The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  Clouds of smoke fill the air so the party people in Jamaica believe they are flying. But it’s the weed. They are not yet high, God no, but you should see the smoke. And the colours flashing in the blur of dance. Bob Marley is not dead in the dance halls of Jamaica. Maybe dreads are going out of style but not Bob, sweet Jesus no. So drop your reservations and clothes; they’ll wear you down in Jamaica.

  The party ends in Amsterdam just before sunrise. The young spread out of clubs like ants from a hole with the energy of a good night’s sleep. Eyes are crossed, shirts torn and faces caked but they all wear smiles as bright as the sun for they have conquered the night.

  When they were back in their bodies on the bed it was already morning and Max couldn’t feel his mind for a long time. His consciousness had been unravelled and seemed to sponge in everything: the porousness of the ceiling asbestos, the sweetness of sugar grains accumulated at the corners of the room … The new day seemed wider than just a day; his idea of it sprawled to see moments of things replicated and begun simultaneously. He saw the cobweb at one end of the wall and thought about the generations of spiders that had come before the one that had spun it.

  How much of it was real? Max looked at his brother. Fingers of light from the window fell on his face but he slept on. André reminded him of their mother, not in likeness but in the way he could emote rest, like their mother poised with her paint brush over canvas, mouth slightly open, eyes almost shut, and he would wonder what was running through her mind.

  Now he looked at his brother and wondered. He reached for a red marker, snickering, and made a thick red dash on his brother’s forehead.

  ‘You are red.’

  Max sat back and stared at the ceiling for a long time, the marker between his fingers like a roll of weed. Then he leant over his bed to the drawer and picked out his blue marker. He marked his forehead and smiled at the memory of their mother with the nostalgia for the dead, even though she was just five or six states away at the time. ‘I am blue.’

  André stirred. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘This is what weed must feel like.’

  ‘Do you want to try?’ asked André, chuckling, eyes closed. ‘Remember what happened the last time.’

  Max remembered and struck him with a pillow and André laughed and cuddled him, burying his face in Max’s armpit to hide from the pillow. Eventually Max released the pillow and allowed his hand to fall on his brother’s back. In that moment everything seemed safe and proper. He wasn’t feeling powerless or insecure. André wasn’t having homicidal dreams or trying to drink himself to death. He almost wanted to call their parents and say the children are fine. He didn’t know André would leave him some days later to fulfil his suicide pact with thirteen other men from all over the world. He didn’t know in a couple of years he would gather his savings and hunt down his brother in Amsterdam. The children are fine. He almost didn’t hear André ask from his armpit, ‘Why did we stop being children?’

  Topic:How they stopped being children

  Date:Some time in February a long, long time ago

  Teacher:Life

  André hated church. He hated the stares the pastors gave him, as if they were staring at the very demon they had failed to exorcise out of him. He hated Sweet Mother for taking him there. But he was pleased that she worried for him. He missed Max’s undivided, undistracted attention most of all, ached badly for it when his brother left him for boarding school.

  One night André and Sweet Mother came back from a retreat to find the father drunk in the living room. He laughed at their surprise to the point of hysteria, and managed to call to André between sobs. ‘Come, come here. Come and sit on my lap.’

  ‘Don’t mind your father,’ his mother said, rolling her eyes at the man and sucking her teeth. She steered her son to a path behind the chairs leading to the corridor. ‘He’s drunk. Let’s go.’

  ‘I SAID, COME HERE.’

  André had never needed to choose between his parents until then. His heart grew too big for his chest and breathing became difficult. Father stood up suddenly, brushed past him and seized his mom, swept her off her feet as if she were a child even as she screamed and slapped and bit him, and carried her to the corridor. Terrified, André ran after them, screaming that Daddy should let Sweet Mother go; chased them to the bathroom with his little belly churning with their war but the door was shut in his face. He pushed and banged the door but it didn’t yield and finally he slid down to the ground sobbing, wishing Max was here. Max would have known what to do.

  He didn’t know he had fallen asleep until the door sudden gave way behind his head and his father marched out, carrying Sweet Mother, who was sleeping and wrapped in a towel. He followed his father to the bedroom to hear what he was mumbling.

  ‘… and so many churches will come and go, so many religions will rise and fall, but God will outlive all of them. Close the door, André. I always tell you to close the door in this house. Mosquitoes.’ André went to close the front door. ‘God’s word will remain. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Now go and sleep.’

  He couldn’t sleep, of course. Max wasn’t there to comfort him. All those years of magic and music were gone because of the appearance of his dead twin brother. His brother had been taken away from him because of his dead twin brother. Before he slept it hit him: the final solution, the thing he must do.

  An hour earlier at boarding school, Macmillan had woken from the most horrific dream he’d ever had. He was even more terrified when he woke up because its horror, the feeling, was all he could remember. His tongue tasted of ballpoint ink and a faint fragrance of roses hung in the stuffy night air. He explained it in brisk sentences to his house captain, who woke the house master, who instead of giving him the emergency pass to go home as he desired, quickly sent for the school chaplain, who said, ‘There is nothing too big for God.’

