All the sounds of the men talking and cheering faded into vague roars of static in his ears. The girl was a waif, tiny breasts and smooth skin everywhere. Her hands were handcuffed behind her back and her underwear was stuffed into her mouth. She looked maybe fourteen or fifteen and was lying on her side, crying. There was a naked man pumping into her like she was salvation, one of her legs draped over his shoulder as his hands pressed her down. Kalu tasted tears in his mouth and his hands stung with noise. His legs bent and uncoiled as he leapt on the bed and seized the man by the throat. The girl screamed behind her gag and the man’s eyes swelled in surprise as Kalu tore him off her body, throwing him away from the bed. He tumbled to the floor, his penis slapping wetly against his stomach, too startled to be soft. Kalu stepped off the bed, intending to stomp on his testicles, to crush them like the balcony woman had ground her cigarette. The rage was almost a relief, the first pure thing he had felt in a long time.
The bouncer stepped through the other men and sunk his fist efficiently into Kalu’s side, right over his kidney, dropping him to the ground and dragging him out of the room. Kalu cried out and the rest of the men shouted in entitled outrage. Through the cluster of their sweaty, hungry bodies, Kalu saw the girl’s wide eyes from where she lay toppled on the mattress. He thought he saw another man climb on the bed as the bouncer forced him out of the room, forearm pressed against Kalu’s windpipe. He was quick and brutal, throwing Kalu into the empty office.
Kalu ricocheted off the desk and thudded down to the carpet, blinded in bright pain. The door slammed shut. He curled up on the floor, groaning and dry heaving. His mouth tasted like coppery nicotine, and he was high and hurting. What kind of man would he be in ninety years? A dead man, his kidney said back resentfully.
“Aima,” he whispered to the air. “I was not a man who folded his hands and watched, Aima. Why couldn’t you wait for a man like that?” Kalu sobbed against the carpet. He could feel the pill twisting his head. “I didn’t bend, not even when it meant losing you. I had to stand for something.”
He tried to think of her face, of the black wing-tipped lines above her eyes, the tart fullness of her lips, but the only face he could see was that girl’s, the mucus from her nose and the thick tears clotting on her cheek. Kalu ripped off his mask and screamed into the rug as the door clicked open.
“Kalu, what the fuck did you do?”
Ahmed knelt beside him and pulled at his shoulder to turn him over. Kalu spat in his friend’s face as soon as he saw it. It took a moment before Ahmed blinked and wiped saliva off his cheek, cleaning his hand on his white trousers, his eyes dropping in temperature. The caftan from earlier was gone and his bare chest was slightly damp, a smudge of lipstick stamped on his neck.
“Fuck you,” said Kalu. Ahmed stood up and waited for him to struggle to his feet, watching with a hard mouth.
“You’re trying to fuck up my party?” he asked, once Kalu was more or less upright. “You can’t assault my clients, Kalu! Just wait your fucking turn next time.” He shook his head in disgust. “Fucking hell.”
Kalu roared and rushed at him, his fist connecting with Ahmed’s jaw smoothly, snapping his head to one side. Ahmed staggered and caught himself heavily against the edge of the desk.
“I don’t fuck little girls, you sick bastard.” Kalu was panting and it felt like everything in his eyes had burst. Ahmed massaged his jaw and looked up at his friend.
“Little girls? Did you just fucking hit me, Kalu?” He slid a finger inside his cheek and felt around. “You’ve gone mad. Completely mental. How much have you had to drink?”
“You have a child in there. You have a child handcuffed in there while men old enough to be her grandfather fuck her till she cries. What the fuck is wrong with you?” Just saying it out loud had turned his stomach and Kalu fought back the urge to vomit. He ran his sore hand over his face and turned away.
“Kalu.” Ahmed was behind him, speaking slowly. “Listen to me. Listen. She’s not a child.”
“Fuck you, man.” He was running out of venom, the horror coating him like a paralytic.
“I swear to God, Kalu. It’s just a setup. The older men pay loads of money for that fantasy, I find a girl who looks like a child and I pay her loads of money to act it out with them. I keep one of my men there to stop them from going too far. It’s clean. On my father’s grave.”
Kalu leaned his head against a bookcase and closed his eyes. “She was crying, Ahmed. Was that part of your setup?”
Ahmed sighed. “They like it like that. There’s more money if she cries, if she acts like she doesn’t want it. More money for her.”
Kalu didn’t want to believe him. It was too easy, a nice package of a story. “More money for you,” he said.
“I’m a businessman, Kalu.” Ahmed’s voice spread like open palms, trying to soak and soften the brittleness. “You know that. Shit, you’re a businessman. But for fuck’s sake, I do not let people rape children at my parties! I don’t let children into my parties. What kind of person do you think I am?”
Kalu’s side was bruised badly, he could feel it pulsing. He rotated his neck till the wood of the shelf was pressed against his temple, so he could look at his friend. Ahmed’s arms hung heavily, and the earlier sharpness of his face had given way to shadows under his eyes and fatigue in his mouth. The white chalk of his mask was scattered on the desk. Kalu couldn’t tell if his friend was lying.
“You just let them ‘pretend’ they’re raping children.” Kalu didn’t need any heat in his voice, the censure boiled out all on its own. It didn’t make sense. This was New Lagos. Those men could find children so easily—why pay Ahmed for a farce? Did Ahmed believe Kalu was naïve enough to fall for this?
