Chapter One
You should know, before anything else, that I loved him. That part was never acting, even though everything else about my life had become a kind of stage direction by then, a behavioural note telling someone else how to stand.
The night Kome Briggs died, I was streets away in a screening room in Victoria Island, 12.3 kilometers away. I was watching a man I had known since he was a boy who could not afford an internet subscription — data — to submit his audition tape, stand under a single lamp and pretend, for the hundredth time, to bury a soldier who never lived.
Folarin does not cry easily on command anymore. Too many years of technique sit between him and the raw thing. That night he cried anyway, more than it was required of him to.
And the room went silent — that is just how it goes when something true slips past the lights and the boom mic and the numerous takes that came before it. I remember thinking, there it is, that is the one they will use.
I did not think of Kome Briggs at all that night. I had a lot going on. I live in a city that never sleeps, and I needed to escape the traffic so much my spirit almost crawled out of my body.
She, Kome Briggs, had reviewed his first stage role eight years before, a small production at the national theater that almost nobody outside of this city ever saw. That is how small the production was, and everyone in attendance got there almost by word of mouth, and most were native to the business.
She had written a line Folarin can still recall perfectly at 3 AM when the Monster energy drink has gone soft in the right places in him. She had said, “He had the emotional register of a Nokia 3310 and about as much charm, he is good but his inability to express different range of emotions is a barrier and I do not know how he keeps getting these roles.”
A good line, the kind a critic writes once in a career and then spends years catching herself half smiling at it, even though I, myself, thought it was good. But then, the smile forgets what that good line actually cost someone.
Eight years later, Kome was found in the third row of the same national theater in Lagos, in the same exact seat she sat in the night she wrote it, a prop machete that had been filed to extreme sharpness through her chest, and it was angled in the bad way a blade goes into anyone. It was projected as if a fight choreographer had been paid too little and nobody rehearsed the depth of the scene properly. It was the exact same mistake from the production she had savaged — you can tell, but only if you know how to look for it; almost nobody did.
The police report called it a sharpened theatrical prop. I read that in a green room, waiting for Folarin's close-up, and felt my chest stiffen up, abrupt, like a generator cutting out during a program.
My name is Morayo Adekunle. For eleven years, I have been the person standing outside the frame in every photograph of Folarin Ajayi — just outside every frame of every picture of him ever taken. I stand right outside of his diary, his read of a room, and how he feels about the result of that reading.
I am the one who knows which producer needs flattery and which one needs to be kept far away, probably file a mental restraining order against. People assume I am his manager; I have never been. The honor of that role belongs to Debo Kalejaiye, a small sharp man who takes his percentage and never tries to understand nothing of what keeps Folarin upright at 6 AM on a call sheet that has extended its relevancy.
What I am does not have a proper title. I run his life. I have been doing that since a rehearsal room in Ile-Ife, where he was a scholarship boy in a jacket two sizes too big, and then, I was something else entirely.
This, I am about to tell you, is the story of six months in which someone the blogs named THE REVIEWER worked through a short list of people who had at one point or another, said something subjectively true and cruel in print about a project Folarin Ajayi happened to be part of. And of how wrong everybody turned out to be.
Before any of this, I used to be a critic myself. I think that is why the case pulled at me the way it did when it started. It is a similar feeling to how a wrong word buried in someone else's sentence used to keep me up at nights; an irritable itch under my skin I could not leave alone until I itched it to a bloody satisfaction. I still do not understand why itching my skin and dried up wounds feel pleasurable.
Anyway, let us proceed.
✦
