Rent Day in Ibadan

The Wrong Key

The key had lived in my handbag for six years. It went to work with me at King's College Hospital and to the post office on Rye Lane, and it sat at the bottom of the bag among the cough sweets, a plain brass key on a red ribbon. Femi had sent it to us by courier in 2020 with a note that said, House key, Uncle. Front door. Do not lose. I had not lost it. I want that recorded first, because what happened afterward was somebody else's doing.

We landed at Lagos in the evening and came up the expressway the next morning in a hired car with a driver called Dotun who drove like a man settling an argument with every other vehicle on the road. Bayo sat in front. I sat behind with the suitcases, because there were five of them and the boot had taken only three. The fifth suitcase contained eleven lever-arch files, and it had cost us sixty-five pounds in excess baggage at Heathrow. The woman at the desk asked whether I was carrying documents, and I said, Twenty years of them.

It had rained in the night. The country between Lagos and Ibadan was the deep wet green of late October, and the soil where the road had been cut was a red I had forgotten, the red of a scraped knee, climbing the white walls of the roadside shops to the height of a child. Bayo kept turning round to point at things. I was looking at the mud.

"You are not looking," he said.

"I am looking at the mud."

"Forty years in England and she comes home to look at mud."

"Thirty-three years," I said. "And it is very good mud."

Ibadan came up at us the way it always has, all at once, from far off a brown spread of roofs across the hills, as if the city had been built by someone who could not stop. Then the furniture makers with their unfinished beds in rows by the road, the women with trays of oranges peeled into spirals. Dotun took the Ring Road and then smaller roads until the road was a long strip of red puddles with houses either side, and he said, "Akobo," as if it were an accusation, and Bayo said, "Palmgrove Gardens. Keep going."

I had seen the house hundreds of times: a cleared plot with a pegged string, the window openings like missing teeth, the bamboo scaffolding lashed with wire, the roof sheets flashing in the photograph like a mirror. I had chosen the cream paint from a swatch Femi photographed against the wall in four different lights. I had seen it on my phone in the staff room at four in the morning on a night shift, and printed at the chemist's and pasted into a file with a date under it in my own hand. I had not seen it in the flesh. Neither had Bayo, not since the plot was bare.

It was very cream. That was my first thought. My second thought was that someone had put a sign on it.

The sign was on the ground floor, over the front window, and it said TOP NOTCH HAIR in red and gold letters with a painted woman's head beside it, the woman wearing braids that went down to the edge of the board. In the window, wigs on white plastic heads looked out at the puddles with patient blank faces. A radio inside was playing juju, the guitars sliding over each other and a man's voice rising and falling like a man arguing kindly with a friend. A smell of hot comb and coconut oil came out into the wet morning.

"This is not our house," Bayo said.

"It is our house."

"There is a shop in it."

"Yes."

He got out of the car. I got out after him. The red came up over the edges of my good shoes. Dotun the driver wound down his window and settled himself to watch, the way a man watches a football match he has no money on.

Up the side of the house ran an outside staircase with a painted iron rail. On the third step from the bottom sat a boy and a girl of perhaps seven, in identical brown school uniforms, eating agege bread out of a plastic bag. They had the same suspicious eyebrows. They stopped chewing and looked at us.

"Good morning," I said.

"Good morning, Ma," they said together.

"Do you live here?"

The girl looked at the boy and the boy looked at the girl. "Upstairs," said the boy. "First floor. Our mummy is a teacher."

"And our daddy," said the girl. "Our daddy is also a teacher."

Bayo had walked round to the front door, which was not the salon door but a separate door to the right of it, solid wood with a brass handle. He had the red ribbon in his hand. I watched him put it in the lock and turn it and watched it not turn. He pulled it out, frowned at it, and pushed it in again. He jiggled it, which I have asked him for forty-four years not to do with keys. It did not turn.

"Sade," he said, without looking round. "The key."

"It is the key."

"It is not the key."

A woman came out of the salon. She was about forty, broad and handsome, with her own hair in short neat twists and a tape measure round her neck like a doctor's stethoscope. She looked at Bayo jiggling at the door with exactly the face I would have had if a stranger had been jiggling at mine.

"Good morning, sir," she said. "Can I help you?"

"I am trying to enter my house," said Bayo.

The woman's face did several things in a short time. I nursed for thirty years, and you learn the stages of bad news: first the not hearing, then the hearing, then the arithmetic. The arithmetic took her longest.

"Your house," she said.

"This is my house. I built it."

"Sir, this is Femi's house."

"Femi," said Bayo, "is my nephew."

The woman's comb hand went slowly to her hip. "Iya Toyin," she said, tapping her own breastbone with two fingers by way of introduction. "This is my shop. I have been here since February last year. I pay my rent to Femi. One year in advance and then another year in advance. Sir. Ma." She looked at me as if I might be more reasonable than my husband, which in general I am. "I have a receipt."

"So do we," I said.

There was a sound from above us, a door opening, and a man leaned over the iron rail of the first-floor landing. He was in a white vest, shaving foam still under one ear. Behind him stood a woman in a blue and white adire dress with a pile of exercise books in her arms.

"Is there a problem?" the man said. "Dayo, Dami, inside. Now."

The twins did not move.

Then a motorcycle taxi coming down the red road with its engine whining like a mosquito, slowing, swerving around Dotun's car, stopping just short of the salon window and splashing a thin line of red up the bottom of the cream wall, the wall I had chosen the cream for. And then my nephew's voice, which I knew from twenty years of telephone calls, a big warm voice that did not match his size, saying, "Uncle! Auntie! You did not tell me you were coming!"

Femi was thirty-six. He had been a skinny boy of fourteen when we sent the first money for the plot, and the work had put muscle on his shoulders and a crease between his eyebrows. He wore pointed shoes that cost more than they should, and the mud had already found them. He hugged Bayo, who stood inside the hug like a lamppost. He hugged me, and I let him, because I have always been fond of him, and because I wanted to smell whether he had been drinking at nine in the morning. He smelled of soap and motorcycle exhaust.

"We told you," I said into his shoulder. "In August. On the telephone. I said, We are retiring in October and coming home."

"You said you were thinking of it."

"I said we were doing it."

"Auntie, with respect, you have said you were doing it every year since 2019."

That was true. I let go of him.

"The key does not work," said Bayo.

"Ah, the lock was changed," said Femi. "Last year. There was a little issue with the old lock. It was stiff."

"Then give me the new key."

Femi looked at the door. He looked at Iya Toyin and her comb, at the teacher holding his towel like a flag, at the twins, at the cream wall with its new red stripe.

"Uncle," he said, "let us go and sit somewhere and talk."

"I am going to sit in my house."

"The house is occupied, Uncle."

"I can see that the house is occupied, Femi. I am asking you by whom."

"By tenants. Respectable people. Mr. and Mrs. Akinola on the first floor, both of them teachers, the children you see. Iya Toyin's salon on the ground. The top floor is empty, there was an issue with the meter—"

"You rented my house."

"I managed the property," said Femi, with dignity. "Somebody has to manage it. An empty house in this place, Uncle, you do not know. In six months they will carry away the doors, the window frames, the roof sheets one by one in the night. I have seen houses stripped to the blocks like a fish to the bones."

"And the money?"

Femi spread his hands. It was a gesture I remembered from when he was a boy and had been sent to buy bread and come back with sweets.

I have run a ward of twenty-eight beds through a flu season with three nurses off sick. When something goes wrong in front of me I think about the next thing. And the next thing was that we were standing in red mud in front of a house we could not enter with five suitcases in a hired car whose driver was charging us by the hour, while a schoolteacher in a vest held a towel and two children ate bread and a hairdresser waited to know whether she still had a shop.

"Mrs. Akinola," I called up. "You will be late for school. Please go. Nobody is putting you out this morning."

The woman in the adire dress came to the rail. She was young, younger than Kemi, with a narrow serious face. "Thank you, Ma," she said. "Thank you. Dayo, Dami. Now."

The twins rose, with the slowness of people leaving the cinema before the end.

"Iya Toyin," I said, "your customers will be coming. Go and do your work."

Iya Toyin narrowed her eyes at me, as one professional to another, and nodded once, and went back into the salon. The juju went on. After a moment she turned it down, which I took as a sign of respect.

Then I turned to my husband and my nephew, nose to nose in the mud like two old goats at a gate, and said, "Femi, where is your mother?"

"At home."

"Then tell her I will come to see her tomorrow. Bayo, get in the car."

"I am not getting in any car. This is my house."

"Get in the car, Bayo. Dotun is charging us four thousand naira an hour to watch this."

Dotun, through the window, raised a hand as if to confirm the figure.

We did not go to a hotel. I telephoned my old friend Abike Bello from the back of the car, while Bayo sat in the front breathing through his nose, and Abike said, "Sade? Sade Ogunleye? You are in Ibadan? Since when? Come now. Come straight. There is a room." Abike and I trained together at the School of Nursing at Eleiyele when we were nineteen and wore white caps starched so hard they could stand on their own. She stayed. I went.

Her house was in Bodija, on a street of old bungalows with deep verandas and mango trees heavy over the walls, a short walk from the market. She was waiting at the gate, smaller than I remembered and exactly the same, and she took my face in her two hands and checked it for damage in transit, and said, "You have become an oyinbo woman. Look at your shoes."

"It is the mud."

"It is the shoes."

The spare room was at the back, with a window onto a yard where a woman was washing clothes in a basin. There was a bed with a mosquito net knotted above it like a cloud, a ceiling fan, a chair, and a smell of floor polish and frying pepper. Dotun carried in the five suitcases. The fifth he set down with a small grunt and looked at me.

"Ma, what is inside this one? Stones?"

"Receipts," I said, and gave him his money, and a little extra for watching.

That evening the power went off at seven. Abike said it would come back at eleven, or at two, or tomorrow. Her generator coughed and caught in the side passage, and up and down the street the others answered it, a low hum all over Bodija like the city purring in its sleep. Bayo lay under the mosquito net in his vest and did not speak. I sat on the chair by the window with the fifth suitcase open at my feet and took out the first file, the one labeled 2004 to 2006 in the black marker I had bought at the stationer's on Rye Lane, and opened it at the first page. A money order receipt, two hundred pounds, and under it, pasted in, a photograph of a bare plot of red earth with a pegged string around it and, in the corner of the frame, the toe of somebody's rubber slipper.

"Bayo," I said, "we are going to court."

From under the net he said, "Good."

Form Nine

My sister-in-law Moji was not at home the next day. Her neighbor, a girl pounding something in a mortar by the gutter, told us she had traveled to Osogbo to see a cousin and would be back when she was back. Bayo said, "She has run." I said, "She is sixty-five and her knees are bad. She has not run anywhere." But I noticed the curtains of her front room were drawn in the middle of a bright morning, and I noticed that the girl with the mortar did not look up when she said it.

So we went to court.

I should explain that we did not go to the High Court. Abike's late husband had been a magistrate, and Abike considered herself, by marriage, an authority. "You do not take your own nephew to the High Court," she said, buttering bread at the kitchen table with great force. "You take him to the customary court. It is cheaper and it is quicker and the president is Pa Alade, who taught my husband geography in 1961 and has never let anybody forget it. He will settle it. That is what they are for. Settling."

"I do not want it settled," said Bayo. "I want it won."

"Then go and buy a wig and be a barrister," said Abike.

The Oke-Ado Customary Court was on the first floor of a long two-story building on a busy road, above a shop selling plastic buckets in every shade from lime to purple. Up a concrete staircase that smelled of somebody's lunch was a room the size of a classroom, with high windows on one side through which came the sound of the road: horns, a hawker crying bread, a reversing lorry beeping like a heart monitor. Rows of wooden benches faced a dais with a long table under a green cloth and three chairs. And above all of it, turning very slowly, a ceiling fan with one blade slightly bent, so that it went round with a small tick, tick, tick, and moved the hot air from one part of the room to another without improving it anywhere.

To the right of the dais, at a small desk of his own, sat the clerk. He was a thin man of about sixty in a short-sleeved shirt, with a great stack of files at his elbow, a pen behind his ear and his chin on his chest. He was asleep.

Bayo had come to file the matter the afternoon before, while I was at the bank changing pounds. He had come back very pleased with himself and said it was done, that the clerk had given him a form and he had filled it in and paid the fee and been given a date, and here we were, the date, nine o'clock, though by ten past ten only a woman with a baby and two young men arguing about a motorcycle had arrived.

At twenty past ten the door at the back of the dais opened and three people came in, and the clerk woke up the way a cat wakes, entirely and at once, as if he had never been asleep in his life, and said, "Court!" and we all stood.

Pa Alade was a small, very upright old man of perhaps eighty, in a cream agbada with brown embroidery at the neck, and a cap. He had a face like a walnut and spectacles on a chain, and he carried a little paper cone of roasted groundnuts, which he set down on the green cloth beside his papers as if it were a piece of court equipment. On his left sat a large woman in a purple gele, who took out a ball of yellow wool and two needles before she had fully sat down and began, without looking, to knit. On his right sat a man in a gray suit too heavy for the room, who folded his hands on the table and looked straight ahead at the back wall and did not move again for the whole morning. I learned later that their names were Mrs. Fadipe and Mr. Ige. I never heard Mr. Ige speak. Not that day or afterward. He was like the bent blade of the fan.

The woman with the baby was first. Then the motorcycle, which ended with Pa Alade sending both young men outside to agree on a price. Then the clerk woke again, consulted a file, and called, "Ogunleye and Ogunleye!"

Bayo stood up. I stood up with him, because I did not understand.

"Ogunleye and Ogunleye?" I whispered.

"Come," said Bayo.

We went to the front and stood before the long table. Pa Alade put on his spectacles and read the paper in front of him, and then he took his spectacles off and looked at Bayo, and then at me, and then he put them on again and read the paper a second time, more slowly.

"Mr. Adebayo Ogunleye," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"And this is Mrs. Folasade Ogunleye."

"Yes, sir. My wife."

"I see that she is your wife," said Pa Alade. "That is the trouble. Mr. Ogunleye, how long have you been married?"

"Forty-four years, sir."

"Forty-four years." He took a groundnut from the cone, rubbed the red skin off it between finger and thumb, and ate it. "And after forty-four years you have come before this court to dissolve your marriage."

The knitting stopped. The bench behind us, where the woman with the baby had stayed to watch, made a sound like a pot coming to the boil.

"Sir?" said Bayo.

"This is Form Nine," said Pa Alade, holding it up. "Petition for dissolution of a customary marriage. You have filled it in very neatly. Under grounds you have written, The house. I have seen many grounds in this court, Mr. Ogunleye, but I have not seen that one."

I looked at my husband. My husband looked at the form. He had been a bus driver on the 36 route through Peckham and Camberwell for nineteen years and a night bus driver for seven before that, and he could find his way from New Cross Gate to Paddington in fog with no lights on the road and a drunk man singing behind him, but he had never in his life read the title of a form.

"The clerk gave it to me," he said.

All of us turned to look at the clerk, who was asleep.

Mrs. Fadipe began to laugh. It started somewhere very deep, under the purple gele, and came up slowly, shaking the yellow wool in her lap, and she went on shaking, and the woman with the baby behind us was laughing, and Pa Alade was not laughing but his walnut face had gone very still in a way that I recognized from consultants on ward rounds who were trying hard not to. Only Mr. Ige looked at the back wall.

"Madam," said Pa Alade to me. "Do you wish to be divorced?"

"Not today, sir," I said.

"Then we will treat the form as spoiled." He tore it across, once, neatly. "Mr. Ogunleye, there is a form for a dispute over family land and property. It is called Form Four. You will find it in the pile on the clerk's desk, which, as you see, is not going anywhere."

That was when the young woman stood up at the back. I had noticed her come in, because she was the only person in the room who looked cool. She was perhaps twenty-seven, slim, in a dark trouser suit with a white shirt and an expensive braided bun, carrying a slim leather case. She walked up the aisle between the benches with quick small steps, and stopped beside me, and said, "Your Worship, if it please the court, I appear for Mr. and Mrs. Ogunleye."

Pa Alade looked at her over his spectacles. "Do you."

"I do, sir. Morenike Bello. I was called to the bar last year."

"Bello," said Pa Alade. "You are the granddaughter of Justice Bello's widow."

"Yes, sir."

"Your grandfather could not tell the Niger from the Benue in 1961. I hope you are better at law."

"I am better at law than at geography, sir," said the young woman, without a flicker, and Mrs. Fadipe laughed again and picked up her needles.

I had last seen Morenike Bello when she was four years old, on a visit home in 2003, sitting under Abike's kitchen table eating a whole tin of condensed milk with a spoon. Abike had told me her granddaughter was a lawyer now, at a firm on the Ring Road, applying for a master's degree in London. She had not told me she would come to court. I looked at Renike and she gave me a very small nod, the nod of a staff nurse to a sister, which says, I have this, and do not make a fuss.

"Mrs. Bello," said Pa Alade.

"Miss, sir."

"Miss Bello. Your clients have tried to divorce each other this morning by mistake. Can you assure the court they will not do it again?"

"I can assure the court, sir."

"Then you will file Form Four today with the clerk. When he wakes up. And you will tell me now, briefly, because it is hot and I am old, what this is about."

Renike told him. She did it in about two minutes, and I could not have done it better, and I had been living it for three days. A retired couple, thirty-three years in London, he a bus driver, she a nurse. Money sent home for twenty years to build a house in Palmgrove Gardens, Akobo, on land they bought in 2004. The building managed for them by their nephew, Mr. Oluwafemi Adeyemi, the son of Mr. Ogunleye's sister. The couple returned, and found the house let to tenants without their knowledge, the rents collected by the nephew, the locks changed.

"Is the nephew present?" said Pa Alade.

"I am present, sir."

