247 Numbers

The message arrives at 11:50. I'm three cars back from the light at the Chevron roundabout, twenty minutes after leaving Yewande's birthday dinner, and it comes with its own clock.

AT MIDNIGHT, SOMEONE YOU KNOW WILL DIE. YOU HAVE TEN MINUTES TO FIND THEM. I WILL NOT TELL YOU WHO. I WILL NOT TELL YOU WHERE.

Under it, red digits count down from 09:59. While I'm staring, they become 09:58.

I laugh. I’m alone in the car with the AC rattling and a slow highlife tune low on the radio. It has to be Debo. He used to do this back when we still spoke, sending me fake alarms to see if I'd bite. I type WHO IS THIS and send it before the light at the roundabout changes.

I told you. I won't say who.

You have 247 numbers saved in that phone. Most of them don't matter to you. Find out which one does.

I look down. My contacts are already open, the little grey count at the top of the screen: 247. I've never once read that number as anything but the app doing its housekeeping. Tonight it looks different.

My thumb moves fast, skipping past the two hundred-odd names that don't matter tonight. The hairdresser. The estate agent still texting about a flat I didn't take. People from work functions, I said maybe to, and never confirmed. An old aso-ebi group I muted a year ago and never left. Even so, what's left is still too many to call one by one in ten minutes. Two hundred and forty-seven names, and any one of them could be the reason I'm too late.

The light turns green. The danfo behind me leans on its horn, one long note, and the conductor hangs half out of the door shouting, "Ajah, Ajah, empty seat dey!" I pull forward into the junction, then swing the car onto the shoulder in front of a shuttered POS stand and put it in park.

09:41.

I call my mother first. She picks up on the second ring, television loud behind her, and asks why I'm calling so late, is everything all right. I say yes, sorry, wrong pocket-dial, and hang up before she can hear that something's wrong. Whoever this is about, it isn't her. She's in her sitting room in Magodo, in the flat she rented when she and my father separated nine years ago, with Channels TV on and a fan going. I can hear both. That's one name gone, out of two hundred and forty-seven.

09:12.

I try Yewande next. She's the last person I actually spoke to tonight. It rings out. I try again. Nothing. I send a text, CALL ME NOW, ARE YOU OK, and watch it sit there marked Delivered, not Read. It hits me properly for the first time: I could spend all ten minutes like this. Ringing out. Delivered, not Read. Two hundred and forty-five more of these, and midnight arriving anyway.

08:40.

A voice note comes in this time, six seconds long. I press play and hold the phone to my ear. All I hear is a generator running somewhere close by, the kind that hums behind almost all the houses on this side of Lagos. It tells me nothing. It could be anyone's house. It could be a street I've never stood on. I sit there with the phone against my ear long after the six seconds end, angry that six seconds of somebody else's power problem is all I've got to work with.

08:05.

My phone rings, and I answer it so fast I nearly drop it. It's Yewande, laughing before I've said a word. Her phone was at the bottom of her bag, she says, while she argued with the Bolt driver about the price to take her home. Why am I calling like this, is everything fine. I tell her yes, fine, wrong pocket-dial twice in one night. She laughs again, says something about the wine, and I hang up on the sound of her still laughing. Two down. Two hundred and forty-five left. A woman who was never in danger, happily arguing with a Bolt driver.

07:12.

The next voice note is eight seconds long. Under the same generator hum, there's something else this time: a ringtone struggling to come through. It isn't a real ringtone, not one anybody still uses anymore. It's the old Nokia default. My father never updated his phone before he died, and after he died, Debo kept it. He never changed the ringtone. Said it was the sound that used to mean Papa was back from the shop, and some part of him still listens for it.

I am the first child. Debo is the last and the only boy, and in the end, that mattered more to our father than birth order ever did. We shared a bed until I was twelve, my heel in his ribs most nights, before our father built the extension. When the will was finally read, months later than it should have taken, the house went to Debo. So did the money, and everything else that had our father's name on it. Our father liked to think of himself as a modern man, but he still believed a house needed a son's name on the deed, not a daughter's. To me, he left the good china and a letter asking me to look out for my brother.

Debo sold our father's Camry five weeks ago, to a stranger from a Facebook group for four hundred thousand naira and didn't tell me until it was already gone. I said it was disrespectful to sell the man's things before the ground had even properly settled. He said the money was his to do what he liked with, since the will said so. I said he always took the easy way. He said I still thought I ran the house, now that there was nobody left to stop me. I blocked his number that night, actually did it, thumb shaking over his name on the screen like I was disarming something.

