Chapter summary
A renewal form forces Tonye toward the erased former name her hand still almost remembers.
8.50am, Monday 22 June 2026, Old GRA, Port Harcourt
The pharmacists’ council had moved its annual renewal online, and Tonye had been staring at the same screen for twenty minutes.
She had filled in everything. Name: Tonye Briggs. Registration number. Premises: three, with addresses. Superintendent pharmacist: herself. The system had swallowed every line without complaint, the way a good machine does, until it reached a box near the bottom.
Former name(s), if any.
She typed N/A. A red line appeared beneath it, thin as a cut.
Our records show a change of name on file. Please enter your former name exactly as gazetted.
Tonye sat back in her chair. The cursor blinked in the empty box, patient as a finger tapping. Beyond her office door, Oyin was arguing with a supplier about a late delivery, and the rain was coming down again on the zinc roof, steady and loud, the way it came on every afternoon in June. She knew there was a former name. She knew about the change; she was not a foolish woman. The papers were somewhere, in the steel cabinet, in a clear plastic sleeve marked DOCUMENTS in her own hand. She had not looked at them in years. She got up, unlocked the cabinet and dug the sleeve out from the back, beneath the lease agreements.
Inside was a photocopy of a page from the gazette: a column of small print, three notices of change of name stacked one above the other like three people on a staircase.
The middle one had a thick black bar across its first line. Marker pen. Somebody had gone over it again and again, so hard that the paper had curled and split under the nib.
She turned the page over. She held it up to the window. The bar was too thick to read through.
She stood in the grey light with the photocopy in her hand, and she knew whose handwriting the black bar was in.
What she remembered was this.
A Sunday newspaper, bought at a kiosk on Awolowo Road. A page of small proud notices on the inside: engagements, graduations, obituaries. One name circled in biro.
A lift going up. A corridor with carpet. A door that opened before she could knock. The smell of cedar.
A table with two sheets of paper on it, and a pen. A long name written on one line and a short one beside it. A man’s voice, close, asking, “Is that real?”
And her own voice answering, “It is now.” That was all. She could see the table and the pen, and she could see her hand moving across the page. She could not have said what was written on the long line. She had tried before. It was like
trying to hold a word that had slipped out of your mouth in a dream: the shape was there, and the weight, and the first sound, and then nothing, only a smooth place where the rest had been.
She remembered that he had not asked her why. He had asked what name, and what date, and where she wanted the notice published, and whether she would be signing in person. When she said she would not be in Lagos, he said he would see to it. He did not ask where she was going. He said, You don’t have to tell me. She said, I’m not going to. He said, Good.
She remembered a brown envelope with the signed papers in it, zipped into the inside pocket of her bag, and how she had touched it through the cloth every few minutes on the bus, as one touches a sleeping child to be sure it is breathing.
She remembered the first week in Port Harcourt well. She had it entire, every hour of it, the way a person has a house she has lived in. It was the time before that came in pieces.
In the room in Diobu, with the mattress that had belonged to other people, she had sat on the floor with a calendar from a bank and a ballpoint pen.
She had turned the calendar over to its blank back and written the new name.
Tonye Briggs. It looked wrong. The T stood too tall, the B was too round. It looked like a name copied off a signboard by someone who could
not quite read.
She wrote it again. Faster. Then again.
She had been taught at school to write a signature once and keep it for life, and she had never thought of it as something that could be changed. It turned out that it could, but it took time, as it takes time to break in a new pair of shoes. She wrote it one hundred and eleven times that night, in pencil, in pen, large, small, slanting, upright, until her wrist ached and the pages of the calendar were grey with it.
By the end, it had stopped looking like someone else’s handwriting.
By morning, it was the only handwriting she had.
9.30am
She sat down at the desk again with a legal pad.
It was a foolish thing to do, and she knew it. The portal could be mended with a telephone call. A woman at the council would find the old record in two minutes and tell her what to type. She would do that. She would ring at ten.
But she picked up the pen and wrote the name at the top of the page, for no better reason than that her hand wanted something to do. Tonye Briggs.
She wrote it again beneath. Then again.
The pen made the letters easily. They were round and even and quick, and when she signed under them with a flourish, the signature was exactly the one on her lease agreements and her bank cards and her certificate from the University of Lagos.
She wrote it a fourth time, and a fifth.
By the sixth line she was thinking about the supplier, and Chief’s birthday lunch on Friday, and whether Oyin had remembered to order more gloves.
When she looked down, her hand had started a different word.
It began with a capital letter. A tall, narrow one, with three short arms.
She looked at it for a long time.
It was an E.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 28 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.
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