THE TEACHER (8)
FLIPPER
Old Ede Road, Ile-Ife
Evening
The building waited beyond a rough track, unfinished and skeletal, its concrete columns rising from the earth without walls to protect them. Evening was lowering itself over Ife in layers of purple and grey. The last light caught the edges of the exposed reinforcement rods, turning them briefly into black needles against the sky.
Inside, the air was close and dusty. The dust coated Seyi’s tongue. Fear came a moment later. He stood beside a raw concrete pillar, trying to arrange his face into the expression he had seen on the older brothers. Bored. Amused. Untroubled. It was the expression of men who had done terrible things often enough to make them look like errands.
Across the room, their victim sat bound to a plastic chair. He was a man Seyi had seen before on campus, a few times at Awolowo Hall, where he and his cousin stayed.
Now his wrists were tied behind him and a cloth had been forced across his mouth. His eyes moved constantly, feverishly, searching the room for the smallest opening through which mercy might enter.
“Please.”
The word came out strangled beneath the gag.
Seyi looked at the floor. One of the brothers seized the victim by the shoulder and struck him hard enough to rock the chair. Seyi’s body moved before his mind could stop it. He flinched.
Alápa saw.
The man they called the Executioner, or Alápa, had the unnerving habit of noticing everything without appearing to look at anything.
“Junior.”
Seyi looked up.
Alápa was smiling.
“You look like you are waiting for your mother to come and pick you up.”
The brothers laughed. Seyi managed a grin.
“I am observing.”
“Observing?”
Alápa put a hand to his chest in mock astonishment.
“You joined Blackbeards to observe?”
“Ah no,” Seyi said, shaking his head.
“Not at all.”
This time the laughter came harder. Seyi joined in to hide his unease.
Alápa came towards him. Something metallic appeared in his hand.
It was a pistol.
Seyi stopped breathing for half a second.
Alápa held it out.
“Oya, gba.”
Seyi stared at the weapon.
“Ah ah.” Alápa’s eyebrows rose. “You dey fear iron?”
“I am not afraid.”
Alápa’s face darkened. His left eye twitched.
“Then touch it.”
Seyi reached out. The metal felt colder than he expected. He touched it with two fingers and withdrew his hand as if the thing had a temperature of its own.
Alápa laughed.
“See? It did not bite you.”
Seyi forced himself to smile.
“There is no bullet in it,” Alápa said. “Relax. It is only there to scare him.”
Seyi swallowed.
“Okay.”
“Stop standing like a visitor, Junior.”
He put the pistol back into Seyi’s hand.
This time there was no laughter.
Seyi felt the weight of it immediately. Not because it was heavy. Because suddenly it was not an object being passed around a room. It was something that belonged in the world of consequences.
“Good,” Alápa said. “Now point it at him.”
Seyi looked up. The victim was staring directly at him. Their eyes met. And something changed. Until then, Seyi had been trying to think of the man as a role. Rival. Enemy. Target. The person who had supposedly ordered an attack on one of the Blackbeards. A name in a story somebody else had told him. A problem the brothers had decided to solve. But the man’s eyes refused the abstraction.
There was a person in them. A person who was afraid to die. Seyi’s hand trembled. The victim’s eyes widened. Alápa growled in his ear.
“Oya shoot.”
Seyi lowered the pistol a little.
“Please, Alápa. Since this is my first time with the brothers, it is better to just watch.”
The room changed. The brothers who had been laughing moments before became still. Alápa looked at him.
His smile remained. But the warmth, if there had ever been any, was gone.
“So that I can learn from you guys,” Seyi added quickly, his voice unsteady. “I’m not saying I won’t do it. I just thought… maybe I should watch first.”
Alápa took the gun from him.
“Fine.”
He turned back toward the victim. Seyi’s stomach tightened.
Something in him understood before his mind did.
“Wait…”
The gunshot split the room.
For a moment, the unfinished building seemed to recoil from the sound. It travelled through the bare concrete and came back thinner, farther away, like an echo from somewhere underground.
“Jesus!”
Deafened by the shot and shocked by what he had just witnessed, Seyi staggered backwards. He pulled his hands away from his ears. Somebody laughed close behind him, but he could no longer hear the victim. The man had slumped in the chair. For one suspended second, Seyi hoped he was pretending. Hope vanished when he saw the blood.
Somebody slapped his shoulder.
“Junior!”
It was Alápa. Pistol now hanging at his side, he looked at Seyi with a cold smile.
“Welcome to the family.”
“You said the gun didn’t have a bullet.”
Alápa shrugged.
“I lied.”
Seyi backed away.
Nobody tried to stop him.
He stumbled through the opening in the wall and into the evening. Outside, the air felt enormous.He took three steps. Then his stomach turned.
He bent over and vomited onto the grass. He stayed there, one hand on his knee, the other pressed against his stomach, his body shaking so violently that he could hardly stand.
He vomited again.
When there was nothing left, he retched dryly. Again and again, until his insides hurt. He stayed with the dark as the voices of his brothers continued inside, tears streaming down his face.
***************************
Sinari Daranijo Street,
Victoria Island
6 a.m.
The day had barely announced itself, but Tomide was already up in his living room, waiting. He waited in the silence as he always did every anniversary of Seyi’s murder.
That morning, he sat with his phone in hand, staring at the photograph of the two of them. They stood shoulder to shoulder in their stiff black matriculation gowns, mortarboards slightly askew, the campus lawn behind them still green with the promise of everything that had not yet gone wrong. Seyi’s smile was wide, unguarded. Tomide’s was smaller, already practising the caution that would never quite save them.
He remembered Ile-Ife.
He had been on the lower bunk that evening, knees drawn up, the paperback of The Power of the Subconscious Mind open against his thighs. The room smelled of kerosene and laundry soap and the particular damp of concrete that never quite dried in the rainy season.
Seyi came in from attending a late afternoon lecture. He nodded at Tomide as he dropped his books on the top bunk.
“How far?”
They exchanged a simple dap of a palm slap, slide, and fist bump. His eyebrows turned up when he saw the book in Tomide’s hands.
“What’s up with these esoteric books you read? You want to end up like that boy from Engineering they say read the Books of Moses and ran mad?”
“This is not the Books of Moses. It’s more psychology than anything. You should try it sometime.”
Seyi hoisted himself onto the edge of Tomide’s bed and swung himself over the top bunk with a low grunt. The bed dipped and swayed with his movements.
“I’d rather watch a movie,” he said, struggling out of his shirt. “I don’t enjoy books the way you do.”
One of their roommates, Simon, stood, muttered something about fetching water, and left with his yellow jerry can. The door clicked shut and the room contracted around them, allowing them a brief moment of privacy.
Seyi leaned over the side of the bunk, his voice dropping to a conspirator’s hush.
“I’ve chosen my name. For Blackbeards. Junior.”
Tomide turned a page he was no longer reading. The only reason they were having this conversation at all was because Tomide could have sworn to watch his back, as his cousin could not be talked out of joining the cult.
“And you?” Seyi pressed. “What’s yours going to be?”
Tomide shrugged.
“I don’t know yet.”
“I think you should pick Flipper.”
“Why?”
“Because of that five kobo coin you keep turning over and over like your personal jazz.”
Tomide chuckled, turning another page.
“I would add something dark to go with it to match your personality.”
“I am not dark.”
Seyi’s disagreeing snort was loud.
“That’s what you think.”
He swung down until his face was close, his breath warm with the faint sweetness of the soft drink he had taken downstairs.
“Do you know what most guys on this floor say about your eyes?”
Tomide lowered his book.
“What?”
“They say you look at people as if you can see inside them.”
He flopped back on his bed, self conviction ringing in his voice.
“And you are tall.” His voice dipped theatrically. “Tall and dangerous. Flipper the grim reaper.”
Tomide laughed, thoroughly amused.
“Substitute grim for green,” he said. “I will manage that.”
“Flipper the green reaper,” Seyi said from the top bunk, his voice now melodic with the solemnity of a priest at a christening.
