THE TEACHER (7)

THE TEACHER (7)

THE FOLDER AND THE CALL

Bola Ogunsanya Crescent,

Magodo, Lagos

2 am

 

The dream unfurled with the sequence of a sephia tinted movie reel. It was an unsettling, eerie dream, forged with the fragments of buried memory. Shayo stepped from the bright red Honda that still held three other members of his fraternity onto the road known as the white and yellow house road, the afternoon heat of Ile-Ife spreading across his skin like a living thing.

Ahead, a lone figure in white tshirt moved with the unhurried gait of someone who believed the day still belonged to ordinary things. Students drifted near the Faculty of Science steps. Others lingered at the hostel entrance, laughing, arguing, scrolling through phones.

His eyes on the moving target, Shayo raised the pistol. The first shot cracked open the afternoon.For a single, suspended heartbeat, the world held its breath. Then chaos detonated.

Screams tore through the air like fabric ripping. Bodies scattered in every direction, bags abandoned mid step and books tumbling to the ground. A girl in a blue hijab stumbled as she dragged a younger student behind a parked bus.

At the hostel gate porters shouted conflicting orders, their voices already thinning beneath the rising tide of panic. The target froze for half a second, long enough for recognition to flood his face, then spun and ran with the herd.

Shayo pursued.

The chase became a brutal geometry of fear. The target cut left between two rusting Peugeots, then right again, weaving past a cluster of students who had thrown themselves flat against a low wall. Dust billowed.

Shayo closed the distance with terrifying economy. He did not waste shots. He simply ran, the pistol steady at his side, the red Honda’s engine still growling somewhere behind them like a waiting animal.

Shayo and his target angled hard toward Moremi Hall. as a porter shouted for the iron gate to be closed. The target flung himself toward the narrowing gap. Metal screamed on metal. The heavy gate slammed shut with a final, irrevocable clang a heartbeat before he reached it. He crashed against the bars, fingers scrabbling, voice breaking into a raw plea.

“Open! Please! Please open the gate!”

The gates remained shut, porters and fleeing students nowhere to be seen.  The target spun, back pressed to the cold bars, chest heaving hard under his tshirt. Dust and sweat streaked his face. His hands rose slowly, palms outward, trembling violently in front of his eyes as though they could shield him from what was coming.

Shayo’s voice rose above them with the din of a battle cry.

“Executioner! Judgment day has come.”  He trained the gun at the target’s chest. “This is for Skippo. For Zeus. For Muscle.”

“I’m not him!” the target screamed, the words fracturing. “I’m not the Executioner. I swear on everything! Don’t shoot! Please don’t…”

Shayo pulled the trigger. The shot was close enough that the sound seemed to arrive inside the body rather than outside it.

The target’s hands fell away. He crumpled against the iron bars and slid down into a widening dark pool, the back of his head striking the concrete with a dull, final sound. The body went limp. Blood traced slow, deliberate paths across the faded jersey and onto the ground.

Shayo stepped closer and looked down into the face of a man now choking on his own blood. The pistol fell from his hand and he staggered back in fear.

The face staring back at him from the ground looked oddly familiar. He glanced at his clothes, found himself in identical clothing as the man on the ground and realized that he was looking down at himself.

Just then, the eyes of the corpse opened fully, wet and alive, and focused on him with perfect recognition. An eerie smile stretched across the bloodied mouth, intimate and knowing.

Shayo’s scream ripped free of his throat and he backed desperately away from himself.

Somewhere at the mouth of the abyss, a pair of hands shook him gently and then roughly.

“Shayo! Shayo! Wake up!”

Shayo bolted up in bed, soaked in sweat and fear. His wife, swollen at the girth from an advanced pregnancy, complained bitterly about not getting enough sleep because of his nightmares. Shooting him a look of annoyance, she flipped to her side, leaving him to sit by himself.

And Shayo sat, his heart pounding and his breathing ragged. He watched the sky outside his window and counted the hours until dawn.

 

*******************************

 

PrimeVistas Advisors

Victoria Island

10:05 a.m.

 

The financial model glowed across dual screens, columns of projected cash flows aligning with the quiet satisfaction of something brought to order. Tomide’s fingers moved across the keyboard, unhurried and methodical. Outside the glass wall the lagoon lay flat and metallic under a gloomy sky.

The door opened without ceremony. John entered wearing the residual brightness of the previous evening where shared drinks, football match flickering on multiple screens, the easy laughter of men donning different football jerseys lowered the walls of professional formality.

He smiled playfully. Too familiarly.

“How far? Just wanted to thank you again for last night. That place was really crazy, men.”

He laughed again and suddenly realized that his mirth was solitary and unshared. He lapsed into a brief awkward silence and adjusted a cuff link of his left shirt sleeve with unnecessary care

“To be honest, I am surprised you invited me.”

