Chapter summary
Watching Tobe’s genuine distress unsettles Sarah, yet spite drives her to puncture both car tyres.
SARAH
Monday afternoon
She had not planned the tyres.
That was what she kept telling herself in the taxi, in sunglasses and a headscarf, like a woman in an old film. She had only meant to see the woman. She had read her emails, her notes and her bullet points, and she wanted to see what kind of person wrote Mama School Fees on a folder.
The office was a glass block in Ikeja, with a security booth at the gate and a car park that smelled of hot rubber. She was there before noon, well ahead of anything that might happen, because she did not trust herself to arrive on time for a thing she was ashamed of. The taxi waited at the kerb with its engine off and its driver asleep.
She found the Honda Accord without looking for it. The number plate was in an insurance email in the cloud. It sat nicely tucked in its corner, clean and silver, with a sticker on the back window that said GOD IS ABLE.
She stood beside it for a full minute with her handbag open. In the bag, with the lipstick and the keys, lay a roofing nail from the garden shed, picked up that morning without thinking. She told herself that she had only brought it by accident.
Then a small mean voice in her head said, Why not? Let the woman walk out of that building and find that her morning was not finished.
She bent down beside the front tyre and pushed the nail into the rubber the way you push a pin into a cake. The hiss was louder than she expected. She did the other tyre. The Honda sank onto its nose.
She was behind a pillar before she had time to be ashamed.
She waited forty minutes. At last the revolving door turned, and a guard came out with a young woman in a navy suit walking beside him like a prisoner.
Tobe was crying. And she was crying well, not for show, but in the broken, ugly way of a woman who has just been told that the thing she was holding up can no longer be held. Her make-up had run. She had a security badge in one hand and a laptop in the other, and the guard was taking both from her gently, the way you take things from a child.
Sarah watched. She had expected to feel what she had felt on Sunday morning with the calabash, a small sharp spark of something almost like joy. She felt nothing at all. She felt a little sick.
The woman went to the Honda Accord, set her handbag in the back seat, and stopped. She stood quite still. Then, to Sarah’s horror, she began to talk to herself, aloud, in a small clear voice.
“What a horrible way to start the week.”
Sarah’s hand went to her mouth. The woman had not seen the tyres yet. She was making a joke about the worst morning of her life, and the worst of it was still coming.
That was the moment. It was not hatred that Sarah felt. It was something worse and smaller. She had not expected the woman to be funny! She had wanted a villain, a vamp, a cheat in a clinging dress. What she got was a tired accountant of a girl in sensible shoes, making jokes with a nail already in her tyre.
Tobe looked down. Her shoulders dropped. “Unbelievable,” Sarah saw her say, with a small shake of the head, and then the woman slid down against the kerb and pulled her knees up to her chest. She sat there, in the hot rubber smell of the car park, with her face in her skirt.
Sarah wanted to run across the tarmac and pull the nails out with her teeth. She did not move.
Then she walked quickly back to the taxi, with her heart bumping, and shook the driver awake and told him to go.
She had done a great many things that week that she could defend. Humiliation, not injury. This one she could not. It was not part of any plan. It was a nail in a tyre, and a woman who would now have to sit in a car park in her ruined make-up and find somebody to mend it.
Pettiness, Sarah thought in the taxi. So easy to do. So hard to take back!
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 8
The story continues in the next chapter.
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The featured photograph is used under the Pexels licence. Four contextual images are AI-generated editorial illustrations for this fictional serial; no generated image depicts a real event or named person. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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