The lines by Ahmed’s mouth took on sharp right angles and his voice was a strip of cowhide cracking in the air. “Would you rather they were actually out there doing it?”
Kalu didn’t say anything. He wanted to tell Ahmed that he wasn’t a savior, that any sins these men committed in here were just controlled versions of what they did somewhere else. Kalu wanted to ask him if the young girls in these men’s homes were safe, if you could buy a child’s consent, and if Ahmed knew the answers to these things or, failing that, if he could tell Kalu how much money had been enough to assassinate his curiosity. Instead, Kalu let his eyes close again and felt Ahmed’s hand on his shoulder.
“You shouldn’t have had to see it, Kalu. I’m so sorry. That was a private session for some very rich, very sick people. I wish you had stayed out with the main party, had some fun, unwound a little. I know you’ve been having a tough time of it with Aima leaving.”
Kalu didn’t plan to tell any of his other friends that Aima had left. He already knew how they’d react.
“Why can’t you just marry the girl?” they’d say. “It’s not as if you don’t want to marry her eventually, so what difference does it make if you do it now?”
They had married old girlfriends who were due for a ring, married whomever they happened to be dating when they finished their degrees and got their jobs and the next step was to get married, so they did.
“At least you love her,” they would say. “Marry her, jo. It won’t change anything—you can continue having fun afterward. What’s your problem?”
But Ahmed was different. He understood the small rebellion and what it had cost Kalu. He understood things Kalu didn’t tell anyone else, like how he was struggling to hold on to who he was even as the city tried to strip him of it. Somehow, living here hadn’t affected Ahmed the way it did other people.
“That’s because they don’t know their own dirtiness,” he once told Kalu. “They come here and the rot grows like a weed inside them. Then it’s a year later and they’re surprised by what they’ve sunk to. Me, I started from the gutter, so I was prepared. There was nowhere left for me to sink to.”
Women flocked to his playboy self, to his carnivorous charm and his incisive honesty, tumbling into his bed, some coy, some wild. He had girlfriends, one after the other although never at the same time, which was strange for this city.
The relationships all faltered and died anyway. “They don’t believe I’m real,” Ahmed said.
One of his exes used to email Kalu. “He scares me a little,” she’d written. “It’s like loving a snake who thinks it’s a man and can’t see it’s a snake. The skin doesn’t fit well.”
Those stretches of being single were when Ahmed first threw his parties, and the invitations would find their way to Kalu no matter where he was. He woke up in a hotel in Dubai one December and found thick paper pressed under his breakfast plate. A small note was waiting inside his in-flight magazine on a plane to Amsterdam a few months after that, and a girl he spent a weekend with in Cape Town had whispered quick instructions before she threw on her clothes and left with a smirk. Ahmed had pawns everywhere; the whole thing was a joke to him, a playground.
Kalu had flown to Johannesburg for that murmured invitation, and Ahmed had stayed sober for the entire trip, even during the party. It was after a sour breakup with a woman he’d considered marrying and he was moody, an island of gray surrounded by his colorful guests.
“My women say they want me, but they’re lying to themselves,” he told Kalu, his mouth twisting. It was the first time Kalu had seen anything in the shade of bitter about him, so he just drank his wine and listened.
“They don’t want a real person; they want someone pretending to be a real person, a character fitting himself to the role. They want me to follow the formula.” Ahmed paused and gripped his friend’s shoulder. He did this so often that Kalu’s skin had placeholders for his fingers, shallow grooves waiting for Ahmed’s hand. “Don’t ever fall for the formula, Kalu. It’s a bloody lie. We know better; we know to live outside it; we know how to live true.”
There were times when Ahmed spoke as if he and Kalu were a unit, complicit in their own private freedom. It was true, they were a team; they had been ever since they were children at that boarding school. They had spent their last school holiday together, sharing a room in the family house in Kalu’s hometown. It was night, all suffocating darkness and whining mosquitoes. The boys were sleeping on mats on the floor, and Kalu had been masturbating in the blackness that covered them, his hand repetitive and slick with saliva, his back turned to Ahmed. His orgasm was reluctant to arrive, and his forearm had started to ache, but Kalu gritted his teeth and tried to focus. When Ahmed sighed in exasperation and slid his hand over his friend’s hip bone, Kalu’s heart screamed into a shocked halt. He stopped moving. Ahmed tugged on his side until Kalu rolled over and lay on his back, staring into the darkness and forgetting to breathe.
“Relax,” Ahmed whispered, and his wet hand replaced Kalu’s, stroking and coaxing. Kalu’s heartbeat resumed like a stampede, and he wondered if he should stop what was happening, but then Ahmed flicked with his thumb and slammed his hand to the base and Kalu stopped thinking completely. His body was moving in unplanned ways, a rocking pelvis and a searching hand that reached inside Ahmed’s trousers and found him hard and hotter than white iron. The sound Ahmed made in response to his touch was like an animal in the sweating night, and when he gasped Kalu’s name, Kalu had a fresh understanding of what power could be held in a palm. His forearm forgot that it was ever tired and his ears wanted to hear Ahmed say it again and again, so he moved his hand faster and faster and so did Ahmed and he said Kalu’s name over and over and Kalu wanted to say his name too but it was a seed stuck in his throat and Ahmed said his name; he said his name until the brightness washed the insides of their eyes as they climaxed. In that moment, Ahmed made a monopoly of him. When Kalu finally managed to crack his voice open, his friend was already turning away.
