Chapter summary
Sammy awakens, clears Sarah, reveals his vasectomy, and destroys Karo’s claim of carrying his child.
SAMMY
Thursday night He came up through the dark the way a man swims toward a light that he is not sure is the sun.
There were voices. A great many voices, all of them women, and all of them quiet, in the way people are quiet in a hospital corridor. A smell of cloves. A cold line of sea air against his face. He opened his eyes onto a ring of faces, lit from below by lanterns, like a bad dream with good lighting.
Sarah. In her boots. With a red mark on her cheek.
Tobe, who had her hand over her mouth. Dara, who was holding a strip of something white, as if it might sting. A man in the doorway he did not know. Baba Sule. And Karo, in her white dress, standing a step apart with the lamp full on her face.
He tried to speak and found that his tongue was a stranger. “Karo?”
“Sammy.” She was at his side in a second. She knelt and took his hand. “Thank God. Oh, thank God. Don’t try to talk. She poisoned you. She put something in your drink.”
“Don’t,” said Sarah. “Don’t say it again.”
He looked at the glass. He looked at the jug, red as a traffic light. He looked at the strip in Dara’s hand, and the pieces slid together with a small dull click, like the last tablet dropping into a rack.
“Karo,” he said. “You made the zobo.”
“Sammy, please.”
“You made it. You poured the first glass yourself.” His voice was slow but it was clear. “And you left at a quarter to seven, and I locked myself into this chair and drank it, and I felt nothing, and then I felt very tired. That is the whole story.”
“She’s lying!” The tears came again, right on time. “She’s a monster! She’s your wife and she’s a monster, and I’m carrying your child!”
He turned his head and looked at his wife. She looked back. It was a long look, a look with fourteen years in it, and nothing in it was a plea.
He had a speech. He had rehearsed it for three weeks in a mirror, in two voices. He found that he could not remember a word.
“Karo,” he said gently. “Listen to me, because I want you to hear it properly. You told me the child is mine.”
“It is yours!”
“It cannot be.” He drew a breath. “Six years ago, in London, the week after Sarah came out of intensive care, I walked into a clinic on Harley Street and had a vasectomy. I told nobody. Not my wife, not my doctor, not my own mother. I could not watch her go through that again. I could not say it aloud without admitting how frightened I was. So I did it in silence and I came home and I said nothing.”
There was a sound from the doorway. Sarah. It was not quite a word.
“I wasn’t a good husband,” said Sammy. “I am not asking anybody to say I was. But I have not been able to father a child since the night our second son was born. That is the secret I have been carrying for six years. I am sorry that it had to come out in front of all of you.”
He looked at Karo.
He had imagined this a hundred ways. He had pictured a scream, or a collapse, or the little half-smile turning to bitterness. What he had not pictured was that her face would simply stop. It was like watching a plate slide off a table in slow motion, with nothing at all that you could do.
“You never told me,” said Karo.
Her voice was very small and it had no music in it.
“Two years,” she said. “Two years of Fridays and you never told me. I counted the dates. I counted them on my fingers. I did all of this, all of it, for…” She stopped. Her mouth was open. Something dreadful and exact passed behind her eyes, and he saw her understand what she had said.
“For somebody else’s child,” said Tobe softly, reading it off her face. “That is what you were going to say.”
Karo said nothing.
Sammy let his head go back against the cane chair. The last of the drug pulled at him like a tide. His heart went on slowly and steadily under his shirt. It had been told the worst, and it had not died.
“Sarah,” he said. “There is an envelope. I wanted to give it to you tonight. I should have given it to you twelve years ago.”
She put her hand against her jacket, over her ribs, where something flat and stiff was pressed against her. She did not answer. She was crying, he saw, with no sound at all, exactly as she had cried in the Camera when they were twenty-four, over a problem she could not solve.
“Not here,” she said. “Not in front of them.”
“No.”
“But I heard you.”
It was all he got. It was, he thought, a very great deal.
SARAH
Thursday night Six years.
She stood at the edge of the terrace with her hand pressed flat against her ribs, where the envelope lay, and she did the sum. The second boy born in a bad October, the three days she could not remember, the doctors saying very sick in a certain tone. Six years, a Harley Street clinic, a man walking in with his collar up and walking out again and saying nothing.
Everything she had read in the cloud for three weeks rearranged itself. His not touching her. The nights he turned his face to the wall. The way he would stand in the boys’ room for a long time, looking at them breathe. She had thought it was indifference. She had put it down to age, or to the other women, or to something she had done. And all this time she had been trying to lose weight for a man who had stopped touching her because he was afraid!
It did not excuse a single thing. She knew that. A man who is afraid of losing his wife can still choose not to take three more women to bed. But a hard knot that she had carried inside her for years came loose in her chest, quietly, like a stitch coming out of a seam, and she found that she was weeping again.
He had done it for me, she thought. And he had never told me. And I have burned a woman’s car tyres and put a calabash at a girl’s door.
Both were true. She stood in the lantern light with the sea in her ears and strangers all around her, and held the two of them together until they stopped hurting.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 38
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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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