Without brushing my teeth, without washing my face or combing my hair, I slipped on my shoes and got out, my manuscript in a folder under my arm. I took a bus to Allen Avenue. I was going to James Fiki, The Dial’s editor. Two years ago (how time flies!), he had promised me a job. That had been my first and only time of seeing him. He had met me in my lecturer’s office, submitting an essay titled ‘The Military in Nigerian Politics’. He had sat in a corner, listening to me elaborate on my essay.

‘O K, O K. I am convinced,’ Dr Kareem said finally. He passed the script to the visitor. ‘Here, James, take a look. See what university education has come to.’

The man read it quickly, then he returned it to Dr Kareem. When I was leaving, he said to me, ‘Come and write for us when you graduate.’ He gave me his card. The next week my essay appeared in The Dial, unaltered.

Well, I had not graduated, but I needed a job. As I climbed the stairs to the editor’s office, I prayed that James would remember me, that he’d still be inclined to give me a job – if he still worked for The Dial.

He recognized me.

‘Dr Kareem told me you dropped out of school,’ he said when I sat down. He looked drastically older than he had looked two years ago. He couldn’t be above fifty, but his hair had gone totally white; his suit was rumpled, as if he had not changed it in days. But his eyes, though red and puffy, were still sharp and secretly amused, as if he knew something you didn’t know about yourself.

‘Yes,’ I replied. He waited, but I did not volunteer more information.

‘And what have you been doing since then?’

I put the folder before him. ‘I’ve been trying to write a novel.’

‘That’s why you left school?’

I did not tell him about the riots, about the incessant closure of the schools, or about my room-mate who went mad.

‘When school began to look like prison, I had to get out,’ I said simply.

He nodded. His eyes ran over my worn-out shoes, my threadbare shirt and trousers, my uncombed hair, my pinched, hungry face. He went through the manuscript quickly. He seemed unsatisfied. He said, ‘What I need are articles and reports, not a novel. What you need is a publisher, not a magazine.’

‘I need a job.’

He closed the folder. He said, ‘You write so well, you express yourself so effortlessly, with so much force. I think you will do justice to almost any subject you care to write on. Tell me, have you ever thought of writing on politics? I remember your article on the military regime that I published.’

I shook my head doubtfully. ‘I am not very political.’