The well is forty paces from Blessing's house. The path is packed earth, the grass on either side is yellow, and halfway along a four-inch iron pipe juts from the ground, the section cut crooked, rust on the rim. Around the pipe the earth is black in a circle of two metres. The pipe does not carry water. It carried oil. Blessing walks past it every morning with a yellow plastic bucket, the handle broken for three months, held with both hands. A green wrapper with an orange border covers her body from the waist down. Her hair is gathered with a black cotton thread. Arms bare. Flip-flops worn at the toe because Blessing always walks forward, from the well to the house, from the house to the well.

The tap is iron, the handle worn on the right side. Water comes out when it turns. It has the colour of water. The water of Nisisioken Ogale contains benzene at nine hundred times the threshold of the World Health Organization. Benzene has no colour. No shape. The water that comes from the tap looks like water. The nose says so before the page writes it down. Inside the house, on the table next to the stove, there is a notebook with one hundred and twenty pages. Seventy-eight are written. Each page is a day. Each day has a date and next to the date a number: one for no smell, two for a slight smell, three for a strong smell. The system was invented by Blessing. It is not scientific. It is the nose translated into numbers. Twenty-three days with the number one. Forty with two. Fifteen with three. UNEP has the spectrometers. HYPREP has the pumps. Blessing has the nose and the notebook.

Ogoniland had two thousand nine hundred and seventy-six oil spills between 1976 and 1991. The figure appears in a United Nations report published in 2011, two hundred and forty-six pages, the most severe contamination in West Africa. The report said the cleanup would take twenty-five years. Fifteen years have passed. HYPREP cleaned fifteen sites out of sixty-nine and then ran out of funds. The fifteen cleaned sites were recontaminated. The pipe beside Blessing's path belongs to site K-Dere 28: the black stain around it was wider in 2011, the rain compressed it, the oil sank into the soil, the soil into the aquifer, the aquifer into the well. Next to the pipe there is an orange pump the cleanup workers left behind. The paint peels off in flakes. Rust eats the metal underneath. No one has come to collect it. Life expectancy in the Niger Delta is forty-one years. Blessing is forty-five.

In January President Tinubu met the Ogoni community in Abuja. The statement said: resumption of extraction activities in the territory of Ogoniland. It did not say: cleanup completed. It did not say: safe water. It said: resumption. The drills would return to the same land where oil had leaked for fifty years and the water in the well would not change, had not changed before the cleanup, had not changed during, would not change after. Blessing read the news on the neighbour's phone. She opened the notebook. She wrote the date. She smelled the water in the bucket. She wrote the number: two. The gesture was the same as every morning. But after Tinubu, marking the smell was no longer a habit. It was the only thing Blessing could do with water she could not change: count it.

The bucket is full. The water sways as Blessing walks along the path. The flip-flops scrape the black earth beside the pipe. Forty paces. The notebook in the house has one more page. The water in the yellow bucket is still. The sun of Ogoniland beats on the bucket. The water shines.