I was almost halfway done with a bowl of amala at Mama Fisayo buka when I heard my name.
"Kunle?"
It was a scream that had stopped my hand. I swiveled around and my spoon threatened to drop. Chuka was standing there a few feet off my table.
Chuka my former school roommate. The very man who had fled without any trace ten years before, as mist does in the morning. No calls, no letters, nothing. Just gone.
I stared, and nearly believed that my eyes were deceiving. "Chuka? What are you doing here?"
he smiled, but his eyes half pursued him. "Can I sit?"
The buka reeked of palm oil and pepper smelling of smoke in the firewood kitchen behind. Women screamed orders, babies cried and somebody was playing Sunny Ade on the radio. However, all that was forgotten as Chuka dragged a chair. His presence was too sharp as though a blade cut into normal air.
I pushed my plate aside. "I figured you had come out of the country. That's what everyone said."
"I did. For a while." He was bending over, his elbows on the wooden table. "But I had to come back. And I had to find you."
My chest tightened. A decade of inquiries was threatening to clog at the same time. "You vanished, man. No goodbye, no explanation. Do you not know how many times I sought you?"
He hit his fingers on the table, and sighed. "I couldn't explain then. Things were complicated."
I studied him. His hair was less, with a slight smattering of grey. He was older, bluer, yet fatigued as though he had slept neither by day nor night in weeks.
"What do you mean complicated?" I asked.
The eyes of Chuka swept over the buka in search of someone to jump out and attack him at any instance. "Not here. Walk with me."
I obeyed, with my own disadvantage. Outward an approaching sun was setting and casting lengthy shadows along the dusty Bodija road. Hawkers carried their trays of groundnuts, keke drivers honked and the air was filled with the normal evening scuffle. But Chuka strode on with no words and then turned into a more deserted street, where mangrove trees bordered.
"Okay," I said, catching up. "Talk. Why are you here? Why now?"
He paused, gave a deep sigh, and looked at me with what seemed to be regret. "Because I owe you the truth. And because I need your help."
My heart thudded. "Help? With what?"
Looking again round, he answered. "Do you recall the final year, the project that we worked on? That little program we have created for Professor Adewale?"
I laughed bitterly. "The one every two hours crashed? How could I forget?"
"There was no crash", said Chuka to himself. "I made sure it didn't. I just told everyone it did. And I went away And someone got it. Badly."
I stared at him, confused. "Chuka, it was just a project."
He shook his head. "Not to them. They saw potential. They gave me money, such as I had never dreamed of. And I took it. I left Nigeria, I sold all we raised. But the deal wasn't clean. I got in a bigger snare, and I could not get back years."
I folded my arms. "Well, after ten years you come? What are you doing here now?"
His voice lowered. "The reason is that the same people are in pursuit of me. They believe that I still cannot access something that I cannot. And I can rely upon only one still and that is you."
Silence hung between us. The night breeze was blowing the leaves of the mango tree. My mind spun. This was the very Chuka who stole my garri at exams. That Chuka who had vowed never to betray me. And here he was, hauling me into the darkness which I knew not.
"Why me?" I asked finally.
"Because you know how I think. I cannot live again in case I leave you, as I was leaving you the first time. Kunle, I need you."
I wanted to walk away. All my instincts cried to me. But behind what he said I felt a kind of desperation that I was not to disregard. His eyes which were once playful and careless in their dreams had something in them other than I had ever seen before.
"If I do this," I said, in a deliberate manner, "Chuka, I want everything. No more half-truths. No more vanishing. You tell me all at the very beginning."
He bowed his head, and a grateful look came on his face. "Agreed."
At this moment a black SUV was coming down the street at a slow pace with tinted windows glinting. The grip of Chuka tightened against my arm. "We should go", he said to himself.
My heart rate accelerated, but I did not know why. It could have been the manner of his saying it, or the manner in which the SUV slowed down as it overtook us. I cleared my throat, but my voice was steady but low. "Chuka what have you gotten me into?"
He looked at me, jaw tense. "The truth, Kunle. You should have known something I told you ten years ago. At this moment, perhaps, it is the only thing that holds us both alive, is it?"
We continued to walk and as the final beams of the sun were setting behind the houses I knew that this was just the start of what I was not so sure I wanted to know.