Clack-Clack

The baton goes clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack against the iron gate, and Emeka isn't listening to it. He hears it. He just isn't listening.

He hears it, dismisses it as irrelevant, and keeps working. He's been in this flat for eleven months. Mallam Haruna has been doing his 1:45 AM round for all eleven of them, baton against iron, iron against night, the same sound at the same hour, every night the same.

He found this flat the week he arrived, on the ground floor of a compound within a gated estate in Wuse 2. He paid the compound levy for the year upfront. It covered generator access, security, and the upkeep of the compound. In eleven months, none of it has ever failed. The generator kicks in before the lights finish flickering. The gate locks on time, every time. He hasn't had to think about any of it since.

Tonight is like every other night. The one thing that's different is on his screen. An error.

It's a silent failure, the worst kind. Something in payment processing has been quietly timing out since 10 PM, and the system that's supposed to pick up that sort of issue never activated. God knows how many transactions have quietly failed, while every status light on his dashboard was green and every uptime metric read normal. He found it by accident at 1:15 AM, clicking into a log he rarely checks. What if he'd gone to sleep at midnight like a sane person?

He doesn't go to sleep at midnight. That's the thing about Emeka that everyone who knows him would tell you, if you asked. He doesn't stop. He came to Abuja with a single Echolac box of clothes and a laptop, and he was working again before the box was fully unpacked.

His third energy drink sweats a ring onto the glass table beside the laptop. The rest of the flat is dark, his laptop the only source of light. On his terminal, he scrolls through the error, tracing it line by line.

Outside, the sound comes again.

Clack-clack. Clack-clack. Clack-clack.

***

At 1:47 AM, the rhythm of Mallam Haruna's baton stutters.

Emeka doesn't look up. He catches it only because he's been in that quietness for over an hour, and in that quietness, the baton has become part of the room's background process, barely registering at all. Then it misses a beat, there is a gap where a strike should be, and it picks back up again.

He frowns at his screen.

His fingers stay on the keyboard.

The baton resumes its circuit, and Emeka resumes his, and two minutes later, he finds a second place where the payment system has broken down, and he's already working backwards to find out why. Somewhere outside, Mallam Haruna is finishing his round, and Emeka doesn't think about him at all. He's buried in someone else's mess, and right now that's the only thing in the room that's real to him.

***

By 2:04 AM, the baton's clacking isn't a stutter anymore.

He hears it this time. He can't not.

The baton doesn't sound right anymore. Two strikes land close together, almost on top of each other. Then nothing, long enough that Emeka almost looks up from his screen. When it starts again, it's rushed, three hits crammed together like Haruna is trying to catch up on something. Then it stops again. Four seconds. Five. Emeka's hand hovers over the keyboard, waiting to see if that's it. Then one more strike lands, and it's closer than it should be. Close enough that Haruna must have stepped off his usual path and come around the side of the building, toward Emeka's window.

Emeka pulls one AirPod out.

He sits very still, head tilted.

The baton starts again. Off-rhythm. Emeka tries to explain it, the simplest reasons first. Haruna's distracted, maybe checking his phone. Maybe there's a cat prowling by the wall, or a drunk man wandering near the gate, and the banging is just Haruna trying to scare him off.

The striking gets faster. More frantic.

Emeka's hand is still on his AirPod. He doesn't put it back in. He doesn't take out the other one. He splits his attention, one ear in the room and one ear in his work, and listens to Mallam Haruna's baton go from irregular to frantic, from frantic to a single crashing strike against iron that rings for a long moment in the night—

—and then stops.

The ringing fades into silence.

Emeka sits in it.

He tells himself the generator's noise could be swallowing the sound of the baton, that it might still be going, and he just can't hear it. He tells himself sound plays tricks this late at night, that everything always sounds closer than it actually is. He tells himself Haruna has probably stepped into the gatehouse for water. It's been a brutal week of heat, even for March.

He puts the AirPod back in and goes back to his screen.

***

At 2:15 AM, a different sound starts outside.

It's wet. It's heavy. It's moving along the outside of his wall. A viscous drag against the tarmac. Every few seconds, it stops, as if something were being set down. Then it's picked up again. Something with real weight. Something that keeps needing to be repositioned.

Emeka pulls both AirPods out.

He stands up. Crosses to the centre of the room. Stops.

The sound moves along the wall, past his window, and continues south along the walkway. It slows. It stops.

He doesn't move. The blue-white light of his laptop screen paints one side of his face. The other side is dark. His energy drink sits where he left it. His screen still shows the error he was tracing a moment ago.

