Deji laughs and nods, the bright in his gaze dancing. ‘You’re terrible.’
‘And yet, you want to take me out.’
‘Yes, because you’re also, clearly, a really funny, smart, interesting and hot terrible person and I would like to get to know you more to truly understand the depth of your meanness.’
I press a hand to my chest and tilt my head. ‘That’s one of the sweetest things anyone has ever said to me. I guess now’s the time to tell you that I think that you’re a dick. Honestly, when I first saw you, I thought, “Ew, what an asshole”。 Imagine my delight when I discovered I was right.’
‘Careful, or I’ll fall in love with you and it will be embarrassing for the both of us.’
At the restaurant, he orders a bottle of rosé and winks at me.
I am on what is possibly the best date of my life.
Alagomeji
Our princess grew up on Noble Street. A road on a slight incline in the heart of Lagos, hidden within a dense metropolis-within-a-metropolis known as Yaba. In the seventies, it is a heaving, cosmopolitan hub that’s beginning to shirk the shackles of colonialism. The old red-slate roofs and roman columns that murmur a staid ‘properness’ sit beside new concrete concoctions; modern, rambunctious and geometrically staggering. They hollered the rise of a new Nigeria. These concrete buildings are patriotic, loyal to their blood. They are re-setting the tone and realigning the country back to its roots, because, if there is anything Nigerians like to do, it is to shout. Eko oni baje. In the swaggering Lagosian way, that, of course, is all that matters – that ‘Lagos will never spoil’。 This mantra is concentrated in Yaba, for here we are in the nucleus of the nucleus, the heart of the heart. And in the heart of the heart, love is rich and in abundance.
This love is overwhelmingly present in an apartment at the top of a block of flats on Noble Street where our princess dwells. This is her tower, her castle. Our princess’s name, translated from Yoruba, unfurls into an iteration of ‘God Loves Me’; and, indeed, she is cherished with a pure affection. She lives with six family members: a doting, slightly overbearing father, whose firmness is undercut with a sure and tender fondness; a sweet, soft mother, who extends her care to lost children in the neighbourhood; and four siblings, two sisters and two brothers. She is the fourth born and love is poured into her. Love gives our princess space to be herself. Her tongue is fast and sharp and holds a gravitas far beyond her years. It exposes injustice and shames her elders. Throughout her life, she will stand up for what’s right and leave indelible marks of good on the world. For it is not that she is a princess who happens to live on Noble Street; she is the person whom it is named for. Somehow, twenty or thirty years before her birth, God placed into the hearts of the town-planners, who set about to construct that street, a knowledge that this particular street should be noble. Their self-proclaimed and ignorant colonialist superiority might have induced them to think that they were naming the road after some English commander or civil servant, but they were wrong. The street was named after our princess. It was named after her heart, one that is both strong with integrity and soft with kindness. Noble Street was named in honour of her tender fierceness.
At ten years old, our Noble princess is sent away to secondary in a boarding school in Abeokuta, a two-hour drive from Lagos. From afar it seems this is a draconian punishment, a banishment – and from her tears and kicks, it would seem so. However, the truth is much more banal, and somewhat disappointing for the purposes of this dramatic tale. She was sent away because that is what those who purported to love their children did in those days. Love was seen as something that should be slightly fearsome, love was Old Testament, forty years in the desert. Love was seen as force that should merely push not pull. So off she went, a little gangly-legged girl, technically a year too young for her new adventure, because she had skipped a grade. Yes, she is smart too.
A poet would describe Abeokuta as a hilly, rustic town of powdery red earth and trees so thickly and richly green it is as if they would have provided a plush rug for the gods. A tourism officer might call Abeokuta a ‘shabby idyll’， and refer to the goats meandering through traffic as ‘pastoral appeal seamlessly blending into the urban’。 To a city girl like our princess, it is a dingy, glorified village where people stare too much. What is green when you could have the grey of concrete? Soil when you could have pavement? Blue skies when you could have smog? Lagos is a complicated handshake and a jig, it is a warm, teasing insult meant to denote familiarity. Abeokuta is a yawn and a stretch, a bulge of the belly after eating pounded yam. Languid, it is an embrace that can make you feel overheated, suffocated. This feeling is compounded by the fact that the town is underneath rocks, huge rocks, so much so that the town is called Under The Rock （the Yoruba people are naturally literary）。 The huge mountainous boulders both surround the town and serve as its higgledy-piggledy foundations. Our princess swears to shine through the shadows of the rocks, to not become slow and lazy from the heat.