Chapter summary
By March, lives tentatively rebuild across Lagos and Oxford, while pregnant Karo begins another campaign.
LAGOS
March In March the rains came early and the harmattan finally lost its argument with the lagoon.
Tobe sat at her desk on the sixth floor with a calculator and a cup of tea. She had been back for three months. Mr. Briggs now said good morning at precisely nine o’clock and hugged nobody, as a matter of policy. Her target for the quarter was thirty percent lower than her old one, because Madame Angelina had asked her, politely, to be honest about how she reached it. She reached it slowly. It meant more phone calls than she had ever made in her life, and she found that she liked them. Her mother’s cough was no better, but her brother’s fees were paid, from her own pocket, with her own name on every lead.
On the twelfth she went to Bisola’s engagement party in a rented hall in Ikorodu and ate jollof rice with four hundred people and a band. Dara was there in a gold dress. They danced to something with a great deal of drumming. Neither of them said Sammy’s name, and they did not need to.
On Sundays there was stew. The kitchen door onto the fire escape stayed open an inch. Felix, who had got a suspended sentence and a job at a call centre, came at one o’clock with a bag of oranges, sat at the table, and washed the dishes without being asked. Nobody had said what it was. Dara said she would tell them when she knew.
Sammy lived alone in the house in GRA with the cook and the gardener and a driver who was no longer needed. He had kept his job. The board thought it a private matter. He went to work on Mondays and came home on Fridays and learned to boil an egg. On Sundays at four he sat in the study with the door closed and a telephone on the desk, waiting for it to ring. When it did he picked up on the first ring, and a small voice said, “Daddy, I have a sword,” and he said, “Tell me everything.”
SARAH Oxford, March The Radcliffe Camera has a round reading room with a dome like the inside of a very expensive hat, and the third-floor window seat on the east side belonged, again, to Sarah.
It was a Tuesday in March and the light came in thin and grey and shy. She had a flask of tea, a pencil behind her ear and a notebook with a yellow cover. On the screen, a model that had been asleep for fourteen years was listening to a recording of a woman in Ibadan saying a single word. The word fell and rose and fell, and the little curve of tone lit up, correctly, in green.
She had cried the first time she saw it do that. Dr. Hartley, who disliked everyone equally, had put a hand on her shoulder for exactly one second and then taken it away and asked whether she had checked the confidence intervals.
Dr. Hartley had kept her server image for fourteen years in an archive he described, with some pride, as not entirely lost. On her first morning back he took her into his office, which had not been dusted since the Blair government, and sat her in the chair that had been hers, and did not say welcome. He said, “There is a gap in your third chapter.”
“There is a gap in my life,” said Sarah.
“Quite,” he said. “Fill the third chapter first. The rest will follow.”
It was, she thought, the kindest thing that anybody had said to her since the autumn. She wrote for six hours that afternoon without stopping, and walked home across the meadow in a light rain with the pages inside her jacket, and she did not think of anybody at all.
The boys were at school in Summertown. Bayo had acquired an English accent in six weeks and Deji had acquired a friend called Hugo. On Sundays she rang Lagos, and the three of them sat in the little flat in Jericho and shouted into the phone at a man who answered quietly and asked about their day. A parcel had come at the end of February. It held a wooden sword, carved, from Oyo. Deji slept with it for a week.
She and Sammy did not speak about the rest. There was a lawyer, and a schedule, and a date in the summer. There was also, sometimes, at the end of a call, a silence that neither of them hurried to fill. She did not know what it was yet. She had stopped needing to.
On the desk beside her notebook sat a pair of old biker boots, two sizes too big, stuffed with socks, which she had carried across the Atlantic for no reason she could name. She wore them to the library on Tuesdays. The porter had stopped remarking on it.
She looked up and out of the window at the grey slate roofs, and then she bent back to her work.
MAMA BOLU March Folasade had stayed. She had not meant to. She came up on a
Friday with a canvas bag, intending to stay one night, and in March she was still sleeping on a mat in the back room of Mama Bolu’s flat and selling gari from a basin at the end of the counter. The customers had begun to ask for her by name.
No news had come. The Inspector, who telephoned once a month, said that these things took time. A student card, a lab log, a phone at the bottom of the sea. “She will turn up,” he said. Neither woman believed him.
On a Tuesday morning in the middle of the month, a man on a motorbike left an envelope at the stall and was gone before anybody could ask a question. Plain brown, no stamp, no name. Mama Bolu opened it at the counter.
There was a single one-thousand-naira note inside, folded small. And a scrap of paper with a few words in a handwriting she would have known in the dark.
For the bread.
Folasade read it over her shoulder. She stood without speaking.
“Do you think she is all right?” said Mama Bolu.
“I think,” said Folasade slowly, “that she is exactly what I made her.” She took the note, smoothed it flat with her thumb, and put it away in the bosom of her wrapper. “And I think that is the worst thing I will ever say.”
Mama Bolu said nothing. She handed her a loaf.
ABUJA The same week Mrs. Chioma Nwosu came out of church at noon with her two daughters in matching yellow dresses and stopped on the steps to take a picture.
She was forty-three, the wife of a man who sat on two boards and was said to be in line for a third. She posted the photograph, as she did every Sunday, with the caption Blessed. It went up in front of eleven hundred followers. By the time she reached the car it had forty-one likes.
One of them came from an account she did not know. No picture. No posts. No followers. Only a name.
She frowned at it. She turned it over in her mind, the way you turn over a coin from another country, and could not think what it meant.
Fatbabygirl.
Down the road, at the corner by the petrol station, a young woman in a loose cotton dress was standing at a bus stop with a small bag over her shoulder. She was thin and quiet and in the sixth month of something, with a stillness about her that made the other passengers stand a step apart. She looked at her phone. She smiled a little, with her mouth and nothing else.
She had a great deal of patience now. It had come late, but it had come.
She had chosen Mrs. Nwosu from the society pages of a newspaper left on a seat in the bus station, on a Monday, in the first week of November. A senator’s sister-in-law at a charity gala in a gold dress. A husband on two boards. A smile that took up the whole of its photograph. Karo had read the caption three times and then torn it out and folded it into the lining of her bag.
She had a different name now, and a different accent that she was still learning to wear. She had taken a room in Gwarinpa with a woman who sold phone credit and asked no questions. She knew precisely how long she had. She knew to the week.
That evening, when the family returned from the club, a calabash was waiting at the front door of the house in Maitama. It was a carved one, dripping a little on the sides with red palm oil. A single feather stood up out of it. The flies were already there, dancing.
Mrs. Nwosu stopped on the step with her keys in her hand and her daughters behind her.
She did not read the note. She did not need to. She stood very still in the gold light of the evening, a woman who had been given a great many things in her life, and who understood, with a cold drop of the stomach, that she was now being given something else.
Somewhere in the south-west, in a farming town in Ogun State that Mrs. Nwosu had never heard of, a destitute man named Alani was sitting at the roadside, eating uncooked yam, licking the oil as it ran down his arm to the elbow.
Perhaps he was a god after all.
Loose Ends · Series complete
The loose ends have found their shape
Return to the beginning and read every choice differently.
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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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