Computer Village

'Delete it,' Obinna said.

He was standing in her bedroom doorway at 5.48 a.m. in a Chelsea shirt with the badge peeling off, holding his Tecno out at arm's length like it had bitten him. The screen had a crack running corner to corner, and the light from it lit his taped glasses from underneath. Outside, the landlord's Mikano had just coughed into life, and somebody on Herbert Macaulay was already shouting for Oyingbo passengers.

Ifeoma sat up. Her palm had crusted in the night. White flakes on the pillowcase.

'Delete what?'

'I don't know. I don't know what it is.' He came in and sat on the edge of her mattress, which he hadn't done since he was eleven. 'Unknown number. Plus two-three-four, then nothing. Just zeros. It came at five-thirty. I thought it was a customer.'

He turned the phone round. WhatsApp, a chat with no name and no profile picture, only a grey silhouette. One voice note, forty-one seconds. Above the bubble, where the app put the date in its little rounded pill, it said 14 JULY 2012.

'WhatsApp didn't have voice notes in 2012,' Obinna said. 'August 2013. I checked. So it's a spoof. Somebody's playing.'

'Did you open it?'

'Once.' He swallowed. 'Just play it. Then delete it.'

She pressed the triangle.

The phone said: 'Ifem. Nne, are you there? Don't go near the fence tonight, you hear me? Stay with your brother. Hold his hand. If they ask you anything, you don't know anything. I'll be home before you finish your rice. I'm putting the light off now. Ifem. Ifeoma. Be a good girl.'

Then a click, and nothing but a faint, ragged sound for the last nine seconds, and the bubble went back to blue.

The room smelled of generator fumes coming through the louvres. Ifeoma looked at the wall. There was a damp patch above the window in the shape of Benin Republic that she had been meaning to report to the landlord since March.

'Is that her?' Obinna said.

She didn't answer.

'Sister. Is that her voice?'

'Yes.'

He took his glasses off and wiped them on the Chelsea shirt, which made them worse. He had been four. He'd told her once, at fourteen, sitting on the balcony with a soldering iron and pretending it was a casual question, that he couldn't remember a single thing their mother had ever said to him. Not one word. He'd made it sound like a technical fault.

'Delete it,' he said again. 'It's somebody's AI thing. They scrape a voice from somewhere and make it talk. People are doing it for scams now, they ring your aunty and say send money. Delete it and block the number and we never talk about it.'

'Where would they scrape her voice from? There's no video of her. There's that one cassette and it's in the wardrobe in Enugu.'

'I don't know. I don't care. Please.'

She played it again.

Fence. That was the word that did it. Nobody had known about the fence. Not the police at Bar Beach, not Aunty Ngozi, not the counsellor the school sent with her leaflets. Ifeoma had climbed it alone at fourteen, in the dark, with the surge coming over the Kuramo shingle, and torn her palm open on the top wire. She had never told anyone why she climbed it. She played it a third time.

'Ifeoma.'

'Shh.'

Fourth time, she ignored the voice and listened to what was underneath it. A hum, low and steady. Not mains. Mains in Lagos, when you had it, buzzed at fifty hertz and sagged whenever the next compound switched on a pressing iron. This was smoother. Warmer. And behind the hum, on the far side of it, a hiss that rose and fell in slow waves, the way a radio hissed when it was tuned between stations and the valves were still warming up.

She had sat beside that hiss for years. Saturday mornings in the old flat in Surulere, her mother at the cooker, a wooden-cased set on the fridge that took a full minute to come alive and always sang through static before it found Radio Lagos.

'She recorded it on a radio,' Ifeoma said. 'Or through one.'

'You can't record a WhatsApp voice note through a radio.'

'I know what you can't do.'

She took the phone from him. The silhouette was not a silhouette. When she pressed on it, the profile picture loaded slowly, line by line, the way pictures had loaded on their mother's old Nokia. A cowrie. Photographed close up, on a cloth the colour of laterite. The same toothed face, the same needle-fine lines. Resistor. Capacitor. The valve in the middle like a building with its floors stacked inside.

She reached across to the plastic chair by the bed and took the cowrie from yesterday's overall pocket and held it beside the screen. Identical, down to a chip on the left lip.

Obinna stopped breathing for a moment. She heard him stop.

'Where did you get that?'

'Look at the bottom.'

She zoomed. Below the valve, at the lip of the shell, almost lost in the grain, was a tiny mark: a circle with a flame inside it, and two letters cut through the flame. S.A.

