‘Meet the amazing Ms Amao,’ Arinze said as they reached the reception desk. ‘Tosin has been with me from the very beginning … she and I opened this office together as the only staff. You could say she’s the face and voice of Haba! Anything you need to know about the business, about how we started, or where to get ink for the printer, or how to requisition books from the store, Tosin’s the person to ask.’ And to Tosin he said, ‘This is—’
‘I know, Furo Wariboko,’ Tosin interjected.
‘Oh yes,’ Arinze said with a low chuckle, and then nibbled his lower lip. Finally he spoke. ‘From now on he will be known only as Frank Whyte.’
During their meeting in Arinze’s office, Arinze had expressed astonishment at Furo’s decision to change his name. In response to his cautious questions, Furo explained that Frank was his Christian name and Whyte was his furo ere, his family name, the English version of his family’s compound name. Many Kalabari families still retained this legacy of the slave-trading days when the chieftains answered one name in the clan and another to the white customer, the European sailors, who had no interest in learning their names and thus, partly in mockery and partly from necessity, addressed them by English nicknames. Hence it became that Fyneface was Karibo, Yellowe was Iyalla, Black-Duke was Oweredaba, Bobmanuel was Ekine, Georgewill was Otagi, Harry was Idoniboye-Obu, and, according to Furo, Whyte was Wariboko.
But Whyte was not Wariboko. Furo wasn’t worried about this fabrication, his first to his boss. He had no fear he would be caught out. Ayo Abu Arinze was Yoruba or more likely Igbo, or even of mixed ethnicity, with some Hausa thrown in somewhere — his three names together were confusing, but his surname was Igbo — and more to the point, he wasn’t Kalabari, so it was unlikely he would know the secret history of Kalabari names. Yet Arinze was Nigerian enough to know that the whitest names in the country came from Furo’s parts, the Niger Delta. Besides, he was pleased at the reason Furo gave for making the change. Because, as Furo said, Whyte would be easier for Haba! customers to pronounce and memorise, and, furthermore, it would remove the distraction of a white man bearing a black name. Such dedication to duty boded well, Arinze said, and he agreed with Furo that no one in the office need be informed of his old name.
From the lobby Furo and Arinze went back upstairs to Obata’s office. Obata was typing on his laptop, and he looked up from the screen as they entered, then pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. He greeted Arinze in a genial tone and nodded at Furo like an old enemy, and then, apart from a sidelong glance at Furo’s face, he showed no emotion as Arinze informed him of the name change. When Arinze finished speaking, he asked:
‘What name should I use in his employment file?’
‘Frank Whyte, of course,’ Arinze answered.
‘And his salary account? Will that be opened under this name?’
‘That’s a good point,’ Arinze said. He turned to Furo. ‘What do you suggest? Your new passport bears your old name. We’ll need new ID to open a bank account.’
Furo pondered on this snag before he said at last, ‘I’ll make the change official. I’ll get a new passport. Is it possible to pay me in cash until I bring the passport?’
‘That we can do,’ Arinze said. ‘Tell you what, Obata. Don’t open a file for him, not yet. For tax purposes let the records show that he’s on a three-month internship in marketing, and put down his salary as marketing expenses. Frank, you’ll have to bring your passport before the end of three months, by the end of September. Then we’ll make your position permanent.’
‘I’ll get the passport this month,’ Furo said. And he added: ‘Thank you, Abu.’
‘Perfect,’ Arinze said. ‘Now let me show you to your office.’
After Arinze left him alone, Furo strode around his office, acquainting himself with his new status. The austere, white-walled room was furnished with a wood-laminate desk, a steel-legged plastic chair, a foot-flip trash can, an air conditioner whose remote control was the only item on the desk’s surface, and a single-tiered pinewood shelf that was affixed to the wall across from the desk. The shelf was lined with books whose spines bore titles such as The Rules of Wealth and Defying the Odds and The Leader Who Had No Title. Adjacent to the shelf was the room’s only window, underneath which stood two cardboard boxes, and when Furo opened their flaps, he found that both were packed full of new-smelling books. After closing the boxes, he rose from his squat, then raised his hand to the window and wedged open the slats of the venetian blind. He gazed through the glass into the front of the compound, where he saw that four cars were parked, a black Mercedes jeep and three sedans. The jeep had to be Arinze’s, and since he couldn’t hope for that, Furo imagined that the least punished-looking of the sedans, a red Kia, was his.
His fantasies were interrupted by a knock on the door. He edged away from the window before calling out, ‘Come in,’ and the door swung open to reveal Tetsola, the IT man, at full size. He looked seven feet tall. When seated in his office he had appeared uncommonly large, but then Furo had also felt Brobdingnagian in the cramped space. What he now felt was embarrassment at his own puniness; and some confusion over his gut-deep stirrings of inadequacy. Everything about Tetsola — his basketballer limbs and those heroic shoulders, but also the commando jut of his chin — were exaggerations of the human form. The stares he must draw, Furo thought with a rush of resentment as unexpected as it was strong. He knew very well how it was to be stared at by everyone; he knew the price he paid for the loss of his anonymity. Yet he still envied Tetsola for standing out from the crowd. Or, nearer the truth, standing above it.
‘Come in,’ Furo said again, to break the cycle of his thoughts.
Tetsola ducked into the doorway and loped forwards. Standing closer, he towered over Furo like a father figure. In his raised palm was balanced a black Zinox. Furo guessed that the laptop was the reason for the visit, and he waited for Tetsola, who was glancing around the room with a smile that showed his bovine teeth, to confirm this, and just as he began to speculate that his visitor might be mute, Tetsola confounded him by saying in the wrong voice, a voice right for an eunuch but too feeble, too squeak-squeak, for a giant’s maw: ‘I’ve brought your lappy.’
For the next half-hour, while seated at his desk and facing the laptop screen, Furo listened in mute wonder to that nasal tone as Tetsola ran him through all his improvements to the laptop. He had upgraded functions, partitioned hard discs, and installed the latest versions of the best programs for any task Furo would ever need to perform on a machine of such limited processing power, limited not because the Zinox was bad, but because, didn’t Furo agree, Mac was the greatest. Much of this geeky lecture, on account of the terminology as well as the R2-D2 inflections of Tetsola’s voice, was unintelligible to Furo, and the torrent of information only succeeded in making his buttocks sweat. He kept adjusting himself to find a less pinching position in the chair, but he kept on listening, he kept on looking, he wanted to understand everything there was to know about the first computer he could call his own.