The Fog: Chapter 3

If you're new here, welcome. You've arrived just in time to read all three chapters of The Fog, a fiction series following Nimisola Clark.

Nimi is 26, talented, and quietly unravelling. She has a job that costs her more than it pays, an art practice she is slowly losing grip on, and a mind that has started working against her in ways she cannot yet name.

The Fog is a fiction series about what it looks like when everything is fine on paper and nothing quite is. New here? Start with Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.

And if you've been here from the start: hello again, sorry to have kept you waiting.

Let's get back to Nimi.

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The “Ona Foundation Restructuring Week” started like any other week, except that Marie kept calling Nimi in for impromptu meetings that all seemed to blur into one another. By Wednesday, Nimi had started recording them on her phone, holding it casually on her lap and hoping Marie wouldn’t notice. It was the only way she could keep up.

The tension in the office had been building for weeks before that. Marie’s old school friend had recently been appointed Managing Partner, West Africa at one of the Big Four consulting firms, and Marie had put together a proposal — with Nimi’s help, of course — to bring the firm in for the restructuring, but the new board had declined and instead hired a smaller consulting firm that had only recently opened its Nigerian office in Abuja. Their lead consultant was reportedly someone outside Marie’s social circle who had recently moved to Nigeria. This, combined with increasing tensions between the board and Marie regarding her discretionary budget, made the atmosphere in the office thick with a particular kind of unease that made everyone move a little more carefully.

For Nimi, this translated immediately and practically into the loss of her remote working days until the restructuring was fully in effect. Her 4:30am wake-up, previously sacred time carved out for her art account @nimisartworld, was now spent catching up on last-minute document changes that Marie sent at odd hours. The commissions she had been chipping away at sat untouched. One of them, a birthday art print for an early supporter who had been following her since her first year on Instagram, had been sitting in her drafts folder for two weeks. She had promised it would be ready but by the looks of things and where she was at mentally, Nimi knew it was not going to be ready in time for the birthday.

She sent the cancellation message on Tuesday evening and spent longer than she should have staring at the reply: “Oh okay. No worries.” Three words that managed to say quite a lot. She checked her follower list and realised she had been unfollowed. She was crushed. It was the first time she had ever had to cancel an order. She had kept her commission slots deliberately limited to avoid exactly this kind of disappointment, but her responsibilities at Ona were taking up so much space in her life that she didn’t know what else to do.

Part of the new responsibilities Marie had assigned her under the restructuring was coordinating the organisation-wide health evaluation, a mandatory exercise introduced as part of the new board’s governance requirements. Every staff member was required to complete both a physical and psychological assessment, and Nimi was in charge of the legwork: collating the forms, chasing the stragglers, liaising with the contracted clinic and filing everything with HR by the end of the week. Nothing about chasing people to fill out cumbersome paperwork was remotely enjoyable, and she dreaded the eye rolls that came with every follow-up.

She completed her own assessment forms on a Thursday afternoon, filling them out quickly between two other tasks and not paying particular attention to the psychological questionnaire beyond what was required to submit it. She had a stack of other people’s incomplete forms to chase. She filed hers and moved on.

What she did not follow up on, because there was simply too much happening, was the email that arrived four days later from the clinic’s psychologist. It was courteous and brief, noting that her assessment results had been reviewed and that the lead psychiatrist would like to schedule an optional follow-up consultation at her earliest convenience. Nimi read it, swallowed the invisible lump she felt lodged in her throat and deleted the email. The last thing she needed was anything that would give Marie more reasons to chastise her under the guise of concern.

The collation itself did not go smoothly. Two senior staff members missed the submission deadline despite three reminders. The clinic sent the wrong template for one section. Nimi followed up, resent the correct forms, followed up again and still submitted the collated file to HR two days late. This was the other thing on Marie’s desk the morning she called Nimi into her office.

The RFP (“Request for Proposal”) folder for an important government-funded art programme was open beside it. Marie had collected it that morning and had been out of the office for most of the day. Nimi had spent those hours finalising the airport logistics for the consultant’s arrival and trying not to watch the clock. Her phone buzzed at 3:47pm.

My office. Now.

She saved the draft she was working on, picked up her notebook and her phone and walked down the corridor.

Marie’s office always felt slightly cooler than the rest of the building. Marie herself was sitting at her desk with an almost expressionless face when Nimi came in, holding her notebook to her chest like a shield.

“Neemay, have a seat please, this won’t take long.” She paused. “I understand that the health assessment that they insisted on having for you people was meant to be done and dusted by Thursday. But you apparently completely forgot.”

“Thurs — no, today —” Nimi stumbled over her words. “We — I mean, yes, today is Tuesday, uhm, Marie.”

She couldn’t seem to place the days in order and that wasn’t even her biggest problem right now. Completely forgot? All she had thought about for the past two weeks was this restructuring. She had taken on her own tasks and Marie’s board deliverables simultaneously, and now she was being told she had completely forgotten, by the same person who referred to those deliverables as something they insisted on, and to the staff affected as you people.

“I’m a bit confused, Neemay, because you waffle on about these fancy ideas and now I give you a rare opportunity to work on them, to show how competent you are, and yet you always fall short.”

Nimi took a quick sharp breath and looked away. “I really tried to get everyone to submit on time. I just — I’m sorry.” Then a thought surfaced. “But I did send everything to Saint Dymphna Medical. I didn’t forget.”

“Two days later,” Marie said flatly. She exhaled loudly. “Ughhh, really. You know this special projects role isn’t just about waving a fancy title around. You actually have to work.”

