The Third Door — Chapter 41: The Wig

Chapter summary

Kamsi carries her mother’s wig to the waterside, counting toward release without revealing her choice.

5.45am, Friday 16 October 2026, Port Harcourt Waterside

The creek at Port Harcourt waterside smelled of mud and woodsmoke and fish, and at a quarter to six in the morning, in the grey light before the sun, it lay as flat and dark as a sheet of glass.

Kamsi stood at the end of a rotting jetty with her back to the shore.

She had walked here from Diobu, through streets that were just beginning to wake: women sweeping, a boy with a tray of bread, a man pulling a handcart of plantain through the puddles, calling the price. She had passed the creek houses on their stilts, with their rusted roofs and their strings of washing, and the long canoes pulled up on the mud, and a woman gutting fish at the water’s edge, who had looked up at the red coat and the bare, plain, unadorned head, and looked down again.

She had not worn the wig since Wednesday. She held it now in both hands, as one holds something that has been drowned and brought back. It was heavier than it looked. It always was. The round, dark, dusty cloud of it lay across her palms in the dawn with the faint, sweet, stale smell of every room it had been carried through, a bridal shop in Lekki and a ballroom and a hotel lobby and a dozen cars at night, and a flat in Ogba, where a woman had once put it on in front of a mirror and said, Nne, who is this beautiful woman?

She had watched it all from across the road.

On Thursday morning she had been in the doorway of the shop in a headscarf and glasses, between a woman selling credit cards and a boy with a tray of watches, when the man in the charcoal suit went in. She had seen him leave, afterwards, with his shoulders so straight that they trembled, and the small round man in the brown safari suit run after him, apologising to nobody. She had watched them climb into a car and drive away, and had understood that she was never going to see either of them again.

She had thought that she would feel glad.

She had felt nothing. It was only a man, in the end, going away in the rain.

The sun was coming.

A thin line of light had begun to show along the far bank, between the mangroves, the colour of a dull coin. A flock of egrets lifted off the water in a slow white rustle and went across the sky. Behind her, the town was rising: horns, generators, a radio playing a hymn.

She held the wig out over the water. She had always known what she would do with it. She had known since a Saturday in Balogun Market, with a thin boy in a vest saying, Nobody wan wear am. She had thought of it as a weapon, then, because it was a face. A way to make a woman look up at a lobby, at a door, at a hotel lift, and see her own ghost.

It had never been a weapon. It had been a way of keeping her mother in the room.

Finish am, her grandmother had said. Find her. Finish am.

She had found her.

She had done it as thoroughly as anything she had ever done. She had followed her for twenty years, to the end of a country, and she had knocked on her door. She had stood in front of her with a page of her mother’s handwriting, and read it out loud.

It was not you. It was never you.

She did not know whether that was finishing. She had expected, in her imaginings, a kind of shining silence, a thing like a bell struck once and left to ring. What she had been given was a woman on a shop floor with her hands over her face, saying: I do not know what I am sorry for.

She does not know.

She had gone back to Diobu, in the dark, and lain on the mattress for the rest of the night with her eyes open, and for the first time in her life she had been unable to count anything.

She did not know what to call it. It was not forgiveness. She was not ready for that. It was not pity, either, although there was a great deal of that in it. It was nearer to something that she had felt on one single occasion before, at seven, in a hot flat in Ogba, with her mother’s cold hand in hers: a fear so enormous, and so quiet, that it stopped being fear and became a kind of listening.

She stood at the end of the jetty, in the first light, and she listened.

There was the water slapping the piles. There was the hymn on the radio, thin and far away. There was her own heart.

She thought of her mother’s laugh, and the way it climbed when the green car came. She thought of a child in a yellow pinafore who had closed a door so softly. She thought of a woman on a shop floor with her hands over her face.

I will tell her what I wanted to tell her at the door.

Her fingers tightened on the wig.

She lifted her arm. The water below was the colour of a bruise, patient, still and deep. It would take it without a sound. It would take it as it had taken the waste of a city for a hundred years, and a thousand shoes, and a thousand boats, and the little ferries that went out on stormy nights and did not come home.

She drew a long breath, and let it out.

She began to count.

One.

The first rim of the sun came up over the mangroves, red and slow.

Two.

Three.

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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.