Table Six, Episode 5: The Staff Quarters

Behind the Clinic. Thursday, 12:04 AM.

The farm at night smelled of wet soil and the piggery. Cassava ridges ran away into the dark like ribs. Somewhere a frog was complaining about something.

Kamsi walked fast. Ife walked faster, so she could stay half a step behind him, where she could watch his hands.

"Start from the beginning," she said. "And if you lie to me once, I'm going back."

"Okay."

"Everything."

"Okay, Ife."

He didn't speak for ten ridges of cassava. Then he did, low and flat, like reading out a statement he had rehearsed in his head a thousand times.

"My father paid Ekpo two and a half million naira for the SS2 promotion papers. All nine subjects. He said it was an investment. He said a boy who would be Senior Prefect couldn't come fourth in his class behind a scholarship boy." Kamsi's jaw tightened. "Ekpo has been doing it for years, Ife. Board members' children. The ones whose fathers built the ICT block and the new hostel. Everyone pretends not to know."

"And Dayo found out."

"Thirtieth of June. He came back early from prep and found the envelope under my mattress. He was my bunkmate. He knew my mattress better than I did." A strange sound, almost a laugh. "He didn't shout. He just sat down on his bed and said, Return them tomorrow and tell Ekpo you won't use them. Or I'll report it. Not you. Him."

"So you returned them."

"I called my father."

The frog stopped complaining.

"My father called Ekpo. The next day Ekpo called me into his office and gave me a second envelope. Copies. He told me to get Dayo's locker combination and put them inside. He told me to sign out the exam office key that night with a boring excuse, so if anybody saw a prefect in the admin block at eleven, there'd be a reason in black and white." Kamsi's voice thinned. "He said, It's either him or you, and I promise you, Kamsiyochukwu, it will not be you."

"And you got the combination from Zee."

"Yes."

"For a Fanta."

He flinched like she'd hit him. "Yes."

They had reached the end of the farm. Ahead was a wall of bush, and above it the dark roofs of buildings nobody used anymore.

"When I returned the key that night," Kamsi said, "I photocopied the register page. In the admin office, on the old machine by the bursar's door. I don't even know why. My hands just did it." He looked at her for the first time since the clinic. "I think part of me wanted to be caught."

"And then Ekpo noticed his little cover story had your name on it."

"Two days later. He tore the page out in front of me and made me write a new one. Same time, same purpose. Different name." He swallowed. "He picked yours."

"Why me?"

"Because on the assembly ground, Dayo looked at you." Kamsi's voice was very quiet. "He didn't look at me, or Zee, or Tolu. Only you. Ekpo was standing behind the principal. He saw it. He thinks you know something."

Ife stopped walking.

"I don't," she said. "I've never known what he said."

Kamsi pushed aside a curtain of elephant grass. Behind it, a path someone had been flattening every night for weeks.

"Then ask him yourself," he said.

---

The Old Staff Quarters. 12:21 AM.

The old staff quarters had been empty since 2018, when the school built a new block near the main gate. Six bungalows in a row, roofs sagging, windows gone. Pawpaw trees growing through a kitchen floor. A painted sign by the first door that still said BLOCK C, FLAT 1 in faded blue.

A lantern was burning in Flat 3.

Ife could see it through the window frame: orange and low, turned down to almost nothing. Two shadows on the wall inside.

One of them stood up.

Ife didn't remember crossing the yard. She didn't remember the doorway, or the broken step, or the smell of mosquito coil and old rain. She remembered only that suddenly he was there in front of her.

Taller than in July. Thinner. A little fuzz of beard that made him look older and also, somehow, younger. The same glasses, the masking tape on the bridge gone grey with dirt.

Dayo.

"Hi, Ife," he said.

She hit him. Hard, on the arm, with her whole fist. He winced.

Then she grabbed him and held on and cried into his dirty T-shirt like a JSS1 on resumption day, and she didn't care who saw.

"Forty-one times," she said into his shoulder. "I called you forty-one times."

"I know." His voice was rough. "Ekpo had my phone. I'm sorry."