Nimi wasn’t under any impression that the title was fancy. She said nothing.

“If you actually paid attention to your job, there wouldn’t be any time to go nosing around to the board about how I speak to you. Maybe if you did these things well the first time, you would —”

“Marie.” Nimi heard her own voice before she had decided to use it. “I don’t know what you mean about the board. I haven’t spoken to anyone on the board before.”

She had seen the board members on two occasions, both times as they filed into the conference room for meetings with Marie present. She had barely been able to muster the courage to contribute whenever she had a one-on-one with Marie. The idea that she had been going to the board with anything was almost funny.

“Oh,” Marie said, her demeanour shifting slightly. “Well, I — okay, that’s fine.” A brief pause. “It’s such a shame though. One does so much to try to get things running properly and suddenly you’re the villain. These people don’t want to work. No wonder the country is in the state it’s in. We can’t find good workers anywhere.”

Nimi kept quiet. She knew her colleagues put in their best and often went well beyond what was expected of them in service of Ona Foundation’s mission. There had long been whispers among the staff about senior management being paid in foreign currency while everyone else struggled to keep pace with the country’s rising costs, though nobody dared to confirm it openly. She kept quiet about that too.

Marie kept talking. Nimi’s mind began to drift, trying to mentally arrange everything into some kind of order, like pushing pieces around a poorly drawn map. The birthday commission. The guilt of the cancellation. Mr. Ranti and Babs who had asked her to fill their assessment forms for them and to make sure they were certified “healthy and not mad, in Jesus name.” The consultant. When was the consultant arriving? What was today’s date? Wait — she was forgetting something. What was she supposed to have done this morning?

From what she could absentmindedly piece together, Marie’s concern was less about the delay itself and more about what it signalled: that Nimi needed to take greater ownership in her new role, that the board expected a level of operational rigour that reflected well on the whole team. Nimi nodded and took notes and did not mention the three reminders she had sent, or the clinic’s error with the template, because she had learned by now which details Marie absorbed and which ones she didn’t. At the end of the meeting she thanked Marie for the feedback and left.

Walking back to her desk, Nimi turned over the RFP feedback in her mind. Some of it had been fair. There was a document that should have been a more recent version and a section that needed more specifics. But the feedback also felt like a renegotiation. Tolani was Marie’s maternal cousin, a fresh graduate on her NYSC posting, stepping into the assistant role Nimi had vacated. She had started at Ona a while ago with a lot of energy and questions. She CC’d Marie on emails where it wasn’t necessary, asked Nimi things that were more efficiently answered by reading the onboarding document Nimi had prepared, and had the particular quality of someone who was performing helpfulness rather than enacting it. Marie had insisted that Nimi assign her duties on the Art project which she did. From Nimi’s perspective, it wasn’t her fault that Tolani did not deliver. But Nimi knew better than to imply that anyone related to Marie was less than perfect. She had it all on recording anyway. By the time the conversation wound down and Marie was in a noticeably lighter mood, Nimi had summoned enough nerve to ask for a transport and lunch stipend and formal ownership of the art programme going forward. Marie agreed to both.

In the middle of all of this, the fog had started showing up more frequently and in smaller, more insidious ways. Not the long heavy episodes she recognised from university but brief flickers: moments where she would open a tab and immediately forget why, read the same email three times and retain nothing, or find herself standing in the kitchen at work with the kettle already boiled and no memory of having walked there. She lost her work lanyard twice in one week. She arrived at a staff meeting, realised she had left her notebook at her desk, went back for it and returned to find the meeting had moved rooms. Small things. It always started with the small things.

Meanwhile, onboarding the new consultant had become formally her responsibility. The consultancy brief named someone called Bola, and their email correspondence had been polite, efficient and entirely undemanding in a way Nimi had found quietly refreshing given everything else. She had not had the time to look the person up on LinkedIn. The emails had given her a sufficient enough picture: patient, courteous, organised. She had set three alarms for the airport pickup.

Still, she almost missed it.

She had been sitting at her desk at 4pm on a Friday, staring at a budget spreadsheet she had been meaning to update for two hours, when it arrived with a slow, cold clarity: Bola’s flight landed at 5:15pm and the drive from the office to the airport was at minimum forty-five minutes on a good day. A Friday at 4pm in Lagos was not a good day. She grabbed her bag, told Tolani she was heading out and walked very quickly to the car park.

She made it with minutes to spare and stationed herself at the arrivals exit, slightly out of breath, holding a printed card that read ONA FOUNDATION and reminding herself to look like someone who had not just sprinted across a car park.

The arrivals hall was its usual theatre of reunion: drivers holding phones aloft, families craning over barriers, the low hum of trolley wheels on tiled floors. Nimi scanned the faces filtering through the exit, running through her mental image of who she was looking for. She hurriedly pulled out her phone, switching between her work email and LinkedIn for any picture of the person she was meant to be picking up.

What came through the doors instead was an attractive, well-dressed man making his way through the sea of travellers, walking in long, confident strides. Bola was tall, somewhere in his mid-thirties, with the unhurried ease of someone who had just slept through a flight and was in no rush to prove anything to anyone. He spotted the card, smiled and walked over with his hand extended.

“Nimisola? I’m Bola.”

She shook his hand. “Welcome to Lagos.”

She would think about her assumption later and find it faintly embarrassing, which was how she tended to process most things.

Nimi had presumed that she was picking up a woman.