She had seen it before. Scratched into the back panel of the radio on the fridge in Surulere, beside a curling paper sticker that said REPAIRED, OTIGBA ST, IKEJA, with a phone number half rubbed off by their mother's oily thumbs. Ifeoma had picked at the corner of that sticker for most of 2009.

'Get dressed,' she said.

'It's not even six. I have Further Maths at—'

'Not you. Me.' She was already on her feet, already hunting for her hard hat under the pile of drawings by the wardrobe. 'Do your past questions.'

'Sister, where are you going?'

She put the cowrie in her bra, where nobody would find it, and the phone in his hand, and did not tell him.

---

By noon she had signed the attendance register at the Alausa secretariat, nodded through a corridor conversation with Mrs Adesina about yesterday's incident report ('Sikiru says you went into the drain. Inside it, Ifeoma.') and walked out again with a clipboard held in front of her like a permit. A clipboard could get you anywhere in Lagos. Nobody stopped a woman with a clipboard and a hard hat.

Otigba Street was not built for walking. It was built for selling, and walking happened in whatever space the selling left over. Ifeoma went sideways between a man fanning a tray of tempered-glass screen protectors (1,500, sister, 1,500, original) and a bench where three boys in matching red caps had a Samsung open like a fish, its battery out and swollen. Generators thudded under every second canopy. Someone's speaker played Asake over someone else's speaker playing a pastor. The gutter along the kerb was 450 millimetres wide and choked with SIM packaging, and she logged it automatically, the way other people noticed shoes.

The phone number on the old sticker was dead. The street wasn't. She asked four people for the radio man and got four different directions, and the fifth, a woman selling chargers from a Ghana-must-go bag, pointed with her lips down a gap between two container shops.

'Baba Sunday. He dey inside there. No disturb am, he no like noise.'

The gap opened onto a stall the size of a lift car. Plywood shelves to the ceiling, every shelf stacked with radios: Philips, Grundig, a Bush with its fabric grille hanging off like a loose tooth, a whole row of wooden-cased sets with the backs unscrewed and the valves standing in them like small glass buildings. The air smelled of rosin and hot dust. A fan turned on the floor and moved none of it.

The old man sat at a bench under a bare bulb. Bald, wiry, a short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the throat. He was soldering a transistor onto a green board with his left hand, and his right hand lay on the bench beside him in a white cotton glove, very still, the way you'd rest a tool you weren't using. An unlit Benson & Hedges sat behind his ear.

'Good afternoon, sir.'

He touched the iron to the joint. A thread of smoke. He didn't look up.

'I'm looking for whoever repairs radios with this mark.' She took the cowrie out (from her pocket now, she'd moved it in the car) and set it on the bench beside the board. 'S.A. In a flame.'

He looked at the shell for perhaps one second. Then he looked at his joint.

'I don't know it.'

'It's on the back of my mother's radio. Wooden case, Philips, 1970-something. Your sticker was on it. Otigba Street.'

'Plenty people on Otigba Street.' He blew on the solder. 'Plenty people fix radio.'

'Not like this.' She thumbed her phone awake. She had forwarded the voice note to herself at 6.04 that morning, before she gave Obinna back his Tecno, and on her own phone it had arrived dated today, ordinary as a bank alert. She held it out and pressed play.

The voice came out small and tinny into the stall. Ifem. Nne, are you there? Don't go near the fence tonight.

The iron stopped a centimetre above the board. Only for a moment. Then it went down again.

She let it run to the end, through the nine seconds of ragged nothing. In here, among all the dead radios, the hiss under her mother's words sounded very much at home.

'That's my mother,' she said. 'Chinwe Nwosu. She disappeared on the fourteenth of July 2012. That message is dated the same night. It came to my brother's phone this morning with your shell as the profile picture.'

'Then somebody is playing with you.'

'That's what he said.'

'He has sense.' Pa Sunday put the iron in its stand and finally looked at her. His eyes were yellowed at the edges and very steady. 'Listen to me. You are a foolish girl chasing ghosts. Your mother is gone. Whoever sent you this wants something from you, and it is not something you want to give. Go home.'

'I'm not leaving until you tell me...'

'Go home.' He picked up the cowrie with his good hand and put it in her palm and closed her fingers over it. His skin was dry and hot, hotter than the room. 'Before dark. You hear me? Not after. Before.'

Her scar itched under the shell. Fine. Fine. She had stood in front of contractors who lied better than this, men who swore a 900 mm culvert had been laid to spec while the outfall sat a metre too high. You didn't argue with them in the moment. You went away and came back with a level.

'Thank you for your time, sir.'

