The Third Door — Chapter 5: The Wrong Friend

10.20am, Tuesday 7 March 2023, Old GRA, Port Harcourt

The signboard outside still smelled of paint.

Briggs Pharmacy was four months old. Blue letters on white, a green cross, a ramp at the side for wheelchairs, and a bell on the door that Tonye had bought herself because she liked to know, always, when someone was coming in.

It rang now.

The woman who walked through it did not so much enter as arrive. She was short and wide and bright as a market, in an ankara wrapper of orange and purple that made the shelves behind her look timid. Bangles clattered on both wrists. A phone was clamped to her ear, and she was shouting into it in a language Tonye did not speak.

“…no, no, no, tell am make he bring the white chairs first, the gold ones go dey for evening. Abi na me go carry am? I dey come.” She hung up, turned toward the counter, and stopped dead.

Silence fell on the shop like a dropped tray.

“Tonye?”

Tonye lowered the box of gloves in her hands.

“Tonye Briggs? Government Girls’? SS3 Arts?” The woman put both hands over her mouth. Behind them, her voice rose. “Chai! Na you! Na you for real!”

“Good morning, ma,” Tonye said. “I think you have the wrong person.”

“Which wrong person? Make I see your face.” The woman had crossed the shop in four steps and was peering at her from a distance that would have been rude in a doctor. “Hmm. The face don change small. You don fat! But the eyes. And the voice, my ear dey remember am.” She snapped her fingers. “Wait. You no know me? Boma! Boma Wokoma! We share one locker!”

“I’m sorry,” Tonye said, in the polite voice she had spent a year learning. “I never attended that school. I grew up in Ibadan.”

“Ibadan?” Boma’s whole face fell and rose again. “But your name na Tonye Briggs?”

“It’s on the signboard.”

“Eh? Abi I dey blind?” Boma twisted to look, saw the blue letters through the glass, and burst into a laugh so large it made the vitamin bottles tremble. “Ha! See me! Standing in your shop, shouting your name like say na market!”

Tonye gave the small, courteous smile she kept for strangers.

“I get that a lot,” she said. “Apparently there are many of us.”

“Many of una?” Boma wiped her eyes. “No o. The Tonye I know left for Canada after SS3. Her father na Navy man from Abonnema. She promise say she go write me, and I never see letter since. Twenty-five years.” She sighed, and the bangles sighed with her. “I dey look for her face every time I enter a new shop. Na sickness.”

“I’m sorry you haven’t found her.”

“Me too. But you…” She tilted her head. “You hold your shoulders the way she hold hers. Like say you dey wait for somebody to knock.”

A small cold finger passed down Tonye’s back.

“A coincidence,” she said.

“E fit be.” Boma shrugged. “But I no dey believe coincidence. My husband say na my sickness.” She put a hand out. “Boma Wokoma. Fabrics and Event Décor, two streets from here. If you dey plan your opening, I get chairs.”

Tonye shook the hand. It was warm and dry and gripped like a market woman’s.

“Tonye Briggs,” she said. “Pharmacist.”

“Of course you be pharmacist,” Boma said happily. “Give me one vitamin C, and check my pressure. If e high, na you cause am.”

11.05am

When the bell had rung behind Boma for the last time, Tonye walked slowly to the back office, closed the door, and stood with her palms flat on the steel desk.

Her heart was going hard and neatly, like someone counting.

Of all the names.

She had chosen it in a hurry, in the first terrible week, from the congratulations page of a Sunday newspaper. A column of small proud announcements, a parent’s pride in a graduating daughter. Tonye Briggs, First Class Honours. She had picked it the way you pick a seat on a crowded bus: because it was there and it was empty and it sounded like a woman with nothing to hide.

She had never thought the name might belong to someone who still answered to it.

There was no way to undo it now. The name was on the lease, on the pharmacy licence, in the gazette, on the sign outside and the degree on the wall. She had put it everywhere, and she had put it everywhere on purpose. A name was a door, and she had nailed this one open behind her.

It was too late.

She took the pad from the drawer and wrote it out, slowly.

Tonye Briggs.

The pen made the letters easily. It always did. She looked at them and felt, as she sometimes did, a faint dizziness, as though she were reading an address she had once known.

She tore off the page, folded it small, and laid it in the bottom drawer on top of a brown folder she had been given and had not opened.

Then she knocked on the office door, three times, from the inside, which made no sense at all.

She had done it before she realised.

8.05am, Wednesday

The bell rang before the shop had properly woken up.

“I no fit sleep,” Boma announced, bursting in with a steel flask in one hand and a foil packet in the other. “Na you dey worry me. So I carry akara and pap come. If you don eat, eat. If you don eat, eat again.”

“Ma, I did not…”

“Boma. Na Boma.” She dropped the food on the counter and pushed a stool toward the display shelf. “I know say you no be my Tonye. My husband explain am to me last night. He say, ’Boma, if the woman say she from Ibadan, she from Ibadan.’ But I no fit leave you like this. Everybody need person wey go bring akara.”

Tonye stared at the foil packet. It was still warm. The smell rose in a golden cloud: fried bean, pepper, hot oil.

She could not remember the last time someone had brought her food without wanting something.

“Sit,” she heard herself say.

Boma sat. She talked. She talked about Obaro, her husband, a ship engineer who vanished offshore for three months at a time and came home smelling of diesel and sleeping through his own sons. She talked about the three boys, the shop, the landlord, a church member who had stolen her blue lace. She laughed at her own stories before she had finished them.

Tonye ate the akara. She ate all of it.

At some point in the middle of the second story, she realised she was smiling. Properly, with the right side of her mouth, as she had not done since the night bus.

She stopped at once.

Boma noticed nothing. She was too busy describing her landlord’s wife.

But when the bell rang again and Boma had gone, Tonye stood at the window with the empty foil in her hand and thought of the girl who had left for Canada twenty-five years ago.

Somewhere in the world, if the world was kind, there was a real Tonye Briggs. She had her own face and her own voice and her own life, and a friend who had never stopped looking for her.

And Tonye had taken her name without asking.

The Third Door · Continue reading

Chapter 6 is the next 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.