Sarimam. Even the echo of her name brings him pain. He tries to lighten his dark countenance as he enters the editorial room of The Dial. Today is Wednesday, the lull day after yesterday’s production frenzy. By tomorrow, the weekly tide will start building up again, the waves growing stronger through the weekend, finally to break on Tuesday’s rocky shores. The Dial is a weekly magazine of arts and society, and recently politics. Ordinarily, Lomba does not come to the office on Wednesdays; he goes to the library in the mornings, and the evenings he devotes to Sarimam. But this morning, the day has stretched before him like a tundrascape, long, white and huge, without variety. That is why he is here. Because he doesn’t want to go and get drunk, or stay indoors and cry; at twenty-seven he is a bit too old for that. The editorial room is half empty: only three people are there, one flipping through back issues, his legs on the table; another watching the TV without much interest; the last yawning as she files her nails.

‘Ah, here comes the great Nobel Prize hope! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Lomba, the defender of the arts pages,’ says Seun, throwing aside a back issue. Seun thinks he is a comedian. That is not his only problem. He is also obsessed with sports – he writes the sports pages – and is fat, clumsy and club-footed.

‘Lomba, the editor wants you ASAP,’ Adam of the society page says in a clipped, military tone, without turning away from the TV screen, on which two semi-nude girls are dancing suggestively, pursing their lips at the camera. Adam is a stiff, unwieldy character who delights in talking about his years at the military school in Zaria. He was thrown out of the army ten years ago when he went AWOL.

‘You look down,’ Nkoyo says, blowing nail filings from her dress. Lomba sits down; his desk is next to hers. ‘A little problem at home?’ Her voice is incurious, but that is a disguise: she really wants to know if he has quarrelled with Sarimam – she knows they live together. Nkoyo is an intern; young and pretty and interested in Lomba. But to him, she is too young at twenty-one.

‘The editor wants me?’ he asks, not looking at her, arranging papers on his table.

‘Yes. He came here himself to ask for you about ten minutes ago.’

James Fiki’s office is on the other side of the building, across the reception lounge and down a corridor, next to the chairman’s office.

‘Ah, Lomba, come in, come in. We’ve been waiting for you,’ James says as Lomba enters. He is not alone. There is a young man in one of the seats, facing him. The young man is in the middle of a sentence, his hands raised before him in illustration of a point. He lowers his hands and stands up.