Table Six, Episode 6: The Ceiling

The Old Staff Quarters. Thursday, 1:41 AM.

Nobody touched Dayo at first. That was the strange part.

The two men in suits just stood on either side of the doorway of Flat 3, the way you stand beside a goat you have already paid for.

"Baba Sule," said Mr Ekpo. "Call the police post at Ibafo. Tell them we have an intruder."

Baba Sule fumbled for his phone.

"No."

The Chief hadn't raised his voice. He didn't need to. Baba Sule's hand froze halfway to his pocket.

"No police," the Chief said. "Police write things down. Police ask why." He turned his stone face to Ekpo. "Lock the boy somewhere. Call his mother. He can go home with her after the panel, quietly. Like a lost goat."

"Chief, with respect, a trespasser..."

"Ekpo."

One word. Ekpo shut his mouth.

Ife saw it then, the thing nobody at Heritage Hills had ever been allowed to see. Ekpo wasn't the top of anything. He was a man standing one step below another man, and he hated it.

---

In the shuffle out of the flat, everything happened in the dark between torch beams.

Zee stumbled over her fallen bucket. Went down on one knee on the mat. One of the suits grabbed her arm and hauled her up, and she let him, swearing at him in Hausa, loud enough to cover the small sound of something sliding under the edge of the mat.

Ife saw it because she was looking at Zee's hands. She had learned that this week. Always look at the hands.

Zee's hands were empty now.

The cracked Samsung, with its video of a silver Nokia, was under Dayo's sleeping mat in an abandoned flat behind a pig farm.

And none of them would be allowed back here again.

---

Isolation Room. Thursday, 2:30 AM.

Baba Sule nailed the louvres shut himself.

He did it slowly, with a borrowed hammer, three nails into each frame, while Ife sat on the bed and watched. Nurse Esther stood in the doorway in a hairnet and a wrapper, her arms folded so tight she looked like she was holding herself together.

"I'm sorry, my daughter," Baba Sule muttered between nails. "Na Oga Ekpo send me."

"It's okay, Baba."

"It is not okay." He hammered the last nail. Then, without looking at her, he dug in the pocket of his old army jacket and put something on the side table. A sachet of groundnuts. "Eat. You no chop since."

At the door he stopped.

"Seventeen years I dey this gate," he said quietly. "Every visiting day, Oga Ekpo carry brown envelope go car park. Different car every time. Big car." He looked at her then, his old eyes yellow in the torchlight. "I no blind. I just get children for house."

Then he was gone, and Nurse Esther shut the door, and Ife heard the key turn.

---

Isolation Room. Thursday, 7:50 AM.

Mr Ekpo came at breakfast.

He brought a tray. Bread, an egg, a cup of Lipton. And a single typed sheet of paper with a fountain pen lying across it like a bridge.

"Eat," he said.

Don't eat anything he sends.

Ife didn't move.

Ekpo sat down on the bed with the spoiled spring. It groaned. He didn't seem to notice. He looked tired this morning. There was a grey bristle on his chin that he hadn't had time to shave.

"You are a clever girl, Ifeoluwa," he said. "That is your problem. Clever girls think the world is a Chemistry equation. Balance both sides and you get the truth." He tapped the typed sheet. "The world is not an equation. The world is a staircase. Somebody is always standing on somebody."

She read the sheet upside down.

I, Ifeoluwa Adeniran, admit that Oladayo Martins, an expelled student, pressured me to collect and hide examination materials on his behalf...

"Sign it," Ekpo said, "and on Friday I will recommend suspension, not expulsion. One term. You will still write WAEC. Your aunty will cry, but she will thank me in ten years." He leaned closer, and she smelled the menthol. "Don't sign it, and you will be expelled, and Oladayo will be handed to the police for trespass and theft, with your statement or without it. Those are the two staircases."

"The Chief said no police."

Something flickered across Ekpo's face. Quick. Ugly.

"The Chief," he said, "says a lot of things."

He stood up. Left the pen on the paper.

"You have until six o'clock this evening."

---

Isolation Room. Thursday, 12:45 PM.

Tolu came with a Literature exercise book and a face the colour of chalk.

"Nurse Esther said five minutes," she whispered. "She says Mr Ekpo said nobody, but she says I'm not nobody, I'm a classmate. I don't understand her, Ife."

"Sit down. Listen. I don't have time to say this twice."

Ife told her everything. Fast and low. The staff quarters. Dayo. Kamsi walking to his father. The Samsung under the mat.

And the envelope in Tolu's locker, before resumption. Who had really sent it.

Tolu went very still at that.

"Kamsi," she said.

"Yes."

"Kamsi blackmailed me." She laughed, a small cracked sound. "And then he cried in the art room so I'd teach him your signature. He used me twice." She looked at her hands. "And I let him both times, because I never want to know anything."

"Tolu." Ife took her wrist. "I need the phone from under that mat. It's the only proof of what Ekpo did with the Nokia. Zee can't go, they've got Senior Folake sleeping across her doorway. I can't go." She jerked her head at the nailed louvres. "It has to be you."

"Me." Tolu's voice was a thread. "Ife, I can't climb a wall. I can't run. I get asthma when I see a staircase."

"You don't have to run. You walk. Through the farm, in daylight, during siesta, with a cutlass and a basket, like you're on farm duty. Nobody looks twice at a girl on farm duty."

