Chapter summary
Tobe and Dara confess their compromises while driving toward Sammy’s ominously silent beach house together.
TOBECHUKWU
Thursday evening Dara’s car was a silver Toyota with a dented bumper and a rosary hanging from the mirror. When Tobe climbed in at the Yaba junction at half past seven, it smelled of vanilla air freshener and nerves.
Dara wore a black dress and flat shoes and no jewellery, as if she were going to a funeral where she did not expect to be sad. She had a small can in the cup holder.
“Is that pepper spray?” said Tobe.
“Don’t ask.”
“Is it legal?”
“I said don’t ask.”
They crawled onto the Third Mainland Bridge in a river of red tail-lights. It was a warm night with a gold smear of sunset behind the lagoon. For a while neither of them said a word. Then Dara said, “He told me on Monday that I didn’t need him. That I could do anything I wanted.”
Tobe turned her head.
“He said, ‘You don’t need me for it.’ I thought he was just being sweet.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “At the door he said, ‘Take care of yourself.’ He kissed me on the forehead. In two years he never kissed me on the forehead.”
“On Saturday,” said Tobe slowly, “he told me I would do fine. We were eating at my place, and he said, out of nowhere, ‘Tobe darling, whatever happens, you’re going to be fine.’ I put it down to wine.”
They looked at each other in the dashboard glow.
“He was ending us,” Dara said.
“In order.”
“A man who cheats on his wife with three women and then breaks up with them one by one in a polite sequence, with forehead kisses.” Dara gave a high bark of a laugh. “He is the most organised coward in Lagos.”
“Maybe he was going to tell her,” said Tobe, and was surprised to hear herself say it. “Tonight. Maybe that is what the house is for.”
“Don’t make excuses for him.”
“I’m not.” She looked out at the lights on the water. “I’m only counting. It doesn’t add up to a man who wanted to hurt anyone. It adds up to a man who wanted to stop and didn’t know how.”
“That is the same thing as hurting people,” said Dara, “only slower.”
Tobe did not argue. It was true.
“Can I tell you something awful?” she said after a while. “I used his leads. Six months of them. Deal sizes, dates, who was about to sign. I sold on every one. I told myself it was networking.”
Dara said nothing for a bit. A matatu honked beside them and moved on. “He paid my rent,” she said. “Two years. I told myself it was a gift.”
“Isn’t it terrible how many names you can give a thing?”
“Gift. Networking.” Dara gave her high bark of a laugh. “Arrangement. Friendship. Support. Love.”
“We are very creative women.”
“We are very tired women,” said Dara, “who have spent a long time putting nice lamps in corners.”
They drove a few hundred metres in silence.
At the toll gate Dara’s phone buzzed in its cradle. She glanced at it, and her face closed like a door. “Felix.”
“What does he say?”
“It’s an email. I’m not reading it.”
“It might matter.”
“It might be an apology,” said Dara, “and I am not ready for an apology. I have not finished being angry. I’ll read it afterwards.” She turned the phone face down on the dashboard. Tobe, who had spent a week learning what happens when people do not read what is in front of them, said nothing, and later thought about that silence a great deal.
Past the Lekki toll the traffic loosened and the road narrowed and the buildings fell away into palm trees and dark plots and the smell of the sea. At twenty to nine Dara slowed at a turning that was little more than a sandy track between two walls.
“Last chance to be sensible,” she said.
“I have never been sensible,” said Tobe. “I only look it.”
The Toyota nosed into the lane. Ahead of them, a green gate caught the light of a single lantern, and beyond it, over the wall, came the long slow breathing of the sea.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 33
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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