CHAPTER 1
Can I do this? Can I really leave? It was too late for her to contemplate or ask about that now. A typhoon of insurgent worry and doubt stormed inside her head as she took a deep breath. It is the first of May 1999. The sun stained every surface with heat and saturated the atmosphere accordingly as vehicles toured around the city toward their various destinations. The airport was a five-story cocoon of reinforced concrete with windows that permitted so many streaks of light. It was illuminating as any summery day in Cairo. Speakers in the terminal crackled with announcements as indistinct voices broke through the early morning chatter. Above, airplanes leisurely and simultaneously soared through the sky, leaving behind twin white trails.
"Due to heightened security measures, please keep your possessions and belongings with you, or unaccompanied luggage would be tagged, labelled, and confiscated." The instructor announced over the PA. As she approached the reception, her sea-green eyes examined the environment as she pushed the uneasiness within her. She dusted loose threads from her jade leaf-patterned shirt and scratched her cheeks where a small freckled spot of mahogany dots covered her caramel-coloured skin. By the counter, the tiles projected the reflection of her comely figure and round face; which was made up of widespread eyebrows, delicate sea-nymph ears framed by a button nose, and oxbow lips.
"Good morning, I would like a one-way ticket on the next flight to Casablanca, please." She heaved as she spoke in Egyptian-Moroccan Arabic. The passenger representative swiftly consulted her computer and clicked her tongue.
"I'm sorry, but we have cancelled all flights to Morocco today because of the bad weather forecast."
Her eyes narrowed. Mouth downturned. A streak of heat spread within her chest, growing into every inch of hope she possessed.
"What do you mean, cancelled? The weather report claimed everything was okay," She complained.
"For the safety of the passengers, those flights were postponed, but we can make an alternative plan for you tomorrow," the representative explained, calmly.
The arrival and departure schedule board showed that flights to anywhere else were unavailable except Lagos, Nigeria. Time was running out because the police were searching and coming. At this rate, it doesn't matter where she would end up. What mattered at the moment was to leave immediately. It was better to tolerate a diversion than risk the chances of freedom than get caught; after all, the greatest risk is not taking one. Maybe this was going to be good. Maybe it was going to be great, she thought. Perhaps start afresh. Leave those inimical deeds behind, start anew. Make amendments. Rewrite history. Create something new. She shifted from one foot to another. In the warm fog of her thoughts, she made her decision.
"What about the flight to Lagos?" She asked desperately.
"That will be Flight four-o-nine. We have one seat left." Explained the airline representative in a mellow tone.
"What time does the plane leave?" She asked again, patiently, a little helplessly.
"In sixteen minutes. You only have time to board."
"Okay." She nodded indulgently. "I'll take a last-minute ticket for Lagos."
"Passport please," an airline staff inquired, who looked as if she had materialised straight out of a soft-focus ad from a magazine.
"Here you go," she breathed nervously and gave her passport for check-in processing.
The woman frowned, gently, as she fiddled with her documents, "You have no stamps on Lagos. Which suggests you've never been there before. May I recommend accommodation? It's quite difficult to acquire at this time of the year."
"Yes, please."
"Okay, I will assign an apartment where you can accommodate as soon as you arrive to ease your search."
The airline staff organised her travel documents as the security post secured her bag pack to examine it on a scale. Nervously, she pinched the pockets on her cargo trouser in anxious anticipation. She wondered whether or not they would find out about her forged passport as a distant memory overcame her thoughts. They were thoughts of her parents who used to be explorers; who were hard-working and had sacrificed everything to build a good life for their only daughter in a small house by the Cabo Negro beach. And perhaps it would've been better and different had they survived the raging storm that claimed their lives on her eighth birthday during that night at the Marrakech International Film Festival in the year 1990.
Promptly, the airline staff stamped and folded the pieces of paper in a single file, stacking them properly then pushed it forward.
"Have a pleasant flight, Noor Assad," the airline staff smiled in a sugary voice and returned her boarding pass.
Coming out of her daydream, Noor smiled. "Thank you." She collected her documents and luggage.
