The Stairs at Ebute Ero

Pa Sunday walked like a man who had been late for something since 1979 and had stopped apologising for it. He cut through Ebute Ero with his gloved hand held close to his chest and his good elbow out, and the crowd folded around him the way water folds round a pier. Ifeoma kept two steps behind and lost him twice.

They had come down from Ikeja in a danfo that charged them ₦800 each to Idumota because it was raining somewhere, the conductor said, though not here. Pa Sunday had paid for both of them without asking and spent the whole of Ikorodu Road with his eyes shut. She had spent it watching the back window for men with skin like wet laterite. She'd counted four candidates. All of them had turned out to be men with skin.

At 6.20 p.m. the market was at its worst. Women with smoking drums of mackerel and catfish lined the passage under the Carter Bridge approach, fanning charcoal with flattened Peak Milk tins, and the smoke hung at head height in a brown layer that stung her eyes and soaked into her braids. Ankara bolts stood stacked in towers taller than the sellers. A boy pushing a wheelbarrow of frozen turkey parts shouted 'Shift! Shift!' and did not wait to see if anyone did. Somewhere a generator coughed twice and caught. She breathed through her mouth and tasted fish anyway.

'Pa. Where are we going?'

He didn't turn. 'Down.'

'Down where?'

'You are an engineer. Down is a direction.'

Fine. Fine.

He ducked left between a stall selling padlocks and a stall selling Bibles, through a gap she would have sworn was only a shadow, and the noise dropped by half. Behind the main row the stalls were shuttered, their corrugated fronts painted with names and phone numbers: MAMA RISI ENTERPRISES, GOD'S TIME IS THE BEST PROVISIONS, a third so faded only 0803 survived. The ground here was older. She felt it through her boots before she saw it, the tarmac giving way to a patch of granite setts worn smooth as soap, the kind the colonial Public Works Department had stopped laying before her grandmother was born.

Pa Sunday stopped behind Mama Risi's and kicked aside a flattened carton.

Underneath was a grate. Cast iron, maybe seventy centimetres by a metre, rusted to the colour of dried blood and eaten through at one corner so that the bars ended in lace. Someone had cast a pattern into the frame: a small cross, a ship, and numbers she had to crouch to read. 1 7 8 something. The last digit had rotted away.

'That's not PWD,' she said. 'That's older than PWD.'

'Portuguese.'

'Portuguese weren't building drains on Lagos Island in seventeen-eighty-anything.'

'Then go and tell them.' He fished inside his shirt.

She stood up. Her ribs ached where the clay man had shoved her into the phone stall, and her palm had started to itch again, slow and steady, a pressure gauge creeping into the red. She looked at the grate, at the black gap between its bars, and her whole working life looked back at her: H₂S, methane pockets, leptospirosis, the man from Kosofe Local Government who had gone down a manhole at Agboyi in 2019 without a gas meter and come up three days later in the Ogun River.

'No,' she said.

Pa Sunday waited.

'I've been in more drains than you have eaten hot dinners, Pa. I know what's down there. Sludge. Rats. Gas that will kill you before you smell it. And you want me to climb into a hole in the middle of Ebute Ero, at night, with no torch, no harness, no meter, because an old man I met this afternoon said down.' She heard her voice climb and dragged it back. 'Somebody tried to kill me today.'

'Two somebodies.'

'You're not helping.'

'I am not trying to help.' He drew a cord out over his collar. It was a loop of brown string threaded through cowries, perhaps twenty of them, clicking against each other, and hanging at the bottom was a key. Brass, long-shanked, a key for a door in a novel. 'I am trying to show you.'

He bent to the grate. She hadn't seen the padlock. It sat underneath the frame, fixed to a hasp she would have taken for part of the casting, and it was the only clean metal for ten metres in any direction. The key went in. He turned it with his good hand, and the lock opened with a sound like a cough in an empty church.

He lifted the grate. It should have taken two men and a crowbar. It came up on a hinge without a squeal.

Ifeoma looked in.

Steps went down. Stone, narrow, cut into the wall of a shaft, and every one of them was wet. The wet was glowing. A faint cold green, the green of the lagoon at Makoko on certain nights when the boats disturbed it, beaded along the edge of each tread and pooled in the hollows where feet had worn them down over two hundred years. It went down further than the light reached. Below the eleventh step she stopped being able to count.

Air came up out of it. No gas. No rot. It smelled of salt, and under the salt, very faintly, of somebody frying plantain.

Pa Sunday held out the cowrie key, not to her, just out, so the light caught it.

'Lagos has a floor,' he said. 'Mind your head on the third step.'

She hit her head on the third step.

