Chapter summary
Tonye opens her third pharmacy, but a child’s question and three knocks expose buried trauma.
5.30am, opening day, D-Line, Port Harcourt
Tonye woke before the alarm, as she had every morning for four years.
The flat was still dark. Somewhere below, a baby had been crying since three and had finally given up. A cock complained from a neighbouring compound. Through the louvres came the green, wet smell of a city that had been rained on all night and had not yet decided whether to forgive it.
She lay for a moment, listening, and let the day arrive.
It was a small, tidy flat on the top floor of a three-storey block, with two bedrooms, a narrow balcony and a kitchen that had room for one. There were two other families in the building. Below her lived the Ibes, a young couple with a baby and a generator they refused to share. Across the landing lived Mr. Dappa, a retired headmaster in his seventies, who read three newspapers a day and had opinions on all of them.
She liked it because nobody asked her anything.
In the bathroom, she switched on the light and looked at the woman in the mirror.
She was still not used to her. The hair was cropped short and dyed the red of ripe tomatoes, a colour that had startled her in the hairdresser’s chair and delighted the girls at the shop. The face under it was round and calm. Tonye turned her head left and right and thought, as she thought every morning, That is a woman who has never been in a hurry.
She had chosen the dress the night before: deep blue, loose, cut to fall from the shoulder and hide whatever lay beneath. She had worn nothing else for years. The girls at the pharmacy said she dressed like a queen. She dressed like a woman who had once been known by her shape, and had decided to give it up.
She ate breakfast at the small table by the window, in the chair that faced the door.
Then she picked up her keys and went out.
9.20am, Peter Odili Road
By nine o’clock the new branch looked like a wedding.
A white canopy had gone up over the forecourt. Gold chairs stood in rows beneath it, each with a satin bow. A band in matching shirts tuned its instruments in the shade. Balloons in the blue and white of the Briggs logo nodded from the railings, and a young man on a ladder was fixing a banner that read, in letters a metre high, BRIGGS PHARMACY: HEALTH YOU CAN TRUST.
“Madam Briggs!” Boma stormed out of the crowd in a wrapper the colour of fire, arms flung wide. “Na so you go stand there dey look like person wey dey wait for exam result?”
“Good morning, Boma.”
“Good morning my foot. Come here.”
She was swept into a hug that smelled of cocoa butter and hot-comb oil. Tonye held herself very still inside it, as she always did, and then, as she always did, let her shoulders come down.
“The chairs,” Tonye said. “They are beautiful.”
“Of course dem beautiful. Na me carry am.” Boma stood back, hands on hips, to admire her own work. “Fifty gold chairs. Four weeks I dey fight with that man for Mile Three. You know how much I take beg am?”
“I know you will tell me.”
“I go tell you after the party.” Boma grinned. “Now go and look like somebody wey get three pharmacy.”
Tonye smiled. A small smile, the one she kept for her friend.
Chief Amakiri arrived at ten past ten in a gold gele the size of a wheel and a retinue of five. She took her seat in the front row as a queen takes a throne, and the band struck up something loud and cheerful in her honour.
When the pastor had finished praying and the speeches had been made, she leaned across and spoke into Tonye’s ear.
“One photograph.”
“No, Chief.”
“For the newspapers, my dear. A woman with three shops and no face? They will think you are a ghost.”
“Faces are for politicians.”
Chief sat back. For a moment, she looked at her with an expression that Tonye could not name, somewhere between tenderness and the weariness of a woman setting down a heavy bowl.
“One day you will be tired of hiding,” she said quietly.
“From what, Chief?”
“That,” said Chief Amakiri, “is what the folder is for.”
Tonye said nothing. The band played on.
The ribbon was red and wide. A boy of twelve in a blue blazer held the scissors on a velvet cushion and presented them with a bow that was much too serious.
Tonye stepped forward. The crowd murmured. The cameras lifted. She turned her shoulder, as she always did, slightly away from the nearest lens, so that her face sat three-quarters to the light, the way a woman turns her face from a window she does not trust.
The flashes began.
She lifted the scissors. For a second she felt the whole weight of the morning: the balloons, the gold chairs, the little fortune she had built from a loan, a mistake that was not hers and a name that was not hers either.
She cut.
The ribbon fell. The crowd roared. Someone set off a small cloud of confetti. Boma was whooping in the front row, and Chief was clapping with a faint, sad pride.
A small hand tugged at her dress.
It was a girl of about five, in a yellow frock and two puffs of hair, who had slipped past the barrier and stood looking up at her with perfect seriousness.
“Aunty,” she said, loud enough to be heard in the front row, “why your smile dey go one side?”
The confetti kept falling. Tonye heard nothing else.
She stood very still. Something cold had touched the back of her neck.
“Pikin dey talk true!” Boma shouted, doubled over laughing, and the crowd laughed with her. A mother appeared, scooped the child up with a flurry of apologies, and carried her away.
Tonye smiled at the cameras, all the way, so that for once it went up evenly on both sides. It felt like holding a door shut with her whole weight.
9.15pm
She came home after dark, with her feet aching and her ears still ringing.
The stairwell smelled of someone’s fried fish and the wet concrete of the rainy season. On the landing, the bulb had blown again. She climbed in the half-dark with one hand on the rail and her keys in the other, and stopped at her own front door.
She knocked on it. Three times, softly.
It was only when her knuckles touched the wood the third time that she realised what she had done, and she stood there with her hand still raised and the keys cold in her fist.
Behind her, a door opened.
Mr. Dappa stood in the wedge of lamplight in his vest and slippers, a newspaper folded under one arm. He was a thin, upright old man with a white moustache and very patient eyes. He had never once raised his voice in four years.
“Forgive an old man, Madam Tonye.”
“Good evening, sir.”
“Every night since you came. I have counted. Three knocks, soft. On your own door.” He tilted his head. “Who are you knocking for?”
“Nobody,” she said. “It’s a habit.”
“Hm.” He thought about that. “A habit is a thing one learns from somebody, you know. It does not grow on its own, like a weed.”
He wished her good night and closed his door, courteously and without haste.
Tonye let herself in. She locked the door behind her and stood in the dark of her small clean flat, with her back against the wood, and her breath going in and out.
It was the first time in four years that she had told a lie and not believed it herself.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 15 is the next door
The story continues. Follow the next chapter through the door.
What do you think happens next? Share your theory in the comments below.
Cover and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence. Cover source; cover design for The Third Door by akinakingbogun.com.
Discover more from Akin Akingbogun
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.