Chapter summary
Dami keeps vigil through Mama’s death, then leaves unreachable Eni a grief-stricken final spoken message.
11.30pm, Monday 10 August 2026, Akoka, Lagos
The doctor had said days. He said it on Friday, in the corridor, with his bag already in his hand, and he said it kindly. Her heart is tired, madam. We can only keep her comfortable.
Dami had taken leave from the hospital pharmacy the same afternoon. She carried a mat up the stairs and laid it on the floor beside the big bed, and she had slept on it every night since, in her clothes, with her shoes by her head, like a woman waiting for a train that would not announce itself.
Bukola slept in the corridor. Mama Rotimi, who was eighty-one now and walked with two sticks, came over twice a day and sat by the bed with her wrapper tied tight and her lips moving. She did not say what she was saying. She had known Mama for nearly forty years, and had a right to her own conversation.
On Monday night the house was quiet. The rain had come and gone. A single lamp stood on the bedside table with a cloth thrown over its shade to soften the light, so that the whole room glowed a dim, tired amber, like the inside of a lantern. Beside the lamp, pinned to a folded handkerchief, lay the thing Mama had never let anyone move. It was her nursing watch. A round fob watch with a white face and a second hand, which she had worn upside down on her uniform for thirty years, so that she could read it at a glance with her hands full. She had bought it with her first pay in 1974. It still kept good
time.
Dami lay on the mat and listened to it tick.
She listened to her mother’s breathing as well. It had gone shallow, with long gaps. The breaths came in small dry sips, and then stopped, and Dami waited, and they started again. She had been listening for three nights. She no longer knew whether she was asleep or awake.
At some point after two, Mama spoke.
“Dami.”
She was up on her elbow before the word was finished.
“I am here, Mama.”
“Is it raining?”
“No. It has stopped.”
“Hm.” Mama’s eyes were shut. Her lips barely moved. “Good. The roof leaks in the corner. Tell your father.”
“I will.”
“And take the clothes in.”
“Yes, Mama.” She said nothing else for a long time. Dami took her hand. It was dry and light and cool, and the skin on the back of it hung loose, like a glove a size too big. She sat there holding it and watched the second hand of the watch sweep round its white face.
Her mother’s chest lifted. It fell.
It lifted. It fell.
Then there was a gap.
Dami counted. She did not decide to. It was simply something her mind did. One. Two. Three. She counted to ten, and then to twenty. She leaned forward and put her ear close to her mother’s mouth.
Nothing.
She waited. She counted again.
The watch ticked.
The watch said fourteen minutes past three.
She did not scream. She had always thought that she might. She had imagined it, in a dull way, for years, the way you imagine a tooth being pulled. In the end she only sat straight on the edge of the bed with her mother’s hand still in hers, and listened to the house.
A gecko clicked on the wall. The generator next door coughed. Down in the street, someone was dragging a bucket across concrete. She closed her mother’s eyes with two fingers. She straightened the sheet. She drew the handkerchief with the watch pinned to it a little nearer to the lamp, so that the light fell on the white face, and she thought, Somebody should wind it.
Then she put her head down on the bed beside her mother’s hip and cried.
It was not a loud cry. It came in long dry heaves, out of the pit of her stomach. She cried for her mother, who had been tired for thirty years and had never once complained of it. She cried because the room was so quiet. And under all that, a long way under, she cried for something else, which she had not said aloud since a hot afternoon in Abuja in the shade of a bus, and which she said now, into the sheet, in a flat voice.
“Eni. Where are you?”
5.50am
Bukola’s wail woke the house at four. It started in the corridor and went on until Mama Rotimi came up the stairs on her two sticks and took the girl into her arms and rocked her, saying, ”Ah, Mama Eniola! Una don leave me for this world! Una don leave me!” in a high rolling chant that had gone out of fashion everywhere but in houses like this.
Dami let them. She had made the first calls already. The doctor. The funeral home on Herbert Macaulay. Mama’s cousin in Ibadan, who would tell the rest. She had written the times and the numbers on the back of an envelope in neat block capitals, because it was something to do with her hands. She stood at the window of the sitting room and looked out at the street. It was getting light. A woman in a green wrapper was sweeping the pavement in front of the bakery with long, unhurried
strokes. A boy went past on a bicycle with a crate of eggs balanced on the back.
She took out her phone.
She had not planned to. The number had been in her contacts for twenty years, under Eni, and she had not deleted it. She had dialled it hundreds of times. Then she had stopped, a long time ago, in a market, with a man who mended phones. She had told herself she was not that kind of person any more.
She pressed it.
The line clicked. A woman’s recorded voice came on, polite and flat, in English and then in Yoruba.
The number you have dialled is not available. Please check the number and try again.
She had heard it three hundred and eleven times. It was always the same. Up to now she had cut it off at the third word.
This time she held the phone against her ear and let it finish.
There was a click. A silence. Then the recording began again from the top, and she let it play again, all the way through.
“Eni,” she said.
The voice went on, polite and flat. “Eni. It’s Dami. Mama is gone. She died at fourteen minutes past three. I was with her. She asked about the roof, and she wanted me to take the clothes in.” Her voice cracked, and she waited, and went on. “I don’t know where you are. I don’t know whether you
can hear this. I don’t think you can. But Mama is gone, and I wanted you to know, and there is nobody else I can tell.”
The recorded voice began a third time.
Outside, the sun came up behind the bakery. The woman with the broom paused, leaned on it, and looked up at the sky.
Dami did not hang up.
She stood at the window with the phone against her ear and let the empty voice go round and round, and she kept talking to it, until the light was all the way up and Bukola came to ask what she should do about the food.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 31 is the next door
The story continues. Follow the next chapter through the door.
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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.
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