The Third Door — Chapter 6: The Scrapbook

Chapter summary

Kamsi’s lifelong scrapbook turns family tragedy into patient revenge, drawing her quietly into Eni’s life.

Onitsha and Lagos, 2000 to December 2021

The first photograph Kamsi cut out was of two girls on the steps of a courthouse.

She was eight. Mama Nneka had brought the newspaper home from Main Market wrapped around a parcel of fish, and she had spread it on the kitchen table to iron out the creases while she cooked. Page three. A tall girl in a grey dress, twenty or so, with small eyes and a tired smile that leaned to one side. A younger girl, nine or ten, hanging on to her hand and staring at the camera as if she would like to bite it.

Oyelaran’s daughters leave court, the caption said.

Kamsi did not read well yet. She knew the word Oyelaran. She had heard it in her grandmother’s voice, low and flat, like a stone dropped in a well.

“Mama, who be these ones?”

Her grandmother turned from the stove with the wooden spoon still dripping. She looked at the photograph for a long time. Then she took the scissors from the drawer, cut the picture out in four slow strokes, and pressed it into Kamsi’s hand.

“Keep am,” she said. “Those ones, dem still dey enjoy breakfast.”

That was the first page.

She kept the scrapbook in a shoebox under the bed, beside a second shoebox she was not allowed to open. The second box held her mother’s things. The first held everything else: court reports in brittle yellow newsprint, a hospital notice, a clipping about the abortion doctor’s death cut so neatly that its edges looked sharp enough to draw blood. Over the years it outgrew the box. Mama Nneka bought her a ring-binder. Then, when Kamsi was sixteen and had found the internet in a cybercafé on Awka Road, a flash drive.

She learned them the way other children learned their multiplication tables.

The older daughter was Eniola. Born 1980. A pharmacy degree from the University of Lagos in 2005 that nobody had printed a photograph of. A wedding in 2009: a bride in cream lace, a groom with his arm around her, and a smile in the picture that tilted to the right like a house that had settled. Her husband was Tunde Bankole. He worked in a bank.

The younger one was Damilola. Eleven years behind. A pharmacist too, as if the family could not decide whether to make or to mend.

And the father, Dr. Folarin Oyelaran. Ten years under section 228. In 2008, when Kamsi was fifteen, three lines in a Sunday paper said he had died in Kirikiri of an illness unspecified. She carried it to her grandmother, who read it twice, sat down on the kitchen stool, and wept without any sorrow in her face at all.

“God don cheat me,” Mama Nneka said. “I wanted to watch am rot.”

“What now, Mama?”

The old woman wiped her face with the end of her wrapper. When her eyes lifted, they were dry and enormously calm.

“A debt no dey die when the debtor die, Nne. E just change hands.”

Kamsi folded the newspaper carefully and added it to the box.

She did not rush. It was the thing she was proudest of, later. Revenge, she had decided, was a craft like any other, and like any craft it belonged to people with patience.

She trained as a make-up artist because faces were what she understood. She learned how to age a cheek, to hollow an eye, to make a stranger look like a woman who had been loved. She learned that every face told the truth if you studied it long enough with a brush in your hand. She worked weddings in Lekki and shoots in Ikeja and a film set where she dusted the nose of an actor who had once been famous. She saved. She watched.

She began to follow Eniola the year she turned twenty-six. Once a month at first, then once a week. A rented Corolla parked across the road from the pharmacy in Lekki, a cup of cold zobo in the holder, her eyes on the glass front through a pair of cheap sunglasses. She saw a woman in a white coat bend to speak to a customer in a church dress. She saw her walk to her car with her head down. She saw her stand at the door of a café with her hand raised, hesitate, and knock three times on wood before going in.

Why would anyone knock on an open door?

She wrote it in the margin of her notes and underlined it twice.

She never approached. Approaching was for people who wanted answers. Kamsi had questions, and she was in no hurry to lose them.

December 2021

The bank’s year-end party offered itself like a gift.

A school friend worked on the events team at Atlas Trust. The make-up team had dropped out at the last minute. Would Kamsi do the photo wall? Half her usual rate, and nobody would ask her name.

She wore a mask and a black scarf and an apron, and she stood in the light of the umbrella lamps with her brush and her compact, a small steady piece of furniture in a room too busy to look at her.

She saw Eniola Bankole across the ballroom in an emerald dress.

She watched her for two hours.

The woman held a glass she never drank from. She stood where she could see the door. She smiled at a joke she did not find funny, and the smile leaned right, and Kamsi’s brush stopped over a man’s forehead because something old and cold had gone through her. She had seen that smile before, at seven years old, bending over her in the doorway of a flat in Ogba, holding out a doll in a plastic box. Passed down like a family heirloom to a woman who did not know she carried it.

“Madam, you dey alright?” the man in front of her said.

She was in a ballroom again, with powder on her fingers.

The man was Tunde Bankole.

She had not planned to touch him. She did it anyway: tilted her head, studied his face, tapped powder across his shining forehead. A tired man. A vain man. A man bored with everything he owned, which was the same thing as a man left unguarded.

That is the door, she thought.

A woman’s marriage was the one place she kept her back unguarded. Kamsi had read it once in a magazine and assumed it was a line about love.

The following Saturday, Balogun Market, Lagos Island

The wig shop was no wider than a corridor, and every inch of it was hair.

Heads of it hung from the ceiling like fruit. Long silky waves. Blonde bobs. A row of mannequin heads in a glass case wearing styles nobody had asked for since the Eighties. The attendant, a thin boy in a vest, looked at what she wanted and sighed.

“Madam, this one wey you dey ask, na Nineteen Ninety style. E no dey sell again. Nobody wan wear am.”

“Show me anyway.”

He climbed a stool and lifted it down from a high shelf.

A full, round, dark afro, thick as a cloud and a little dusty. Hair from another age.

She did not tell him why. She did not tell him that she had once lived in a one-bedroom flat where a wig sat on a stand beside the mirror, that her mother called it her second head, that on certain nights Ijeoma Nwosu would put it on and dance in front of the glass and say, “Nne, who is this beautiful woman?” and laugh until she cried.

“I’ll take it,” Kamsi said.

In the small cracked mirror by the till, she pulled it over her own hair and set it with both hands.

And her mother looked back at her.

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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.