Blackass (11 page)

Five days after I found her on Twitter, I got a chance to meet @pweetychic_tk. I was conflicted about that move – should the artist probe too deeply into the mundane lives of their characters – but grabbed the chance anyway. We met by arrangement at the gate of her church in Egbeda on an overcast Sunday afternoon after the close of service and, at her suggestion, I took her to The Palms in Lekki for ice cream. Her name was Tekena. (When she asked what she should call me, @_igoni or just plain Igoni, I joked, ‘Call me Morpheus.’)

‘I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was.’

—Elizabeth Bishop,
In the Waiting Room

On Thursday, 21 June, Syreeta gave Furo an old phone that she no longer used, and after she loaded it with airtime, she made a call to someone she knew at the passport office in Ikoyi. A new passport would cost nine thousand naira and take three months to process, but through her contact it would take three days and cost seventeen thousand. Furo didn’t have the money, and he said so in a voice shocked into loudness after hearing Syreeta say into the phone, ‘We’ll come tomorrow,’ but she shushed him with a finger pressed to her lips, then muffled the phone against her chest and whispered to him, ‘At least see the man first, get the application form.’ Furo shut up in agreement, and on Friday morning she drove him to the passport office, parked the car by the gate, and handed him an unsealed envelope. ‘That’s twenty thousand,’ she said, and when his outpourings of gratitude had dragged on too long, she interrupted, ‘Go on. The man is waiting.’

The arrangement was for Furo to wait by the flagpole at the passport office entrance until Syreeta’s contact came to fetch him. Easy instructions to follow: so easy that Furo dreaded the difficulties that must arise. It seemed to him imprudent, provoking – a clear-cut case of trouble dey sleep, yanga go wake am – to walk into the lair of immigration officials and stand under the Nigerian flag. But the previous day, after the set-up phone call, when he disclosed his misgivings to Syreeta, she had laughed them off. Her confidence only served to bolster his doubts, which grew even bigger after he got down from the car and watched her drive off to her appointment at the beauty salon. But he had no time to dwell on his superstitions, as his appearance had caused a tidal wave of excitement in the horde of informal agents, the hustlers, young men and the odd woman who rushed about offering help to everyone who approached. When this crowd fell on him with their frenzied cawing, their begging stares and smarmy smirks, he hurried forwards with his hands guarding his pockets and his lowered head shaking no until he entered the gate of the passport office, through which none of the hustlers ventured. After he halted beside the flagpole, he placed the call. ‘It’s Syreeta’s friend. I’m here, under the flag,’ he said into the phone, and the man grunted in acknowledgement, then ended the call. Furo glanced around, searching for a face that matched that voice. The man’s number was stored in the phone as Passport Man. Furo had asked Syreeta for his real name, but she didn’t know it and neither did her friend who had recommended his services to her. For safety from sting operations and disgruntled customers, Furo supposed. Another reason to worry.

The passport office comprised two long rows of office blocks whose patios were sealed off by wrought-iron bars. Immigration officials in khaki uniforms marched down the patios and into the open doorways of the front office block, through which Furo could see desks and queues of people. A man, a uniformed officer, emerged from one of the doorways. After staring in Furo’s direction for meaningful seconds, he lifted his nametag from around his neck, stowed it in his trouser pocket, and started forwards. Though he looked younger than Furo had imagined from the voice on the telephone, he had to be Passport Man. This was confirmed when he called out from several paces away, ‘Wariboko?’ At Furo’s nod he showed no emotion, and on reaching his side, he said, ‘Come with me.’ He led Furo out through the front gate, and after calling over a sly-faced man from the throng of informal agents, he told Furo, ‘Go with him.’

Furo trailed the agent to a plywood shack by the fence of the passport office. On the shack’s doorstep a pass-my-neighbour generator coughed out fumes, which, over time, had blackened the front wall. The cramped, smoke-darkened interior held a laminating machine, an inkjet printer, a bulky photocopier, an electronic binder, and a desktop computer atop an old rickety table. The agent stopped at the table, selected a sheet from the papers strewn across it, then pulled a biro from his pocket and bent down in preparedness to write. With a frown of concentration on his upturned face, he asked Furo his surname.

‘Wariboko,’ Furo answered.

‘Abeg spell it for me.’

Furo extended his hand for the biro. ‘Let me write it.’