Tomide lifted his eyes. The smile he offered was a polite arrangement of muscle that never reached the rest of his face.

“No problem.”

Something in that bloodless courtesy unsettled John. He twisted the cuff link harder, nearly breaking it.

“You’re a nice guy, Tomide. Top guy.”

Tomide leaned back. The leather chair exhaled beneath him. His gaze remained steady, unblinking.

“Thank you John, but do you really believe that?”

The question arrived coolly, yet it altered the temperature of the air. John’s thoughts lurched sideways to the photocopied reports he and Sonia had gathered in secret. A fearful recognition stirred. Perhaps he had been too fast to forget the history of his new friend.

“I…yes. Of course,” he managed, the words catching on one another.

Tomide’s smile deepened by a fraction, still without warmth. From the top drawer he withdrew a small folded sheet and held it between two fingers like evidence produced in a court that required no further witnesses.

“Why are you digging into my past, John? What are you looking for?”

John read the words written by his own hand and felt his stomach lurch. It was the same piece of paper he handed to Sonia weeks back as they met at the firm’s lobby. Sweat surfaced at his hairline. He opened his mouth, closed it, then forced the truth out in fragments.

“It wasn’t my idea. Sonia asked me to dig. I just… followed up. I didn’t even  want to, bro.”

Tomide nodded once, the gesture almost gentle.

“I know.”

Relief flickered across John’s features, fragile and immediate. An apology tumbled after it, hurried and incomplete. Tomide offered nothing in return. He simply watched, and the silence grew dense enough that John shifted his weight from foot to foot, as though the floor itself had become uncertain.

At last Tomide spoke again, voice level.

“I will keep this between both of us, but let this be the last time.”

John swallowed. “No problem bro.”

He turned toward the door, already tasting escape. Tomide’s voice reached him just as his hand found the handle.

“One more thing. I want you to do something for me.”

 

***********************

 

Sinari Daranijo Street

Victoria Island 

6:30 pm.

The apartment was bathed in the fading gold of the setting sun, shadows stretching across the polished floor.. Tomide sat on one of the three low slung contemporary sectional sofas in the sitting room, one hand around a cold can of Heineken zero and another slung across the top of the sofa. He stared at the unplugged flatscreen television, his mind drifting in slow unfocused circles.

His phone vibrated against his thigh where he had forgotten it. He answered without checking the screen.

“Hello?”

A young voice, careful and slightly unsure, answered across the line.

“Brother Tomi… good evening. It’s Layo.”

Something long buried shifted in Tomide’s chest. Nostalgia braided with distance and the particular ache of blood recognised after years of deliberate separation.

“Layo. How are you?”

A pause followed, heavy and reluctant.

“Brother Tomi, things haven’t been too great here. Last week, daddy fell in the bathroom. I have used all of my money, but he’s not getting better. Brother Tomi, please help me with some money, so I can buy drugs for him.

Tomide closed his eyes for a moment.

“How much do you need?”

Layo named a figure, the number spoken almost apologetically. Tomide listened, then answered with quiet finality.

“I will do something.”

There was another hesitation before his brother spoke again.

“I hope we can see each other soon. We have not seen since Mummy passed.”

“Don’t worry. I will be in touch,” Tomide said.

When the call ended he transferred twice the requested sum without hesitation. Then he sat motionless, the phone still warm in his palm, and the past rose to claim his attention.

It was the rainy season, when the air hung heavy with the scent of wet earth, the ground softened into clay, and floodwaters swallowed roads without warning. It was a season that left little room for innocence, especially for a five year old already fluent in the architecture of danger. The house where they lived was a small bungalow inherited from his stepfather’s father.

The bungalow was small, its two rooms and sitting room arranged around the mood swings of his stepfather, a retired army major perpetually aggravated by his presence. Baba Layo as his mother called him was a stout, heavyset man who spent his days chasing a pension and gratuity the government seemed determined to withhold from him.

As the years went by, the lines across his forehead became deep grooves of disillusionment that were testament to the storms that raged within him. The storms when unleashed, lashed with a fury at him, finding him in doorways and narrow spaces he had gone in to make himself invisible. His mother bore the worst of the tempest.

“It is all your fault. This is all your fault. Since I married you, everything has stopped working.”

Often, open handed slaps and painful blows accompanied such terse vituperations. Tomide could only watch, fearful and helpless as the forces that possessed his stepfather made their rampage through the house. His baby brother, Layo was the light in that bleak world. When the house was quiet, they would play on the worn linoleum while their mother concerned herself with house work.

One evening, his stepfather’s eyes were darker than usual when they fell upon him. An argument over the meatless efo riro served at dinner hardened into something irreversible.