The aeroplane, which seemed loose and weightless, banked and floated to the left and shuddered through a thick cover of white-bloated clouds about five minutes out into the ascent. Searching through the contents of her bag pack, Noor extracted her Sony TPS-L2 cassette Walkman and scrolled through the ultimate playlist of noise she created the night before last. She played September by Earth, Wind & Fire and the lyrics dominated her head and thumped an undercurrent of bass which provided her a quantum of solace. In what seemed hardly any time at all they made landing. Outside, the sun was a yellowish red and a drooping Nigerian flag stirred in the windless atmosphere at the entrance of the airport. Ahead of her, people rose numerous hands up and attempted to flag down a taxi as they uttered discordant mixes of hellos and goodbyes to other people while drivers persuaded foreign people to board their taxis, employing expensive charges. At a far end, a taxi pulled to the curb and discharged its passengers at the terminal. As the driver counted his profit, Noor approached the taxi and pocketed her head into the taxi festooned with a coppery appearance.
"Excuse me, sir. Are you free?" She asked.
"That depends. Where are you going?" He coaxed life into the engine and shifted the gearbox professionally.
"Four-fifty-five, Red Cargo Valley, Victoria Island," Noor muttered.
In the yellow and black taxi, the sounds of distant horns travelled around the city. Billboards appeared everywhere. The lines of ungroomed traffic on the pockmarked road had become a surge of fused honking. A traffic clog of vehicles with boots sunken by heavy loads nosed up to each other. There about were crowds of congregated locals chattering: people of every colour, manner, and kind. More than elsewhere, everybody here wanted to be somebody, for Lagos is a natural multicultural beacon, alongside a hustling and bustling city.
By 5:48 PM, they arrived at the address to a darkening purple sky. She peered at the bleak and crummy apartment as the fumes from the exhaust pipes dissolved into the distance. It is a cracked yellow building, but it seemed to have faded over time, so it looked beige. There were pole wires interwoven from rooflines with cats on them. Traders colonised the entranceways on the first floor. Footfalls of beautiful brown-skinned telekinetic Fulani women who advertised fura da nono with men who sold popcorn and groundnuts occupied the remaining floors. Tenants above leaned against the balcony observing the horizon, and some played whot cards and ludo. Others were making inaudible conversations as many neighbourhood children played on the pavement. Some laughed and shouted, sometimes all at once. By the office of the superintendent, she collected her room keys from a stern-looking man. He made a noise, grudging, of acceptance, as Noor made payment for a room. From her peripheral vision, Noor could see tenants from every corner gawking at her as if she was something that came from another galaxy. As she threaded upstairs, each person she passed waved like they knew her or they wanted to.
The entrance door to flat 2D unsealed with a muffled sigh, and Noor was inside the shuttered, airless and unoccupied space. She dropped her bag pack aside listlessly, and her probing visual caressed the sun-swept place. The dimensions were sophisticated and impressive, somewhat old but roomy enough. Pixie dust illuminated the oak wood floorboard and permeated every object it touched. At the as-yet unopened windows, it afforded a stunning view and a capital display of the street periphery. She could see everything everywhere all at once. The kitchen was rather small but manageable nonetheless. It was too late to branch any supermarket to purchase whatever was necessary and move in at the moment because it was dark, and there was an unforgiving traffic waiting outside. As a shopping guide, Noor catalogued some items to purchase into a pocket notebook (which also served as a personal diary) for the items she needed to acquire for every space and left to stay the night in a local motel. It was an old building with faint flickering and buzzing light bulbs, drawing a lampshade of insects to its hot glass surface. It took some time, but when she fell asleep at last, with the TV set on, she had a dream.
There was a cluster of people, all chattering with gasps, gathered around a boardwalk, pointing at an object. It was unmistakeably her parent's fishing boat with them in it. There was a violent howling whirlwind with grey murky clouds and lighting hovering over the ocean. She jumped into the water and swam as fast as she could to save them from the swarming tempest, but the closer she got the farther the boat sailed away. Without warning, a burst of wind pushed the boat to the east. The flaps rose then reaped apart and the last cables snapped, and in a great, looping roll the boat toppled as the waves snatched the fishing boat. Unexpectedly, an aftershock wave was triggered and it crashed into her.