She turned to go. The gap between the containers framed the street like a screen: red caps, a wheelbarrow of Infinix boxes, a girl balancing a tray of sachet water on her head, two hundred naira a bag in this heat.

Behind her the stall had gone quiet. No iron hissing. No scrape of the board.

She glanced back. Pa Sunday's hands lay flat on the bench, both of them, the glove and the bare one. He wasn't watching her at all. He was watching something past her shoulder, out in the crowd, and the unlit cigarette behind his ear had begun, very faintly, to smoke.

She stepped out of the gap anyway, because standing in a dead man's shop staring at the street was not a plan.

The lane took her back like a current. A keke horned at nothing. A boy ran past with a laptop held over his head. She went left, towards Medical Road and the bus stop, and the crowd thinned for no reason she could see, the way water parts round a stone you haven't spotted yet.

Then she saw the stones.

Two men, standing in the middle of the lane, ten metres apart, ten metres ahead. Navy trousers, white shirts, the kind of outfit that said driver or church usher or nobody. They weren't doing anything. That was the first wrong thing. Nobody on Otigba Street stood still unless they were selling, and these two had nothing in their hands.

The second wrong thing was their skin.

It was dark and red at once, the colour of a laterite road just after rain, and it had the same shine. Too smooth. No pores, no sweat, no creases at the knuckles. In thirty-four degrees and ninety per cent humidity, every face on the street was wet with honest salt, and theirs were wet with something else, a slick that sat on the surface and didn't run.

She turned right.

A third man wasn't there, which was something, but the lane narrowed between a stall of refurbished iPhones and a stack of pure water bales, and beyond it a delivery van had backed in and stopped, its tailgate down, two boys unloading generator parts as slowly as human beings can unload anything. No way past. She turned again. The two men were closer now. She hadn't seen them move.

'Chinwe,' the nearer one said.

His voice was perfectly ordinary. That was worse.

'Chinwe's daughter,' said the other. 'Come.'

'I don't know you.' She heard her own voice go up half a tone, the voice she used on site when a foreman was lying and they both knew it. 'Who sent you?'

'Come,' the first one said again, and took a step, and his shoe made no sound on the concrete at all.

She looked at the iPhone seller. He looked at his iPhones. The man with the screen protectors had found something urgent to do with his back turned. Somebody pulled a canopy flap down. Lagos had a hundred ways of not seeing, and she watched the lane run through all of them in about four seconds.

Her shoulder hit the pure water bales. Stacked chest-high, maybe sixty of them, clear nylon sacks of twenty sachets each, sweating in the shade under a stall's blue tarpaulin awning. Behind her, the container wall. To her left, the van. In front, two men with mud for skin, one of them lifting a hand that was too smooth to have fingerprints.

Her scar was not itching any more. It was burning.

She didn't decide anything. Afterwards she would try very hard to remember deciding, and there was nothing there. Her hand went into the top bale and tore it, nylon splitting along the seam, and her fingers closed on sachets and burst them, and the water came out over her wrist cold, far colder than water that had been sitting in the sun at Computer Village, and then it didn't fall.

It went up. A sheet of it, lifting off her hand like it had been waiting for permission. Twenty sachets, half a litre each. Ten litres, give or take. Ten litres was nothing. Ten litres was a bucket. She felt it anyway, all of it, the way you feel a load through a beam before the gauge moves, and she felt it narrow, pressure stacking on pressure, the sheet thinning to a line, and somewhere far back in her head a lecturer at UNILAG was saying waterjet cutters run at four thousand bar, you could slice steel with a garden hose if you had the pump.

She threw her hand out. She had the pump.

The water went across the lane flat and bright as a blade. It hit the awning's front pole and the pole was simply not one pole any more. It went through the tarpaulin with a noise like a zip. The blue sheet sagged, folded, came down in a heap of nylon and bent aluminium and a cascade of phone cases, red and gold and Hello Kitty pink, and landed in a ragged wall between her and the two men.

Someone screamed, finally. A man shouted, 'Ah! Ah! My goods!' The water she hadn't used dropped off her fingers and splashed her boots like it was ashamed of itself.

Ifeoma stood with her arm still out, breathing through her mouth. Her palm was wet. Not with sachet water. With brine, running in a thin line from the scar down to her wrist.

Across the wreck, the two men had not stepped back. They hadn't flinched. The tarpaulin had missed the first one by perhaps thirty centimetres and he stood with a pink phone case resting on his shoe and did not look down at it.

He was looking at her hand.

