The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  Years later in Amsterdam he will remember these women and realise sex work is an art. All he knew about giving one’s body away was what he’d experienced in the hands of Madamthemadam and in the brazen smiles of Ibadan night women, smiles that required tremendous courage to hold up, smiles that said they were ready for whatever the night had to offer. What amazes him in Amsterdam is the way these women are able to present their bodies to different kinds of situations: junkies who need a human body to cool off their high, men tired of their wives, women tired of their husbands, men tired of men, gentlemen in suits who refuse the condition of romance for sex with their partners, fathers seeking their daughters in some stranger’s eye, elderly men trying to keep their hearts pumping, those curious about interracial sex, those trying to rekindle their luck with women, those who believe they are travellers seeking a new host, and then the tourists who see in these prostitutes their last stop, who want in the laps of these women to discover Amsterdam. People like him.

  It was high art, he would learn later, but at first the reason he went after those Amsterdam prostitutes was because he wanted to know if he would ever be interested in sex after what happened to him in Ibadan. He could remember a few things from his nights with Madamthemadam from the nightmares that started hunting him, forcing his mind shut from the first sexual encounters. To heal from these nightmares he had to live them out, so in Ibadan he punished himself by inducing erotic dreams of her whenever he was with the Ibadan night women. He continued in Amsterdam because he wanted them to enjoy their own flesh, for now this was his God-given calling: reconciling women with their bodies. By now he was grown: not too muscular, not too tall, face like a fox that swept in at the cheekbones and jutted out into the most sinfully red pair of lips, lips in a permanent pout as if in perpetual challenge of an argument or a kiss. In Amsterdam many women took on this challenge.

  One of them, Helga, believed only money could make her happy until she met him. He spent studio time researching the secret pools of women’s pleasure in his apartment on the high street paid for by his studio, and after a week of practice the women returned his money and begged him to collect theirs instead. Eventually the studio fired him and the band voted him out – his truancy and eccentricities were costing them too much – so he ended up living his nights room to room with no earthly possessions. Now that the roles had been somewhat reversed, he realised it was high art, placing your body next to a stranger’s body every night to learn what the stranger would make of it.

  His name passed between the lips of the women of the red-light district and they called him Genezen or Gene or ‘the cure’ because he knew just what to do with your body. Some women wanted sex proper after spending their days with old men, while some girls merely wanted someone to hold them throughout the night, only their eyes betraying what the previous customer had put them through. They called him ‘darling’ but no woman desired to own him; the very thought of owning André was an aberration: who could own the sun? For he was their sun, walking down the streets in his jacket and cornrows, winking at them with a smile that could keep you warm on those cold nights when business was bad. Soon he was ruining business for male prostitutes and escorts. He was bad business because he would give himself freely and wasn’t bringing any revenue to them or the city pimp gangs, and they sought to catch him, shake him up a bit. They never did because he never stayed with one woman longer than a night; the women quickly passed him on before danger could get to him.

  ‘Darling, you are staying at Rowena’s tonight.’

  ‘Ooooo, I see you like me no more.’

  ‘Haha, stop being an ass; I’ve got customers.’

  ‘Hia! Customers as in plural. Your market is really selling today, o.’

  ‘Haha, go away, you devil!’

  And as he looked back to wink, he would see in their eyes that twinkle, their smiles ready as the women of Ibadan for whatever may come, and know that they knew it too: they knew their power, this art, and they used it – not the one-timers who had student fees to pay or children to take care of, but the veterans who had become vestibules of the knowledge all kinds of people came to deposit on their bodies from all parts of the world. More than artists in sex, these women through years of experience had become conversant in other languages, chiropractors, relationship experts, psychiatrists, marriage counsellors and even religious evangelists.

  The night André was to stay with Rowena, he knocked and waited at the door as she screamed after her client who must have been dressing, ‘You can cheat your wife and children but you can’t cheat God!’ The door whipped open and a dark Italian breezed past him, head down.

  ‘If you keep having sex without a clear conscience you will keep messing with your chi,’ she yelled, then she smiled at André. ‘Come in, darling, lock the door. We are not doing anything crazy tonight. Just come and lie with me and sing the Angelus. Helga told me you are a musician and you used to be Catholic. Come on now, just sing to me until I fall asleep.’

