The Third Door — Chapter 2: The Year-End Party

8.15pm, Friday 17 December 2021, Victoria Island, Lagos

The ballroom of the Lagoon Crest Hotel had been dressed to look expensive, and it very nearly succeeded.

Gold chairs stood in rows of ten, each tied at the back with a white bow. Three chandeliers hung from the ceiling like frozen fireworks. A banner stretched behind the stage in letters tall enough to read from the car park: ATLAS TRUST BANK. A YEAR OF GROWTH. The band, in white jackets, was playing highlife a little too politely, and the whole room smelled of perfume, roast meat, hairspray and new money.

Half the guests wore their face masks hanging off one ear like earrings. The rumours about the new variant had not yet reached the buffet.

Eni stood at the edge of it all in an emerald dress that her hips refused to let hang straight, a glass of chapman sweating in her hand. She was forty-one years old. She had attended nine of these dinners in twelve years of marriage, which was eight more than she had ever enjoyed.

Across the room, her husband was working the crowd like a man tuning a radio.

Tunde Bankole was tall and easy in his tuxedo, with a laugh like loose change thrown on a table. He touched arms. He remembered the names of wives. He could make a junior accountant feel like a partner in four sentences, and a partner feel like a friend in two. Eni had once found it the most attractive thing about him. Now she watched it the way you watch a magician after you have learned where the second card goes.

“Oga Tunde! You dey spoil us o!” a red-faced man shouted from the next table, thumping the cloth. “Everybody dey look you. Leave some shine for the rest of us!”

Tunde bowed, hand on heart, and the table roared.

Thirteen years in March, Eni thought, and sipped her chapman.

The photo wall stood near the entrance: a white backdrop printed with the bank’s logo, lit by two umbrella lamps. A queue of staff and spouses had formed in front of it.

A girl in a black apron and a black face mask moved along the line with a brush in one hand and a powder compact in the other, touching up foreheads like a priest giving blessings. Her head was wrapped in a black scarf, so that all Eni could see of her was a pair of calm, dark eyes. Eni noticed her only because of her hands. They were the steadiest hands she had ever seen on anyone who was not a surgeon.

When the girl reached Tunde, she tilted her head and studied his face. Then she tapped powder across his forehead, quickly, thoroughly, as if she were erasing something. Tunde said something that made the people around him laugh.

The girl did not laugh. She lowered her brush and moved on to the next face.

Eni forgot her within the minute.

“Gentlemen.” Tunde’s hand found the small of her back and steered her into a circle of dark suits. “My wife. Eniola. The only person in Lagos who can tell you what your tablets are for and make you feel guilty about it.”

The men laughed. Eni gave the smile she kept for such moments, the one that bent a little to the right, and shook hands down the line.

“Barrister Dele Fashina,” said the last of them. “Legal.”

He was somewhere in his late thirties and wore his tuxedo as though it were a second skin and not a rented one. Close-cropped hair. A trimmed beard. Eyes that stayed on her face one second longer than the sentence required. When he took her hand, he did not release it when the handshake was finished.

He smelled of cedar, warm and dry, like the inside of a wardrobe in a good house.

“Mrs. Bankole. I have heard that you keep this man alive.”

“He makes it difficult,” Eni said.

“I imagine he does.”

His thumb moved once across the back of her hand. By accident, or not. She took her hand back at exactly the speed of good manners, and he let it go with the faint smile of a man who had noted the speed.

“Pharmacist, yes? Which pharmacy?”

“A small one. In Lekki.”

“Nothing about you looks small.”

Tunde, who was telling a story to the circle, did not hear it.

Eni felt her smile begin to bend, and she set it straight again before it could finish.

She knew about Ngozi from Corporate Treasury. She knew about the woman in Ikeja, and the one before her, whose name she had never learned and whose perfume she could still smell on a particular blue shirt. She had found the first in 2014, by accident, in a hotel receipt folded inside a wedding invitation. She had found the second in 2017, by arithmetic. After that, she had stopped counting, the way you stop counting the steps in your own house.

The marriage had become a well-furnished room with no air.

She did not cry about it anymore. She did not even shout. Every Sunday she and Dami sat in a café in Lekki and compared notes, the way other women compared recipes, and then they laughed until their eyes were wet. It was easier than screaming. It was almost a kind of prayer.

The ladies’ room was down a long corridor lined with potted palms. Eni stopped in front of the door.

She knocked three times.

“Who be that?” a slurred voice called from inside. “Just come in na!”

“I knock first,” Eni said, and opened the door.

A woman in gold lamé was repairing her lipstick at the mirror. Her eyes slid over Eni in the glass.

“Madam, you dey alright?”

“Perfectly.”

She washed her hands for longer than she needed to, and she began to hum under her breath. An old hymn, low and a little flat. In the mirror her smile came and went, crooked, leaning to the right like a door that would not quite close.

Chapter four, she thought. The woman in the green dress.

They had a system. Chapter numbers, like the paperbacks they had traded as girls. It was a joke, mostly. Mostly.

She dried her hands and went back to the party.

10.05pm

The speeches had started. A director in a gold agbada was thanking the Lord, the board and the Lagos traffic, in that order. The band took a break. The waiters circulated with trays of puff-puff and peppered snails.

Eni sat at Table Nine beside her husband. His hand rested on the back of her chair, warm and dutiful. Beyond him, three seats away, Dele Fashina was not looking at her with great concentration.

Tunde’s phone buzzed on the tablecloth between the bread plates.

The screen lit up. A small bright square in the dim ballroom.

He turned it face down so quickly that the glasses shivered.

Eni did not move. She went on watching the director, and she did not blink.

In twelve years of marriage, Tunde had never once hidden his phone from her. He had never needed to. The others had been careless, with their receipts and their perfume and their late-night laughter in the corridor. She had found every one of them without even trying.

This was the first time he had been careful.

Careful, she thought, was a different word. Careful meant someone worth being careful for.

The Third Door · Continue reading

Chapter 3 is the next 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.