Tolu stared at her for a long time.

Then she closed her Literature exercise book very carefully, like she was closing a door on somebody.

"I want to know," she said.

"What?"

"For once in my life." Tolu stood up. Her hands were shaking. Her voice wasn't. "I want to know what happens."

---

School Farm. Thursday, 2:20 PM.

Siesta lay over Heritage Hills like a heavy blanket. Even the piggery was quiet.

Tolu walked between the cassava ridges with a borrowed cutlass and a raffia basket, her heart going so hard she could feel it in her teeth. She hacked at weeds every few steps, in case anybody was watching from the admin block. She was very bad at it.

The elephant grass was where Ife said it would be. So was the flattened path.

Block C looked worse in daylight. Sadder. Lizards ran across the walls doing their push-ups. The door of Flat 3 hung open.

Tolu stepped inside.

The lantern was gone. The textbooks were gone. The jerrycan, the Indomie, the mosquito net. Somebody had cleared everything out in the night. All that was left was the mat, rolled up in the corner.

She unrolled it with trembling fingers.

Nothing.

She checked the floor. The corners. Behind the door. Under the window frame, in the pawpaw roots in the kitchen.

Nothing.

The phone was gone.

Tolu sat down on the dusty floor and pressed her fists against her eyes, because of course, of course. The one time she decided to want to know something, the thing was already gone.

Then she saw it.

On the wall above where the mat had been, low down, where you'd only see it if you were sitting on the floor. Scratched into the old blue paint with something sharp, like a compass point.

Two letters.

K.E.

And an arrow, pointing straight up.

Tolu looked up.

The ceiling of Flat 3 was old asbestos boards, sagging and stained. One board, directly above the arrow, was sitting slightly wrong in its frame. Pushed up and put back, by someone tall enough to reach.

Tolu was not tall enough to reach.

She dragged the upturned paint bucket over. Climbed on it. Wobbled. Reached.

The board lifted. Dust rained into her eyes. Her fingers found something in the dark above the ceiling: smooth, flat, wrapped in a nylon bag.

Two things.

---

Isolation Room. Thursday, 5:40 PM.

Tolu didn't come back.

Ife watched the light go orange through the nailed louvres. She watched the shadow of the hibiscus crawl across the floor. At five, she heard the bell for evening prep. At half past five, she heard Ekpo's voice in the corridor, talking to Nurse Esther.

The typed confession lay on the side table. The fountain pen across it.

Twenty minutes.

She thought about Aunty Bukky, flying in tomorrow morning in her Dior to find her niece expelled. She thought about Mummy in Manchester. She thought about WAEC, and the university forms, and the Mass Communication course she had wanted since JSS2.

She thought about Dayo locked somewhere in this school, with his taped glasses, waiting for his mother to come and take him home like a lost goat.

She picked up the pen.

At 5:47 the door opened.

It was Nurse Esther, with the dinner tray. Eba and egusi. Her face was blank in a careful, practised way.

"Your classmate sent your Literature notes," she said loudly, for the corridor. "She said you left them in the class."

She put the tray down. Under the plate, the exercise book. Under the exercise book, something heavy.

Then she leaned close, as if checking Ife's temperature, and whispered: "That child is very brave. And very dusty. I've hidden her in my store until Ekpo goes."

The door closed.

Ife lifted the exercise book.

A nylon bag. Inside it: Zee's cracked Samsung, switched off to save the battery.

And a single sheet of paper, ruled, slightly torn along one edge where it had been ripped from a hardcover book.

EXAMINATION OFFICE: KEY REGISTER.

01/07 | 10:40 PM | 11:25 PM | K. EZE-OBI | Return of prefects' files | [signature]

Not a photocopy. Real ink. Real paper. A real signature, with Kamsi's big confident K and the little flick at the end where he always underlined himself.

The original page.

Clipped to it with a paper clip was a strip of exam pad in handwriting she knew from five years of borrowed notes. Big, sloping, careless.

2009 worked. He's going to notice tonight. I walked to my father so he'd stop watching me. I'm sorry it had to look real. It had to look real.

Tomorrow I'll stand where you need me.

K.

Ife pressed the page against her chest and laughed once, a sound that was almost a sob.

Kamsi hadn't walked away. Kamsi had walked in. Into the one room in this school where nobody would watch him: the middle of his father's trust.

Then she heard the footsteps in the corridor.

Fast. Hard. Not Nurse Esther's slippers. Leather shoes, the kind that clicked.

And the smell of menthol, arriving before the man.

Ife had three seconds. She folded the page twice and pushed it deep into her sock, the way she had hidden a note from Dayo on the first Sunday of term. She shoved the Samsung under the egusi plate.

The door crashed open.

Mr Ekpo stood in the doorway. He was breathing hard. His shirt was untucked on one side. In his hand he held a gold prefect badge with the pin bent, like it had been torn off somebody.

SENIOR BOY PREFECT.

"My safe," he said, very softly, "keeps a record every time it is opened. Did your friend know that?"

He held out his other hand.

"Give me the page, Ifeoluwa," he said. "Give it to me now, and Oladayo goes home tomorrow with his mother." He smiled, and it was the worst smile she had ever seen. "Or keep it, and tomorrow morning he goes to the police station at Ibafo instead. And I promise you, the Chief will not stop me this time."

To be continued in Episode 7.