The medication was at a pharmacy in Ojuelegba.
Zara found this out through a chain of phone calls that took forty minutes and required her to speak to four different people including a pharmacist in Agege who didn't have the medication but knew someone who might, and a woman in her nursing school class whose mother worked in pharmaceutical distribution and who was able to confirm that yes, a shipment had come in last week, yes it was the right formulation, yes they still had stock, but she should come before Thursday because these things moved.
She wrote the address down. She calculated the bus fare against her current account balance against the cost of the medication against the nursing school fee instalment due in six weeks and she did this calculation quickly and without drama the way she did all calculations involving money not with resentment exactly, more with the focused attention of someone navigating terrain that required care.
The balance, after medication and transport, left her with enough for food if she was sensible about it, which she always was.
She showered and dressed and was out of the apartment by 11am, moving through the particular texture of a Lagos Tuesday morning the bread sellers and the okada riders and the smell of exhaust and frying akara from the woman who set up on the corner of her street every morning with an efficiency that Zara privately admired. The city at this hour had a working quality to it, purposeful and loud and entirely indifferent to any individual's inner weather.
She found this comforting. Lagos did not require you to be well. It only required you to keep moving.
The bus to Ojuelegba was full in the way Lagos buses were always full past capacity, redistributing the concept of personal space into something purely theoretical. Zara stood with one hand on the overhead rail and her bag held against her chest and her pharmacology notes in her free hand because the commute was forty minutes and forty minutes was forty minutes.
The man standing next to her was on a phone call about a business deal that had gone wrong in ways he explained at length and volume. The woman on her other side was asleep standing up, which Zara respected enormously. A child of about six sitting in the seat beside her kept looking up at her with the frank assessment children applied to strangers before they learned discretion. Zara looked back. The child appeared to reach a conclusion and looked away.
She read her notes. Beta blockers, mechanism of action, contraindications. The bus lurched through traffic with the heroic aggression of the driver who had somewhere to be, which was every Lagos bus driver simultaneously.
Her phone buzzed. A message from the nursing school group chat: assignment deadline moved to Friday. Praise God. Seventeen thumbs up emojis in rapid succession. She added one because it was the social contract and because Friday was genuinely better than Wednesday.
She was reading about selective versus non selective beta blockers when the feeling started.
It was not a dramatic feeling. It did not announce itself. It was simply a quality of attention that she became aware of the way you became aware of a sound that had been playing for some time before you consciously registered it. The sense that something in her immediate environment was oriented toward her specifically.
She looked up from her notes.
The bus was as it had been loud, full, moving. Nobody was looking at her. The child had lost interest. The man was still on his phone call. The woman was still asleep.
She looked at the window the glass smeared and scratched, the street outside moving past in the blur of moderate speed. A car was keeping pace with the bus on the left side. Dark, late model, with tinted windows that told her nothing.
She watched it for thirty seconds. It maintained pace exactly.
Then the bus lurched right around a corner and the car went straight and disappeared and she was left with nothing but her own heartbeat which was slightly elevated in a way she noted clinically and attributed to insufficient sleep.
She went back to her notes.
The pharmacy in Ojuelegba smelled like every pharmacy she had ever been in antiseptic and cardboard and underneath it something chemical and faintly sweet. It was narrow and efficiently organised with a young man behind the counter who was watching a football match on a phone propped against the till with the dedication of someone who had achieved genuine peace about his priorities.
He looked up when she came in. She gave the medication name. He checked his system with two taps, found it, quoted her the price which was eleven percent higher than the Surulere pharmacy's usual price which was exactly what she had calculated, and went to the back to get it.
She waited by the counter. On the wall behind the till there was a calendar from a pharmaceutical company with a photograph of a mountain range that she was fairly certain was not in Nigeria and possibly not in Africa. Below it someone had taped a hand lettered sign: WE DO NOT GIVE CREDIT. THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD AND OURS.
She appreciated the honesty.
The young man came back with the medication. She paid. She put it in her bag with the careful attention she gave to things that had cost her something real.
Outside the pharmacy she checked the time 12:15pm. The pharmacology class was at 1pm in Yaba which was twenty minutes from here without traffic, which meant forty five minutes with it, which meant she needed to move now.
She moved.
The class was on drug metabolism and it was taught by Dr. Bankole who was seventy years old and had been teaching pharmacology since before half his students' parents were born and who delivered every lecture with the serene authority of someone who had long ago stopped being interested in whether people were paying attention and had decided to simply dispense truth into the room and let it settle where it would.
Zara paid attention. She always paid attention. Attention was free and she had learned early that it was one of the few resources available to her in unlimited supply.
She sat in her usual seat third row, left side, angle that gave her sightline to both the board and the door, which was a habit she had developed so gradually she could no longer remember not having it. Beside her was Chisom Eze, her closest friend in the programme, who was from Onitsha and who had been offered a visa to the UK eight months ago and had deferred it twice and was still deferring it with the pained expression of someone who had not yet found the argument that would make the decision feel clean.
"You look like you didn't sleep," Chisom said, before the class started.
"Four hours."
"Zara."
"It's enough."
"You always say that."
"Because it's always enough."
Chisom gave her the look she gave her when she decided that arguing was less efficient than simply noting an objection for the record. "There's a study group tonight. Emeka's place. You should come."
"I have a shift."
"You always have a shift."
"Because I always need the money."
Chisom's expression softened into something that was not quite pity Chisom was too practical for pity but adjacent to it. She had offered twice to help with the school fees situation and Zara had declined both times with a brevity that closed the subject and Chisom, who understood the specific pride involved, had not raised it again.
Dr. Bankole began speaking. Zara opened her notebook.
She thought about the dark car three times during the lecture. Once when Dr. Bankole said something about distribution half life that she didn't immediately catch because her attention had gone somewhere else briefly. Once during a question from a student in the back row whose voice had a particular quality that made her turn to look before she had consciously decided to. Once right at the end when the class was packing up and she became aware, for a second that passed quickly, of the feeling from the bus that sense of being the specific object of someone's attention.
She looked around the classroom. Students gathering notebooks, phones appearing, the low noise of post lecture conversation. Nothing unusual. Nobody looking at her.
She packed her own things. She said goodbye to Chisom who reminded her about the study group with the tone of someone who already knew the answer. She walked out into the Yaba afternoon.
The dark car was parked across the street from the building's entrance.
She did not stop walking. She did not change her pace. She turned left and walked to the bus stop and stood in the small crowd waiting there and did not look back.
Her heart rate was elevated again.
Still not panic, she noted. Just information.
She stood at the bus stop in the Yaba afternoon and the car did not move and eventually her bus came and she got on it and she went home and she ate rice and stew that she made in twenty minutes and she studied for two hours and she went to bed at 9pm because her next shift started at midnight.
She lay in the dark and thought: they know about you.
She thought: who is they.
She thought: what is there to know.
She fell asleep before she found answers to any of it, which was perhaps the most Nigerian thing about her the ability to fall asleep in the middle of an unsolved problem because the problem would still be there in the morning and she would be better equipped to face it rested than she would be awake.
The problem was indeed still there in the morning.
She faced it rested.