Slowly, the way clay settles when you leave it out overnight, both of their faces moved. The corners of the mouths went up. It was the first expression she had seen on them, and it was a smile, and it was pleased, the smile of a surveyor whose borehole has come up exactly where the drawings said it would.

'Yes,' the nearer one said. 'That is her.'

They came round the wreck together, one on each side, stepping over the phone cases without looking down. The stallholder was still shouting about his goods. Nobody went to help him.

Ifeoma reached for the bale again. Her fingers found nylon and nothing in it; she had emptied the top sack and the next one down was wedged tight under its neighbours. Two seconds to tear it. Maybe three. The nearer man was four metres away and closing without any sound at all.

'Ah-ah. Not here.'

The voice came from her left, flat and bored, the voice of a man refusing a bad price. Pa Sunday stood in the gap between the van's tailgate and the container wall, where there had been no gap a moment before. Same grey singlet as an hour ago, same white cotton glove on his right hand, an unlit Benson & Hedges hanging off his lip. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the nearer man's arm.

The sleeve caught.

There was no match, no spark, no lighter. One moment it was a white cotton shirtsleeve and the next it was burning from the cuff up, a clean yellow flame that climbed towards the elbow faster than cotton burns. Ifeoma had seen a lot of fire on site. Gas lines, a generator once in Agege. Fire needs a source and a path. This one had neither. It simply started where the old man's eyes had landed, as if looking was enough.

The man didn't scream. He stopped. He looked at his arm with mild interest, and where the flame reached his wrist the skin went pale and dry and cracked like a pot left too long in the kiln.

'Come,' Pa Sunday said to her, and this time it was not a suggestion.

His good hand closed on her upper arm, harder than seemed possible for a man that thin, and then she was moving: behind the van, along a slot between containers no wider than her shoulders, over a coil of extension cable and a sleeping cat, through a back door she hadn't known his stall had. He kicked it shut behind them. Two bolts, top and bottom. A bar across. A padlock, which he snapped closed without looking.

Then it was dark, and close, and everything hummed.

Radios. Forty or fifty of them, on shelves floor to ceiling, valve sets in walnut cases and Bakelite, a Grundig with its back off, a Philips the size of a microwave. Every one of them was switched on. None was tuned to anything. The sound was a low, layered hiss, and under it the warm smell of hot dust and old solder. Orange filaments glowed through the vents like coals.

Ifeoma's legs decided they were finished. She sat on an upturned paint bucket. Her hand was shaking so badly she put it between her knees.

'What was that?'

He was at the front shutter, checking the gap at the bottom with his foot.

'What were they? Their skin. You set him on fire. You looked at him and he burned. Don't tell me that didn't happen, I was standing there, I...'

'Lower your voice.'

'You told me you didn't know her.' It came out cracked. 'An hour ago. You looked at that cowrie and you said you'd never seen it and I should go home and greet my brother. They knew her name. They said Chinwe's daughter. You knew her.'

He took the cigarette from his mouth and studied it. The tip glowed, briefly, though he had not lit it, and went out again.

'Who were they?'

'Somebody's errand boys.'

'Whose?'

He didn't answer that. He turned from the shutter and looked at her properly for the first time, at her wet palm, at the brine still threading down to her wrist, and his face did something tired and old.

'You should have gone home,' he said. 'I told you.'

'Then tell me something true.'

Outside, someone tried the shutter once, a single metallic rattle, polite. Then nothing. The radios hissed on. Pa Sunday listened until he was sure, then lowered himself onto a crate opposite her, the gloved hand resting on his knee like something he had been asked to hold for a friend.

'Now they know you exist,' he said.

Not an answer. A sentence, in the court sense. She heard it land.

Ifeoma looked down at her palm. She thought of the drain under Ojuelegba, the cold, the voice, the pull. She had told herself all day that the water had been dragging her down. It hadn't. It had thrown her out. Upstream, against the gradient, eleven kilometres of pressure spent shoving her up through a manhole on Western Avenue and away. And the note on Obinna's phone, sent from nowhere, dated the night her mother vanished. She had played it seven times and heard only the voice, because the voice was all she'd wanted.

Ifem. It's me.

Not hello. Not come.

Stay where you are. Stay dry. Stay small enough that nobody looks.

And she had walked into Computer Village with a cowrie in her pocket, asking questions at stalls, and torn the water open in front of half of Otigba Street.

On the shelf behind Pa Sunday, the Grundig with its back off stopped hissing. Its needle swung, untouched, across the dial and settled on a frequency nothing in Lagos broadcast on. Through the speaker came a sound she knew from the bottom of every drain she had ever opened.

Water, filling.