Chioma was flipping through the Pilot newspaper, relaxed in her chair, hair packed in a bun at the nape of her neck, in her red suit and trendy mule sandals, when the same overwhelming discomfort she had felt for days now welled in the pit of her stomach, again. It was like the feeling that comes with eating too much food, and as the puke moved up to her chest, she ran to the bathroom to throw up.

Her boss, Tade Bosun, was waiting in front of her cubicle when she returned: mug in one hand, jug in the other. She wanted to stifle a smile but failed. Tade was stunning at 6’2 with svelte features. The only indications of his age were his balding head and the white hairs jutting out of his nose. Chioma sat down in her chair and used the tissue in one of the drawers to clean her mug.

“Wow, don’t you trust me?” Tade’s voice was smooth and velvety. Like a refined form of Lagbaja’s. A Lagbaja that went to Harvard.

Chioma smiled at him. She noticed how everyone at work was engaged—increased footsteps, raised voices, signs that the boss was within earshot.

“You couldn’t even offer to pull out my chair,” she said as Tade poured tea into her cup. “You would never have let me.”

Bullshit.

Tade pulled out chairs for ladies he wanted to fuck. He would use that opportunity to examine their backsides and imagine how they would look when bent over. She knew this from a previous life, one which she wanted to keep in the past.

“I have a story for you,” he continued, sipping the tea.

“Show me what you got.” Chioma, who didn’t just take any case, hoped that Tade brought something worthwhile.

“It’s about witchcraft,” he said with a chuckle.

He handed her the file. As she read the case, she was both amused and bemused that he thought she didn’t have better things to do.

“Not interested,” she said.

“This will interest you. It’s a case zero.” Case zeros were cases they got as anonymous tips from the internet. Tade had lots of people he could hand such a case to, so Chioma wondered why he chose her.

“Okay, you know the drill; I don’t want any other details aside from what is in the file.”

When she noticed the change in his countenance, she scowled and took the file.

The case was about Mama; a woman found dead in her home. She was called Mama, not because that was her real name, no. She was called Mama because that was the only name that people remembered her having. When people stopped seeing her around the community, they assumed that she had travelled back home to her village somewhere in Ondo State. Chioma did not like Makoko because it was one of those places in Lagos that reminded her of difference. How worlds could be different and how difference was a neighbour. This difference was beside the Atlantic, not far from the Third Mainland Bridge that connected most of Lagos. Part of Makoko was dry land, the other part more green swamp than the blue water of the Ocean. The shacks were built on stilts, threatening to fall yet withstanding sea storms and floods. The air had the stench of dried faeces and old urine. Whatever dream Makoko once held was lost; now it held the air of hopelessness.

Chioma got the blessing of the Makoko community leader, an elderly man called Baba. He looked well into his sixties, with yellowed teeth. He spoke English well and even joked with her about being educated at the College of Technology, her alma mater. Baba’s youngest wife, a silent woman whose eyes showed that she knew more than she was willing to say, accompanied her to Mama’s house.

Had Tade not personally asked her to handle the case, she would have dropped it because she did not understand why Mama was relevant: she lived alone on the outskirts of Makoko, had a dog which, according to her neighbours, was either stolen or eaten or sold for a measly amount.

Chioma went first to the fisherman who lived closest to Mama. He wore a bamboo hat, singlet, khaki shorts, and was seated on a rock as he gathered his fishing nets into a basket.

“She is a water spirit,” he said, “because she was always inside the water. When she slept, she made loud noises and cries that woke everyone, but nobody dared go close to her house.”

The next closest neighbour was a woman who had a screeching child strapped behind her back. She told Chioma that Mama used to stop every five steps and spit on the floor and that she coughed like a person with tuberculosis. She added that Mama loved to bathe in the water by herself, yet never drowned.  She pointed to the water after putting her breast into the child’s mouth: “Someone once saw her bathing in the water in a storm. She was not alone.”

On getting to Mama’s home and seeing her disfigured body, Chioma made the sign of the cross even though she had not gone to a church for years.  It took a lot of convincing from her guide for the two policemen at the entrance to let them in. Mama’s body was swollen, from her abdomen to her feet. Baba had said that the morticians who came to assess her body earlier noticed she had a lot of water inside her, so it would be hard to keep the corpse fresh. That was an understatement; her body looked like it had been dead for weeks with her skin barely holding it together. It had turned an unnatural black and fell apart like corn flour made with too much hot water. But for its rigid limbs, Chioma could hardly tell that it had been human once. She   for any   that could help her search, as much as the police would allow without asking for roja.