It was Femi. He had been sitting at the very back, on the end of the last bench, by the door, and none of us had seen him come in. He came forward now in a white kaftan and dark trousers, with a folder under his arm, and took his place across the aisle from us, and did not look at Bayo.

"You are Oluwafemi Adeyemi."

"Yes, sir."

"Do you have a lawyer?"

"I do not need a lawyer, sir. I have the truth."

Mrs. Fadipe's needles paused. Pa Alade took another groundnut and rubbed it. "In this court," he said, "the truth is welcome. It is also usually late. Mr. Adeyemi, do you dispute that the house belongs to your uncle?"

Femi opened his mouth and then closed it again. I watched him. I had known that face since it was a baby's face, wet and furious, held up to me in Moji's parlor in 1990 for me to admire. He was choosing his words.

"Sir," he said. "I dispute that it belongs only to him."

Bayo made a noise. Renike put her hand very lightly on his sleeve, and he made the rest of the noise more quietly.

"I see," said Pa Alade. "Is your mother present?"

"No, sir. She has traveled."

"Traveled where?"

"To Osogbo, sir."

"Then she has not been served," said Pa Alade, "and in a family matter of this kind, I want the family. All of it that is alive and can walk. I want the mother, because she is the uncle's sister and the nephew's mother, and therefore she knows more than either of them and will tell us less." He turned to the clerk, who was awake again, as if on a spring. "Mr. Oyelaran. Serve Mrs. Mojisola Adeyemi. Give a date in three weeks. And give these people Form Four. The correct one." He looked at me. "Madam, I am told you are a nurse."

"Retired, sir. Thirty years."

"Then you will understand when I say that you must all drink water. This room is not fit for a goat in the afternoon. Next matter."

We came down the concrete stairs into the white glare of the road. It was eleven in the morning and already the heat stood on the pavement like a second person. The bucket shop had put out more buckets. A woman went past with a tray of oranges on her head and a baby on her back, and the baby was asleep with its mouth open, and the woman was calling her price in a voice that lifted on its last note, and from the other side of the road a man selling recharge cards answered her with his own price, rising the same way, and the pair of them sang to each other across the traffic like a pair of birds.

Femi came down behind us. He stopped on the bottom step, holding his folder. Bayo turned to face him.

"Not only to me," said Bayo. "Not only to me. Who else does it belong to? To the man who sells the cement?"

"Uncle—"

"To the tenants? To the woman with the wigs?"

"To me," said Femi quietly. "A little. Uncle. A little."

"Mr. Adeyemi," said Renike, in her court voice, stepping between them in her cool suit. "My clients will not be speaking to you outside of the proceedings."

Femi looked at her, a long look up and down, from the braided bun to the polished shoes. Then he looked at me.

"Auntie," he said. "You know it."

He went off down the road toward the motorcycle taxis waiting by the junction, the white kaftan moving in the hot wind. I watched him go. I did not know it. I did not know anything yet, except that I had a lawyer of twenty-seven who had eaten a tin of condensed milk under a table, a husband who had nearly divorced me by accident, and a court that met in a room above a bucket shop under a fan with one bent blade.

"Ma," said Renike, at my elbow. "Do you have the receipts?"

"Eleven files."

She smiled for the first time that day. It made her look her age. "Good," she said. "Bring all of them."

Borrowed Room

Abike's house ran on a timetable that she kept in her head and enforced with her voice. The power from the public supply came when it came, and when it came she shouted, "Light!" from wherever she was, and everybody in the house moved at once: the girl who helped in the kitchen ran to plug in the freezer, Abike's grandson plugged in his phone and his laptop and a speaker, I filled the electric kettle, and Bayo, after the first week, learned to switch on the pumping machine so that the tank on the roof would fill. When the power went, which it did with a click and a sigh of every fan in the house slowing at once, Abike said, "Ah," in a tone of personal disappointment, and then there was the question of the generator.

The generator lived in the side passage under a sheet of corrugated iron, a squat red machine that she called the Small One, to distinguish it from her late husband's diesel generator, the Big One, which stood in the garage under a tarpaulin and had not been started since his funeral because nobody but him had ever understood it. The Small One ran on petrol. Petrol was bought in yellow jerry cans from a man at the end of the road. The Small One ran from seven until midnight, and then Abike turned it off, because she could not sleep with the noise and because petrol was not water. From midnight until the light came back, if it came back, the house was dark and warm and full of small sounds: the mosquito net breathing, a dog two compounds away, the neighbors' generators humming on through the night like large contented insects, all of them a slightly different note.

I did not sleep well for the first week. I had slept for thirty-three years beside a radiator in Peckham with the 36 going past under the window every eight minutes, and I had thought nothing could keep me awake. But the heat lay on me like a blanket I could not kick off, and the dark was so complete when the Small One stopped that I would lie with my eyes open and see nothing at all, not my hand, not the wardrobe, and I would listen to Bayo breathe and think about the house.

So I worked. I am a nurse. When you cannot sleep you do the notes.

Kemi had set it up for me before we left London, in her kitchen in Lewisham, with the baby on her hip and her laptop on the counter between the kettle and the fruit bowl. A private space for the family, she called it, only us, nobody else could see it, and she had shown me how to make a folder and name it and how to put things into it, and how Tolu in Croydon and she in Lewisham and the grandchildren could look at it whenever they wanted. She had meant it for photographs. She had meant it, I think, so that she could see what we were eating. I had nodded and said yes, and then, the night before we flew, I had sat up until three with the lever-arch files on the sofa and Abike's grandson's old scanner in my imagination, wondering whether a person could put twenty years into a folder.

Abike's grandson's scanner was real. His name was Seun, he was seventeen, and he regarded me with the tolerant pity of the young for the old who wish to learn technology. On my third night he brought it to my room under his arm and set it up on the chair by the window and showed me which button to press, and then he stood in the doorway and watched me press it, and said, "Ma, you are doing it correct," in a voice that suggested he had expected otherwise. After that he left me alone.

So in the evenings, while the Small One ran, I sat on the bed with the net looped back and the files open around me on the sheet, and I scanned. One receipt, one photograph, one page at a time. The money orders from the shop on Rye Lane, pale green slips with a carbon copy that had faded over the years to the color of a bruise. The bank transfer statements from later, when the shop had closed and Tolu had shown us how to send from the bank. The photographs Femi sent: at first printed and posted in brown envelopes, later on my phone, which I had printed at the chemist's on Rye Lane on Saturdays and pasted in under each receipt with a date. I named each one with the date and the amount and what it was for. 2004, March, two hundred pounds, survey of plot. 2005, October, three hundred and fifty pounds, foundation blocks, first load. 2006, January, one hundred and eighty pounds, iron rods. I put them into the folder Kemi had made, in order. A year a night, sometimes two, if the power held.

On the fourth night Kemi left a message under the first folder. She wrote, Mummy, what is this. Then, an hour later, she wrote, Mummy. And then she telephoned.

They called together, my two children, from their two kitchens, on the video call, so that my phone screen was cut in half. Tolu was on the left, in Croydon, in his work shirt with the collar open, eating cereal at eight in the evening, which he has done since he was a student and which I have given up trying to stop. Kemi was on the right with her hair wrapped for the night and the baby slung asleep against her shoulder, and behind her the lights of her kitchen, very white. Both of them looked tired. Both of them looked like their father when they were cross, which is to say they pressed their lips together and moved their heads very slightly from side to side.

"Mummy," said Kemi. "We have been looking at the folder."

"Good. That is what it is for."

"Did you really keep every single receipt?"

"Every one. Except one. A money order in 2009 that your father used to write down a telephone number. He says it was important. I have a note in the file explaining."

"Mummy," said Tolu, with his mouth full. "This is a lot of money."

"Sixty-eight thousand, three hundred and ninety pounds," I said. "Over twenty years. And a little in naira that your father carried when he came for your grandfather's burial in 2007."

They were quiet on their two halves of the screen. Behind me through the window the generators were humming, and from across the road came the radio of a night watchman, a man talking very fast about football.

"Mummy," said Kemi, carefully, the way she talks to her patients' relatives at the pharmacy when she is about to tell them something about the dose. "Why don't you just come home."

"I am home."

"London home. You know what I mean."

"I know what you mean."

"You and Daddy are sleeping in Auntie Abike's spare room. You are sixty-eight. You had a flat. You had your bus pass. You had Rye Lane and the ladies from the ward and the GP and the hospital and us. Zara keeps asking when you are coming back. Jide drew you a picture of a bus. He says Grandpa has to drive it."

"We gave the flat back to the council in September, Kemi."

"They would give you another one."

"They would not. And I do not want another one. I want my house."

"But the house is full of other people," said Tolu reasonably. "A hairdresser and a family. You are going to take your nephew to court for it? Femi? Mummy. It is going to take a year. It is going to cost—"

"Renike is doing it for nothing."

"Who is Renike?"

"Auntie Abike's granddaughter. She is a lawyer."

"How old is she?"

"Twenty-seven."

Tolu put his spoon down. Kemi closed her eyes.

"Mummy," said Kemi. "Please think about it. Kola from Daddy's old garage says there is a one-bedroom in Nunhead coming up. Ground floor. No stairs."

"Tell Kola from Daddy's old garage that I said thank you."

When the call was finished I stayed sitting on the bed's edge, the phone in my lap. The Small One coughed in the passage, as it did around eleven, as if it were clearing its throat to say something, and then went on. Bayo had been asleep through the whole call, or pretending to be, under the net. He lay on his back with his hands folded on his stomach, as he has slept since the first night of our marriage, like a man laid out on a table for a photograph. In the green light of the phone his face was gray and patient and old.

I opened the folder again and went on. 2007, April. Two hundred and fifty pounds. Blocks, second load. Under it the photograph: the foundations finished, a square of gray concrete sitting on the red earth like a plate on a tablecloth, a pile of blocks beside it, and in the bottom corner of the frame, half out of the picture, somebody's foot in a rubber slipper. I studied it until the screen dimmed. Then I pressed the button and the scanner light went across it, slow and green.

In the mornings I went to Bodija market with Abike. This was a separate education.

I had left Ibadan in 1993, when the price of a tuber of yam was something you could pay with the coins at the bottom of your bag. I had come back on visits since: three times, each time for less than three weeks, each time in a cloud of relatives and parties and gifts in which I did not buy so much as an orange for myself. I had not done the market. Abike did the market as a commander does a battle. She took a large woven bag and a smaller one inside it, and a purse she kept down the front of her blouse, and she walked through the gate at the top of the yam lane with the face of a woman who has been cheated before and intends that it should not happen again.

The market at eight in the morning was already loud and already hot. The yam sellers sat behind their great pyramids of tubers, brown and hairy and as long as a child's arm, some of them stacked so high that you could only see the seller's head wrap over the top. Further in, the pepper women: baskets of red pepper and yellow pepper and the small fierce ones that make your eyes stream if you only walk past, tomatoes in heaps, onions, the smell of crushed leaves where people had trodden on spinach. Women with trays of fried fish. A man selling plastic bowls who beat on one of them with a stick to draw attention. And over all of it the calling, which I had forgotten and which came back to me as soon as I heard it like a song you knew as a child: one seller crying her price, another answering from across the lane, a buyer calling back, the seller answering, the whole lane a long conversation thrown backward and forward over people's heads.

"How much is the yam?" I said to the first woman.

She told me.

I said, "For one?"

She looked at Abike, and Abike looked at me, and the woman said to Abike, not to me, "Is she from abroad?"

"London," said Abike, apologetically.

"Ah," said the woman, and smiled at me with real kindness, as at a child, and did not change her price.

That was how it went. Every price I heard was three times the price in my head. The price in my head was from 1993. I knew this. I could do the arithmetic; I had done the arithmetic for twenty years, sending pounds that turned into more and more naira each year, watching the blocks get dearer in Femi's messages and the cement double and double again. I knew the numbers. I had not known them in my body, standing in the heat with a yam in my hands and a woman smiling at me kindly as she named a figure that would once have bought a goat.

"You see," said Abike, on the way back, with the yams in the big bag and the pepper in the small one and the purse safely restored down her blouse. "You see why Femi rented it."

"I see why Femi wants money. Everybody wants money."

"Sade," she said. "That house was standing empty for nearly two years. Finished. Painted. Waiting for you. You kept saying next year. Next year. He was paying a watchman out of his own pocket."

"He did not tell us that."

"Did you ask him?"

I did not answer. We walked down the street under the mango trees, where the fruit had all been eaten and the leaves were thick and dark and dusty, and a boy on a bicycle rang his bell at us twice and went past with a tray of agege bread balanced on the handlebars, the loaves soft and pale in their plastic, and the smell of it came after him down the road.

That evening when the light came, Abike shouted, "Light!" and I plugged in the scanner. 2008. 2009. The roof went on in 2010. In the photograph the roof sheets were new and silver, and the sky behind them was white with harmattan, and the shadow of the man holding the camera lay across the bottom of the picture, long and thin, with its arm raised.

Exhibit A

By the second hearing the harmattan had begun to come down from the north. It came at first only in the early mornings, a fine pale haze that softened the ends of the streets and made the sun rise like a coin dropped into milk, and by nine it had burned off and the day was hot and clear again. But you could feel it in your throat, a dryness, and on your skin, which began to tighten on the backs of my hands like paper. Abike brought out a pot of shea butter and set it on the dressing table in my room without a word. Bayo's lips cracked. The red mud of October dried in the ruts of the roads and broke into a fine red dust that the motorcycles lifted in plumes, so that every white thing in Ibadan began, slowly, to turn pink.

Renike came to collect us at eight in her small blue car, which was very clean inside and smelled of air freshener and the coffee she drank from a steel flask while she drove. She had read every page I had scanned. She had made her own binder, a fat white one with colored tabs down the side, red for money orders, blue for bank transfers, yellow for photographs, green for what she called correspondence, which meant Femi's messages, printed out and dated. On the front she had written, in a careful round hand, OGUNLEYE: EXHIBITS. She had also, at her own expense, had the most important pages laminated.

"Laminated," said Bayo, holding one up to the window. It was the money order for the land. "Like a menu."

"The court room is very hot, sir," said Renike. "Paper sweats."

The eleven original files traveled in the boot. I had insisted. Renike had said copies would be enough, and I had said that I had not carried them in a suitcase from Heathrow so they could sit in Abike's spare room while somebody looked at copies. She did not argue. I think she had heard from her grandmother what I was like about notes.

The fan had not been mended. Tick, tick, tick. The clerk, Mr. Oyelaran, was asleep at his desk with a newspaper over his face this time, rising and falling. Mrs. Fadipe had progressed with her knitting, and the yellow wool had become something with a sleeve. Mr. Ige looked at the back wall.

And at the back of the room, on the last bench, sat my sister-in-law Moji.

She had not traveled to Osogbo, or if she had, she had come back. She wore a green and gold wrapper with a matching blouse and a gele tied high and stiff, a gele for a wedding, not for a courtroom, and she held a raffia hand fan which she was using with great energy, and she did not look at me when I turned round. She looked at the ceiling fan. Femi sat beside her with his folder on his knees, and she had one hand on his arm, the way she used to hold him at the market when he was small so that he would not run into the road.

"Your sister," Renike whispered to Bayo.

"I can see my sister."

"She is their witness. She will not speak today. Pa Alade will hear the documents first."

"She has worn her best gele," said Bayo, "to testify against her own brother."

"Perhaps she has worn it," I said, "because she is ashamed."

He looked at me with surprise, and I was surprised too, because I had not known I thought it until I said it.

Pa Alade came in at a quarter past ten with his groundnuts. The clerk woke, removed the newspaper, said "Court!" and we stood. There were two small matters first, a dispute about a goat that had eaten a neighbor's cassava, which Mrs. Fadipe settled from her chair without putting down her needles, and a young couple who wanted to postpone their own matter because they had made it up, which Pa Alade allowed in the manner of a man who had heard that before. Then Mr. Oyelaran called, "Ogunleye against Adeyemi!" and Renike rose with her white binder.

She was very good. I have watched young doctors present a patient on a ward round, the clever ones who have read everything and are frightened of nothing except the consultant, and she had that quality, of a person who has stayed up late to be ready and does not want you to know it. She put the land purchase first: the agreement, the survey, the money order for the plot in 2004, the receipt from the family who had sold it. She had a photograph of the plot as it was, red earth and a pegged string. She walked the court through the first three years, receipt by receipt, photograph by photograph. She had a laminated sheet for each year with the total at the bottom.

Femi objected to everything.

He did not know how to object, which made it worse. He did not stand up and say "Objection," as on the television. He raised his hand from the bench like a boy at school and said, "Sir, sir, excuse me, sir," and when Pa Alade nodded at him he said things like, "Sir, that photograph, I took that photograph," and "Sir, that is not the right date, the blocks came on a Thursday," and once, memorably, "Sir, that receipt is in pounds. Pounds do not build a house. Naira builds a house."

"Mr. Adeyemi," said Pa Alade, the third time. "You will have your turn."

"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."

"Is there anything in Miss Bello's documents that is false?"

Femi looked at the binder in Renike's hands. He looked a long time. "No, sir," he said finally. "It is only that they are not everything."

"Nothing is everything," said Pa Alade. "Sit down."

Then Renike called Bayo.

He went to the front and stood before the green cloth. He had worn his good gray suit, the one from Kemi's wedding, and it was much too warm, and I could see the sweat coming through at the back between his shoulder blades in the shape of a map of somewhere. He stood very straight. He had driven buses for twenty-six years, and he stood like a man at the start of a route, waiting for the signal.

"Mr. Ogunleye," said Renike. "Please tell the court how you earned the money that you sent home."

"I was a bus driver," said Bayo. "With London buses. Twenty-six years."

"And what route did you drive?"

That was her mistake. She told me afterward she had meant it as a small question, a warm-up, to settle him. She did not know my husband.

