Chapter summary
Karo discovers she is pregnant, breaks Sammy’s rules, and travels across Lagos seeking answers immediately.
KARO
Monday Since the incident with the calabash, Karo had become apprehensive. The anxiety had become a kind of background noise, like traffic on some unseen road. She barely slept that Sunday night and tossed and turned until dawn. Even when the heavens opened their bowels in the dead of the night to cleanse the earth, it did nothing to ease the despondent feeling.
When she rolled out of bed that Monday morning, she drew in a sharp breath of wet air before sitting bolt upright. Her mind was unsettled, and her puffy eyes carried the weight of her insomnia. But the moment she tried to get off the bed, she felt an overwhelming urge to puke.
After retching the little she had managed to eat the night before, she wondered what had gotten hold of her. Something did not feel right. She washed her face with water from the tap until she felt a bit better.
She reached for her phone, lost within the rumpled sheets, in the hope of a message from her boyfriend. It was almost two days since she had heard his voice.
There was nothing from him. Just an eerie silence.
The second time the urge to retch came, it was all she needed to reach for the pregnancy dipstick and confirm her suspicion.
And the result? Two clear lines. Undoubtable!
Karo did one of her half-smiles. “When it rains, it pours!” she declared, sitting on the toilet seat in shock.
The tears that were always beneath her eyes poured out effortlessly, and the bathroom swam.
“Oh my God, what do I tell Mum?” Her body rattled violently as waves of sobs died in her breath. Mum, who had raised her alone in Isara and had never once explained the Mercedes that came on the last Friday of every month and was gone before dawn.
This was one of those days she wanted her boyfriend there with her. For a moment she thought of him as a stranger who had passed through her life. Then she remembered the rose on her collarbone and knew better.
“How is this even possible?” she asked no one in particular. “I took the morning-after pill within twenty-four hours. How is this even insanely possible?”
“How? How?” She cried until the tears stopped, and all that was left was her heaving breath and the drip of the wash hand basin tap she had not closed properly.
When at last she summoned the strength to get off the bathroom floor, she had made up her mind. It was time to pay her man a visit at his office.
She had never been to his office. He had forbidden it, the way he had forbidden Sunday calls. But two lines on a stick had cancelled all the rules.
She did not wash her hair. She did not put on make-up. She picked the grey hoodie she wore for studying, the one with the stain on the cuff, and stood in front of the mirror for a long time looking at her own face with no expression on it at all.
It was nearly an hour by danfo and then bus to Victoria Island. She sat by the window with her bag on her knees and watched Lagos change shape outside the glass, the low brown roofs and red dust giving way, mile after mile, to towers of blue glass and the smell of money. A man selling sachet water banged on the window. Somebody was preaching at the back of the bus.
Only in Lagos!
She did not rehearse what she would say. She had learned a long time ago that rehearsed words come out as rehearsed words. She practised only how it felt to be a girl who has had a very bad week, and found that it came easily. It was not even difficult!
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 9
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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.
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