Chapter summary
Eniola’s hidden notebooks chart childhood trauma, betrayed marriage, revenge, and her deliberate escape into Tonye.
Akoka, Lagos, 1990 to 2022
She had kept the three exercise books for thirty-six years, and in all that time nobody had asked to read them.
They were not a diary. A diary is a thing one writes for the sake of a future reader, however unlikely, and she had never once imagined that anyone would come after her. They were more in the nature of a ledger: a place to enter what was owed and what was paid. In them she wrote what she could not say aloud and had nowhere else to put, and when a page was full, she turned it, and did not look back.
Tuesday 9 October 1990
Today I came home early because I had a hot head. Mama’s night, so she was asleep. The bus driver was very kind.
I am not going to write the rest.
The remainder of the page had been torn out, so close to the stitching that only the ghost of a ragged edge remained. The next entry began three days later, in a different pencil, in a smaller hand.
Friday 12 October 1990
Things I will do when I am big. 1. Be a pharmacist (nobody shouts at pharmacists). 2. Learn to swim. 3. Sit at a table where nobody counts how much I eat. 4.
Sing the whole hymn on the veranda and not stop. 5. Have a shop by the water with my name over the door. 6. Never be in a house when it is quiet.
The sixth had been rubbed out, with such force that it had left a grey scar in the paper. Anyone holding it to the light could still read it.
Saturday 10 June 1995
Daddy bought me a calculator with a cover. It is the best thing I own. He says I am his sensible one. He is extra nice to me these days, and I do not like it, and I do not know why.
Number 4: I have stopped singing the hymn. It does not matter. I hum it. It is the same.
Saturday 19 July 2003
Third year of pharmacy school. Daddy is in Kirikiri awaiting a verdict. Mama says nothing. I have learned to count in my sleep.
Number 2: I still cannot swim.
Monday 10 October 2005
I sent Dami to Ibadan today. I told her to knock first, three times, and to wait. I did not tell her why. I think she thought it was a game.
Gbenga was gone by Sunday night. I wish I had been home on Thursday. I wish I had been in that corridor. I wish I had knocked once, a long time ago.
Saturday 21 March 2009
I married a man who laughs well. It is not nothing. Mama cried. I did not.
Number 3: There was a table. It was long, and I sat at the head of it, and everyone watched me eat.
Thursday 4 September 2014
A receipt in an invitation. A hotel in Ikeja. I put it back exactly. A woman is a ledger, I think. If you keep it correct, nobody asks what is in it.
Number 5: I looked at the list tonight. A shop by the water. I laughed. I do not even know whether I want it.
Sunday 21 June 2020
Dami cried in my sitting room for two hours about a text message. I got out the paperbacks. We have started something. It is the first thing I have enjoyed in six years, and I do not know whether to be ashamed of that.
Chapter One.
Thursday 13 January 2022
It was her. The face. The same woman, or her daughter, or the ghost of a woman who has waited twenty-two years in a lift. I sat behind a fern. I counted the floors to seven.
My husband is being kept warm by the one person on earth I owe an apology. And I find I cannot hate either of them.
I have started to work out how to go.
The writing grew smaller on the next page, and neater, with the cool, even slant of a pharmacist’s prescription. It was not a confession. It was a list.
PLAN A. Make him feel it. (Done by the end of January.)
PLAN B. Leave. Port Harcourt. (Why: it is by the water. I have never been. No one I know has ever been. Dami will not look there first.)
The name: choose it from a newspaper. Something with nothing to hide.
The money: He cannot report it. (The ledger. Leave the ledger.)
The phone: north.
The driver: H. (He owes me. God forgive me for using it.)
Ibadan: I know it. I visited Dami at St. Monica’s every month for four years. I know the road, the market, the smell of the rain. If anyone asks, I grew up there.
Shoes. A bag. A hymn I cannot finish.
Remember: you must not look back. Whatever you do, when you are gone, do not look back. She had looked at the last line for a long time. Then she had taken her pencil, and drawn a line under the words Plan B, and then a second line, harder, under the first, until the lead snapped and the point ran off across the page in a black streak, like the track of a mouse.
Friday 4 February 2022
Eleven days.
I find I am not afraid. It frightens me that I am not afraid.
If anyone ever reads this: I never meant to hurt her. Either of them. I only wanted to be somebody who was allowed to leave.
She had closed the book, and tied the ribbon in a bow, and put it in a pillowcase at the bottom of a box in a room she had once shared with her sister, and laid a copy of a paperback on top.
Then she had gone downstairs, with a blanket in her arms and a torn chapter folded small in her handbag, and washed the dishes with a laughing girl, and counted the minutes of her voice.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 36 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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