“I cannot continue to take care of another man’s child. You have to take him to his people.”

His mother horrified, had turned broken eyes to her husband.

“Ah Baba Layo, but you know

Mide’s father is dead.“

“And so bloody what?! Ṣé èmi ló pa á?”

“He has no one but us. Where will I take him to?”

The major remained adamant. He threatened to put Tomide and his mother out, keeping only Layo, the son who carried his blood. Tomide had listened from behind the big sofa where their visitors sat, not fully understanding the import of his stepfather’s words until the next morning when his mother gently roused him from sleep, her eyes red and brimming with tears.

“Mide, get up. We are going to Lagos.”

Layo  strapped to her back, a small check Ghana-must-go bag of his clothes in her hand, they had gone to Iwo Road Motor Park. In the cramped Hiace bus, he had seen the tears that trickled down her cheeks before disappearing into the edge of the wrapper she held to her eyes. H long journey to Lagos she sits beside him. Layo’s small hand repeatedly reaches across her lap for Tomide’s fingers. Sometimes she turns her face toward the window and wipes at her eyes with the edge of her wrapper. He had studied her profile in the shifting light, the curve of her cheek, the way her mouth presses tightly together and slightly droopy corners of a mouth that had forgotten how to laugh, and wished he could take she and Layo away from the man that made their life miserable.

When they arrived at the modest three bedroom house in Surulere where his mother’s cousin lived with her two daughters and a son, the woman greeted him warmly and offered him a bottle of Fanta. The women spoke in low, urgent tones with his aunt shooting him pitying glances every now and then. In the end, his mother kneeled, cupping his face in both hands.

“Be a good boy, okay? Always listen to your aunty, okay? I will come back for you.”

Then just like that, she was gone. He stood beside an aunt he was just meeting for the first time and watched her vanish down the busy street.

Later that day, he had met his cousins, Bimpe, Dayo and Seyi. The two girls regard him with open curiosity. Seyi, outgoing and only a year younger, offered him a tentative smile and a scuffled football they bounced around for a bit, and for a few hours the reality of his predicament did not sting as much.

That night, after the house had settled into its unfamiliar quiet, Tomide lay under the small ceiling fan turning lazily above him and his cousins and remembered Bodija.  He missed the particular weight of his mother’s hand on his back when she thought he was asleep. He missed Layo’s gurgling and high pitched noises. He missed the dark walls marked by kerosene smoke.The walls of the Surulere house were white and pristine. They did not know him. Even the air felt different.

Tears came first as a silent burning behind the eyes, then as a shaking that travelled through his small shoulders. He tried to muffle the sound against the pillow under him, but the grief was larger than his frame. It escaped into the air, waking Seyi.

For a long time the younger boy simply watched him in the dim light. He did not speak at once. Then he shifted closer, his hand finding the top of Tomide’s head. Clamping gently on it, he shook it back and forth in a slow, awkward motion.

“Sorry.”

His cries deepening, Tomide rubbed his hand against his eyes.

“I want my mummy.”

 

*************************

 

8pm

Tomide stood before the bathroom mirror, buttoning the dark charcoal shirt he had chosen with deliberate care. The recessed lights cast a cool, even glow across the marble surfaces, illuminating the planes of his face with unforgiving clarity. He paused, studying his reflection. The soft mask he wore every day at the firm had given way to the harder, measured profile that emerged only when he was alone, a face stripped of diplomacy, revealing the quiet resolve and guarded intensity he worked so carefully to conceal from the world.

The lights flickered.

Once. Twice. Then a rapid, stuttering pulse that threw the room into alternating brightness and shadow. From the corner of his eye, in the precise angle where the walls met, a hooded figure seemed to take shape, tall, motionless, the darkness beneath the hood deeper than the dimming light should allow. Tomide’s breath caught. A sudden, piercing tinnitus screamed through his skull, high and pure as a blade drawn across glass.

He closed his eyes against it.

The Teacher’s voice arrived not as sound but as certainty, settling into the marrow of his bones. It was an echo of a lesson he had taught before, only this time, it came out sharper, urgent and reproachful.

He who kills, kills himself, for there are no others. Only one.

The flickering ceased. The lights held steady again. Silence returned, absolute and ordinary. When Tomide opened his eyes the corner was empty. Yet the words lingered, heavy as wet earth.

In their wake came another voice, lighter, brighter, belonging to a child of four whose laughter had once filled the compound of the house in Surulere. His cousin Seyi, small and tireless, calling from the open doorway while the late afternoon sun turned the dust golden.

Tomi, come outside and play.

Tomide’s jaw tightened. He met his own gaze in the mirror and held it until the childhood echo faded and only the hardened resolve remained. He turned and left the bathroom.

