Loose Ends — Chapter 35: The Driver Who Waited

Chapter summary

Tunji quietly witnesses Sarah’s crisis, honours his promise, and drives her toward the uncertain hospital.

TUNJI

Thursday night Tunji had parked the Mercedes at the mouth of the lane, under a coconut palm, with the engine off and the windows an inch open for the sea. He was a graduate of Economics who had been driving the same woman for four years while he waited for the economy to need him. He had read the newspaper twice and was reading the football pages a third time when the silver Toyota went past him with its dented bumper.

Two women in it. One tall, one in a black dress. They did not look at him. They looked, like soldiers, straight ahead.

He folded the newspaper.

He had said nothing for a week. That was the job. A driver sees where he is told to go and not what he sees there, and in four years Tunji had learned to drive with his listening turned down low, like a radio in another room. But he had eyes. He had watched Madam go out on Sunday morning in boots he had never seen and come in at ten smelling of palm oil. He had waited at a junction on Tuesday with his heart in his teeth. He had turned the air conditioner off when she was shaking.

He had a wife called Bimpe, who was seven months pregnant, and he thought of her now, in their one-room flat in Agege with the fan on, asleep on her side.

At about twenty to nine a scream came over the wall. Thin and high, a young woman’s voice. Tunji sat bolt upright. Chai! He opened the door and put one foot on the sand, and stopped.

It was not his business. He told himself so, firmly. But he stood there with one foot out of the car for a long minute, his hand on the door, listening to the sea and the voices, and he did not get back in.

When the ambulance came up the lane with its blue light turning on the walls, he walked after it. He stood at the gate behind the caretaker in his football jersey and saw her on the terrace. She was standing by herself in the lantern light, with her back to the sea, with a stain on her shoulder. She looked very small. He had never seen her look small.

She saw him. For a second their eyes met across the crowded terrace, and she lifted two fingers from her side in a gesture that he understood perfectly, stay there, I am all right. He stayed.

At one in the morning, when it was over, he opened the door of the Mercedes for her and said, “Madam, where to?”

“The hospital, Tunji.”

He drove. In the mirror he saw her lean her head against the glass and close her eyes. He thought of what he had said on the bridge, with respect, madam, I will wait. It was perhaps the only brave sentence he had ever spoken, and she had known it.

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