A call from Owerri
The boy from Aba called the British number. He has shoes now, and a job, and a number a friend wrote on his own arm to give away. On how a line becomes a line.
Two in the morning here, seven at home, and the British number rang, and it was the boy from Aba. Two years since the bus with no shoes. He has a job at a phone shop in Owerri, a room, a pair of trainers he described to me in detail, and he was calling for a reason: a boy he knows, in the same room with the same four men last week, and he had written a number on the boy's arm in biro. Mine. The British one. And he wanted to know if it still worked before the boy called.
It works. I said so. Then I could not say anything for a while and he waited, the way I waited for him, and then he said, oga, are you crying, and I said the harmattan is bad here, and he laughed, and he knows there is no harmattan in England.
So this is how a line becomes a line. Not with an office or a website, though there is a website now, or a number, though there are five numbers now, in Nigeria and Ghana and here. With a boy who was given a number on a bus writing it on another boy's arm. The woman under the umbrella. The plate of rice outside the door. Sit down. That is the whole organisation, and it has never had a name, and I am not going to give it one.
The other boy called at nine, my time. I talked to him until midnight. I did not say anything clever. I said sit down. Then I said, there is a boy in Owerri with new trainers who wants to meet you, and I gave him the number. Pill at nine, in the middle of the call. Took it. Told him so. He asked what it was for. I told him that too.