The Third Door — Chapter 4: Pills

9.10am, Saturday 8 January 2022, Lekki Phase 1, Lagos

By nine in the morning, Eni had already run until her thoughts went quiet.

She did it every day at half past five, on a treadmill in a gym where nobody knew her name, with her earphones in and nothing playing. Forty minutes of steady, sweating, unglamorous work. It was not for her waistline, though her husband had begun to notice the waistline and say nice things about it, in the voice of a man congratulating a property he did not plan to keep. It was for the quiet. When the belt was moving, the old pictures could not catch her.

Now she stood behind the dispensary counter of Medix Pharmacy in her white coat, counting tablets into a tray with the flat, quick fingers of long habit, and the pictures were politely waiting outside.

“Aunty Eni.” Chinedu, her junior, leaned over from the till and lowered his voice. “The woman don come again o. The one wey dey buy pregnancy test every month.”

“I see her.”

“E don be like say na her own pharmacy be this one.”

“Chinedu.”

“Sorry, Aunty.”

The woman stood by the glass shelf of vitamins, thirty-something, in a church dress that had been ironed with hope. She wore a wedding ring and a face she had rehearsed. When she reached the counter she placed a test kit on it with both hands, as if it were a plate of something hot.

“Just this one,” she whispered.

Eni rang it up. Then she did something she was not supposed to do. She came round the counter, took the woman’s elbow and led her to the little chair by the blood pressure machine.

“Sit. Drink some water. You are shaking.”

“I’m fine, Ma.”

“You are not, and that is allowed.” Eni pressed a paper cup into her hand. “How long have you been trying?”

“Three years.” The woman’s eyes filled up and she looked at the ceiling, annoyed with them. “My mother-in-law says if there is no child by this December she will find her son another wife. She says it nicely. She says it while serving rice.”

Eni sat on her heels in front of her.

“Your mother-in-law is not in this room,” she said gently. “Right now there is only you and a test and a cup of water. Do it properly. Read the instructions. Whatever it says, it says it to you first.”

The woman laughed wetly and wiped her face with the back of her wrist. She thanked her twice.

When she had gone, Chinedu watched Eni walk back behind the counter.

“Aunty,” he said carefully, “you dey kind for that kind person.”

“It costs nothing.”

It cost a great deal. But she had never found a way to say so.

1.20pm, Sunday 9 January, Surulere

Mrs. Folasade Bankole’s house sat behind a green gate on a street of old trees and older grudges. It had four bedrooms, a veranda with rusting chairs, and a sitting room that smelled of Dettol, camphor and fried plantain. Every Sunday after church, the family came to eat.

There were eleven at the table. A cousin. Two aunts. A pastor’s wife. Tunde at the head, because his mother insisted on it, his sleeves rolled up and his plate full. And Eni, beside him, pretending to be hungry.

“Eniola. Eat. You are too thin.”

“I’m eating, Ma.”

“A woman in your position must keep her flesh.” Mrs. Bankole was seventy-four, small and upright, with a voice like a drawer being closed. “Flesh holds the child.”

“Mama,” Tunde said mildly, through a mouthful of amala.

“What? I’m speaking to my daughter.” She turned her bright, hard gaze back to Eni. “My friend Mrs. Adeniji’s daughter-in-law had twins at forty-four. Forty-four. They gave her herbs from a woman in Ibadan, and now she has two boys.”

“God is good,” said the pastor’s wife.

“Ah ah, Eni,” cousin Bisi added brightly, “even goat dey born. Wetin you dey wait for?”

A few people laughed. It was the laughter of those who think a joke is a window you can open without anyone getting cold.

Eni kept her smile exactly where it was. She had a way of doing it, she had perfected it, a way of lowering her face a half-inch and tilting the smile to the right so that the cruel little pause passed over her like weather.

“You are a pharmacist,” Mrs. Bankole went on, lifting a morsel of pounded yam. “You know medicine. Is there a medicine for what you have?”

“There is nothing wrong with me, Ma.”

“Then why?”

The table went quiet.

Eni looked at her husband.

Tunde was studying his stew. After a moment, he reached over, patted her hand twice, the way you pat a dog you have no intention of walking, and said, “We are in God’s hands, Mama.”

He did not say leave her alone. He did not say it is not her fault. He did not say anything at all that had any weight in it.

“God does not like lazy women,” Mrs. Bankole said, and reached for the pepper.

3.05pm

Eni sat in her car outside the green gate with the engine off.

Tunde had left early. A client call, he said. On a Sunday. He had kissed his mother’s forehead and gone, trailing cologne and an excuse nobody had asked for.

She opened her handbag. Beneath the tissues and the spare keys lay a small round tin that had once held lip balm. She prised the lid open with her thumbnail.

Inside, folded in foil, was a strip of tablets. Pale, small and ordinary.

She pressed one free and swallowed it with a mouthful of water from a warm bottle.

The act was so small, so private, so completely without drama. And yet she knew that if anyone discovered the tin, the whole family would stand around it like mourners at a graveside. For nine years she had told them the doctors had found nothing wrong. For nine years she had let them blame her body, her age, her career, her God.

She had never told them that her body was the one honest participant in the whole arrangement.

A child.

She saw it suddenly, without wanting to. Not a baby in a pram. A girl, small and serious, standing at the end of a corridor, looking at a door that was slightly open. A strip of yellow light on the floor. The shape of a hand on the handle.

Eni shut her eyes.

She did not look at the picture directly. She had learned, long ago, that some pictures were like the sun: you could live beside them for decades so long as you never looked at them head-on.

I will not make a child to stand at a door.

It was the whole reason. It was the only reason. There was no medical report, no secret grief, no brave story. Only a fear so old it had stopped feeling like fear and had become part of the furniture of her mind.

She pressed her thumb against the pulse in her wrist and began to count, slowly, the way women in church count the beads of a rosary. Twenty-one days to go until the cycle ended. Seven days to rest. Then the foil again.

Her phone lit up in her lap.

Client dinner tonight. Don’t wait up. T.

Eni read it twice.

Four Sundays had passed since the year-end dinner. Tunde had had a client for three of them.

She put the phone face down on the seat, the way a certain man had once done in front of her, and she started the engine.

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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.