The Third Door — Chapter 11: The Wrong Batch

Chapter summary

Tonye accepts blame for counterfeit drugs, earning Chief Amakiri’s trust as her buried identity resurfaces.

Port Harcourt, the first year

The bus came into Port Harcourt at dawn, smelling of diesel, wet clothes and the sleep of forty strangers.

She remembered that smell before she remembered anything else about the morning. The park at Mile One was a bowl of noise. Touts shouted the names of towns into the rain. A woman balanced a tray of boiled eggs on her head and a baby on her back, and hawked both with the same voice. Tonye stepped down with a nylon bag in one hand and a heavier bag pressed against her ribs, and stood in the wet while the city rushed at her like water into a hole.

She had a new name, a ticket stub and a promise she had made at another motor park, many hours and many kilometres behind her. She kept the promise in the same pocket as the ticket.

The first terrible week passed in a room in Diobu, with a landlady who asked no questions and a mattress that remembered other people. She wore her new name like a borrowed coat. It was too big in the shoulders, and she grew into it slowly.

In the second week she walked into Amakiri Pharmacy on Ada George Road and asked for work.

Chief Ibinabo Amakiri was a large, upright woman of sixty with gold-rimmed glasses, a lace gele folded like a crown, and the voice of someone who had been obeyed for forty years. She sat behind a steel desk in the back office with a ledger open in front of her and a cold cup of tea at her elbow. Her late husband’s name was on the signboard. Her own hand was on every drawer.

“You say you are an assistant.”

“Yes, Chief.”

“You say you have experience.”

“Yes, Chief.”

“You say you can count.” The glasses lifted. “Most people can count, my dear. Very few can count honestly.”

The licence that proved Tonye was a pharmacist lay folded at the bottom of her bag. She did not offer it. A pharmacist is asked questions. An assistant is only asked to count.

“I can count honestly,” she said.

Chief Amakiri studied her for a long moment, the way a trader studies a fish.

“Start tomorrow. Six o’clock. Do not be late.”

“I won’t.”

“They all say that,” said Chief. But she wrote the name down.

For five months Tonye was the first to arrive and the last to leave.

She learned the shelves in the dark. She learned which customers wanted advice and which wanted company. She learned that Chief took her tea at ten and her anger at four, and that the manager, her nephew Dagogo, a soft, handsome man of twenty-nine, had two great loves in life: a discount and a deadline.

In July, a distributor offered sixty cartons of antimalarial tablets at a price that made Dagogo’s eyes shine. He called Chief at a funeral in Bonny. Tonye stood close enough to hear her voice come thin and impatient through the speaker. If the price is right, take it. I have no time for this today.

The cartons arrived on Wednesday.

On Wednesday night, alone in the stockroom, Tonye checked the batch numbers against the invoice. Two did not match. She checked again with a torch, her heart going small and hard. Then she took a slip of paper and wrote down what she had found, and in the morning she gave it to Dagogo.

“What is this?”

“The numbers on the boxes are not the numbers on the invoice.”

“You are the assistant, Tonye.” He folded the slip and put it in his pocket. “I am the manager. Mind your counting.”

On Friday, two inspectors from the drug regulator walked into the shop with a sample kit and a polite, terrible calm.

They tested the tablets in the back office with the door closed. Dagogo stood against the wall and sweated through his shirt. The senior inspector, a tall man with spectacles and a voice like a closed door, laid out three sheets of paper on the desk.

“These cartons are counterfeit. The batch numbers are forged. Whose authority is this order on?”

Nobody spoke.

“A licence can be withdrawn for this,” he said. “The superintendent pharmacist is responsible. Where is the superintendent?”

“In Bonny,” Dagogo said. His eyes went sideways. They landed on Tonye. “Na… na the assistant dey handle that kind thing. I just sign.”

Tonye looked at the man who had folded her warning into his pocket. She looked at the inspector, and at the sheets of paper that could cost an old woman the work of forty years.

She thought of Chief’s thin voice through the speaker. I have no time for this today.

“I placed the order,” she heard herself say. “The manager signed on my authority. The Chief was not told.”

The inspector turned slowly.

“You are the assistant?”

“Yes, sir. The mistake is mine.”

The shop was fined heavily and closed for a week. The cartons were burned in a yard behind the market, in front of a small crowd of onlookers and one television camera. Chief Amakiri returned from Bonny in a black wrapper and a worse temper, and listened to the whole account in silence.

Then she said, “Somebody must pay.”

Nothing else.

For three months, Tonye’s wages went to the fine. She could not pay rent. She slept on a mat in the stockroom among the cartons of cough syrup, and washed at the tap in the yard before the others came in. She told no one. Dagogo avoided her eyes. Chief walked past her without a word, with her back very straight.

Boma, who would not walk into her life for another five months, would have said it was a kind of madness. Tonye did not know what it was. She only knew that the shelf had been hers to check, and she had checked it.

A Monday in October

“Sit.”

The back office smelled of camphor and old paper. Chief Amakiri sat very still behind the steel desk. On the blotter in front of her lay two things: a thick white envelope and a brown folder sealed with tape.

“I have had you looked at,” she said.

Tonye’s blood went still.

“I was angry. I wanted to know what kind of fool takes a fine that is not hers.” Chief’s gaze was level and unreadable. “I paid a man to find out. He is very good. He is expensive. He has told me a great many things.”

“Chief…”

“I am not going to tell you what they are.” She pushed the brown folder across the desk. “They are in there. It belongs to you. Open it when you are ready, or do not. I will not ask.”

Tonye did not touch it.

“I am sixty years old,” Chief went on. “I have buried a husband and two shops. I know loyalty when it is expensive, and I know a person carrying something heavy when I see her carry it. Everybody comes to Port Harcourt carrying something. I do not ask what. I ask only whether they will put it down in my shop.”

She tapped the white envelope.

“This is a loan. Thirty million naira, no interest for the first year. You will open your own pharmacy. Not here, not next door. Old GRA, where the money is. You will use your own name. You will do it properly.”

Tonye stared.

“Why?” she managed.

“Because I know a pharmacist when I see one, my dear,” said Chief Amakiri gently. “And I know when she has been counting honestly.”

That night Tonye sat alone in the stockroom with the folder on her knees.

The tape had yellowed already at the corners. The flap lay flat against the paper, and it would have taken a thumbnail and one second to lift it.

She did not.

She laid it in the bottom drawer of the steel cabinet, under a roll of invoice paper and the spare keys, and closed the drawer.

Then she sat in the dark with her heart going quietly, and tried to count the people on earth who could have given Chief Amakiri a name that was not Tonye Briggs.

There was one man she had made a promise to at a motor park, at four in the morning, eight months before. Give me one year, she had said.

It had not been a year.

Someone had broken it.

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