The Third Door — Chapter 1: Night Shift

11.40pm, Old GRA, Port Harcourt

The rain hit the zinc roof like someone emptying a sack of gravel.

Tonye did not look up. She had learned to read the weather in this city the way she read prescriptions: quickly, and without being fooled by the handwriting. Rain at eleven meant flooded roads by midnight. It meant fewer customers, more fevers, and no light by one.

Behind the building, the generator coughed, found its rhythm and held it.

She stood on the third rung of a stepladder in the stockroom, running a pen down a list that had already been checked twice. Tomorrow at ten, the third branch of Briggs Pharmacy would open on Peter Odili Road. There would be a ribbon, a pastor, a tray of small chops and a photographer she had already decided to avoid. Tonight there were forty-two cartons to count and load into the delivery van parked in the yard, where Mr. Ibifuro, the night driver, slept on a bench with a towel over his face.

Forty-one.

She counted again. Forty-two. The missing one had been hiding behind the cough syrup.

“Ma, you no wan rest small?”

Oyin leaned in the doorway with a biro wedged behind one ear and her braids piled on her head like a bundle of firewood. She was twenty-four and had a way of asking questions as if she were handing you a cold drink.

“Tomorrow won’t open itself, Oyin.”

“Na the ribbon go open am. You just go cut am and smile.”

“I don’t smile for ribbons.”

“Ma, you no dey smile for anything.” Oyin grinned, to show she meant it kindly. “Journalists go come tomorrow. Dem go ask me for your picture. I don check everywhere, even the staff WhatsApp group. No single photo.”

“Give them the pharmacy.”

“Pharmacy no get face o.”

“That is why it photographs well.”

Oyin laughed. Then she saw that Tonye had not, and the laugh folded itself away.

Tonye came down the ladder with the care of a woman who did not trust surprises. She was broad through the shoulders and soft through the middle, and the loose wrap dress she wore, the colour of burnt orange, fell to her ankles and kept its own counsel about the shape underneath. Her hair was cropped close and dyed the red of ripe tomatoes. Her round face carried the cut as if it had been made for it. At forty-six she had been called “Ma” for years by girls half her age, and she had stopped hearing it as a title.

The front door banged against its frame.

“Madam! Abeg, Madam!”

A man stood dripping on the tiles. A security company cap was plastered to his forehead, and against his chest, wrapped in a soaked wrapper, was a small body that did not move.

“Na my pikin. E dey burn. E don shake once for the road.”

Tonye was across the shop before Oyin had finished turning. “Put him here.” She swept the counter clear with one forearm and boxes of lozenges slid into the bin. “On his side. Gently.”

The boy was perhaps two. He lay limp as washed cloth, cheeks flushed, lips cracked. His eyes rolled to her face and away again.

Breathing. Good.

“How long has he been like this?”

“Since afternoon. His mama say na teething. I say make we wait. Then just now…” The man’s voice cracked in the middle. “E shake.”

“How long did the shaking last?”

“Maybe one minute. Two.”

“Oyin. Thermometer, bottom drawer. Then the towels from the cupboard. Not cold. Room temperature.”

Oyin was already moving.

Tonye brushed the boy’s hair back with two fingers and spoke to him in the voice she kept for frightened things: slow, level, in no hurry at all. The thermometer beeped. She read the number and did not say it aloud.

“What is his name?”

“Preye.”

“And yours?”

“Tamuno, Ma.”

“Mr. Tamuno, listen to me.” His eyes jumped to hers. “A fever with a fit in a child this small needs a doctor tonight. Not syrup. Not herbal tea. Not morning.”

“My car no start. I come by okada, and the man don run go. I no get…”

“I did not ask what you have. I am telling you what he needs. Our van is in the yard. You will go in it.”

She measured a small cup of syrup to the line his weight demanded and wrote the time on the label in block letters. “This brings the fever down while you travel. It does not replace the hospital. Do you understand the difference?”

He nodded the way men do when they intend to understand later.

“Oyin, wake Mr. Ibifuro. Tell him to bring the van round, now. Then ring the children’s clinic on Aba Road and tell the night doctor a toddler is coming with a fever and a fit.”

“Yes, Ma.”

Tonye wrapped the boy in a dry sheet from the display shelf. His hand opened and closed on empty air, found her finger and held it.

For a moment she did not move.

Something crossed her face too quickly to be given a name. Then it was gone, and she was a pharmacist again.

Headlights swept the glass as the van came round from the yard. Its engine idled in the rain like a patient animal. Tonye walked them out under the awning and watched the tail lights go down the street until the dark swallowed them.

Back inside, the counter held a small wet handprint.

She wiped it away with her palm.

12.20am

The clinic called at twenty past midnight. The night doctor had seen the boy. The fever was coming down and the fit had not returned. They would keep him till morning.

“Thank God,” Oyin said, sagging against the shelf of vitamins. “Ma, you see how you just dey calm? Me, my hand dey shake.”

“Your hands did what they were told.”

“My hand no even know wetin e dey do.”

“That is how it works.”

Tonye’s shoulders came down by an inch. For her, that was a speech.

The rain had thinned to a steady drizzle. Somewhere beyond the wall, a neighbour’s generator died and a chorus of voices cursed it in three languages. The shop smelled of Dettol, wet cardboard and diesel, the particular perfume of a Port Harcourt night when the light has gone.

She left Oyin to finish the cartons and walked to the little office at the back. At the door she stopped.

She knocked three times. Softly, evenly, like a woman asking permission from a room she owned.

Then she opened it.

“Ma.”

Oyin was watching from the stockroom, biro in her teeth.

“Yes?”

“Why you dey knock your own office?”

Tonye’s hand stayed on the handle. “It’s a habit.”

“Whose habit?”

“Mine.”

She went in and closed the door.

The office was small and very tidy. A steel desk. A chair that faced the door, because Tonye never sat with her back to one. A succulent in a chipped mug. On the wall, a framed degree from the University of Lagos, and under it, in gold letters, the name Tonye Briggs.

The desk had no photographs. Neither did the shelf, nor the walls, nor her phone.

She poured cold tea from a flask, sat, and let the quiet settle over her like a sheet.

The rain ticked against the louvres.

She began to hum.

She did not decide to. It simply came, the way a tap runs when you lean on it. An old hymn, the kind that rose out of church halls on Sunday evenings under slow ceiling fans. Her voice was off-key and low, and it carried the first line easily, and then the second.

The third line would not come.

She tried again from the top. The tune ran, climbed, reached the place where the next phrase should be, and stopped. It was like coming down a dark stair and stretching a foot for a step that was not there.

The foot found only air.

Tonye sat very still with the cup halfway to her mouth.

Then she set it down, bent, and slid open the bottom drawer of the desk.

The folder lay where it always lay, under the spare keys and a roll of invoice paper. Brown. Thick. Its flap sealed with tape that had yellowed at the edges. Chief Amakiri had put it into her hands almost four years ago. Open it when you are ready, she had said.

Tonye had never been ready. She had told herself there was nothing inside that she needed.

Tonight her fingers rested on it anyway.

She could not have said why. Only that the hymn had a hole in it, and the folder was the one thing in the building that might know what belonged there.

She did not open it.

But for the first time in four years, she did not push the drawer shut either.

The Third Door · Continue reading

Chapter 2 is the next door

The sealed folder is still open on Tonye’s desk. Follow the story into Chapter 2.

Continue to Chapter 2 →

What do you think is inside the folder? Share your theory in the comments below.

Cover portrait and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence. Cover photograph by Boko Shots; cover design for The Third Door by akinakingbogun.com.