Static Hour

Thin Walls

The walls of the building were old brick pretending to be soundproof.

Adaeze learned this on her first night, lying on a mattress still smelling of plastic wrap, staring at the ceiling fan that turned too slowly to matter.

She could hear him through the wall. Not words at first. Just the register of his voice, low and even, the particular rhythm of a man on the phone trying not to sound urgent.

She told herself she wasn't listening. She was simply awake, and the wall was thin, and there was nothing she could do about either fact.

Then a word surfaced, clear enough to catch. Ikoyi.

She sat up.

It meant nothing on its own. Half of Lagos had business in Ikoyi. But something in the way he said it, clipped and careful, made her think of the bundle on the balcony, the way he had tucked it under his arm like a man protecting a rib that had already been broken once.

She moved closer to the wall without deciding to. Her palm found the cool brick near where she guessed his bed might be, though she had no real way of knowing the shape of his apartment, only the shape of her own guessing.

"...if the buyer moves before Thursday, we lose the window," he was saying. A pause, someone answering on the other end, too faint for her to catch. Then, sharper: "No. Not through him. He's compromised."

Compromised. A strange word for a man to use about a friend, if that was what the other voice belonged to. It sounded like something out of the crime documentaries her cousin watched on repeat, not like something real people said to each other on a Tuesday night in Yaba.

Adaeze pressed her ear flat against the wall, unashamed of herself for exactly as long as it took to hear the voice on the other end go silent, and his own voice go quiet with it.

Then nothing. Just her own breath, embarrassingly loud in her ears.

She stayed like that for a full minute, feeling foolish, feeling something else underneath the foolishness that she did not yet have a name for. She thought about her mother's voice on the phone that morning, asking if the new place had a good lock on the door, if the neighbourhood was safe, if she was eating. She thought about how she had said yes to all three questions without checking a single one of them.

She was still deciding whether to feel afraid when the knock came.

It landed exactly where her ear had been pressed a moment before, three knuckles against brick, close enough that she felt it more than heard it, a vibration traveling through the wall into her own skull.

She flinched back so fast she knocked her elbow against the headboard.

"You should get a glass," his voice said through the wall, perfectly level, almost amused. "Works better than an ear. My mother used to do the same thing when my brother snuck girls in."

Heat climbed up her neck, fast and total. She said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't confirm exactly what he already knew.

"Adaeze."

Her name again, the second time in one day, and it still did something strange to her chest to hear it in his mouth, low and certain, like a word he'd already decided belonged to him a little.

She found her voice. Barely.

"What?"

A pause on his side.

When he spoke again, something in his tone had changed, gone careful in a way that made her sit up straighter.

"Don't listen at that wall again," he said.

"Not because I'll mind. Because some of what you'll hear, you won't be able to unhear. And once you know it, you're already part of it, whether you want to be or not."

She opened her mouth to ask what it was, the question that had been building in her since the balcony, since the bundle, since her own name in his mouth before she'd ever given it to him.

But before she could get the words out, she heard something else through the wall. Not his voice this time.

A second knock. Not on the shared wall. On his front door. Three heavy raps, unhurried, patient in a way that made her stomach drop before she understood why.

And then his voice, pitched away from her now, low and flat and entirely different from the voice that had just spoken her name.

"You're early," he said to whoever stood on the other side of his door.

Silence answered him. Then the unmistakable sound of a door opening that he had not chosen to open.