Back in my room, I put the bag down and began to collect my poems and stories from the floor. I just couldn’t leave them lying around like that, my own creations. I found their folder, torn, under a mattress. I followed the trail of papers to the verandah and the courtyard. I gathered them in a pile on the grass and set fire to them. My eyes filled with tears as I watched the pages curl and blacken in the flames.

As we walked to the gates, Adegbite kept pointing out to me particular spots and little memorials of the battle with the police. A broken bottle, a shattered kiosk, a busted window. I listened without speaking, my mind filled with other thoughts. Bola would be in Ibadan by now, with his uncle, Auntie Rosa, and the twins. This morning he had not recognized me. Adegbite shook my hand outside the gates and said, ‘See you when we return.’ I stood and watched him cross the road and get on a bus. But I was not coming back here. I knew that deep inside.

As I turned and surveyed the gate and the fences beside it, I saw the fences suddenly transform into thick walls, standing tall, top-tufted with barbed wire and broken bottles, arms widespread to restrain and contain and limit. I wanted no more limits; only those I set for myself.

I started down the road, hefting Bola’s bag on to my shoulder. I didn’t know what to do with the bag. I should have left it with the porters. A bus slowed down and the conductor urged me to hurry up. I started to run after it, and then I stopped. I was not in a hurry to go anywhere because I had nowhere to go. Anti-riot policemen still patrolled on foot, in groups, combing the deserted back streets for trouble, tear-gas canisters hanging from their belts, and rifles from their shoulders. I shivered.

Yesterday Uncle Bode had traced the Peugeot 504 to the divisional office of the State Security Service. After explaining things for over an hour, he had been told to return today. He went back early this morning. He was directed to the psychiatric hospital in Yaba. Later, when we went, Peter, Paul and I, we found him and Auntie Rosa seated glumly beside a hospital bed on which Bola lay, staring at the ceiling.

‘See what they did to him,’ Auntie Rosa said and burst into tears.

We flinched as our eyes fell on his bare torso: every inch was covered with thick, punctured weals. He had been systematically beaten from his face down to his legs. One arm was fractured – it lay by his side in a thick plaster. And he didn’t recognize us. His eyes passed over us incuriously before returning to stare with mindless vacuity at the ceiling.