Chapter 20

# Chapter 20

The morning was overcast.

Lagos does not do overcast well. It is a city built for extremes—the hammering sun, the biblical rains, the sudden, operatic darkness of a storm rolling in from the lagoon—and overcast sits uneasily upon it, a mood the city has not rehearsed. The light was flat and grey and without direction, as though the sky had been covered by a single, enormous sheet, and the heat was the same heat—it is always the same heat—but the heat without sun is worse, somehow, because the sun at least gives the suffering a source, a thing to blame, and the grey sky offers nothing, only a diffuse, sourceless pressure that sits on the skin like cloth.