Drain Fourteen

The rod went in eighteen inches and stopped dead, with a sound like a spoon hitting a plate.

Ifeoma pulled it out and tried again, lower, angling for the invert where the silt usually sat soft as pap. Same result. Same little ring travelling up the steel into her wrist. She sat back on her heels in two inches of brown water and looked at the rod as though it had lied to her.

Drain Fourteen was a twelve-hundred-millimetre box culvert running under the Ojuelegba flyover from the Tejuosho side to the outfall channel behind the motor park. Her number, not the Ministry's. The Ministry had it on a 1987 drawing as SW-OJ/C3, which nobody could say out loud without sounding like they were reading a licence plate. It carried the run-off from about forty hectares of roof, road and market, and when it blocked, the underpass filled to the knee in twenty minutes and the danfos parked themselves in it anyway, out of spite.

NiMet had promised seventy millimetres from four o'clock. It was 1.42 p.m. on a Thursday, the twenty-sixth of June, and the air under the flyover was so thick she could have wrung it into a bucket.

Overhead, the okadas were leaning on their horns in long, offended blasts, the way they did when a lorry had stopped to argue with a police officer. Through the grating at the culvert mouth she could see a strip of road, a pair of rubber slippers going past, the hem of a wrapper, a wheelbarrow of agbalumo with a hand-lettered sign: 3 FOR 500. Somebody's radio was playing Wizkid, which on this particular corner was less music than local by-law.

'Engineer!' Sikiru called from the van. 'Madam Adesina dey call you. Third time.'

'Tell her I'm in the drain.'

'I told her. She said, which drain.'

'This one.'

He went away. Her phone, zipped into the chest pocket of her overalls, buzzed once more against her sternum and gave up.

She clicked her head torch up a notch and duck-walked further in. The concrete roof was low enough here that her hard hat scraped it every third step, a dry little rasp she'd stopped hearing years ago. Box braids crushed flat under the shell, sweat running down behind her ears. The smell changed about four metres in. Outside it was diesel and fried yam and the sour breath of the motor park. In here, normally, it was rot: drowned nylon, a dead rat or three, the sweetish wrongness of the meat sellers' run-off. Today it was something clean. Sharp at the back of the nose. Iodine, and under the iodine something like sugar left too long in a hot pot.

She knew what she expected to find, because she'd found it a hundred times. Sachet-water bags, packed in layers like filo. Styrofoam takeaway packs from the buka on Ojuelegba Road. A sandbank where some genius building a fence at Tejuosho had washed his excess fill straight into the gutter, because the gutter took everything and asked nothing. Once, memorably, a whole car tyre with a plantain tree growing out of it. You cleared it with rods and a jet truck and a gang of four, and you wrote a report nobody read, and then it rained again.

The torch found white.

It filled the culvert from wall to wall and floor to roof about two metres ahead of her, a plug of it, glittering. Not foam. Foam slumped. This stood. It had edges, flat planes that threw the torchlight back at her in hard little squares, and where it met the concrete it seemed to have grown into the joints, feeling its way along every crack the way roots did. She'd seen calcite in old pipes. Lime scale, the furry grey beard you got in Lagos water tanks. This was nothing like that. This was the inside of a geode somebody had poured into a storm drain.

She crawled closer. Her knees went from water onto a hard crust that crunched.

Fine. A spill, then. A lorry had shed a load of something industrial upstream, caustic soda, fertiliser, God knew, and it had washed down and set. That happened. Not like this, but it happened. She reached out and snapped off a spur about the length of her finger. It broke clean with a small bright crack and lay in her gloved palm, cube stacked on cube, perfectly square, catching the light.

Through the glove, her left hand had started to itch. The scar. A thin pale crescent across the heel of her palm that she'd carried since she was fourteen and that only ever bothered her in the cold, and there was no cold in Lagos in June. She flexed the hand. The itch stayed.

She peeled off the glove with her teeth, and she knew this was a stupid thing to do, she knew exactly what a properly trained engineer with a Ministry of Environment ID card would say about putting unidentified crystalline deposits anywhere near her mouth, she could hear Mrs Adesina saying it, the beads on her glasses chain clicking with every syllable, and she pressed her fingertip to the spur and touched the fingertip to her tongue anyway.

