The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  There were no drugs in the house; their parents made sure of it. During the cold rains, if one of them started sneezing, a finger of ginger would be shoved in the child’s mouth and the child would be asked to chew. For a sore throat, the mother boiled mashed ginger and added milk for them to swallow. Their father knew which leaves to fetch from the forest and boil for malaria fever. When there was a rumour of an epidemic on the radio, the father would make everyone chew garlic and onions. For restlessness, the mother discovered a plant in the backyard whose leaves in food could put the child to sleep and save him from hurting himself. For the deranged scribbling on walls which affected all children of a certain age, the father painted a whole wall of the living room black and gave the children chalk. ‘Oya, write here, only here.’

  It was this wall that made André stand up before his time as a toddler because he wanted to reach higher, where there was enough space to scribble jargon. The parents took the jargon on the wall seriously. It charted the growth in height and mental development of their children.

  In the February heat that came the year the elder brother would stop talking to his mother, the year he would stop trusting his father’s hands, they slept on the terrazzo in their underwear and then sat in the half-filled Geepee tank to cool off from the heat.

  Their father did not wake them up for school one morning. When they did wake up, he fed them and joined them in bed, spinning the stories he usually reserved for moonlit nights, till they dozed off. When they woke up late afternoon, he hadn’t woken up so they sneaked out and saw their mother painting in the courtyard. She was almost finished, whatever it was that she had been painting.

  But she wasn’t their mother.

  She had become The Thing.

  Her eyes danced and she smiled when she saw them, as if they were friends from her childhood. Her head was tied with a white handkerchief and her waist was wrapped in an unused canvas, but her chest was bare. She was their mother so they had no fear.

  She made them dip their hands and feet into a small pail of paint before stamping on a gigantic cardboard she spread in the corridor. They covered every space on the cardboard, bringing it alive with primary-coloured hands and feet. She told them that making art, doing this, was their superpower and soon they were all rolling on the floor, sprinkling paint on each other, chuckling. Their mother stopped them suddenly and dipped her hands into the small pails of paint. One red, one blue.

  ‘I anoint you red,’ she said, drawing a line between André’s thick eyebrows and stopping just before the tip of his nose. She finished it up with a thick dot and said, in the voice of a commander, ‘From now on your superpower is red!’

  André stamped his feet and saluted.

  ‘And you …’ She turned to repeat the exclamation mark on Max’s nose with the blue paint. ‘I anoint you blue.’ He laughed. Then they sang the song, dancing round her, and she became a child herself, swaying her hips side to side in the midst of them, punching the air.

  Sweet Mother, I no go forget you.

  The father came out of the room and joined them in the corridor. His face was scrambled from sleep but they could all see the worry.

  ‘I am fine,’ Sweet Mother said with a chastising laugh. ‘We are fine.’ Then she pointed to the pail of paint. ‘We left space for you.’

  Those were the days when happiness would press down on the house, a warmth to which André could stretch out his hands to hold and laugh with in sleep at night. This was before that hot February that came and ruined everything.

  After washing and feeding, the father led them to the bedroom again for another round of sleep. It wasn’t hard waking them up before midnight; with all that daytime sleep they were grateful to have been dragged out of hovering between states of semi-consciousness. André kept jumping on the bed until their father warned him not to wake their mother. He urged them to explore the house in the night darkness, to move gently in the dark so that no one would hit an object.

  They learnt how loss of one sense can heighten the others. They could not see but they could taste the air even before smelling it and therefore divined the different spaces of the house: old paper and dust for the living room, red oil and faint mashed onions and wet sand for the kitchen, old paper and dust and charcoal and thick air in the storeroom.

  In their parents’ bedroom, nothing but mother.

  Their feet could anticipate a step down or step up throughout the house. They learnt time worked differently at night. After they had succeeded in navigating the house by heart, committing the positions and juxtapositions of things to memory, the father led them outside to the silvery darkness. Sprinkled with stars the sky seemed wider, and the moon was so large they could clearly see the imprinted face of Mother Mary looking down on baby Jesus. The leaves all had a silvery lining and the wire-mesh fence was the colour of water. All was still and enchanted. Thin sheets of cloud raced across the sky in waves. Max held little André’s hand and led him after their father without fear; he had not known the secret menace of shadows then.

  Their father led them up the street, naming the resident families for them. ‘Mr Sly used to live here. This is Baba Hassan’s car; I don’t know if it is working. I don’t know how to drive but your mother can drive.’

  Max chuckled and tugged his father’s jalabiya. ‘Is a lie, Daddy. You can drive.’

  ‘I am serious. It’s your mother who can drive. Do you want to know a secret?’

  Their faces came alive and he stooped low to whisper, ‘We have entered a new day.’

  ‘But it is still night, Daddy. How can night be a new day?’

  ‘Issa lie, Daddy! Issa lie!’

  ‘Let us get back home first, Daddy, and we will check the clock.’

  ‘The clock is not working. I will give you my wristwatch.’

  At home, Max was amazed when he tilted the face of the leather-strapped watch to the moonlight to better see the time. ‘Four o’ clock! Then five o’ clock, six o’ clock and the sun will appear!’

