Loose Ends — Chapter 9: Thursday, He Tells the Glass

Chapter summary

Karo confronts Sammy at work, conceals the note, but cannot reveal her pregnancy before Thursday.

SAMMY

Monday By Monday morning the second phone had been switched off for twenty hours, a record. Sammy sat in his corner office on the fourteenth floor in Victoria Island, pretending to read a term sheet, and felt almost clean.

Then Mrs. Odunsi, his assistant, called through. “Sir, there is a young lady at reception. She says her name is Karo and that you will know.”

He knew. The floor dropped a few centimetres, the way it does in a lift.

He went down himself, because the alternative was to let her come up. She was sitting on the edge of a leather sofa beside an artificial plant, in a faded hoodie, with no make-up and eyes so puffy she looked as if she had been crying since Sunday. Two security men watched her the way they watched everything that was not wearing a suit.

“Not here,” he said, low, and steered her by the elbow into the stairwell. “How did you get this address?”

“Your business card. You used it as a bookmark in my novel.” Her voice shook. “Sammy, somebody left a calabash at my door.”

“A what?” “A calabash. With yam and palm oil and a used pad inside it. And a note, but the oil had eaten the ink. I couldn’t read it.”

He had never heard Karo lie, so he had no way of knowing that he was hearing it now.

Something cold slid down his spine and stopped. He went through the people who could have done it, which took no time at all, because the three of them did not know about each other, and none of them knew where he lived. Sarah, he thought, and almost laughed. Sarah, who cried at the Montessori nativity play every December and had once carried a lizard out of the kitchen in a plastic cup.

“It’s a prank,” he said. “Some boy in the area. Did you shout at anybody?”

“I don’t shout at anybody, Sammy.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I need to tell you something. It can’t wait.”

“Not here.”

“Please.”

“Thursday.” He heard how kind his own voice sounded and hated it. “Lekki. I promised you, didn’t I? On Thursday I will listen to everything you want to tell me.”

She looked at him for a long moment. He pressed thirty thousand naira into her palm. “For a taxi. Go home, lock the door, and eat something.”

She did not take her hand away at once. She leaned in and breathed against his collar. “You smell like flowers,” she said. “You always smell like flowers, Sammy.”

“Hotel soap.”

“Even in your office?”

“I keep a bottle in the drawer.” It was the stupidest lie he had ever told, and he had told some beauties.

Karo smiled. It was the half-smile he knew, the one that never reached her eyes. “Of course,” she said.

He watched her walk out through the revolving door, a small figure in a hoodie with a red rose hidden under the collar. Two years of Fridays had gone into that rose.

“A cousin from the village,” he told the receptionist, who had not asked.

Back on the fourteenth floor he stood at the window for a long time. The lagoon was the colour of an old pot. Tonight was Dara’s night. He had not found the courage to cancel it, so he would keep it, the way a man keeps a bad tooth, until Thursday.

The second phone lay in the drawer, switched off. He did not need to turn it on to know what was in it now. A girl who had come to a glass tower in her pyjama hoodie to tell him something that could not wait. And something she had not said.

“Thursday,” he told the glass.

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