Loose Ends — Chapter 29: The Birthday Drink

Chapter summary

Sammy ends Karo’s affair, doubts her pregnancy, drinks her drugged zobo, and collapses awaiting Sarah.

SAMMY

Thursday At eleven in the morning of his forty-ninth birthday, Sammy sat on the edge of the bed in the master bedroom at Lekki and typed a message to his wife. He typed it four times before he sent it.

Come to Lekki tonight. Come at nine. I am not in Dubai. I owe you the truth.

He turned the phone face down like an animal that might bite. It buzzed within thirty seconds. One word. Okay.

He stared at it. No question mark, no what, no why. It was the calmest okay he had ever received, and it frightened him more than a scream.

Okay? That was all? Okay what?

The day went on without him. Baba Sule sang under his breath to the lanterns. The cook banged about the kitchen with a pot lid. The cake sat in the fridge with its small white bicycle, and the yellow roses stood in a bucket of water on the terrace like patient guests. On the dressing table lay a large envelope. It held the only thing he had done in twelve years that he was proud of, and he had told no one. On the front, in block capitals, he had written FOR MY FAT BABY GIRL.

The cook, a broad woman called Mama Chidinma who had worked in that house for three years and had opinions about everything, came out onto the terrace at noon with her arms folded.

“Oga, you are doing a wedding?”

“No.”

“You are leaving somebody?”

He opened his mouth and found he did not have an answer ready. “I am not sure.”

“Then the jollof is for the wrong occasion,” said Mama Chidinma, and went back inside, and made it anyway.

At five o’clock Karo arrived.

She came up the sandy lane alone, in a white dress with a round collar, with her hair loose and her face washed clean, and she looked about sixteen. Baba Sule opened the gate because Oga had said he might. “The other lady,” he told Sammy, with a look he would not meet. “The young one.”

He sat her in the lounge, in the armchair by the window, and took the sofa across from her, because he did not trust himself to sit nearer.

“I need you to listen,” he said. “This is over, Karo. I should have said it two years ago, and I did not, and that is my fault and nobody else’s. I am sorry.”

The tears came at once. They always came at once. He watched them run down and, for the first time in two years, he found himself thinking that they arrived very promptly.

He hated himself for it and went on.

“I got your message. The last one.”

“It’s yours, Sammy.”

“Karo.” He kept his voice kind, because he had decided that it was the one thing he would do right that day. “I am going to say this once. I do not know whose it is. I want you to see a doctor, a good one, and I will pay for it, and for the child, and for you, whoever the father is.”

He saw it then. For the length of one breath the girl in the armchair was not crying. She had stopped, the way a screen stops when the cable is pulled. Her face was a face with the sound turned off. She was looking at him with a stillness he had never seen on her, and it was not the stillness of a girl who had been hurt.

Then the tears came back, a little late, and she put her hand over her mouth. “You think I’m lying.”

“I think you’re frightened. You came to a glass tower in your pyjama hoodie on Monday because you were frightened. I don’t think you are a liar.” It was the wrong thing to say, and he did not know why. Something moved behind her eyes and went back into hiding.

“Is your wife coming?” she asked.

He went still. “Why would you ask that?”

“I’m only asking. You are not in Dubai. You are in a house with flowers.” She looked through the glass doors at the yellow roses, and her voice was gentle. “Somebody is going to be here tonight, Sammy. A man does not buy roses for me.”

“Karo.”

“I’m not angry.” She smiled the half-smile. “I only wanted to know whether I should leave before she comes.” “You will be gone by seven,” he said, and heard the relief in his own voice, and hated it.

“Of course,” said Karo. “I have always been very good at leaving on time.”

“I made you a birthday drink,” she said, wiping her face. “Zobo. I made it myself. It’s in the bottle in my bag.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“Please. Take it. Let me do one nice thing.”

She went into the kitchen, and he heard the fridge open, and the cook’s voice, and a glass. She came out with a jug the colour of a red traffic light and a single glass, which she set on the terrace table next to the roses.

“Drink a little now,” she said. “It’s nice cold.”

He took one sip to be polite, and made a face at the sweetness, and set the glass down. She watched him do it. He remembered that afterwards, the care with which she watched.

He pressed an envelope into her hand. There was money in it, and a number for a clinic in Ikoyi, and the name of a driver who would be at the gate at a quarter to seven. She thanked him in a small voice. At the door she turned. She did not say goodbye. She said, “Happy birthday, Sammy,” and the half-smile came and went.

At a quarter to seven Baba Sule locked the gate behind her and said, “Oga, the girl cried all the way to the road.”

“Yes,” said Sammy. “She would.”

He changed his shirt. He lit the candle in the jar. He sat at the table on the terrace in the cane chair, which was the best chair in the house, and watched the sea go dark, and rehearsed.

At eight he poured himself a glass of the zobo because his mouth was dry and his hands were not steady. It was sweet and cold, with cloves in it. He drank it all. He felt, at last, almost calm. He poured another.

He remembered, in the last clear minute, the third floor of the Radcliffe Camera. A girl in boots two sizes too big, holding out a pen without looking up. He remembered thinking, quite distinctly, that if she looked up he would never be able to leave.

Then the cane chair took him, very gently, like a hand.

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