‘I’m feeling better.’
‘That’s good. So you’re strong enough to give me some sugar? You know I’ve missed you. I had to cancel an important meeting today. Just so I could see your face.’
Syreeta’s voice now came from a different place, somewhere further away, nearer the bathroom. ‘Give me a moment to get ready. Are we going to Oriental?’
‘I’m here already,’ Bola said. She made no reply, and he continued, ‘We haven’t spent time in this flat since you moved in. I don’t even know what your bedroom looks like.’ Furo barely had time to interpret the creaking sounds from the settee when, as Syreeta called out with urgency, ‘No Bola, that’s the guest room!’ the door handle turned. Furo stared at the door with evangelical awe, the sweat dripping from his face like the last grains of sand in a fatal hourglass. ‘Is it locked?’ Bola asked, rattling the handle, each swing tugging the string that was snagged in Furo’s guts. And then, ‘Why is it locked?’ His voice, to Furo’s ears, was sibilant with suspicion.
‘No reason,’ Syreeta said. ‘I hardly ever use the guest room and so I locked it. I misplaced the key somewhere. I’ve been meaning to get a carpenter, but I keep forgetting.’
Again the handle turned under Furo’s terrified gaze. ‘Do you want me to force it open?’
‘Hell no, you’ll spoil the door! Leave it alone. I’ll take care of it later.’ Her words were followed by rapid footfalls, and after her door opened, she said, ‘This is my bedroom. Come and sit here and wait for me, I’m going to bathe. I’ll finish now-now.’
While he listened to Bola’s voice rising and falling in telephone conversation, Furo began to recover from his overdose of adrenaline. His outpaced heartbeats still left him short of breath, and his skin was cold with sweat, the wetness squelching in his armpits and between his thighs, yet he was calm enough to steer his thoughts to the trough of common sense. This much was clear: Bola was Syreeta’s sugar daddy, her lover and benefactor, her man. Furo had always suspected how Syreeta afforded her lifestyle, but now he knew it was to Bola as much as her that he owed his gratitude for the comfort he was provided. The roof over his head, the bed he slept in, the twenty thousand for his passport, the food he ate and the fruit juices he drank, he knew from whose pocket everything came. If Syreeta was the breast at which he sucked for favour, then Bola, though unknowing, was the father figure. As this notion flashed through his head — that he was fucking the woman of the man who sheltered him, a man whose voice this moment was bubbling from behind the wall that shielded his cuckolder — Furo felt a twinge of remorse. He shrugged it away. Going by what he’d gathered, the man was himself an adulterer. Syreeta was free, unmarried, her own woman; and from the sound of things, probably half Bola’s age. If anyone deserved pity, it wasn’t Bola.
The slam of the front door signalled the departure of Syreeta and her man. Through a chink in the curtains Furo tried to catch a look at them, but they had turned in a direction that was beyond the window’s angle of sight. He knew they were off to lunch, because after Syreeta emerged from the bathroom, he had overheard her and Bola discussing where to eat, and while she was dressing, they reached a decision to do the English pub on Sinari Daranijo. From Bola’s arrival in Furo’s life to his exit from the house no more than two hours had elapsed, but that was time enough for him to mark Furo’s hideout with his dominant smell. New banknotes in old leather, laundered fabric sprinkled with eau de cologne, and the pewter whiff of heavy jewellery: the smell of a man used to having his way. Before emerging from Syreeta’s bedroom Bola had handed over her pocket money for two weeks, two hundred thousand naira Furo had heard him say. Syreeta’s thank you, to Furo’s shocked ears, was unimpressed-sounding.
Furo’s phone rang. The sound came from Syreeta’s bedroom, and so he let it ring on. Seven missed calls later, by which time it was apparent that whoever was calling wasn’t giving up, Furo unlocked the guest room door and crept into Syreeta’s bedroom to find the phone under the bed. As he’d suspected, his caller was Syreeta, who said when he picked up the call, ‘Why didn’t you answer?’
