Chapter summary
Sarah dresses, confronts Sammy, finds him sedated, and realises Karo’s carefully staged trap awaits her.
SARAH
Thursday evening Sarah dressed for it the way a bride dresses, in the right order.
Jeans. A white shirt. The old biker jacket, with the patch on the shoulder that she had sewn there at twenty-three. Then the boots, which she laced slowly, one eyelet at a time. They fitted as if she had never taken them off. She left the helmet on the shelf. She had said what she had to say through a helmet all week. Tonight she wanted her own face.
At six she kissed the boys. Deji looked up from his plate of rice and said, “Mummy, will Daddy bring me a sword?”
“He might,” said Sarah.
Bayo was at the foot of the stairs with his schoolbag. He looked at her boots, and her face, and her hands. He was eight and had a sensitive nose for lies.
“Mummy, are you going to fight someone?”
“No, my darling.”
“Your face says so.”
She crouched and fixed his collar, though it did not need fixing. “I am going to say something very difficult to somebody I love. It will take a long time, and I will not be home until you are asleep. Will you look after your brother?”
He considered it with great seriousness. “Can I have the big torch?”
“You may have the big torch.”
It was the nearest she came all evening to changing her mind.
Tunji drove. The Mercedes slid out of GRA onto the expressway, past the old billboards and the new estates, and for a long while neither of them spoke.
“Madam,” he said at last. “I will wait at the junction.”
“No. Go home to your wife, Tunji. I will take a taxi.”
“Madam, with respect, I will wait.”
She looked at the back of his head. “You have never once asked me what we are doing.”
“It is not my business, madam.” His eyes found hers in the mirror. “But I have eyes.”
BODLEIAN-7 sat on her lap in its bag, with the folder of four hundred pages on top and the sticker on the lid that she had put there herself, in capitals, in the happy days. She did not need the laptop. She did not need the folder. She had brought them the way a soldier carries a rifle through a village where there will be no fighting.
She had spent the afternoon trying to decide what she wanted. She did not want him dead. She did not want him back. She wanted him to look at her while she said it. She wanted twelve years of silence to arrive in one room and sit down at the table.
At 8:26 the car stopped at a green gate. She stood a moment in the lane, listening to the Atlantic, and found that her heart was calm. It surprised her. All week her heart had been a small animal she was carrying. Now it had curled up and gone to sleep.
Baba Sule opened the gate before she touched it. He was in his football jersey, and he looked frightened and relieved at once. “Madam Sarah. Oga said I must open for you only. Please, this way.”
The house smelled of lemons and of frying fish. She passed through the living room with its low lamps and its clean tiles and its wall of books that nobody had read, and out through the glass doors onto the terrace.
The lanterns were lit. The candle in the jar was burning down. The sea was a long dark noise beyond the wall, with a white line in it that was the surf. The table was laid for two. White cloth. A cake in an open box, with a small white chocolate bicycle propped against a lemon-yellow dome. A bucket of yellow roses on the floor beside the chair.
She knew the bicycle before she knew what she was looking at. She knew the dome.
He had remembered!
In the cane chair at the head of the table, Sammy sat with his head tipped back and his mouth slightly open, like a man listening to music.
“Sammy?”
She crossed the terrace in six steps and put two fingers under his jaw. Warm. A pulse, slow and steady, like a clock in another room. She patted his face. His eyelids fluttered.
“Sarah,” he said, softly, and smiled with his eyes shut. “You came.” And went under again.
She stood with her hand on his cheek. On the table, half under the cake box, lay a large envelope. Block capitals, his writing, the nib pressed hard.
FOR MY FAT BABY GIRL.
It was her word. It was her word, in his hand, on an envelope that he had addressed to her, and for a second the terrace floor was a very long way off.
She picked it up. She did not mean to. She slipped it inside her jacket, against her ribs, like a letter she would read in private. Then she reached for the glass beside his hand, because something was wrong with his breathing and she wanted to know what he had been drinking.
It was a red drink, sweet and cold, with cloves. Hibiscus. And under the cloves, a thin smell, chemical and clean, that did not belong.
She was still holding the glass up to the lantern when somebody screamed.
“What have you done to him?”
A girl in a white dress had come up the beach steps and was standing at the edge of the terrace, with her hair loose and her face wet and her hand pressed to her mouth. She looked about sixteen.
And Sarah, with the glass in her hand and the envelope under her jacket and her boots on her feet, understood for the first time that she had been invited to a very different party.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 32
The story continues in the next chapter.
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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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