FRANK WHYTE
‘For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.’
The soreness in Furo’s buttocks was a minor irritation when he opened his eyes on Monday morning. A bigger worry was his new job, all the unknowns that could go wrong on his first day. But as much as he dreaded this new adventure, he was also excited by it. Yawning widely to clear his head of sleep, he sat upright in bed and threw open the doors of his mind to the sounds scrabbling beyond the darkness of the bedroom. He could hear Syreeta knocking about in the kitchen; she was becoming flatteringly domestic. And she had offered, last night, as they lay in bed, before she turned to him with her ‘fuck me’ sigh, to drive him to the office this morning. It was she again, sounding just like his mother, who had suggested that they set off early to avoid the Monday traffic. Furo was surer than ever of how she felt about him, but still, just to be safe, now that the two weeks were up, he would ask if he could stay on longer at her apartment. Later today, he thought, when he returned from work, he would ask then. At this, his first decision of the day, he climbed out of bed.
After a rushed breakfast of toast and boiled sausages, Furo and Syreeta left the house at five thirty. The sky was deep purple; the moon was still out; dew dripped from the leaves of the looming trees in whose branches roosters roosted. As they tramped past the silent houses, the crunch of sand beneath their shoes sounded like ghouls in conversation. The estate streets were deserted except for clusters of sheep bedded on the tarred road leading to the gate. Syreeta had to zigzag the Honda around the motionless shapes, and when the headlights stilled against the closed gate, the guard, swaddled in blankets and rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands, shuffled from the shadows and shone his torchlight into the car before crossing to unlock the gate. Syreeta sped through with a scream of rubber.
The roads were clear through Victoria Island, across Third Mainland Bridge, and down the endless stretch of Ikorodu Road, but, as the sky brightened under the sun’s approach, they drove into heavy traffic at Maryland Roundabout. At first sight of the congestion Syreeta cursed, and as the Honda slowed, Furo stared out the window at the stagnated cars and thought about the last time he had passed this way. On foot, homeless and broke, and headed for The Palms. He owed Syreeta much more than he could tell her. ‘Sorry about the traffic,’ he now said to her. ‘Hopefully you won’t have to drive me tomorrow. I should be getting my car today.’
She took a moment to respond. ‘I still think that salary is too small.’
The previous night, after lovemaking, they had had a conversation about Furo’s job. Syreeta felt that his status, his oyibo-ness, had been taken advantage of. She argued that he was worth way more than eighty thousand and a company car, and when he sighed with indifference, she told him that the first job she’d got out of university had paid two hundred and fifty thousand. She was also given a car, the Honda. At this offered scrap from the mystery of her life, a history she had guarded thus far with utter silence, Furo’s interest sat up and woofed. She had to be, and if he had thought about it, he would doubtless have concluded that she was, but it had never occurred to him that Syreeta was a graduate. After he blurted out his surprise, she laughed before saying how could he think she wasn’t, and then she told him that she had a degree in accounting from Unilag, and that she had done her youth service at the National Assembly in Abuja, where she was retained afterwards, though she gave up that position when her benefactor lost his senatorial seat in the last elections. She capped her testimony by repeating that Furo could do better, to which he responded with some heat: ‘Our situations are different. You’re a woman.’ A kept woman, he meant, and Syreeta caught his meaning in his tone. She shot back: ‘And you’re a white man. You don’t have to fuck anyone for favours.’ Then she turned her back and ignored him until he fell asleep.
But now she was smiling as Furo replied with caution: ‘Maybe the salary is small, but it’s all I have.’
‘Until something better comes along,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ agreed Furo.
‘That’s the spirit. Something better will come, very soon, you’ll see.’
When the Honda pulled up at the gate of Haba! Furo said his goodbyes to Syreeta, then clambered down from the car. He felt like a cosseted child on the first-ever day of school, a feeling of abandonment and peril that grew stronger as Syreeta drove off with a cheery wave. It felt too easy to call her back, to climb back into the coolness of the car and be driven home to finish his sleep, and then watch TV, eat her cooking, do anything but worry about work, money, responsibility. It felt too easy to give up what he had wanted for so long — a money-paying, office-going, real-life job. Not easy enough, he told himself, and striding to the closed gate, he nodded at the maiguard who emerged from the gatehouse at his knock, then said in answer to the old man’s polite question, ‘I work here.’
Following their start-up meeting, which lasted about an hour, Ayo Abu Arinze showed Furo around the office, and during the tour he delivered a running commentary on the internal workings of the three-year-old company, its mission and vision, rules and regulations, the anecdotal history. ‘Work starts at eight and ends at five, but the office is locked up around ten, so you can stay until then if you want … what we sell, in a nutshell, is self-education … lunch hour is between noon and one … I was a senior manager in the telecoms industry before I resigned my job to start this company … every word in a Haba! proposal must be spelled correctly, no text message spellings, that is a rule … Nigerians must start reading serious books, whether for work or for pleasure, that’s my vision … the red button on the dispenser is actually cold water and the blue is hot,’ Arinze said as he led Furo into office after office and presented him to the staff as Frank Whyte, the new head of marketing.
Sales, Accounts, Human Resources, Information Technology, and Marketing: the five departments of Haba! The sales department comprised two staff members, one of whom had been employed on the same day as Furo. The senior sales manager and department head was a bejewelled, hijab-wearing, boubou-clad woman called Zainab. She beamed a fatigued smile at Furo, and when, to the clatter of gold bangles, she raised a hand and patted her belly, he saw she was with child. The new salesperson was a plump, stylish woman whose name was Iquo, and after Furo was introduced, she spoke in a confident tone of voice, her words directed at Arinze: ‘I remember Mr Whyte from the interview day. I also want to thank you, sir, for granting me the opportunity to work for this great company. I promise to give my best, sir.’ She sounded easy to boss around. This intuition of Furo’s was strengthened when she stood up from her desk and rushed towards the door as he and Arinze turned to leave, but Arinze waved her back and said, with a cool glance at her eager face, ‘I can get the door myself. One more thing, please don’t call me “sir”.’ The next-door office was the IT department, and it held one person, Tetsola. He was a wide-shouldered and long-limbed man who sat hunched over a white-tiled ledge in the dim cubbyhole that was crammed with dismembered computers and discarded compact discs and tangled rubber cables. His office, which shared a wall with the lavatory, had been converted from a bathroom, and perhaps for this reason, because of the mouldering smell that seeped from the peeling walls, he remained silent when Furo was introduced. He dipped his head at Furo’s hello, and then shuffled his feet in their outsized sneakers as Arinze described his duties and praised his work to Furo, but he refused to say a word. After emerging from the IT office, as they made their way downstairs, Arinze told Furo that he himself handled the company accounts, hence his office doubled as the accounts department, while the HR department was staffed by two people, Obata and Tosin. Obata was the head of department, but it was Tosin who managed the support staff of two drivers and one gatekeeper. She also served as his personal assistant.