Chapter summary
Sarah remembers abandoning Oxford, confirms Sammy’s secret Lekki rendezvous, then receives an impossible anonymous warning.
SARAH
Oxford, fourteen years earlier The Radcliffe Camera has a round reading room with a dome like the inside of a very expensive hat, and the third-floor window seat on the east side belonged to Sarah from October to June.
She was twenty-four, a doctoral student in computer science, a Nigerian girl on a scholarship that required her to be brilliant and punctual at the same time. Her thesis was about teaching machines to hear tone in Yoruba, a language in which one word can mean husband, farm or spear depending on how the voice rises and falls. She liked the irony. She did not tell anybody about it.
She rode to the lab on a second-hand Honda bought from a departing postdoc for four hundred pounds, in a pair of biker boots two sizes too big, stuffed with socks. In winter the boots made her walk like a toddler. In spring she walked like a queen.
She ate like someone settling a debt. The cooks in the college buttery loved her. They piled her plate and stood at the hatch to watch her finish.
He was a visiting MBA student from the business school, a Lagos boy with good shoes and a beard that had no business being so charming. At ten to five on a Tuesday he asked to borrow a pen. She handed it over without looking up. He returned it at closing time with a note folded around it. I have watched you eat two lunches. Please marry me, or at least let me buy the third.
She tore the note in half and kept both halves.
The first time he saw her finish a dessert and ask for another, he leaned back, laughed, and called her his fat baby girl. She was a size eight. In the ears of a twenty-four-year-old it did not sound like an insult. It sounded like being chosen.
Her supervisor, Dr. Hartley, a thin man who disliked everyone equally, told her over sherry that her model would hear tone better than any speaker in Oxford within two years. She believed him. It was the only thing anybody had ever said to her that she believed without checking.
Then Sammy’s firm called him home.
“One year,” he said in the Camera, holding her face in both hands. “Take a year off. We’ll come back. I promise.”
That was fourteen years ago. The year became two years of waiting, and then a wedding. The wedding became a boy, then another boy and a hospital room. Then came a house in GRA with a cook, a gardener and a graduate driver, and a business in scented candles that she was very good at and did not love.
She kept the research on a server in the study, in a folder called Unfinished. Every computer she had owned since was named BODLEIAN. She was now on number seven.
Nobody in Lagos knew she could have been somebody. Sammy knew, and had stopped mentioning it around the time he stopped touching her.
SARAH
Tuesday evening Sarah sat on a low wooden stool, the kind popularly called apoti, right outside at the back of the house, cleaning her biker boots. She spent the evening carefully picking out the bits of mud caked between the soles, until the boots looked as good as new. Until that
Sunday she had not worn them since her student days at Oxford.
They reminded her of the girl who had walked like a toddler in winter and like a queen in spring, and who had believed, for a few years, that the world was a language that could be learned.
On the kitchen table behind her, her laptop was still open to a list of three names. Each of them had been struck through. Under the list there was a fourth line with no name at all, only a place and a day. A beach house in Lekki, Thursday and Friday, booked under a name she had never heard her husband use. Ernest.
The shrill sound of her phone brought her back through time into the present. It was her driver.
“Madam. I am ready.”
Sarah knew it was time to go.
SARAH
Tuesday evening, later The Lekki-Ikoyi link bridge crawled that evening like the funeral of a very important person. Tunji, her driver, drove with the steady, uncomplaining face of a man who had long ago accepted that Lagos owned his time.
Sarah sat in the back in her biker jacket, with her boots on the seat beside her, wiped and drying. She had not planned to wear them again so soon. But she had come this far on a plan, and she was not a woman who changed shoes in the middle of a plan.
The house stood at the end of a sandy lane, behind a green gate with a bell that played the first bars of an old highlife tune. A caretaker in a faded football jersey looked at her through the gap.
“Good evening, madam.”
“Good evening. Baba Sule? I am from the agency. I only want to confirm the arrangements for Thursday.”
He studied her boots, her jacket, and Tunji idling at the junction with the Mercedes. “Nobody told me the agency was coming.”
She folded a crisp envelope into his palm. His suspicion left him the way water leaves a sponge.
He allowed her as far as the gate of the terrace. Beyond a low wall the Atlantic was doing what it always did, which was to ignore everybody. Under a string of unlit lanterns a table had been laid for two. White cloth, two glasses, a candle in a jar.
For two. She had expected that. It was a mistress’s table. A man who has decided to sin in comfort always remembers the tablecloth.
“Everything is ready,” Baba Sule said proudly. “Oga came on
Monday to inspect it himself. He said nobody should know. Not even madam.”
“Madam?” Sarah kept her voice flat. “Which madam?”
“The one he is doing it for.” He heard himself and stopped. “I have said too much, madam. Please.”
She thanked him. She walked back to the car with a smile that she held in place by its corners, like a tablecloth in the wind.
Madam. Not the girl. Not the lady. Not that one. A man does not teach a caretaker to say madam for a girlfriend unless the girlfriend has been promoted. So one of them had been promoted. Karo, Tobechukwu, Dara, or somebody she had not found yet. Three names on her list, struck through, and a fourth woman sitting at a table for two.
“Tunji, drive.”
“Where to, madam?”
“Anywhere with a long road.”
He took the Epe expressway, past the new estates and the old billboards. Somewhere after the toll gate her phone buzzed with a message from a number she did not know.
Thursday. Lekki. 9pm. He will not be alone. Come early and bring your boots.
She read it eleven times.
She had told nobody about the boots. She had told nobody about Lekki. She opened every account she owned, one after another, and found nothing out of place, no strange sign-in, no stranger’s fingerprint on her own machines. She had designed the whole week, down to the minute, and for seven days she had been the only person in the story who knew what was going on.
Now there was a second person, and she did not know the name.
For the first time since the night she lifted her husband’s phone from the bedside table, Sarah had the feeling that somebody else was holding the other end of the rope.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 19
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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