The name, however absurd it had seemed at first, had stuck and somehow become his truth, a gift from a cousin he now owed justice.
A car horn blared outside his window, reminding Tomide of the present. He thought about the eighteen months he had spent at Abule Ijesha, making plans, studying the firm and waiting for the right moment.
He was at the last reckoning post. His jaw tightened. He pushed himself to his feet, and the mask slid into place.
***************************
Primevistas Advisory
Victoria Island
8 a.m.
Tomide’s Office
Tomide sat unmoving in the leather chair, his surroundings reduced to a blur of light and misshapen objects. His mind swelled on the dream from the night before.
He found him in the dark, hooded and motionless as if waiting for him to speak.
Tomide had spoken.
“I still wonder.”
“Tell me.”
“I wonder who you really are.”
“You have asked and I have answered.”
“Yes, Rabonni. But that’s not really all, is it?”
The figure gave no answer at first, but the silence that followed was not empty. It seemed to listen, holding its breath as though the darkness itself wondered with him.
When the teacher finally spoke, the voice did not seem to come from a throat. It arrived already formed, low and resonant, as if the darkness itself had decided to shape sound.
“It is you who must now answer. Who am I?”
Tomide felt the weight of that reply settle against his ribs.
He took a step closer.
“You confuse me. How can I answer when I don’t know?”
“You know.”
A strong urge rose within him.
“Your face. I want to see your face.”
The hood remained a perfect oval of shadow. No feature stirred within it. No glint of eye, no suggestion of mouth.
“It is not yet time.”
“Why?”
“Because you are still yet to remember.”
He opened his mouth to protest, to demand an explanation, but found himself unable to speak. He heard the word, the same that had been spoken countless times and in the same place.
Remember.
Tomide leaned back into the chair.
The coin was already turning between his fingers, the old, mindless rhythm of metal against skin.
He stopped.
His hand lowered to his desk and he closed his eyes. Behind the lids he summoned Sonia with deliberate care. He saw her with the clarity of a conjurer. He saw the precise tilt of her head when she listened, the way light gathered at the corner of her mouth before a smile fully arrived, the quiet intensity of eyes that searched where his past had left its deepest shadows.
He held the image steady, as one holds a candle in a wind, and issued the command without sound, without breath, yet with absolute intent.
Think of me now. I am all you think of. Think of me now.
Minutes passed in the soft mechanical hush of the office. When he opened his eyes again, he fixed them on the closed door, as though the wood itself might answer. Then, almost absently, he set the coin spinning once more.
***************************
Sonia’s Office
8:15 a.m.
The intern roster glowed on Sonia’s screen like a ledger of small, manageable lives. Names, availability windows, the tidy boxes of tasks she had assigned for the week. The tasks. proofreading, data cleaning and other grunt work kept the firm’s larger engines turning.
She was temporary custodian of them because Tomide had been given the solar-panel brief, the one that had arrived with the weight of a major client and the soft, unmistakable scent of victory.
Her own client, the one whose file he had brought to her apartment, had been meant to be the largest she had ever ushered through these doors. She had nurtured it for months, learned the cadence of the principal’s voice, the precise temperature of his caution.
Now it sat in the shadow of something larger, something Tomide seemed to have summoned from nowhere.
She was still tracing the neat columns when his name surfaced without warning, unbidden and complete.
Tomide.
Her body answered before her mind could intervene. An unexpected heat bloomed low within her, sharp and sudden, as if a match had been struck in the dark. The sensation spread outward in slow, insistent waves, disturbing the composure she had carefully arranged around herself.
She glanced unnecessarily toward the closed door, as though expecting someone to have noticed the change in her. Then, almost furtively, she slipped a hand beneath the desk. The discovery made her draw a quick breath. She was wet.
She withdrew her hand at once and sat straighter, willing herself back into the orderly world of figures and spreadsheets. But Tomide’s name had already returned to her mind, arriving with an unwanted memory.
It was five in the morning, the day after he had slept on her couch. She had woken from a sleep that was only a patchwork of shallow naps and the constant, insomniac awareness of him lying a few metres away.
