"Hitmaker"

New money in Lagos has one sound, and it is the credit alert.

For three years my phone lived on silent, because nothing arriving deserved an announcement. That season I turned the sounds back on. The alert is two notes, a fifth apart---an ugly little interval, no composer would keep it. I have worked on a number-one record. No melody has ever done more for me.

The EP season ran on the click. Sessions at ten in the morning and ten at night, the twins in the booth until their voices filed complaints, Portuguese and English braiding tighter with every song. Outside work started finding me too, now that the first-refusal clause was dead---two placements for other artists, a feature to arrange, a rate that had stopped apologizing for itself. I ate at normal hours maybe twice a week.

I checked every credit before I checked any money. Spelled right, attached, where anyone could read it. Then the money.

⁂

Mama called on a Tuesday, ahead of the network as usual.

"NWOKE. I have collected the keys."

The New Haven house. Two bedrooms, her own gate, a mango tree she had already begun a relationship with. The seller had wanted a figure. Mama spent two weeks explaining to him that his house had been watching the gutter for ten years and should be humble, and removed eight hundred thousand from his mouth.

"And the meter," she said, and here her voice did something it does maybe once a year---it slowed down. "The meter is outside my own kitchen. It has my name on it. NKASIOBI UGWU. I went and read it myself this morning. Nothing to report. I read it anyway."

I looked out my window until my eyes behaved.

"Furnish it," I said. "I sent the transfer yesterday. Everything new. Bed, fridge, cooker, everything."

"New bed for what? My bed knows my back. You want me to start training a new bed at my age."

"The fridge, then."

"The fridge I have bought already." A pause with victory inside it. "The man opened his mouth to say a price. I closed it for him. By the end he was begging me to carry the fridge and go, Nwoke. Begging. His apprentice was watching him learn."

"And Uncle Cyprian?"

"Your uncle came to ask questions about the new house." Her tongue clucked, once, the sound of an incoming proverb. "I answered him in proverbs until he was tired."

Then I told her the other thing. That I had carried my mattress out of Steve's parlour at last. A place of my own, with a gate, and a meter waiting for somebody to one day read it.

A pause. Somewhere in Enugu, a chicken made an announcement.

"Good," she said. "Greet Steve. Tell him he has tried---not everybody can keep another woman's son alive on indomie for three months." And then, in the same breath, mid-instruction, no ceremony at all: "Egbe bere, ugo ebee. Let the kite perch, let the eagle perch. The one that says the other must not perch---its wing will break there. You hear me? Each of you on your own branch now. That is how friendship survives."

"Yes, Mama."

"Mm. Buy curtains. A house without curtains is a television for your neighbours."

She was gone before I finished laughing.

⁂

An empty duplex has terrible acoustics.

I walked through it on the first evening clapping once in every room, listening to the decay---hard slap off the tiles, a long ring in the stairwell, every space a bathroom until furniture teaches it manners. Two floors. A staircase of my own, going up to rooms of my own, and my clap coming back at me from every one of them, unimpressed.

Lekki Phase 1. Ten minutes from the studio, twelve from a kitchen table I used to own half of. I told myself the first number was the reason.

The rent was two million a year. The market wanted six. Between those figures sat one phone call Luísa made standing in the empty parlour on inspection day, ninety seconds, in Portuguese---I caught obrigada, and a man's name, and the tone she keeps for family friends. The agent, after that, called me sir and called her Luísa.

I paid the two million in one transfer and stood in the echo, and it did not feel like rent. It felt like a down payment on the man I was planning to be mistaken for.

She furnished it the way she loves, which is in confirmed delivery windows. Beds arrived on Thursday between ten and twelve---a real one, a bed that would never fold, with mattresses she had tested in the showroom by pressing one palm flat into it for five seconds, verdict delivered as a nod. A proper desk for the back room where my keyboard now stood against its own wall. Kitchen things with weight to them. Blackout curtains, hung the same day Mama demanded them, which the two women involved will never know they agreed on.

