‘One day I must return schooling.’ His English was a tortuous parody of correct grammar whenever he spoke to me – but to everyone else in the compound he spoke pidgin. He seemed almost desperate in his efforts to impress me. He’d pick a page I had just finished writing and follow the scrawled, barely intelligible characters with his eyes.

‘You write this?’ he’d ask. ‘Are you student?’

‘No. I am a writer. I am trying to be, that is,’ I said.

I didn’t discover what he did for a living till my fifth month in the compound, till the morning he woke me up and pushed a carton of corned beef into my room.

‘Eat,’ he said, ‘my friend give me dash.’

And before I could say anything he was gone. I stood looking at the carton, unsure what to do with it. Then in the evening, when I returned from my teaching job, my neighbour said to me, so softly I didn’t hear her at first till she repeated herself, ‘Your friend na thief o, softly de follow am o.’

I looked at the tormenting breast, the taunting, worldly wise eyes, and behind her the rumpled, still-warm bed.

‘I see,’ I said.

I saw it all: the footsteps trafficking the corridor late at night when I sat writing, or when I paced the room with insomnia; the early-morning returns. I remembered a glimpse I once had of his room; it was stacked with all sorts of stuff – TVs, fridges, tape players, chairs, and piles of clothes carelessly thrown into the chairs – like an emir’s chamber, like a bargain store.

That night, when he came to my room, I told him to take away the corned beef. ‘I am trying to become a vegetarian.’

He was seated on the edge of my bed. I was in the chair by the window. His bulbous red eyes wavered off mine; they went quickly to his thick, mud-covered boots and the small bag lying by his side. He had just returned.

‘Not all you hear can be true,’ he said, still not meeting my eyes. ‘Rumour-monging and gossipers full our compound.’ Then, as if a thought had just occurred to him, he stood up and with an ‘I’ll be show you’ he went out and returned with a snapshot in his hand. He dropped it on the table before me. It was a young girl. She had one arm around the smiling, bearded Nkem. She couldn’t be older than fifteen. Her eyes were smiling happily and innocently into the camera. ‘My propose,’ he told me, smiling broadly. ‘You see, I be responsible person. Soon I’ll be marry her and she’ll be come to live here. Then you believe. But forget rumour.’