"The 36," said Bayo, and his face changed, and he put his hands behind his back. "From Queen's Park, sir, down the Harrow Road to Paddington. Then along to Marble Arch and down Park Lane, past the hotels, and round Hyde Park Corner. Victoria. Then down Vauxhall Bridge Road and over the river at Vauxhall. Then the Oval, sir, where they play the cricket. Camberwell. Then Peckham, sir, where I lived. Rye Lane. Then New Cross Gate. That is the end. Nineteen years. Before that, the N36, at night. Seven years. The night is a different route, sir, even if it is the same road. At night you see the city as it really is."

"Mr. Ogunleye—" said Renike.

"At night," said Bayo, to Pa Alade, "a man gets on at Victoria at two in the morning in a dinner jacket and sits next to a cleaner going to her first job of the day at Camberwell, and they talk. You would not believe what they talk about. I had a man propose to a woman on my bus on Vauxhall Bridge. In the rain. She said yes. I stopped the bus between stops, which is not allowed, so that they could get off and look at the river. I received a warning for it."

Pa Alade had stopped rubbing his groundnut. Mrs. Fadipe's needles had slowed. Even Mr. Ige, I thought, had moved his eyes very slightly from the back wall toward my husband.

"I worked the night bus," said Bayo, "because the night bus paid more. Every extra shift, the money went into the house. Every Christmas Day I worked. Double time. Every Boxing Day. My children opened their presents with their mother. I was on the Harrow Road. There is a photograph, sir, in that binder, of the first floor of the house going up. Two hundred and eighty pounds. That was the Christmas of 2008. I drove from five in the morning to four in the afternoon on Christmas Day with nobody on the bus except one man going to visit his mother in a hospital, and I said to him, Sir, I am building a house in Ibadan, and he said, Good for you, mate. Good for you."

The room was very still. Somebody's phone rang out on the stairs and was silenced.

"Thank you, Mr. Ogunleye," said Renike gently.

"I have not finished the route," said Bayo.

"You have finished, sir."

"There is a part about Park Lane."

"We will come back to Park Lane, sir."

He sat down beside me, breathing hard. I put my hand on his knee. Through the gray suit I could feel his leg trembling, very slightly, the way it trembled after a long shift when he took off his shoes on the doormat in Peckham. I had forgotten that. I had forgotten that the money came out of his legs.

Pa Alade cleared his throat. "Miss Bello. The total."

Renike opened her binder at the last tab. Before she could read it I said, "Sixty-eight thousand, three hundred and ninety pounds, sir. And forty pence. Over twenty years and one month. Not counting what my husband carried in cash in 2007, which was four hundred pounds' worth of naira, and for which I have no receipt, only his word."

Pa Alade looked at me over his spectacles for a long moment.

"And forty pence," he said.

"A money order fee, sir. In 2011. They overcharged us. I complained. They refunded the difference but not the forty pence."

"Madam," said Pa Alade, "you would have made a very great clerk." He looked at Mr. Oyelaran, who had gone to sleep again. "A very great clerk."

Mrs. Fadipe laughed into her knitting.

"Mr. Adeyemi," said Pa Alade. "You have heard. Do you have any question for Mr. or Mrs. Ogunleye?"

Femi stood. Moji's hand slid off his arm. He came a few steps into the aisle with his folder and stopped. He looked at Bayo, and then, for a longer time, at me. The fan ticked.

"Ma," he said. "Auntie. I have one question."

"Ask it."

"Who carried the blocks?"

I did not understand. "I beg your pardon?"

"Your receipt," he said, "says two hundred and fifty pounds, blocks, second load. April 2007. Very good. I remember that load. The lorry could not come down the road because of the rain, the road was mud to here." He chopped his hand against his own knee. "So the lorry dropped the blocks on the main road, at the junction. Eight hundred blocks. Who carried the blocks from the junction to the plot, Auntie? It is not in your file."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came. He did not wait.

"I did," he said. "With two boys from the estate. I was seventeen. Two days. My hands were bleeding. My mother put shea butter on them." He turned round and looked at Moji on the back bench, and she looked at the floor. "That is all, sir. I do not have more questions. Only that one."

He sat down. Pa Alade took a groundnut, rubbed it, and did not eat it.

"Adjourned," he said, "to the twelfth of December. Mr. Adeyemi, at the next sitting you will bring your witnesses. All of them. And your mother will speak."

In the car on the way back to Bodija, Renike drove with both hands on the wheel. The harmattan haze had come back in the afternoon, and the road was soft and pink with dust, and the sun was a white disk you could look straight at. At a junction a hawker came to my window with a tray of puff-puff, golden and dusted with sugar, and I bought a bag without thinking, and they were warm, and I held the bag in my lap and did not eat any.

"Ma," said Renike, at a red light. "It is not a legal point. Who carried them. It does not change the ownership."

"I know."

"In law, the house is yours."

"I know, Renike."

Bayo, in the front, looked out of the window at the pink road. "I did not know about the blocks," he said, to nobody. "He did not tell us."

"Did you ask him?" I said, and heard Abike's voice in my own mouth, and was quiet.

Mapo Hill

On the first Saturday in December Bayo woke me at six and said, "Come. I want to show you something."

"I have seen Ibadan."

"You have seen Bodija market and a court room and Abike's kitchen. Come."

We took a motorcycle taxi to the bottom of the hill and then walked, because Bayo said you had to walk, it was not the same if you arrived sitting down. The harmattan had settled on the city by then and did not lift. Every morning was the same pale gold haze, the sun coming up behind it like a lamp behind a sheet, the air dry and cool for an hour and then hot, and the dust in everything. It was in my hair when I combed it. It was on the windowsill each morning in a fine layer I could write my name in. It was in my teeth. The leaves on the trees had gone the color of cardboard, and the women in the streets had wrapped their heads and noses against it, and the children on their way to Saturday lessons had gray dust to their ankles, as if they had all walked through the same field of flour.

The road up Mapo Hill went through the old city, and I had not been in the old city since I was a girl. The houses stood close on either side, mud and plaster and block, some of them two stories with wooden balconies leaning out over the lane, painted once in blue or ocher or green and long since faded to the colors of old cloth. Goats stood in doorways. A woman sat on a low stool outside a house frying akara in a black pan over a wood fire, and the smell of hot bean paste and palm oil came down the hill to us through the dust, and a little queue of children stood with coins in their hands. A man was mending a radio on a table in the street with all its insides laid out on a cloth in front of him like a surgical tray. Somewhere a cock was crowing with great conviction, though the sun had been up an hour.

At the top of the hill was Mapo Hall, the old town hall, with its great white columns standing in a row across the front like a line of tall men at a wedding, all their faces turned the same way. The paint was flaking. The steps were wide and shallow and swept. There was nobody there except a watchman asleep on a bench and a girl selling sachets of water from a cooler.

Bayo took my hand, which he does not often do in public, and led me round the side of the hall to the edge of the hill, where a low wall ran along the top of a slope. And there it was.

I had forgotten. You think you remember a thing, and then you see it and you realize that all you had kept was a picture of a picture. Below us, in every direction, as far as the haze allowed, lay the roofs of Ibadan. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Corrugated iron, almost all of it, rusted to every shade of brown there is, from the dark wet brown of a kola nut to the orange of a ripe pawpaw to a red so deep it was nearly purple, sheet against sheet, roof against roof, sloping this way and that, all crowded together with no space between, like the scales of some enormous animal lying asleep across the hills. Here and there a new roof flashed silver. Here and there a tall building stuck up out of the brown like a stick out of mud: Cocoa House, far off, and the tower on Oke-Are on its own hill. Thin smoke rose from cooking fires and rose without a waver and joined the haze. And the sound came up to us, all of it at once, horns and voices and radios and hammering and a generator somewhere, softened by the distance into one long low murmur, like the sea.

"There," said Bayo.

I did not say anything. I could not.

"In London," he said, "on the night bus, when I came over the river at Vauxhall at three in the morning and saw all the lights, I used to think of this. Not the lights. The roofs. You remember? We came up here."

"I remember."

We had come up here in 1981. He was twenty-three and drove a bus for the city then, a big orange bus with no glass in half the windows that went from Dugbe to Mokola and back all day, and I was a student nurse at Eleiyele, and he had seen me every morning at the bus stop at Dugbe for a month before he said one word. When he finally said it, the word was, "Madam, you are standing in a puddle." I was. I had been thinking about an anatomy exam. He brought me up Mapo Hill the following Sunday, on his day off, in a shirt so stiff with starch it creaked, and stood at this wall and pointed out the roofs of every relative he had in Ibadan, which took nearly an hour, and then said that one day he would have a roof of his own that he could point at from here.

"Can you see it?" I said now. "Akobo?"

"No." He pointed, east and a little south, into the haze where the roofs faded out into pale nothing. "It is that way. Too far. But I know where it is."

We stood there a long time. A hawk turned over the old city, very slowly, on the warm air coming up off the roofs. The girl with the water cooler came over and sold us two sachets, and we bit the corners off and drank, and the water was cold and tasted of plastic, exactly as it had tasted in 1981.

"Sade," said Bayo. "What if we lose."

"We will not lose. Renike says in law it is ours."

"I do not mean the law."

I looked at him. The dust had settled in the creases at the sides of his eyes, and in his eyebrows, which had gone white in London, slowly, one hair at a time, over thirty winters, so slowly that I had not noticed until one day in Peckham I looked up from the newspaper and he was an old man reading the football results.

"Then what do you mean?"

But he did not answer. He was looking out at the roofs.

At midday we went to eat. Bayo had found, through some network of old men that operated by its own rules and that I was not permitted to understand, three of his friends from the bus days who were still alive and still in Ibadan, and they met every Saturday at an amala joint near Oke-Ado, not far from the court, in a long low room open at the front to the street, with benches and tables covered in plastic cloth printed with lemons.

The joint was run by a woman so large and so calm that she seemed to be a part of the building. She sat at the front behind three great pots on charcoal and did not get up. The smoke from the charcoal rolled out under the low roof and hung there, blue, and mixed with the steam from the pots, and the whole room smelled of it: smoke and palm oil and pepper and the dark, earthy, slightly sour smell of yam flour cooking. Girls brought the food to the tables in enamel bowls. The amala came in a smooth dark brown mound, soft and hot and faintly gray-purple at its heart, and beside it a bowl of ewedu, green and slippery, and a bowl of gbegiri, the bean soup, yellow-orange and thick, with the red stew poured over the top of both of them so that the three colors ran together at the edges like a flag in the rain.

I had not eaten amala with my hand in a restaurant in thirty-three years. In London we ate it at home, on Sundays, with a fork if the children's friends were there. I washed my right hand in the bowl the girl brought and took a piece of the amala and pressed it into a small hollow with my thumb, the way my mother taught me, and dipped it in the gbegiri and the ewedu together so that it came up streaming green and gold, and ate it, and the heat of it went all the way down to my stomach and stayed there.

Bayo's friends were called Mr. Ajibade, whom everybody called Teacher because he had once been briefly a teacher before he was a driver, and Mr. Oladejo, who had lost a finger to a bus door in 1987 and pointed at things with the gap, and Baba Kehinde, who was very old and very deaf and laughed at everything a second after everybody else. They were delighted with Bayo. They were more delighted with me. They had all heard about the court.

"Form Nine!" said Teacher, slapping the table so that the bowls jumped. "He filed Form Nine!"

"I did not file it," said Bayo. "The clerk gave it to me."

"Oyelaran," said Mr. Oladejo, pointing with the gap. "That man has been asleep since 1999."

"He wakes up when he hears money," said Teacher.

Baba Kehinde laughed, a second late.

They ate, and talked, and I listened. They talked about the old routes, and the buses, and who had died and who had married whom. They asked about London. What was the pay. Was it true about the cold. Was it true that the buses had stairs inside and a man could sit on the top and see into the windows of the houses. Bayo answered all of it, and as he answered, his face opened in a way it had not since we left. He told them about the snow of 2010 when the whole of Camberwell stopped and he drove the last 36 back to the garage at walking pace with a woman in the front seat knitting a scarf for him. He told them about the Christmas lights on Regent Street. He told them about the Jamaican bakery on Rye Lane and its hard-dough bread, and the man from Ghana at the garage who had argued with him about football every morning for fourteen years, and the café on Peckham High Street where the owner knew how he liked his tea.

And I saw it. I sat on the bench with my hand in the amala and the smoke in my eyes and I saw my husband, sixty-eight, who had wanted all his life to come home, and who had come home, and who was homesick. Not for Ibadan. For Peckham. For the bus garage and the bakery and the man from Ghana. For the cold, even. For being, for twenty-six years, a man who knew exactly where he was going and when he would arrive.

And I was not. That was the strange part. I looked out of the open front of the joint at the road, at the dust, at a motorcycle going past with a whole wardrobe strapped on the back of it and a boy sitting on top of the wardrobe, at a woman in a yellow adire wrapper selling oranges from a wheelbarrow, at the haze over everything, and I did not miss London at all. Not the ward, not the flat, not the 36 every eight minutes under the window. I missed my children. I missed my grandchildren very much. But I was sixty-eight and I was in Ibadan with red dust on my good shoes and I wanted, more than I had wanted anything in a long time, to stay.

On the way home in the motorcycle taxi, holding on round Bayo's waist, I took out my phone and put one photograph into the family folder, the one I had taken from the wall on Mapo Hill: the roofs going away into the haze, brown and red and orange, a hawk a small dark mark above them. Under it I wrote, Your grandfather's first view.

By the time we reached Bodija, Zara in London had written underneath it. She wrote, Is that a city?? Is that ALL ROOFS??

Yes, I wrote back. All roofs.

Femi's Witnesses

Femi brought his witnesses in a group, the way a man brings goats to market, walking behind them up the concrete stairs to make sure none of them wandered off. There were three of them. I watched them come in from my seat at the front and tried to work out who they were before anybody told me, which is a game I used to play on the ward with new admissions, and which I am usually good at.

The first was a short, very broad man of about fifty with forearms like a pair of yams and a cap pulled low. Builder, I thought. Foreman. He sat with his knees wide and his hands on them, palms down, and studied the ceiling like a man calculating how much it would cost to repair.

The second was tall and thin and anxious, in a long brown kaftan, and he was carrying something wrapped in a cloth under his arm, something heavy, which he held against his chest with both arms as though it were a baby. I could not place him at all.

The third was old, older than Pa Alade, very dark, very small, white-bearded, leaning on a stick, and a blanket round his shoulders against the morning chill of the harmattan, though by ten the room was already sweltering. His eyes were milky at the edges and very sharp in the middle. A watchman, I thought. He has the look of a man who has spent his life sitting up at night.

Moji came in after them in another gele, blue this time, and sat at the back and did not look at me again.

Renike had warned us that the morning would be Femi's. "He will call them, and he will ask them questions, and they will say good things about him," she said in the car. "I will ask a few questions. Not many. The documents are ours. There is nothing they can say that changes the documents."

"Then why are we here?" said Bayo.

"Because Pa Alade wants to hear the family," said Renike. "He said so."

The fan ticked. Mrs. Fadipe's yellow knitting had become two sleeves and part of a front. Mr. Oyelaran was asleep with his head on his folded arms on the desk, the pen still behind his ear. Pa Alade came in with his groundnuts and a small electric fan of his own, battery powered, which he set on the green cloth facing himself and switched on with an air of having outwitted somebody.

"Mr. Adeyemi," he said. "Your witnesses."

Femi called the broad man first.

"Your name?"

"Lasisi Afolabi. Master bricklayer."

"How do you know the defendant?"

Mr. Lasisi looked at Femi. "I have known him since he was a boy. He was my laborer. Then he was my boss." He thought about it. "He was a bad laborer," he said. "Too many questions. But a good boss."

Somebody on the benches laughed.

"Tell the court about the house in Palmgrove Gardens," said Femi.

Mr. Lasisi told the court about the house in Palmgrove Gardens. He told it, I realized after a few minutes, the way a builder tells it, which is not at all the way a nurse with eleven files tells it. He did not mention money. He did not mention dates. He mentioned the soil, which on that plot was bad clay at the bottom corner, so that they had to dig the foundation trench deeper there by two feet and fill it with hardcore, and he mentioned that the first load of blocks had been badly made, too much sand, and Femi had sent them back. He mentioned the rains of 2011, which washed half the scaffolding away, and the harmattan of 2016, which cracked the fresh plaster on the north wall so that they had to do it again. He mentioned a particular boy who had fallen from the second-floor slab in 2013 and broken his arm, and that Femi had taken him to the hospital on the back of a motorcycle and paid for the plaster cast.

"Is that boy here?" said Pa Alade.

"No, sir. He is in Lagos now. He is a mechanic." Mr. Lasisi held up his own arm. "It healed crooked. He can still fix a car."

Renike stood. "Mr. Lasisi. Who paid your wages?"

"Femi."

"With whose money?"

Mr. Lasisi shrugged his enormous shoulders. "With money," he said. "I did not ask where money came from. Money came from Femi. When money did not come from Femi, I went home and waited."

"Did that happen often?"

"Once," said Mr. Lasisi. "For a long time."

"When?"

He frowned at the ceiling, calculating. "The year the slab went on the second floor. 2014. Money stopped. We had already put up the formwork for the slab, the boards and the poles. Then the rain came. Formwork in the rain, Madam, is like bread in the rain." He made a gesture of something going soft and falling apart. "If you do not pour the concrete, you lose the boards, you lose everything, you start again. I told Femi this. I said, Femi, I will go home and wait, but your boards will not wait."

"And what happened?"

"He poured," said Mr. Lasisi.

"With what money?"

Mr. Lasisi looked at Femi. Femi looked at his folder. "I do not know, Madam. You should ask him."

Renike sat down slowly. She turned to me and raised her eyebrows, and I shook my head. I did not know either.

