The customers were used to Nancy’s strange ways. Brother washed his hands and began to eat. Halfway through the meal he stopped suddenly, his eyes bulging, fixed to the wall on his right. I stopped writing, waiting to offer assistance if he was choking. He wasn’t. He was reading the graffiti on the wall; Nancy had made it this morning with her inexhaustible supply of coloured chalks. It was a hobby with her. The walls in our room were covered with graffiti. She could spend hours on it: cleaning, correcting, re-writing. All sorts of things: proverbs, clichés, epigrams, even couplets. The one immediately above her bed, in green chalk, read: Today Here, Tomorrow Gone. Such is life. Over mine she had written in red chalk: Love is a Gamble. She was a magpie for quotable lines – a phrase on a billboard, or on the tailboard of a truck, or in a magazine, would stick in her mind and she wouldn’t rest until she had off-loaded it on some wall, mostly in our room. The one that seemed to be sticking in Brother’s throat read: Poor Man’s Paradise… I couldn’t see his face clearly from where I sat, to determine if he was amused or impressed or annoyed. Slowly he turned and with oil-reddened fingers beckoned to me. I went.

‘Who… who write this?’ He wasn’t amused. His eyes had grown redder. A bearded customer sitting across the aisle turned, surprised by his sharp tone.

‘Take am easy, Brother. Na small boy.’

‘Who… who write am?’ The anger made him stutter.

I remained quiet, contemplating what to say, but luckily Nancy heard us from the kitchen and came.

‘What’s wrong with it? I wrote it,’ she said belligerently. She stood beside me, her right hand on her hip, her foot tapping the floor.

‘ “Poor Man’s Paradise”,’ Brother read out aloud. ‘This one na insult to us, your customers.’

Nancy raised her head and looked at the graffito, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Insult? What do you mean?’

I could feel the charge from the tension gripping her every limb. Brother turned and looked at the other customers – there were five sweating, oily-fingered men in the room now, their hands suspended over their dishes, their expressions uncertain, expectant.

‘Because we carry our hard-earned money come de chop for here, na’im you de call us poor, abi? Poor Man’s Paradise! Na our fault say we poor?’

‘Look, I don’t have the time…’