The Fog: Chapter 2
Despite everything, Nimi graduated university with a second-class degree in sociology, earned in the way many things in her life were earned: through workarounds and last-minute recoveries. What came next was less the result of ambition and more the result of proximity. Through a family friend, she landed an assistant position at Ona Foundation, the country’s largest education advocacy organisation.
She liked the job. It was stable, and stability in a sector notorious for poor pay and high turnover, in an economy that made employment feel like a privilege, was not nothing. She knew this and reminded herself of it often.
The person who had made it possible was Mrs. Amadi, her mother’s oldest friend, who had been catering the private functions of Lagos’ upper crust for nearly two decades. One of her longest-standing clients was Marie Jean, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Ona Foundation, who came from the kind of family that required very little introduction. Mrs Amadi had recommended her to Marie three years ago at the foundation’s summer brunch which she catered. She had also been catering Marie’s family functions now for almost two decades and was held in high regard by her family. Marie’s mother was a Nigerian socialite from a prominent royal family, known citywide for her annual Christmas parties and charity galas, which Mrs. Amadi’s company, Delightful Bites, catered every year without fail. Marie’s father, a French national, had spent years in Nigeria as a senior diplomat before pivoting to build a shipping company across West Africa. There were rumours of mining operations in the North, though nothing had ever been confirmed, and he was by all accounts a recluse who nobody pressed.
When Marie mentioned that she was looking for an assistant to work with her at the foundation, Mrs Amadi took that opportunity to get her best friend’s daughter employed. That was three years ago.
In the time since, Nimi had come to understand with increasing clarity what it actually meant to work in close proximity to the one percent. Marie’s role at the foundation meant she operated in a world of influence built through institutional access, alumni connections, and an inherited social capital. During major projects and events, these circles extended briefly and conditionally to Nimi. She attended the meetings, sat in the rooms, and carried the folders. She understood she was adjacent to something, not inside it.
As colleagues, they both got along half of the time, the other half was Nimi reminding herself about the job market and how the assistant role enabled her to cover living expenses while saving the occasional income from her art side-gig.
At the time Nimi accepted the assistant job offer she had been making a stipend from an art account she opened on instagram during the pandemic as a way to occupy her time and share her drawings. The art account had started almost by accident. Her friends from the university art club had all graduated, most of them had left the country and for the few left, it was no longer easy to meet up for drawing sessions particularly during the lockdown. With her friends scattered across the world and meeting up with the few who remained proving difficult during that period, Nimi had turned to Instagram partly out of boredom and partly out of a need for something to belong to. She began posting her sketches and slowly, strangers started paying attention. Then they started making requests such as greeting cards, small commissions, prints and these requests led to a nice income stream for her even after the pandemic. The validation she got from it, that someone she had never met would pay for something she made, was a quiet and reliable source of confidence especially on the days when working under Marie wore her down.
Marie Jean was by most outward measures, quite pleasant. At 5’8” with hazel eyes, fair complexion and a slender body, she often drew the attention of any room when she walked in. She was friendly enough on first meeting as most people in her circle were, but Nimi had come to recognise a particular quality in that friendliness over time. It was a smile that never quite reached the eyes, a glance that moved across a person quickly and assessingly as though calculating in a single sweep exactly where they placed in the room’s social order and whether that placement warranted further investment.
Nimi had first encountered this during her job interview. Seated in Marie’s tastefully furnished office, she had answered questions about her coursework and career interests and then just before the meeting closed, Marie asked how soon she could start, adding almost as an aside that if Nimi already had “summer travel plans” she was happy to accommodate a later start date in the contract just incase the plane tickets and hotel bookings were already booked. Nimi, not yet fluent in what was being communicated, replied cheerfully that she was free to start immediately and had a family road trip to Akure over Christmas. Marie replied stiffly “Oh… right,” smiled the smile, glanced briefly at Nimi’s outfit and ended the interview with instructions to resume the following Monday.
It had taken Nimi a while to understand what had happened in that room and even longer to stop feeling mildly foolish about it.
Three years on, they had settled into a functional rhythm. Nimi scheduled Marie’s calendar every Friday, screened her calls and transferred only those from the French embassy, her parents or anyone flagged as VIP, and ensured lunch from Bakendales arrived without incident. It was not glamorous work but it was manageable, and manageable was what Nimi had quietly built her life around.
Despite the routine they had established, two new things had changed in the last few months which meant that the perfect routine was getting harder to maintain and Nimi’s perfect balance between her art business (which she woke up as early as 4:30 on weekdays to work on) and the demands of her job at Ona foundation had begun to falter.
The first was the appointment of a new board of directors. The governor’s wife had been added following a memorandum between Ona Foundation and the state government, a partnership that brought new funding and with it a different kind of scrutiny. This change put everyone in the organisation on high alert and Marie, in response, had begun to lean harder on Nimi. Requests came faster and expectations that were not part of her role were now being added. The buffer Nimi had carefully constructed, early mornings reserved for her art and workdays kept within their limits, was being quietly eroded and she could feel it giving way at the edges.
This is the second chapter in The Fog, a fiction series. If you’re just joining, you can catch up on the first chapter here: