Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett

Even if he succeeded in suspending their disbelief, there were then the frantic efforts they would undertake to regain what was lost: the medical investigations, the money it would cost them, the media circus that must follow; and, probably, for his mother, whom he knew would be desperate enough when all else had failed, the recourse to consultations with spiritual healers. Now, with his disappearance, they would expend effort and spend money in attempting to solve the mystery, but at least they would be left with an image of him that they could hold on to.
    Yes, he was doing the right thing, he was even surer.
    Better his family retain their image of him and he his of them.
    Furo awoke to the caress of the early sunlight streaming in through the window above his head. After a quick glance to check that nothing had changed – his colour was the same, as white as night becomes day – he sat unmoving for a long time, his ears tuned to the city. Hunger came, and the harder he resisted the stronger the pangs became. His neck resumed its ache. His palms, when he dropped them from rubbing his nape, were oily with grime. Beneath the dirt, the skin was paler than any hand he’d ever studied, and the lifelines were etched fainter, the palm edges and pads reddened with coursing blood. Not bad-looking as hands go, he said to himself … but owning these, calling them his, that was too much to handle.
    Dropping his hands to the ground, Furo pushed up into a crouch, then picked up his folder and slipped it under his arm as he straightened to full height. He stood motionless for some moments inhaling the grass-dew smell of a new day, but when he started brushing off his clothes, the cement dust of abandonment flooded his nostrils, choking him with sadness.
    It was time to move forwards.
    Again the stares. The hawker from whom he bought a seventy-naira loaf of Agege bread stole glances at him as she knelt beside her wooden tray, sawed open the loaf, and spread ten naira worth of mayonnaise on it. The woman who sold him three sachets of pure water stared with open amusement as he squatted by her icebox and washed his face and his mouth and his hands and drank what was left. And the pedestrians, the sleepy-eyed taxi drivers, the minibus passengers with their work-ready faces, the road sweepers and roadside beggars and policemen standing useless at clogged intersections – all followed him with their eyes as he strode by.
    Under the sun’s glare, almost as hard to bear as the stares from which there was no hiding place, Furo trekked from Ikeja to Maryland. He didn’t plan his direction: it was set out for him when he found himself beside the police college’s long-running fence on which was painted at intervals RESTRICTED AREA: KEEP MOVING. He obeyed this instruction until the fence was passed. He kept on moving, past the landscaped grounds of Sheraton Hotel & Towers and the red-and-white facade of the Virgin Atlantic building. He slowed his steps to skirt a cluster of commuters at Onigbongbo Bus Stop and quickened his pace as he approached the thumping roar of a helicopter rising from the bowl of OAS Heliport. Onwards he went, throwing step after step along the sun-cracked sidewalk until he reached the watering-hole bustle of Maryland Junction.
    Foremost consequence of Furo’s journey was the burning sensation on the bridge of his nose, which made his eyes water when he mopped his sweating face with his handkerchief. But the gruelling trek, and the unrelenting lash of the sun, the total pointlessness of his fatigue, also bleached his mind of clinging delusions and helped him decide where to go. To Lekki, stamping ground of the Lagos rich. He would go to The Palms, the largest mall in Lagos.
    There, at least, the air conditioning was free.
    And it was far from Egbeda, as far from his family as he could go in Lagos.
    And then again, there would be others who looked like him.
    Getting to Lekki from Maryland would involve hopping buses.