My Sister, the Serial Killer Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019

Ayoola summons me with three words: “Korede, I killed him.” I had hoped I would never hear them again. The smell of bleach masks the scent of blood, a fact I know too well. While Ayoola sits perched on the toilet seat, a beautiful doll in a blood-spattered dress, I am on my hands and knees, scrubbing. This is the third time. The man's name was Femi. I write it in the small notebook I keep, the one I'd bought to record happy moments. On the first page, I wrote, *I saw a white owl through my bedroom window.* The pages that follow are a ledger of the dead.

We take him to where we took the last one - over the Third Mainland Bridge and into the dark, churning water of the lagoon. At least he won't be lonely. My life is a carefully constructed thing: I am a nurse, efficient and meticulous, respected at St. Peter's Hospital. My uniform is always pristine white. I have a secret affection for Dr. Tade Otumu, whose voice is like an ocean and whose kindness makes my mouth go dry. My only confidant is a man in a coma, Muhtar Yautai, who lies in room 313, a perfect listener to secrets he will never repeat. This ordered world is the one Ayoola constantly threatens to shatter. She is my sister, a phenomenon of beauty who leaves men breathless and, sometimes, lifeless.

One afternoon, she brings the sunshine into the sterile white halls of the hospital. Every head turns. Every man, including Tade, is captivated. He looks at her and his eyes dilate. “I didn't know you had a sister,” he says to me, but his gaze never leaves hers. And just like that, the one part of my life that was mine is now hers. He sends her orchids, which she deems unsatisfactory. “I. Really. Prefer. Roses,” she texts him, and a spectacular bouquet arrives by noon. I try to warn him away. “Her relationships tend to end badly,” I say, an understatement of monumental proportions. But he only sees her perfect face, her angelic smile. He doesn't see the knife.

The knife was our father's. He was a cruel man who would bring out the nine-inch curved blade to impress his guests, telling grand lies about its origin before polishing it with a tenderness he never showed us. Ayoola took it after he died. Now, she carries it with her for “protection.” It is the knife that killed Femi, just as it killed the others. She claims they all became angry, that they cornered her, that she had to defend herself. But there is never a mark on her, not a single bruise. The only blood spilled is theirs.

The police begin to investigate Femi's disappearance. They find a bloody napkin a cleaner missed at his apartment. They question Ayoola, and I am there to coach her, to help her construct the perfect, plausible lie. They take my car - the one we used to transport the body - and I am sick with fear, but my cleaning is too thorough. They find nothing. Still, the pressure mounts. Femi's sister posts his poetry online, haunting me with the words of a man I helped disappear. She even confronts us outside our gate, weeping, and Ayoola pulls her into an embrace, comforting the sister of the man she murdered while staring at her melting ice cream with detached resignation.

My world shrinks to the hospital, where I escape into my work and my one-sided conversations with Muhtar. Then one day, the impossible happens. “Your best friend is awake,” a colleague tells me. Muhtar is conscious. And he remembers. “Oh yes,” he tells me when I finally gather the courage to see him, his eyes sharp and knowing. “I recall you saying that your sister is a serial killer.” He holds my secret, but for reasons of his own, he keeps it. He becomes my only true friend, a man who knows the worst of me and does not turn away.

Tade, however, is lost to me. Blinded by love, he sees my warnings as jealousy. “She's killed before!” I finally scream at him in a moment of desperation, and the words seal all our fates. When Ayoola learns what I've said, that I chose a man over her, she goes to confront him. That night, her call is different. She is the one who is hurt. I find her bleeding on Tade's bedroom floor, her own knife buried in her side. “He came at me,” she says. “She tried to kill me!” he cries. There is a choice to be made, a side to be taken.

In the end, there was never really a choice. She is my sister. I sit with the police and I lie, calmly and convincingly. Tade's career is ruined, his life upended. He is gone. Muhtar, my strange and silent confidant, is discharged, leaving an empty room and an unfillable void. I am alone again, with only Ayoola.

One evening, the house girl informs me there is a guest downstairs for my sister. I hear their laughter from the living room. I smooth my dress and descend the stairs to meet him. He is handsome, and he smiles at me as Ayoola makes the introduction. I smile back.