The Third Door — Chapter 25: The Year Everything Stopped

Chapter summary

Young Eni learns Ijeoma died, lies to police, and begins protecting Dami through inherited silence.

7.10am, Tuesday 17 October 2000, Akoka, Lagos

The newspaper arrived with the milk, and Eni did not see it until her father had picked it up.

She was twenty. She was in her second year of pharmacy at the university, and she sat at the breakfast table in the front room with a plate of fried yam going cold in front of her and a pharmacology textbook propped against the sugar bowl. Dami, nine years old, sat opposite her, building a tower of cornflakes with a concentration that would one day be put to better use. The ceiling fan turned slowly. The radio on the shelf played a morning hymn.

It was a Tuesday like any other Tuesday. She would think of that for years, how ordinary it had been. How the light came in through the louvres in long yellow stripes, and the tea steamed, and the fan clicked on its third beat.

And her father stood at the door in his shirt sleeves with the folded newspaper in his hand, and went stiff. He was a tall man, Dr. Folarin Oyelaran, with a gentle voice and gentle hands and a smile that went up on one side. He lectured in the faculty of medicine and was spoken of, on the campus, as a man who was good to his students. He had a way of looking at you as though you were the only person in the room. For ten years, since a certain hot afternoon in 1990, he had been extra kind to his elder daughter, with a tenderness that was almost anxious, as if she were a glass he was afraid to drop.

He looked at the front page for perhaps four seconds.

Then he folded it once, and again, so the headline was hidden, and slid it under his arm.

“Daddy?” Dami said, with her mouth full. “What is it?”

“Nothing, my dear. Business for the university.” He smiled. It went up on one side. “Eat your breakfast. Eniola, don’t read at the table. It is bad for the digestion.”

He went out to the veranda with the paper.

Eni sat with her fork in the air.

She had seen it. It had been the smallest, most casual of glances, because she had been looking at the door, and he had been holding the paper up the wrong way, for a moment, as people do. A photograph, in a black frame, in the top corner of the page.

A round, young face. A wide forehead. A halo of dark hair. And a mouth that lifted a little more on one side than the other.

She put down her fork.

It was Mr. Rotimi from next door who brought her another copy, shamefaced, folded inside his own, as she was leaving for her lecture.

“Eniola,” he said, in a low voice. “I think say you should know. Before your mother hear am from somebody else.” She took it round the corner of the wall, to the little yard behind the kitchen where the mango tree dropped its leaves, and she

opened it.

STUDENT DIES IN BACK-STREET CLINIC. UNILAG LECTURER QUESTIONED.

She read it slowly, the way she read everything. She read it twice.

Ijeoma Nwosu, twenty-nine, a postgraduate student of biochemistry, had died on Friday evening in a one-bedroom flat in Ogba, of complications following a termination carried out at a private clinic in Mushin. A doctor was in custody. A second man, a senior lecturer at the university, was helping police with their inquiries. A neighbour was quoted as saying that the dead woman had been a quiet girl, who laughed a lot, who had a small daughter.

A small daughter.

She looked at the photograph.

She had known it at breakfast. Her body had known it before her eyes did, a slow cold drop, like the stomach going out of a lift. It was a studio portrait, formal, a little stiff. The woman was not wearing a wig. Her hair was her own, short and close to her head. But the mouth was unmistakable.

The woman who had looked up from her father’s bed and smiled. Eni stood in the yard with the newspaper trembling in her hands, and the whole warm October morning went out of focus around her. She heard the mango leaves rattle. She heard, in the road, a boy selling bread. She heard her own pulse, like a steady animal, pounding.

I knew her face.

I have always known her face.

And under that, quietly, as the answer to a sum she had been working at for ten years, came another thought.

I saw. I said nothing. And now she is dead.

She did not go to her lecture.

5.40pm

The police came at twenty to six, in two vehicles, with the dust of the road still on their wheels.

She was in the sitting room when she heard the gate. At nine years old and at twenty, the hinge told her the same story every time. A squeal. A pause. A clang. Then the heavy tread of boots on the path.

Mama was already at the door.

