Chapter One — The Fare

Tunde had been driving for eleven hours when the woman slid into the back seat at Oshodi at 11:47 p.m. She wore a silver wrapper that caught the streetlights and carried no bag. "Yaba, then Ebute-Metta, then back," she said, in crisp Yoruba-accented English. "Triple fare. Do you take it?"

The city at night has its own rules. The lights on the Third Mainland Bridge flickered like a broken rosary, danfos rattled past with music spilling out, and the lagoon beneath was black and endless. Tunde said yes. He needed the money — his younger sister Amaka's school fees were due Monday, and his mother had stopped asking, which was worse.

In Yaba, the woman collected a boy — no older than nine — sleeping on a bench outside the market. "My son," she said, answering no question. At Ebute-Metta, she stopped at a compound where an old man waited with a plastic kettle and prayed over the boy's head for a long time. No one spoke on the drive back.

It was 1:12 a.m. when Tunde dropped them again at Oshodi. The woman paid, then pressed a folded paper into his hand. It was a drawing, crayon on newsprint: the bridge, a yellow taxi, three stick figures. "He draws what he dreams," she said. "Tonight he dreamed of you."

Lagos After Dark is not about the skyline. It is about the people who keep the skyline lit — the night traders at Computer Village packing up, the nurses changing shifts at LUTH, the lovers quarrelling softly at bus stops because they cannot afford to wake the neighbours. Each night is a small country. Each fare is a story.