She became awake, panting with a blank stare, sweat across her forehead. It was an odd dream, but not an untypical one. It wasn't the first, most likely not the last either.
The following day, Noor consumed a cup of tea and sandwich by way of breakfast as she waited at a nearby bus stop. An unroadworthy rickety old shuttle arrived, and Noor got in. It would have been easier to get a taxi, but, for some reason, she wanted to encounter the Lagos experience so she took a bus. She was sandwiched between other bodies and could hardly breathe, hence the combination of body odour, which was not a feat for the faint-hearted. The road smelled of exhaust, a lace of petrol on the atmosphere, smog in each breath. As the bus wove past several potholes, it hit one big hole. It made Noor think the suspension would give and tumble over because it listed to one side from the weight of luggage strapped to its roof.
In due course, she hired dexterous movers to transport her heavy goods. Upon arrival, the movers jumped down from the perch at the back of their truck, offloading boxes and packing tapes. As Noor turned the key to her flat, she stepped in, arms weighing down with bags and enough novel genres to fill a whole library for a month. The electricity flickered on; a radio blared then ABC by The Jackson 5 travelled throughout the space. The movers all poured in, placing every sheaf of equipment in their righteously reposed positions. Artfully, she sifted and consolidated her books in ascending order, sorting through and arranging them by colour, category, condition, and genre. She repainted the walls from a muted blue with proper equal distribution of visual weight to a deep saturated cerulean. Her refrigerator, now, was full of things you tossed into a shopping cart without thinking about only because they sounded and looked good. At intervals, exhausted from stacking boxes on boxes and relocating the chattels, they took a lunch break to eat. Her room wasn't spacious; but adequate. She placed her bed near the window and introduced a mauve Afghan rug in the middle of the room, which gave it a warm minimalistic touch to the design language of the room. She fixed a study desk and chair to a free corner, nailed a world map on the wall and stacked a volume of books on some built-in shelves. At a choice of corners, she planted pots of monsteras where they could fit, especially at all the bright places.
"Are we done here?" Noor asked one of the movers wearily as she took a short swig from a bottle of water.
"Yes, we are." He confirmed. "Go ahead and fill these out," he ushered, handing Noor a stationery clipboard of white forms. As she sat into one of the chairs farthest from the kitchen, Noor leaned over the clipboard and filled out the form, but hesitantly hovered and lingered over the part where her name would lie for a moment, pen poised over for some seconds and wrote Noor Assad.
As she signed the outlined registry, returned it, and paid for their services, he thanked her and cheerfully left with his merry colleagues. Later, she relaxed and firmly massaged her neck to ease her kink, and stretched it a little further, here and there, to get out the last of the cramp. It didn't just feel good, it felt great, actually.
At forenoon, Noor fetched herself a novel and settled in a chair near the kitchen. She liked how tall the shelves on either side of her were, liked the look of the dust suspended in the afternoon light. Before she gave herself over to the pages, she gathered herself by the very same token. Everywhere seemed at peace and occupied. Noor wore her headphones, selecting a random pensive track. As Noor stared out the window, she noticed a face peeked through the curtains of a foyer window and disappeared. It was an odd thought, but Noor felt as though she was being watched. Meditatively, she leafed through The Little Prince; a story when she was younger, she would snuggle under her covers to read by torchlight. Outside the kitchen window, the day uniformly transmuted from afternoon and journeyed to twilight. Halfway across the book, after quite a bit of thinking and frowning, Noor ran out of blinks and fell into one of those otherwise strange and monochrome periods of sleep; a type of sleep whereby you are sure you are still quite awake but aren't. When she did wake, from this peculiar half-sleep, it seemed as if it were the beginning of the world in the middle of the night. A rash of electricity had spread over the city. Radiant streetlamps flooded the kitchen with cadmium orange light and lampposts anchored outside threw an amber haze into the conversation of the night. Under the wide and starry sky woven in a dark navy-blue backdrop, the flat was quiet and still, except for the serenade of cicadas chirping, the sound of crickets that swelled in the gardens and frogs that croaked.