The tall thin man was next. His name was Mr. Odunsi and he made blocks. When Femi asked him to tell the court about the house, he stood up, came to the front, unwrapped the cloth from the heavy thing he had been holding, and set it on the green cloth in front of Pa Alade with a thump that made the groundnuts jump. It was a concrete block. A plain gray hollow building block, nine inches, the kind of which there must be a billion in Ibadan.

"This," said Mr. Odunsi, with great emotion, "is a block from my yard. Same mold. Same mix. One cement to six sand. Not one to eight. Not one to ten, like the cheats on the Lagos road. One to six." He laid his long hand on top of it. "Every block in that house is like this one. Eleven thousand, six hundred blocks. Femi came to my yard and counted them himself. Every load. He broke one from every load with a hammer to see inside. He made my boys cry."

Pa Alade considered the block at length. Then he turned to Mrs. Fadipe. Mrs. Fadipe put down her knitting, leaned over, and tapped the block with one of her needles. It made a small clean sound.

"It is a good block," said Mrs. Fadipe. It was the first thing I had heard her say.

"Thank you, Madam," said Mr. Odunsi, and wrapped it up again, and carried it back to his seat in his arms.

The watchman was called Baba Ibeji, because, Femi explained, he was the father of twins, and everybody in the estate had called him that for so long that nobody, including possibly Baba Ibeji, remembered what his name had been before. He did not come to the front. Pa Alade let him speak from the bench, sitting, with the blanket round his shoulders. His voice was high and dry and very clear, like a reed.

"I watched that house," he said. "From the day it had a roof. Before that there was nothing to steal but blocks, and the blocks are heavy, and the thieves are lazy. When the roof went on, Femi said, Baba, the roof is aluminum, it will walk away in the night. So I came. Every night. I sat in the doorway with my radio. Nine years."

"Who paid you?"

"Femi."

"Every month?"

"Every month. Even when it was empty. The last two years, when it was finished and nobody came, he paid me. He said, Baba, my uncle is coming next year. Next year. I said, Femi, the next year in London is very long."

Mrs. Fadipe laughed, then stopped. Pa Alade took a groundnut and looked at me, and I felt it, the look, like a hot hand on my face.

Then Femi called his mother.

Moji came forward slowly. She had always been slow in her walk, even as a girl; Bayo said she walked like a queen who had lost her shoes. She stood before the green cloth with her raffia fan and her blue gele and looked at Pa Alade and then at the floor and then, at last, at her brother.

"Mrs. Mojisola Adeyemi," said Pa Alade. "You are the mother of the defendant."

"Yes, sir."

"And the sister of the plaintiff."

"Yes, sir. His younger sister. By four years."

"Then tell me," said Pa Alade, "whose house it is."

Moji opened her fan and closed it again.

"Sir," she said, "my brother is a good man. He went to London when it was very hard, he drove a bus in the cold, he sent money every month. Every month, sir. I have known him sixty-five years. He has never told a lie. Except to our mother about a radio in 1974." She stopped. "That is not important."

"Go on."

"And my son is a good man. He was fourteen when they started. He did not go to university because of that house. He had a place. At Ife. For engineering. He did not take it. He said, Mama, who will watch the building if I go to Ife? My husband said, Let him go. Femi said no. Femi said, Uncle is trusting me."

I looked at Femi. He was sitting very straight on the bench with his jaw tight. I had not known about Ife. Nobody had told me about Ife.

"So," said Moji, "both of them. Both of them are right. That is what I came to say. Both."

"Mrs. Adeyemi," said Pa Alade patiently, "this is a court. In a court somebody has to be more right."

"Then you decide, sir. That is your work. Not mine."

Mrs. Fadipe made a small noise of approval over her knitting.

Renike rose. "Mrs. Adeyemi. The bricklayer said that in 2014 the money from London stopped. Is that correct?"

Moji looked at Bayo. "For eight months," she said. "Yes."

Bayo turned to me. I already knew. I had the file. 2014, I could see it as if it were open on my lap: a money order in January, a money order in February, and then nothing until October. I had a note in my own handwriting on a yellow sticky slip on the page for March, which said, Tolu final year fees, and another on the page for June, which said, Kemi wedding. I had put them there at the time so that I would remember why. I had not thought, then or since, about what happened in Ibadan in the months with no money in them. They were empty pages. You do not think about empty pages.

"And the slab was poured in that time?" said Renike.

"Yes."

"With what money, Mrs. Adeyemi?"

Moji opened her mouth.

"Mama," said Femi, from the bench. Quietly. Not a question.

Moji closed her mouth. She looked at her son for a long moment, and something passed between them that I could not read, and then she looked back at Renike and said, "You should ask him. It is his to tell."

"Mrs. Adeyemi—"

"I have finished, Madam," said Moji, with great dignity, and went back to her bench, and sat down, and opened her fan.

The fan ticked. Somewhere on the road below, a lorry was reversing, beeping, beeping. He took off his spectacles and cleaned them on the sleeve of his agbada and put them on again.

"I am going to see this house," he said. "With my own eyes. All of us. The court will sit at the property on the ninth of January, after the holidays. Mr. Oyelaran will arrange a bus." He looked at the clerk, who was awake, and alarmed. "A bus, Mr. Oyelaran. With seats. Mr. Adeyemi, you will tell the tenants that the court is coming, and that nobody is in trouble. Mr. and Mrs. Ogunleye, you will come too." He looked at me. "Madam, you have shown me the receipts. On the ninth of January I would like you to show me the house."

"I have never been inside it, sir," I said.

Pa Alade looked at me over his spectacles. "Then it will be interesting for both of us," he said. "Adjourned."

Wash and Set

I went to the salon on my own, on a Tuesday, in the week before Christmas, and I did not tell Bayo or Renike or Abike where I was going. Renike would have said it was improper to approach the other side's tenants. Abike would have wanted to come. Bayo would have wanted to know why, and I did not have a reason I could have said out loud, except that my hair was a disgrace. That was true, and it was enough. The harmattan had got into it and dried it to wire, and the relaxer I had had done in Peckham in September had grown out an inch, gray at the root, and in the mirror in Abike's spare room every morning I looked like a woman who had been left out in a field.

I took a motorcycle taxi to Akobo. The rider was a boy of about twenty with a scarf tied over his nose and mouth against the dust, and he drove with great care, as if I were a basket of eggs, and when we reached Palmgrove Gardens he said, "Ma, is it the house with the court case?" and I understood that the whole of Akobo knew.

In the morning light the house looked smaller than it had in October. The red stripe Femi's motorcycle had splashed up the cream wall had been washed off, not quite perfectly, so that there was a faint pink shadow along the bottom of the paint. The harmattan had put a thin film of dust over everything, the wigs in the window, the iron rail of the outside stair, the leaves of a young pawpaw tree that somebody had planted by the gate and that was now as tall as me and carrying three green fruit. The salon door was open. The radio was playing, not juju this time but a woman singing very high over a guitar, sweet and slow, and the smell of hot comb and shea butter and something sharp, the relaxer chemicals, came out into the dry air.

Iya Toyin was standing in the doorway with her tape measure round her neck. She saw me get off the motorcycle and did not move. I paid the boy. I walked to the door.

"Good morning," I said. "I would like my hair done."

Iya Toyin studied my hair the way Mr. Lasisi had looked at the court room ceiling.

"Yes," she said at last. "You would. Come in."

The salon took up the whole of the front of the ground floor. It was one long room with the window of wigs at one end and a door at the other into what should have been, according to the plans I had in file number four, a kitchen, and was now a back room with a sink and two hood dryers and a stack of plastic chairs. Along one wall there were three swivel chairs in red leatherette facing three mirrors, and in front of each mirror a shelf crowded with combs and pots and bottles and sprays and a hand mirror with a pink plastic back. Along the other wall there was a bench where four women were waiting, and a low table with a pile of old hair magazines and a plate of groundnuts. A ceiling fan turned, without ticking, which I noted. Two girls of about seventeen in pink tabards were working at the first two chairs, one braiding a woman's hair into long thin braids with extensions she took from a hank over her shoulder, the other washing somebody's hair in a basin, and they both stopped when I came in and stared at me in the mirrors, and Iya Toyin said one word to them and they started again.

The women on the bench did not stop staring. One of them nudged another. They knew.

"Sit," said Iya Toyin, and pointed at the third chair.

I sat. She put a pink nylon cape round my shoulders and fastened it at the back of my neck, and lifted a handful of my hair and let it fall, and made a sound in her throat like a mechanic who has looked under a bonnet.

"London," she said.

"Peckham."

"They do not know hair in Peckham."

"They know it a little."

"A little," she said, "is not enough." She picked up a wide-toothed comb. "What do you want?"

I had been going to say a relaxer. Then I looked at myself in the mirror, with the gray coming in at the roots and the harmattan in the ends, sixty-eight years old with the cape round my neck like a bib, and I said, "Cut off the relaxed part. Let it be gray. Thread it. The way my mother used to."

There was a small silence in the salon. The girl who was braiding stopped braiding. Iya Toyin looked at me in the mirror, and for the first time since October her face changed.

"Thread it," she said.

"In the old way. With the black thread."

"Ma," said Iya Toyin, "nobody asks me for that. Only the old women from the village. And the girls who are getting married, for the photographs."

"I am an old woman from the village," I said. "My village is Peckham."

One of the women on the bench laughed out loud. After that it was easier.

It took three hours. She cut off the old relaxed ends first, with long scissors, and the brittle hair fell in little black curls onto the pink cape and the tiled floor, and the gray underneath came out soft and springy and much more than I had expected. Then she washed it in the back room in the basin, with water that came out of the tap in a cold rush from the tank on the roof, and rubbed shea butter into it, and combed it out, and parted it with the tail of a comb into sections, six of them, running from the forehead to the crown. Then she took a spool of black thread and began.

I had not had it done since I was eleven. My mother used to sit on a low stool out on our veranda in Oke-Ado in the evenings with me on the floor between her knees, and wind the thread round each section from the root to the tip, tight, so that every section stood up stiff and straight like a spike, and then she would bend the spikes over and tie them together at the top, so that by the end my head was a small dark crown, a basket, a cage of black thread. It pulled. It always pulled. I used to cry and she used to tap me on the top of the head with the comb and say, Beauty is not cheap. Then the next morning at school all the girls would come and touch it.

Iya Toyin's hands moved exactly as my mother's had. Wind, wind, wind. Pull. The thread pinched my scalp. The radio sang. The girl at the next chair, braiding, began to hum along. Outside the window the dust lay on the road and a woman went past with a basin of tomatoes on her head and called her price, and from somewhere along the street a man called back. And somewhere above us, through the ceiling, I could hear the footsteps of children running, and a woman's voice telling them to stop running, and the children running anyway.

"Is that the twins?" I said.

"Dayo and Dami," said Iya Toyin. "On holiday from school. They will run until January. Their mother has the patience of ten women."

"Mrs. Akinola."

"Bimpe," said Iya Toyin. "She is upstairs. She will come down. She always comes down at eleven to bring me a drink."

At eleven, exactly, Bimpe Akinola came down the outside stair with a tray. On the tray were two bottles of cold malt drink, sweating, and a plate of puff-puff, and behind her came the twins, in shorts and vests and bare feet, carrying nothing and looking at everything. When Bimpe saw me in the third chair with my head half threaded, she stopped dead in the doorway, and the tray tilted, and one of the malt bottles slid to the edge and Dami caught it, neatly, like a goalkeeper.

"Good morning, Ma," said Bimpe. Her voice had gone very small.

"Good morning," I said. "Please. I am only having my hair done."

"Yes, Ma."

"Sit," said Iya Toyin to her. "Sit, sit. Give the madam the malt. Give her a puff-puff. Dayo, take a chair."

So that was how I came to be sitting in my own house for the first time, in the salon that should have been my front room, with my head in a black thread crown and a cold malt drink in my hand, talking to my tenant.

She was twenty-nine. She taught Primary Three at a public school ten minutes away, and her husband Tunde taught mathematics at a secondary school in Challenge. They had lived before in a two-room place in Agbowo, near the university, where the drain at the back had flooded every rainy season, and the twins had had chest infections three winters running, and one year the water had come in under the door so high that Tunde had had to carry the children out to a neighbor's in a basin. They had saved for two years for a better place. Then a friend of Tunde's at the school told them about a new building in Palmgrove Gardens, finished, never lived in, good tank, good roof, a man called Femi who was letting the first floor.

"How much?" I said.

She told me. It was a fair price. Less than fair, for Akobo; Abike had been teaching me the rents.

"Two years in advance," said Bimpe. "That is what we paid. It was everything. All of our savings. Tunde borrowed a little from his cooperative at the school."

"Two years," I said.

"We moved in last December. It is the first place the twins have had their own room." She held the cold bottle against her neck, under her ear. The twins had gone outside and were drawing in the dust on the pawpaw leaves with their fingers. "Ma. Please. I know it is your house. Everybody knows it is your house now. I am not saying anything against that. Only—" She stopped and started again. "We paid until next December. If we have to go now, the money is gone. Femi does not have it. He told us that. He said he spent it on the building. If we go, we go with nothing."

"Nobody is putting you out," I said. I had said it in October from the bottom of the stairs, without thinking. This time I thought about it.

Iya Toyin had stopped threading. She was standing behind me with her hands in my hair, very still, and in the mirror her face was a fierce, careful blank.

"Me too," she said quietly. "Two years in advance. My shop. I had a shop before in Dugbe market, Ma, a small one, a stall. Twelve years. Then they knocked down that whole row for a road. You know. One morning there were men with a bulldozer. I had two days to move. I came here because Femi said the ground floor was good for a shop, people pass, the new estates are filling up." She went back to threading, wind, wind, pull, harder than before, so that my eyes watered. "I have built my customers here from nothing. Twenty-two months. If I go, I start again. I am forty-four years old."

"I know how old forty-four is," I said.

She snorted. It was almost a laugh.

When she had finished, she held up the pink hand mirror behind my head so that I could see the back in the big mirror. My head was a crown of black thread and soft gray hair, six spikes bent over and tied at the top, neat and tight and very, very old-fashioned, and it made my face look like my mother's face. I had not expected that. I could not stop looking.

"It suits you, Ma," said Bimpe.

"It is my mother's," I said.

Iya Toyin took off the pink cape and shook it, and my old London hair fell onto the floor with the rest. I paid her. She tried not to take it. I made her take it.

As I was leaving, Dayo came running back from the gate and stopped in front of me in the doorway and looked up at my head with deep suspicion.

"Are you going to live in our house?" he said.

"Dayo!" said his mother.

"I live in a room in Bodija," I said. "With a lady who shouts when the light comes."

He considered this. "Our mummy also shouts when the light comes," he said, and ran off again.

I walked out into the dust and the heat to look for a motorcycle. At the gate I stopped and looked up. The top floor windows were shut, and the glass was gray with harmattan, and nobody had planted anything in the window boxes I had chosen from a catalog. It was the only part of the house that was empty. My scalp ached under the thread, a small tight ache, all over, like a hand holding on.

Site Visit

Mr. Oyelaran arranged a bus. It was white, or had been, with a faded blue stripe along the side and eighteen seats, and it was driven by a young man in sunglasses called Rasaki who had never been to Akobo in his life and said so cheerfully as we climbed in outside the bucket shop at nine in the morning. The court sat in the front three rows: Pa Alade by the window with his groundnuts and his battery fan, Mrs. Fadipe beside him with the knitting, which was now very nearly a cardigan, and Mr. Ige alone in the row behind, looking straight ahead through the windscreen at the back of Rasaki's head as he had looked at the court room wall. Mr. Oyelaran sat across the aisle with his files on his knees. Before we had left Oke-Ado he was asleep, his head against the window, his mouth a little open, his pen behind his ear rising and falling.

Bayo and I sat behind them with Renike. Femi sat at the very back with his mother, who had brought a cooler bag and a flask and a whole loaf of agege bread wrapped in newspaper, as though she expected the visit to last several days.

"Which way?" said Rasaki, at the first junction.

"Left," said Femi from the back.

"Right," said Bayo, at the same time.

Rasaki looked in the mirror. Pa Alade looked at both of them over his spectacles.

"Mr. Adeyemi has been there four thousand times," said Pa Alade. "Mr. Ogunleye has been there once. Rasaki, go left."

Bayo folded his arms. For ten minutes he said nothing while Rasaki drove, and I could feel him beside me suffering, the way some men suffer at a football match, every muscle moving with the bus. When Rasaki braked late at a speed bump and all eighteen of us rose a little out of our seats and came down again, Bayo made a small sound, and when Rasaki overtook a lorry on the inside of a bend with a motorcycle coming the other way, he could not bear it any longer and leaned forward and said, "My son. Lower gear. Before the bend. Not in it."

Rasaki looked at him in the mirror.

"Twenty-six years," said Bayo. "London. Double-deckers."

"Double-deckers," said Rasaki, and took off his sunglasses. "With the stairs inside?"

"With the stairs inside."

After that Rasaki drove in a lower gear before the bends and asked Bayo questions about double-deckers for the rest of the journey, and Bayo answered all of them, and Mrs. Fadipe said, without looking up from her needles, "Now we will never get there," and I saw Mr. Ige's mouth move very slightly at one corner.

The harmattan was thick that morning. The whole city was the color of a sheet of sandpaper. The sun was a pale disk you could look at without blinking, and the road out to Akobo was soft and red with dust, and every vehicle that passed us lifted a cloud of it that hung in the air behind and drifted in at the open windows and settled on Pa Alade's cream agbada so that he brushed at his sleeve with a handkerchief. Along the road the trees stood gray with it, like trees in an old photograph. A woman sold bananas from a wooden table under an umbrella, and the bananas were dusted pink.

