‘About a week.’

‘So how do we contact you if there’s something urgent?’

I told her that I would ring Aunty Dimma to check in. My mother had also refused a land phone.

‘Kings, whatever it is you people are doing, please be very careful. Be very, very careful.’

Aha! We were making progress. If she wanted me to be careful, that meant she accepted I was in the speed lane. It was only a matter of time before she completely came around.

‘Of course, Mummy,’ I said.

She sighed the world’s deepest sigh.

Twenty-five

It was my first trip on a plane. I waited for Cash Daddy to settle down into his first class seat and left him with Protocol Officer. Then I walked towards the back to find my own place.

‘Don’t worry,’ Cash Daddy said as I left. ‘Very soon, you’ll be able to join other big boys and fly in style.’

Had I not already seen what first class looked like, I might have thought nothing of it. But when I swept the separating curtain aside, I was startled. The people in economy were packed tight together, like a set of false teeth. After much probing, I found my seat in between two men and settled down to enjoy this new experience. But one of my neighbours refused me the enjoyment. Every few minutes, he would release a silent dose of effluvium, powerful enough to disperse a civil rights protest march. It became worse after the elegant, blond air hostess served minor portions of rice with a suspicious-looking green sauce that tasted like nothing I had ever eaten before. Bland, raw, and chalky. Could this really be the sort of Western diet that my father preferred over African food?

At Heathrow Airport, the immigration queue did not recognise first class or economy so, once again, I was reunited with Cash Daddy and Protocol Officer. The stern immigration officers were scrutinising passports, interrogating coldly, and whispering amongst themselves. Some from our queue were asked to stand aside and wait while an immigration officer took their passports and disappeared. I wondered what they had done wrong. I had heard all sorts of gory stories about desperate immigrants who had their hopes demolished right here at Heathrow – escorted onto the next plane back to Nigeria without even as much as a glimpse of the greener pastures beyond the airport. What if the same thing happened to us? What if they suspected that we were 419ers? I shuddered.

Finally, it was our turn. Protocol Officer quickly stepped forward and handed over Cash Daddy’s passport.

‘How long do you plan to stay in the United Kingdom?’ the officer asked. His teeth were brown and misaligned.

‘Two weeks,’ Protocol Officer replied on Cash Daddy’s behalf. ‘He’s here on holiday.’

The immigration officer stared back into Cash Daddy’s passport. Then he stared directly into Cash Daddy’s face. Cash Daddy glared back. The man shrank and took his stare away. He looked back at the passport and flipped the pages. He cleared his throat, brought out a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket, and looked through his glasses and over them. He cleared his throat again and looked over his glasses again, then through them once more.

He opened his mouth to ask another question.

Cash Daddy stared right into his face.

The man withered.

‘Welcome to the United Kingdom,’ he said.

Cash Daddy ignored him and strode past. The man spent some extra time staring at Protocol Officer’s passport and asking questions. Many of Protocol Officer’s answers missed the truth by about five kilometres. For some reason, the officer did not think I deserved too much scrutiny. He welcomed me without much ado.

‘Nonsense,’ Cash Daddy said, when I caught up with him. ‘Witches and wizards fly in and out of any country they want to without going through immigration. Why should I be harassed?’

The important thing was that we had made it through.

‘Anyway, by the time I become governor,’ he continued, ‘I’ll have a diplomatic passport so nobody will be able to talk to me anyhow.’

I knew that we were in the white man’s land. Still, I felt a slight shock at seeing so many white people walking about in one place at the same time. It was extremely rare to see a white person on the streets of the average, small Nigerian town. So rare, in fact, that sometimes in Umuahia, people would stop and stare at a white person, some chanting ‘Oyibo’, hoping that the white person would turn and wave.

When I was in primary four, there was a German girl in my class whose father was an engineer with the Golden Guinea Breweries. Several children spent their spare time surreptitiously running their fingers through her hair just to taste the straight, blond strands. Being the cleverest pupil, I was assigned by my teacher the prized sitting position right next to her. Standing up to answer a difficult question one day, I pressed the heel of my shoe against her toes. I just wanted to hear what it sounded like when she screamed.

The driver of the hired limousine also had brown and misaligned teeth. And so did the hotel concierge. My father had not mentioned any such anomaly in his traveller’s tales. How could English people have such bad teeth? Or perhaps these were just immigrants, and not real English people.

After settling into our different rooms, we converged in Cash Daddy’s suite for a final briefing. I and Protocol Officer stood by the bathroom door while Cash Daddy addressed us from the bathtub.

‘Like I told you people, this one is not the type of job that you chop and clean your mouth and shit and it ends there.’

He shot one leg out of the soapy water and draped it over the tub.

‘We have to package this mugu very well so that we can keep chopping him for a very long time. Once things start off well, Kings can just be talking and meeting with him regularly. That’s all.’

Sometime ago, Cash Daddy had instructed Protocol Officer to send letters to foreign businessmen who might be interested in investing in Nigeria. Protocol Officer wrote that, as the CEO of Ozu High Seas Construction Company, he had a strong government contact who could guarantee access to juicy contracts. All he needed was a foreign partner with a muscular bank account to act as guarantor. Mr Winterbottom had responded. He was the director of Hector Bank International and the CEO of Changeling Development Cooperation, Argentina. Because he had partnered extensively with South African businessmen, Mr Winterbottom was willing to peep into Nigeria. He and Protocol Officer had had several discussions over the phone before agreeing on this meeting in London. Protocol Officer told him that the current Nigerian minister for aviation was attending an economic summit in London over the next two days. The minister was, he said, his former boss, and Protocol Officer wanted both men to meet. Because of his limited time, the minister had asked them to join him for breakfast at his hotel tomorrow morning.

I nodded calmly as Cash Daddy went through each person’s script line by line, also giving instructions about body language and general demeanour.

‘Kings,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘all that big grammar they taught you in school, this is the time to speak all of it.’

But a riot had begun in my endocrine, nervous, and digestive systems. Not only was tomorrow going to be my first, real, live episode with a mugu, I had a few other worries. For example, the real Nigerian minister of aviation was actually attending an economic summit in London. It had been on the news.

‘Cash Daddy,’ I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other to conceal some embarrassment I felt at my cowardice, ‘what if he sees the real minister on TV?’

Both men laughed as if I had just cracked a splendid joke. Cash Daddy cleared his throat and wriggled the toes of the foot dangling over the tub.