The Power Cut

The first time Tiny heard AJ speak, it was in the bathroom queue at half past six in the morning, outside Room 9.

"Sorry," said AJ, to the corridor in general. "Is this the queue?"

Tiny closed his eyes like a man listening to music. "Say something else."

"Like what?"

"Anything. Say Tuesday."

"Tuesday," said AJ, suspiciously.

Tiny opened his eyes and looked AJ up and down: the mosquito bites, the shoes with no laces. "Wasted," he said sadly. "My brother, you have a London accent and you are using it to ask about a queue."

"What should I be using it for?"

Tiny only put a hand on his heart.

Iloro House is a face-me-I-face-you, a rooming house where every door faces another across a corridor, and a corridor like that has no secrets. By breakfast the whole house knew that Tiny had offered the new man lessons.

"On credit," Tiny explained. "First lesson free. After that, ₦2,000 a lesson. You pay when you can."

"You want me to pay you on credit," said AJ, "to learn how you have no money?"

"Money talks, my brother. But it never listens." Tiny tapped his ear. "I listen."

Lessons

The first lesson took place on the veranda bench that evening, and it was this: remember her mother's name.

"Anybody can remember her name. Her mother's name. Her mother's health. The girl at work who borrowed her lipstick and gave it back worse. A woman can buy flowers anywhere. Nobody sells being remembered."

"I'm trying to pay two and a half million naira to some policemen," said AJ, "so they'll open a gate."

"Lesson two," said Tiny. "Never tell her that."

AJ bought an iron the week he started as a ball boy at the bush, with his first football money, because a man who has slept on a concrete floor wants at least one thing in his life to be flat. Tiny borrowed it that same night, returned it warm the next morning with a compliment ("This iron has a good heart, AJ"), and the mattress method was retired forever.

Lesson three came free. AJ had been seen talking to Funke, the medical student at No. 5, at her upstairs window after dark. "Brother, that one has a father," said Tiny, with deep respect. "Some gates are not opened by talking. Say hello properly, in daylight, and go away. Then come back."

Benny, listening from the doorway of Room 8, took the rubber band off his notebook and held out a page near the back. It said TINY across the top, underlined twice.

Phone credit, ₦3,000. Soap, ₦400. One umbrella, lent in rain, returned in two pieces. One charger, not returned ("it is on loan to a lady"). Bus fare to a naming ceremony, ₦700. Bus fare back, ₦700, because he had been paid in jollof rice. Under the total, in Benny's careful capitals: INTEREST: NONE. HOPE: SOME.

"Before you pay him for lessons," said Benny, "read the page."

The poet and the talker

When NEPA takes the light (NEPA is what everybody still calls the power company), the house comes out onto the veranda, and sooner or later Danger opens his other notebook. Benny keeps the money. Danger keeps the verses, written by candle, and when he reads them the whole veranda goes quiet, and so does the street. He does not raise his voice. He has never needed to.

The tower light goes round all night and never finds a friend.

I wave at it anyway. A man should greet his neighbors.

Over the rooftops, the Kirikiri watchtower light swung round on cue. Everybody laughed, and then went quiet again, because it was funny and it was not.

"That's beautiful," said Tiny. "Can I borrow it?"

"My verses are not for borrowing."

"Not the whole thing. One line. For Saturday."

Danger looked at him over the candle. "Your lines are cheap verses, Tiny. A verse you say to one person is a poem. A verse you say to five people is a jingle."

"And a verse you say to a prison wall," said Tiny, "is a complaint."

The veranda said oooh. Danger's grin went cold for one second, and the bench went very still, because everybody on June 12 Street knows that look. Then he laughed, the big laugh you can hear from the gate, and pointed his pencil at Tiny like a warning and a blessing at once. "One day," he said, "a woman is going to say your own line back to you, and you won't know what to do."

"Never happened," said Tiny.

It happened that Friday.