She had walked nearly on tiptoe to the living room and found him already awake, his phone illuminating the handsome side profile of his face, the spare duvet half wrapped around powerful legs that seemed too long for the furniture.
She had stood in the shadowed corridor and measured the length of time since any man had occupied that space with such quiet authority.
Then he looked up.
The early light filtering through the curtains turned the air between them into something almost intimate. They exchanged quiet good mornings. His voice was low, unhurried. He told her he was returning to his place.
And then he did, leaving only the faint impression of his weight on the cushions and the residual scent of whatever soap he used.
Almost at once, she recalled the Facebook thread with the woman she had found online, the one she believed had once stood closest to him.
Thank you again for meeting me. It was good to put a face to the name.
The reply had been prompt, polite, almost tender in its neutrality. Their conversation the previous evening had been a careful dance of shared interests and the mild complaints of Lagos traffic. Sonia had smiled and nodded and asked nothing of the years at Ife. For some reason she had avoided every question she had prepared in advance.
Next meeting, she told herself, she would not be so hesitant. The sooner she found answers to the mystery around him, the better.
Yet even as the thought formed, a quieter fear woven in it. She was beginning to lose focus and she did not know why.
The intercom on her desk crackled with a summons from Mrs. Fabiyi’s office.
Sonia rose at once, smoothed the front of her blouse, and walked the short distance that always felt longer when the older woman called without warning. She found Mrs. Fabiyi smiling.
“Guess who is coming back to Nigeria?”
Sonia did not need to guess. Mrs. Fabiyi herself supplied the answer.
Joshua, her firstborn, who had relocated suddenly to the United States after running into trouble at school.
They slipped easily into the softer register of women who had known each other for years and spoke about a welcome party and all the other things that the news of a long absent son brings with it.
******************************
Lounge Room
12 noon
Tomide sat at the corner table he preferred, his back to the wall, a bottle beaded with condensation on the table.
Simi occupied the chair opposite him, knees angled slightly toward his, her voice bright with the particular eagerness of someone still learning the difference between invitation and opportunity.
She wanted a date with him. It was game night in two days. She promised fun in soft tones, leaning in when she spoke, the scent of her perfume, citrus and a strong dash of persistence, cutting through the air.
Tomide answered with the careful courtesy he reserved for women he had no interest in.
“I’m too old for game nights.”
She laughed, a quick, disbelieving sound, and shook her head.
“You’re not only young,” she said, her voice becoming coy, “you’re quite handsome.”
He allowed the compliment to settle without claiming it. His eyes drifted past her shoulder toward the entrance, timing the moment with the precision of someone who had already decided how the scene should open.
Sonia appeared in the doorway exactly when he expected her to, tablet tucked against her side. She crossed the room with purpose, acknowledging them once with a curt nod.
The carefree, happy smile on Simi’s face disappeared. Restraint and regret came in its stead. Sonia had made her team lead for the morning’s task. She was due for a meeting with her peers to discuss it, and now the other woman had seen her flirting with Tomide. The shadow of a query hung over her head, forcing her to gather her things and beat a retreat.
Grateful for the separation from the young, forward intern, Tomide glanced at Sonia, who was now standing before the glass-fronted refrigerator where soft drinks glowed in neat rows.
“Hi, Sonia. I was thinking of coming over to your office. I need your opinion on the client I’m working on.”
A flustered expression appeared on her face. Then she recovered, her face turning serious.
“Oh, I see.”
She turned to him, resting her back on the countertop.
“I have a small task for Mrs. Fabiyi,” she said. “I am not sure there will be a chance to look at your file.”
He waited.
She held his attention for a few seconds, broke contact and turned back to the refrigerator. There, she seemed to turn into solid, immovable rock.
Hand still on the handle of the refrigerator, she turned her face to him again.
“Maybe later. You can come over at eight. I will see what I can do.”
Tomide nodded slowly, the sharp residual glint of intense focus softening in his eyes.
“Thank you.”
