Chapter summary
Etim reveals Eni’s secret contraception, shattering Tunde while Kamsi recognises Eni as her story’s author.
6.30pm, Friday 20 January 2023, Ikoyi, Lagos
Mr. Ubong Etim arrived with a plastic folder under his arm and the grave, apologetic air of a man about to deliver a bill.
He sat on the very edge of the cream sofa, a small round person in a brown safari suit, with a moustache that looked as though it had been ironed. He refused three times, politely, to be offered a drink. He held the folder on his knees with both hands, like a hymn book.
Tunde stood at the window with his back to the room. Kamsi sat at the far end of the opposite sofa in a plain green dress, with her own hair under a scarf and a glass of water balanced on her knee. In the nine months since Abuja she had made herself useful in all the small ways that matter. She knew how he took his tea. She knew which of his mother’s calls he would not answer. She had a drawer in his house, and a toothbrush in his bathroom, and he had stopped noticing that they were there.
“Ubong,” Tunde said, without turning. “You said you had something.”
“Yes, Oga.” The investigator cleared his throat. “I get one small information. I no know whether to bring am or leave am.”
“Bring it.” “Sir, e fit pain you.”
“I am paying you to be useful, not to be kind.”
“Yes, sir.” Mr. Etim opened the folder and looked at the first page for some time. “I go the pharmacy where Madam work. Medix, for Lekki. I talk to the young man for there. Chinedu.”
Kamsi saw Tunde’s shoulders tighten, slightly.
“When I tell am say na your wife I dey look for, the boy cry small. He say Aunty Eni na the best person wey he ever work with. I give am small something for his trouble.” The moustache twitched in apology. “He talk.”
“About what?”
“About one thing she dey take. Every month, sir. From the shelf. She dey pay with her own cash, in her own name, and she tell am say make he no mention am.” He turned a page. “E be family planning tablet, Oga. The ordinary one. Every month. Since the first year of the marriage.”
The room went quiet.
“Say that again.”
“Twelve years, sir.” Mr. Etim looked down at his shoes. “Madam no be barren. She just no wan born.”
For a long moment, nothing happened. Tunde stood at the window with the dark Lagos evening behind him. Down in the street, a generator started, coughed, and caught. The air conditioner hummed. A bat flickered past the glass and
was gone.
Then he laughed.
It was a short, dry, astonished sound, like a man who had been handed a gift and found it was a knife. He laughed again, and the second laugh broke in the middle and turned into something that was not a laugh at all.
“Twelve years,” he said.
He put one hand flat against the window, as if to stop it moving.
“I told my mother she was barren. I told my friends. I stood at my father’s grave and told him I was sorry that I would not give him a grandson.” His voice was climbing, thin and strange. “Every Sunday. Every single Sunday, my mother looked at her across that table and called her a field with no seed in it, and I said, ’We are in God’s hands, Mama.’ God’s hands.”
He slid down the glass.
It was not graceful. He simply folded, the way a tall man folds when the strings are cut, until he sat on the carpet with his back against the window and his knees drawn up and his handsome face gone slack and wet.
“She never wanted a child with me,” he whispered. “She just sat there. She sat at my mother’s table and let them say it. She smiled. She smiled.”
Mr. Etim rose, hurriedly, with the folder clutched to his chest. “Oga, abeg make you no vex. I go leave you. I go call tomorrow.”
He let himself out with the soft, tactful click of a man who had seen a great many people break and had never grown used to it.
Kamsi crossed the room and knelt on the carpet beside him.
She did it without thinking, and it was only when his head came down on her shoulder that she saw what she was doing. His whole weight collapsed against her. He smelled of cologne and sweat and the faint metallic tang of fear. He was shaking, silently, in long waves, and she put her arms around him as she would have put them around a child.
“Don’t leave me,” he said into her neck.
“I’m here.”
It was the second time she had said it to him. She thought it was probably the only time it would be both a lie and the truth.
She held him, and stroked the back of his head, and looked over his shoulder at the dark window, and found that she was thinking of her mother.
She was thinking of a woman in a one-bedroom flat in Ogba, with a wig on a stand and a doll in a plastic box and a man in a green car who had said, It is a problem. And I am telling you how to solve it.
Her mother had had no choices. That had been the whole of it, the shape of the grief that had dug itself into Kamsi’s bones at seven years old. The woman on the
floor with the bright patient eyes had been a woman to whom everything had been done. Her body, her future, her name, all of it signed away by other people in other rooms.
And Eniola Oyelaran, the woman with the tired smile and the ledger and the house that looked like a showroom, had walked through twelve years of marriage with a secret in a lip-balm tin, and had said no, quietly, a little every month, to everyone who asked.
She never wanted a child with me, Tunde had wept. But he had it wrong, Kamsi thought. She had not refused him. She had refused the door.
She had spent twenty years building a woman out of newsprint. A helpless wife. A tired smile. A victim of a man’s appetites, the way Ijeoma had been the victim of one. She had loved that woman’s face on the page with a grim tenderness, because it was a face she could hate cleanly.
The woman who had walked out of this house in February had not been helpless.
She had planned. She had planted a phone in a stranger’s rucksack and emptied a safe, and she had chosen, again and again and again, for a long time, with a spine like a bridge cable.
She was never the victim, Kamsi thought, with a jolt that went down to her heels. She was the author. Tunde was still weeping against her shoulder. Slowly, almost absently, she began to rock him.
A woman like that did not do this alone. She would need a car, and a driver who would ask no questions. She would need someone who owed her a great deal and who was afraid enough of her to keep a secret.
Someone had taken her to the park.
Someone she had trusted enough to ask.
And that someone, Kamsi realised, was still out there, in some ordinary house in some ordinary street, living an ordinary life and keeping a promise that nobody else knew had been made.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 22 is the next door
The story continues. Follow the next chapter through the door.
What stayed with you? Share your thoughts 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.