My auntie’s restaurant was on Egunje Road. At the head of the road, like a showpiece, was the Women Centre. It was the biggest and newest building on the street. I didn’t know what the women did there. I always passed them sitting out on the balcony on plastic chairs, eating and talking loudly in Yoruba. Everybody started using the shorter name, Women Centre, when the full name changed twice in the two years of its existence, from Mariam Babangida Women Centre to Mariam Abacha Women Centre. The first name was still faintly visible, in white ink, beneath the hastily painted new name in blue. Behind the Women Centre was Olokun Road, the shabbiest and poorest of all the quarters on Poverty Street. Olokun Road terminated in the less squalid, but more notorious University Road. The latter was the flux point for all vices on the street: there were hotels for sex and alcohol, and there were doorways and alley-mouths for marijuana and cocaine. The sex workers were mostly young university girls from the neighbouring campus, hustling on the side to make ends meet. The street had one primary school, Morgan Primary School, and a secondary school, Morgan Comprehensive Day Secondary School, both state owned. They were situated side by side on, naturally, School Road. The church was on Church Road and the mosque on Mosque Road.

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Joshua taught English and literature at the secondary school a block away from his house. A room, really. It stood alone, surrounded by blocks of unplastered, unpainted storey buildings occupied by noisy working families that hung their washing – underwear, bed sheets, babies’ nappies – on the railings before their rooms, and threw their dirty water into the road. A housewife would stand with the empty pail in her hand and absently watch the water break into a million dirty brown crystals before it hit the ground. The storey buildings looked shaky, adventitious, as if the first strong wind that passed this way would uproot them. The fronts and backs of the buildings were hidden by huge hills of refuse that overflowed and constricted the path to Joshua’s room.

A half-completed wall circled the room. The room was squat and rectangular, its walls covered with distemper that stuck to the hands. He was alone. The room blazed like a lighthouse. The door and windows were open, the curtains lifted – a trap for the passing breeze. He was seated at the reading table by the window, staring out into the dark. He did not turn when I stopped at the door and knocked.

‘Come in!’ he shouted.

I entered. ‘Good evening, sir,’ I said.