Chapter summary
Dara investigates malicious delivery while Felix’s coercion and surveillance betrayal tighten around their fractured relationship.
DARA
Wednesday Dara slammed her kitchen door so hard that the cutlery jumped in the drawer. For a full minute she stood there with her palm stinging and her heart doing the Azonto.
She did not feel better. She had expected to. In her head, slapping Felix had been a clean and complete act, like flushing a toilet. Instead she felt like a woman who had hit a vending machine and watched it start to cry.
At eleven her work phone rang, and because Dara was a professional, she answered it.
“Customer success, Dara speaking. How can I help you today?”
“My airtime has vanished,” said a man’s voice, vibrating with grievance. “Five thousand naira. Gone. I held on to your company for forty minutes yesterday. Do you people know what you are doing?”
“I am so sorry for the inconvenience, sir. Let me pull up your account.”
She pulled it up. Six years inside other people’s problems, she could have done this asleep. She heard her own voice go through every line, the apology, the verification, the small warm laugh in the right place, while the faint ghost of Tuesday’s pizza refused to leave her nostrils. It took two minutes. The airtime had gone to a wrong number in Kano. She had it reversed before he finished complaining.
“Madam,” said the man, in a different voice. “You are an angel.”
“No, sir,” said Dara. “I am customer success.”
She put the phone down. She sat for a moment with her hands on the desk. Then she began to laugh, and in the middle of the laughing something went wrong in her throat, and she put her head on the keyboard and stayed there until it passed.
Dara was not a stupid woman. By noon she had finished sulking and begun to think, which in her case was the more dangerous activity.
Felix had been at home on Tuesday afternoon. She knew because she had heard his kettle through the wall. A man who has just paid somebody to deliver faeces to your door does not, as a rule, stay in to make tea.
So she put on her slippers and went down to the estate gate.
“Mallam Garba. Tuesday afternoon. The delivery lady with the helmet. I want to see the camera.”
“Camera no dey work, madam. Two weeks now. The landlord say he go fix am.”
“So nothing was recorded.”
“Nothing.” He tapped his temple. “But I see the woman. That one get manners. She greet me properly. She even call me sir.”
“Which company bike?”
“No be company bike, madam. She come with okada, one small one, and the rider no wait. She go round the corner, and one white Mercedes wey dey park for the junction pick her.”
“A Mercedes.”
“E-class. Tinted glass. The driver dey read newspaper. Madam, I think say na somebody big.”
She thanked him and walked back slowly. A delivery lady who arrives on an okada and leaves in an E-class with a driver reading a newspaper. A woman with a driver. A woman who could afford a joke that cost her a pizza and an afternoon.
Dara had never seen Ernest’s wife. She had been careful never to look. A woman who has decided not to look at a thing becomes surprisingly good at imagining it.
At the top of the fire escape she stopped. Felix’s kitchen door stood a hand’s width open, and his voice came through the gap, low and tired and not talking to her.
“No. I said I will not do it again. She is not what you said she is.”
She stood with her hand raised to knock. She heard nothing else. After a while she lowered the hand.
Her pride, which had never once failed her, told her to go inside.
FELIX
Wednesday Felix sat on the floor of his kitchen with his back against the cupboard and held a bag of frozen peas to his cheek. Dara had given him the peas in the second week they knew each other, with a note stuck on the bag that said Emergency. He had never been able to throw the note away.
Two slaps. He deserved the second one. Not for the pizza, which he had never touched, but for the email.
On Tuesday afternoon, at twenty to three, from an account that did not belong to him, he had typed five words at somebody else’s dictation. This is just the beginning. She had told him to make them red. She had told him the name to put on the sender line, and he had not known what it meant, and had not asked.
His phone lit up on the floor beside him. The screen said Aburo.
He let it ring four times before he answered. The voice at the other end was soft and patient, the voice of a girl asking you to pass the salt.
“Did she hit you hard?”
“How do you know she hit me?”
“Her kind always does. Listen, Felix. Tomorrow, one small thing.”
“I am not doing it. I told you after the email. I am finished.”
“Finished.” The voice laughed gently. “Who put the program inside her computer?”
“You asked me to. You said the man who pays her rent was a fraudster. You said you only wanted to see what he sent her.”
“And I saw. Thank you.” “She is not what you said she is, Aburo. She is not the one who…”
“Who is who, Felix? You don’t know who is who. You are a nice man, and nice men are very useful.” There was a pause so smooth that he could almost hear it being polished. “And if the police ever wanted to ask who installed software on a woman’s computer without her permission, I kept the messages. Every one.”
Felix said nothing. His mouth had gone dry.
“One small thing,” the voice said again, kindly, and hung up. He looked at the peas. He looked at the wall he shared with the woman he had loved since the second week.
In the beginning it had been so simple! A favour for a relative. A few weeks next door. A program that watched and said nothing. Then she asked him to carry a wardrobe up the stairs, and the wardrobe became a laugh, and the laugh became a kiss that lasted three minutes, and now he lay awake in the dark with a secret that was growing teeth.
She thought he had sent the pizza. She was wrong about the pizza and right about everything else.
He would do the one small thing. And then he would tell Dara all of it, every word, even if she broke the other cheek.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 22
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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