The room did not reveal much. Its darkened moist wall was crawling with green algae, the wood filled with holes, like something eaten out by termites, black worms crawled out of these holes; it looked like a place that was tired of living and breathing, and much like Mama herself, it resembled a dead thing. Chioma was about to leave when she stepped on a piece of folded paper. Mama was uneducated, Baba had said; they had to communicate with her in her native Yoruba language, so how was she able to read? Chioma picked up the paper, a faded green thing with a tinge of blue. She left with gratitude when the police asked her for just 500 naira. When she got outside, Baba’s wife was there, waiting, and without a word, she began walking back to the community quadrangle. Chioma followed.

At home, the cold made Chioma shudder as she struggled with her keys at the entrance to her flat. It had been raining since she left Makoko, and she was unfortunate to be caught in the deluge. Once she got inside, she had a long, warm shower and sat down to a cup of warm tea in the dining room. She looked at the trophy case containing all the awards she ever won, a constant reminder of what she could achieve if her mind was right. She could feel her tummy ache and fold over itself again. She was not getting used to the heaviness in her legs, the growing expansion that made her opt for sandals rather than stilettos. Tade left an email to ask her how the work was going. “On top of it,” she replied. He sent a text on WhatsApp: “on top of you.” As she reread it, mouthing “on top of you”, her tummy ache, which she had forgotten about, sliced through her. She reached for the dial button on her phone. But calling Tade would be foolish, she thought. Foolishness would even be an understatement. As she pondered the pros and cons, the devil called, as if privy to her deepest thoughts. She answered.

“Want to pretend that you didn’t see my message?” Tade’s drawl was undeniable, and Chioma felt her face flush.

“What is with all the games, Tade?”

“I’ve been trying to talk to you, and you’ve been ignoring me at work with your funny ‘I do not mix business with pleasure nonsense.’”

Chioma thought about what he said and remembered why she had done that in the first place. It was “pleasure before business” that caused her legs to swell and her body to feel like it no longer belonged to her.

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want. We aren’t at work now.”

She had an opportunity and did not tell him with good reason. Tade would try to dominate the conversation and her body. Although she did not need the pressure, she was also tired and lonely, very lonely. She thought about it: things would be easier with someone else to share the burden. They could even, maybe, remedy their relationship. But maybe was not absolute.

“No, Tade,” she said. “I have to work.”

“You’re no fun! But I get it. Let me know what you find out.”

She put aside the phone, not knowing how exactly to reply to his message. Opening her bag, she looked at the paper she had collected from Mama’s house. It barely escaped the wetness of the rain, but she could still see an emblem. It was a serpent wrapped around a pole. The letters were in dark print and she was able to make out the bold title. As if it was some confirmation she needed, she replied to Tade, “I am going to the hospital tomorrow.”

Chioma got to the hospital early. The records office looked like it needed de-cluttering. There were folders upon folders piled high on top of one another against the ugly green walls that needed repainting. It would take years for someone to go through all those documents. She imagined herself counting a page of the document per day for the rest of her life, her fingers drying up and becoming paper, too. The records woman was fair-complexioned, her skin red like angry bell peppers. Her lips were pressed in a tight line and her nose was upturned, as if she had already rejected Chioma before seeing her.

“Where is your card?” she asked.

Chioma handed her the green card in her pocket.

“Are you the patient?”

“Daughter.”

“Then why have you not been bringing her to the hospital for the past year?”

“We have been having financial difficulties, so we could not afford her drugs anymore.”

“Go and pay in the other office for a new card and consultation fee before I can attend to you.” She handed Chioma the card and called for the next patient.

“But I do not know the office.”

“Ask security to direct you to the office.”

“Could you by any chance tell me the name of her disease again? My brothers used to bring her before, but they don’t remember.”

The woman paused and looked at Chioma as if discovering her face for the first time. “Heart failure.”

Chioma turned and walked out of the room as clueless as she had been when she had first arrived. She met a security guard outside who described the office that she was supposed to somehow know.

