Voice Notes

For six years I knew Kayode Balogun as a voice, and at Murtala Muhammed airport at ten past eleven on a Friday night the voice walked up to me in the body of a man in a grey kaftan whom I did not recognise.

“Obinna Nwosu,” he said, exactly as he said it in the notes, in three flat beats, as if reading a name off a cargo manifest. “You’re shorter than I imagined.”

“You’re wider than your profile picture.”

“That picture was taken in 2014.” He laughed, and I knew the laugh at once. It started low, with a cough in it, the sound of a generator turning over on a cold morning, and for six years it had been coming out of my phone at all hours of the day and night. Hearing it at arm’s length did something to my stomach. “Welcome to Lagos, my brother. Give me that bag.”

“I can carry my own bag.”

“You’re sixty percent jet lag. Give me the bag.”

I gave him the bag.

I should say how it started. In 2019 I was a structural engineer in Houston with a failing opinion of Nollywood, and I wrote a long, unkind post about a film called Third Mainland on a forum for people who care about such things. The film had a bridge collapse in it, and the bridge was drawn all wrong. The producer wrote me a private message of four paragraphs in capital letters. I answered with two pages of load calculations. Then one night at 3 a.m. his time he sent me a voice note instead of a message, forty seconds long, saying, “Mr Engineer, you are correct about the bridge. I will never forgive you. Have you eaten?” I played it eleven times.

We have exchanged, by my count, something over four thousand notes. Films, bridges, his mother, mine. The night my mother died he stayed on the line four hours and said almost nothing, only breathed, and I understood that this was a man who knew how to stay. Somewhere in the third year the notes grew late and low, and neither of us named what we were doing, and neither of us stopped.

Now I was in his Prado on the Airport Road with the windows up against the dust, his big forearm on the gear lever, and I couldn’t think what to say to him. In six years I had never once been without a word for him.

“You’re quiet,” he said.

“It is different when you are not in my ear.”

“Ehn.” He glanced at me, and back at the road, where a bus with a hand-painted sign about the blood of Jesus was trying to occupy the same lane as us. “I was thinking the same. All these years I could say anything. Now I’m sitting here with my mouth full of sand.”

“Harmattan,” I said.

“Na so.” And he laughed that laugh again, and the car got smaller, and I watched the dust standing in the headlights, thick as flour, and thought: I am fifty-three years old, I have crossed an ocean, and my hands are damp.

He took the long way, an extra hour of it, up onto the Third Mainland Bridge, and he did it on purpose. The lagoon lay black on both sides with the lights of the fishing canoes strung across it, and the road hummed under the tyres with the thump of old expansion joints. I put my palm flat on the door and listened to it like a doctor.

“The joints are tired,” I said.

“I knew you would say that.”

“You can hear it. Every fourth one is worse. Somebody should look at that.”

“Somebody is looking at it. He is sitting in my car with a hand on my door.” He changed lanes around a truck. “Six years, Obi. I put one bridge in one film, and the stranger who told me it was wrong got into my car and the first thing he did was inspect the road.”

“It is a lovely road.”

“It is a terrible road,” Kayode said, tenderly. “I’m so happy.”

---

The house was in Ikeja, behind a green gate with a security man named Mallam who looked me over with open interest, and a generator roared in the yard because NEPA had taken the light at nine. Kayode’s living room was big and untidy, with film posters all over the walls and a heavy dark dining table with eight chairs, and it smelled of ofada stew from a pot in the kitchen that had clearly been cooked for two.

“You cooked,” I said.

“Sit.”

“You cooked, Kayode.”

“I’m a producer. Producers don’t cook. I paid my cousin to stand next to me while I did.” He put a plate in front of me, rice and the green-brown stew with its dark, bitter-sweet smell and a boiled egg, and sat down across the table. “Eat. I won’t watch.”

He watched. We both ate. The table under our plates was a heavy slab of iroko with a split along one edge, and he told me, with a hand flat on it, that his mother had bought it in Abeokuta in 1971 and fed eleven children off it, and had threatened every one of them with a wooden spoon if they put a hot pot down on it without a mat. I put my glass down on the bare wood without thinking, and he stopped talking and looked at the wet ring, and we both started laughing. The generator droned in the dark yard and a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead. He told me about the cousin, who was sixteen minutes late and had burned the first batch, and about the film he was cutting, a long bad-tempered family drama set in Abuja with a very good grandmother in it. I described the flight. We were good at it, the same easy rhythm as the notes, and halfway through the egg I understood what I was doing, which was putting off the evening for as long as I could.

“Kayode.”

“Hm.”

“The guest room.”

