As a child, Lawrence flips the pages fast, searching the pictures, not the text. He comes to a diagram of the solar system, with planets diagrammatically circling the sun, full page, in colour. Should be elliptical, but he’s not choosy. He rips the page out and replaces the book on the shelf. He folds the paper carefully and pockets it, then sprints for the back of the library, running his torch beam across the spines of books, hoping that something will catch his eye, though nothing does this time. He kills the torchlight.

He works his way out of the toilet window and lands on the grass.

Light returns, and he thinks the impact switched the torch on again, but it’s not his torch.

“Anything broken?” asks the uniformed guard.

Lawrence shakes his head.

“Let’s go ask your parents why they permitted you to be out of the house after dark, shall we?”

His parents, of course, have no idea that Lawrence has been stealing out at night, breaking into the library and building a personal astronomy resource centre in a derelict car on their street. He has books, journals, hand-written notes and posters ripped from texts.

Getting caught turns out to be a good thing. The librarian says he ought to be encouraged, not punished. His father, a rickshaw driver, disagrees. They both have their way, and Lawrence fills out application forms while sitting on bruised, welt-covered buttocks.

He ends up with a special scholarship to a space academy on Earth, and when he graduates he immediately joins NASA after rebuffing three private firms. He’s fast-tracked to interstellar work. This starts his career, which ends in Space Station Lagos in politics.

Lawrence signals Joké one last time without much hope. The girl is capricious at the best of times, and he has never been able to keep track of her. He waits five minutes, then rises, leaving the fish food for whoever comes to the bench after him. Some kids who are too young to be unsupervised hang out on this segment from time to time. Lawrence does not think they know who he is. He heads for the lift and calls up the IFC to signal his intention to be at the meeting. It promptly informs him that he is five minutes late, and the quorum is waiting for him to arrive before they start. Lawrence does not hurry.

Things weren’t always thus. He took this post ten years past and he was by inches marginalised, although deep down he wants to step down and retire. Leadership was and is a mistake. He knows it’s something they want, but a stubborn streak makes him refuse to quit until they come out and say it.