Chapter summary
Eni silently abandons her marriage, identity, and phone, boarding a Port Harcourt bus before dawn.
2.50am, Tuesday 15 February 2022, Ikoyi, Lagos
Eni had not slept at all, and she was not tired.
She lay on her side of the wide bed with her eyes open, listening to her husband breathe. He was home tonight, for once, flat on his back with one arm flung across the pillow where her head should have been. A sliver of orange light from the street lamp lay across the ceiling. The generator had gone off at one. The air conditioner ticked as it cooled.
She waited until the clock beside the bed said ten to three.
Then she rose, without a sound, as she had risen on a thousand nights to check a child that did not exist.
She had laid out her clothes in the bathroom the night before: dark trousers, a plain cotton top, flat shoes, a light cardigan. Nothing a person would notice. She dressed in the dark and stood for a moment before the mirror above the basin. Her face looked back at her, pale and composed, with small steady eyes. A pharmacist’s face. The face of a woman who had counted a great many things in her life and was now counting the last of them.
There were two bags waiting by the wardrobe. A small backpack with two changes of clothes. And a grey holdall, heavier than any woman’s bag should be, whose handles she lifted with a gentle, practised care, the way one lifts something asleep.
She did not look at it. She had looked at it enough.
On the landing outside the bedroom, she stopped.
The door was a few steps behind her, closed. Behind it, her husband slept in a house she had decorated, in a marriage she had kept like a ledger, correct to the last kobo and empty of every other thing.
She turned around and raised her hand.
She knocked on the door. Three times, very softly, as she had every night of her marriage.
Nobody answered.
She waited the length of one slow breath. Then she lowered her hand and did not go in.
That was all the goodbye there would be.
Downstairs, the sitting room was dark and cool. By the front door, on the small brass tray where keys were kept, she laid her wedding ring and her set of house keys. The ring made a small, bright, clean sound against the metal. There was a pale band on her finger where it had been, narrower than she had expected.
Her passport was in the drawer upstairs. She had left it there on purpose.
The pedestrian gate was never locked. Baba Gate lay asleep in his plastic chair with a small radio muttering on his chest. She slipped past him and out into the street, into a dark so thick with harmattan dust that the lamps wore halos.
3.40am
The car was at the end of the road with its engine off and its lights off.
She would not have found it, if she had not known where to look. A dark saloon pulled up against a wall, beside a heap of refuse and a sleeping dog. The passenger door opened from inside before she reached it.
She got in. She laid the grey holdall in her lap, where it sat like a heavy, patient child.
For a moment neither of them spoke. The man at the wheel stared straight ahead through the windscreen. He was the only person in her whole life she had ever asked for anything. And he was the only one who owed her a thing he could never repay.
“You sure?” he said at last.
“Drive.”
He started the engine. They moved off with their lights still dark, and only at the corner did he switch them on.
The road to Ojota was empty at that hour. Closed shops. A solitary danfo parked under a flyover, its conductor asleep across three seats. A woman sweeping the front of a church with a broom the size of a small tree. The city lay in the half-light like a body between two breaths.
“Eni.”
“Yes.”
“If I do this…” He gripped the wheel. “If anybody asks me…”
“Give me one year.”
He swallowed. In the dashboard glow she saw the line of his jaw, tight and unhappy.
“One year,” he said.
“Not a day less.”
“Not a day less.”
It was not a promise either of them was sure he could keep.
4.10am
Ojota motor park at that hour was a field of sodium light and stirring bodies.
Buses stood in long rows with their engines coughing, their windows fogged. Touts called out the names of cities like men selling the same bread: Abuja! Kaduna! Kano! Enugu! PH, PH, PH! Aba! Dust hung in the air like flour. A boy walked between the queues with a tray of sachet water balanced on his head, and a woman roasted groundnuts over a small drum of embers, and the smell of both followed Eni like a stray.
She left the man in the car. She did not look back at him. It was easier that way.
At a small booth lit by a bare bulb, a clerk in a bobble hat looked up from a ledger.
“Sister, where you dey go?”
“Port Harcourt.”
“Name?”
“Mama Sade.”
The clerk did not so much as blink. In his job, everybody was Mama Sade at four in the morning. He wrote it down, took her cash, and tore off a ticket the colour of weak tea. She folded it small and put it in her pocket.
Then, with the backpack on her shoulder and the grey holdall pressed to her ribs, she walked down the long row of buses, past the ones for the east, to the line of coaches that faced north.
A big white coach stood at the end with its door open and its engine idling. ABUJA. KADUNA. KANO. A few passengers had boarded already. Through the windows she could see a row of sleeping heads, their mouths open, their jackets folded for pillows.
She stepped up, just inside the door.
A young man in a grey hoodie slept in the first window seat, curled against the glass. A rucksack leaned open against his knee, its side pocket unzipped.
Eni took her phone from her cardigan. The screen glowed and she dimmed it. Eighty per cent. She set it to silent. She held it a moment in her palm. It was a small, warm, ordinary thing, with her sister’s face on the lock screen, laughing at a café table.
She slid it into the side pocket of the sleeping boy’s rucksack, the way she had once slid thermometers under the arms of sleeping children.
Then she stepped back down onto the tarmac, and she was a woman with no phone, no ring, no name and a heavy bag.
4.55am
Her own bus was an old blue one with a cracked windscreen and a picture of Jesus above the driver. She took a seat by the window, with the holdall at her feet and her backpack on her knees.
The engine caught. The bus lurched out of the park through a gate hung with torn banners, past the sleeping shops and the shuttered stalls, and swung onto the expressway.
Behind her, the lights of Lagos hung against the dark, thousands of them, gold and white and orange, like a city made of embers.
She watched them through the glass.
She did not look back at the park. She did not look back at the man in the car, who would sit there, she knew, until the sky had gone grey, with his hands on the wheel.
She counted the lights.
One. Ten. A hundred. She counted them the way she had once counted the steps of a bus, and the days of a cycle, and the cracks in a ceiling. She went on counting until the numbers broke apart in her mouth and there were too many lights to hold.
And then, very carefully, as one folds a letter that cannot be answered, Eni began to forget.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 14 is the next door
The story continues. Follow the next chapter through the door.
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Cover and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence. Cover source; cover design for The Third Door by akinakingbogun.com.
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