“Ah.” He put down his fork. “The guest room is made up. My sister Folasade came on Wednesday and changed the sheets, and she told me, with the maid listening, that I would be a gentleman or she would hear of it.”

“And will you?”

“I told her,” Kayode said, slowly, “that I had been a gentleman for six years and it hadn’t killed me yet.”

The fan ticked. A moth had found the light over the stove.

“I have said many things to you in the notes,” he said. “At night. After you had said certain things to me. Do you remember note two thousand and something, the one where I described what I would do on a Sunday afternoon?”

“Two thousand one hundred and six.” My voice came out dry. “I have it saved.”

“I thought so.” He looked at his hands. “A voice note can be deleted, Obi. It can be played at three in the morning and never mentioned at lunch. I have been very brave in the dark. I would like to be brave in the light, with the light on, while you can see my face.” He lifted his eyes. “So I am saying it to you, in this room. I want you. The man at my table with stew on his chin. If you want the guest room, you will have the guest room, and you can tell your friends in Houston that Lagos was very hospitable. If you want something else, you say so.”

I had a speech ready for this. I had composed it on the plane, over the Atlantic. All of it went out of my head.

“I want something else,” I said.

“Say it plain, Obi.”

“I want to go to bed with you. I want to go to bed with you tonight, and I’ve wanted it since note nine hundred and something, and I flew seven thousand miles to say so with my own mouth.” I gripped the table. “That’s plain. Is that plain?”

“That’s plain.” His face had creased all over. “My God, you’re brave.”

“I’m terrified.”

“Then you are exactly as brave as I am, my brother. Come here.”

---

I did not get as far as the bedroom. I want that noted.

He rounded the table and stood me up and cupped my face in his big dry palms and kissed me. The kiss was slow and tasted of pepper and palm oil, and when it was over we were both out of breath, as if we had run the length of the street. His belly pressed against mine. His beard was shot with white and rougher than I’d imagined. I put my hands under his kaftan, on the broad hot slope of his back, and he shivered.

“Ehn,” he said against my ear. “I have wanted to feel you do that.”

“It’s a lot of back.”

“It is a lot of back. It has been waiting.”

He slid his hands down over my hips, found my belt, hesitated. “Tell me if I go too fast.”

“Go faster.”

“Obi.”

“I’m telling you.” I laughed, shaky. “Please. Six years.”

He laughed, that low motor laugh, and unbuckled me. It was bright in the room, the overhead tube and the lamp both on, and he had said he wanted the light, so I gave him the light. My trousers went. My shirt went. I stood in his living room in nothing but my socks, fifty-three years old, my chest hair going grey and the scar down one thigh from a site accident on show, and he went over me from head to foot with an expression I knew from his voice. It was the way he sounded when he said eat.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“Abeg.”

“I mean it.” He took off the kaftan and the singlet under it and the drawstring trousers, and stood there as wide as a door, the silver hair covering his chest and over the heavy brown swell of his belly. “Take your time. I’m a big old man. If this is a problem, tell me now.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Good.”

He cleared the dining table in six seconds. The plates went to the sideboard and the fruit bowl to a chair, leaving the bare dark wood shining under the lamp. He turned back to me and wiped his palm on his hip.

“Sit.”

I hitched myself up onto the table’s edge. The wood was cold under my thighs. He stepped between my knees and put his big warm hands on them and pushed them wide, slowly, watching my face.

“I said Sunday afternoon,” Kayode said. “In the note. I said I’d start by taking my time.”

“You said it was going to be a long afternoon.”

“It is going to be a long night.” He bowed over me and kissed my chest, my collarbone, the hollow under my throat, then lower, and I gripped his shoulders and heard myself make a sound that I’d have been ashamed of in the notes. “Lie back for me.”

“On the table?”

“On the table. Unless you want the floor. I’m fifty-nine.”

I lay back. The wood was hard and polished under my shoulder blades. The fan went round above me. He had his thumbs on my hipbones, and he looked down the whole length of me as if sizing up a long road he’d decided to drive, and then he knelt and closed his mouth over me.

I said his name several times, in the register I had used for six years to say goodnight. He answered with a hum that ran through me to the crown of my head. The generator thumped in the yard. Somewhere a dog started up and was told to be quiet.

“Ah, ah, Kayode, ehn, don’t, I’ll—”

“You will not.” He lifted his mouth, wet and grinning. “I want you the first time with me inside you. You can come the second time on my face.”

“The second time.”

“I have a long list. It’s on my phone.” He kissed my thigh. “Is there anything I must fetch?”

“Jelly. Water-based. In the side pocket of my bag.”

He went to the hall where my bag stood and found it, whistling under his breath, and came back reading the label with enormous dignity. “Water-based. You are a man after my own heart. Oil I do not trust.” He clicked it open. “Lie still. You are making me nervous.”

