Chapter summary
Sammy accepts Sarah’s departure, confesses to his mother, and recognises Karo’s exploitation with belated compassion.
SAMMY
Friday, later He lay in the hospital bed after she left and listened to her boots go away down the corridor. It was a steady sound, an unhurried one, the sound of a woman who knew exactly where she was going. He did not call out. He noticed that. It seemed to him the first correct decision he had made in a long time.
The nurse brought tea. He drank it. It was very sweet and tasted of nothing, which in the circumstances he found a mercy.
At ten his mother called. She was seventy-four, a small woman in Mushin who had cooked on the days that were hers and eaten in the corner on the days that were not, and she had never once in her life telephoned him before noon. “They said you were in a hospital,” she said. “Baba Sule called me from your phone.”
“I am all right, Mama.”
“Are you?” A pause. “Then what are you ashamed of, that you are speaking in that voice?”
He told her. Not all of it. Enough. When he finished she said nothing at all for so long that he thought the signal had gone.
“Your father’s house,” she said at last, “had four wives and one rota. I used to lie awake on the nights that were not mine and say to myself, a house with one woman and one love is a house that no man should ever leave. And God gave you one. He gave you a woman with Oxford in her head and your children in her arms. And you let her sleep in the cold.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“I raised you better than that.”
“No,” said Sammy. “You raised me exactly like that. I had the vow, and I broke it. I am sorry.”
“Don’t say it to me.” Her voice cracked. “Say it to her. And then do what she asks, whatever it is, even if it breaks you. That is all that is left.”
He turned his face to the window. Outside, the day went on. A tree. A wall. A yellow bus. Somewhere beyond the wall, twenty kilometres of road away, a girl in a stained white dress had stood under a lamp the night before and climbed on the back of a stranger’s bike. He did not know where she was. He thought, to his surprise, that he hoped she had eaten.
She had been twenty-two, and good at it. That, he thought, was the saddest part.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 43
The story continues in the next chapter.
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All five images are AI-generated editorial illustrations for this fictional serial; no image depicts a real event or named person. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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