Over his shoulder she saw Zee sitting on an upturned paint bucket, wiping her own eyes with the heel of her hand and pretending she wasn't.

"I told you," Zee said thickly. "Before Friday. I swore on my life."

---

Flat 3 had a mat on the floor, a mosquito net hanging from a nail, a stack of textbooks, a jerrycan of rainwater, and a carton of Indomie with half the packs gone.

"Kamsi's provisions," Dayo said, seeing her look. "His Indomie is better than mine. Chicken flavour, not onion."

"You've been living here for three weeks?"

"Since the second of September." He sat back down on the mat and pulled his knees up. "I told Mummy I was going to fix it. I came here because this is where it's broken."

"How did you even..."

"Kamsi came to Ketu in August." Dayo didn't look at Kamsi when he said it. "He found me helping Mummy sell pap at five in the morning. He told me everything. Standing in the gutter, in his Jordan sneakers, crying." A pause. "I didn't forgive him. I'm still not sure I have."

Kamsi stood in the doorway. He didn't come in. He seemed to know he hadn't earned the inside of the room.

"So why are you here together?" Ife asked.

"Because he can't talk first," Dayo said. "His father told him that if a single word about the papers came out, he would make sure Lola's scholarship was cancelled and Mummy's stall at Ketu market was pulled down by the local government in one afternoon. My mother has sold pap on that spot for eleven years." He pushed his glasses up. "And because the photocopy is not enough. It's a photocopy. Ekpo will say it's forged. He'll say Tolu did it. Everyone knows Tolu can copy anything."

"So what is enough?"

"The original page," said Kamsi from the doorway. "The one he tore out. With my real signature. In my real handwriting."

"He didn't burn it?"

"He kept it." Kamsi's mouth twisted. "In August I heard him on the phone with my father. He didn't know I was in the next room. He said, Don't worry, Chief, I have the original page. Safely kept. Let's both remember who knows what."

"Insurance," Zee said. "Against your father."

"Against everyone."

Ife looked from one face to another in the lantern light. Zee. Kamsi. Dayo.

"The steel safe," she said. "The new one. Only I have the combination."

"Yes."

---

"There's one more thing," Ife said, "and I need somebody to say it out loud."

Nobody spoke.

"Tolu." She turned to the doorway. "The envelope in her locker. Dayo's notebook, the typed note, the twenty thousand naira. The exeat form. Do this or Mrs Oyelaran gets this." She held Kamsi's eyes. "That was you."

Dayo's head came up. "What?"

Kamsi's face had gone grey.

"I needed a note Ife would believe," he said. "In Dayo's handwriting. It had to look like it came from before, from July. Dayo couldn't go near the chapel. People would see him."

"You blackmailed Tolu?" Dayo was on his feet. "Kamsi, I could have written it myself! I was right here!"

"You'd have said no to the plan."

"Because it was a terrible plan!"

"It worked!"

"She cried for two days in July because of us, and you did it to her again?"

The lantern flame shivered. For a second Ife thought they would fight, two tall boys in a dead room, and she didn't know who she'd pull off whom.

Then Kamsi sat down on the broken step and put his head in his hands.

"I know," he said. "I know. That's who I am now. I keep doing the wrong thing for the right reason and telling myself it counts."

Nobody said it didn't count. Nobody said it did.

"The brass key in my locker," Zee said slowly. "That was you too."

"I needed you to go with her." Kamsi didn't lift his head. "I knew Ekpo would try something once he worked out what we were doing. I didn't want her alone in that chapel."

"How did Ekpo find out?"

"He saw Tolu put the note in the hymn book on Saturday. He reads the lessons at morning service. He's in that chapel more than the chaplain." Kamsi rubbed his eyes. "He must have read it and put it back. Then he took Dayo's phone out of his drawer and started texting. To pull you apart. To make you suspect each other. Don't tell Kamsi. Watch Ife. He's good at it. He's been doing it to teachers and parents for nineteen years."

"And to Lola," Dayo said quietly. "Every night. Are you eating, Dami." His hands curled into fists. "Using my name on my little sister."

