The Third Door — Chapter 3: Sunday Scripts

1.30pm, Sunday 19 December 2021, Lekki Phase 1, Lagos

Dami knocked three times on a door that was already open.

She noticed only when the waiter looked at her strangely. She smiled, said “Habit,” and walked into Sable Café as if she had meant to do it.

She had never asked herself where the habit came from. Some things you simply carry, like a birthmark or your mother’s long neck.

The café was the kind of place that charged four thousand naira for a cappuccino and served it with a small, smug biscuit. Exposed brick. Hanging plants. A chalkboard with a quotation about courage. On Sundays, after church had let out and before the evening traffic woke up, it filled with women who had somewhere better to be and nowhere better to say so.

Eni was already at their table.

She always was. She sat in the corner by the window with her back to the wall and her eyes on the entrance, a cup in front of her and her phone face down. Even in a room full of strangers, Dami thought, her sister arranged herself like someone expecting to be surprised.

“You’re late,” Eni said.

“I am eleven minutes early by the standards of any normal person.”

“Then I am early by the standards of a pharmacist.”

They kissed cheeks. Eni smelled of cocoa butter and the faint ghost of cigarettes she swore she did not smoke. She was forty-one and prettier than she thought she was, with small, watchful eyes and a smile that leaned to one side as though it carried a secret it was too polite to spill. Dami, eleven years younger and ten kilos lighter, had their mother’s neck and their father’s habit of narrowing her eyes at anything that wanted to be believed.

She sat. A waiter appeared with a menu she did not need.

“Madam, una wan order? We get fresh chin-chin today.”

“Cappuccino,” Dami said. “And chin-chin, abeg. A small one. Don’t give me the big one that will look at me.”

The waiter grinned and went.

The Sunday ritual had begun by accident eighteen months earlier.

Dami had come to Eni’s house to cry about a text message she had found on Hakeem’s phone. It had been from a woman saved as Bukky Dispatch, and it said, in a tone of such casual intimacy that Dami wanted to be sick, Safe journey, my love. Eni had listened to the whole story without interrupting. Then she had opened a drawer, taken out a battered paperback with a cracked spine, and laid it on the table between them.

“Do you remember this?” she had asked.

Of course Dami remembered. They had grown up on those books, passed back and forth under the sheets like contraband. Cheap, glossy, outrageous romances with titles like The Ferry Never Waits and Her Name Was Lagos, borrowed from the hospital library where their mother worked nights. The heroines were always betrayed in Chapter Two and magnificent by Chapter Nine.

“What if,” Eni had said slowly, “we stopped crying and started reading?”

It had begun as a joke. Then the joke acquired rules. Each Sunday, over coffee, they gave a report in the language of their childhood: Chapter Four. The woman in the green dress. Chapter Seven. The hotel bar. Chapter Eleven. The stranger who knows too much. They picked their scenes. They chose their men with care, as a surgeon chooses an instrument. They met in serviced apartments on Victoria Island that Eni booked under the name of her pharmacy, and they came out afterwards looking like women who had been somewhere else.

It was a revenge so elaborate that it almost stopped being revenge. It became a kind of theatre. It became a way of being the author for once, and not the character.

“Report,” Eni said, stirring her coffee.

“Chapter Six,” Dami said. “The airport hotel bar.”

“Ooh.”

“The man ordered what the villain orders in the book. I said my line. You’re not from here. He said, Nobody is. It was very good. Then he asked what I did for a living.”

“And?”

“I said pharmacist. He asked if I could look at a rash.”

Eni put her head on the table and shook with silent laughter. Dami joined her, and for a minute neither of them could speak. At the next table a woman in a yellow head-tie glanced over with the sour interest of the very respectable.

Dami’s phone rang. Hakeem. She answered on speaker, to make a point.

“Babe, I dey road. Traffic na wa o. I go reach by evening, abeg make you cook.”

“Which road?” Dami said sweetly. “Ikeja or Ikoyi?”

A pause. “Why you dey ask?”

“Just wondering how you spell road.”

He laughed, because he did not know what else to do, and hung up. Eni lifted her cup in a small toast.

Mama had called twice that morning.

The first time she had asked whether Dami had eaten. The second time she had asked whether Eniola had come home from school yet, and whether someone should go and fetch her, because the rain was heavy.

“She said it was raining,” Dami told her sister quietly. “It was twenty-eight degrees.”

Eni turned her cup a quarter turn on the saucer. She did that when she did not want to look at something directly.

“I’ll go on Wednesday,” she said. “I’ll take her a new blanket.”

“She won’t know which blanket.”

“She’ll know it was brought.”

There was a small silence, soft as dust. Their mother was seventy-two and a retired nurse. For thirty years she had worked nights so that her daughters could study, and the work had taken what it took. Now, little by little, the rest was leaving too, without noise, like a tenant who has decided not to pay.

Eni excused herself.

Dami watched her cross the café. At the door of the ladies’ room she stopped, knocked three times, softly and evenly, waited, and went in.

She does it everywhere, Dami thought. I do it everywhere. Nobody has ever asked us why.

She took out her phone and saw that her hand was not quite steady.

2.40pm

Eni came back with fresh lipstick and an expression Dami could not read.

“Tunde turned his phone over at the dinner on Friday,” she said, sitting. “Face down. Right in front of me.”

“Ngozi?”

“No. Ngozi he would have left face up and asked me to read the text aloud.” She pulled the chin-chin closer and studied it as though it were evidence. “This one, he was careful.”

“Careful how?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Dami waited. She had learned that her sister could not be hurried. Eni simply arrived at things, the way a ship arrives at harbour, when the tide and the captain were ready.

Outside, a generator started up and the lights in the café flickered and recovered. A child at another table was told, twice, not to touch the plants.

“You know what, Dami?” Eni said at last. She was smiling, but only with half her mouth, the right half. “I think I’m done keeping score.”

Dami laughed.

But as the sound left her, she realised it was the wrong response. Eni had kept score of everything since the day she could count. Marks. Rice. Who owed whom a phone call. Which cousin had come to which funeral. Her whole life was a ledger, kept in a neat hand and never once closed.

She had never, in thirty years, said she was done.

The Third Door · Continue reading

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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.