The first time they’d ever spoken, Julius found Duke under a stairwell, claiming to be fine after three lads had beat the shit out of him. Duke could barely walk and his eye was closing, but he refused to go to the nurse’s office. Julius had fetched a wodge of wet tissue to wash blood off Duke’s face. Then they’d spoken about how hard St Gilda’s sucked, and their friendship was sealed when Duke noticed the storm-trooper-on-a-skateboard sticker on the back of Julius’s iPhone.

‘Death or glory!’ Julius boomed, steeling himself for the rocky slope.

He took a longer run-up than Duke. The Vans, with grips worn smooth, made bad climbing shoes. But after a downed knee and a flurry of tumbling pebbles, Julius got far enough to grasp Duke’s hand and take a pull.

The teenagers shuffled along the wall, then swung legs over where it had mostly collapsed. The wind carried a vile, vomit-like smell as the boys jumped down onto a footpath that had cracked and subsided, spawning plants that went up to their waist.

‘What in the Lord’s name is that?’ Julius complained, shielding his nose with an arm.

‘Snow leopard shit,’ Duke explained.

Julius glanced about, confused by rusted metal fences and mildewed concrete buildings daubed with graffiti. ‘There are leopards here?’

Duke laughed. ‘Not right here. They’re in cages on the other side of the revolving restaurant …’

Julius realised where he was.

‘Arctic Zoo,’ he blurted. ‘I was supposed to come here on a trip when I was in nursery class. But the place closed down.’

The story of Arctic Zoo was a local legend. Nigeria spent most of the 1980s ruled by military dictators. General Sebastian Edochie was put in charge of Ondo State. He quickly grew bored with everyday problems, like clean water or the seventy per cent of Ondo’s children who didn’t get enough food, and decided that what Akure really needed was a zoo. And since Nigeria already had plenty of gorillas, giraffes, hippos and big cats, Edochie decided people would only visit if he filled his zoo with creatures from cold places.

A famous Danish architect created austere pens with hexagonal pools and swooping concrete pedestals. His design also included an education centre and a squat tower, topped by a revolving restaurant that gave hilltop views over Akure. A French company engineered a complex water-cooling system to keep animals comfortable and South African gamekeepers travelled the globe, buying or catching polar bears, Siberian tigers, white wolves, snow leopards, muskox and reindeer.

The zoo was a disaster. A fresh military coup meant General Edochie fled Nigeria before Arctic Zoo opened. The revolving restaurant only worked for two weeks, cage bars warped in the heat, concrete pedestals were dangerously slippery and the cooling system had no back-up generators to cover frequent power cuts.