Loose Ends — Chapter 38: Somewhere With a Long Road

Chapter summary

Karo escapes along the beach, discards evidence, and immediately begins planning beyond her spectacular failure.

KARO

Thursday night There is a moment in every plan when it stops being yours. Karo had known that, the way she knew things, from the outside. She had not known how it felt from inside.

It felt like standing on a beach at low tide when the water goes out too far and too fast, and you realise that it is going to come back.

She backed a step. Another. The hem of the white dress dragged against the terrace tiles. Nobody was looking at her now, and she saw that this was the worst of it. They were looking at Sammy, at his wife, at one another. Dara was reading from her phone. Tobe was talking to Baba Sule about the police. She had stopped being the centre of the room. She had become a thing that was in it.

She reached the top of the beach steps. At the bottom of them stood the figure of her cousin.

Felix had gone ahead of her, down through the dark. He was standing on the sand with his hands in his pockets and the surf behind him, and he did not look like a man blocking a path. He looked like one who had come to see her off.

“Cousin,” she said.

“Karo.”

“Let me pass.”

“I can’t stop you.” His voice was very tired. “I never could. That was the whole trouble.”

“Felix, please.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. Go.”

He stepped aside. It was the first time in his life that he had ever said no to her, and he said it with his body, not his mouth. It was the only way he knew how.

She went past him onto the sand. Behind her, on the terrace, someone shouted her name, and someone else, a woman, said in a loud voice, “Let her go. She isn’t worth the paperwork.” It sounded like Sarah.

She did not run. She walked, as she had always walked when she wanted to look like a girl with nowhere particular to be, along the edge of the water where the sand was hard. The Atlantic came in and went out in long grey rolls. The lights of the house shrank behind her.

She took the second phone out of her bag, the one that had rung. She held it in her palm for a moment, with its small useless glow, and then she threw it as far as she could into the dark. It went in without a sound.

She did not cry. She noticed that. For three days she had cried on cue, in front of deacons and caretakers and a man she had meant to marry. Now the night was empty and nobody was watching, and the place where the tears were kept had gone quiet.

She thought of the sack of beans in Mama Bolu’s kitchen, and the six-year-old on it with her feet not touching the floor, watching the door. She remembered what she had been thinking at the time. She had not been thinking of her mother. She had been counting the people who came in.

Her mother had waited fifteen years to be chosen. Karo had given it three days, and had still been too slow. A second house is only a first house with patience, and she had run out of patience at the one hour when it mattered.

She put her hand on her stomach. Not tenderly. As a woman checks that a bag is still on her shoulder.

She thought of her mother in Isara, in the dim kitchen with the radio on, who was at this moment probably praying. She had never once in her life told her mother the end of a story, and she did not intend to start tonight. A girl can run from a great many things. She had not yet found a way to run from a face she had seen in her own mirror.

There was a baby, then, and a father in a parked car outside Ikorodu, and a plan that would have to be made again from the beginning, by somebody a little older and a good deal more careful. She found that she was not sad. She was already thinking! And it frightened her a little, how fast.

After twenty minutes the sand turned to a path and the path to a road. The lamps of the expressway burned in a long orange row. She stood under the first of them, a thin girl in a stained white dress with her sandals in her hand, and an okada slowed beside her with its engine knocking.

“Madam, where to?”

She looked up the long road, where it vanished between the lights.

“Anywhere,” she said. “Somewhere with a long road.”

She got on behind him and did not look back.

Loose Ends · Continue reading

Continue to Chapter 39

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