‘No,’ said the agent. ‘Just spell.’

Furo spelled out his surname, and after the next question, his first name, too.

‘What is your place of birth?’

‘Port Harcourt.’

‘Spell Harcourt. I have forget how many Rs.’

With a groan that didn’t pass his lips, Furo did as asked.

‘What is your date of birth?’

‘Six, May, 1979.’

‘You’re a male,’ the agent stated, and ticked that section. Glancing up, he asked, ‘Do you know your state of origin?’

‘Rivers,’ Furo said.

‘What of your local government area?’

Furo had had enough. ‘I can read,’ he said curtly. ‘Let me fill the form myself.’

The agent straightened up as if his back was cramped, then met Furo’s gaze and said: ‘Don’t worry, oga, relax yourself. This nah my work, I know what I am doing. The smallest mistake can spoil your passport finish. Let me handle everything so your money will not waste.’ He bent again over the table. ‘Oya, talk now, what is your local government?’

‘Akuku Toru,’ Furo replied in a resigned voice. He understood now that the agent knew his job indeed. For Furo, it was too much effort to resist the haggling etiquette of jobbery.

‘I know that one spelling,’ the agent responded, and wrote it out before asking, ‘What is the name of your guarantor?’

Furo stared in puzzlement. ‘What do you mean by guarantor?’

In a voice of gloating, the agent said, ‘See what I was saying! That’s why I’m doing the form for you. Nah small things like this wey fit scatter your application.’ He waited for Furo to stew in his ignorance a few more seconds before he explained: ‘A guarantor is somebody who will guarantee you’re Nigerian. No be just anybody o, it must be an adult who has a good job. But no worry yourself, leave am to me, I go take care of that.’

After the agent finished filling in the form, he inserted the single sheet into a cardboard folder and handed it to Furo with the words, ‘Give this to your man.’ Drawing closer to Furo, he said in a tone of instruction: ‘During your interview, if perchance they ask you for the name of your guarantor, tell them it is Joseph. And if they ask you for his workplace, you can tell them anything. Better you say he’s a civil servant.’

‘What about his surname?’

‘Don’t worry about that one.’

‘Are you sure?’

The agent laughed. ‘You’re still doubting me? But I done tell you sey this nah my work.’

‘If you say so,’ Furo muttered, and made as if to leave. The agent cleared his throat, and when Furo glanced back at him, he hardened his face into a grin and spoke in a coaxing tone, ‘Ah, oga, you want go just like that? You no get anything for your boy?’ Furo pulled out his wallet, and as he flipped it open, the agent added, ‘I’m not charging you o, but you’re a big oga, oyibo man like you.’ He plucked the two hundred banknote from Furo’s fingers. ‘God bless you, sir! In case of next time, if you want to do new passport, or even yellow card or international driving licence, just come straight to me. I will handle everything for you for a better price. Why not take my number? You can save it as Passport Deji. The spelling is D-E-J-I.’

Passport Man was finishing a cigarette under the flag. As Furo arrived, he flicked away the butt, took the folder from Furo with his left hand and thrust out his right, then raised his eyebrows with a meaning that was unmistakable. Furo counted out three thousand naira from the envelope and handed over the rest. Passport Man thumbed through the thousand-naira banknotes, pulled out two, slipped them into Furo’s folder, and shoved the envelope into the same pocket he had put his nametag in. Then he said in a sharp tone, ‘Walk behind me. When I stop, you stop.’

He led Furo through a doorway in the first office block. By the front wall of the room a cluster of people were seated on wooden benches, and across from them was a desk at which presided a female immigration officer. A man wearing a rumpled French suit sat before her in a straight-backed chair with his hands stuck together between his knees and his shoulders hunched forwards, and whenever she addressed him he nodded his halo of hair before uttering a response. The occasional Yoruba phrase floated to Furo where he stood just inside the doorway. Finally the woman closed the man’s folder and slid it across to him, and as the chair creaked under his rising, Passport Man raised a hand and hurried forwards, Furo following. The woman’s eyes caught Furo’s face and stuck to it. But she looked down when his folder landed on her desk. ‘Special,’ Passport Man said in his rusted voice, and then backed away, leaving Furo feeling exposed. He hadn’t foreseen that he would be left alone to face an official armed with a system.

