The first thing a tailor learns is that the body doesn’t lie. People lie. They suck in their stomachs, they stand up taller, they say “I’m a size medium” when they have not been a size medium since university. But the tape measure doesn’t care. The tape measure goes round the body and tells you the truth.
I had Emeka’s measurements by heart. I’d had them for nine years. Chest 104. Waist 86. Inside leg 81. Neck 41, and a small bump on the left collarbone where he broke it playing football at fifteen, so the left side of every shirt needs two millimetres more ease, or it pulls.
Six years since I last measured him. Six years since he moved out of my flat in Yaba with two suitcases and a sentence — “Ify, I can’t do this, my family needs me to be somebody” — and three months later his engagement photos to the daughter of a man who owns half the bank buildings on Marina were all over Instagram.
So when the bell over my shop door rang on a Tuesday in March and he walked in, in a navy suit that someone else had made — badly, the left shoulder pulling — I didn’t stand up from my machine.
“Ifeyinwa,” he said.
“We’re closed.”
“The sign says open.”
“The sign is a liar,” I said. “Like most things in this room.”
* * *
His fiancée wanted me. That was the joke. Not him — her. Amaka Ogunleye-Bright, twenty-eight, very beautiful, very busy, had seen a dress I made for a society wedding in Ikoyi and decided that only the tailor of Yaba could make her groom’s suit and agbada. She had no idea who I was to him. He hadn’t told her. Of course he hadn’t.
“I tried to change her mind,” he said, standing in the middle of my shop, among the bolts of lace and ankara and the mannequins with pins in their chests. “She doesn’t change her mind.”
“No,” I said. “Rich people don’t need to.”
I should have refused. My sister said refuse, my pastor would have said refuse, my own body was telling me refuse — my hands were shaking on the machine. But the fee Amaka’s people named was a year’s rent. And under the shaking, under all of it, something else had woken up. Something cold and slow and patient, like a needle going through thick cloth.
“Take off your jacket,” I said, and picked up the tape.
* * *
I took my time. That’s my right. A good tailor takes her time.
I measured his chest first. I stood very close behind him and passed the tape round under his arms and drew it snug across his chest, and my breasts touched his back through his shirt, and I felt him stop breathing. Still 104. He’d kept himself. His shirt smelled of a cologne I didn’t know — something expensive and woody that she had probably bought him — and under it, his own smell, which I did know, which I had slept in for three years.
“Arms up,” I said.
He lifted his arms. I measured his waist, slowly, my fingers flat on his stomach either side of the tape, and I watched in the long mirror how his eyes closed.
“Ify,” he said.
“Don’t talk. You’ll change the number.”
Inside leg. I knelt. You must kneel for that one, there is no other way. I knelt on my own shop floor in front of the man who had left me, and I put the end of the tape at his ankle and slid my hand up the inside of his leg, slowly, over the cloth, all the way up, until the back of my hand was resting where it was resting, and I held it there, and I looked up at him.
His face. I’ll keep his face for myself. I’ve earned it.
“Eighty-one,” I said, and stood up, and wrote it down.
* * *
There were four fittings. You need four, for a suit and an agbada done properly.
At the second fitting he kissed me. I let him. I’d known he would; I’d worn the red dress, the one from the night of my thirtieth birthday, the night he said he’d never leave. I had pins in my mouth when he did it and I had to spit them into my palm first, and he laughed, and for one minute in my hot little shop with the generator thumping outside and the danfo buses shouting on Herbert Macaulay, it was nine years ago and nothing had happened yet.
At the third fitting I let him do more than kiss me. The shutter down. The fan going. The half-made agbada, deep wine-coloured brocade, lying across my cutting table, and me lying across it too, the cloth slippery and cool under my back, his mouth at my neck, his hands pulling the red dress off my shoulders, and the pins from the hem scattering on the floor like rain. I’ll leave it there. A tailor doesn’t show the inside seams to the customers.
Afterwards he lay with his face in my neck and said, “I’ll call it off. I swear to God, Ify. I’ll call it off.”
I stroked his head. I said, “I know you won’t.”
He didn’t argue. That was the worst part. He didn’t even argue.
* * *
That night I finished the lining.
You have to understand what a lining is. It’s the hidden part of a suit, the part against the skin. Nobody sees it. It holds the whole shape together from the inside.
I had kept his letters. Nine years of them. The love letters from university, the notes on the fridge, the card from my thirtieth: I will never leave you, Ifeyinwa Nwosu, put that on my gravestone. I cut them into strips, his handwriting, his words, and I stitched every strip between the silk lining and the canvas of the jacket, by hand, a quilted layer of paper over his heart and down his back. Fine stitches, tiny, invisible from outside. And at the centre, over the left breast, where the inside pocket goes, a square cut from the red dress.
Then I sewed the canvas so that the lining carried the structure. If anybody cut those strips out, the chest would collapse, the shoulders would sag. The suit would be ruined. You couldn’t take my words out without taking the suit apart.
* * *
At the last fitting he put it on. It was perfect. It was the most perfect thing I’ve ever made. Two millimetres of ease on the left. It sat on him like his own skin.
He turned in front of the long mirror and his eyes filled up. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “Ify. It’s — I feel—”
“Put your hand inside,” I said. “Left side. The pocket.”
He did. He found the square of red silk. He drew it out a little way and stared at it.
Then I told him. All of it. What was in the lining. Whose words. Where.
He stood very still in the mirror with his hand inside his own jacket, over his heart, over his letters. The colour left his face slowly, like dye running out of cloth.
“Cut it out,” he said, hoarse.
“You can,” I said. “It’ll fall apart. There’s no time to make another. The wedding is Saturday.” I picked up my scissors and held them out to him, handle first. “Your choice, Emeka. Somebody in your family has to make one.”
He didn’t take them.
* * *
The wedding was in a hotel ballroom in Victoria Island. Twelve hundred guests. I saw the photos on Instagram like everybody else in Lagos.
He looks magnificent. Everyone says so. The suit is the talk of the wedding blogs — the tailoring, the fit, the deep wine brocade of the agbada for the second outfit. In every photo his left hand is resting on his chest, over his heart, as if he’s feeling for something. People say it’s because he’s so moved.
He’s sweating in every single one.
Amaka sent me a thank-you card with a big tip inside. Next year, she says, she wants me to make the christening clothes.
I’ve put the card on my cutting table, beside my scissors. I haven’t decided yet.
But I’ve kept the measurements. Chest 104. Waist 86. Inside leg 81. A bump on the left collarbone that needs two millimetres more ease.
The body doesn’t lie. I’ll know if he’s changed.
