Chapter summary
Karo reveals a pregnancy lie, surveillance scheme, and plan to frame Sarah while securing Sammy.
KARO
Wednesday night Karo had stopped being afraid at 8:14 on Tuesday morning.
She remembered the time because she had looked at her phone when Mama Bolu said the word perfume. A big woman, Mama Bolu said, on an okada, with the helmet on the whole time. Smelling of flowers like a church wedding.
She had gone very still. She could feel it happen, the way you feel a lift begin to move. Because Karo knew that smell. It had been on Sammy’s collar every Friday for two years. Soft, powdery, sweet, with a little cream underneath. Hotel soap, he said. She had asked once whether the soap changed from hotel to hotel. He said yes.
She had walked from the stall to the bus stop with her loaves under her arm and the picture open on her phone, the one she had not wanted to look at on Sunday. She pinched the screen until the blur at the back of the queue stood up. A helmet. A biker jacket with a patch on the shoulder. A pair of boots. A hand reaching for plantain, with a pale gold ring.
It took her eleven minutes at the bus stop to find the wife. The name was easy. Sammy had said it once at the house in Lekki, lying on his back, in the tone of a man speaking of a hotel receptionist. Sarah couldn’t boil an egg. The rest was a search. A business called Sarah’s House, scents and candles for the home, with a page full of flowers. Under the description of one perfume, in the same soft language, someone had written, freshly cut flowers, powder, cream. And lower down, in a post from two years back, a photograph captioned Throwback, Oxford biker girl, of a young woman in the same jacket.
Karo looked at it. Then she laughed. It was her first real laugh in three days, and it made a man at the bus stop edge away from her.
The wife! The woman had stood three feet from her in a queue, buying plantain!
So the wife had known. The wife had done it with her own two hands, a woman who sold candles and had learned to be rotten. Karo did not hate her for it. She admired her. It takes a particular kind of person to put a used pad inside a calabash and sign it with a pet name.
But admiration is not a plan, and Karo had never in her life gone anywhere without one.
She had begun to build hers eight months earlier. One night at the Lekki house Sammy slept like a felled tree, and she lay awake in the dark and picked up his second phone. The rent receipts were for a flat in Yaba. A girl named Dara. A woman named Tobe. Some of the Fridays she thought belonged to her had been shared out, and none of the three knew about the others.
She did not cry. She copied the details into her own phone, in the bathroom, with the tap running.
Her cousin Felix wrote programs for a living and owed her mother money. He needed a cheaper flat. By the end of that month he had one, next door to Dara, with a shared fire escape and a window facing hers. She told him it was a favour. She told him the man who paid Dara’s rent was a fraudster cheating somebody close to the family. He believed it, because Felix believed anything said in a soft voice.
She had not known what she wanted from any of it. She knew only the first rule of her mother’s life, which she had learned at six years old on a sack of beans. Information is the one house a woman can own.
Then, on Monday morning, the two lines.
She had cried, and the crying had been real, for about four minutes. The father was not Sammy. The father was Tunde, the pastor’s son, three weeks earlier, in a parked car outside Ikorodu, for old times’ sake. She sat on the bathroom floor with her face wet and counted days on her fingers and found that the dates did not matter. A baby has no birthday until it arrives. By the time anybody asked questions, she would have a ring.
Sarah had started the war. Karo meant to finish it.
The plan arrived whole, the way the good ones do, at about half past eight on Tuesday morning, at the bus stop, with the loaves going cold under her arm. A man cannot marry a woman who has poisoned him. A man cannot go home to a wife the police have taken. But a man is perfectly able to marry the girl who sat beside his hospital bed holding his hand and carrying his child.
Everything after that was housekeeping. On Tuesday afternoon Felix, who did not like it, typed a red email to Dara, because a frightened woman is easier to point. On Tuesday night a message went to Sarah from a number bought for the purpose, to make sure she came, and another on Wednesday afternoon, to make sure she stayed. On Wednesday evening two more, each woman given the other’s number, so that on Thursday there would be witnesses. Three furious women and one gentle girl in a white dress. And at four minutes past four on Wednesday afternoon she had sent Sammy the one she had polished since Monday night. I am pregnant. It is yours.
Mama Bolu worried her for a moment. The old woman had looked at her on Tuesday as if she were reading a letter that Karo had written to herself. But Mama Bolu was a market woman who would not harm a fly, and in sixteen years she had never told anyone anything. Karo let the worry go.
She stood in front of the bathroom mirror at eleven that night, with the light off and the street lamp falling across her face. Her mother had waited to be chosen. Her mother had waited fifteen years of Fridays and an envelope, and in the end there had been a lorry, a wrapper, and a wife’s people with sticks. Karo had never waited for anything in her life.
She cried on cue, twice, for practice. Real tears, easily, from the place where she kept them. Then she stopped, and wiped her face with the back of her hand, and the mirror had nothing to say.
KARO
Wednesday afternoon Tunde called at two in the afternoon, while she was buying hibiscus flowers at the market.
She almost did not answer. His name on her screen, with the little cross she had put beside it years ago for a joke, made her mouth tighten. But she stepped away from the stall, behind a stack of yams, and put the phone to her ear.
“Karo.” His voice had the old catch in it. “I have been thinking about you since Saturday.”
“Three weeks ago, Tunde.”
“I know. I know what it was. I keep thinking, if I had been braver. If I had told my father.” A breath. “Kemi found the messages again. She is going to her mother’s. Karo, I could come to Lagos on Friday. We could talk. Properly. I feel that I owe you something.”
“Don’t come on Friday.”
“Why not?”
She looked at the dark red petals in her hand, the colour of a thing you do not want to see. “Because I will be busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Being married,” said Karo.
He laughed. It was a small, startled laugh, the laugh of a man who has been told a joke he does not understand. “Karo, you are not even engaged.”
“I will be.”
A pause. Somewhere behind him a church bell rang in Port Harcourt. “Are you all right? You sound different.” “I am very well,” she said, and meant it. “Goodbye, Tunde. Don’t call me again.”
She hung up. She did not feel anything. She felt a little the way you feel when you have thrown out a pair of old shoes, and found that your feet do not miss them.
She paid for the hibiscus. “Madam, you are glowing,” said the woman at the stall. “Thank you,” said Karo, and walked to the bus stop in the heat with her bag of flowers, red as blood, swinging lightly against her hip.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 27
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Featured and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence and are illustrative; the characters and events are fictional. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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