Salt.

Not table salt. Not the Mr Chef sachets on the buka counters. This was the taste of being nine years old and getting knocked flat by a wave at Bar Beach, coughing up half the Atlantic while her mother laughed on the sand. Bitter at the edges. Mineral. Alive, almost, if salt could be alive.

The nearest seawater was eleven kilometres south, on the far side of Surulere and the whole of Lagos Island, past the Marina and the Third Mainland and the reclaimed sand off Victoria Island. Between here and there ran a city of twenty million people and the best part of a hundred thousand tonnes of concrete. Rain did not carry salt eleven kilometres inland. Rain did not grow cubes.

She spat, carefully, to one side.

The water around her boots made a small sound. A lick, a suck. She looked down.

The trickle that ran along the bottom of the culvert, the two inches of brown run-off she'd been squatting in for a quarter of an hour, had changed direction. It no longer slid past her ankles towards the mouth of the drain and the light. It slid the other way. Away from the road, past her boots, up the floor, towards the wall of salt.

She had surveyed this culvert herself in March. Gradient one in two hundred, falling north to south. She'd written it in her own notebook in her own small capitals. Water did not argue with a gradient.

This water was climbing it.

She backed up a step on her knees. The water came with her.

It didn't rush. That was the worst part. A flood rushed: she had stood on a footbridge at Alaba in 2022 and watched a two-metre wall of canal water take a parked Corolla like a sachet bag, and that had been loud and stupid and obeyed every rule she knew. This was slow. It rose around her boots in a smooth dark swell, as if the floor of the culvert were filling from underneath, and it was cold. Not cool. Cold. The kind of cold that came out of a deep freezer at Shoprite when you opened the lid.

Ankles. Then the tops of her boots, then over them, pouring in over the rubber and soaking her socks in one long icy slide.

'Sikiru.'

It came out at normal volume, which was useless. She cleared her throat and tried again, louder, and her voice went down the concrete and came back flat and small. On the road the Wizkid song had ended and something with a heavier bass had started, and a danfo conductor was bawling Oshodi, Oshodi, enter with your change, and nobody in the whole of Ojuelegba was listening to a woman in a drain.

Fine. She didn't need Sikiru. She needed six metres.

She turned on her knees, slower than she wanted because the roof was low and the hard hat caught, and started back towards the light. The strip of road through the grating looked very bright and very far away. A yellow danfo crossed it. The agbalumo seller's wheelbarrow wheel. A woman's leg in a black skirt.

The water was at her knees now, and it was pushing.

She knew load. She knew it as a number before she knew it as a feeling: nine hundred millimetres of pipe at full bore, a head of maybe a metre, call it ten kilopascals at the invert, and she had braced against worse than that in training at Ikorodu with a rope round her waist and three men laughing at her. This wasn't head pressure. It didn't push from one direction. It leaned. It pressed on the backs of her thighs, then on the fronts, then on both at once, as if it were testing her for a weak point, the way a fluid in a cracked pipe will find the crack every single time, without fail, because it has nothing else to do and all the time in the world.

Her knee slipped on the salt crust. She caught herself on one hand. The water came up to her elbow.

Then it spoke.

It wasn't a word at first. It was the sound a drain makes when it swallows air, a deep wet glug from somewhere behind her, from the wall of salt. Then again. And the second time it had a shape in it, two syllables, low and thick, with the vowels dragged long the way a voice drags them over a bad line.

'Ifem.'

She stopped moving.

Nobody called her that. Obinna called her Ife or Sister or, when he wanted money for a new soldering iron, Engineer Madam. Mrs Adesina called her Nwosu. The boys on the jet truck called her Oga Madam, which was a joke she'd decided long ago not to find funny. Ifem was a different thing. Ifem was a voice in a kitchen in Surulere singing Oliver De Coque half a tone flat, a hand flat on the top of her head steering her out of the way of a hot pot. Ifem, come and taste this. Ifem, you have not done your Further Maths. Ifem, hold the fence, hold it, I'm coming back.