At Palmgrove Gardens everyone was waiting. Femi had done as he was told. The Akinolas waited at the foot of the outside stair, Tunde in a pressed shirt and tie, Bimpe in a blue and white adire wrapper and blouse, the twins in their school uniforms though it was still the holidays, scrubbed, with their hair freshly cut, standing so still that they seemed to have been switched off. Iya Toyin stood in the salon doorway with her arms folded and her two girls in pink tabards behind her. Baba Ibeji the watchman sat on his stool by the gate in his blanket with his radio on his knee. And at the corner of the estate wall, under a mango tree, a woman with a black pan over a charcoal brazier was frying puff-puff, and a small crowd of neighbors had gathered round her, ostensibly to buy puff-puff and actually to watch the court.

Mr. Oyelaran woke up as the bus stopped. He peered through the glass at the house and at the crowd and at the twins, and said, "Court!" out of habit, and the twins, who did not know what it meant, stood up even straighter.

Pa Alade got down from the bus slowly with his stick and stood in the road and looked at the house for a long time. He looked at it the way I had seen him look at a witness, from the bottom up. He looked at the foundations, at the faint pink tide mark along the bottom of the cream paint, at the wigs in the window, at the outside staircase, at the first-floor windows with the Akinolas' curtains in them, yellow with blue flowers. He looked at the top floor with its gray, shut windows and its empty window boxes. He looked at the roof.

"Mr. Adeyemi," he said. "Show me."

Femi showed him.

He did not start where I expected, at the door. He led Pa Alade round to the back corner, where the ground dropped away a little toward the estate wall, and showed him a place at the base of the wall where the blocks went down further into the earth than anywhere else, a dark band of concrete a foot wide below the line of the plaster. "Clay," said Femi. "Bad clay here, sir. It holds water. We dug two feet more and put hardcore. Otherwise in ten years this corner would sink and the whole wall would crack from here"—he put his hand at the bottom—"to here," and he reached up and laid his palm flat at the top-floor window ledge.

Pa Alade bent with difficulty and looked at the dark concrete. Mrs. Fadipe looked at it too. Mr. Ige stood behind them both, looking at the wall.

Then Femi took us to the north side, and showed us where the plaster had cracked in the harmattan of 2016 and been done again, and you could see it if you knew, a very slightly different texture, smoother, like new skin over a graze. And then he took us into the salon.

Iya Toyin stepped aside. The court filed in among the swivel chairs and the hood dryers and the smell of shea butter, and the girls in pink tabards flattened themselves against the mirrors. Femi went straight through to the back room, where the sink was, and the dryers, and the stack of plastic chairs, and he stopped in the corner by the window.

"Here," he said.

We all looked at the corner. It was a corner. There was a gray floor tile with a crack across it and a bucket of combs soaking in blue liquid.

"The rains of 2011," said Femi. "The roof was not on. The first floor slab was on, so there was cover here, only here. We had sixty bags of cement delivered in June, for the first floor walls. Sixty bags. You cannot leave cement in the rain, sir. And you cannot leave it alone at night, because in this place in 2011 there was no wall round the estate, there was no gate, there was nothing, there was bush, and sixty bags of cement is a fortune. So I slept here. On the cement. For seven weeks. With a lamp and a cutlass." He looked at Pa Alade. "For the snakes, sir. Only for the snakes."

"Seven weeks," said Pa Alade.

"Until the walls went up and the bags were finished."

I looked at the corner, at the cracked tile and the bucket of combs. I tried to see a young man of twenty-one lying there on sixty bags of cement in the rain with a hurricane lamp, and I could not, and then I could. I thought of what I had been doing in June 2011. I had been working nights on the cardiology ward. I had been sending, that month, a hundred and ninety pounds, which was in file number six with a photograph of the first-floor walls half up and a note in my handwriting that said, good progress.

"Ma," said Renike, very low, beside me. "It is not a legal point."

"Stop saying that," I said.

Then we went upstairs.

The Akinolas showed us their flat with great nervousness and enormous pride. Bimpe had cleaned it as I have seen people clean a house for a funeral. Every surface shone. The twins' room had two small beds with matching bedspreads printed with footballs, and on the wall above them, stuck up with tape, were drawings in crayon: a house, cream, with a brown roof, three floors, and two small figures at a window, and a pawpaw tree. Tunde showed Pa Alade the kitchen and explained, unasked, that he had fixed the tap himself and had kept the receipt for the washer. Pa Alade said gravely that he was glad to hear it.

"Mrs. Ogunleye," said Pa Alade, on the landing. "The top floor."

Femi had the key on a ring with about twenty others. He found it without looking. He went up the last flight of the outside stair in front of us and unlocked the door at the top and pushed it open, and then he stood aside on the landing and did not go in.

I went in first. That was not planned. Bayo was behind me, and Pa Alade with his stick, and the rest, but I was first.

It was very bright. The windows were gray with dust, but there were so many of them, on three sides, and the light came through the dust soft and pale and filled the empty rooms like water fills a bowl. There was no furniture. The floor was tiled in the cream tiles with the small brown pattern at the corners that I had chosen from a photograph in 2021 on my phone in the staff room on a break, and they were clean, swept, every one. The walls were painted. The light switches were in, and the sockets, and the ceiling fans hung still in every room, their blades new and white. The kitchen had a sink and cupboards with no doors on yet. The bathroom had a white tiled shower and a basin and a mirror with dust on it. It smelled of new paint and dust and closed-up heat, and nobody had ever lived in it.

At the far end of the main room there was a glass door, and beyond it a balcony.

There had been no balcony in the plans. I knew the plans. I had them in file number two. Three floors, a flat roof at the top, a parapet. No balcony. I walked across the cream tiles toward it with everybody behind me, and pushed open the glass door, which stuck a little in its frame, and stepped out.

It was small. Two people could sit there, with a little table. It had a low wall in front, plastered and painted cream, and it faced east, over the estate wall, over the roofs of Akobo, toward a line of low hills gray in the harmattan where the sun was still climbing.

"Femi," I said.

He was in the doorway behind me. Everybody else had stopped in the room.

"You said it on the telephone," said Femi. "In 2015. I was telling you about the roof, and you said, Femi, when I come home I want to sit outside in the morning and drink my tea and watch the sun come up, like my mother did in Oke-Ado. You said it once. You were laughing. You do not remember."

I did not remember.

"It was not in the money," said Femi. "It was not in the receipts. I paid Mr. Lasisi for it myself. Two weeks' work. I thought—" He stopped. "I thought you would come and see it."

Down at the gate, the woman under the mango tree was lifting a batch of puff-puff from the pan, golden, and shaking them onto a tray, and the smell of them came up to the balcony through the dust, sweet and hot. Baba Ibeji's radio was playing somebody singing. The twins had escaped from their mother and were running round the pawpaw tree.

Pa Alade came to the glass door with his stick and looked out over my shoulder at the view. He took his time over it. Then he turned back to the empty, swept, finished rooms.

"Mr. Adeyemi," he said. "How long has this floor been ready?"

"Since March of 2025, sir."

"And nobody has lived here."

"No, sir. I kept it."

"For whom?"

Femi looked at me. "For them, sir," he said. "For when they came."

Mrs. Fadipe, behind Pa Alade, had stopped knitting. Her needles hung still in her hands with the yellow wool between them.

"We will go down now," said Pa Alade, "and we will have puff-puff, because I am old and I am hungry. And then we will go back to court."

Night Buses

It was Zara's idea. She was fourteen and in the habit of having ideas on the video call at nine in the evening London time, which was ten in Ibadan, when the Small One had been running for three hours and was beginning to sound tired.

"Grandpa," she said. "You have to tell me the bus stories properly. Not for school," she added quickly, because her mother was in the background. "For me. I want to keep them."

"Which stories?"

"All of them. The one about the man who proposed on Vauxhall Bridge. The one about the snow. The one about the fox that got on at Peckham Rye and rode to the Oval. Mum says you told it at her wedding and nobody believed you."

"It is a true story," said Bayo, with great dignity. "The fox paid nothing."

"So tell it. Grandma can hold the phone."

So I held the phone. We did it in the spare room, Bayo propped on the bed against the wall, legs stretched under the mosquito net, which he had refused to untie, so that he looked like a man being interviewed inside a cloud, and me on the chair by the window with the phone propped against the scanner, and Zara's face very small in the corner of the screen with her chin on her hands. Before we started, she said, very seriously, in the voice she uses for her own important things, "Grandpa, is it all right if I keep this? With your name on it? Like, Adebayo Ogunleye, told in Ibadan, January?"

"Who else's name would it have?"

"Just checking," said Zara. "You have to say yes."

"Yes," said Bayo. "Yes, yes. Adebayo Ogunleye, the 36, Queen's Park to New Cross Gate. Write that."

He told the fox first. It took twenty minutes, because a fox story told by my husband has a great deal of route in it, and he could not get the fox from Peckham Rye to the Oval without describing every stop and who got on and off at each one and what the weather was doing. A fox got on, in the story, at a quarter past three on a February morning in 2001, through the middle doors, which had opened for a man in a hospital porter's uniform, and sat under the seats at the back, and nobody noticed it until Camberwell Green, when a woman in a fur hat screamed, and the fox looked at her fur hat with what Bayo described as professional interest. He did not stop the bus. He said a fox was a passenger like anybody else, as long as it behaved itself, and it did. At the Oval the doors opened and the fox got off and trotted away down the Harleyford Road and turned left. "Left," said Bayo. "Toward the river. Like a man who knew where he was going."

Zara laughed until she was lying across the table. Behind her, in the kitchen in Croydon, I could see Tolu leaning against the fridge with his arms folded, listening, and his face had gone soft in a way I had not seen in a long time.

Then he told the snow, and the proposal on Vauxhall Bridge, and the night in 1999 when a man got on at Victoria at two in the morning carrying a whole wedding cake in a box and sat on the top deck with it on his knees, and would not say why, and got off at Peckham, and Bayo never saw him again and had wondered for twenty-seven years. He told the Christmas of 2008. He told about the first winter, in 1993, when he was a cleaner at the garage before he got his license, and the cold came through his one coat as if it were paper, and he walked home every night down Rye Lane past the butcher's and the fabric shops with their bolts of wax print in the windows, all those colors from home in the gray street, and thought he would die of it, the cold, and did not.

"Grandpa," said Zara, when he stopped, "why did you stay, then? If it was so cold?"

Bayo looked at me through the mosquito net. "Because your grandmother had a good job," he said. "And because of the house."

"What house?"

"The house in Akobo, Zara. The one in the photographs. Every winter, I said, one more winter, and that is a window. One more, and there is the front door."

Zara was quiet. "Oh," she said. "I thought that was just a house."

When the call ended I saved the recording into the family folder, beside the receipts, and named it the way Zara had asked: Adebayo Ogunleye, told in Ibadan, January, the 36. There were three files by then. The receipts. The wall photographs. And now this, an old man's voice telling a story about a fox. I thought they belonged together. I could not have explained why.

It was the next evening that Kemi sent the tickets.

She did not send them to me. She sent them to Bayo, on his phone, which he looks at twice a day, and I found him sitting on the veranda at seven holding the phone, its screen still lit, and the Small One coughing in the passage, and the mosquitoes coming up off the gutter in the dusk like smoke.

"What is it?"

He held it out. Two tickets. Lagos to Heathrow. The twentieth of February. One way. Paid.

"She has paid for them," said Bayo.

"I can see that."

"She says it is a gift. She says, Daddy, if you win, you can sell the house and come back. If you lose, you come back anyway. She says Kola from the garage has found the flat in Nunhead. She says it has a garden."

"Bayo."

"A small garden. For tomatoes."

"Bayo, we are not going back to London."

He put the phone face down on his knee. The sun had gone and the sky over the mango trees was a deep dusty orange fading to gray, and on the other side of the road the neighbor's girl was sweeping the front yard with a short broom made of palm ribs, bent double, swish, swish, in long patient arcs, and the dust she lifted hung in the last light.

"Why not?" said Bayo.

I had not expected him to say it. I sat down on the bench beside him.

"Because we have a house," I said.

"We have a house with a hair salon in it and two teachers and their children, Sade. We have a house that my sister's son built with his hands while we sent paper. We have a court case against my own nephew. My sister will not look at me. She has worn two geles to court and she has not looked at me once." He was not shouting. Bayo does not shout. His voice was low and very tired. "On Saturday at the amala joint Teacher asked me what I am going to do with my days. And I did not know. Sade, in London I knew. I got up at four, I went to the garage, I drove the route. Every day of my life for twenty-six years, I knew where I was going. Here I do not know where the buses go. I do not know the prices. I do not know which of my friends is dead until somebody tells me. I am a stranger. In my own town."

"You were not a stranger on Mapo Hill."

"On Mapo Hill I was twenty-three," he said.

A generator started across the road, and then another one further down, and then Abike's Small One in the passage, which had cut out and been restarted by the kitchen girl, and the three of them together made a low uneven chord that filled the street.

"Do you remember what you said to me," I said, "on Mapo Hill. When you asked me what if we lose, and then you said you did not mean the law."

"I remember."

"What did you mean?"

He did not answer for a time. The girl with the broom had finished and gone in. A motorcycle went by with no light on, the rider a dark shape against the darker road.

"I meant Moji," he said at last. "And Femi. I meant, what if we win the house and lose them. What if we come home after thirty-three years and the only thing we have is the walls." He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the phone. "In London at least nobody was angry with me."

I took the phone from him. I studied the two tickets. Then I slid it into the pocket of my wrapper.

"I will talk to Kemi," I said.

"And say what?"

"That she has her father's habit of buying things nobody asked for. That she can get a refund within twenty-four hours if she is quick."

He laughed. It was a small laugh, and tired, but it was one.

That night I could not sleep, again. The Small One stopped at midnight and the house went dark, and the other generators hummed on up and down Bodija, one deep, one high, one with a rattle in it like a loose part, a whole night choir of them. Under them, if you listened, were the smaller sounds: a baby crying two houses down and being hushed, a radio left on low somewhere giving the football from England, a man coughing on a veranda, the night watchman across the road knocking his stick against the gate every hour so that the owners would know he was awake. In Peckham the night had been the 36 under the window and a siren on the Old Kent Road and the foxes screaming in the bins like quarreling babies. I had slept through all of that for thirty-three years. Here I lay awake through generators. I lay under the net and listened to them and thought about the balcony. About Femi standing in the doorway behind me saying, You said it once, you were laughing, you do not remember. About a young man asleep on sixty bags of cement with a lamp.

At about two I went through to the kitchen for water, and found Renike there.

She was sitting at her grandmother's kitchen table in the light of a rechargeable lamp, in an old T-shirt and wrapper, with her laptop open and a mug of cold tea and her white binder beside her, and she was not working. She was looking at a letter on the screen. She jumped when I came in.

"Ma. Sorry. I could not sleep."

"Neither could I. What is that?"

She hesitated, then turned the laptop round. It was a letter from King's College London. An offer. A master's degree in law. September.

"King's," I said. "My hospital was King's. Not the same King's. But near."

"I know. Grandma told me." She turned the laptop back. "I have been waiting for it for a year. It came last week. I have not told anybody. Not even her."

"Why not?"

Renike looked at her binder, at the white cover with OGUNLEYE: EXHIBITS on it in her careful round hand. "Because I am sitting in your case," she said, "every week, watching what happens when people go to London for thirty years, and I am thinking, Renike, is this what you want? To go and come back and find the house full of other people?"

I sat down across from her. I took a sip of her cold tea, which was terrible, too much sugar.

"Go," I said.

She looked at me.

"Go to King's," I said. "It is very cold. Buy a proper coat, not a fashionable one. Take the 36 over Vauxhall Bridge at night once, and look at the river. And when you go, tell your grandmother where you keep your receipts."

She laughed, startled into it, and pressed her knuckles to her eyes, and when she took it away she looked about twelve.

"Ma," she said, "who carried the blocks?"

"I am beginning," I said, "to find out."

The Cousins

Word had gone round. I do not know how. In London, news travels by telephone and takes a week; in Ibadan it travels by a method I have never understood, something to do with markets and motorcycles and women on verandas, and it arrives before you have finished telling it. By the end of January everybody who had ever been related to the Ogunleyes or the Adeyemis, or had been to school with one of them, or had sold one of them a goat, knew that the case of the house in Akobo was coming up again on the twenty-ninth, and that the court had been to see the house, and that there was a balcony.

So on the twenty-ninth they came.

When Renike and Bayo and I climbed the concrete stairs past the bucket shop at a quarter to nine, the corridor outside the court room was already full. There were people on the bench and people standing and people sitting on the stairs. There were old men in agbada and old women in wrappers with their geles tied for an outing, and middle-aged men in shirts and ties who had taken the morning off work, and young women with babies, and a boy of about twelve selling sachets of water from a bucket, who had perhaps come on his own initiative. The noise was tremendous. When they saw Bayo they surged toward him.

"Bayo! Bayo! Adebayo Ogunleye!"

"Brother!"

"Uncle!"

A large man in a blue kaftan seized him in a hug that lifted him off his feet. "Bayo! It is Dele! Your cousin Dele! From Ogbomoso!"

Bayo, in the air, looked at me over the man's shoulder with an expression of total blankness.

"Dele," he said, when he was put down. "Of course. Dele."

"You do not remember me," said Dele, delighted. "I was this high." He held his hand at the level of his own belt. "You gave me a sweet in 1979."

A small woman in purple took my arm on the other side. "Sade! I am Yemisi. You remember Yemisi. Moji's husband's brother's wife. I came to your wedding. I wore green." She leaned closer. "I have come to speak for you."

"Thank you," I said. "Speak about what?"

"About the house! About how Bayo always said he was building it for his old age. He said it at my husband's sixtieth. In 2011. Everybody heard. I have come to say so."

"But Mama Yemisi," said a man behind her, "I have come to speak for Femi. He told me in 2018 that his uncle said, Femi, the house is yours to look after. Yours. I heard it with my own ears."