  ‘You don’t understand, sir,’ Max said, on the verge of tears. ‘My little brother—’

  He was led to the dining hall where six seniors and another teacher had been waiting, were clapping their hands already, speaking in tongues, walking in circles, battle-ready. They would have prayed down any mountain for him, but he had been here before, at the Lord’s feet, and he knew what would happen if he didn’t get home. He didn’t know exactly when his body started running from them, running so fast, or where it was taking him to until the chaplain, who had been reluctant to chase him, screamed, ‘Fast! He has passed the fence. Catch him!’

  They climbed the low wall just in time to see a taxi pull up in front of the boy. The chaplain, a bulky man in stature, had stopped halfway to rest. From the look on his face they knew he was no longer interested in exorcism but in judgement. ‘That boy,’ he panted, ‘is expelled!’

  Max was stunned by his good fortune in finding a driver at such short notice at that hour, a driver intoxicated enough to believe the eleven-year-old boy in pyjamas was running from kidnappers. He was so drunk he didn’t even see the school signboard.

  Max didn’t wait for the driver to park properly when they got to the last house on the right; he shot out of the taxi like a bullet aimed for home. He banged on the door but of course no one answered. There was no routine in this house – the family could be up one night arguing about the existence of God with the children till midnight today, and they could be asleep by eight tomorrow. He banged on his parents’ bedroom window, screaming at them, begging them to wake up, but they weren’t getting up fast enough. He went around the house to the abandoned room and found that the air conditioner opening was still covered with polythene inside a grille cage, so he opened the cage, tore the polythene and crawled in. He could hear the driver yelling for his money outside and the murmurs of other neighbours but he didn’t get distracted. He kicked open the door that led into the bathroom he shared with his brother, which was smart because André had locked himself in from the main door.

  André is cutting his face with
a kitchen knife when Max breaks in, cutting from above the eyebrow downwards, revealing the white between the slivers of flayed skin, and Max finds himself hypnotised by the faraway look in his little brother’s eyes in the mirror. But when the knife cuts past the thick ridge of eyebrow hair to the rim of the eye socket, Max snaps out of it and grabs him the way he had grabbed him out of his dreams, the knife clattering into the basin, which has already collected the first drops of blood, pulls him to the ground and rocks him like a baby, crying silent tears for his little brother who could not cry for the first three years of life but had started talking secretly at two, who is already a genius at papier-mâché and has started composing his own music. He holds him on the ceramic floor tiles, crying for him and rocking him, side to side, side to side.

  André doesn’t cry. All is still in the room. They are the only two humans on earth; then he blinks and the moment is shattered, the door broken down by adults with the violence of a small action after a long empty pause, adults who rush in but Max doesn’t let him go. His father, Sweet Mother, his principal, the taxi driver – all faces from a forgotten dream. Someone reaches out to take André but the glare Max gives the person’s hands makes them disappear. André snuggles deeper into Max’s arms, sucking his thumb as blood flows from his face.

  Max shares the hospital bed with André throughout the night.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ he asks once they are alone.

  ‘I wanted to kill him dead.’

  Max nods in understanding. He wants to kill him too.

  They fall asleep as the sun rose.

  The hospital wanted to keep André for observation. The parents detested modern medicine. The administrators threatened to use legal authority to force them to leave their son there. The parents assured the hospital that they wouldn’t pay a single kobo for his treatment. That settled it. The parents had to take their boys home for they knew Max would end his education to stay with his little brother in the hospital ward. What they actually needed was for him to get his brother to talk.

  ‘If you don’t talk to us,’ the father threatened back home, ‘we will send you back to that hospital and leave you with those men, shebi? You saw how they were fighting us for you?’

  ‘I killed my brother in your stomach,’ André said.

  Sweet Mother crossed the short distance between them and struck his little face. André turned to her with such hatred that she shivered. ‘You didn’t kill anybody,’ she said and sank into the nearest chair. ‘Don’t say that nonsense again.’

  ‘He told me, he told me! I ate him up in your stomach.’

  ‘Talk to your son!’ she admonished her husband. ‘Don’t just stand there and look at him!’

  But that was what the father did – leant back on the wall near the corridor and looked at them with a hand on his mouth and the other hand cupping his elbow.

  ‘It is true,’ he said finally. ‘Your mother was supposed to have twins.’

  Just then the door burst open and men in green uniforms rushed in with guns and ordered everybody to lie down flat if they didn’t want to eat bullets. André lay on the floor like a fallen tree. He didn’t want to eat bullets. He didn’t know what they would taste like.

  ‘Oya, Shariff, just follow us. Stand up slowly and follow us and all will be fine. Don’t be foolish.’

  André gnawed the dust on the carpet. Max actually couldn’t move, couldn’t stand up until he heard the roar of the vehicles fading away.

  ‘Mummy, where are they taking Daddy?’ he asked, dusting his knees, which were still smarting from the bite of the sandy rug.

  Sweet Mother was standing looking calmly out of the window, holding the curtain with one hand, the other on her waist.

  Max approached her with caution and André linked his arm in his. ‘Mummy, what did Daddy do?’

  She let the curtain fall and turned to them. ‘Your father wrote a book.’

  ‘But you write books too and they didn’t take you.’