Not hard. Hard enough. The roof of the shaft came down in a lip of dressed stone she would have seen if she had been looking up instead of down at the green light on the treads, and her hard hat was in the van at Ojuelegba with Sikiru, who would by now have told Mrs Adesina she'd gone home sick. She swore in Igbo. Pa Sunday, four steps below, said nothing in a way that was clearly saying something.

She counted anyway, because counting was what she had. Sixty-two steps. Riser of about nineteen centimetres, uneven, the tread narrowing where the wall bellied out. Call it twelve metres of drop, which put them below the water table of Lagos Island by a margin that should have meant a flooded shaft and two drowned idiots. The walls sweated. They did not leak. Something was holding the water back, and she put her bare palm flat against the stone to feel for it before she could stop herself.

Pressure. Enormous and even, pressing in from every side like a fist closed round an egg, and not one crack taking the load. Her scar throbbed once, a valve opening.

'Take your hand off the wall,' Pa Sunday said.

She took it off.

The stairs ended on a ledge, and the ledge ended in light.

She had seen it for thirty seconds from inside the Tejuosho feeder, upside down and drowning, so she had thought she was ready. She was not ready. The shaft opened onto a canal perhaps eight metres wide, running left and right under a vault of red brick so old the mortar had gone to powder and been replaced, in patches, with what looked like cement, and in other patches with what looked like nothing at all. The water was lit from inside. Not lamplit, not reflecting anything; the green came up out of it the way heat comes off a road, and where the current broke against the footings it flared brighter, almost white, and then settled. Along the vault somebody had stapled LED strips, the cheap ₦3,500-a-roll kind from Alaba, in red and blue and one long run of pink, and they were wired back to car batteries stacked on brackets every twenty metres or so. The two lights fought each other. The green won.

Doorways had been cut into the brick on both banks. Some had shutters. One had a curtain made from a Glo banner. A woman sat on a stool outside it shelling egusi into a basin and did not look up.

And there were boats.

Long flat barges, the length of a danfo, loaded to the gunwales with sacks and jerrycans and, on one, a stack of old CRT televisions tied down with blue rope. Each one had a pole at the back, and on each pole was a figure that was not quite a person. She looked at the nearest and her eyes kept sliding off the edges. It was the right height for a man. It held the pole the right way. But it was made of the canal, the same lit green water standing up in the shape of shoulders and arms, and when it leaned on the pole, the water of its body sloshed down into its legs and back up, and the barge moved forward a good three metres more than the push could account for.

Flow rate. She was trying to work out the flow rate. Of a man.

'Pa,' she said. 'Pa, what is that?'

'Walk.'

'I just want to look at—'

'Look with your feet.' He had her by the elbow, his gloved hand, and it was hot through the cotton like a pot handle. He steered her right along the ledge, past the egusi woman, past a boy selling Gala sausage rolls out of a cooler marked PROPERTY OF ST GREGORY'S COLLEGE. 'Everybody down here sees everybody. You stand there with your mouth open like a JJC at Murtala Muhammed, by tomorrow morning half of Osa will know there is a new face, and the other half will know whose face.'

'Whose face is it?'

He didn't answer. Fine.

She kept her chin down. She kept walking. She did not stop looking, because she could not, but she did it sideways, the way you watch an area boy at Oshodi who has not yet decided whether to bother you. The ledge was wet. Her boots squeaked on it. She noted, without wanting to, a hairline crack running diagonally through the brick above a doorway on the far bank, maybe forty centimetres long, and a damp stain beneath it the shape of Africa. That one would go in a heavy year.

A barge was coming the other way, riding low. Yams, mostly, and a single plastic chair lashed to the bow. Its pole-spirit was smaller than the others, and older, if water could be old: the green of it had gone murky, silted, the colour of the lagoon after the first rains wash the gutters out.

It drew level with them. It stopped poling.

The barge kept drifting on the current, and the spirit turned on it, slowly, the whole column of water revolving like a pipe being threaded, until whatever served it for a face was pointed at her. Not at Pa Sunday. At her. It held there. She felt it in her ears first, a pop like a plane coming down into Lagos, and then in her palm, the scar pulling tight as a seal.

Pa Sunday's grip on her elbow became painful.

The spirit's face had nothing in it. No eyes. Just the water, turning, and a single bright fleck deep in the head where the current broke against something solid. It watched her for the length of the yam barge passing, and then a little longer than that, long enough that she heard the egusi woman behind them stop shelling.

Then it set its pole against the canal floor, leaned, and was gone round the bend in the brick, and the green settled behind it as if nothing had been there.

The egusi woman started shelling again. Pa Sunday did not let go of her elbow until they had turned off the canal ledge, through a brick arch with a padlock hanging open on a chain, and into noise.