"You were not there!"

"I was there! I was holding the phone!"

Pa Alade came up the stairs at ten past ten with his stick and his groundnuts, and the corridor parted for him like water. He looked at the crowd without expression. Inside the court room, every bench was full. People stood along the walls under the high windows. The heat was already terrible, and the fan ticked over our heads, moving nothing. Mrs. Fadipe took her seat and looked at the crowd and put her knitting away in her bag, which I had not seen her do before. Mr. Ige looked at the back wall, which was now covered with standing relatives.

Mr. Oyelaran, the clerk, was awake. He looked frightened.

"Who," said Pa Alade, into the noise, and the noise stopped, "are all these people?"

Femi stood. He was at the end of the front bench on the other side of the aisle, with Moji, and he looked as if he had not slept. "Sir," he said. "They are the family."

"Whose family?"

"Both, sir."

"Did you call them?"

"No, sir. They came."

Pa Alade took off his spectacles and looked at the crowded benches for a long time. Then he put them on again. "Very well," he said. "I asked for the family. I did not ask for all of it at once, but this is Ibadan. Let them speak. But they will speak one at a time, and they will tell me first who they are."

That was the mistake.

The first man who stood said he was Bayo's cousin. Then a woman stood and said he was not Bayo's cousin, he was Bayo's father's cousin's son, which was different, which made him a second something, and he said it was the same thing, and she said it was not the same at all, her grandmother had been very clear about it. Dele from Ogbomoso stood up and said he was Bayo's first cousin on the mother's side and that there was nobody in the room closer except Moji, and an old man at the back said Dele's mother had married into the family in 1960 and was therefore not on the mother's side at all, she was on the side of the mother's brother's wife, and Dele said that was the mother's side, and the old man said it was the mother's brother's side, and Mrs. Fadipe said, "Please," quite loudly, and Pa Alade put his head in his hand.

Then Mama Yemisi stood and said what Bayo had said at her husband's sixtieth, and the man who had held the phone in 2018 stood and said what Femi had told him, and a third woman stood and said that both of them were liars and that she had been there on both occasions and what Bayo had actually said was something about a goat. A young man said Femi had promised his daughter the ground floor for a shop before Iya Toyin came. Iya Toyin, who was standing against the side wall with her arms folded, said something short and sharp, and the young man sat down.

It went on for forty minutes. I have seen a great many family meetings, on wards, when a patient is very ill and the relatives arrive from all over the country and stand round the bed and argue about who should sign the form. This was worse. This was every family meeting I had ever seen, in one room, at once, with a fan that did not work.

At eleven o'clock Pa Alade said, "Stop."

Everybody stopped.

"I have been the president of this court for nineteen years," he said, "and before that I taught geography for thirty-four. I have never been so confused about where anybody is." He looked at Renike. "Miss Bello. You are a lawyer. Can you tell me who these people are?"

Renike stood. I saw her look at me, and I nodded.

"Sir," she said. "My client's daughter, in London, has been keeping a family tree. With both families on it. The Ogunleyes and the Adeyemis. Other relatives have been adding to it since November, sir, when the case began. They put in their own names, and their parents, and who married whom. If the court will permit, I can show it."

Kemi had started it in the first week, after she had looked at the receipts. She had not told me. I had found it in the family folder one night in December when I was scanning 2017, a page I had not made, with her name at the bottom of it and Tolu's and the grandchildren's, and then mine and Bayo's above them, and Bayo's parents above us, and Moji beside Bayo, and Moji's husband beside Moji, and Femi below them. And then, week by week, more. Kemi had sent the page to Moji, quietly, through Tolu, who sends Moji money at the festivals and has her telephone number. And Moji had sent it to her husband's sisters. And her husband's sisters had sent it to their children. And now, at the end of January, there were a hundred and forty names on it, added by twenty-six different people in Ibadan and Ogbomoso and Lagos and Houston and Peckham, and under every one, in small letters, whoever had put it there.

Renike turned her laptop round on the table in front of Pa Alade and enlarged the screen.

Pa Alade looked. He put his spectacles further up his nose. Mrs. Fadipe leaned over from one side, and, after a moment, so did Mr. Ige from the other, which caused a murmur in the room. The three of them looked at the screen together for a long time.

"Mr. Dele Akande," said Pa Alade at last.

"Sir!" said Dele, rising.

"You are the son of the sister of Mr. Ogunleye's mother's brother's wife."

"Yes, sir!"

"That is not a first cousin."

"It is very close, sir."

"It is not a first cousin. Sit down." He scrolled. "Mrs. Yemisi Adeyemi. You are the wife of the brother of the late Mr. Adeyemi. Correct. Mr. Bolaji Ogunleye, at the back. You are not related to anybody in this case at all."

An old man at the back stood up in great indignation. "Sir, my grandfather and Bayo's grandfather—"

"Were friends," said Pa Alade, reading. "Your granddaughter has written here, Not related, Grandpa only says so. Very helpful. Sit down."

There was a roar of laughter from the benches. The old man sat down, muttering. Somebody patted his shoulder.

Pa Alade went on scrolling, slowly, through the branches. He was enjoying himself. I could see it. He was, after all, a geography teacher, and here at last was a map. He found everybody. He read out their places, one by one, and the room went quiet as he did it, because people wanted to hear where they were. When he got to a name he did not know he would look up and say, "Who is this?" and somebody would stand and say, "Sir, me," and he would nod and go on. Mrs. Fadipe found her own sister's husband on it, two branches over, and was so pleased that she took out her knitting again.

Then Pa Alade stopped.

"Mr. Tajudeen Adeyemi," he said. "Tailor. The late husband of Mrs. Mojisola Adeyemi. Father of the defendant." He looked at the screen. "Born 1953. Died the fourteenth of July 2014."

He looked up. He looked across the aisle at Moji, and then at Femi, and then, slowly, at Renike's white binder on the table, open at the blue tab for 2014, with its two receipts in January and February and then nothing until October.

"July 2014," he said. "Mrs. Adeyemi. That is the year the slab was poured on the second floor."

Moji stood up. She did not wait to be asked. Femi put out his hand to stop her, and she took his hand in hers and held it and did not let go, and she stood there in the hot, crowded, silent room in her blue gele with her son's hand held against her side.

"My husband was a tailor for forty years," she said. "He had four sewing machines. Good ones. Heavy ones, with the foot pedals. He had a shop in Oke-Ado, by the junction. Everybody in this room has worn a shirt he made." There was a murmur. Several people nodded. "When he died that July, it was raining. It rained every day. And the boards for the slab were up, and the money from London had stopped, and Lasisi had gone home to wait. And my son sold his father's four machines and the shop to pour that slab. Two weeks after we buried him. He sold them to a man from Ogbomoso for less than they were worth because the man knew we were in a hurry." She looked at Bayo. "He did not tell you. He told me not to tell you. He said, Mama, Uncle is paying for Tolu's school and Kemi's wedding, he cannot send, he will be ashamed. So I did not tell you. For twelve years. Brother."

The room was entirely silent. Even the road outside seemed to have stopped.

Bayo stood up. He looked at his sister across the aisle. He looked at Femi. He opened his mouth and nothing came out.

Pa Alade took a groundnut from the paper cone. He rubbed it between his finger and thumb until the red skin came off. He did not eat it. He put it down on the green cloth.

"Adjourned," he said quietly. "Two weeks. The family will go home." He looked at Renike's laptop, still open, the tree spread across the screen with its hundred and forty names. "Miss Bello. Please tell your client's daughter in London that this is the most useful document anybody has brought into my court in nineteen years."

"Yes, sir," said Renike.

"And tell Mr. Bolaji Ogunleye's granddaughter," said Pa Alade, "that she has a future in law."

Akara at Dawn

I went to Akobo at half past five in the morning, alone, in a motorcycle taxi, in the dark, which Abike told me afterward was the most foolish thing she had ever heard of a woman of sixty-eight doing, including a woman she had once nursed who tried to discharge herself through a window.

I had not planned it. I had woken at four, as I had woken at four most mornings since the cousins, with my heart going fast and the house dark and the Small One silent, and I had lain under the net and listened to Bayo breathing, and to the generators of Bodija thinning out one by one toward the morning as people's petrol ran out, and I had thought: Femi buys his breakfast at the gate. Bimpe had told me, at the salon, in the week before Christmas. Every morning at six, before work, akara and ogi from the woman under the mango tree. You could set a clock by him.

So I got up and dressed in the dark and went out to the end of the road, where there was always one motorcycle waiting, its rider asleep across the seat with his feet on the handlebars, and I woke him up.

The city at that hour was another city. The harmattan had begun to thin by then, in early February; there were mornings now when the haze was only a softness at the edges of things, and the sky over the roofs was a clear pale gray turning to pink in the east. It was cool. Properly cool, the only cool hour of the day, so that I was glad of the shawl over my shoulders and the rider's back in front of me broke the wind. The streets were almost empty. Here and there a woman was sweeping in front of a gate, swish, swish, in the half dark. A man was opening the shutters of a kiosk with a long hooked pole. On the Ring Road the lorries were already moving, slow and heavy, their headlights yellow in the dust. And everywhere, from every second house, from the corners and the junctions and the roadside tables, came the smell of frying: bean paste dropped in hot oil, palm oil, wood smoke, charcoal. The whole city was making breakfast.

At Palmgrove Gardens the gate was open and Baba Ibeji was asleep on his stool in his blanket with his radio silent on his knee. Under the mango tree at the corner of the wall, Iya Bunmi had her fire lit.

She was a young woman with a baby tied on her back, asleep, its cheek against her shoulder blade. Her brazier was a cut-down oil drum with charcoal glowing red at the bottom and a wide black pan on top, and in the pan the oil was moving, shivering, catching the firelight. Beside her on a low table was an enamel basin of akara batter, pale and thick and flecked with pepper and onion, and she was scooping it up with her fingers and dropping it into the oil in quick small lumps, one, two, three, four, so that each one hissed and spat and swelled and turned in the pan by itself and went from pale to gold to deep brown in the time it took her to drop the next. She fished them out with a slotted spoon into a sieve lined with newspaper, where they sat and steamed. Beside the brazier on the other side was a big covered pot of ogi, the corn pap, and a stack of plastic cups.

"Good morning, Ma," she said, without surprise, as if old women from London arrived at her stall every morning in the dark. "Akara?"

"Please. And ogi."

She gave me a cup of ogi, hot and smooth and very slightly sour, pale as wet sand, with a skin on the top that I broke with my lip, and six akara in a twist of newspaper, so hot I had to pass them from hand to hand. I sat on the bench by the wall under the mango tree, a plank on two blocks, and ate them one by one. They were crisp outside and soft and full of air in the middle, and the pepper bit, and the ogi was sour and sweet after it, and the smoke from the brazier went up through the dark leaves of the mango above me and I watched the sky over the estate wall going from gray to pink to a pale clear gold.

Femi came at six. I heard the motorcycle first. It stopped in the road and he got off in his work clothes, jeans and a shirt and boots with dried cement on them, and he said, "Iya Bunmi, the usual," and then he saw me.

He stood still in the road for a moment. The motorcycle went away.

"Auntie," he said.

"Sit," I said. "Iya Bunmi, his is on me."

He sat on the other end of the plank. Iya Bunmi gave him a cup of ogi and a twist of akara, ten of them, and he held them on his knee and did not eat.

"Did Uncle send you?"

"Your uncle is asleep in Bodija. He does not know I am here. Abike does not know I am here. Nobody knows I am here, except Iya Bunmi, and the man on the motorcycle, who was asleep."

He almost smiled. He took an akara and ate it in one bite, the way he had as a boy.

We sat. The baby on Iya Bunmi's back woke up and looked at us over her shoulder with enormous eyes and went back to sleep. The pan hissed. Somewhere inside the estate a radio came on, juju, very low.

"Why did you not tell us," I said. "About the machines."

He looked at his boots. "Because Uncle would have been ashamed," he said. "Because you were paying for Tolu. Because Kemi was getting married. Because—" He stopped. He drank some ogi. "Auntie, I was twenty-four. My father had just died. I was angry with everybody. With him, for dying in the rains. With you, for the money stopping. With myself, for not going to Ife. I thought, I will pour this slab with my father's machines, and I will never tell them, and one day they will come and stand in this house and they will not know that part of it is his. And that will be my revenge." He laughed, short. "Very good revenge. Nobody knew about it except me."

"And your mother."

"And my mother."

The sun came over the estate wall. It came in a rush, as it does here, low and red-gold through the last of the dust, and lit up the cream wall of the house behind us, and the window of wigs, and the pawpaw tree with its three fruit, now turning yellow at the bottom. The first floor curtains were still closed. On the top floor the gray windows caught the light and went gold.

"Then why did you rent it," I said. "If you were keeping it for us."

"I kept the top for you."

"Femi."

He put his cup down on the plank between us. "Because I owed money," he said plainly. "Auntie, the top floor. The tiles you chose. The fans. The wiring. The balcony. The watchman, two years when it was finished and nobody came. The money from London had finished with the roof, you remember, Uncle said that was the last, you would do the inside when you came. But if I left it with no inside, in two years it would be a shell. So I borrowed. From a man in Challenge, at a bad rate. I finished it. Then he wanted his money back. And the teachers needed a place, and Iya Toyin needed a shop, and I thought—" He spread his hands, that old gesture, bread and sweets. "I thought, they are not coming. Every year, next year. Next year. And there is a man in Challenge who is coming every month."

"How much do you owe him now?"

"Nothing," said Femi. "I paid him off from the rents. In June." He picked up his cup again. "And the rest I spent. That is true. I will not lie to the court. Some of it I spent on myself."

"On what?"

He did not answer at once. Iya Bunmi dropped a new handful of batter into the oil, and it roared, and she shook the pan.

"There is a woman," said Femi, to his boots. "Yewande. She is a nurse at UCH. On the children's ward." He glanced at me sideways. "She knows who you are. She says you are a famous woman in Peckham, Auntie, I have told her so much. We have been together four years. Her father says I cannot marry her until I have a place of my own. Not my mother's house. A place. So I have been saving. That is where some of the money went. Into a box. For the bride price and the place." He was quiet. "I thought, half of that house is mine. Uncle said it. On the telephone, in October 2014, when I told him the slab was poured. He said, Femi, this house is as much yours as mine. I remember it. I was standing on the slab when he said it. The concrete was still wet."

I closed my eyes. I could hear Bayo saying it. I could hear exactly the voice, the big warm careless voice he uses on the telephone, the voice of a man at the end of a long shift who is pleased and tired and wants to say something kind, and says it, and forgets it before he has put the phone down.

"He does not remember saying it," I said.

"I know."

"He would have meant it, when he said it."

"I know, Auntie." He finished the akara. "That is the trouble with Uncle. He always means it when he says it."

We sat. The sun was up. Baba Ibeji woke on his stool and switched on his radio, and a man began reading the news in a deep slow voice, and Baba Ibeji switched it off again in disgust and went back to sleep. Upstairs on the first floor a curtain opened, and I saw Bimpe at the window in a nightdress, and she saw me on the bench under the mango tree with her landlord, eating akara at sunrise, and her mouth fell open, and she closed the curtain again quickly.

"In your file," said Femi suddenly, "for 2014. What is there?"

"Two receipts. January and February. Then my notes. Tolu's fees. Kemi's wedding. Then nothing until October."

"Nothing."

"Empty pages," I said.

He nodded. He left it there. He did not need more. I had kept every receipt for twenty years. I had kept them in order and labeled and pasted and dated, and I had carried them through Heathrow in a suitcase that cost sixty-five pounds, and I had scanned them one by one at night under a mosquito net, and I had never once in twenty years turned to an empty page and asked what had happened in it. I had been so proud of the full pages.

"Femi," I said. "Bring Yewande to see me."

He looked at me.

"At Abike's. On Sunday. I would like to meet a nurse from UCH. I want to know whether they still make the juniors do the night drug round on their own. When I was a student at Eleiyele they made us do it at nineteen and I gave a man in bed four the wrong tablets and he slept for two days."

Femi laughed, properly this time, surprised. "Auntie, she will be frightened of you."

"Good," I said. "Then she has sense."

He stood up. He brushed the crumbs off his jeans. He looked down at me, and for a moment he was fourteen again, a skinny boy holding up a photograph of a red plot with a pegged string, saying, Auntie, look, this is where your house will be.

"I have to go to work," he said. "A site in Oluyole. They are pouring a slab today."

"Is it raining?"

"No, Auntie. It is February. It does not rain in February." He looked up at the clear gold sky. "Not yet."

He went to the road to find a motorcycle. Iya Bunmi had already wrapped another twist of akara and held it out to me without a word, and I paid her for it, and for his, and for mine, and for the next morning's too, because she would not take a tip.

Exhibit Forty-Seven

I found it on a Wednesday night, eight days before the next hearing, with the Small One running and the scanner warm on the chair and the files open around me on the bed.

I was not looking for it. I had finished scanning in January; all twenty years were in the family folder, in order, every receipt and every photograph, and Tolu had written underneath the last one, Mummy, this is mad, in a tone I chose to take as admiration. But after the morning at the akara stall I could not leave them alone. I kept going back. I kept opening the years and looking at the photographs again, not the receipts, the photographs, as if I had never seen them, as if there might be something in them I had missed. I did not know what. I think I was looking for the empty pages.

It was the slipper that did it. The toe of a rubber slipper, blue, in the bottom left corner of the very first picture, the bare plot with the pegged string, March 2004. I knew it by heart. I had seen it in October, in Abike's spare room, on the first night. I had always thought of it as a flaw, the way you think of a thumb over a lens. That night I enlarged it on the laptop until it filled the screen. A boy's foot in a cheap blue slipper with a broken strap, mended with wire, standing on red earth.

