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she said, and touched his shoulder. “God will bring Shell. We will be okay, darling.”
    The flats were in fact already rented by an oil company, but he sometimes told her senseless lies such as this, because a part of himhoped she would ask a question or challenge him, though he knew she would not, because all she wanted was to make sure the conditions of their life remained the same, and how he made that happen she left entirely to him.

    CHIEF ’ S PARTY WOULD bore him, as usual, but he went because he went to all of Chief’s parties, and each time he parked in front of Chief’s large compound, he remembered the first time he had come there, with his cousin Nneoma. He was newly back from England, had been in Lagos for only a week, but Nneoma was already grumbling about how he could not just lie around in her flat reading and moping.
    “Ahn ahn!
O gini?
Are you the first person to have this problem? You have to get up and hustle. Everybody is hustling, Lagos is about hustling,” Nneoma said. She had thick-palmed, capable hands and many business interests; she traveled to Dubai to buy gold, to China to buy women’s clothing, and lately, she had become a distributor for a frozen chicken company. “I would have said you should come and help me in my business, but no, you are too soft, you speak too much English. I need somebody with gra-gra,” she said.
    Obinze was still reeling from what had happened to him in England, still insulated in layers of his own self-pity, and to hear Nneoma’s dismissive question—“Are you the first person to have this problem?”—upset him. She had no idea, this cousin who had grown up in the village, who looked at the world with stark and insensitive eyes. But slowly, he realized she was right; he was not the first and he would not be the last. He began applying for jobs listed in newspapers, but nobody called him for an interview, and his friends from school, who were now working at banks and mobile phone companies, began to avoid him, worried that he would thrust yet another CV into their hands.
    One day, Nneoma said, “I know this very rich man, Chief. The man chased and chased me, eh, but I refused. He has a serious problem with women, and he can give somebody AIDS. But you know these men, the one woman that says no to them is the one that they don’t forget. So from time to time, he will call me and sometimes I go andgreet him. He even helped me with capital to start over my business after those children of Satan stole my money last year. He still thinks that one day I will agree for him. Ha,
o di egwu
, for where? I will take you to him. Once he is in a good mood, the man can be very generous. He knows everybody in this country. Maybe he will give us a note for a managing director somewhere.”
    A steward let them in; Chief was sitting on a gilded chair that looked like a throne, sipping cognac and surrounded by guests. He sprang up, a smallish man, high-spirited and ebullient. “Nneoma! Is this you? So you remember me today!” he said. He hugged Nneoma, moved back to look boldly at her hips outlined in her fitted skirt, her long weave falling to her shoulders. “You want to give me heart attack, eh?”
    “How can I give you heart attack? What will I do without you?” Nneoma said playfully.
    “You know what to do,” Chief said, and his guests laughed, three guffawing, knowing men.
    “Chief, this is my cousin, Obinze. His mother is my father’s sister, the professor,” Nneoma said. “She is the one that paid my school fees from beginning to end. If not for her, I don’t know where I would be today.”
    “Wonderful, wonderful!” Chief said, looking at Obinze as though he was somehow responsible for this generosity.
    “Good evening, sir,” Obinze said. It surprised him that Chief was something of a fop, with his air of fussy grooming: nails manicured and shiny, black velvet slippers at his feet, a diamond cross around his neck. He had expected a larger man and