It had been a culvert once. She could tell from the invert, the curved floor worn smooth down the middle where a century of runoff had scoured it, and from the old cast-iron step irons still bolted into the wall at intervals, leading up to nowhere. Somebody had bricked off the top end. Now it was an arcade, maybe four metres across and as long as she could see, with stalls jammed along both sides under plastic sheeting and the floor channel boarded over with planks that flexed when she stood on them. Every stall had a light. Most had a generator. The air was petrol and hot solder and fried plantain, and a radio somewhere was playing Fuji loud enough to rattle a sign that said NO CREDIT TODAY, COME TOMORROW.

'SIM! Grandfather SIM! Clean line, no static!'

'Auntie, your mama dey here, come and greet am!'

'MTN, Airtel, 9mobile, any network your people dey, we fit carry am!'

A vendor in a Chelsea shirt leaned over his table and pushed a tray at her. SIM cards, dozens of them, in tiny ziplock bags with masking tape on each one. Names written in biro. MR OKONKWO, 1971. ALHAJA (DO NOT RESELL). BABA EKO, VERY OLD, VERY STRONG. The gold contacts on the cards had been scratched over with fine lines. Not random. A pattern, the same branching shape as the cowrie in her overall pocket.

'Try am,' the vendor said. He slotted one into a Nokia 3310 with no back cover and held it to her ear before she could step away.

An old man cleared his throat in it. A real throat, wet, close. He said something in Yoruba about a goat that eats in the market and is not told the price, and laughed at his own joke for a long time.

'Twelve thousand,' the vendor said. 'Proverbs every morning. He fit tell you which landlord dey lie.'

'Who is he?'

'Who send you? He is grandfather. Ten thousand, last price.'

Pa Sunday plucked the phone out of the man's hand and dropped it on the tray. 'She is not buying.'

'Pa, I no talk to you.'

'You are talking to me now.'

The vendor looked at the glove. He sat back down.

They moved on. She kept her hands in her pockets. On her right a girl was soldering a SIM into the back of a valve radio with the case off, and the valves were glowing a colour no valve should glow, green like the canal. On her left, a man was selling the cases of dead phones by weight, ₦800 a kilo, and a sign above him said ANCESTOR REMOVAL 100% GUARANTEE.

'So what is it,' she said. 'Storage? You put a voice on a chip and it stays?'

'Something like that.'

'That's not an answer.'

'It is the answer you have room for this evening.' He stepped round a puddle without looking at it. 'Listen, because I will say this once and then you will ask me again tomorrow anyway. Down here, the power is in four lines. Four Stools. Salt for water and pressure. Ash for fire. Red Earth for stone, laterite, the ground itself. Harmattan for wind and dust. The four of them sit together on the Salt Table, and the Table says what happens in Osa and some of what happens up there.'

'Four families running a city.'

'Four lines.'

'That's what I said.' She ducked a cable strung at head height. 'And people just accept that.'

'People eat. People sell SIM cards. Who has asked them?'

'Somebody should.'

He made a noise that might have been a laugh if it had been allowed out.

A hawker brushed past with a tray of puff-puff on her head. Further down, two men were arguing over a ceiling fan wired to a car battery, and the fan was turning without the battery connected to anything, and nobody seemed to find this remarkable. Ifeoma counted it anyway. Load with no supply. That bothered her more than the water men.

'Salt,' she said. 'Water and pressure.' She took her left hand out of her pocket and looked at the scar. It had dried to a crust, white at the edges. 'That's what happened at Ojuelegba. And this afternoon, with the sachets.'

He didn't say yes. He didn't say no.

'So where do we fit? My mother's people. Is that the line?'

Pa Sunday stopped. A man behind them nearly walked into his back and swore and went round. The old man took a Benson & Hedges out of his breast pocket and held it, unlit, between two fingers of the good hand, and looked at it as if it owed him money.

'In August 2012,' he said, quietly enough that she had to lean in over the Fuji, 'the Table sat and declared the Salt line extinct. No holder, no heir. Finished. They wrote it down.'

'Extinct.'

'Like dinosaur.'

'But I'm…'

'I know what you are.' He put the cigarette back in his pocket. 'Twelve years, nobody has been looking for you, because officially there is nothing to look for. You understand me? Those two men at the Village did not come because you are Salt. They came because somebody saw something that is not supposed to be possible, and they wanted to see if it would bleed.'

She thought of the laterite men, the smooth faces, the way one had said Chinwe's daughter as if checking an item against a delivery note.

'And now?'

'Now you have walked through the middle of Osa on a Friday evening with your mother's face on you.'

