Chapter summary
After receiving Sarah’s threat, Dara confides in her mother and wrongly decides Felix is responsible.
DARA
Tuesday The walls of her house could not hold the stench that oozed out of the festering sewage disguised as pizza. Her neighbours began to ask if her toilet water trap was broken. One of them walked around the building sniffing like a police inspector, in search of the source of the putrid smell. It was awful.
Since the delivery, questions she had no answers to drowned her thoughts, and confusion scattered the few answers she could think of.
“Why would anyone go through all the trouble to deliver such a disgusting package to me?”
“Who is Fatbabygirl? Could that be the bitch who delivered the package?” Her eyes wandered about the room as though the answer sat somewhere within sight.
“But she came with a POS machine and she was decently dressed. Could there have been a mistake somehow?” The whiff of faeces reminded her quickly that it was no mistake, and her nose twitched in agreement.
“Yes, she was slightly on the big side, gracefully so, but certainly not fat. And she spoke good English. Could she have known what was in the package?”
That was when her phone rang out loud, piercing the silence that was begging for answers. It was the pizza company, calling to say that her order was still in transit.
Still in transit? Then what had she paid for at the gate?
“What the hell? Someone is messing with me,” Dara concluded.
She dialled her boyfriend’s number for the umpteenth time that afternoon. It rang unanswered. He had not replied to her messages either. He had warned her that Tuesday would be impossible. He was always busy on Tuesdays and barely had time for calls until late in the evening, on his way home to his wife and kids.
A strange email notification flashed on her phone. It was strange because the message was in red print, and because it came from a name that was now her albatross that afternoon. Fatbabygirl.
It read: “This is just the beginning!”
Her doorbell startled her. Irritation danced across her now oily face, for the stress of the last twenty minutes had taken its toll on her mental health.
It was the pizza delivery man, with her much-awaited lunch.
DARA
Tuesday night By nine o’clock the flat smelled of Dettol and defeat. Dara sat on the edge of her bed with the phone on her knee and did something she had not done in three years. She called her mother.
Her mother picked up on the second ring, as she always did, with the television turned down and the voice she kept for bad news. “Dara? What is it? Are you sick?”
“No, Mummy. I’m fine.”
“Then why are you calling at this hour?”
She told her a part of it. Not the faeces, not Ernest. She said somebody had sent her a rude package and she was upset.
Dara had grown up in a two-room flat in Surulere, where her mother cleaned offices at night and sold Ankara fabric from a bag by day. Her father left when she was nine and took the generator with him, which her mother never forgave more than the leaving. At eleven, with a school ruler in her hand, Dara had promised herself that she would never depend on anybody for anything.
At twenty-eight she lived in a flat she could not afford, inside a life she could not afford to examine.
She had met Ernest at a conference at the Eko Hotel, where he sat on a panel about keeping clients. She asked a question about customer churn that made the moderator laugh and Ernest turn round in his chair. Afterwards he gave her a card with only a telephone number on it. By the second month she had stopped counting the envelopes.
She was not a fool. She had done the sums, decided that the answer was bearable, and put a nice lamp in the corner.
“Is it the man again?” her mother asked.
“Which man?”
“Dara. I cleaned offices for twenty-two years. I know what it means when a girl has a nice flat and no husband. I am not asking you to explain. I am asking if it is the man.”
She did not answer.
“Whoever is doing this to you,” her mother said, more gently, “ask God, and ask yourself. Sometimes people are punished for what is not theirs. And sometimes they are punished for what is.”
“I love you, Mummy.”
“Eat something.”
She sat on after the call. Then she opened the red email again. This is just the beginning! The beginning of what? She read it until the words stopped being words.
She did not sleep. At two in the morning, lying in the dark with the ceiling fan going round, she settled the matter. It was Felix. It could only be Felix. She fell asleep on the strength of that, the way you fall asleep on a wrong answer you have decided to defend.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 17
The story continues in the next chapter.
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The featured photograph is used under the Pexels licence. Contextual scene illustrations are original editorial artwork created for this serial; the characters and events are fictional. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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