A journalist
A woman from Lagos with a recorder and a train of questions that were not the officer's. She could not publish it. She told me to.
A journalist. From Lagos, a woman, thirty maybe, with a recorder and a notebook of her own and a way of asking that made me tell her more than I had told the lawyer. Someone who knows someone gave her my number. She sat in the room by the stadium for three hours and looked at the ceiling stain when I looked at it.
At the end she turned the recorder off and said: I cannot publish this. Not with your name, which would be a death sentence, and not without it, because my editor will say it is a story about nobody. And I said, so what was this for. And she said: you.
She said I had a way of putting it in order. She said the notebooks were a book already, if I would let them be. She said, write it yourself; nobody can ask a book the officer's question. And then she got on the bus to Lagos and I have not heard from her since and I do not expect to.
But I have started. Tonight. Not the notebook; a new file on the phone, and a first line, which I have written and deleted six times, and which is currently: They tell us that justice exists. It is a start. It is the first sentence of something that is not for under the mattress.