The puff-puff hawker had stopped twenty metres on. She was not selling anything. She was looking back up the arcade at them, tray still balanced on her head, and as Ifeoma met her eyes, she turned and slipped sideways between two stalls and was gone.

Pa Sunday did not turn to look. He walked faster.

The arcade ended in a brick arch with a date pressed into the keystone, 1898, and after it the planks gave out and the floor became wet stone. The LED strips thinned to one, then none. The light came from the water now, a slow green bloom along a channel cut into the floor, and the noise of the market dropped behind them until she could hear their footsteps again, and then she couldn't, because something ahead was roaring.

The tunnel opened into a junction. Four mouths, one in each wall, and once it would have been a fine piece of work: a brick drum maybe twelve metres across, with an iron walkway round the rim. The walkway was gone. So was most of the north mouth. Its arch had folded in on itself, and through the gap came black water, a lot of it, standing up in a hump where it hit the far wall and spinning back on itself in a slow brown-black eddy that filled the whole drum. The glow didn't reach it. The lagoon light stopped at the edge, as if it knew better.

Ifeoma did the sums without wanting to. Two metres of head at the breach, at least. A flow rate she'd want a pump station for. The eddy would hold a body under for as long as it liked.

'That's not a crossing,' she said.

'No.'

'So we go round.'

'There is no round.' Pa Sunday took out a phone, a Nokia with a cracked keypad, thumbed a number and held it up into the air. He didn't call anyone. He just held it there, screen glowing, like a man hailing a taxi at Obalende.

For a moment nothing. Then the air changed.

It dried. That was the first thing she noticed, the damp going out of her nose and her throat, her lips tightening. Grit hit her cheek. Dust came down the east tunnel in a long low sheet, the colour of December, and riding on it, standing on it, knees bent like a boy on the back step of a danfo, was a man.

He came in fast and stopped hard, a metre above the water, and the dust underneath him kept moving while he didn't. He was slight, quick-handed, with dust-coloured locs tied back in a rubber band and a Lagos State reflective vest over a T-shirt that said JESUS IS LORD OF THIS BUS.

'Pa Sunday!' He had a voice that could have carried across Ojota motor park in the rain. 'Lagos Island, Marina, Idumota! Enter with your change o!'

'Femi.'

'How many?'

'Two. To the Marina stairs.'

Femi looked at the water, sucked his teeth, and made a show of considering the ceiling. 'Current bad today. Breach don widen since Tuesday. Fifteen thousand.'

'Fifteen thousand naira,' Ifeoma said. 'For thirty metres.'

'For thirty metres of that.' He pointed with his chin at the eddy. 'You fit swim am for free. I go even hold your bag.'

'Ten.'

'Auntie, I get overheads.'

'You get wind.'

'Wind no be free.' He grinned at her, and leaned forward on his gust to see who he was talking to, and the grin stopped halfway.

He looked at her properly. Not at the hard hat or the Ministry overall. At her face: the long jaw, the eyebrows that went up at the ends, the mouth her aunties had always said was borrowed. He looked at it the way she'd look at a crack in a beam: tracing it to where it started.

Then he looked at Pa Sunday. Pa Sunday looked back and said nothing at all.

'Thirty,' Femi said.

'You just said fifteen.'

'I said fifteen before.' He tapped his own cheekbone, once, lightly, with two fingers. 'Risk allowance.'

'What risk?'

He didn't answer. He reached into the vest and came out with a POS terminal, an old Moniepoint one with the logo half rubbed off, and held it out across the gap.

'Card or transfer.'

'There's network down here?'

'There's network everywhere, if you pay the right person.'

She had ₦41,200 in her account and rent due in nineteen days. She looked at Pa Sunday. He had taken the cigarette out again and was rolling it between finger and thumb, studying the eddy as if he had personally offended it.

Fine. Fine.

She tapped her card. The machine thought about it, and beeped, and spat out a receipt the length of her finger, and Femi tore it off and gave it to her with a small bow, like it was a certificate.

'Hold my vest,' he said. 'Not my hair. Anybody wey hold my hair dey enter water.'

The dust thickened under her boots. It felt like standing on a mattress full of sand, giving and holding. She took a fistful of reflective vest. Pa Sunday stepped on behind her without being asked, light as a man stepping off a kerb.

They went out over the junction. Below her the eddy turned, black and patient, and her scar began to itch, then burn. The water was reaching up. She could feel it in her teeth, a pull with a direction, the way a pipe tells you where the blockage is.

Femi felt it too. He didn't look down. He looked straight ahead at the far arch, and said, low, so only she could hear it over the roar: 'Pay me again on the other side. Your people no too dey reach other side.'