I opened 2005. The foundation trench. In the bottom of the frame, a shadow. A thin shadow with a raised arm, the arm holding the camera, falling across the red soil into the trench.

2006. The first blocks. In the corner, the same slippers. In the next picture, a boot.

I went through them all. I took a sheet of paper from Renike's pad and a pen, and I went through every photograph in twenty years, one by one, and I made a mark for each one where I could find him. A foot. A shadow. A slipper, and later boots, and in 2013, after he must have bought them, a pair of good black shoes with the dust on them. The edge of a sleeve. A reflection in a window pane, very small, of a young man holding up a phone. In one, in 2016, the north wall with its cracked plaster, the shadow was holding the camera with one hand and something else with the other, and when I enlarged it I saw that it was a trowel.

There were two hundred and six photographs in the twenty years. He was in a hundred and ninety-one of them.

The fifteen he was not in, I found when I sorted them, were from the months when somebody else had taken the picture: Mr. Lasisi, twice, with his big thumb over the corner; Moji, once, crooked; and twelve from the year 2011, when I remembered now that Femi had written to say his phone had been stolen at the site, and sent us pictures for a while from a borrowed one held by a boy who was too short to get the walls in.

And 2014. In October 2014 there was one photograph. The second-floor slab, poured, gray and finished, wet in places from the rain. In the bottom of the frame, the shadow of a man standing very still, both arms down. Not holding the camera. Somebody else was holding it. He was just standing there on the slab. In the shadow, round the arm, I could see the dark band of the cloth that men tie for mourning.

I sat on the bed with the laptop on my knees for a long time. The Small One coughed and caught. Bayo slept.

Then I woke him.

"Bayo. Look."

He put on his reading glasses under the mosquito net and looked. I showed him the slipper, and the shadow, and the boots, and the trowel, and the reflection, and the slab. I showed him the paper with the marks on it. A hundred and ninety-one. He looked at them all, without speaking, in the light of the screen, and when I got to the slab in October 2014 he took off his glasses and sat holding them in his lap, folding and unfolding the legs.

"I said it," he said, after a long time. "On the telephone. I do not remember it. But I said it."

"Yes."

"As much yours as mine." He put his glasses back on. "He was standing on the slab."

On the day of the hearing the harmattan had nearly gone. It was hot again, a heavy wet heat coming back up from the south, and the sky over the bucket shop was not white any more but pale blue with high thin clouds, and the court room was worse than ever. Somebody had opened all the high windows. The fan ticked. The cousins had not come back, or most of them had not; Dele from Ogbomoso was there on the end of a bench, and Mama Yemisi, and the old man who was not related to anybody, who seemed to have come out of loyalty. The Akinolas had come, both of them, in their school clothes, having arranged cover. Iya Toyin had closed the salon for the morning and sat at the back in a magnificent gele the color of a flame.

Renike had not wanted me to do it.

"Ma," she said, in the car. "You cannot. You are the plaintiff. You cannot bring evidence for the defendant. It is—I have never heard of it. It is not done."

"Is it forbidden?"

She opened her mouth and shut it. "In the High Court it would be very irregular."

"This is not the High Court. Abike says this is a court for settling."

"Ma—"

"Renike," I said. "You told me it was not a legal point. Who carried the blocks. You told me three times. You were right. It is not a legal point. So I am not going to make it a legal point. I am going to make it a photograph."

She looked at me in the mirror, and then she laughed, despite herself, and shook her head.

When Pa Alade came in and the clerk woke and said "Court!" and we stood, and the matter of Ogunleye against Adeyemi was called, I stood and stayed standing, and Renike, beside me, said, "Your Worship, if it please the court, my client has asked to address the court herself. On an exhibit."

"Which exhibit?"

Renike swallowed. "It is an exhibit for the defendant, sir."

Femi, across the aisle, looked up sharply. Moji turned on the bench. Mrs. Fadipe put down her knitting, which was now, unmistakably, a finished yellow cardigan with only the buttons to go.

Pa Alade looked at me over his spectacles for a long time. "Madam," he said. "In nineteen years nobody has done that."

"No, sir."

"Proceed. I am interested."

I had printed them. Renike had helped, at her firm, late at night, on the big printer: not all two hundred and six, but forty-seven, the clearest ones, one or two from every year, on good paper, laminated, because the court room was hot and paper sweats. I had put them in order in a plain blue folder, and on the front I had written FOR THE DEFENDANT, and underneath, in smaller letters, Photographs of the house at Palmgrove Gardens, 2004 to 2025, taken by Oluwafemi Adeyemi. I walked to the green cloth and laid them out in a row along the front of the table, one after another, all forty-seven, so that they stretched from one end to the other and Mr. Oyelaran had to move his files.

"Sir," I said. "These photographs are in my files. My husband's money paid for what is in them. I have the receipts. Your Worship has seen the receipts. But I did not take a single one of these pictures. I was in London. My nephew took them, every one, and sent them to me so that I could see my house going up. And in every picture, if you look—" I put my finger on the first, the blue slipper on the red earth. "There he is."

Pa Alade bent over the table. He looked at the slipper. Then at the next photograph, the shadow across the trench. Then the next. Mrs. Fadipe got up from her chair and came round the end of the table and bent over them too, with her spectacles on the end of her nose. And Mr. Ige, who had not moved from his chair in four hearings except to look at a family tree, stood up. The room made a sound. He walked slowly along the row of photographs from one end to the other, looking down at each one, hands clasped behind him, like a man walking along a line of graves looking for a name.

"There," said Mrs. Fadipe, pointing. "The boots. And there."

"The trowel," said Pa Alade.

"There is a reflection in this window," said Mr. Ige.

It was the first time anybody had heard his voice. It was very deep and very mild. The whole court turned to look at him. He did not seem to notice. He was bending over the photograph from 2019, the first-floor windows with their glass just in, and pointing at the small dark figure in the pane, holding up a phone.

When they got to October 2014, all three of them stopped.

Nobody had to explain. The shadow on the wet slab with its arms by its side, the dark band round the arm. Pa Alade stayed over it a long while. Then he turned across the aisle at Femi, who was sitting forward, elbows on knees, face turned away toward the high windows, very still.

"Mr. Adeyemi," said Pa Alade gently. "Is this you?"

Femi did not turn round. "Yes, sir."

"Who held the camera?"

"My mother, sir."

Moji, on the bench beside him, sat with her fan closed in her lap and both hands holding it.

"Madam," said Pa Alade to me. "Why have you brought this?"

I thought about it. I had thought about it all week and I still did not have a good answer, the kind a lawyer would have.

"Because my files are very good, sir," I said. "Everybody says so. And they are only half. I kept the money. He kept the house. I would like the court to have both halves."

Pa Alade sat back in his chair. He took a groundnut from the cone, looked at it, and put it back. Then he took off his spectacles, folded them, and set them on the green cloth beside the row of photographs.

"Mr. Ogunleye," he said. "Stand up."

Bayo stood.

"Did you say to your nephew, on the telephone, in October 2014, that this house was as much his as yours?"

Bayo looked across the aisle. Femi had turned round now.

"I do not remember it, sir," said Bayo. "But I said it. I know I said it. It is the kind of thing I say." He swallowed. "And I would like the court to know, sir. When I said it, I meant it."

Moji lifted her head. For the first time since October she looked at her brother. She kept looking.

"In this court," said Pa Alade, "I can give a verdict. I have the documents. The law is clear. Miss Bello has done her work very well and I could write it this afternoon." He looked down at the row of photographs. "But I am not going to. Not yet. You are going to go away, all of you, the family, and you are going to sit down in somebody's parlor and eat something and agree what is to happen to this house. Then you will come back here and tell me, and I will write that down instead. And if you cannot agree, I will write my verdict, and none of you will like it." He put his spectacles back on. "Four weeks."

He gathered up the forty-seven photographs himself, one by one, and squared them into a pile, and handed them not to me but to Mr. Oyelaran.

"Mark these," he said. "Exhibit Forty-Seven. For the defendant. Tendered by the plaintiff." He looked at me. "Madam, you would have made a very great clerk."

"You have said, sir."

"I am saying it again," said Pa Alade. "Adjourned."

The First Storm

The rain came back on the ninth of March, in the afternoon, and it came the way it always comes after the harmattan, as if it had been waiting behind a door.

All morning the heat had been building. It lay over Ibadan like a lid on a pot. By noon the sky had gone a thick yellowish gray, low and swollen, and the air was so heavy that it was an effort to move your arms through it, and the leaves on the mango trees hung down dead still, and the dogs lay flat in the shade with their tongues out and did not bark at anything. Even the hawkers had gone quiet. In the road outside Abike's gate a woman with a tray of oranges on her head had stopped under a tree and stood there, not calling, just waiting, like everybody else.

I was at the house in Akobo. Femi had asked me to come.

It was the first time he had asked me anything since the akara stall. He had brought Yewande to Abike's on the Sunday after, as I had asked, a tall quiet young woman with short natural hair and a nurse's way of looking at your hands before your face, and she had sat very straight on Abike's settee and answered all my questions about the night drug round at UCH, which was exactly as bad as it had been in 1977, and Abike had fed her until she could not stand up. Femi had sat in the corner and watched us with the face of a man watching two lorries approach each other on a narrow road. When they left, Yewande had shaken my hand on the veranda and said, very low, "Ma. Thank you for the photographs," and I had understood that Femi had told her.

And then on the Thursday he had telephoned and said, "Auntie. The top floor. Will you come and tell me what furniture." And then, after a pause, "Uncle too. If he wants."

Bayo wanted. He had pretended not to, for an hour, and then he had put on his good shoes.

So we were there, the three of us, on the top floor, in the bright empty rooms with the cream tiles, when the storm came. Femi had a tape measure and a notebook. I had my own ideas. Bayo had an opinion about where the bed should go, which was by the east window, so that the sun would wake him, which I said was the last thing either of us needed after forty-four years of getting up at four, and he said that was exactly why, he wanted to be woken by something other than an alarm, and Femi wrote it down without comment. We had got as far as the kitchen and the question of cupboard doors when the light changed.

It went green. I do not know how else to describe it. The light coming through the dusty windows went from yellow-gray to a strange deep greenish color, like the light under water, and then there was a gust of wind that came from nowhere and slammed the balcony door so hard the glass rattled in its frame. Through the window I saw the pawpaw tree by the gate bend nearly double, and the dust come up off the red road in a great sheet and blow sideways, and a plastic bag go up into the air and keep going up, turning over and over, until it was out of sight.

"Here it comes," said Femi.

The first drops hit the windows like gravel thrown by a hand. Big drops, far apart, each one leaving a round clean mark in the harmattan dust on the glass. Then more. Then all of it, all at once, a roar on the roof sheets above us so loud that I could not hear Bayo, who was saying something two feet away. The windows went white with water. Down below I heard the twins shrieking with delight on the first floor, and Bimpe shouting, and doors banging, and from the salon, very faint under the roar, the radio still playing.

And the smell came up. If you have not smelled the first rain on Ibadan earth after four months of harmattan, I cannot tell you. It is the smell of the whole dry country drinking at once. Dust and heat and leaves and laterite turning to mud, sharp and sweet and green, coming up through the floor and in at every crack in the windows, so strong you could taste it. I stood in the middle of my empty kitchen and breathed it, and I was eleven years old on the veranda in Oke-Ado with the thread in my hair, and my mother was running out into the yard to bring in the washing.

"Auntie," said Femi. "Uncle. Look."

In the corner of the main room, where the east wall met the north, a dark stain was spreading across the ceiling. As we watched, a drop formed at the center of it, hung, and fell onto the cream tiles with a small flat sound. Then another.

Femi swore, quietly, in a way I chose not to hear. "The flashing," he said. "At the corner. I knew it. Lasisi's boy did that corner and I knew it, I said to him in 2024, that is not tight, and he said, Oga, it is tight. It is not tight." He was already moving. "There is a ladder downstairs. And sealant. Uncle, hold the ladder."

"In this?" I said. "You are going up on the roof in this?"

"If I wait until it stops, the ceiling will come down. It is plasterboard."

"Then I will go up," said Bayo.

We both looked at him.

"I will hold the ladder," said Bayo, more reasonably, after a moment.

I will not describe all of it, because some of it I could not watch. There was a fixed iron ladder on the outside at the back of the house, going from the top-floor landing up to the flat part of the roof where the water tank stood, and Femi went up it in the rain with a tin of sealant in one hand and a short trowel in his teeth. Bayo stood at the bottom of it on the landing in his good shoes and his good trousers with both hands on the rails and his face turned up into the rain, shouting instructions that Femi could not possibly hear. Left. More left. Mind the edge. Mind your feet. Femi, there is a sheet loose by the tank. Femi. Then, when the sealant tin slipped from Femi's hand and came rolling down the slope of the roof sheets toward the gutter, Bayo let go of the ladder, which he had told me in the strongest terms he would not do under any circumstances, took two steps along the landing rail and caught it, one-handed, at full stretch, like the young man who had caught the 36 at a run on the Harrow Road for twenty-six years.

He passed it back up. Femi took it. They looked at each other, through the rain, the nephew on the roof and the uncle on the landing, both of them soaked to the skin, and Femi said something that I did not hear, and Bayo laughed.

I stood in the doorway of the top floor with a plastic bucket under the drip and watched them. The rain came off the edge of the roof in a solid sheet and fell past me into the yard, where the red road had already turned to a river of mud, red and fast and running, carrying leaves and plastic and a single rubber slipper, blue, which went past the gate and away down toward the main road and I did not see it again.

It took them forty minutes. When they came in they were as wet as if they had been swimming. Bayo's good shoes were ruined. Femi had a cut on his palm from the edge of a roof sheet that he had not noticed until I took his hand and turned the palm up to the light, the old way, under the window. It was not deep. I cleaned it with water from the bucket and wrapped it in the handkerchief from Bayo's breast pocket, which was also wet.

The drip had stopped.

"It is tight now," said Femi.

"Lasisi's boy," said Bayo, shaking his head, dripping. "In London they would have sacked him."

"In London," said Femi, "they would not have let you hold the ladder."

The family meeting was at Moji's on the Saturday. Pa Alade had said somebody's parlor, and Moji had said, without being asked, that it would be hers, and that she would cook, and that if anybody brought food she would throw it in the gutter.

Her house was in Oke-Ado, ten minutes' walk from the court and the bucket shop, an old bungalow on a lane of old bungalows, with a veranda and a parlor at the front full of heavy furniture with lace covers on the arms and photographs on every wall. I had sat in that parlor in 1990 and held Femi when he was nine days old. The photographs were the same. Moji's wedding. Bayo and me at ours, very young and very stiff, me in a gele as high as a hat. Femi in his school uniform. And over the door, in a frame, a photograph I had never seen: a man of about sixty at a sewing machine in a small bright shop, a measuring tape round his neck, looking up at the camera with a pin in his mouth.

"Tajudeen," said Moji, seeing me look. "In the shop. 2012."

The meeting was the five of us: Bayo, me, Moji, Femi, and Renike, who had said she would come only as a friend of the family and then had brought her white binder and a fresh pad of paper and three colored pens. Abike had wanted to come and had been refused by everybody. Yewande was in the kitchen helping Moji and kept coming to the door to listen and being sent back.

Moji had made amala, a great smooth brown hill of it in a covered bowl, and gbegiri, yellow and thick, and ewedu, and a stew so red and rich with pepper that it shone, and she brought it all out on trays and laid it out on the low table and stood over us until we had washed our hands and started. Outside the rain had come back, softly, a steady gray patter on the iron roof, and the parlor was dim and warm and smelled of the food and the rain and the lavender polish on the furniture. On the radio in the kitchen a man was singing juju, his voice going up and down over the guitars, and Yewande was humming along as she washed the pots.

I will not describe the meeting either, not all of it. It took four hours. It took two pots of tea and a second hill of amala. There was a point, around the third hour, when Bayo and Moji stopped speaking about the house altogether and began speaking about a radio their mother had bought in 1974 and which of them had broken it, and there was a point after that when Moji cried and a point after that when Bayo did, and Femi went out on the veranda for a while and stood in the rain. But Renike wrote. She sat at the end of the settee with her pad on her knee and wrote everything down in her careful round hand, in three colors, and every time somebody agreed to something she read it back to them and made them say yes. By the end of the evening there were two pages.

The house would stay in our names. Mine and Bayo's. That was the law, and Femi did not argue it.

We would live on the top floor.

The Akinolas would stay on the first floor, for as long as they wanted, at the rent they were paying now.

Iya Toyin's salon would stay on the ground floor.

Femi would manage the building. He would collect the rents and pay the watchman and fix the roof when Lasisi's boy's corners were not tight, and he would be paid for it, every month, from the first-floor rent.

And the ground floor, the salon, its rent, and in time the floor itself, would be Femi's. For the slab. For the machines.

When Renike read the last part back, Moji got up and went out of the room. She came back a few minutes later with a damp face and a fresh pot of tea and said nothing about it, and poured for everybody, and sat down beside her brother on the settee.

"Yes," said Bayo.

"Yes," said Femi.

"Yes," said Moji.

They all looked at me.

I looked at the photograph over the door, at the man with the pin in his mouth. Then I looked at my husband, who was sitting beside his sister with gbegiri on his sleeve and his ruined shoes still wet from the roof, and who had not been homesick for Peckham, as far as I could tell, for three days.

"Yes," I said.

Terms of Settlement

The last hearing was on the second of April, in the full wet heat of the early rains. It had rained in the night and stopped at dawn, and the road outside the bucket shop was red mud again from one side to the other, as it had been in October when we came, with the motorcycles slithering through it and spraying it up the walls. The bucket man had brought his buckets inside. The concrete stairs were printed all the way up with red footprints, hundreds of them, going up and coming down, as if the whole of Oke-Ado had climbed to the court and back in the night.