No television. Steve raised this immediately, on inspection day, scandalized.

"He has monitors," Luísa said, from the kitchen, unbothered.

The first night I lay in my own bedroom and the ceiling said nothing. No fan. No clicks. Nothing to count. I lay there a long time with my eyes open, counting anyway.

⁂

The housewarming arrived through the stairwell before it arrived through the door---Steve's laugh first, climbing ahead of him, then the twins' blend, then heels and bergamot.

By nine the flat was learning what it sounded like full. Jollof and asun from the caterer Luísa had vetted like a witness; pizza, chicken wings, fries and small chops going round in foil, the twins' bottle of something Brazilian that Iago swore was tradition and Diogo swore was duty-free. Steve came with a cool bottle of Hennessy, a carton of malt and a speech about how gifts are for strangers. Luísa came with wine and a fire extinguisher.

"The kitchen is new," she said. "You are not."

Steve toured the whole duplex with his glasses down, saying nothing, which from him is a survey report. At the top of the stairs he turned.

"Two million." He looked at the ceiling, the corridor, me. "Two. I dey pay four for corridor kitchen and generator wey get moodswing. Nwoke. This your madam---she fit find me wife? Even girlfriend. Even landlord wey get fear of God."

"Sit down and eat, Steevo."

"You see this house ba?" He tapped his own chest, once. "Na my mouth build am oh. My referral. History go remember me."

Iago spent dinner attempting pidgin at him, which went the way it always goes.

"This jollof dey... make sense well well... isn't it?"

Steve put his fork down, took his glasses off, and cleaned them for a long time. "Who teach this boy? Abeg come collect am. E dey leak."

Somewhere in the middle of it, Diogo mentioned, lightly, into his plate, that Zubby's A&R had texted him directly about the camp. Luísa didn't look up from serving herself salad. "Forward it. Through me." Iago looked at his twin one beat past normal, and Diogo pocketed the phone, and the table moved on.

Then the food was gone and the glasses were full, and I stood up.

A toast has a shape. I kept mine to one climb. I thanked Steve for a parlour, a geyser, and three months of indomie on credit. I thanked the twins for singing my scratch melodies better than I heard them. And then Steve, who cannot leave a question alone, shouted the one hanging over the whole flat.

"Oya tell us---who find this house?!"

I looked at her.

"My woman found this house," I said, and crossed the room, and kissed her in front of everybody.

I felt the scan fire under my hands---the reflex, the sweep for who was watching. There was nowhere for it to land. Everyone was watching. For the first time in her working life the optics were her, not something she was managing on behalf of somebody else, and for a second her spine didn't know the posture for it. Her hand went up to tuck hair that was already tucked. The ring made half a turn and stopped.

Then she gave up management entirely, which I had never seen, and the smile that usually gets denied at the door was allowed the whole face.

Steve stood up and applauded alone, taking full credit. Iago whooped. Diogo took out his wallet and put five hundred dollars into his twin's open palm, and neither of them explained it, and nobody asked.

Later I stood in my own kitchen doorway with a drink going warm and looked at the whole picture. The twins arguing in Portuguese over the last puff-puff. Steve DJ-ing off his phone through my monitors, volume set by a man who mixes for a living and heckles for free. Her at the counter, stacking plates nobody had asked her to stack, sleeves folded back once, at ease in my house in a way I had never seen her be anywhere, under my bulbs, behind my gate.

Three months ago, in a studio, a life had assembled itself in my head with me standing in it. Now the life had furniture.

I had arrived somewhere, finally, at thirty-three. She was standing at the exact centre of the arrival. And I took the entire feeling and called it by her name, and nobody checked my working. I made sure of that.

⁂

They left in stages, the way good nights end---Steve first, with leftovers he had negotiated for during dessert, then the twins, still arguing, their voices going down the stairwell in two languages.

