Chapter summary
Seven-year-old Kamsi witnesses her mother’s death and learns to turn grief into patient, counted revenge.
Ogba, Lagos, 2000
Seven-year-old Kamsi knew the sound of Uncle Fola’s car long before she knew his name.
It was a low, thick, expensive sound, like a big animal clearing its throat, and it came up the lane every Tuesday and Friday after dark. Every window in the compound twitched. The woman who sold roasted corn at the gate stopped fanning her coals. A dark green SUV, taller than any car on that street, would pull up in front of the yellow building and its headlights would swing across the louvres, across the ceiling of the bedroom, across the wall where Kamsi’s drawings were pinned.
“Nne, go and sleep,” her mother would say, already pulling on her shoes. “I will bring you something.”
She always did.
A doll in a plastic box, with real hair. A red cardigan with gold buttons. A tin of Danish cookies she was allowed to eat only after dinner. A calculator with a cover, because Uncle Fola said a clever girl should be taught to count properly.
“Say thank you to Uncle Fola.”
“Thank you, Uncle Fola.”
He would bend down to her, a big man smelling of a clean shirt and car leather, and smile. A small, crooked smile, one corner higher than the other.
“Good girl,” he would say. “Be good for your mother.”
Kamsi loved the red cardigan. She loved the doll. She did not love what happened to her mother’s laugh when the green car came, how it went higher and thinner, like a glass being tapped with a spoon.
They lived in a one-bedroom flat on the second floor, with a kerosene stove, a small television with a bent aerial, and a single bed they shared, her mother curled around her like a comma. On the shelf beside the mirror sat a wig on a stand, round and dark and enormous, which her mother called her second head.
“Mummy, why you get two heads?”
“One for school,” Ijeoma said, “and one for dancing.”
She was twenty-nine and a postgraduate student of biochemistry at the University of Lagos. She studied at the kitchen table at night with her glasses on the end of her nose and her lips moving. She laughed at everything. She sang while she cooked. On Sunday mornings she put on the wig and danced to the radio until the neighbours knocked, and Kamsi sat on the bed clapping and thought, with perfect certainty, that her mother was the most beautiful woman in Nigeria.
Her father had gone when she was a year old. Nobody spoke of him. He was a gap in the shape of a man.
Uncle Fola was not a gap. Uncle Fola was a weather. He came, and the room changed.
The night before
The voices started late.
Kamsi woke on the narrow bed and found that her mother was not in it. The door to the sitting room was closed, but the flat was small and its walls were thin as a promise.
“I don’t want to, Fola.”
“Ijeoma. Listen to me.”
“I said I don’t want to.”
“You will ruin everything. Do you understand? Everything. My name, my work, my family. I am not asking for much. I know a man. A good man. A doctor. It will take an afternoon.”
“It is a baby.”
“It is a problem.” His voice, which was always so gentle with her, had gone flat and cold as a plate. “And I am telling you how to solve it.”
A long silence. Then Kamsi heard something she had never heard before: her mother crying with her whole body. Not the way children cry. The way a house sounds when it begins to fall.
She lay with the blanket up to her chin and her eyes wide in the dark, and she counted. She did not know why. She counted the cracks in the ceiling from the window to the door. Eleven. She counted her own breaths. She counted the headlights that swept the wall, one, two, until the car pulled away.
The morning after
It was a Friday. School was a short walk. She remembered that her mother did not make breakfast.
She remembered that her mother did not stand when Kamsi came into the sitting room. She sat on the sofa with her knees drawn up, and her face had gone a colour Kamsi had no word for.
“I am going to a clinic with Uncle Fola’s friend,” Ijeoma said. “I will be back soon. Go and play with Chioma downstairs.”
“Mummy, you look sick.”
“I’m fine, Nne.” She smiled, a small, brave, crooked smile. “Go.”
That evening
She came home from Chioma’s flat at seven. The green car was not there.
The door was unlocked.
The bedroom was dark. She switched on the light and her eyes would not, at first, understand what they were being shown. A dark shape on the floor between the bed and the wall. A sheet. Her mother’s feet, bare. A pool spreading dark and shiny across the tiles, much darker than anything that should have been red.
“Mummy?”
“Nne.” A whisper. “Don’t come.”
She came anyway. She knelt in the wet. Her mother’s face was grey against the floor, her lips almost white, her eyes bright with a terrible, patient calm.
“Mummy, I will get somebody.”
“Sit by me.” A hand found hers, cold and slick. “Sit by me and count. Count for me. I want to hear you count.”
So Kamsi counted.
She counted to a hundred. She counted again. She counted the small rise and fall of her mother’s chest, quick and shallow, like a kettle coming to the boil, and then slower, and then in gaps that seemed to stretch. She counted until the numbers went to nonsense. She counted until she finally found her voice and screamed, and the neighbours came running, and a man pulled her away, and the counting stopped.
Two days later
Her grandmother came from Onitsha in a hired bus with a plastic bag of clothes and an expression like a locked door.
She did not cry at the flat. She did not cry at the hospital mortuary. She sat on the bed with Kamsi in her arms and looked at the wig on its stand for a very long time. Then she lifted her granddaughter’s chin with one hard, trembling finger.
“Listen to me, Nne,” Mama Nneka said. “Listen well, because I go talk am only once.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Dem kill your mother.”
“The clinic…”
“Dem kill am. The doctor, and the other doctor, and the man with the car wey send am go there. And dem go dey enjoy breakfast while she dey cold. But God no dey sleep.” Her grip tightened. “You go grow, Nne. You go grow strong. And one day, when time reach, dem go pay.”
Kamsi looked at her grandmother’s face.
She did not cry. She had not cried at the flat. She had not cried in the bus. She would not cry at the burial in Onitsha, with its brass band and its wailing aunties and its coffin as small as a boat.
She was seven.
She did not cry.
She counted.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 10 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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