Pressure in her ears. A pop, like on a plane coming down into Murtala Muhammed.

'Ifem.'

Closer. Behind her and below her and, horribly, inside the water round her legs, as if the whole drain had a throat.

She got moving again. She didn't decide to. Her body did it, the way it had once taken her off a Bar Beach sandbank at a dead run with the sea coming over the fence behind her. Hands, knees, hands. Her hard hat struck the roof and spun half round on her head and she let it. The water was at her waist, and the strip of light was four metres away, three, and the cold had got into her jaw so her teeth were going.

Two metres. She threw her right hand forward and caught the bottom bar of the grating.

Steel. Twenty-millimetre round bar, welded on a hundred-and-fifty pitch, rusted to the colour of pepper stew. She knew it because she had specified the replacement herself and the contractor had sent the wrong bar size and she had made him take it back. She got her left hand on it too. The scar burned against the iron, an actual burn, as if she'd grabbed a pot handle, and she held on anyway and pulled.

The water pulled back.

It took her by the hips and the backs of her knees and leaned on her, gently at first, and then not gently at all. Her shoulders stretched. Her fingers whitened round the bars. Through the grating she could see Sikiru's van, the Ministry crest on the door half scraped off, and Sikiru himself leaning on the bonnet with a sachet of Pure Life between his teeth, scrolling his phone. She opened her mouth to shout.

'Ifem. Nne. It's me.'

It was.

It was the voice exactly. Not a likeness, not something that sounded like it if you squinted. The real one. The little catch at the end of nne. The Onitsha flattening on the vowels that thirteen years in Lagos had never sanded off. Ifeoma had not heard that voice since she was fourteen, and she had stopped, round about the third year, being able to call it up properly in her head, and here it was, every grain of it, coming up out of a storm drain under the Ojuelegba flyover on a Tuesday afternoon.

Her grip didn't fail. That was the part she would think about afterwards, again and again, lying awake on a wet pillow. The steel held. Her fingers held. She had enough strength left in them to keep holding for another minute at least, maybe two, long enough for Sikiru to finish his sachet and look up.

She let go.

Her hands just opened. One, then the other. As if somebody had said her name across a room and she had turned round to see who.

The water had her at once. It flipped her, neat as a mechanic rolling a tyre, so that her chest hit the salt crust and her chin hit the water and the head torch went under and turned the whole world green. It took her by the wrists. By the shoulders. It hauled her the length of the culvert face down, back over the floor she'd just crawled, and the salt wall that had stood there like the inside of a geode wasn't there any more. In its place was a round black mouth, low in the far wall, where the feeder came in from Tejuosho. Six hundred millimetres. She had measured it herself. A child could get through six hundred millimetres. A grown woman with her shoulders could not.

Her hard hat went first. She felt it scrape off and go.

Then the pipe took her in headfirst, cold as the bottom of the sea, and the last thing she heard from the surface was the conductor on the road, still shouting Oshodi, Oshodi, as if nothing at all had happened.

The pipe was not six hundred millimetres. She knew that the way she knew her own height. Her shoulders should have jammed at the first joint and they didn't, and there was no joint, and after the third stroke of her arms there was no pipe either. No wall under her fingers. No roof against her skull. Just cold, pushing evenly on every square centimetre of her at once, the way it does at the bottom of a deep tank.

Up went. Down went. She kicked and couldn't tell which way she was kicking. The head torch had died or been torn off; she couldn't feel the strap. Her ears were full of a pressure that kept climbing, past the plane-landing pop and into something that sat in the hinge of her jaw and leaned.

She started counting. Habit. On site you counted everything: rings, bolts, seconds of flow into a calibrated bucket. One. Two.

At four there was light.

She thought at first it was her eyes, the sparks you get from pressing on your lids. It wasn't. It was below her, or ahead, or wherever the water was carrying her: a point of yellow, then another, then a string of them swaying in a line, the way bulbs swing on a flex in a market stall when a generator kicks. Lamps. Hanging lamps, dozens, strung over something long and dark that moved.

Eleven. Twelve.