Her bag was by the stairs. It had been by the stairs since eight o'clock.

Neither of us mentioned it.

The door knew before we did. It swung inward under her back and she reached behind her for the frame and found the light switch instead, and the hallway went dark, and she laughed against my mouth.

"Leave it," I said.

"I'm not---" She lost the sentence somewhere in the collar of my shirt. "I'm not managing. I'm locating."

"You're managing the dark."

"The dark is poorly lit. Someone should."

I kissed the complaint off her mouth. She let me. Her hands gave up on the switch and found the back of my neck, and the door gave up on being a door and became a wall, and we became the thing the wall was holding up.

Somewhere in the movement from hallway to stairs she lost a heel. The other one she kicked off herself, with prejudice, and it hit the banister and clattered down into the dark, and neither of us turned to watch it fall.

"Those were---"

"Expensive," she said. "I don't care."

The bedroom door I had closed that morning on an empty room. It opened now on a room with a bed in it, and the bed had been theoretical until this exact moment---a thing she'd tested with one palm at a showroom, a thing that arrived between ten and twelve on Thursday, a thing I had slept in alone for exactly zero nights. We did not so much reach it as arrive at it, a tangle of fabric and hands and her mouth on my throat and my hands learning the architecture of her back, the clasp that wasn't where clasps usually live, the sound she made when I found it anyway.

"Of course you can---" She didn't finish.

The blouse came off like a verdict she'd been postponing. The rest followed in the order urgency dictated, which was no order at all, and somewhere in the middle of it she pulled back and looked at me---the full stare, the one that reads a room off you and doesn't apologize---and I looked back, and neither of us arranged anything.

"There you are," she said, quietly.

Then there was no more talking. There was skin and the dark and the small sounds she made that had nothing to do with management---sounds I had never heard her make, sounds she had never let anyone hear, sounds that arrived unproduced and stayed that way. My hands found the places that made her breath catch. Her hands found the scar in my eyebrow, the burn on my palm, the places I'd spent years hiding from rooms exactly like this one, and held them without asking what they cost.

We moved the way we'd learned to make music---call and response, tension and release, the bridge that builds toward something and finally, finally arrives. When she came apart she said my name in Portuguese. I don't know if she knew she'd switched. I caught it anyway. I caught all of it.

Afterward we lay in the wreckage of the bed that would never fold, her head in the hollow of my shoulder, my hand in the damp curve of her spine, and the ceiling said nothing, and the AC I hadn't installed yet didn't hum or click, and there was nothing to count. For the first time in my adult life, in a room I paid for, in a city that had buried me three times, there was nothing to count.

"Okay," she said, into my chest, in the tone she used for done deals.

"You said that already."

"I'm confirming."

⁂

I woke at six out of habit and reached for the edges of a mattress that needed folding.

There were no edges. There was a bed, and a woman asleep in the crook of my arm with her bob gone completely off-duty, and a ceiling with nothing to count on it. Outside, the estate made its small morning sounds---a gateman's radio turned down to a murmur, one polite generator far away, water moving in pipes I now paid for.

That was the first morning of the good month. Nobody tells you the number of them while you're inside.

She surfaced slowly, took inventory of the room with her eyes half open, and located me last.

"My woman," she said, into my shoulder. "All those songs in your catalogue. Number one in the country. And that is the lyric you stood up with."

"It worked."

"It was under-rehearsed." Her mouth was against my collarbone, so I heard the smile more than saw it. "Steve clapped alone for eleven seconds."

"He's proud of his referral."

"He should be." She went quiet a while, her thumb moving once over the burn mark on my palm, not asking about it. The morning went on being the morning.

Then her phone buzzed on the side table. She reached over me, read the screen, and breathed out through her nose.

"The thread has spoken," she said. "Papa wants to meet the man managing my heart."

My hand started for my jaw. I turned the movement into rubbing sleep off my face, and if she caught it, she noted it.

"When?"

"Sunday lunch," she said.