It is not possible to describe it if you have never been there. But you know it because you have lived there. It is what you will call a ghetto neighbourhood. Metal sheets nailed together in a row. The metal is rusty and dark. Like the lives lived in them. They look crass and rough, like the work-abused knuckles of Sunday. Sunday is the master-of-all trades of the area. He washes. He cleans. He scrubs. People say he has half a brain. Makes you wonder if his skull is lop-sided as a result, you know, a bit like a weighing scale with too much weight on one side and nothing at all on the other. It does not look like that from the outside though. His head is round with a bush of thick, black hair. His half a brain does not stop people from contracting him for the chores they want to escape doing. It certainly does not stop him from making a baby who looks very much like him. Nobody knows who the mother of the baby is. They say Sunday just turned up one day with a bundle of rags and bones. Women like to tell how they nurse the baby to health. How Udo's mother who has just had a new baby also breast-feeds the new baby, a baby at each breast.

He is a hungry baby
A greedy baby
Grabs the nipple in his mouth and would not let go
Sucks like he has never seen food
Probably never has. Poor baby
Who is the mother anyway?
Who would sleep with Sunday with half a brain?
Tufia! Some women will sleep with anything, Sunday kwa!
Poor beautiful baby

For Sunday with the half brain has a beautiful baby boy with dimpled cheeks and fat, fat thighs. And all the mothers love to take care of him. They watch him thrash his arms and laugh with pleasure as he struggles to take his first steps, waddling on two feet like a giant crippled pigeon. And Sunday says that one day he will fly. Fly above the metal boxes in which you eke out your existence. He says he will fly beyond the skies.

Your father says it is not a life you live there. Can not be for lives are full and filling. Soothing. Like a cup of ice-cold water on a hot dry day. But what you have is a struggle to live. To wake up each morning and walk out into the stench of urine mixed with sand.

You want to fly like Sunday says his baby will. To fly above the shanty. To merge with the clouds. To escape into a life that is full. And filling. Like coca-cola after a loaf of bread.

That is what brings you to Antwerp.

One day when you are sixteen and curved in all the right places, a man turns up. He has a moustache above his full brown lips and patent leather shoes. Shoes that look out of place in your neighbourhood. His clothes are new. They have that crispy look of newness. Not like the washed ones you are used to seeing around. He stands out like a festive masquerade appearing on an ordinary day. He tells you that he has been seeing you around and wants to know you better. You want to know him better too. To smell the shoes and fuel your longing for a life. You have never smelt patent leather shoes before. You want to touch his moustache and have him touch you.

His name is Bob. Short and sweet, he tells you. Just like him. The short you can see. The sweet, you are yet to find out.

He tells you of places close to the sky. Way beyond this environment riddled with the smell of dead and decaying things: rats. Mice. Cockroaches. Dogs. Cats. Pungent smells rolling into each other. Places with names you have heard. And many more with names you have never dreamed of. Names you cannot roll on your tongue.

He tells you those places have no smell. At least no bad smell. No pool of urine stagnating outside your door. No dog feaces forming a mound outside your little window. No worms wriggling in excitement on the waste.

He calls you his little nymph. You have never heard that word. Do not know what it means. But you like the way it sounds coming from his lips. Falling like drops of rain after a really harsh dry season. The type of dry season farmers consider a curse. Little Nymph!

He says he will take you anywhere you want to go as he cradles your breasts, like they were newly born twins. He kisses your ears and tells you to choose. Antwerp. Brussels. Milan. Madrid. Barcelona. Amsterdam. Berlin. Frankfurt. The world is your oyster. All you have to do is say where. And he will make sure you get there.

You do not know where Antwerp is. Or Brussels. You know his shoes come from Milan and have a huge "Made in Italy" printed underneath them. The other cities do not mean anything to you. You have never left Enugu where you grew up. How can you choose if you do not know one from the other? They all sound like the bar of chocolate you had once. Sweet. Soft. Chocolatey. You close your eyes and stick a pin on a sheet of paper with the names scrawled in his lazy handwriting on it. The metal pin picks out your destiny. Fate decides for you: Antwerp. The city with the Cathedral, he says. You will like it. You will see. Loads of Africans. You won't miss home, he hisses in your ear as he nibbles on a lobe. But you do want to miss home. You want nothing to remind you of where you are leaving. Nothing to remind you of the dirt, the rust and the death. You want to forget and forge new memories for yourself.

"I will send you to school" he whispers like he were saying a prayer. Easy, just like that. He snaps his fingers to show how easy. You look into his eyes, the colour of slightly bleached oil, and you do not want to question how you will enter school with no prior education. Your father is too poor to afford anything. Least of all school. For a mere girl. If he had a boy, maybe.

When your father, balding and frail and disappearing forbids you to go, you tell him you do not want to stay and disappear like him. You see his eyes shut in pain as if a bright sunlight has suddenly hit them. But you do not care. And when your mother, her eyes shedding tears like they have an excess reservoir of it, holds on to you and begs you not to break her heart ,you push her away and set out into the dark to your freedom. Her voice chases you in that darkness:

You don't know who he is, kedu onye obu?
If he loves you, he should marry you
He should pay your bride price
Show he is serious
We do not know his family

You do not look back as you make your way to Bob's house from where you will leave the next day to Belgium. You have your brand new passport with a smiling picture of you in your handbag. You bring out the passport and open the page to where the visa is stamped. You put your nose to it and inhale. It smells of dreams about to be born. It is an intoxicating smell and makes you float.

You leave Ikeja airport on one of the hottest nights of the year. Bob says that kind of heat is enough to bake bread in. Your white T-Shirt announcing boldly that you are "Fantastic" plasters itself on your body. Your laps itch from sweat and makes you regret your decision to wear your brand new Jeans trousers. Sweat dribbles down the sides of your face and you regularly dab at them with your white scented handkerchief, one of the numerous presents you have been given by Bob. You are happy when it is time to board the plane and you stride in smartly, like a hospital matron. The cool air of the plane hits you and dries the sweat. All through the six hour flight on Sabena, your heart does an atilogwu dance, somersaulting over and over again. It keeps you from sleeping. It is not like you want to sleep anyway; you do not want to miss any part of your journey.