GROUNDNUTS

Dami

By Thursday morning, the post had been shared forty thousand times, and my mother had called me eleven times.

I let the first ten go to voicemail. The eleventh, I answered, because my assistant came in and told me that my mother’s driver was downstairs and had been told not to leave without me.

“Lare.” Her voice was very calm. That’s how I knew. “The ex, Lare. On a gossip page. Holding your hand at Ninth Floor.”

“She’s not just the Ex, Mummy. She’s my girlfriend.”

“She is your sister’s wedding planner.”

“She can be both.”

“Nobody can be both. That is the entire point of a planner.”

I looked out of my office window at the lagoon. A ferry was crossing toward Ikorodu, very slowly, as if it had all the time in the world.

“Is that why you called?” I asked.

There was a pause. A long one, for her.

“Has Daniel said anything to you?” she asked. “About me?”

I turned away from the window.

“Like what?”

“Nothing. Anything.” Another pause. “He’s been very… friendly. At the house. He asks a lot of questions. He was in your father’s old study on Sunday, looking at the photographs. I don’t like it.”

My mother has never in her life admitted to not liking something she couldn’t fix with a phone call.

“Mummy. Is something wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong.” The calm came back like a door closing. “Bring Chimamanda to lunch on Sunday. If we are going to be humiliated on the internet, we may as well be humiliated with good manners.”

She hung up.

I sat there with the phone in my hand for a long time.

……………….

Amanda’s inbox, meanwhile, had exploded.

“Forty-two new enquiries,” she said on the phone, sounding dazed. “Forty-two, Dami. Since last night. A senator’s daughter. Two Lekki weddings. A woman in Abuja who wants a divorce party and says she’ll pay anything.”

“That’s good.”

“There are also three hundred people in my comments calling me a gold-digger.”

“That’s less good.”

“Bisi is replying to all of them personally.” A sound in the background that might have been Bisi typing with violence. “She says it’s a Head of Operations matter.”

“Tell her to stop.”

“I’ve told her. She says, ejoo, let her enjoy her life and teach those oloshis a lesson.”

I laughed despite myself. I seemed to do that a lot now.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m fine.” She wasn’t, quite. “Dami. My father reads the papers.”

“Not the gossip pages.”

“Every page. Twice. He has nothing else to do in there.” A breath. “He’s going to see your face and ask me questions, and I’ve already lied to him once.”

……………….

Tiwa came to my office on Friday at lunchtime, without calling first, which she has not done since she was fifteen and had gone through her first breakup.

She sat in the chair across from my desk and twisted her ring round and round on her finger.

Her ring. White gold. Six-claw setting. A tiny chip on the inside of the band.

For C.

“Lare,” she said. “Can I ask you something stupid?”

“You’ve never asked me anything stupid.”

“I asked you if fish sleep.”

“That’s a good question. They do, sort of.”

She almost smiled. Then she didn’t.

“At my fitting,” she said, “Ruth’s assistant called Daniel ‘Marcus’. Did Mandy tell you?”

I kept my face blank. “She mentioned it.”

“He laughed. He said he has one of those faces.” Tiwa looked at the ring. “But he turned round first. Before he laughed. Like it was his name.”

“People turn round for all sorts of things.”

“And he takes calls outside. At night. In the garden, at Aunty’s house, at one in the morning. When I ask, he says it’s work in South Africa, the time difference.” She looked up. “Lare, the time difference with South Africa is one hour.”

There it was. That line between her eyebrows. My little sister, who asked if fish sleep, doing arithmetic she didn’t want to do.

I could have told her. Everything. The passport, the licence, the receipt, the blank birth certificates. It was all on my phone. It would have taken five minutes.

And then she would have gone home and asked him. And he would have known exactly how much we had, and from where, and he’d have been gone by midnight. Or worse, he’d have stayed, and smiled, and she’d have believed him, and never trusted me again.

“Do you love him?” I asked instead.

“Yes,” she said. Immediately. Then, quieter: “I think so. I do.”

“Then give me a little time,” I said. “And if anything else feels strange, tell me first. Not him. Me.”

She studied me.

“You know something,” she said.

“I’m checking something.”

“That’s what you said about my first boyfriend.”

“And I was right about your first boyfriend.”

That got a real smile, finally. She stood, hugged me hard, and left.

I sat in the empty office and hated myself very precisely. It’s a skill. My mother taught me.

……………….

On Sunday morning, before lunch with my mother, I bought groundnuts.

I don’t fully know why. That’s a lie. I know exactly why.

The hospital smelled of Dettol and boiled rice.

I knew him the moment I saw him. I always remember faces. I had met him at my mother’s gala when he supplied the puff-puffs.

Pa Ikenna Okorie was sitting up in bed with his glasses on his nose, reading a newspaper from Tuesday.

He looked at me over the top of it. Then at the paper bag in my hand.

“Who are you?”

He said it the way Nigerian fathers say it, which means ‘Explain yourself, and quickly.’

“Oluwadamilare, sir. Amanda’s… friend.”

“Amanda?” He frowned. Then his face cleared. “Ah. You’re the nice somebody.”

“I hope so, sir.”

He didn’t remember me.

He held out his hand. Not to shake. For the groundnuts.

I gave him the bag. He opened it, inspected it, sniffed, and nodded, like a customs officer who had decided to let me through.

“Sit,” he said.

I sat on the plastic chair. It tilted to the left.

He ate four groundnuts in silence. Then he said, “The other one used to bring these.”

“I know, sir.”

“He stopped.” He cracked another shell between finger and thumb. “You will not stop.”

It wasn’t a question. I answered it anyway.

“No, sir.”

“Do you eat?” he asked.

“Sorry, sir?”

“When she cooks. Do you eat properly?”

“She’s never cooked for me, sir.”

He put the newspaper down.

“Then what are you waiting for?” he said.

My phone buzzed. Tobi.

I stepped out into the corridor to answer.

“Found her,” he said, without hello. “The C on the receipt. There’s a woman in Johannesburg called Candice. She’ll talk.” A pause. “But only to Mandy.”