He isn't in my favourites. He isn't near the top of my call log, or the top of anything. If you'd asked me yesterday who I'd drop everything for at midnight, I don't know that his name comes first. It comes now. It comes so fast it frightens me, the moment the generator and that stupid, dead ringtone tell me the person in danger might be him.

05:50.

I unblock him. My hands are ahead of my head on this. It rings twice, then MTN drops it, that dead stretch of silence before the automated voice tells you the call cannot be completed at this time. I try again. Nothing. I send a text, DEBO PICK UP, and watch it sit there marked Delivered, not Read. Behind me, a LASTMA man blows a whistle at nobody in particular. The POS stand beside my car runs its own generator. For one bad second, I think I'm hearing the voice note again, live. Then I understand that it's only Lagos being Lagos. Every third building on this road runs its own small generator against the dark.

05:10.

He still lives in the house. That's the one fact I have, so I use it. I pull back into the road without checking my mirror, and a bike nearly clips my bumper, the rider cursing over his shoulder as he swerves. Ikorodu from here, at this hour, with hardly any traffic, is eleven minutes if the light on Admiralty stays green and the one after it doesn't stop me. I don't have eleven minutes. I need someone who's already inside that house. My hands are shaking on the wheel, and I grip tighter instead of slowing down.

So I call the gateman instead. Baba Fatai has sat at that gate since before I could walk. My father bought him a phone years ago so he could always be reached. I have never once called it after ten at night.

He picks up on the first ring, voice already tight. He asks straight away who has died. That's the only reason a man his age expects a call this late.

"Baba Fatai, is my brother in the house?"

There's a pause, one I can tell he's trying to keep short. "He dey inside. Why, madam?"

"Go and check on him. Now, please. Knock on his door."

"Wetin happen—"

"Please, Baba. Just go."

04:20.

I hear him moving, slippers slapping against tile, taking the stairs two at a time. I keep one eye on the road, and the phone pressed hard enough to my ear that it'll leave a mark. Somewhere under his footsteps, I hear the same generator hum from the voice notes, closer now, the sound of a house I already know too well. My phone buzzes with a new message, still pressed to my ear. I don't look at it. I already know what it says. I've run out of minutes to spend reading the same threat twice.

"Madam, the door lock from inside."

"Break it."

"Madam—"

"Baba Fatai, break the door."

On the second try, the door cracks open, the wood splitting away from the old lock. Then he says my brother's name three times, each one louder than the last, and there's nothing steady left in his voice.

03:10.

"He dey breathe," Baba Fatai says finally. Something that's been locked in my chest since 11:50 comes loose all at once. It's bad enough that I have to grip the wheel to stay upright in my own seat. "Madam, he don faint. Plenty medicine dey for floor. I no know wetin to do."

"Don't move him. Stay with him, Baba, stay right there on the floor next to him, I'm calling for help myself, I'm putting you on hold one second, I am not hanging up, I promise—"

I click over. I scroll past a former landlord's number I never got round to deleting, a plumber I used exactly once, and land on a number I haven't dialled in seven months: Grace Specialist Hospital, just off Ikorodu Road. It's the hospital that admitted my father the year he died. I still have the number saved from then. 

A woman answers on the third ring, flat-voiced, until she hears how fast I'm talking. I give her the address, my brother's name and age, and everything Baba Fatai told me. She tells me a unit is already close, already moving. I don't loosen my grip on the wheel until she says it a second time. I don't know if that's true or if it's just what she says to people like me at midnight. I thank her twice and hang up.

01:47.

I click back to Baba Fatai. He's still there, still breathing loud into the phone. He tells me my brother's eyes moved, just now, just for a second. I don't know if that's true either, or if an old man alone in a dark room with a body on the floor will say anything to keep a frightened woman driving safely through traffic. I keep driving anyway, toward Ikorodu, toward a house I won't reach in time. Stopping isn't something I can do right now. The Third Mainland Bridge stretches out ahead of me, lamp after lamp after lamp, and I put my foot down.

00:22.

00:10.

00:04.

00:03.

00:02.

00:01.

The countdown runs out its last second in silence. No 00:00 appears, no message, nothing but the screen sitting empty where the digits used to be. Then my phone buzzes, the same as it has all night. I'm on the Third Mainland Bridge at exactly midnight. Before I even look down at it in my lap, I already know I'm not going to like what it says.

TIME'S UP.

Nothing else follows it. I put the phone face down on the passenger seat, both hands back on the wheel, and keep driving toward Ikorodu, watching the road instead of the screen.