When Furo made no response, she continued in a calmer tone, ‘I just wanted to tell you, I put the plantain in the fridge. Can you fry dodo?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there still light?’
‘Yes.’
‘You should warm the stew in the microwave before light goes.’
‘OK.’
Her next words were weighted with casualness. ‘I’ve gone out with my friend. I’m not coming back tonight. I’ll return in the morning.’
Furo said nothing.
‘Are you all right?’ Her tone was touched with defiance.
‘I’m fine.’
A pause, then a slow sigh, and she said: ‘Till tomorrow then.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Furo said and hung up.
After plugging his depleted phone into the wall socket beside the vanity table, Furo headed to the kitchen. He took the peeled plantain and the covered dish of tomato sauce out of the fridge, placed the plantain in a pan of groundnut oil on the gas burner, and while the slices sizzled and caramelised, he heated up the sauce in the microwave. Afterwards he trotted over to the bathroom to pee, and on the stroll back to the kitchen, he caught sight of a folded newspaper on the centre table. Bola’s no doubt; even the toilet smelled of him. His meal ready, he set it on a tray and bore that to the settee, then drew the parlour curtains, turned on the TV, and returned to the kitchen to fetch a can of Maltina from the fridge. The big new fridge, the glitzy microwave, the IKEA tableware, his appetising meal, he knew whose money paid for all of this. The fridge door closed with a whump.
As Furo sank down on to the settee to eat, he winced from the pain in his rump. His buttocks felt bruised. He had first noticed the sting in the morning as he rubbed on the whitening cream, but he made nothing of it, too much sitting around he supposed. The smarting had gotten worse this afternoon, it was becoming painful to sit, and it now seemed his right cheek had a sore. And so, after he finished his feast and put away the dishes, he entered the bedroom to look in the mirror.
The whitening creams were working: the skin of his buttocks had brightened. No doubt about it, a layer of shade had sloughed off, and the reddened skin underneath shone like a good egg held up to the light. And yet, seen beside the whiteness of his back and legs, his rump looked black and angry. The bleaching action had opened a sore on his right buttock, the size of a large coin, raw-red in the centre and ringed by encrusted ooze. It looked even worse than it stung.
There it was.
It was easier to be than to become.
Furo was certain he had made the right decision. He was determined not to give up until his ass was as white as the rest of him. But for now, faced with the mirror, he admitted the painful truth: until the sore healed, he had to stop bleaching his buttocks.
Around midday on Thursday, Furo was inspecting his laundered clothes in the parlour when he heard the scratching of a key in the front door lock, and the door swung open to reveal Syreeta awash in the avenging light of the bright sun. Her chipper tone, as she spoke from the kitchen, seemed forced to his ears. ‘I have a surprise for you.’ She moved forwards and left the door open, then stared at the blaring TV, avoiding Furo’s eyes. ‘Dress up. We’re going out.’
On the drive down Syreeta refused to tell him anything about the surprise. She fended off Furo’s questions, only revealing that they were headed to a place near Alpha Beach. Their destination turned out to be a shopping complex at the mouth of a wide sand road that ran straight as a chalk line towards the crashing ocean. Syreeta spent some time finding a spot in the jam-packed car park, and after they got down from the Honda, she led Furo past several blocks of shops. The row they turned into was lined on both sides with shops whose fronts teemed with party-dressed, white-looking mannequins. Furo guessed the nature of the surprise even before they halted in front of Success Is the Lord’s Clothings, ‘stockists of Italian suits and ties, British shirts and shoes, American wristwatches and belts, French perfumes & etc.,’ as the signboard announced. Chuks Yelloman Emmanuel was the MD/CEO. When Syreeta rapped on the sliding glass door and called out his nickname, he approached and wrestled the door open, then pressed his shoulders against the wall so they could squeeze past, and once they were through, he shoved the door closed as if anxious to keep in the clouds of frost blowing from the air conditioner.