Renike picked us up at eight. She had not slept, she said, because she had read the two pages from Moji's parlor so many times in the last three weeks that she could recite them, and she had typed them up properly in the language a court likes, which made them six pages, and then she had worried all night that the six pages said something the two did not. She was wearing a new suit, dark green, and her braided bun, and she had a slim new folder in place of the fat white binder, which she said she had retired.

"Retired," said Bayo. "Like us."

"It has done its work, sir."

"Then it will need a house," said Bayo. "I know a top floor."

In the corridor outside the court room the family had come again, but fewer of them this time, and quieter, as people are quieter at the end of a thing than at the start. Dele from Ogbomoso was there, and Mama Yemisi, and the old man who was related to nobody, who shook Bayo's hand with great solemnity and said, "Congratulations, cousin," and Bayo said, "Thank you, cousin," and neither of them smiled. Moji was there in a gele of plain white, the first plain thing I had seen her wear in six months, and Femi beside her, and Yewande beside Femi, holding his hand. The Akinolas had come with the twins, who had been allowed out of school for the morning for what Bimpe called educational purposes, and who were standing at the top of the stairs looking at the red footprints as though they were a puzzle. Iya Toyin had closed the salon again. She wore a dark blue adire wrapper and blouse and a gele the size of a small umbrella, and she nodded to me across the corridor, once, as one professional to another.

I had not told anybody what I had found the night before. Kemi had asked, in March, whether Femi could have his own way into the family folder, and I had said yes, and she had sent it to him. Last night, scanning nothing, only looking, I had opened the house's timeline, the long line of years I had built from the receipts, and found that the empty months of 2014 were empty no longer. Under July, in the plain short words of his messages, he had written: Slab poured, second floor. Paid by Baba's four machines. Under it, a photograph of the machines in the shop in Oke-Ado, shining, with the morning coming in through the door. Added by Femi Adeyemi.

Inside, the fan had been mended.

That was the first thing I noticed. It was going round, the same slow old fan, but the bent blade had been straightened, or replaced, and it no longer ticked. It went round with a soft, even whisper, and moved the hot air from one part of the room to another, still without improving it anywhere, but silently. I found that I missed the tick.

"Who mended it?" I whispered to Renike.

"I do not know, Ma."

At the back of the room, on the last bench, Femi was looking very carefully at the ceiling.

Mr. Oyelaran was awake. That was the second thing. He was not merely awake; he was sitting upright at his desk in a fresh white shirt, with his files squared and his pen in his hand instead of behind his ear, and he looked, alert, for once in my acquaintance with him, as if he had been saving himself up for something.

Pa Alade came in at ten o'clock. Not a quarter past; ten. He carried his groundnuts and his stick and a small parcel wrapped in brown paper, which he set down on the green cloth beside the groundnuts. Mrs. Fadipe came in behind him without her knitting. Mr. Ige came in last and sat and looked at the back wall, and then, after a moment, looked at the twins, who looked back at him.

"Court," said Mr. Oyelaran, and we stood.

"Ogunleye against Adeyemi," said Pa Alade. "Miss Bello. I understand the family has agreed."

"Yes, sir."

"Then we will hear the terms. Mr. Oyelaran will read them into the record."

Renike handed her six pages to the clerk, and Mr. Oyelaran stood up, and cleared his throat, and began to read.

He had a beautiful voice. I would never have guessed it. He had a deep, unhurried, carrying voice, the voice of a man who might once have read the news, and he read Renike's six pages of court language as though they were a story, and in his voice they were. The parties to this matter, he read. Mr. Adebayo Ogunleye and Mrs. Folasade Ogunleye, of Palmgrove Gardens, Akobo, formerly of Peckham, London. Mr. Oluwafemi Adeyemi, of Oke-Ado. Having agreed before their family as follows. That the property at Palmgrove Gardens shall remain in the names of Mr. and Mrs. Ogunleye. That Mr. and Mrs. Ogunleye shall occupy the top floor as their residence. That Mr. and Mrs. Babatunde Akinola and their children shall remain as tenants of the first floor at their present rent, and that the advance rent already paid by them to Mr. Adeyemi shall be honored in full. That Mrs. Toyin Alabi, trading as Top Notch Hair, shall remain the tenant of the ground floor. That Mr. Adeyemi shall manage the property on behalf of the owners, for a monthly fee. That the rent of the ground floor shall from this day be paid to Mr. Adeyemi, and that the ground floor shall pass to him, in recognition of his labor on the building over twenty years, and of the second-floor slab poured in July 2014 at his own expense and from the sale of the late Mr. Tajudeen Adeyemi's tailoring machines.

He paused there. He did not need to, for the sense. But he paused, and the room was very quiet, and at the back I heard Moji draw a breath.

Then he read the rest: the signatures, the witnesses, the date. He sat down.

Bimpe Akinola was crying, quietly, into a handkerchief. Tunde had his arm around her. Dami, beside them, looked up at her mother in alarm and then at me, and I made a small face at her, and she made one back.

"Mr. Ogunleye," said Pa Alade. "Do you agree to these terms?"

"I agree, sir."

"Mrs. Ogunleye?"

"I agree."

"Mr. Adeyemi?"

Femi stood. "I agree, sir."

"Then you will sign. Mr. Oyelaran."

The clerk brought the papers to the green cloth with three pens, and a fourth form on top, which he set before Bayo. Bayo picked up a pen. He bent to sign. And Pa Alade, without raising his voice, said, "Mr. Ogunleye. Read the title first."

Bayo stopped with the pen an inch above the paper. He read the title. He looked up at Pa Alade, then at the clerk, then at me.

"Form Nine," he said.

The room exploded. Mrs. Fadipe laughed so hard that she had to hold on to the edge of the table. Dele from Ogbomoso slapped his knee. Iya Toyin laughed out loud, a great rich shout, and the twins, who did not understand it, laughed because everybody else was laughing, and Mr. Ige, at the end of the dais, put his head down and his shoulders shook. Even Femi was laughing, helplessly, with his hand on Yewande's arm.

Mr. Oyelaran, who had put it there, looked at the ceiling with an expression of perfect innocence.

"I am old, Mr. Ogunleye," said Pa Alade, when the noise had died down. "I do not have many pleasures left. Mr. Oyelaran, take that away and give him the right one."

They signed. Bayo first, slowly, reading every page. Then me. Then Femi, who signed his name in a quick small hand, very neat, the hand I knew from twenty years of brown envelopes, Auntie, here are the walls. Then Renike as the one who had drawn it up, and Moji and Bayo's friend Teacher, who had come specially, as witnesses, and Mr. Oyelaran stamped every page with a round purple stamp, bang, bang, bang, and blew on the ink.

"It is settled," said Pa Alade. "This matter is closed."

Renike sat down very suddenly on the bench, as if her knees had gone.

"Miss Bello," said Pa Alade.

She stood up again at once. "Sir."

"I have been watching you since November," he said. "You were very well prepared. Your binder was excellent. Your laminating was excellent." There was a ripple of laughter. "And you did not win."

"No, sir."

"Nobody won," said Pa Alade. "I have had one family back in this room for thirty years over one verdict. Their grandchildren are still coming. I do not expect to see these people again." He looked at the family on the benches, the Ogunleyes and the Adeyemis, sitting mixed up together now, Moji beside Bayo, Dele beside Femi, the old man who was related to nobody beside Mama Yemisi, who was sharing her fan with him. "Unless they want to show me the balcony."

He reached for the small brown paper parcel on the green cloth, and handed it to Mrs. Fadipe, and Mrs. Fadipe stood up and came round the end of the table and down the step from the dais and walked to Renike with it.

"For you," she said. "From the court."

Renike looked at the parcel, then at Mrs. Fadipe, then at me. She unwrapped it. Inside was the yellow cardigan. Finished, with buttons, round wooden ones, every one sewn on.

"Your grandmother told me," said Mrs. Fadipe, "that you are going to London in September. To King's. To study." She folded her arms. "I am told it is very cold."

Renike held the cardigan against her chest, the same way Mr. Odunsi had held his block. She could not find a word.

"Buy a proper coat also," said Mrs. Fadipe. "That one is only for indoors."

"She has been knitting it since November," said Pa Alade. "In my court. During my hearings. I did not say anything. I thought it was for me." He took a groundnut from the cone, rubbed the skin off, and this time he ate it. "Adjourned. No. Closed. Go home, all of you. Go home."

We came down the red stairs into the bright wet morning. The mud on the road had begun to dry at the edges in the sun. A woman went by below with a tray of akara on her head, calling, and from across the road the man with recharge cards answered her, his voice going up at the end the way hers did, and she called back. Bayo stood on the bottom step and looked at the road and breathed, as if he had just come off a long route.

Femi came down behind us. He stopped on the step above Bayo, as he had stopped on that step in October.

"Uncle," he said. "When do you want to move?"

Bayo considered. "When is the light connected? On the top floor? You said there was an issue with the meter."

Femi looked at his boots.

"Femi," I said.

"There was never an issue with the meter, Auntie," said Femi. "I said that so you would not ask to go up."

Bayo stared at him. Then he began to laugh, a real laugh, from the bottom of his chest, the laugh from the bus garage and the amala joint, and he put his arm round his nephew's shoulders on the red stairs above the bucket shop.

"Saturday," said Bayo. "We move on Saturday. You will carry the files."

The Top Floor

We moved on the Saturday, as Bayo had said, and Femi carried the files.

There were not many other things to carry. We had come from London with five suitcases, and we had lived for five months in a borrowed room, and when Abike stood in the doorway of the spare room on Saturday morning and watched me fold the last wrapper into the last case, she said, "Is that all? Thirty-three years in England and that is all?" and I said, "The rest is in the folder," and she did not know what I meant and did not ask.

She cried a little, at the gate. So did I. Then she told me that if I did not come to Bodija market with her every Wednesday she would come to Akobo and drag me, and I said I would come, and she said the Small One would miss me, and I said the Small One had never liked me, and that was the end of it.

Rasaki drove us. That was Bayo's doing. Since the site visit in January he and Rasaki had been meeting on Tuesday afternoons on an empty stretch of road behind the Agodi gardens, where Bayo was teaching the young man to drive the white eighteen-seat bus, as Bayo put it, like a professional and not like a goat. Rasaki wanted his commercial license. He wanted, one day, to drive the long route to Lagos with a full load of passengers and arrive with all of them still speaking to him. Bayo had found this an entirely reasonable ambition and had taken it on as if it were a contract with the city. On the Tuesdays he came home to Abike's with dust to his knees and his voice hoarse from shouting about gears, happier than I had seen him since the night bus.

"Lower gear," said Bayo now, from the front seat, at the first bend. "Before the bend."

"Before the bend, sir," said Rasaki.

The road out to Akobo was red mud again, soft and slick from the night's rain, and the trees along it were green, all of them, washed clean of the harmattan as if somebody had gone along with a hose. The sky was very high and clear and blue with big white clouds sailing over it, the clouds of April, which pile up all morning and break in the late afternoon. The woman who sold bananas at the wooden table under the umbrella had her bananas yellow again, not pink. The smell of wet earth came in at the open windows.

Femi was waiting at the gate with Yewande and a small lorry he had borrowed from a site in Oluyole, which carried the things we had bought in the last week from the furniture makers on the Lagos road: a bed, a wardrobe, a table and four chairs, a settee with blue cushions, and for the balcony two low wooden chairs and a small round table, which Femi had made himself at the site in the evenings from offcuts of iroko and would not let me pay for. Baba Ibeji was asleep on his stool. Iya Bunmi had finished the morning's akara and gone, and the brazier under the mango tree was cold. Iya Toyin's door was open and the radio was playing, juju again, and she came out with her tape measure round her neck and looked at the furniture going up the stairs and said, "Is that settee for an old woman or a young one?" and I said, "For a tired one," and she nodded as if that settled it.

It took two hours. The twins helped, by which I mean they ran up and down the outside stair in front of everybody, carrying cushions, and dropped one of them over the rail into the yard, and ran down to get it, and ran up again. Tunde Akinola carried the table legs and explained to Femi, as he did it, a better way of fixing them to the top, which Femi accepted with good grace and ignored. Bimpe made jollof rice in her own kitchen on the first floor and sent it up in a covered pot at midday with a bowl of fried plantain, and we ate it standing in my new kitchen, which now had doors on its cupboards, out of the pot, because the plates were still in a box.

The fifth suitcase went up last. Femi carried it. He took it from the back of Rasaki's bus by the handle and nearly fell over, and set it down in the red mud and looked at it, and said, "Auntie. What is in this one? Stones?"

"You know what is in it."

He stood over it a little. Then he picked it up again with both arms, against his chest, the way Mr. Odunsi had carried his block, and went up the three flights of the outside stair with it, one step at a time, not stopping, and set it down on the cream tiles of the main room under the east window, where Bayo had already decided the bed would go.

"There," he said, breathing hard. "That is the last load."

"Not quite," said Bayo. He had been standing in the middle of the room, turning slowly round, looking at the walls. Now he went to the bag he had brought from London and had kept by him, shut, through all the months at Abike's, the one I had never asked about, and opened it and took out something wrapped in a towel and handed it to me.

It was a bus stop sign. A real one, a London bus stop flag, red circle on white, with the route number on a strip below it: 36. It was battered and scratched and one corner was bent.

"Where did you get this?"

"Peckham garage," said Bayo. "When they changed the stops on Rye Lane in 2019. They were throwing them out. I asked." He looked at it. "I was going to hang it at the gate. Like a joke. So that people would know where I came from."

I looked at it, and at him. "You cannot hang a sign at the gate, Bayo."

"Why not?"

"Because Iya Toyin has the only sign on this house, and she will kill you."

Femi laughed. Bayo looked at the sign a while longer and then he took it out onto the balcony and leaned it against the inside of the low wall, facing in, where nobody in the road could see it, only us. It stayed there.

At four the clouds broke, as April clouds do, and it rained for an hour, hard and warm, and we sat on the new settee with the blue cushions and listened to it on the roof, and the corner where Lasisi's boy had done the flashing stayed dry.

At six Tolu and Kemi called.

I held the phone up and walked them through every room, as I had walked through the empty rooms in January behind Pa Alade. The kitchen with its doors. The bedroom with the bed under the east window and the fifth suitcase beside it, still unpacked. The bathroom. The balcony, with the two iroko chairs and the round table and the wet low wall and, beyond it, the roofs of Akobo going away under the clearing sky toward the low green hills, and the light going gold at the edge of the clouds. I did not show them the bus stop sign. Bayo had asked me not to.

Kemi had the baby on her lap, awake, staring at the screen. Tolu had stopped eating his cereal with the spoon halfway up.

"Mummy," said Kemi at last. "It's beautiful."

"It is all right," I said. "The tiles are good. I chose them."

"Daddy," said Tolu. "Are you all right?"

Bayo leaned in to the phone over my shoulder. "I have a student," he said. "Rasaki. He is going to drive to Lagos."

"What?"

"I will explain in August," said Bayo. "When you come. Bring Zara. Bring Jide. Bring the baby. There is a room. I will teach Jide to drive a bus."

"Daddy, he's ten."

"Then he has time to learn properly," said Bayo.

Zara came on the call later, on her own, when the others had gone, and asked whether she could add the balcony to the family folder, and the bus stop sign, which her grandfather had shown her in secret. I said yes. She added them. Under the balcony she wrote, Grandma's tea place (not yet used). Under the sign she wrote, The 36 terminates here. Then she added a third thing, which I did not see until later: the recording of her grandfather telling the fox story, moved from where I had saved it and placed at the very end of the house's timeline, after the slab, after the roof, after the settlement, under the date of that day. Told in Ibadan. Top floor.

That night I did not sleep well, but not for the old reason. I slept the way you sleep in a new house, lightly, waking at every sound, learning them. The fan turning above the bed. Bayo breathing beside me, his hands folded. A generator next door, and another, and another, the same night choir as in Bodija but in different voices. A dog. The rain dripping off the roof edge long after it had stopped. Baba Ibeji's radio at the gate, very low, then silent. Below us, through the floor, one of the twins talking in his sleep, and Bimpe's voice answering him, and then nothing.

I woke at half past five and got up without waking Bayo, and put on my wrapper, and filled the kettle. The power was on. I stood in my own kitchen in the dark and listened to the kettle begin to tick and hiss, and made my tea in the cup I had brought from Peckham, the one with the chip, and carried it out through the glass door, which still stuck a little in its frame, onto the balcony.

It was cool, the best hour of the day. The sky over the hills to the east was gray going to pink, and the roofs of Akobo lay below me in the half dark, wet from the rain, rusted and new, brown and silver, going away in every direction until they faded into the morning haze toward the old city, where, too far to see, Mapo Hall stood on its hill above the rest of them. The air smelled of wet red earth and wood smoke. A cock crowed somewhere behind the estate wall, an hour late as usual. Another corrected him.

Then the hawkers started. First one voice, a woman's, far off on the main road, calling bread, her voice climbing on the last note. Then another, nearer, a man, calling something I could not make out, and the first woman answered him, and a third voice joined them from the other side of the estate, and they went on calling and answering across the roofs in the dawn, back and forth, as they had at Bodija and Dugbe and outside the bucket shop and on every morning of my childhood in Oke-Ado, a long conversation thrown over the heads of the sleeping city.

Below me, at the corner of the estate wall, under the mango tree, a match flared. Iya Bunmi was lighting her charcoal. I watched her bend over the brazier with the baby on her back, and blow, and the coals catch and glow red in the dark, and set the black pan over them, and pour in the oil. In a few minutes I heard it begin to shiver and hiss. Then she dropped in the first handful of batter, and it roared, and the smell came up to me on the cool air over the wet wall of the balcony, hot bean and pepper and palm oil and smoke, the smell of every morning in this city.

I sat down in one of Femi's iroko chairs with my tea in my lap and my feet on the cool tiles, and I watched the sun come up over the hills.