Outside, the generator keeps its steady drone. Everything else has gone quiet. The dog from the compound next door isn't barking, the one that always seems to start up on the nights he actually wants to sleep. The hum of traffic from the main road, the one he never actually notices, isn't there either.

He goes to the window.

He slides the window open just a crack and puts his eye to the gap.

Sodium light turns the walkway orange. The tarmac runs out to the wall, its top strung with parallel lines of electric wire on white insulators, evenly spaced the length of the compound. Every door on the row is dark and shut, exactly as it should be.

There's a stain on the tarmac, close to his window, running toward the gate. Dark. Wide. Still glistening.

Emeka stares at it.

Engine oil, maybe. Water spilt from the overhead tank. A gutter backed up. He lists them off, one after another, not stopping on any of them.

His eyes follow the stain back to the wall.

Where's Haruna?

Emeka goes back to his laptop.

He opens a new tab and finds the compound's WhatsApp group. He joined it in January, when the diesel argument made it onto three consecutive compound notices. He scrolls up past generator schedules and a forwarded news item about fuel prices and compound security. The last message was four days ago. An argument between the compound caretaker and the owner of Flat 9 about parking.

He types in the group: Anybody awake? Haruna is not on his round.

He watches the screen. The two ticks go grey and stay grey. No one else in the compound is awake to see it. Whatever help he was hoping for, it isn't coming from there.

He goes looking for Haruna's number.

He doesn't have it.

He has lived in this compound for eleven months, and he doesn't even have the number of the one man whose job is to stand at the gate all night.

He searches for the compound caretaker. He finds Augustine's name in an old WhatsApp thread about sanitation dues from earlier that month, with a number attached. He calls.

It rings six times, then drops to voicemail. A flat, automated voice tells him to leave a message after the tone. Then the beep.

He hangs up.

He stands in the middle of the room, phone still in his hand. I'm probably the only person awake in this compound right now.

He goes back to the window.

The smear is still there.

It hasn't spread. A smear of engine oil or gutter water stays where it spills. He reminds himself of this. He slides the window open further this time, wincing at the small sound it makes, loud in all that silence, and looks around. Everything else looks the same.

The gate—

—is open.

The pedestrian gate, set into the side of the main vehicle gate, hangs open, off its latch. The wind pushes it, and it creaks. The gatehouse is dark, the low concrete booth where Haruna keeps his stool and his flask and the dog-eared paperback he's been working through since September.

Emeka slides the window shut.

He sits down on the floor, back against the wall beneath the window, below the sill, out of sight of anything that might look in.

The laptop is still open, the screen glowing blue in the dark. He reaches for it without looking away from the door, misses the edge of it once, finds it, and closes the lid. The light goes out.

He's in the dark.

His flat is on the ground floor because ground floor means you don't need a key for the stairs, means faster food deliveries from online vendors, and means you can take the bin out in slippers. He chose it for convenience.

He sits there and takes stock. A sliding window. A door with a Yale lock. A bolt he hasn't used tonight, the same bolt he never uses, because nothing's ever made him feel like he needed to. He paid the levy. The levy covers security.

He stands up. He crosses to the door. He slides the bolt across.

Then he crosses back to the window and sits down again, knees drawn up, making himself as small as he can.

***

At 2:38 AM, Emeka goes rigid.

Footsteps. Two feet, crossing the gravel near the wall. Emeka counts them. One. Two. Three. Four. Steady. Unbothered. Closing the distance.

They stop outside his flat.

Emeka doesn't breathe.

He can't see the gap under his door from where he's sitting, and he discovers, in this moment, that he's not going to cross the dark floor to look. The lamp outside is still on. He saw it through the window minutes ago, throwing orange light over the tarmac. The gap should show a line of that orange. It doesn't. That gap is dark, and that darkness isn't the lamp being off. It's something standing in front of the lamp.

The footsteps don't try the door.

The gravel has stopped crunching. There's no sound outside his door at all now. Just something standing there, waiting for him to make one.

Emeka's phone is in his hand. He has 112 open on the dialler, his thumb over the call button. He knows the response time. He attended the estate's first community meeting eleven months ago because it was mandatory for new residents, and the estate chairman mentioned that the contract security company had a twelve-to eighteen-minute response window. Twelve to eighteen minutes. The door hasn't been tried. His lights have been off since he closed the laptop, so there is, he hopes, nothing to see from outside.

His thumb hovers over the call button. If he presses it, he makes a sound, and whatever is out there will know for certain someone is home. Twelve to eighteen minutes is a long time to wait after that.

His hand is shaking. He hadn't noticed until now.

