Damola sat on a plastic chair in her kitchen, a room she had rarely ventured into, with a napkin tied around her mouth, and rope (where had he found the rope? She was sure she didn’t keep rope in the house?) around her wrists. She watched and listened as her cook (ex- cook, she supposed) went through her phone looking for someone who would give him money to let her go. 

She’d had a fairly normal morning for Lagos. She had left home on Monday morning before dawn, the sky grey with the promise of sunshine just over the horizon. Unfortunately, so also had thousands of Lagosians, and so she had ended up stuck in traffic at 7 in the morning, the earlier promise of a hot day kept. The driver of an ancient blue Volkswagen beetle rather pointlessly leaned on his horn on the highway which had been at standstill for half an hour. Damola made the ‘Should I fly’ motion with her hands at the antique car, her fingers made longer and narrower by the nail extensions she had just installed, as she held them together next to her ear like a very small plane. The Beetle owner ignored her, and kept on with the horn. 

Damola had reflected that anyone still driving a Beetle in 2021 could not care for anybody’s opinions in any case. Then the traffic eased, and it was left for the 4 lane highway, converted to 6 lanes by impatience, to resolve itself back into 4. Cars jostled for space, playing chicken. Damola realized she had lost the contest against the Beetle, stopping suddenly to avoid scratching her white Benz after realizing her rival had no such concerns. Exultant in victory, the driver of the Beetle called her an Ashawo! and drove off. 

“Lazy,” she’d thought. 

“Ashawo, prostitute” a policeman had screamed when she refused to bribe him.

 “Ashawo, prostitute” a street hawker had said when she ensured she got her change instead of leaving it with him. 

“Ashawo, prostitute” thought a doctor, she was sure, when he enquired about her marital status after she asked for birth control. 

*

“Good morning, aunty!” greeted the security guard who was also the parking attendant as she drove into her shared office building.

Glad for the change of pace, Damola wondered at what point she had transitioned from sister into aunty, probably at some point after she turned 35. She couldn’t wait until she transitioned to ‘Mummy’ – not because of the children she didn’t plan to have, but for the automatic shift she would make from mere woman to respected elder in society.

“Good Morning, Godwin,” she answered, trying to sound like a serious lawyer. It had taken her forever to realize she was often the oldest person in the room and so stopped calling everyone Ma and Sir. Still, the staring contest for who would greet whom first was always exhilarating, greeting being the first major power play in any Lagos interaction. She enjoyed watching the process of the calculation – losing seniority points for her baby face and gender, and gaining seniority due to her gray hair and expensive clothes. More often than not these days, she came out on top, extracting a reluctant greeting from a learned colleague.

For a certain type of man, it was impossible to be of lesser rank to a woman, regardless of her apparent age or social status. Somehow, at least once a month, she would walk past a dark corner from which a voice of man, previously unseen, would gruffly shout out: ‘Can’t you greet?’, to which she had learned the best response was the echo of disdainful silence.

Godwin, always glad to greet it seemed, and always offered to carry her bags to her office, but at 7:30 in the morning, her practice was empty and she didn’t want, as her sister would put it, “stories that touch.” He asked how she was doing. She was fine, she replied. She wasn’t of course, but she lied to Godwin who had only been kind to her because he looked like he could one day be the kind of man who would perhaps, not be so kind.

She lied all the time to protect herself, connecting herself to one or more imaginary men. Her house, which she had built with money hard-earned by drafting air tight contracts for oil and gas firms, was in fact one of her late father’s houses, she’d told one of her neighbors. Her husband lived in Canada, she’d lied to a nosy driver, and she bought a fake wedding ring to support this story, until tired of making up reasons why her non-existent Oga never came home, or she never went to see him, she let him go. Actually now that she thought about it, that wasn’t the real reason she let the driver go. It had been because he had laughed uproariously when she had asked him to take a certain route and went in a different direction, as though the very idea of her giving instructions was hilarious. She had directed him to park the car and hand her the keys. That had been it. “Why are you laughing?” she had asked and the driver had just kept laughing at her, even after she drove off with him at the side of the road, maddeningly.

Now she sighed at the memory – Jamiu must have thought she was laughing at him as usual.