*****************************
Keffi Street,
Ikoyi
9 p.m.
They sat across from each other.
Sonia had offered him a bottle of wine with a small, practiced smile. He thanked her, refusing her offer.
“I don’t take alcohol.”
He asked for water instead of the soda she offered next.
Conversation had begun easily. First they spoke about his client, moving through layers of technicalities that lent the air a deliberate formality.
An interlude brought on by a phone call from a friend softened the rigidity.
He took swigs from the bottle in his hand, making notes as she spoke. A lull after her call offered an opportunity for redirection, and he took it.
He asked about Port Harcourt and her childhood. She answered guardedly at first, but the interest in his eyes gradually wore down her reserve, and memories began to roll from her tongue.
She told him about the years before she turned seven. The heavy, green air of the city, the particular rhythm of life in the estate they lived in when her father still worked for Shell. The posting to Lagos had come without warning.
As she talked, Tomide listened with an attentiveness that felt almost intimate. He absorbed each detail without interrupting.
She did not know that the details she offered. The street names, the exact year of the transfer, the modest bungalow at Old GRA, already lived in a private file he had assembled weeks earlier.
Completely relaxed now, she continued unprompted. He gave subtle nods of encouragement when Mrs. Fabiyi’s name came up.
Then, almost casually, she mentioned that Mrs. Fabiyi’s son, Joshua, had also gone to OAU.
“Like you.”
His nods continued, his smile slightly thinned.
“Like me.”
A brief silence caused them to relapse into work speak, but this time lighthearted. She told him about the interview she had conducted the previous month, a candidate so garrulous and theatrical that the entire panel had struggled to maintain professional faces. The man had turned every answer into performance, complete with gestures and sudden shifts in volume.
He laughed when she laughed, convincing and effortless.
Their shared laughter rose and then settled, leaving a different kind of quiet in its wake. Sonia looked down to see that the distance between them had somehow narrowed without her realizing.
Tomide noticed her glance and did not move away. He studied her for a moment.
“Would it be crazy if we kissed?”
The question arrived without pressure, almost formal in its restraint.
She leaned in.
The first touch of his mouth was careful, testing. Then it deepened. His hand rose to the side of her face, thumb brushing the line of her jaw as the kiss gathered heat and urgency.
She answered it, lips parting, breath catching.
The careful distances they had maintained all evening dissolved.
He shifted, guiding her down until her back met the cushions of the sofa. The weight of him followed, controlled, deliberate, his body settling over hers without crushing.
One hand moved to the back of her neck and the other traced the curve of her shoulder, then lower, finding the soft rise of her breast through the fabric of her dress.
Her hands found the hard plane of his back, the tension in his shoulders, the heat of skin beneath the shirt. His explored the length of her side, the dip of her waist, the fuller shape of her hip, then returned to her breasts.
The kiss grew deeper, wetter, intense. Their breathing tangled. Fabric shifted. The soft sound of skin against skin filled the small space between them.
For long moments the room itself seemed to narrow to the press of mouths, the heat of palms, the slow, deliberate movement of bodies that had forgotten every reason to stop.
They hovered at the edge of something irreversible.
Then he stopped.
Tomide pulled back, eyes darker than she had ever seen them. He withdrew his hands as though the contact itself had become dangerous.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to go so far.”
He sat up, putting careful space between them and quietly rearranging his clothing. Sonia sat up slowly, smoothing the front of her dress with fingers that trembled slightly.
“It’s fine.”
The air felt too condensed.
She tried to gather the scattered pieces of her composure in an attempt to return to the only persona she had shown him before the kiss, but the professional version of her refused to be summoned.
She pressed her lips together, still tasting him, and wondered how the evening had slipped so completely beyond the boundaries she thought she had set.
The silence that followed was awkward and stubborn. They returned to small, harmless words, neither quite willing to acknowledge what had happened.
When Tomide eventually stood, he thanked her for the evening with a politeness that felt almost rehearsed.
She walked him to the door, where they exchanged a brief goodbye without touching.
He left, and the door closed behind him with a quiet finality.
