Now he lowered his voice, like a conspirator. ‘Maybe there’ll be another coup, eh? Maybe the leader will collapse and die. He is mortal, after all. Maybe a civilian government will come. Then. There will be amnesty for all political prisoners. Amnesty. Don’t worry. Enjoy yourself.’

I looked at him, planted before me like a tree, his hands clasped behind him, the papier-mâché smile on his lips. Enjoy yourself I turned the phrase over and over in my mind. When I lay to sleep rats kept me awake, and mosquitoes, and lice, and hunger, and loneliness. The rats bit at my toes and scuttled around in the low ceiling, sometimes falling on to my face from the holes in the ceiling. Enjoy yourself

‘Your papers,’ he said, thrusting them at me once more. I was not sure if he was offering them to me. ‘I read them. All. Poems. Letters. Poems, no problem. The letters, illegal. I burned them. Prisoners sometimes smuggle out letters to the press to make us look foolish. Embarrass the government. But the poems are harmless. Love poems. And diaries. You wrote the poems for your girl, isn’t it?’

He bent forward, and clapped a hand on my shoulder. I realized with wonder that the man, in his awkward, flat-footed way, was making overtures of friendship to me. My eyes fell on the boot that had stepped on my neck just five days ago. What did he want?

‘Perhaps because I work in prison. I wear uniform. You think I don’t know poetry, eh? Soyinka, Okigbo, Shakespeare.’

It was apparent that he wanted to talk about poems, but he was finding it hard to begin.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

He drew back to his full height. ‘I write poems too. Sometimes,’ he added quickly when the wonder grew and grew on my face. He dipped his hand into his jacket pocket and came out with a foolscap sheet of paper. He unfolded it and handed it to me. ‘Read.’

It was a poem; handwritten. The title was written in capital letters: ‘MY LOVE FOR YOU’.

Like a man in a dream, I ran my eyes over the bold squiggles. After the first stanza I saw that it was a thinly veiled imitation of one of my poems. I sensed his waiting. He was hardly breathing. I let him wait. Lord, I can’t remember another time when I had felt so good. So powerful. I was Samuel Johnson and he was an aspiring poet waiting anxiously for my verdict, asking tremulously, ‘Sir, is it poetry, is it Pindar?’

I wanted to say, with as much sarcasm as I could put into my voice, ‘Sir, your poem is both original and interesting, but the part that is interesting is not original, and the part that is original is not interesting.’ But all I said was, ‘Not bad, you need to work on it some more.’