Loose Ends — Chapter 3: The Glove-Compartment Rota

Chapter summary

Sammy juggles family lunch, secret lovers, childhood guilt, and a promised Thursday reckoning in Lekki.

SAMMY

Sunday

Sunday lunch at the house in GRA was a loud affair, and Sammy loved it for exactly that reason. Noise meant nobody was asking him questions.

Sarah had made jollof rice, fried plantain and her mother’s peppered goat meat. The boys were arguing over a drumstick neither of them intended to finish. Sammy sat at the head of the table saying “mm” and “is that so” at the right intervals, like a man reading a script he had memorised.

“Tell us about Dubai, Daddy,” said Bayo, who liked facts. “Is it true that they have a snow room inside a shopping mall?”

“I believe so.”

“Will you go in it?”

“If I have time.” “Which hotel?” said Sarah, passing the plantain. She said it the way she asked about the weather.

“The Address,” said Sammy. It was the first name that came into his head. It was a lie, but it was a lie of very good quality.

“Lovely,” said Sarah. “Do send photographs.”

She smiled at him. He ate a piece of plantain and could not taste it.

He had gone out to the car twice already, once for his sunglasses and once for his charger. He did not own sunglasses that needed fetching, and the charger was in his pocket.

The other phone lived in the glove compartment, under a packet of tissue and an old parking receipt. It was a cheap Samsung with a number only three people knew. When he pressed the power button, standing in the driveway with the sun hammering the back of his neck, the screen lit up like a slot machine.

Fourteen missed calls. Eleven from Karo, two from Tobe, one from Dara. Dara’s message said, Happy Sunday, baby. Dreaming of Monday. Karo’s said, Please pick up. Something happened.

He read them the way a man reads his own medical result, slowly, with his mouth slightly open.

Sammy had grown up in a house in Mushin where the question at dinner was never what was for dinner. It was whose turn it was.

His father had four wives and eleven children under one corrugated roof. A rota hung on the pantry door, written in biro, with names against days. His mother was the third wife. She cooked on the days that were hers and ate in the corner on the days that were not. She lived her whole life like a woman apologising for the space she took up.

When Sammy was nine, the first wife poured a pot of boiling water in the corridor outside his mother’s room. She did not pour it on his mother. She poured it close enough for the steam to say what the words did not. Sammy watched his mother lift her feet and say nothing at all. That night he made a vow, the way only a child can, with his whole chest. He would never make a woman live like that.

He had kept the vow for most of his life and broken it for six years. He was forty-eight, and on Thursday he would be forty-nine, and he was running three rotas from a Samsung in a glove compartment.

He held the button down until the screen went black.

By Thursday, he told himself, all of it would be over. The apartment rent. The leads he had fed Tobe. The rose he had paid to have inked on a girl’s collarbone because he could not think of anything else to give her. He would sit Sarah down at Lekki, with the cake and the flowers and the whole sorry truth, and whatever she decided afterwards, he would carry it.

He had booked the house under the name he used for the others, because he had run out of names that were clean.

“Sammy! The goat meat is getting cold!”

“Coming, fat baby girl.”

He walked back into the noise. Sarah looked up from her plate and held his eyes a second too long. He wondered, for no reason he could name, whether she could smell the phone on him.

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