The Third Door — Chapter 31: The Obituary

Chapter summary

An obituary draws Tonye toward Lagos, where Yoruba and Eniola’s name expose her buried identity.

6.40am, Sunday 16 August 2026, Old GRA, Port Harcourt

The newspaper had been left on the counter by mistake.

It was Boma’s mistake. She had come in the evening before with a parcel of fried fish for Oyin’s lunch, wrapped in the Sunday edition because that was how fish was wrapped in Port Harcourt and always had been, and she had gone out again in a hurry, leaving the paper behind like a dropped glove. Nobody had thrown it away. It lay folded in four at the end of the counter, with a pale translucent stain of oil across its front page, and on Sunday morning, before the shop opened, Tonye picked it up to move it, and it fell open in her hands at the obituaries.

She did not read the obituaries. She never had. It was one of her rules, a habit of the eye that she had never thought to examine: she let those pages of black borders pass as one lets a funeral procession pass on the road, with the face turned politely to the wall.

But the paper lay open, and in the corner of the right-hand page, between a retired colonel and a bishop’s wife, there was a photograph of an old woman in a nurse’s cap. It was an upright woman with a firm mouth and hooded, patient eyes, the eyes of someone who had spent her life watching other people sleep. The cap sat on her head like a folded paper boat. The photograph had been taken a long time ago, and had been enlarged until the grain showed, so that her face seemed to be

looking out through a screen of fine rain.

Tonye looked at it for longer than she meant to.

REST IN PEACE. Mrs. Abisola Eniola Oyelaran (Mama Eniola). Retired Senior Nursing Officer. Born 3 March 1950. Passed away peacefully on Tuesday 11 August 2026.

Below it ran the usual list, set in tight grey type. She was survived by two daughters, Mrs. Eniola Bankole and Pharm. Damilola Lawal. She was preceded in death by her husband, Dr. Folarin Oyelaran. The funeral service would be held on Saturday 22 August at ten o’clock in the morning at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, Akoka, Lagos, with interment to follow at Atan Cemetery, Yaba. The family would receive guests afterwards at the late Mama’s residence.

Eniola.

It was only a name. Half the women in Nigeria were called Eniola. And it was the custom, everywhere, for a mother to be called by her firstborn’s name, so that Mama Eniola meant only the mother of Eniola, who was the elder of the two daughters listed in the notice, a Mrs. Bankole, whom Tonye had never met in her life.

She told herself all this, calmly, in order, standing at the end of her own counter with the generator ticking behind the wall and the rain beginning to patter on the zinc. But the name did not move out of her way.

It stood in the middle of her mind like a person in a doorway. She looked at the photograph, at the folded cap, and for a moment the

grain of the print seemed to shift, and she saw, quite plainly and from a great height, a woman in a wheelchair beside a window. A rug across her knees. Small hands folded on the rug, cracked and brown at the knuckles, the hands of someone who had spent thirty years of nights on her feet.

Eniola. My own.

It was not a voice she heard. It was a voice she remembered hearing, and the two are as different as a letter and the smell of a letter.

Tonye put the newspaper down on the counter, carefully, as one puts down a glass that is full.

Her hands were shaking. She looked at them with a kind of interest, as though they belonged to somebody else.

9.10am

“Ma, you dey alright?” Oyin had come in with her bag still on her shoulder and her braids wet from the rain. She looked at Tonye’s face and then at the newspaper, and then at Tonye’s face again. “Somebody die?”

“Nobody I know.”

“Then why you dey look like say you see ghost?” “I did not sleep.” Tonye folded the paper into four and slid it into the drawer under the till. “Oyin. I shall be away from Friday evening until Monday. Mr. Ibifuro can open the Trans-Amadi

branch and you will run this one.”

“Away where?”

“Lagos.”

“Lagos?” Oyin’s eyebrows went up. “For wetin? You no dey go anywhere.”

“A funeral,” said Tonye.

“Whose?”

She opened her mouth to say a distant relative, which was the lie she had prepared. It did not arrive. What came instead was the plain truth, in a voice that sounded so ordinary that she almost believed it was somebody else’s.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I only know that I have to be there.”

Oyin studied her for a moment with the grave, unsurprised look of a young woman who had learned that her employer was a country with borders she was not meant to cross.

“I go carry your bag,” she said.

9.30pm, Friday 21 August 2026, Mile One Motor Park

The park at night was exactly as she remembered it, which was strange, because she did not think she remembered it at all. It was the same bowl of noise and sodium light, the same long rows of buses with their engines coughing, the same tray of boiled eggs balanced on the same sort of head. Touts called the names of

cities: Lagos! Lagos! Ojota, Ojota! Ibadan, Ore, Benin! A boy ran past her with a crate of sachet water and a woman roasted groundnuts over a drum of embers, and the smell followed her through the dark.

She had bought a black dress that afternoon at the mall on Peter Odili Road. It was plain, loose and cut to the ankle. She had folded it into a bag with a pair of black shoes and a cardigan and nothing else. She wore dark glasses, although it was dark.

She bought her ticket from a clerk in a bobble hat who looked up from a ledger and said, in the bored voice of his profession, “Name?”

“Tonye Briggs.”

He wrote it down. He tore off a ticket the colour of weak tea and slid it under the glass.

She took the window seat of a blue coach with a picture of the Virgin Mary above the driver, and held her bag against her knees. Nobody sat beside her. The engine caught. The bus lurched out of the park and swung onto the road north-west, toward the long black ribbon of the East-West highway, and the lights of Port Harcourt fell behind her one by one, like the lights of a town seen from an aeroplane.

She sat with her forehead against the glass. She did not know the road. She told herself that, firmly, as a woman tells herself she does not know the name of a tune that is already running in her head. And yet at Ore, at four in the morning, when the bus stopped at a petrol station and the hawkers

swarmed up to the windows with trays of boiled groundnuts, she found herself leaning toward the glass and saying a thing in a language that she did not speak.

A woman holding up a bottle of water had called out, “Mama, omi tutu!”

“E se, ma,” said Tonye, quite naturally. Thank you, ma. “Mo ti ni.”

I already have some.

The woman blinked. She said something warm in Yoruba, laughing, and moved on to the next window.

Tonye sat with both hands pressed flat against her mouth.

She had not meant to say it. She had not known that she knew how. It had come out of her as a breath comes out, with no more thought than that, and it was only afterwards, in the long silence that followed, that she understood that she had answered in easy, perfect Yoruba, with the lilt of Lagos in it.

The bus lurched and began to move.

She took her ticket stub out of her pocket. It was a damp slip of paper with a stamp on one side and a clerk’s careless ink on the other. She turned it over. She took a biro out of her bag.

She did not decide what to write. When she looked down, the word was there in her own hand, in round, even, careful letters, as if she had been writing it all her life.

Eniola.

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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.