---

The lantern was running low. Somewhere out past the farm, a dog barked twice and stopped.

Ife sat down on the mat next to Dayo.

"On the assembly ground," she said. "You said something to me. I've watched it in my head every night for three months. I could never read it."

Dayo looked at her. For a moment he looked very tired, and very young.

"Check the register," he said.

Ife let out a breath she felt she'd been holding since July.

"I saw Kamsi come back to the hostel at eleven-thirty that night with the exam office key tag sticking out of his pocket. The red one. I didn't understand until the next morning, when they opened my locker." He shrugged. "Then they were walking me to the gate, and you were the only person I trusted to actually go and look."

"I looked," Ife said. "Eventually."

"You found it."

"I found the wrong version."

"Then we get the right one." Dayo picked up a textbook from the stack. New School Chemistry. Inside the front cover, in his tiny slanted writing, were numbers. Rows and rows of them, crossed out. "I was Ekpo's lab assistant in SS1. Scholarship duty. I cleaned his glassware for a whole year. He uses the same number for everything. The chemical store padlock. The prep room. His old filing cabinet."

"What number?"

Ife already knew. She could hear Ekpo's voice in her head, smooth and amused, the day she'd been caught with his register in her hands.

2009. It was built in 2009.

"Twenty, zero, nine," Dayo said. "The year he became exam officer. The year his business started. He's proud of it. He tells everybody."

"He told me," Ife said. "To my face."

Zee leaned forward on her bucket. "So we open the safe. Tomorrow. While he's teaching SS3 double Chemistry, nine to ten-twenty. Kamsi has the prefect pass for the admin block. I keep watch at the staircase. Ife..."

"Ife is suspended and locked in the sick bay," Kamsi said.

"Ife," Ife said, "is coming."

For the first time all night, Dayo smiled. The old smile. Crooked, a little smug, the boy who got 100 in Further Maths and pretended it was easy.

"Table Six," he said.

"Table Six," said Zee.

Kamsi said nothing. But he lifted his head from his hands.

---

The Old Staff Quarters. 1:37 AM.

The light came first.

Not lantern light. White light. Torch beams, three, four, five of them, swinging through the empty window frames of Flat 3 and pinning them to the walls like moths.

Zee knocked over her bucket. Dayo was on his feet. Ife couldn't see anything but white.

A voice came from behind the glare. Smooth. Pleasant. Smelling, faintly, of menthol.

"Oladayo Martins."

The beams parted. Mr Ekpo stood in the yard in a dark jacket over his pyjama shirt. Baba Sule was beside him with a cutlass hanging loose from one hand and a face full of apology. Behind them, two of the men in suits from visiting day.

"Trespassing on school property," Mr Ekpo said. "An expelled student. Living in staff quarters, eating stolen provisions, conspiring with a suspended student who has broken out of the sick bay." He sighed, almost sadly. "Ifeoluwa. You make my work so easy."

Ife couldn't breathe.

Then a second figure stepped out of the dark behind Ekpo. Tall. Broad. No agbada tonight, just a white kaftan and a face like stone.

Chief Ifeanyi Eze-Obi.

He didn't look at Dayo. He didn't look at Ife or Zee. He looked only at the boy standing in the doorway of Flat 3.

"Kamsiyochukwu," he said. Not loud. He didn't need to be loud. "Come here."

Nobody moved.

The torches buzzed. A moth battered itself against the lantern glass.

Kamsi looked at his father.

Then he looked back into the room. At Dayo, at Zee on the floor beside her fallen bucket, at Ife. His face was completely blank. The light switched off, the way it had on visiting day.

"Kamsi," Ife whispered.

"Now," said his father.

Kamsi stepped down off the broken step.

Then another step. And another.

Across the yard. Into the torchlight. Towards his father.

The Chief put one heavy hand on the back of his son's neck.

"Good boy," he said.

Mr Ekpo cracked a menthol sweet between his teeth and smiled at the three of them left in the room.

"Friday, then," he said. "Nine o'clock. I think we'll need a bigger panel."

Kamsi didn't look back.

To be continued in Episode 6.