Chapter summary
After intimacy with Tunde, Kamsi learns the woman planted her phone and recognises an adversary.
7.10am, Sunday 3 April 2022, Maitama, Abuja
The sun came into the room slowly, the way a polite guest enters a house.
It began at the edge of the curtains as a thin gold seam, then widened and crept across the carpet, the foot of the bed, the white sheets rumpled into small hills. It touched the back of Tunde’s hand where it lay flung across her hip, and the tiny dark hairs on his wrist lit up one by one like a row of lamps.
Kamsi lay awake and watched it come.
The hotel was one of those expensive Abuja places with a lobby the size of a cathedral and a bathroom full of tiny bottles. They had arrived late the night before, after an evening flight from Lagos, on the strength of a telephone call from Mr. Ubong Etim. Oga, I get a lead. A woman wey match the description. Wuse Market. Come now now.
They had spent the evening in the market under a tarpaulin of dusk, showing a photograph to women selling cloth. Nobody knew her. Nobody ever did. At ten o’clock Tunde had said, in a defeated voice, “Let us eat,” and at midnight he had stopped saying anything at all.
Now he slept. On his back, one arm flung out, mouth a little open. In sleep, his face had the soft, unfinished look of a boy who had been told something that he did not yet understand.
She studied it, as she studied all faces. The line between the eyebrows, which was deeper than it had been in December. The small grey thread at the temple. The mouth, which in waking moments was a weapon, and now looked merely tired.
I could be gentle with you, she thought, with no particular feeling. If I wished.
Then she turned her head into the pillow so that the thought could not be read.
He woke the way he did everything: all at once, and expecting to be pleased.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
His hand found her hip. His thumb moved on it, slowly, and the sheet slid a little off her shoulder. She lay still and let the sun come across her skin, and she did what she had come to do: she turned toward him, the way a flower turns, so that her eyes opened last.
“You are not wearing it,” he said.
Her hand went to her head. Under the silk scarf, her own hair lay close and short against her scalp, and on the table by the window the wig sat on its stand like a sleeping animal, round and dark and enormous.
“I take it off to sleep.”
“You look different.”
“Different is good?”
“Different is…” He searched for a word and didn’t find one. He put his hand against her cheek instead. “Younger. Like someone who has not had to be careful yet.”
The words went into her like a thin, cold needle.
She smiled, slowly, so that he would see it begin.
What followed was slow, and sweet in the way of things done at the beginning of a day, before the world has had time to ask for anything. Her mouth against his throat. His fingers in the scarf, loosening it. The sheets sliding. The sun was on her back like a warm hand, and the room smelled of sleep and starched linen and the faint dusty perfume of curtains. His breath caught, then hers did. She let it. She had learned that a thing can be both true and a performance, that the body does not read the script.
But underneath it, in the cool, clear place she had built for herself at the age of seven, she went on watching. The way his eyes closed. The way he said her name, Kamsi, Kamsi, as though it were a door he had found in a corridor and was surprised to see open.
She thought of her mother, very clearly, and for one second she could not breathe.
Then she let it pass, and smiled.
“Stay,” he murmured, afterwards, against her hair. “Don’t go back to Lagos today. Stay with me.”
“I’m here.”
“You are the only person who hasn’t lied to me,” he said sleepily.
She turned her face into his shoulder, and he did not see what it did.
8.20am
The phone rang on the bedside table.
Tunde grunted, reached, squinted at the screen. “It’s Etim.”
He sat up against the headboard, ran a hand over his face and put it on speaker, as he always did, as though the telephone were a witness.
“Ubong. Good morning.”
“Oga! Good morning, sir. Abeg no vex say I call you early.” The voice was thin and crackly and eager, a small man speaking from a very long way down a very bad line. “But I get information. I think say you go like am.”
“Go on.”
“I dey Kubwa since morning, sir. I follow the phone. Na one small boy for market, he dey sell phone. Student boy. He tell me everything.”
Tunde’s body went very still against the headboard. Kamsi felt it through the mattress.
“The boy say the phone dey inside him bag, sir,” said Mr. Etim, with the gravity of a man delivering news from a battlefield. “Inside him bag. For the bus. He no know how e take enter. He sell am for a stall. And Oga, I ask am, ’Was there a woman?’ He say no. Only men. All men for that bus.”
A silence.
“Say that again.”
“Oga, the phone was sold in Kubwa. She was never on that bus.”
The line crackled. In the room, nobody moved.
Kamsi lay with her cheek against the pillow, and with her eyes open on the gold seam of light at the edge of the curtain. She did not breathe. She did not blink.
Never on the bus.
Someone had put the phone there. Someone had taken the trouble to plant it in a stranger’s bag, so that a husband and a private detective and a sister would all go running north, after a thing that was not there.
It was beautiful. It was cold and clean and patient. It was exactly what she herself would have done.
And for the first time since she began, since a scrapbook and a shoebox and a pair of scissors in her grandmother’s hand, Kamsi felt a small, thin thread of fear go through her.
She had thought that she was hunting a frightened woman.
She was beginning to suspect that she was hunting somebody who had been planning this for a very long time.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 21 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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