  ‘Not the kind of book your father wrote.’ She pushed the curtain aside again and gave an explanation that they couldn’t comprehend – ‘we are in a military regime, my children’ – then continued staring at the dust the vehicles had left behind.

  ‘Maxwell, Maxwell!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Food is ready.’

  ‘Oya, see me here now. Where is the food?’

  ‘Is a lie. I was just doing play-play.’

  ‘I am not a child any more. I am a secondary-school student. I cannot be doing play-play with you.’

  ‘But shebi, you are my brother.’

  ‘You have lied and you will go to hell and burn with the devil.’

  ‘But I will still worship God na. I still talk to Jesus on the shelf. I will talk to Jesus now, you will see.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I am going to talk to Jesus on the shelf in the parlour.’

  ‘Come back here. I said come back here! If you make me chase you I’ll punish you, ehn.’

  ‘Jesus, shebi, you know I love you. But Macmillan doesn’t want to play with me. And you said people should be playing with their junior brothers. And Macmillan doesn’t want to play with me—’

  ‘I will carry your Jesus and break him now.’

  ‘Macmillan—’

  Max strides to the shelf, pushes André aside, seizes the ceramic Jesus and smashes it on the ground.

  Before André could make new friends to show off to Max so he could know the world didn’t revolve around him, the disciplinary committee forgave Max so he returned to boarding school. They weren’t in a hurry to lose their honours student and didn’t even punish him for scaling the fence because exposing his vices would give the board members a bad name for having selected him in the first place.

  The father, or the ghost of the father, returned on the night before Max left, and everyone knew not to cross his path.

  ‘Because of your … case,’ Sweet Mother said to André, packing his lunch box, ‘they didn’t expel your brother again.’

  ‘Mummy, my eye is scratching me,’ he said, lifting up a hand to the eyebrow.

  ‘No!’ she screamed and his food flask slipped from her hand to the kitchen sink. She looked down at him. ‘Don’t touch it. If you touch it, it will not heal fast-fast. And if anybody at school asks you what happened, tell them armed robbers attacked your house, you hear?’

  ‘Yes, Sweet Mum.’

  She smiled and pinched his cheeks.

  ‘Is Daddy not feeling fine? He won’t play with me, be sleeping all the time.’

  ‘Daddy didn’t sleep very well in the place where they kept him, ehn. Let him sleep. You can play with anyone else, you hear?’

  ‘But what of my twin brother? Can I play with him?’

  Sweet Mother sighed and looked away. ‘He is dead.’

  ‘But I saw him again. I thought he was angry because I tried to kill him that day but—’

  ‘Just go to school, ehn. Try and forget him.’

  ‘But the bandage is still scratching me.’

  ‘Okay, go to the writing wall and write out that solfa notation for the tune you were humming yesterday.’

  ‘Sweet Mum?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What is hummin?’

  ‘That sound you were making in your mouth is called a hum. Hum-hum-hum. Oya, go out of my kitchen.’

  But he had been sulking on the bed, not humming, he wanted to say, but she had already pushed him out of the kitchen and put a piece of chalk in his hand.

  Aunty Jolade had got the conductor of an orchestra in Abuja that sometimes played for the Aso Villa to take an interest in André. The toothpick man, dressed in a dark three-piece suit reminiscent of the colonial masters, travelled twice a week to Kaduna for love. With the passion he hoped Aunty Jolade would notice, he taught André solfa notation to better arrange the ramblings muttered on the boy’s walk home from school and while he did his chores and sometimes when he slept so that he wou
ldn’t forget the tunes once they had left his mouth. Once a week, the man could be seen in his three-piece suit cycling down Freetown Street, long face surrounded by curly black hair jutting out to the wind, ‘hummin’ something, so that the residents of the Quarters came to believe he had ridden the bicycle all the way from Abuja. In reality he had the bicycle stored in the boot of the car transporting him. Aunty Jolade would be at the last house on the right, the Madhouse, waiting for him.

  It was a stressful, year-long exercise for everyone, even the Madhouse, for it wasn’t used to hosting so many visitors, and the toothpick man would have moved the orchestra to Kaduna to win Aunty Jolade’s heart once and for all. But he assured her, realising she was worried by his expensive visits, that André’s potential was worth much more, if only they, the parents, knew his gift, so she was grateful.

  Max wasn’t told this when Sweet Mother came to visit him at school, not even when he mentioned that he had joined the school band. She didn’t tell him that their father had disappeared from the house again. Max had only joined the band to appease her, so she would stop nagging about his solitude. What she told him was that they were getting a sister.

  ‘Mummy, you are pregnant!’

  ‘Do I look pregnant?’ she chuckled, happy that he had shown some emotion for the first time in months.

  ‘Mummy, but Father drinks too much beer, and you enter your studio and forget we exist, and Andrew … How is Andrew?’

  ‘Lower your voice; see how the other parents are looking! Who is Andrew?’

  ‘Ma, I have been explaining to people why my name is Macmillan and why I don’t have a surname. Better tell André that his name is Andrew before they start calling him a slave. Teacher says it is only descendants of returning slaves from Brazil who name their children like that.’