“I’m making you nervous?”

“I have never done this with four thousand voice notes watching.”

I laughed so hard that the table shook. He used the moment, cold gel and a thick careful finger, and the laugh broke in the middle and became something else. He was patient. He watched me the way he had talked to me, never hurrying, with every few strokes a quiet question. “Tell me. Is this good? A little more? Say it plain, my brother, I’ll hear you.” I said it plain. I said a good deal that I hadn’t said in the notes.

“Note two thousand one hundred and six,” he said, low, with his finger curling inside me. “You asked me what I would do first. I said, ‘I will put you on a table, Mr Engineer, and find out how long you can stay quiet.’ You said, ‘Not long.’ Do you remember?”

“Kayode. Please.”

“You said ‘not long,’ and then you confessed you had played mine back three times.” He added a second finger and watched my back come off the wood. “Not long. You were right. I can feel you hold on.”

“Ah, God, Kayode, just come in. Please.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

He stood, slicked himself with a hand that wasn’t quite steady, and took hold of my hips, and drew me down the polished wood until my backside was right at the edge. I felt him hot against me, the blunt weight of him, and I looked up at the man standing over me, the lamplight on his white chest hair, and his face wide open.

“Tell me when,” he said.

“Now. Now, Kayode.”

He pushed in, slowly, by degrees, and I felt every bit of it, the broad stretch and the heat. I cried out, a great helpless gasp that rang off the film posters. He held still the second he was in, shaking, with his forehead against my knee. “Obi. Obi. Are you all right?”

“Much better. Move.”

“Say it again.”

“Move, you old fool. I came a long way.”

He moved. He drew back slowly, and I tightened unbidden, and he groaned, and slid back in, deep, all the way. My legs were round his waist now, crossed behind him, and he had my hips in his hands and the dark table shone between us. Each stroke carried me a little way up the wood and he hauled me back down onto him. The sound was loud. The wood began to creak, a low complaining groan that matched the groan in his chest.

“This table,” he said, between strokes, “belonged to my mother.”

“Don’t tell me that now.”

“She would be very surprised.”

“Kayode, abeg, I’m about to die laughing—”

“Then die.” He drove in hard, once, and my laugh turned into a shout. “Listen to what you do to me. Do you hear that? That’s me, that’s what you’ve done, you and your load calculations. Six years I’ve been waiting for you to be shorter than I imagined.”

“I’m not short.”

“You are perfectly short.” He hit the place, whatever it is, the place I had never known the shape of, and the whole room tilted. “There. Yes? Say it, Obi.”

“Yes. There. Oh my God, you big man, there, there—”

“Louder. Mallam can hear. I don’t care. Let him know a man is happy in this house.”

“Kayode, ehn, you are splitting me open. Don’t stop. Use me, use me till I can’t stand, I want it in me, I want it running out of me tomorrow.”

I yelled. I had no pride left; it had gone in the arrivals hall. I yelled his name and a good deal of Igbo and some things about his mother’s table that I’m not going to repeat, and he fucked me hard and without mercy, his belly smacking against me. The pleasure rose in me like nothing I’d had in Houston, a great rolling swell with no bottom to it. I didn’t touch myself. I couldn’t have found the strength. I lay with my arms flung over my head and my fingers hooked on the far side of the table, and I came all over my own stomach, with no hand laid on me, with a cry I felt in the soles of my feet.

“Ah,” Kayode said, in a kind of wonder, watching it. “Ah, my brother.”

He held on for three more strokes. Then he went rigid, gripped my thighs hard enough to bruise, and said my name in his low flat three beats, Obinna Nwosu, like a man signing a contract, and came inside me, shuddering, his whole weight trembling.

We stayed joined for a long while, with the generator running and the dust settling on the windowsill.

---

Later we found the bedroom, and went back to it at two, and again before it was light. The second time was on his face, as threatened, and I will say only that he kept his word about the list.

I woke at six in the grey harmattan dawn with a large warm arm over me. The room was hazy and gold. There was a cough in the yard, then the generator cut out, and the silence rang. The ceiling fan slowed and stopped. A moment later it turned again, the fridge in the kitchen clunked, and from the street came the cheer of a whole neighbourhood, up and down the road, because NEPA had brought the light back.

“Ehn,” said a voice by my ear, thick with sleep. “What is that?”

“That’s the light.”

“They never bring it back before eight.” He pulled me closer. “It’s a sign.”

“It’s the grid.”

“It is a sign, Mr Engineer.” And Kayode Balogun began to laugh, the low cough-and-motor laugh I had loved for six years, and this time I felt it shake him there at my back, and I laughed along, and the sun came up through the dust.