“Can I do it for someone?” she asked, hoping that it would not give her away.

“Do what?”

“Change a card.”

“Yes,” he said.

And before he could say more, she muttered a quick “thank you” and walked away.

The office was not so different from the records office. There was a man at the reception and the mood was the same; the dimly lit room was so dark that she had to turn on her phone’s flashlight to see. The man, poring over paperwork, did not look up when she walked into the room, not even when she cleared her throat and stated her intentions. He stretched out his hand and motioned for her to drop the paper at the small window of the counter, which she did, and then, like some remote-controlled robot, he went to work.

“I will be with you shortly. Please take your seat,” he mumbled. Chioma sat in the only chair in the room and watched as he went to the back of his office. He was so animated, going from file to file, looking for the folder that she almost fell into a trance watching him. He reappeared with a file and called Mama’s name.

“Yetunde Ayorinde,” he said as if there were more people in the room.

Hearing Mama’s real name was so strange that Chioma, relaxed in the chair, took a few extra seconds to stand up and walk to the counter.

“Is she your mom?” he asked, more out of procedure than actual curiosity.

“Yes.”

He handed her the file, hunched over and continued, “Take it to the office you are coming from.”

“I would like to ask, sir. She has not been in the hospital for over a year, yet no one checked on her to see if she was doing well.”

Chioma walked out of the room and took as many pictures as she could get, watching the corridor to ensure that no one else was watching when she heard footsteps that startled her. The young security guard who gave her directions earlier approached.

“Ma—”

“Thank you very much, he said I should give this to you to give it to the records woman.”

Chioma handed him the files and was gone before he could respond.

On reaching home, she sent a message to Tade that she would be absent from work. He accepted. She had to make sense of all the information she had gathered, but first, she had to make sense of Mama’s heart failure. She read everything she could find on heart failure, saw that heart failure was a significant cause of death in the elderly in Nigeria and that it was the terminal pathway for most of the common heart diseases, saw that one in two people older than sixty-five would die outside of the hospital from heart-related causes: this was both underreported and under-researched. She knew a family member who currently had heart failure, her aunty Chinyere. She remembered how Aunty Chinyere used to bathe her when she was two years old, after both her parents had died in an accident, something Aunty Chinyere referred to as “intervention by the village people.”

They had fallen out after an argument about Tade. Aunty Chinyere had warned her about him, but she felt she knew better: she could handle herself; he was not going to ruin her; he loved her. Tade had given her opportunity; he had made sure that she got the best gigs, the ones that won her all her awards, and she was livid when Aunty Chinyere disapproved of him. She had found out about her heart failure years ago but did not reach out. She decided to call her on  WhatsApp, her fingers trembling as she clicked her name.

“Chioma,” Aunty Chinyere’s voice boomed through her phone’s speaker like a boar’s—full, bold. A sound that she had not heard in ages, a sound she almost did not recognise.

“Aunty,” she said. “How are you?”

“Funny how you have not reached out for years then you just call out of the blue.”

“I would like to know more about your illness.”

“Why?”

“It’s for work.”

“I see. Well, there isn’t much to say about it. I don’t sleep well most times, I stay awake most nights, and I cough too. There’s an awful lot of coughing. The only thing worse than that is breathing. It’s hard to breathe.”

That explains the voice, Chioma thought, strained and dry, like scraping against wood.

“Can you do something about it? The coughing.”

“No, I can’t. I take the drugs, but it turns out I’m allergic to them. They even make my cough worse. Funny how I’m grateful though. In my father’s time, they would have thrown me into the bad bush. People would not have thought twice about it, but now, thanks to Christianity and modernisation, all people can do is call you a witch behind your back and leave you to die alone.”

“Thank you, Aunty.”

“You are welcome. By the way, how is Ta—”

She cut the call before she could say anything else and tried to push away the tears that gathered in her eyes. She began to think about all the people whose fates, like Mama’s, would be death because they had no control over their bodies. She thought about her own body now, a fragile thing, a thing within a thing wrapped in a ball of meat, water and crimson, and folded like the faded green paper. There was only so much time before everyone else knew what she knew about bodies: they hide nothing and betray everything.

