Loose Ends — Chapter 7: Two Nails Beyond the Plan

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 the person looked like who 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 waited behind a pillar for forty minutes, until 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, as the other one had cried into her phone in the lane, 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 a 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.”

That was the moment. It was not hatred. It was something worse and smaller. Sarah 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 a joke about the worst morning of her life.

Sarah wanted badly to hate her. So she did the one petty thing that she could do.

In the boot of the taxi she had a roofing nail from the garden shed, picked up that morning without thinking and dropped into her bag with the lipstick and the keys. She waited until the guard had gone. She crossed the car park, 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.

Then she walked quickly back to the taxi, with her heart bumping, and told the driver 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 stand 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!

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The featured photograph is used under the Pexels licence. Contextual scene illustrations are original editorial artwork created for this serial; the characters and events are fictional. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.