His thumb stays on the button. He doesn't press it.

He sits on the floor.

Outside, gravel crunches as weight comes down on it, small stones tumbling into place. Then nothing. Whatever it is has decided to wait.

He stays on the floor for a long time.

***

At 3:52 AM, the footsteps start again.

They cross the gravel in the same unhurried way, away from his door, along the walkway, and through the open gate. He hears the gate's dry creak as it swings further open. He hears the footsteps continue down the access road outside the compound, growing smaller, until the night takes them and there's nothing left.

The gate continues to creak in the wind.

He waits a long time before he risks another look outside. The orange light is gone. Sometime in the last hour, it died or was cut. The walkway is dark and still. The gatehouse is dark. The gate is still wide open. Nothing moves.

It's only now that he notices the generator has stopped too. He doesn't know when. The diesel must have run out, he tells himself. It happens. Someone forgot to check the tank.

Somewhere else in the compound, a generator hums faintly. Maybe Mr Okafor's.

He's been sitting in total darkness for a long time now. He realises he can't feel his left leg from the knee down, and he shifts his weight, slowly, making no sound.

The compound stays quiet.

He doesn't sleep. He doesn't move.

At 4:00 AM, he's still on the floor.

At 4:30 AM, he's still on the floor.

At 5:00 AM, the first birds start somewhere in the neem trees along the compound wall. They make a single call, then silence, then three more. He holds his breath and listens to them the way he should have listened to the baton.

At 5:40 AM, the sky outside the window shifts from black to grey. Objects in the room acquire edges. He can see his own hands.

At 6:15 AM, Mr Okafor's personal generator cuts off, the one he uses because he's never paid into the compound's generator levy. Directly above Emeka, a ceiling creaks. Footsteps cross a room. A tap runs.

The Okontas are awake. Flat 11, directly above his own. Eleven months of a neighbour he's never spoken to, and right now Emeka is grateful for every sound the man makes. He nearly cries as the tap runs. He sits on the floor and just listens, doesn't move, just breathes.

The compound is waking up.

Emeka stands.

His legs don't work properly. He holds the wall. He waits until they work. He crosses to the door and puts his hand on the bolt for a long time before he slides it open.

***

The walkway is empty.

He steps out into it. The sky is turning pale above the neem trees, the overhead tank a black shape against it. No one else is outside yet, though he can hear the compound stirring behind shut doors. The lamp is off. He can't tell if it's just because it's morning, or if it never came back on after last night.

For a few seconds, standing there, he almost believes none of it happened.

Then his eyes drop to the tarmac. The smear is still there.

He can see it properly now in the daylight. It begins near the base of the wall, right beneath his window, and runs along the walkway, continuing to the gate. It's not engine oil. Oil stays slick even after it dries. This has crusted matte and is dull against the tarmac, reddish-brown at the edges, black where it pooled thickest. He looks away. He doesn't look back.

He walks toward the gate. His feet on the tarmac sound very loud.

The gate is still open. The access road beyond it is empty. Further on, where it meets the main road, a keke napep passes, its engine sound fading.

He stops at the gutter by the gatehouse. Then he sees the baton. One end of it is dark.

The baton lies at the far end of the smear's trail, right where it meets the gate. It didn't travel here on its own. Someone carried it and set it down deliberately.

He looks from the baton to the gatehouse.

The gatehouse light is on.

It was dark at 2:15 AM. Dark when the gate swung open. Dark at 3:52 AM when he checked. Dark for every hour he sat on the floor of his flat listening to birds and waiting for a ceiling to creak. The light is on now. Someone turned it on. He doesn't know when. Through the small window, one patch of glass has fogged, like someone's breath is right up against it.

And in the gatehouse chair, visible through the open gatehouse door, facing away from him, there's a figure.

Emeka stands beside the gutter, one hand pressed against the wall, and looks at the figure in the chair.

It's not moving.

He tries to call out. His voice comes out wrong, too small, scraped. He whispers, "Haruna."

The figure doesn't move.

He takes one step toward the gatehouse door.

***

Somewhere up the access road, a hawker starts calling in a singsong voice. "Pure water, pure water."

A door opens in Flat 11. Mr Okonta's keys jingle as he locks up to leave for work. His footsteps cross the upstairs walkway and come down the stairs, and as he passes behind Emeka, he nods. He doesn't seem to notice the smear. He doesn't look at the gatehouse. He walks on, through the gate, and is gone.

Emeka watches him go. Then he turns back to the gatehouse. He hasn't taken another step. He still doesn't know if he's going to.

The figure in the gatehouse chair still does not move.