****************************
First Avenue
Banana Island
Ikoyi
9 pm
The call came just after nine, interrupting the calm stillness of the room.
Mrs. Fabiyi answered on the second ring, pushing the sleep mask onto her forehead. She smiled and brought the phone to her ear.
“Joshua.”
Ten years in America had not erased the soft edges of the boy she remembered, though the man who spoke now carried a steadier weight.
“Hi, Mummy.”
They talked about family matters and the little changes that had taken place at home. Then he talked of relocation, of final arrangements, of the slow turning of plans toward home.
He had been speaking with a friend, he said, about investment opportunities. An investor had shown interest in the real estate sector; numbers were being examined, possibilities measured. Lagos, he believed, still held room for the right kind of return.
She listened, interjecting the small maternal questions that rose without effort.He answered with assurances, and they lingered on the phone until he finally had to go.
When the call ended, she remained seated in bed, the phone still warm in her hand, the residual sound of his voice lingering like the last note of a hymn.
The past arrived without invitation.
Far away from her bedroom with its muted colours, large bed and carefully chosen pieces, and a husband sleeping in another bedroom, a practical arrangement that had gradually acquired the permanence of habit, it opened a door she had long taught herself not to look through.
It had been the rainy season then, the air in Lagos thick with the promise of storms. The call had come late, his voice fractured by the poor connection of a constantly failing network.
“Mummy, I have a small issue.”
She had begun to smile, telling herself that it was the usual request for money.
“You always do. I will send something now.”
“No, Mummy, wait. It is not that.”
The urgency and fear in his tone had caused her stomach to lurch.
She pressed a hand against her chest to still her rapidly beating heart and demanded more details. The fuller truth emerged. He had joined a cult.There had been a death.
He had been with the killers, but he had only been driving the car, and now the rival group was hunting him.
She called him by the name his grandfather had given him, shock reducing her voice to a raspy whisper.
“Rotimi? O pa ẹnìyà n? You killed somebody?”
“Not me, Mummy. Not me! It was my guys. Please help me, Mummy. The other guys want to kill me.”
She had moved quickly.Connections accumulated over decades of careful living were called in before dawn. A visa was arranged with a speed that money and influence could still purchase in those days.
But first there had been the safe house, her uncle’s, the retired general, a place of high walls and quiet men who asked no questions.
She had driven him there herself in the early hours, watching the rearview mirror more than the road, her heart a hard, continuous fist against her ribs.
Only when the plane lifted him toward America did she allow herself to breathe fully again.
Mrs. Fabiyi dropped to her knees beside the bed. She thanked God for the growth she had heard in her son’s voice, the steadiness, the ordinary ambitions of a man building a future different from his past.
She rose again and reclaimed her spot on the bed, her heart not quite settled.
Why did it feel as if the past was no longer safely behind her, but somewhere close, just beyond the reach of her knowing?
***********************
Sirani Daranijo,
Victoria Island,
Lagos
10 pm
The night air was still on the balcony of Tomide’s apartment. Below, headlights streaked through the darkness, voices rising and fading from the streets.
He stood at the railing, thinking about Sonia. The evening had unfolded more easily than he had expected. The kiss had been unexpected. Not the kiss itself, perhaps, but his reaction to it.
He had liked it.
The realization interested him only briefly.
He remembered Seun. He called his old friend. Seun answered, his voice heavy with sleep, but he cleared his throat and began with news from a meeting he had just had with some of their old friends.
One of them, a senior government official close to the governor, had offered to arrange a meeting with him. The governor, Seun added, was an old Blackbeard.
Tomide listened quietly.
“And Shayo?”
“We are keeping an eye on him,” Seun said.
Tomide was silent for a moment.
“I was with Sonia tonight. Tobi is coming home.”
He did not ask the identity of the man.
He knew.
“Okay, bro. Let’s talk tomorrow.”
The call ended.
Tomide remained at the railing, the phone still in his hand. His expression did not change, but his thoughts had moved somewhere else entirely.
Reckoning.
© Umari Ayim.
2026