The woman raised both hands to adjust her beret, after which she drew Furo’s folder closer with one hand and dropped the other under the desk, as if to scratch an itch. She indicated the empty chair with her chin, and after Furo sat down, she pinched open the folder, bent forwards to eye the contents, then pulled open a drawer and tipped the folder into it. When she replaced the folder on the desk and flipped it open, the money was gone.

‘
Kedu aha gi?
’

‘Excuse me?’ Furo said. He smiled in apology. ‘I don’t speak Igbo.’

‘I don’t speak Kalabari,’ the woman retorted, ‘but I doubt you do either.’ Picking up a red pen, she asked in a churlish tone, ‘What are your names?’ Her following questions all came from the form in the sequence Furo remembered, but she stopped before arriving at the question he feared the most, about his guarantor. While she wrote on the form Furo watched her hand – corded with veins, hard nails covered with chipped brown polish – as it guided the pecks and scratches of the pen. She finished writing, closed the folder, spun it across to Furo, and said, ‘
Dalu.
’ Goodbye.

He rose from the chair and turned around to see Passport Man beckoning from the doorway. By this time it was clear to Furo that the process was moving along much more smoothly than he’d expected. The bribe-sharing, the queue-jumping, the fact non-checking, and the customer-handling were as efficient as any system whose design was alimentary: in through the mouth and straight out the anus. He was no more than a bite of food for a subverted system, which chewed him up for money and, to avoid the cramp of constipation, shat him out fast. It was bad business for Passport Man to fart where he ate, and so, for his own sake, he put real effort into guiding Furo around the hiccups in the bureaucracy. Step by step Furo grew surer of the ground he walked on, and with new confidence he followed Passport Man into the next office, where his photo was taken and his fingerprint biometrics collected by another paid-off official, and then on to the third office, where yet another official fulfilled his stomach duty by stamping a slip and instructing Furo to return with it on Monday for passport pick-up. Emerging with Furo from this office, Passport Man said, ‘We have finished. Call me when you get here on Monday.’ He permitted himself a smile for the first time since Furo set eyes on his commando face. ‘You’re now a Nigerian, officially.’

Vultures, hyenas, Lagos taxi drivers, in rising order of cunning, greed, hard-heartedness, Furo was convinced after forty minutes of standing by the roadside opposite the passport office. And when his legs grew tired, he walked some distance away to a new spot along the road, but that didn’t help, every taxi that pulled up – ordinary yellow, special red, metro black, or unpainted kabu-kabu – sped away empty, the drivers unwilling to reduce their inflated prices. Furo knew why, as did everyone who witnessed his heated haggling. A white man in Lagos has no voice louder than the dollar sign branded on to his forehead.

Furo’s frustration turned to anger. Anger directed everywhere. Everywhere he turned he made discoveries about this new place he had lived in all his life. Life in Lagos was locked in a constant struggle against empathy. Empathy was too much to ask for, too much to give: it was good only for beggars to exploit in their sob stories aimed at your pocket through your heart. Heart, in Lagos idiom, meant guts, mettle, even recklessness, but rarely compassion. Compassion was a fatal fracturing in hearts bunkered against the city’s hardness. Hardness so evident in the hiking of taxi fares and the drivers’ refusal to look beyond a white face and hear a weary voice bargaining for understanding … that was the Lagos he was discovering afresh.

A smiling lady came to his aid. She was passing on the sidewalk when the last taxi driver called out his last price, four thousand naira, and then drove off after Furo held up his fingers in a peace sign that meant two thousand. As Furo stepped back from the road with a muttered curse, the lady approached him and said hello. At his grudging response, she threw him a cordial smile that raised his hackles and made his voice crackle with resentment. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I see you’re having trouble getting a cab,’ she said airily.

‘Yes,’ Furo replied in a rude tone, but his decision to cut short the conversation was overcome by the yearning to spread around his bitterness. ‘Can you imagine these bloody drivers? See the prices they’re calling! For what – where am I going?’ And when the lady indulged him by asking where he was going, he cried out: ‘Just Lekki, near The Palms!’

‘Ah-ah, but that’s not far at all.’ Her tone was soft with sympathy.

‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ Furo said. ‘I’ve been standing here for nearly an hour and I’ve stopped how many taxis, more than ten, and yet none of them has agreed to go below four thousand. I’ve even offered two!’