Unpredictably, a delicate set of knocks emanated from the door. Her ears fluttered. Additionally, the doorbell made an elaborate, symphonically excessive chime. Now her ears were alert and attentive. Soon, there was another sequence of knocks afterward. She eyed the entrance door suspiciously as more subdued knocks radiated.
It was so infrequent, Noor thought, considering she had recently moved into the neighbourhood, and it's not like she knew anyone or had any friends yet. Her forehead knotted and her heartbeat quickened erratically then rocked out through her ears and temples. Who could it be? She wondered. Thoughts apace, at a rate of knots, simmered inside her head. Had they found her already? Only one way to find out. Noor took a deep breath, feeling the humid air wrestle its way in and out of her body. Stealthily, she crept toward the teakwood door and spied through the olive-tinted glass panels. An anonymous figure filled the doorway and darkened the doorstep. It was a girl about her age, it seemed. She was as tall as Noor, nearly five feet, with a moderate body fill. Exhaling and vaguely prepared, she unsealed the locks, chamber by chamber as her hand encircled the doorframe and opened the door. In the darkness ahead, the figure of the girl, from her feet going above, materialised within the spread of the indoor lights. Excitement quivering in her voice, she exhibited a compelling megawatt smile.
"Hello, I am Ayomide Acolatse," she gleamed. "Ayo for short. I live across from you. We are neighbours." She wore colourfully loose-fitted dashiki and yellow African wax printed trousers that contrasted with her chocolate skin colour of rain-drenched earth. Her hair was made into thick Bantu knots decorated with fairly wide golden braid rings. They were as waves of the ocean which softly shimmered in the moonlight, each bunch independently in an ocean-borne breeze, a compliment to her undemanding stillness. Her narrow face looked wearisome and yet beaming with a keen expression of delight. Her eyes are large and slanted, with a nick of an old wound above them.
"Hello, Ayo." Noor croaked, her voice faint and raspy. "I'm Noor Assad."
"Yesterday, I saw you move in. So, I thought I'd stop by and welcome you to the neighbourhood."
"Oh, you shouldn't have, but that's very kind of you." Noor simpered.
"Are your parents in?" Ayo asked curiously, having not seen them.
"Oh, no. They are not around," Noor explained, good-naturedly. "They're somewhere else at the moment."
"Oh, okay. I see." Ayo frowned, but didn't protest. "Well, I have something for you." Mildly crouching and sparsely wincing, Ayo grabbed a grey cardstock box from the ground that Noor almost strained to make out from the dark.
"I made these cupcakes for you as a 'welcome' present," Ayo beamed and handed the box over. "They're vanilla flavoured." She added, proudly. Noor collected it; eyes wide in astonishment as she scanned the box of cupcakes that she baked to order.
"How sweet and thoughtful. Thank you." Noor, flattered, commented.
"Have you left your house since?" Ayo asked eagerly. "I noticed you haven't gone out."
"I haven't. This is my first time here in Nigeria and I don't know anywhere yet." Answered Noor, nonchalantly.
"Well, tomorrow, I have time to spare within the market day, and I could show you places." Suggested Ayo, politely.
"That would be great. I would like that." Breathed Noor.
"Okay, then. Meet me at flat 2B by four o'clock tomorrow."
"Okay, I will be there." Noor promised.
"Great. So, see you tomorrow. Have a goodnight." Ayo waved, stepping back.
"See you too. Have a goodnight," Noor smiled contiguously, watching Ayo leave as her footsteps dissolved away. Speculatively, with an inkling surmise of supposition, Noor could tell that they were going to be good friends.
Glossary
Noor (also spelled Nur, Nor, or Nour) is a common Arabic unisex name meaning 'light' in Arabic.
Fura da nono is a traditional drink made by the Fulani from the milk of a cow.
Whot is a game played with a set of non-standard cards in five suits: circles, crosses, triangles, stars, and squares.
Ayo is a unisex Yoruba-given name that means 'Joy'.