By Eloghosa Osunde

The things Johnny used his eyes to see in Lagos ehn, his mouth could not say out loud. Literally. Before he arrived in Lagos from the Raffia City, by GIGM night bus, his cousin Clement—the one he finally swallowed his pride and asked to connect him to real wealth in Lagos—had told him this: “This job you are going for, they reserve it for mute people. You go get money well well, you go fit take care of your whole family with zero qualms. But once your leg touch Lagos, forget your voice o.”

“Which kain job be dat?” Johnny asked.

“Driver.”

Johnny chuckled. He could drive well, sure. But, “Ah ah, wetin concyn driver with silence again? How will I now reply if they give me instruction?”

“You see? You’re already talking too much.” Clement hissed. “You’re not ready.” It gave him great pleasure to flaunt the out‑of‑reachness of his bright city life every time he visited home. He felt a twisted knot of pleasure at the bottom of his stomach each time someone’s eyes softened with pleas. He liked knowing that people wanted what he had, that they would wear his life quickly if he took it off and offered it to them. And why not? Who doesn’t like good things?

Fine, Johnny said back with his own eyes.

The first thing Clement had given up when he left Uyo years ago was his name. He’d left Uyo as Enieffiong—his given name—and returned as Clement. Nobody at home questioned him because he returned as a new man with arrogant cologne that could lift you by your collar and pin you to the wall. What he didn’t bother explaining was that this was simply the sensible thing to do, because which filthy-rich boss had more than two seconds to be pronouncing your difficult name in a fast city like Lagos? Everything in Lagos moves at staggering speed, and the first thing to know about the rich is this: they hate stress. Clement had learned this from his friend Alamieye­seigha, whose boss had said “Your name is what?” when he introduced himself, and then rechristened him on the spot before Alamieyeseigha could even say Allah. “From now on, you answer to James. Do you understand?” Of course, he did. This was the first lesson Clement gave his cousin too: “Nobody has time to be calling you Aniekan, un’sten? I think you should be answering John. Well, John for short, or as the oyinbos like to say it: Johnny. It fits you.”

“Okay,” Johnny had said. That night, alone in his room, he tried the name on over and over again. It didn’t feel too tight. “Not An­iekan anymore, do you hear me? Johnny. Johnny. Johnny.” He was eager to learn, especially from someone like Clement, who seemed to have mastered the ways of the city.

So, “Explain na,” Johnny said, half-begging Clement the next day. “About the job.”

Again, that sweet knot. “Well,” Clement said. “To work in Lagos, you have to give up something. Everybody does—even the high and mighty. Some give up their language, some their names, some their sanity, some their conscience, some their ears, their eyes, and so forth. Me, for instance, in my place of work, I don’t speak all this pidgin. I speak only the Queen’s English. If they find out I use broken at home, they can fire me for that alone, because the man doesn’t want his chil­dren to be speaking nonsense. And my boss is not as strict as some.” He paused for effect.

“Now,” he continued, “this job I’m talking about for you, I say you will be rolling in money, get that right. You go get pass anybody wey you know. But even if they curse you, curse your family, curse your whole generation, no make mistake open mouth o. Anything wey you see, you no go fit talk. Because na kill dem go kill you once. Dem go just put bullet for your body, and you go close eye.”

Johnny’s heart hiccupped. Ha. A whole kill? Who was he going to be driving? The president? The thought jarred him, but he replaced that fear with a bright curiosity to keep Clement’s irritation at bay. “So I go need deaf too?”

Clement shook his head. “Okay so if you’re also deaf, how will you hear instructions? Ehn, young man. Ezacly. Think! They need you to hear, but they don’t need your reply.”

“Ahhh,” Johnny said. “Okay, I get now. Is that the one you’re doing, too, in Lagos?”

Clement laughed. “I resemble person wey mute? They offered me that job, but me I say I no do. I don’t have the liver for that sor’ of a thing.” Johnny had never craved a different accent than the one he had, but when Clement spoke, rolling his tongue over syllables the way he did, Johnny sometimes found himself eager to train his tongue too—though it was unclear what exactly the accent was.

“No be driver work? Wetin concyn driver with liver?”

“If your mouth dey sharp like that, go try am now?”

Johnny sighed. “But bros, hook me up to the one wey you dey do now? Since na that one better pass. Me I don’t know if I can give up my voice.”

Clement chuckled. In all his years working in Lagos, Clement had never said what his actual work was. But every two Christmases when he visited home, he arrived in a new car with a trunk full of months’ worth of provisions for his parents, so nobody bothered to ask him, in case he read it as an insult. Because what would they do then? What if he stopped coming home out of vex?

Johnny knew this too. But now that they were having a frank con­versation, Johnny wanted to make his envy clear, and he knew that it flattered Clement to see it shining out of his voice like a new kobo.

“If to say I fit,” Clement said, “I for don hook you up since. You know you’re my brother. But I ken’ lie to you, there’s no vacancy there. And besides, the kind of work I do, you can’t, you cannot, do it.”

Johnny knew better than to push. Clement was older than him by five whole years and it was by God’s grace that he chose him out of all the other cousins to sit next to. When Johnny asked him, Clement said he chose him as his right hand because he wasn’t like the rest—“you’re cool- headed,” he said—and it was the first time Johnny felt proud of his temperament. Johnny thought hard about it and decided that he’d take what was on offer. He could make a good driver. What was there to it? He could drive and drive well. And he loved cars—but the good kinds, not the yeye V‑boot he’d been towing around for years. He loved feeling the cool of the air conditioning on his face whenever Clement let him drive his Toyota, both of them keeping their eyes straight ahead, ignoring people trekking by in the next lane. On rough days, he made sure he made eye contact with them. It felt good to be comfort­able, simple, and he wanted people to know.

When Johnny first moved to Uyo from the Raffia City, he was still shiny-eyed. But Lagos could run circles around Uyo. Everything was better in Lagos. If all he had to do was obey, he already knew enough about that. Growing up, his father had done the necessary work of eating his rebellion with koboko and canes and belt buckles. There was not even a single crumb of resistance remaining in him. If it was his younger brother now, ehehn, he’d hesitate to send him, because by the time that one was born, all the violence in their father’s hands had fallen to a quivering hush—and it showed. You could provoke that boy just by breathing next to him; he had anger that could boil yam. He’d make a terrible employee. But Johnny wasn’t like that. He was different.

Johnny was the kind of person life would have rewarded well by now if things were fair. But life was not fair—which is why, even with his first-class degree in physics, Johnny ended up a lesson teacher earning forty thousand naira per month for teaching spoiled children science on their parents’ Italian dining tables; tables that were worth enough to pay his rent for six years. He was over it. He’d done every­thing right. He’d waited on God—what again? Sure, Uyo was cleaner and saner and quieter than Lagos, but who sane and quiet and clean help, when there was no money to match it?

This is an excerpt from Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde.

Eloghosa Osunde is a Nigerian writer and artist. An alumna of the Farafina Creative Writing Workshop, the Caine Prize Workshop, and the New York Film Academy, she has been published in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Catapult, and other venues. Winner of the 2021 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and the recipient of a Miles Morland Scholarship, she is a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow and a 2020 MacDowell Colony Fellow.

Copyright © Eloghosa Osunde, 2022. Please do not repost or reproduce this material without permission.