  ‘Precisely, my boy.’

  ‘Keep the wristwatch,’ said the father.

  ‘What about André’s own?’

  ‘You are his elder brother. That is why I am giving it to you – to always tell him the time when he has to know the time.’

  Max knew in that moment that he would guard that watch for the rest of his life.

  The sound of the bathroom flushing startled them out of the moment and André joined them in the room, scratching an eye with his left knuckle. ‘I clean my bum-bum,’ he said by way of explanation. Those were the years he had just started talking. Until André was four, only Max could understand him.

  ‘Daddy, are we sleeping with you?’ Max asked.

  ‘No, no, let’s check on your mother and go to your room.’

  Their mother was sleeping on a new canvas. If the moonlight had been brighter they would have seen the worried look on the father’s face before he picked her up and turned to them. ‘Your mother is very tired. You boys go and sleep. Make sure you wear socks because of mosquitoes.’

  ‘Goodnight, Daddy.’

  ‘Goodnight, my captains.’

  And they crawled to bed still with the anointing of power their mother had drawn on their foreheads and fell into a deep sleep feeling victorious for having conquered the wonderful world of the night.

  By then, meningitis was already a national epidemic and future records would show Max that the disease wasn’t responsible for any of the lives lost in Freetown Street that February. He would grudgingly attribute this to the hard work of the vaccinators. When they came, the father was ready for them.

  The parents had kept malaria at bay by drinking the water of boiled lemon grass, but it returned with such magnitude that they submitted themselves to the hospital, relying on their sons to pay the bus drivers from their house savings and navigate the road that took them there. To André and Macmillan’s shock, they swallowed drugs in the hospital canteen after sharing a plate of rice. That was
when the boys realised how sick their parents really were.

  The parents were discharged. ‘But Daddy, why didn’t lemon grass work?’ Max asked that evening, before they slept. The question had been sitting on his tongue all the way home.

  The father turned to their mother on the bed to exchange a sad smile. Both of them were contaminated with military-government aid food and violence and fear. ‘Because we didn’t start taking care of ourselves on time.’

  ‘We have been swallowing medicine since,’ added Sweet Mother.

  ‘The way you start something is the way you finish it. We have started well with you people. Your blood is still pure, both of you.’

  When Max volunteered for a blood analysis years later, in his second year of studying medicine, the laboratory was thrown into quandary, everybody wondering why this immunity or that bacteria wasn’t in his system. ‘You could die!’ explained their senior lecturer. ‘You are just like a newborn baby. If you catch a cold or get bitten by mosquitoes you could just die.’

  As he gets into the shop, he considers dying now.

  At thirty three. The same age as Jesus.

  Max has had many markers of death throughout his life. The last one was when he turned twenty-four and realised in the apartment bathroom mirror one day that he was growing bald. It couldn’t be from his father – the man had a rich head of jet-black hair kept in a low afro. It wasn’t from his mother’s family either – he could remember his maternal grandfather from the crazy month they lived with him decades ago. Max’s hairline didn’t recede gradually; no, instead a patch just appeared on top of his head where hair from his last haircut should have grown to meet the sides, just grazed off as if it had been cursed dead. He managed it in a low cut until age twenty-seven, when the middle patch slowed its speed of growth to about a third that of the growth of the sides. There was no salvaging the situation at that point. He went to the hair salon and asked the surprised barber to shave it all off.

  But Max’s first memory of death was from a day that February, shortly after they returned from the hospital. Two women walked past their wire-mesh fence to the last house on the right. Without knocking, they began marking the wall with purple chalk. André had been watering the Queen of the Night that had mysteriously started growing in front of the house beside the door and they hadn’t noticed him. André had only been talking for a few months back then and school teachers were still complaining that he wasn’t talking enough. On several occasions, Max had to be summoned from his class to interpret André’s silence for them.

  So he probably just stared at them as she asked over and over, the nice lady in hijab, for his mother. Or father. By the time Max came out to see who the visitors were, for no one on Freetown Street had the guts to pay them a visit, André had stretched out his arm to touch the lady because she was so nice and he wanted to make sure she was real.

  ‘Daddy!’ Max called out in panic.

  She smiled. ‘Hello, fine boy. How old are you?’

  ‘Our daddy said we should not talk to strangers.’

  ‘But I am not a stranger.’ The nice lady leant over him. ‘I want to be your friend. Have you heard of the word mee-nee-jai-tis before?’

  ‘You are a stranger, madam,’ said the father, emerging from the front door. He was tying his wrapper and his hands were speckled with tiny flecks of the bitter leaf he had been chopping for yam porridge. ‘Pack your luggage and leave my house.’

  ‘Sir, we have come peacefully—’

  ‘Toh, I don’t have peace for you. You’d better leave now.’

  ‘We can get the police; the children have a right to—’

  ‘Which children?’ He jumped down the little step and marched towards her. ‘These ones?’ He pointed a thumb behind him, grimacing at her. She didn’t step back, just stared back in disgust and surprise. The palm leaves rustled and the muted caw of birds reached them from the forest. She tried to sound nice. ‘If we have to, every child—’

  He broke into a laugh, clapped and laughed some more. ‘You want to call police over my head for children I gave birth to, children I raised? Sebi, you are the one who delivered them? Or you are their mother? Or you are God?’

