Soon he is off to a country called Euphoria.

The woman looking down into the box camera

is in her adiré best, is damming her tears.

All she can see is her little boy Taiwo, five,

with a lovely dimple and a love of dumplings.

1993

Fast forward. The man. The balcony. Cracked.

Cars zoom past, noisy as a washing machine’s last spin.

Skin clings to bones where once it sheltered them.

Shoulders hunched with a lifetime’s tension, somewhere

around his knees, his age shows. Juicy lips dried out.

The young woman, his daughter, taking photos

with her brand new Olympus sees through her father

to the boy. Hopeful. Before he ate the bitter kola nut.

He has revealed himself. Here, his childhood home.

His jaw fossilised, with the gritting of it.

‘DEAD BODIES in the streets for days, open sewers,

ambushes on the road. I heard it all over the years.

To be honest, I was frightened.’ Ellen looks over

as boisterous girls with blue dresses and dusty legs

scoot past the hotel patio. She squints at the sun sneaking

up over unfinished roofs, dreading its sticky lethargy.

She sips tea, grimaces at the condensed milk inside.

A gecko hovers on the ceiling; she tightens her wrapper,

moves her chair away. ‘The people here are so warm.

We English are such cold fish, I realise that now.’

Lara is doing Yoga exercises: Tree Pose, Mountain Pose.

Two dogs, wretched as ancient teddy bears, scuttle past.

Ellen perks up ‘The only thing that bothers me

are the mosquitoes, to be honest. Maybe I’ll finish

my teaching career here. They’re hungry to learn,

not like those ungrateful terrors back in London.’

Lara stops stretching. ‘You’re a few decades late, Mum.

I’m pretty sure they want African teachers now.’

Ellen puts down her mug, ‘I expect you’re right.’

She keeps one eye on the sun clearing the mosque.

Lara assumes Warrior One Pose, then Warrior Two.

‘What I’d give for a cappuccino and croissant right now,’

she says before going into Upward Facing Dog.

Ellen giggles, gets up as the sun hits her, moves inside,

walking like an oyinbo in an African wrapper.

‘You must adjust, dear. Adjust.’

HENRIQUE OLIVEIRA’S cottage is dead.

Boarded up, crossed planks, termites. Taiwo exclaims

melodramatically, ‘It is the cankerworm of neglect!’

He pontificates as if on a milk crate at Speaker’s Corner,

haunts the Quarter like a refrain, trying to kiss-of-life

his barefoot boyhood, his age of innocence.

The Quarter fans out from the GPO to the YWCA

in Broad Street, roads sweep up in hills to the left.

Taiwo’s classmates inhabit houses which Brazilian ancestors

built when they returned over a hundred years ago.

They guzzle Nigerian beer on doorsteps, eat Kola nuts,

eulogise the halcyon past, bemoan the here and now.

Lara walks with Taiwo, vigilant, reprimanding him

for flashing wads of naira or hailing taxis in the dark, drunk.