She decided to visit Makoko again. This time, the sun glistened in Makoko, and the air was less putrid. People gathered around her and welcomed her like they would a sister. Baba threw more jokes about their alma mater, and she indulged him. Baba’s wife led her to Mama’s house again. This time, the house was empty, there was no body. The body had been taken away almost as soon as Chioma had left the other day. A picture of Mama was placed in the centre of the room, her smile crooked and welcoming, almost beckoning. It was surrounded by candles and some cowries. Some of her clothes and a few calabashes were strewn across the floor, signs of a small ritual blessing.

“We use it to honour the dead and chase away trapped spirits,” Baba’s wife said.

Chioma almost jumped out of her skin when she heard her speak. Her voice was so hoarse that she almost mistook it for Mama’s ghost.

“Mama would have wanted that. She was Christian, but she would have wanted that. You have been trying to help Mama?”

“Yes. I want to know why she died,” Chioma said.

“She had a heart problem,” Baba’s wife said, staring at the beads that hung from the walls and the picture of Mama surrounded with candles. “She didn’t know how to communicate it to people, and no one helped her. People ignored her because Baba told untrue stories about her disease and made it look like she was a witch, over a disagreement some years ago. The stories were so bad that people stayed away from her, and nobody wanted to help her.”

Chioma thought about Baba, who had been aiding all her investigations, spreading lies about someone he was supposed to be taking care of because of a disagreement, “You are making some serious accusations. What sort of disagreement?”

“Her house. He wanted her to leave so that he could give it as a gift to people who supported his election as a leader, but she said no. She was not a witch, had heart disease, suffered plenty, and died without anybody. Baba knows what he did, but he will never come clean. Even when they saw her in water, they didn’t know that was the only thing that gave her relief. I used to help her but only when the rains were heavy and people could not see me, so that they won’t call me a witch, too.”

A motorboat drove past, its roaring engine affirming her story. “She had no family to help her, and you know how elderly people without families are on their own. She was vulnerable.”

“Why not tell someone?”

“Nobody will believe what a woman says.”

Chioma imagined Mama’s body, bloated and ragged, gasping for air in a storm to get relief from her pain while struggling to breathe, begging God for release, an end to everything. She imagined herself as Baba’s wife, supporting her, pouring water over her head to help her breathe, to stop her insides from burning, to give her relief even though shortlived. She imagined Mama’s body swelling without her permission just like her own body had begun to swell without her permission. There was little information, in the things she read, on how the lives of people with heart failures ended. Like Mama, most of them would have died outside a hospital. Considering the death rate associated with heart failure, how could hospital staff not follow up with people like Mama who just stopped coming for treatment? This was one question she did not need to address to anyone. She knew how understaffed and overworked hospital personnel in Nigeria were, how the healthcare system was not set up for people like Mama, favouring people with money, influence, or both. Mama had none. Mama would have been immobile in her last days, unable to move because of the fake water weight she had gained despite the true weight she lost because of her long-term illness. Heart failure was supposed to be uncommon among women, but now she knew two women who suffered from it. She thought about Aunty Chinyere; the thought of her aunt’s dead body lying in Mama’s shack made her sick. She ran outside.

“You’re pregnant,” Baba’s wife said, watching her retch from the door. “Does the father know?”

“No.”

With that, Baba’s wife kept quiet and didn’t say another word, not when Chioma thanked her and not even when Chioma waved her goodbye.

The office was bustling, as usual. She barged straight into Tade’s office and found a colleague on his lap. The colleague scuttled over and was about to walk out of the office when Chioma dropped a file at Tade’s table.

“You don’t need to, I am leaving,” she said.

She was about to walk out of the door when she half-turned and said, “Thank you, Tade. For everything.”

The finality of the statement and the act left a deafening silence in the room.

She walked back to her cubicle and carried her already packed bags. Her phone vibrated in her pocket; it was a message from Tade: “I’ll send child support and be there if you need me. I love you.” She had attached a letter of resignation with the folder because she knew it was the right thing to do. Now in her car on her way to the airport, she thought about the best gift to buy Aunty Chinyere, something to make up for lost times and at least start her journey toward reconciliation, maybe some cake or onugbu soup.

Chinaza Ebere Eziaghighala is a medical doctor and writer interested in telling stories that shed light on healthcare issues in Nigeria. She is a University of Iowa International Writing Program Alum. Connect with her at chinazaeziaghighala.disha.page or @chinazaezims on Twitter.