She had come home from the hospital in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody had called her. Mama Rotimi had, quite simply, walked into the ward in her wrapper and said six words, and her mother had put down her clipboard and walked out in her white uniform and her sensible shoes. She stood in the doorway now with her hands folded at her waist, small and upright, as she did when a patient was dying and nothing more could be done. “Dr. Folarin Oyelaran?” said a sergeant, with a cap under his arm and a face like a closed shop.

“He is not at home,” said Mama.

“We have picked him up from the university, madam. We want to look in the house.”

Mama stepped aside.

They went through the rooms like men going through a market. They opened wardrobes. They lifted mattresses. They took away a box of papers from the study and a notebook from the drawer of his desk. Dami stood at the top of the stairs with her thumb in her mouth, which she had not done in four years, watching them with enormous eyes. Mama Rotimi stood at the gate and spoke to the street in a low, ferocious, rolling Pidgin: ”Wetin be this? Policeman for Dr. Oyelaran house? Una no get shame?”

And Eni sat on the brown sofa with her hands between her knees, and the sergeant sat down opposite her and opened a notebook.

“Miss Oyelaran. How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“I am going to show you a photograph.” He turned it around. It was the same studio portrait, printed on newsprint, a little smudged. “Have you ever seen this woman before?”

The room went quiet. She could hear the fan.

Yes. She could say it. Right now. It was just one small word, and behind it was a door, and behind the door a strip of yellow light, and a bed, and a woman who looked up and smiled.

“No,” said Eni.

The sergeant studied her for a moment. Then he wrote something down.

They brought her father back at seven to pack a bag.

He came up the path between two officers, in handcuffs that he held low, almost politely, in front of him, like a man carrying something he had been asked to mind. His shirt was creased. He had lost one cufflink. He stopped at the foot of the veranda steps and looked at his wife, and she looked at him, and a long, quiet exchange passed between them in which neither of them moved a muscle.

Then he turned his head and found Eni.

“Eniola,” he said.

She came down two steps.

He lowered his voice, so that only she would hear. His eyes were gentle, and steady, and dreadfully tired. Behind the gentleness, down at the bottom, she saw something small and cold and alive, like a fish under ice.

“Do you remember,” he said softly, “the day you came home sick from school?”

The world stopped. It did not slow down. It simply stopped, like a clock on a wall.

He was looking at her. He knew. He had known for ten years, and had never once said a word, and had been kind to her every day since.

“No, Daddy,” said Eni.

He held her eyes for a long moment.

“Good,” he said. And he smiled. It went up on one side.

Then the officers led him away, down the path, through the gate that squealed, and into the back of a green Peugeot with a wire grille. Mama Rotimi was wailing now, openly, with her wrapper over her face. Mama herself did not make a sound. She watched the vehicle until it turned out of the street, and then she turned and went into the house, and the sound of the kitchen tap came faintly down the corridor, running and running.

11.50pm

She lay on her back in her bed and looked at the ceiling.

It had cracks in it. She had known them since childhood, the way you know the lines of your own hand. She counted them from the window to the door. Eleven. She began again, and counted the same eleven. There was a knock on the door, three soft taps, and it opened a hand’s width. A strip of light from the corridor lay across the floor.

“Eni?” It was a small voice. “Are you asleep?”

“No.”

Dami came in, in her nightdress, with a rag doll under one arm, and stood by the bed. She was nine years old. She did not understand what had happened, and she knew exactly what it meant.

“Mummy says Daddy has gone to help somebody.”

Eni looked at her sister’s face in the light from the corridor. Small, pointed, solemn. Their mother’s neck, even then. Their father’s way of narrowing her eyes at anything that wanted to be believed.

“Yes,” she said. “That is right. He has gone to help somebody. Go to sleep.”

“Will he come back?”

“Yes.”

It was the third lie she had told that day. She knew it was a lie as she said it. She knew, as she watched her little sister climb into the bed beside her, and curl against her side, and lay her small, damp head on her shoulder, that she was going to go on telling it for a long time.

She lay with her arm round her, and she did not count the cracks any more.

She counted her sister’s breathing, instead. Slow, then slower. In. Out. She did not know yet how many doors there were in a house, and how soon her sister would need to learn to knock on every one.

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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.