"What the City Owes"

A Saturday with nothing in it sounds like your own fridge.

I had gone four months without noticing a fridge. In Steve's flat the compressor lived under the generator, under the fan, under Steve. In my own kitchen it came on at eleven in the morning and ran the whole room, and I stood there with coffee I had made myself, in a house with the curtains open, listening to an appliance I paid for.

Then the phone. Funke, on a Saturday, which meant she wanted the office empty.

⁂

Her firm had moved two floors up since 2022 and taken the good silence with it. Reception carpet. Air conditioning that wasn't fighting anything. A young man at a desk who asked whether I wanted water in a tone that made refusing feel expensive.

ALADE was on the glass now, second name in the line. She used to share a printer.

"Sit," she said. "Don't congratulate me, it delays everything."

Routine business. The twins' outside-work clause, a feature request from a label in London, a producer agreement she wanted rewritten before I looked at it, which is how she prefers I look at things. She talked. I signed nothing. She had three folders on the desk in front of her and she went through two.

Then she pulled a page out of the third to show me a phrasing she liked, and I read four words of it upside down.

...recoupable against future earnings...

Ikeja GRA, 2022. Times New Roman on a letterhead somebody had designed in an afternoon. Every session at a studio the label owned, billed at a rate the label set, against earnings the label counted. I made eleven songs in eight months and each one made me poorer, and there was a Tuesday when I sat in the car park doing arithmetic on my phone and discovered that the cheapest available thing in my life was to stop. Not to fight. To stop. Sixty thousand naira a month to keep going, or nothing to go home.

They kept the eleven songs. I still hear one of them in supermarkets.

That was the third one. The first had marble and a view of a bridge, on Chevron Drive, and it took my name. This one only took the years.

"Nwoke."

"I'm here."

"You're upside-down-reading my documents." Funke turned the page the right way and slid it across. "It's a good clause. It's yours. Read it in your own orientation."

I read it. My fingers had started on my thigh. Index, middle, ring.

She let me finish, then squared the folder and set her pen across it.

"One more thing, off the clock." She looked at me the way she looks at a paragraph. "There's a catalogue I've been asked to look at, for a client I can't name. Zubby Sounds' publishing."

Nothing moved in my face. I have practice.

"It has ghosts in it," she said.

The AC hummed. Somewhere past the glass a printer began and finished a job.

"Ghosts."

"Names that don't sit right against dates. That's as far as I'll go."

"Say more."

"No." Not unkind. Just closed. "Half of what I'm looking at is a filing pattern, and a filing pattern is not evidence, it's a feeling with a spreadsheet. If it becomes something, it'll become something slowly." She capped the pen. "And it won't come from me first. It'll come from somebody with money who got tired."

"And if I told you---"

"Don't." She said it before I finished, which meant she already knew what I'd tell her, which meant she'd known for six years. "Not yet. When there's something to act on, I'll act on it. Today there's a clause and a Saturday."

She stood, and the meeting was over, and at the door she looked at me over the top of her glasses.

"You're doing well," she said. "Do it boringly."

⁂

Luísa came by at four with a bag of things for my kitchen I had not known were missing and would never have bought.

We ended up on the floor of the parlour with our backs against the new couch, because the couch was still too new to sit on properly, and I told her about the twins' first session with the London A&R---the one where Iago attempted pidgin at a British man and the British man agreed with everything.

She laughed at the right place. Then she went quiet at the wrong one.

"Say the last part again."

"Which part?"

"'The man was nodding like a dashboard Jesus.'" She was looking at the ceiling. "You said that on Wednesday. In the car, to Diogo. Same words, same pause before it."

"It's a good line."

"It's a very good line." She rolled her head sideways to look at me. "That's what I'm saying. You have a set. You open with the mother, you go to the geyser story, then Steve, then the dashboard one, and you close on something small about yourself so nobody notices you gave them nothing." The gold ring turned once and stopped. "Same order. Twice this week. I sat through both."

My thumb had gone up to my eyebrow. I brought it down and made a job for it, straightening the bag of kitchen things.

"That's a manager's ear."

"That's four years of watching artists do press." She said it without any edge at all, which was the problem. "Everybody has a set, Nwoke. I have one. Mine is: firm, warm, then a joke about my brothers, then the number I actually came to say." She looked back at the ceiling. "I only notice other people's because I'm working."

"And what did you notice?"

"That yours is very good." A pause. "And that I've never once heard track two."

I gave her something. I don't remember what. It arrived late, and this time she didn't turn her head to check.

⁂

She left at seven for a call with London.

I stood in my own doorway and listened to her heels go down my stairwell, and then the estate did its Saturday evening---a gate, a car, somebody's child being called in twice.

I went up and looked in the wardrobe for a while without taking anything out of it. Tomorrow was a house I had never seen, a table I had heard about for four months, and a man whose sons I had made money for. My hand went over my jaw twice and I let it, because there was nobody in the house to read it.

Then I laid out the linen shirt, the good one, and sat on the edge of my bed doing nothing at all.

The phone went at half past nine.

MAMA.

Tomorrow wear the blue.