Chapter summary
Dara and Sarah share anger, accountability, uneasy respect, and practical terms beside the waiting police.
DARA
Thursday, later The police came at one. The ambulance had taken Sammy away at ten past eleven, and for a long while the lane was full of torchlight, half-heard Yoruba and the crackle of a radio. Dara sat on the bonnet of her Toyota with a sachet of pure water, sipping, and stared at the gate.
Somebody stopped beside her. She did not need to look. The smell came first, soft and powdery, like a church wedding.
“May I?” said Sarah.
“It’s a free country.”
Sarah sat on the bumper, not close. She had taken off the jacket. Her shirt had a dark stain at the shoulder where the sea air had got to it, and her hair had come loose from its plait. She looked, Dara thought, like a very tired woman who had done a great deal of lifting.
“Why the pizza?” said Dara.
Sarah took a moment. “Because you wrote to him at three in the morning, and what you wrote was Are you coming? I read it forty times. It was the only honest sentence in the entire folder. I wanted you to smell what I had been smelling for three weeks.”
“Did it help?”
“No.”
“Did you think it would?”
“I thought I would feel like a queen.” She almost smiled. “I felt like a woman holding an empty shopping bag.”
Dara drank some more water. The sea was very loud. “I’m still angry,” she said.
“You should be.”
“I slapped you.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sorry.”
“Good,” said Sarah. “I would think less of you.”
A silence stretched between them, not a comfortable one but a workable one, like a bridge made of planks. Dara reached into the sachet of water, found it empty, and tossed it into the dark.
“Your boots,” she said. “When I opened the gate on Tuesday and saw them, I thought, impressive. I thought, only in Lagos.”
“Thank you,” said Sarah. “I did not think anybody would notice.”
“I noticed.” Dara looked at the stain on her shoulder. “I’ll take the money, if you’re offering. For the pizza, for the cleaning, for my neighbour’s therapy and mine. I won’t take the therapist. I’ve got my mother for that.”
“Done.” “And I’ll come to the police station tomorrow,” said Dara. “And I’ll tell them what I know. All of it. Including what you did.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
“Don’t be so reasonable. It makes me want to slap you again.”
Sarah laughed. It was a low, startled sound, the first Dara had heard from her, and it did something odd to the air in the lane.
They sat there a while longer on the bumper of a dented Toyota while the policemen shouted at one another over the wall and the moon came up over the sea, big and yellow and not the least bit interested in any of them.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 40
The story continues in the next chapter.
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The featured photograph is used under the Pexels licence. The four contextual scene images are AI-generated editorial illustrations for this fictional serial; no image depicts a real event or named person. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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