny, who can sell anything to anyone, has studied Tiny for a year and learned nothing he can use. Benny has never had a visitor bring him soup.

Tiny's own explanation, when he gives one, is Ilesa: the old Ijesha town in Osun State whose cloth traders were famous all over the west for selling on credit, and then, when the money was due, sitting down at the buyer's door until they were paid. People still call them osomaalo, "I will squat here." Benny says that explains the credit and does not explain the visitors. Babatunde was the youngest of six and the only boy. His mother sold pounded yam from a buka, a roadside food stall, by the market, his father drove a bus, and the house was five sisters loud from morning till night. In a house with five older sisters, the boy who interrupts does not eat. Babatunde never interrupted. He ate very well.

He knew which sister was quarrelling with which, whose boyfriend was lying, who needed to hear her hair looked fine and who needed the truth. By twelve he was taller than all of them, and his sisters were telling him things they had not told each other.

At twenty-three he came to Lagos with a bag, a folder of photographs of himself and a promise from a man who was starting a clothing brand and needed a face. The brand is still coming. Babatunde has lived in four rooms since, each smaller than the last, and has ended up in the smallest room on June 12 Street with the busiest door.

One night, not long after, when the light went at eight, Mr. Akin counted the marks on the post and announced three hundred and sixty-one days in a row. Then Benny came up the path and pointed his flashlight down the corridor at a thin line of candlelight under the door of Room 3, which had been empty for months.

"New man," said Benny. "From London. You can hear it in two words."

Tiny sat up. "London? Is he handsome?"

"He has no laces in his shoes."

Tiny lay back on the bench and smiled up at the dark.

"Then he needs me," he said.