I passed the gawping neighbours and went into the dark corridor. My closest neighbour on the right was standing before her door, as always. She seemed to know my footsteps, to know them from as far away as the compound entrance, because she’d always be standing here when I came in: before her open door, her shoulders bare, her wrapper loosely held at her bosom, one breast half-exposed. Her eyes would brazenly stare me down, taunting, tormenting. Behind her was her bed, always slightly rumpled, as if she had just left it at the sound of my footsteps. She never said a word to me. When I entered my room I’d hear the sound of her door closing. Through the thin wall I’d hear her footsteps and snatches of raucous bar-room songs. She sold ogogoro and whiskey. Her loud and quarrelsome customers were a trial to me in the nights when I sat down to write. Sometimes a favoured customer would stay behind after the others had left, and deep in the night when I sat down to write, her exaggerated moans and the creaking of the bed beneath them were sore trials to me.

My compound was a block in a row of identical blocks, distinguished from each other by the faint black numbers on their front. I lived in No. 15. When the sun was high, the roof crackled and spat. The buildings were long and tubular – from above they’d look like worms stretched out in the sun to dry. A long, cavernous passage led from the entrance to the door of each room; ten in all, five on either side, facing each other (face-me-I-face-you, the tenants called this formation). The toilet, an outhouse at the back, was open-air, and at night, squatting over the ass-scalding latrine pit, one could raise one’s eyes and contemplate the sometimes cloudy, sometimes starry sky.

It was at the outhouse that I first saw Nkem, early one morning. I had gone to crap and had found the door locked from inside, but he was just finishing.

‘I don’t know you,’ he said when he came out. His eyes were red and suspicious. He was huge and dark. His face looked sinister with its thick beard.

‘I just moved in,’ I said and passed him into the latrine. Inside was hazy with marijuana smoke.

I met him waiting for me in the corridor when I returned. He stepped forward, blocking my path. He thrust out a huge paw and smiled.

‘I am Nkem. I am facing you,’ he said, pointing at his door. He took to coming to my room in the mornings. He’d pick up my books and turn them over and over in his hands, painfully mouthing the words on the cover.