A canal. She could see its edges now, walls of old brick going green, a kerb of dressed stone. On the black water a barge slid past, low and flat, piled with sacks, and nobody was poling it. Something under its hull pushed a pale bow-wave the colour of a phone screen at night. Behind it came another. A man stood on that one with his arms folded, watching the bank like a conductor watching for passengers.

Nineteen.

Beyond the canal the dark went up in shapes. Arches. Stairs cut into rock. Windows, or holes like windows, lit blue and green from inside, stacked one over another in a way that made no structural sense unless something very large was carrying the load. Cables slung between them. A dome, half drowned. She had looked at the Lagos Island drainage survey from 1956 a hundred times and none of this was on it. All of it was the right shape to be a city.

Her lungs had started to burn at about fifteen. By twenty-two the burn had gone white and flat and calm, which she knew from a safety course in 2019 was the bad sign. The body stops complaining when it has decided to stop. She wasn't frightened. That was worse. The lights were close now, warm, and part of her was leaning towards them the way you lean towards a door when someone you love is behind it, and she honestly could not tell, at twenty-six, twenty-seven, whether she was drowning or arriving.

'Ifem.'

Right by her ear.

Twenty-nine.

At thirty the whole thing shut like a phone screen locking. Black. Then a shove from below, hard, a full column of water behind it, and she went up through it like a cork out of a bottle of Five Alive, and her head hit iron, and the iron gave.

She came out into air and noise and diesel. Her elbows caught on a rim. A manhole cover lay tipped on its edge beside her, rocking, and a keke swerved round it and the driver screamed something about her mother that was, under the circumstances, very nearly funny. She dragged herself out onto wet tar and lay there coughing up water that tasted of nothing a drain should taste of. Clean. Salt.

A Western Avenue sign. Half a kilometre north of where she'd gone in. Upstream.

She sat up. Her left hand was stinging. The crescent scar on her palm, the one from the Bar Beach fence, had opened along its whole length, and it wasn't bleeding. It was weeping. Clear beads came up out of it and ran into the lines of her hand, and when she touched her tongue to one, because she was an engineer and wanted the data, it was brine.

~

The okada man wanted two thousand five hundred naira to Yaba because she was wet. She gave him three thousand because she couldn't do the arithmetic for change. Her phone was dead in her overall pocket. Her hard hat was somewhere under Ojuelegba. Sikiru would be ringing it. Mrs Adesina would be ringing Sikiru.

The flat on Alagomeji Street had light, which meant NEPA had brought it back or Obinna had bought fuel without asking. She heard him before she saw him. The balcony door was open and he was sitting on an upturned paint bucket with a tray of dead phones on his knees, glasses taped at the left hinge, a soldering iron smoking in a tin lid.

'You're wet,' he said, without looking up.

'It's raining.'

'It's not raining in Yaba.'

'It's raining in Surulere.'

He looked up then. His eyes went over her overalls, her bare head, the way she was holding her left hand closed. She watched him decide whether to push. He was seventeen and wanted to be trusted with everything, and she had told herself for thirteen years that the kindest thing she could do for him was keep the heavy stuff on her own side of the pipe.

'Your WAEC past questions,' she said. 'How many have you done?'

'Sister.'

'How many?'

He went back to the Tecno he was gutting. 'Four.'

'Do five.'

She shut the bathroom door and stood under the shower until the tank ran out, which took six minutes, and then she sat on the closed toilet in the dark and peeled off the overalls. Something knocked against the tiles. She felt for it in the chest pocket.

A cowrie. Smooth on the back, toothed on the front, the size of her thumbnail. She'd never put a cowrie in that pocket. She held it up to the window, to the orange of the streetlight.

Someone had cut lines into the shell. Fine ones, done with a needle or a laser. She knew what they were before she knew she knew. A resistor, zigzagged. A capacitor, two short bars. And in the middle, drawn as a circle with a filament and a grid and a plate stacked inside it like floors in a building, the symbol for a thermionic valve.

A radio. Somebody had put a radio in her pocket.

On the balcony a phone came back to life and played its start-up jingle, bright and stupid, and her palm started weeping salt again.