On the living room sofa, his phone waited, screen already lit with the message from his contact at FRSC. The plate number had yielded everything required. Shayo Ogunlayo’s residential address in Magodo, a three-bedroom duplex set back from the road behind a modest wall and iron gate. Tomide read the details once, committed them to memory, and locked the screen.

The phone rang before he could pocket it. A woman’s voice, low and carefully neutral, the contact he had asked to keep watch for any approach from Sonia.

“She messaged me,” the woman said. “Asked for my number. Said she needed to speak privately.”

Tomide’s reply was quiet, almost gentle. “Give it to her.”

He ended the call, collected his keys, and stepped out into the warm Victoria Island night.

 

**********************

 

Street, Ikoyi

11:30 p.m

The doorbell cut through the quiet of Sonia’s apartment like a blade. She woke with a start, heart stuttering, the sheets tangled around her legs. For a moment she lay still, listening, half convinced it was residual noise from a dream. Then it rang again in two short, deliberate presses.

She rose, barefoot, and crossed the living room without turning on the main lights. The soft glow from the kitchen under cabinets was enough to show her the outline of her own reflection in the dark glass of the balcony doors: hair loosened from its earlier careful arrangement, silk camisole slightly askew, the faint crease of sleep still marked across one cheek. She pulled a thin robe over her shoulders and peered through the peephole.

Tomide stood on her doorstep, his hands tucked into his pockets, his expression unreadable. Surprise tightened her throat. She unlocked the door and opened it only partway, one hand still resting on the frame.

He cut a composed, almost formal figure in a dark charcoal shirt and brown trousers. Only the open collar and sleeves rolled once at the wrists softened the severity of his appearance. He held a slim plastic folder in his right hand.

“Sonia,” he said quietly. “Sorry to wake you.”

He lifted the folder so the hallway light fell across its cover. She recognised it instantly. It was the confidential onboarding brief for the solar panel billionaire whose name had been circulating through the firm all week. The file she had searched for that afternoon with growing irritation, certain she had left it in Conference Room two after the appreciation meeting.

“I found this on the table after everyone left,” Tomide continued, his voice low and even. “I thought you might have forgotten it. I meant to bring it earlier, but I got caught up meeting some friends. I was driving past and thought I should drop it off.”

She reached for the folder, fingertips brushing the edge of the cover.

“Thank you. I was looking for it all day.”

Their eyes met for a fraction longer than necessary. She stepped back slightly, already beginning to close the door, a polite goodbye forming on her tongue.

His foot slid forward, the toe of his shoe settling lightly against the threshold. Not aggressive, merely present. An apologetic smile curved his mouth, small, almost self deprecating. His eyes told a different story, steady and quietly intent.

“It’s very late,” he said. “I don’t want to run into agberos or have to deal with police. You know how they can be. Would it be possible for me to stay here for the night?”

The request hung between them. Sonia felt the automatic reply rise to her lips. His apartment in Victoria Island was a mere three kilometres away, a ten minute drive with the roads empty at that hour. She inhaled. Something about the lateness of the hour, something about the residual weight of the day, made her hesitate.

“You can sleep on the couch,” she said at last.

She opened the door wider. Tomide stepped inside. The door behind him clicked shut and Tonia walked forward to lead him into the living room. One hand holding the edges of her nightrobe together, she pointed at the biggest of her sofas.

“I will get you something to cover yourself with.”

He thanked her, an appropriately timed smile of gratitude on his face. She did not see the smile slip away when she turned her back, nor the thoughtful gaze that followed the line of her waist to the modest flare of her hips.

 

***************************

 

Sonia lay awake, staring into the darkness. The apartment was silent, yet she was acutely aware of the man sleeping in her living room. A wall and a short corridor separated them, but his presence seemed to seep through both, leaving her body inexplicably alert. She closed her eyes in frustration.

Only last week she had driven to his apartment. She had  been ready to confront him about his past, and as much as she hated to admit it, hoped that he would deny everything, leaving her to explore the uncomfortable truth about the knot that formed in her stomach every time their eyes met. In the end, she had quietly driven into the night, ashamed about her weakness.

Now he was under her roof, worse, she noticed the way the fabric of his shirt clung to his forearms. Sonia closed her eyes. Her lips tightened.

Honestly, Sonia.

She forced her mind to the consider the unsettling certainty that he had not come to her apartment simply because he needed somewhere to sleep. She remembered the way he looked at her the week he picked John at the appreciation meeting. She brushed away the suspicion that he had caught on to the she hatched with John. It was coincidence.

He is just up to something.

She simply didn’t know what it was and John did not know either. She pinned her hope on the woman she had befriended on Facebook. She couldn’t believe her luck when she agreed to share numbers. Now, all she had to do was plan a date.

She was close. She just knew it.

 

© Umari Ayim.

2026