The Third Door — Chapter 26: Thirteen

Chapter summary

Dami survives Gbenga’s assaults, wounds him, and gains Eni’s protection through a lifelong knocking ritual.

4.20pm, Thursday 6 October 2005, Akoka, Lagos

Dami was fourteen when she stopped closing her bedroom door.

Nobody understood it. She had always been a girl who locked it, who had pinned a sign to it in felt-tip, KNOCK FIRST, and who had once reported her own sister to their mother for walking in without asking. Now it stood open night and day, hooked back against the wall with a rubber doorstop, like a mouth that has been told to keep still. When anyone asked, she said it was the heat.

It was not the heat. A closed door was a thing a person could stand behind.

The house had changed since her father went. It had learned to hold its breath. Mama worked double shifts and slept in the afternoons with a pillow over her face, and the rooms filled with the particular silence of a family waiting for a verdict. Into that silence, in 2003, had come Gbenga. He was Mama’s nephew, her sister’s eldest, twenty-one years old and in his second year at a polytechnic in Yaba. He had a big laugh, a gap between his front teeth and a way of filling a doorway, and he had been brought in, as Mama’s sister put it, because a house needs a man in it. He called Dami small madam. For a year he was the cousin who fixed her bicycle chain and borrowed her calculator and ate her share of the groundnuts, and she thought he was the funniest person alive.

Then, in November of 2004, when she was thirteen, he became something else, and for a long time she had no word for it.

The first time left her with a split lip and a story about falling off the school bus. Afterwards he sat on the end of her bed and explained, in a friendly, reasonable voice, what would happen if she told. Nobody would believe her. Mama had enough on her head with Daddy in court. People would say she had asked for it. He was right about all three, and that was the worst of it. He had measured the house like a tailor.

The second time she screamed, and Mama Rotimi’s radio next door was playing too loudly for anybody to hear.

The third time was a Thursday.

She did not remember opening the pen knife. It was the one from her school geometry set, with a silver handle and a blade no longer than her thumb. She remembered the sound he made, a high, astonished sound, like an animal that has stepped on a nail. She remembered that he was on the floor of the corridor with both hands between his legs, and that there was blood on the tiles and on her school skirt, bright as paint, and that the knife was in her hand. Mama Rotimi’s husband drove him to the clinic on Akoka Road in his old Peugeot, with Gbenga moaning on the back seat and a towel pressed to his lap. Dami sat on the stairs in her bloody skirt. Nobody told her to change it. It was as though the house had forgotten she was in it.

The doctor said another half inch and the boy might have bled to death. Or he might never have had children. She heard both through the wall of the clinic’s thin green corridor, and she did not feel anything about either one.

Sunday

They held the meeting in the sitting room after church, among the crocheted headrests and the glass cabinet and the framed certificates her father had earned. There were nine of them. Aunty Funke, Gbenga’s mother, sat on the brown sofa with her handbag on her knees and her eyes swollen. Two uncles stood by the cabinet like men attending a burial they had not been told the cause of. A cousin Dami hardly knew guarded the door with folded arms.

Dami sat on a stool in the middle of the room. Nobody had thought to give her a chair.

“A fourteen-year-old girl,” said Aunty Funke, “took a knife to her own cousin.”

“I know what he did,” Dami said.

“Lies!”

“He did it three times. The first time was last year in November. You can ask…” “Shut your mouth!” Aunty Funke was on her feet. “My son is in a hospital bed. He has stitches. And this one is telling stories. What kind of girl is this? Her father has already shamed this family.

Now she wants to finish the job.”

“Funke,” one of the uncles said. “Sit down.”

“Who will marry her?” said the other, shaking his head. “After a thing like this? A girl who cuts a man?”

Nobody asked her why.

She looked at her mother. Mama sat at the end of the sofa in her church wrapper with her hands in her lap, an upright figure with her eyes fixed on a place in the carpet. She had not slept in two days. Her lips were pressed together so tightly that they had gone pale.

Dami understood, and it was the understanding that hurt. Her father was in the dock on the other side of the city. Her mother was the wife of the man who had killed a student. If she stood up in this room and called her own sister’s son a rapist, the whole street would say like uncle, like nephew, and the family would say look who is talking. There was no ground left under her. Mama had spent it all.

So Mama said nothing. She did not blame Dami. She did not defend her either. She sat there, and her silence went into Dami like a nail into soft wood, slowly, with each tick of the clock.

The front door opened. Eni had come straight from the hospital where she was doing her internship, with her white coat over her arm and her name tag still pinned to her blouse. She stood in the doorway of the sitting room and took in nine faces and one stool, and said, “What is this?”

“Eniola, your sister…”

“I did not ask you.” Eni was looking at Dami. “Tell me.”

Dami told her. She said it in four sentences, in a flat voice that did not seem to belong to her, like a girl reading out someone else’s confession.

Eni listened to the end. Something moved across her face, quick and hard, and was put away. Then she turned to the room.

“Gbenga will be out of this house tonight,” she said. “Aunty, you can take him to your place, or you can take him to the police. Choose. And Dami is not sleeping here again. I will find her a school outside Lagos.”

“You? Who are you to…?”

“I am the one paying,” Eni said. “And I am the one who saw her face when she came home.”

Nobody argued after that. They called it mercy. Gbenga went to his mother’s house in Mushin. Dami was sent to a girls’ boarding school in Ibadan, St. Monica’s, and the family told the neighbours it was because of her father’s trial.

10.40pm

The night before she left, Eni came and sat on the end of her bed. The suitcase stood open by the wardrobe, half packed. The rubber doorstop was still holding the door back against the wall. Eni looked at it for a while, the way a doctor looks at a symptom.

“Why do you leave it open?”

“So I can hear.”

Eni nodded. She did not ask what.

“Listen,” she said. “Where you are going, there will be doors. Dormitories. Bathrooms. Offices. A great many of them. I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“Knock first. Three times. Not hard. Then wait.”

Dami frowned. “Why three?”

“I don’t know.” Eni almost smiled. “It is what I do. One tells them you are there. Two gives them time to say no. Three is so that you have asked.” She took Dami’s fist, uncurled it finger by finger, and tapped her knuckles softly against the wooden bedpost. Three times. “Like that.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Everywhere.”

“Since when?”

Eni did not answer at once. Outside, a generator started up with a cough, and somewhere along the corridor Mama’s slow footsteps passed and stopped at the bathroom door.

“Since a long time ago,” Eni said. “I did not knock once. I have been knocking ever since.” She closed Dami’s hand and held it between both of hers, as one holds something warm that might go out.

“So do it,” she said. “So nobody ever opens a door on you again.”

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