Two plates

Toyin had said choir practice would run until nine. Zainab had said she was working late. So at a quarter to nine, with the light long gone, Zainab came up the path with a flashlight and a plate of Mama Bisola's jollof rice from Mama Shola Hot Stuff Restaurant & Grill at No. 1, because she had finished early and wanted to surprise him.

Two minutes later, Mama Ronke's eldest came running. Toyin was at the street end of the path with a covered pot. The pastor's generator had failed and practice was cancelled.

Tiny stood up, buttoned his cuffs, and turned to the house. "Gentlemen. Tara. AJ. I need everybody."

He gave out the jobs like a general. Danger was to hold Zainab on the bench with verses ("All of them. Slowly."). Benny was to meet Toyin on the path and delay her by selling her something. ("It's night. There's nothing to sell." "Then sell her the night.") AJ got Tara's rechargeable lamp and orders to keep it pointed at whichever woman Tiny was not standing next to. Tiny would slip out of the back door, round the side of the house, and bring Toyin in through the kitchen. Two women, two doors, one dark house.

"And me?" said Tara.

"You," said Tiny, "please just sit there."

"I will sit right here and finish this wig," said Tara, "and if anybody asks me anything, I will answer."

It went wrong in about four minutes.

Benny reached Toyin on the path and, being Benny, could not help himself. He sold her a shortcut: for ₦100, the quiet way round the side of the house to the back door. Tiny, meanwhile, came round the other side to the path and found nobody there at all.

On the veranda, Danger was eleven verses in and Zainab was enjoying them very much. Then she noticed the empty space beside her.

"Aunty Tara," she said. "Where did Babatunde go?"

"Round the side of the house to meet the other one," said Tara, braiding.

"Which other one?"

"The one with the pot."

Zainab stood up, plate in one hand and flashlight in the other. "I would like to see this pot."

AJ, doing his job exactly as instructed, swung the lamp straight down the corridor into the kitchen, where Toyin had just come in through the back door with her pot, and Zainab had just arrived from the front with her plate.

And then NEPA brought the light back.

In the whole history of June 12 Street, NEPA had never once brought the light back early. It did that night. The kitchen bulb flared, somebody's radio burst into Joe-Izzy halfway through a song, and there they all were: Toyin with her pot, Zainab with her plate, AJ with a lamp he no longer needed, and, in the back doorway, out of breath, holding his shoes, Tiny.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Zainab lifted the lid of the pot and looked inside. "Is that ayamase?" Ayamase is the green-pepper stew that Lagos people order at parties and almost nobody makes at home, because it takes all day.

"With ofada rice," said Toyin.

"Where did you buy it?"

"I made it."

"You made ayamase," said Zainab slowly. "On a weekday." She looked at Toyin with new respect. "Did he ever tell you that you're the only person on this street he can really talk to?"

"Every Tuesday," said Toyin.

"Mondays and Thursdays," said Zainab. She turned to Tiny in the doorway and smiled at him very kindly. "Babatunde. You're the only man on this street I can really talk to."

Tiny opened his mouth, and nothing came out. Out on the veranda, Danger laughed so hard the bench creaked.

That was the end of Tiny's evening. The two of them carried the pot and the plate out to the veranda and sat down side by side, and within ten minutes they had found out that they lived three bus stops apart. Toyin served. Zainab shared out the jollof. Benny, Danger, AJ and Tara ate, and Mama Ronke's children appeared from nowhere with spoons. Mr. Akin accepted a plate with great dignity.

"Babatunde," said Toyin, when she remembered him. "There's some left for you."

There was not.

At ten o'clock Toyin and Zainab left together, arm in arm, having agreed to meet on Sunday for, in Zainab's words, "a proper conversation about him."

Tiny sat down on the empty bench in his white shirt. "That went well," he said.

"Did you learn anything?" said AJ.

"Of course. Never let two of them meet. They will like each other more than they like you."

"Will you remember that?"

"Never," said Tiny.

Mr. Akin got up, went to the post and made two marks. "Two visitors," he announced. "No dinner."

And Benny opened the money notebook to the page headed TINY and wrote, for the first time in a year, a line in his favor: Friday. Room 8 ate free. Thank you.