 “Why nobody dey pick phone?” he turned to ask her, not angrily, just bewildered. ‘Your Mama no pick, Your Papa no pick.’ 

She couldn’t answer, but how could she say the only people she was of the most value to, were long dead and she was unwilling to say that final goodbye of deleting their numbers.

Daughter to no-one, wife to no-one, mother to no-one, sister to one, at least, but she wasn’t going to share that information without being pressed. In fact, Damola thought, it would have been obvious to him if he didn’t assume everything she had was derived from someone else, that the person best suited to extort for money from,  was Damola herself.

**

Had she been paying attention, she would have seen it coming last week. 

It had been a Friday afternoon, a rare one which found her working from home. The last echoes of Friday prayers sounded in the background, as Damola forgot to lie, and giggled, sure Jamiu was joking. “What’s funny?” he asked. Indeed, why was it funny? Why did Damola, a single Nigerian woman, find it hilarious that a young uneducated man, small, soft and unthreatening, who could not hold a complete conversation in English, would propose to her, one fine morning, with no warning. After all, did she not know that a woman in the words of her own mother, ‘had nothing if she had no husband?”

He had left for the weekend and on Monday, when she returned from work, had greeted her, eyebrows raised, as though still waiting for her response. It amazed her that he thought it was worth considering. She went to prepare for bed, beginning her complicated skin care regimen.

Her door opened gently, and Jamiu the non-threatening cook, had entered uninvited carrying, rather ridiculously, it seemed to Damola, a cutlass. He held it almost tentatively, as though it had not been his idea, but nevertheless it was a clear threat. She had always thought danger would come bursting in her door loudly and with force, but here was Jamiu following a proposal, a gruff one sure, but still a proposal, with a weapon.

*

And now she sat in her own home, in a chair she didn’t remember purchasing, tied with a rope she had never seen, awaiting her fate. For the first time in a long time, she was unsure of what to do.  Her cook-turned-kidnapper clearly had no plan either.

She tried to think of a strategy, to plan for contingency as she always had done, skills that had served her well at work and now, she wondered how this could possibly end with her alive and Jamiu’s ego protected.

Perhaps–  

Her phone would ring, her sister calling for their periodic chats and Jamiu would be unsure whether to answer, as her sister’s name was saved as ‘That Girl’ showed the phone to Damola, to which she nodded slowly, masking the relief in her eyes. Jamiu would tell Oyinade in his high pitched voice that he has her sister and he would let her go for N1 million, a small amount relatively for a sister, only $2000.  Oyinade would laugh, sure it was a joke – surely a serious kidnapper would have called her first and asked for more. Who would she call to confirm? Definitely not the police, no help without a down payment? Perhaps an aunt or uncle who neither of them had called in years? Angry at being laughed at yet again, he would hang up and look at Damola, enraged.

Perhaps–

Jamiu, impatient for results, calls his colleagues in crime – surely this hadn’t been his idea alone. They tell him something inaudible over the phone and he looks at her, and then looks away – resolved? resigned? He grabs hold of her, forcing her to stand up, avoiding her eyes. He knows her outside this extraction effort, perhaps memories of kindnesses past. His unknown partners knew nothing of her, except perhaps as a source of funds and would be less inclined to forgive her unproductivity. She nods vigorously at him and he pauses – and then, ungagged, she massages his ego enough so he unties her. She praises his kindness, maybe, or promises him her jewelry, or maybe the hand it was on. He could have drugged her after all, and he had not. She could pretend to consider marriage to him in exchange for her life.

The lying, the insults, the acting had after all prepared her for this day, she could do it, Damola thought. Her way out was by smiling at her oppressor, no different from any other day in her life, after all.

About the Author:

Funlola Osinupebi was born and raised in Nigeria, educated in the US, and lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter. Funlola loves collecting and telling stories of the Nigerian experience, and believes no story is too mundane if well told. You can listen to some stories she has collected here: https://www.thestorytellerng.org/, on Spotify/Apple podcasts as TheStoryTeller Nigeria or follow her @funlola on Twitter or @abjstoryteller at Instagram

*Feature image by Stephen Olatunde on Unsplash