At the beach he took me right to the edge of the water, past the confused mill of half-naked bodies throwing balls, riding horses bareback, arcing towards the weak sun on creaky Ferris wheels, or simply reclining in the sand that was so white and fine and plentiful. The sand grabbed at our bare feet as we walked, its gristly fingers inching up our legs below our rolled-up trousers. We sat by the water margin, our legs dipped in its frothy wash. In front of us the water was pale blue, but further in it was a deep indigo, stretching on and on until it disappeared in a white, smoky mist that hung like a curtain between heaven and earth. Its infinite vastness, its restless heaving and roar overwhelmed me. Joshua pointed straight at the misty horizon and said somewhere on the other side lay America. He said if the vast ocean were magically shrunk into a tiny brook, or a narrow river, we could be staring at some beach on the American coast – New York, perhaps. He said the world was not as big and incomprehensible as some people would have us believe. He said everything lay within our grasp, if only we cared to reach out boldly.

2

Brother’s shop, covered by garbage heaps at the sides and at the back, also served as his house. It was made of corrugated iron, which leaked when it rained and cracked and expanded under the hot sun. In front of the shop was a burst pipe – deliberately axed – which shot out water all day. The jet, redirected by a funnelled zinc sheet, formed a pool in a hollowed-out space beneath the pipe. Women and children gathered there all day to wash piles of dirty clothes, fetch water, and gossip. This was done amidst much fighting and swearing.

Olokun Road was named after the mermaid that was said to come there sometimes in the night, transformed into a beautiful maiden, to wait by the roadside for her human lover. I often imagined her, standing perhaps in a recessed doorway, or in the shadows under a tree, hope and anguish etched on her pretty, delicate face as she waited in the pungent, alien environment in vain. The houses were old and craggy and lichened. The place had the unfinished, abandoned appearance of an underwaterscape. Crouching behind the bigger houses or in their own clusters were hastily built wood and zinc structures that housed incredibly large numbers of families: the fathers were mostly out-of-work drivers, labourers, fugitives convalescing between prison terms. Further in towards University Road were nightclubs and seedy room-for-an-hour lodgings, where girls in black miniskirts hung out in dark alley-mouths, smoking cigarettes and waiting for a car to slow down, for the window to roll down and the finger beckon.