  ‘I will be back with the police, sir,’ she said, turning around and walking towards the wire-mesh gate to join her assistant, who had already fled outside.

  ‘If you like, bring Abacha. I will be waiting. Better tell bring plenty police o! They will tell me which of them impregnated my wife for me. Nonsense.’

  He turned to André and Max. ‘Those are the real agents of darkness your mother should be praying against.’ He adjusted his wrapper. ‘Never allow any white man or agent of white man come and put something inside your blood or inside your head in the name of help or assistance, you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Max yelled and André nodded, thumb in mouth.

  ‘You are responsible for yourselves, you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Max yelled and André nodded, and the father went back inside.

  That evening, clouds of something about to happen swirled in Max’s belly. It was so acute it gave him a runny stomach after dinner. The father, who had recovered from his temper, carried him on his back and walked round the house from room to room, soothing him, but he didn’t sleep. André was already sleeping with Sweet Mother in their parents’ room. It suddenly occurred to Max that he had grown too big for his father’s back. Nobody in his class could jump in their father’s lap at their age. The father got dizzy and fell on the bed with him, both of them chuckling lightly, forgetting the illness in Max’s gangly body as evening inked into night outside. Moonlight fell through the window onto his father’s face, so he could see his father was staring into his eyes. Under that steady gaze he forgot his stomach ache and felt wonderful. He felt he could never get lost in those big eyes. He stared back for a while, then brushed his small hand against his father’s prickly beard until those big eyes gently closed, the way the sun slid over the horizon. He realised for the first time that his father’s big chest rose and fell in sleep, and if he listened well he could hear the gbim-gbim-gbim of his father’s heart. He put his head on the chest where it was the loudest and was surprised at how warm it was. Then there was gentle snoring. It rocked him to sleep.

  Sometime in the night Max rolled on the bed, hit the wall and jumped out of sleep with a scream. His father didn’t wake. The walls were on fire. The air was hot. Maybe this would form part of the things that would fill his chest and drive them apart, the fact that he screamed and his father didn’t wake up. His father didn’t wake up and cradle him and tell him one of those wanderer stories until he fell asleep. Maybe there was just too much hot air that night.

  Max felt his way to the door and pushed down the latch to confirm that the house wasn’t burning. As the acting head of the house, it was his duty. He didn’t fear the stillness of night because his father had led them to cross into morning before. Unlike André, he would never fear shadows.

  The moon that had lit up his father’s eyes had grown bigger and now bathed the courtyard in silver light. This moon would not come again until next month, until something had changed inside him forever. Then it would be too late. He would never see his father the same way again.

  He removed his sweat-soaked clothes since he had confirmed that the house wasn’t burning, and climbed into the half Geepee tank of water. The water was hot. But it was better than the hot air. He began a game of holding his breath underwater, but stopped at the horrific thought that he could drown. That was when he started hearing the drums, the symphony of an ending.

  As he climbs the step once more, wrapped pans he had purchased in one hand, the strange urge to knock for permission to enter his own home which had filled him that midnight heat two decades ago, rises again. Max shifts his weight from one foot to the other, swallows the feeling down. He has nothing to be guilty of; he has bought the baking pans, hasn’t he? Out of his own pocket, for that matter. So why can’t he just pus
h the door open?

  Because he can almost hear the music. It is ringing in his head like a phantom phone, so loud and clear after all these years of familiarisation, but not real. Just inside your head. Most people have an event that demarcates their lives into clean halves. A before and after. An ever since …

  For him it was that music. That feverish drumming that met him in the Geepee tank of hot water from far away. But he didn’t know it at the time. He sighs, presses down the latch and pushes the door.

  There was no way he could have known.

  One day the house is devoid of people, the front door left ajar. Strained things relax, a silk dress stretched over the bedroom chair sinks in, a perforated sachet of powdered detergent (Omo!) deflates on the kitchen sink, and the curtains, freed from their tie-backs, stretch themselves freely in the afternoon wind. As the wind picks up the curtains flail violently.

  ‘… nobody can stop reggae,’ pipes a Rasta man on the small radio resting on the window sill beside the door in the living room ‘… nobody can—’ One of the curtains strikes the radio to the ground and the Rasta man is silenced. A storm is gathering outside. A duck rushes in through the front door but stops just beyond the threshold. Something tells it that it doesn’t belong here. It looks back at the darkening sky and quacks in contemplation, but it finds it can’t take another step into the building, so it goes back out the way it came. Once it does, the door slams shut with a force that rattles the whole house.

  André cannot wait for the rain to cease so he says goodbye to Aunty Jolade and starts his journey home, skipping over gutters and kicking stones. None of his school mates live in the Quarters so he always makes the trip alone. He doesn’t mind. The mint of fresh leaves and deep blue of the sky and scent of wet earth are so delicious that he flaps his arms to fly into this unbearably beautiful blue of sky which will always belong to him, and when he is tired of that he sticks his tongue out to catch the occasional drop of after-rain.