~He sat on that bench and talked, speaking Hausa, and Auwal was surprised and flattered in spite of himself, he'd not expected Hausa to be, for this man, a language of tenderness, he'd expected it to be a language for business, a language to be used and discarded and reused.~

~It seemed she had folded her dream and tucked it at the bottom of her box, together with her certificates and medals and old photographs.~

~Every day he lived he felt less like himself. Growth, people called it; he thought of it as estrangement.~

~She could sense his discomfort, slight and well preserved - he was a man with his edges tucked in - but there nonetheless.~

~You wanted to stop, to apologize - but your heart burned, like you had hot charcoal on it, and your tongue was bitter.~

~Tonight, his words dis not come back to him in echoes, but as the responses of passersby, Saint Rita's parishioners on their way home from Mass, neighbours out in the street, drinking or making their hair.~

~Years later, when his songs would set the continent on fire, when I would stand by my window and look out into Lagos, wondering if leaving him was the biggest mistake of my life, it would be these sounds that I would hear in my memory, of a young man throwing up in my bathroom and a beautiful song playing in the background.~