Loose Ends — Chapter 27: White Dress, Red Drink

Chapter summary

Karo prepares drugged zobo, recalls inherited cruelty, ignores her mother’s warning, and travels toward Lekki.

KARO

Thursday, dawn

Thursday began at five, with rain on a zinc roof two houses away. Karo lay with her eyes open and her hands folded on her stomach, like a woman on the morning of an examination she had prepared for.

She was not afraid. She noticed it again, as a fact.

Afraid of what? A woman with a calabash? She almost laughed.

On the chair beside the bed hung the white dress. It was plain and a little too young, with a round collar like the girls in a Sunday school photograph. She had bought it on Wednesday evening from a stall by the university gate. The seller had said, “Madam, it is very innocent,” and Karo had said, “That is why I want it.”

In the pocket of her handbag lay a small strip of white tablets she had taken months ago from the drawer at the pharmacy where she worked on Saturdays. They were not the kind of thing you buy at a kiosk. She had read the leaflet three times. She did not want a dead man. A dead man cannot marry anybody. She wanted a heavy, slow man, asleep in a cane chair with his mouth open, long enough for a story to be told over his body. She had been very careful about how little would do.

On the table a bottle of zobo sat sweating, red as a stop sign. She had made it herself. A birthday needs a drink, and zobo is the colour of anything you want to hide.

The pregnancy made it impossible not to think of Tunde.

Tunde was the pastor’s only son. He was newly married to a nurse called Kemi, with the wedding ring still bright on his finger, when Karo joined the choir at twenty.

She had not planned it. She told herself that for two years. But standing in the choir loft she had discovered something. She could tell exactly how a man looked at a woman when his wife was in the room. And she could make him look at her instead.

It took six months. The nurse found the messages. The ring went into a drawer. On the Sunday after, the pastor’s wife sat in the front row and wept, quietly, from the first hymn to the last, while the congregation turned its heads by inches.

Karo had stood up in the middle of the offering and walked out of the building. From the pulpit the pastor said only, “Let us pray for a certain sister.” Nobody had said her name aloud since.

Tunde still called. On Saturday nights, when Kemi was at her mother’s in Ibadan, he called with the old catch in his voice. Three weeks ago she had picked up. She had not meant that either. She told herself that too, and she was getting tired of the sentence.

People thought she was cruel. She did not think she was cruel. She thought she was early. At six years old she had learned that there are two kinds of houses. The first house belongs to the wife, and the wife’s people carry sticks. The second house belongs to the wind. Her mother had spent fifteen years believing that the wind would be kind.

She remembered the lorry first. It was a green Bedford with a broken headlamp, and it came into the compound at nine in the morning with eleven men in the back, singing. She was sitting on the step of the kitchen hut eating a boiled yam, and she remembered that the yam was hot, because she had been blowing on it.

The wife was a tall woman in black lace with a gold wristwatch. She did not shout. That was what Karo remembered most clearly, then and ever since. She stood in the middle of the compound and told her people what to do in a calm, clear voice, like a woman reading out a recipe she had cooked a hundred times, and they did it. They emptied the house. They carried out the bed, the radio, the cooking pots, the stool on which her mother sat to plait Karo’s hair. A man with a cutlass cut the line on which her mother’s wrappers hung.

Then they took her mother by the wrapper, and her mother, who was beautiful and had never been anything but a second house, went down on her knees in the red dust and began to beg.

Karo had watched from the step, six years old, a piece of yam in her hand, and she understood everything at once, the way children understand what adults hope they will not. Begging does not work. People with sticks do not stop because you are sorry. And the one person in that compound who was not being pitied, or hit, or crying, was the wife, who stood quite still with her hands folded, doing sums.

That was what she took from Isara. Not fear, not grief. A method.

At six her phone rang. Mummy.

“Karo, are you eating?”

“Yes, Mummy.”

“Mama Bolu called me.”

The line went quiet. Rain drummed on the roof.

“She says you have not been sleeping. She says you smiled at her in a way she remembers.”

“Mummy, I’m tired. It’s school.”

“Karo.” Her mother’s voice carried thirty years of gari and sorrow. “I have seen that face in my own mirror. I did not like it then.”

“Mummy.”

“Whatever you are about to do, ask yourself who will pay for it.”

“Nobody, Mummy,” Karo said. “Nobody will pay.”

She said she loved her, and she meant it as much as she meant anything, and hung up with the half-smile on.

At four that afternoon Felix’s old Corolla was waiting at the corner with the engine running and his face turned away. She got in with the dress in a bag and the zobo in her lap like a sleeping child, and said, “Lekki.”

“Karo, please.”

“Drive, cousin.”

He drove.

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