Loose Ends — Chapter 2: A Wife’s Rules for Ruin

Chapter summary

Sarah discovers Sammy’s affairs, builds a humiliation campaign, and frightens Karo with a staged ritual.

SARAH

Sunday, before dawn Sarah woke at four without the alarm. She had not really slept. She lay beside her husband for a while, listening to him breathe, and then she got up the way a thief gets up, one limb at a time.

In the study she woke BODLEIAN-7 from its sleep. The folder called Unfinished sat in the corner of the screen, as it always did, like a dog that had given up asking to be fed. She did not open it. She opened the other folder, the one she had made three weeks earlier, which had no name at all.

Sammy’s second phone was clever. It had its own number, its own hiding place and its own sins. It had been careless about one thing. Its contacts backed up every night into the same cloud account as his real phone, and the password to that account was the boys’ birthdays.

She had read all of it. Not in one sitting. She read it the way a person eats when she is ashamed, a little, then a lot, then a pause to be sick, then a little more.

Three women. A girl called Karo, twenty-two, who sent him photographs of her breakfast. A woman called Tobe, who sent him pie charts and thank-yous. And Dara, who sent him, at all hours, the plainest sentence of all. Are you coming?

She knew what people say. Forgive him. Think of the boys. Pray about it.

Forgive him? Sarah had thought of the boys every hour of those three weeks. She thought of them while she was reading, while she was crying in the car park of the Montessori, and while she sat across from him at dinner with a smile hung on her face like a picture on a wall. But forgive? No. Not in this life!

What she did instead was plan.

She was an IT specialist. A plan was the one thing in this world she knew how to build.

The rules, which she had written on a sheet of paper and burned in the kitchen sink on Friday night, were simple. No violence. Nothing that could kill. Nothing that anybody could trace to her door. Humiliation, not injury. She wanted each woman to feel, for one day, what it was to open her own front door and find the world rotten on the other side.

Was that too much to ask?

There was a list. Karo on Sunday, because she was the youngest and the cloud had handed over her address. Tobe on

Monday. Dara on Tuesday.

There was also a fourth line with no name against it, only a place and a day. She had found it in the same cloud, in a booking for a house in Lekki, two nights, under the name of a man who did not exist. Ernest.

She read the name twice before she remembered where she had seen it. Dara’s messages ended with it!

The calabash was the first item. Sammy had brought it back from a business trip to Oyo for her last birthday, and it had sat on the living room shelf beside the Benin bronze for eleven months, minding its own business. At twenty to five in the morning she took it down and, for once, felt something close to amusement.

Who says husbands never give useful gifts?

She had bought the yam from a woman at Mile 12 market on

Friday, the palm oil in a recycled Fanta bottle, and the feather had come out of a pillow. The last ingredient needed no shopping. She dropped it into the oil with a pair of kitchen tongs, and she did not look at it while she did so. She was not proud. She had decided only to be thorough.

On a yellow Post-it, in block letters, she wrote one word. It was Sammy’s word. Nobody else in the world knew what it meant. It was a love letter in a language that only two people spoke, and she wanted one of them to read it and flinch.

The disguise was simple. The biker jacket and the boots had lain at the bottom of a trunk since Oxford, and the helmet she had ordered online on Thursday. She had not ridden a motorcycle in fourteen years and she was not going to start on the day she meant to be nobody. She found an okada man at the Ikeja junction, paid him double, and sat behind him in her old jacket like a woman doing an impression of herself.

The girl was easy to find. At ten past eight she was at the stall of an old woman a few streets from her flat, in white shorts and a shirt that let a red rose peep from the collarbone, laughing at her phone. Thin. Glowing. Twenty-two.

She looked like somebody to whom nothing bad had ever happened. Sarah’s jaw tightened.

Sarah joined the queue and kept the helmet on. When she reached the front she asked the old woman, in her softest voice, whether the girl in the picture came every Sunday. The old woman said yes, the poor child comes every Sunday for bread and plantain.

The poor child, Sarah thought. She paid for the plantain with a thousand naira and did not wait for her change.

At the edge of the queue, with the girl four people away taking a selfie with the old woman, she took out her phone and liked the picture. The account had existed for five hours and had no name except the one.

The okada man took her through the back lanes. Karo’s door was blue. Sarah set the calabash on the step carefully and squarely, the way you set down a bowl for a guest, and taped the yellow note to its side. Then she stepped behind a pillar and watched the lane.

The girl came round the corner with her head bent, thumbing at her phone. She stopped. She looked. She said something that sounded like a prayer, dropped a bag of eggs on the tiles and ran, and she ran like a child.

Sarah had expected to feel like a queen. She felt like a woman standing in somebody else’s street holding an empty shopping bag.

She did not stay to enjoy it. It was only Sunday. Tobe would be sent to hell by an email tonight, and Monday morning would finish the job. Dara had Tuesday. And Sammy had Thursday, which she had not told anybody about, not even the paper she burned.

On the way home she took off the helmet and let the wind get at her hair. She smelled of palm oil and engine and, underneath it all, of her own house, which in twelve years she had never learned to take off.

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