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more obscene songs, in which he sings about what a man and a woman do behind closed doors and how their six-spring bed creaks noisily. Her neighbors blocked the ears of their children with their fingers and dragged them into their rooms. Mark sat on a low bench, rolling a marijuana cigarette while reading a fat novel. His hands were stained a dark brown from the marijuana. Beauty was dancing for him.Twice she snatched the book from his hands while telling him to watch a sexy sway she was executing. It was said that white people did not like pepper in their food, but Mark was an exception. He ate the same spicy foods that we ate and would on occasion go with a bowl to the roadside food vendor, Mamaput. The people on the street said that any white man who eats pepper would never leave Lagos. This seemed to be true for Mark.
    And then one day, Beauty threw out Mark’s things. She was coming back from down the road where she had gone to buy marijuana when she saw Mark talking with a girl who lived on the same street. Her name was Bridget, and she was an undergraduate at the University of Lagos. They had been discussing one of the novels Mark was reading. He was always reading fat books that were sold cheaply on Lagos sidewalks. They were still talking when Beauty stumbled on them. She pulled up her trousers, clapped her hands, and screamed, “Come and see this small girl prostitute husband snatcher that wants to take my man.”
    “Come on, Beauty, we were only talking about books,” Mark said, trying to placate her.
    “You shut up your dirty mouth there, I will face you later, let me finish with this small
ashewo
first! So you and your mother have been planning on how you will steal my man, you people are no longer satisfied with calling me names behind my back and whispering when I pass, you have shown your hands, me, I will show you people today.”
    She grabbed Bridget by the front of her dress and tore the dress, exposing her breasts. The girl began to cry. People in the compound came out and forcefully pried her hands off the girl, but not before she had left a bleeding mark with her nails on the girl’s face.
    She went inside the room and started throwing out Mark’s things, beginning with his cheap paperback novels and his sneakers and his faded New York Yankees baseball cap and his faded jeans and his checkerboard. She dumped them outside, screaming while she tossed them out, cursing her neighbors for being backbiters, husband snatchers, witches, and wizards.
    Some of the people who had lived on the street for a long time swore that Mark was going to come back. They said they had seen it happen so many times in the past, and Mark always came back in the middle of the night.
    Not too long after that, we saw Mark on television and on movie posters. When Beauty threw Mark out, he had gone to a popular hangout for artistes near the National Theatre called Abe Igi to see if he could locate some old friends from his banking days who drank there. An actor informed Mark that a movie producer who specialized in shooting quick movies with video cameras that were sold in Lagos traffic was looking for a white man to play the role of a colonial missionary in an upcoming movie titled
The Cross and the Pagans.
Prior to this time, the filmmakers had cast albinos wearing wigs in the roles of white men. This time, they wanted to use a real white person. Though Mark had no formal training as an actor, he got the role and played it well. The producers of the movie invested a lot of money promoting the movie on radio and television and also plastered every available space on major streets with posters.
    That same week Beauty walked into the street brandishing the movie poster with Mark’s photo on it. She slapped her thighs and held up the poster.
    “Was it not you people of this street that said my man was an idler? Come and see him now, he has become James Bond, go toScala Cinema tomorrow and see my man in action. Those of you who