  And after she had slept he thought about the hunger that had brought him here, the hunger that had made him watch darkness fall on houses as their lights went up years ago when he was lost in Ibadan and didn’t know it was Ibadan. It had led him – no, dared him – into one of the houses one evening; a particular single-storey squeezed between other identical single-storeys on that street. What set this house apart for him was that it had not been repainted like its neighbours, and its lights were off. It had the lonely melancholy of a home that had been abandoned for too long. He crossed the road to the house. He had to step over ancient broken ceramic tiles on the terrace, under cobwebs drooping low. He knocked on the door twice, then followed it with six heavy knocks. Then one little one for luck. On impulse he pushed the door. It opened.

  He suddenly didn’t want to go in. Not now that the sun had set.

  ‘Close my door …’ came a genderless voice from the bowels of the house, ‘if you are not coming in.’

  Once he had stepped into the dark room and let the door go, it swung back and slammed shut and the room was dark again. For a few seconds in that precise moment, electricity returned. The yellow bulb flickered, conjuring the image of an old woman shrouded in an almost colourless fabric, snug in a chair. When the light flickered off a moment later, her presence went with it. André felt that suddenly she was no longer in the room. The light returned, bringing her back. It was impossible to lift his legs from the ground and run. ‘Don’t mind the bulb, I will get someone to fix it.’

  Flash off.

  Flash on.

  ‘What are you looking for here?’

  Flash off.

  Flash on.

  He was so scared he thought he would pee.

  ‘I—’

  Flash off.

  Flash on.

  ‘You can’t talk?’

  André focused on the lesser hunger before the lights flashed off again. ‘Food.’ He stilled his heart to stop it trembling. When the lights flashed back on her thin lips were smiling.

  ‘I don’t have food.’

  He was tempted to tell her that it was his mother he was looking for, since her half-open ash eyes seemed filled with the secrets of everything, but instead he stiffened his melting spine and said, ‘If you don’t give me food I will call my friends and we will scatter this – this house!’

  Flash off.

  In the darkness that followed, so old it seemed to come from a place that had never known light, her laughter sounded far off, like water dripping in the deep recesses of a cave, just audible enough to make his heart thrash up and down in his chest. He tried to scream but the darkness which made him recall the taste of ink swallowed it up so he fell on his knees and began to crawl on the ground, groping for the door. He could feel the darkness swirling about him like smoke as he moved through it fruitlessly. After minutes of groping he knew he was no longer in that old abandoned living room and, more importantly, he was truly lost. Turning back, he started to sob.

  Fl
ash on.

  ‘This, my bulb has been giving me problems,’ the old woman was muttering from the chair again, examining her varicose hands. In front of him on the ground was a two-hundred naira note. ‘As if my partial blindness is not enough.’ She looked up at him from the chair with eyes wide in surprise, as though just realising he had been there the whole time. ‘O, the money? Keep it. Go and buy Coke and Nasko biscuit. Isn’t today your birthday? Oya, go, go, leave my house o; be going.’

  He found himself outside her door just when he wanted to ask how she knew it was his birthday, how she could be so old and speak such good English, why she lived in an abandoned house with a living room that looked like a lion had chased a goat though it, and why her light bulb flashed on and off according to her temperament. He came back to the house a few days later and found the door open as usual, and she gave him two hundred naira as usual, and he found himself outside the house just as the questions bubbling in his chest were about to spew, as usual.

  A month later, when he’d come to depend on his relationship with the old woman to keep him from pickpocketing and perishing on garbage food, he visited her with a broom. He was going to start cleaning up the house, to clear up the cobwebs and wash the floor. For the first time he visited her in the afternoon. He stepped in without bothering to knock since the door was always open. Since the sun was high in the sky he didn’t need the epileptic bulb to see the living room was in a much worse state than he had perceived. The footprints from his previous visits travelled all over the floor like black holes. Mutilated chairs stood face-down on the terrazzo, faded by dust. Ants had wreaked upon the white walls a map of their transit in streaks of brown crusted sand that confluenced at the window. A shroud of cobwebs superimposed on the netting kept most of the daylight outside. It was impossible to think of the house as empty and abandoned with all this activity of destruction going on inside it.

  Kpam-kpam-kpam.

  André was too preoccupied to realise someone was knocking.

  Kpam-kpam-kpam.

  He turned to open the door, an apology for his distraction sitting on his tongue, when his eyes locked on three faces watching him through the cobwebbed front window. A woman and two men of various ages, watching him with the patient gaze of predators, as if he were a choice animal in a cage.

  They had no way of knowing the door wasn’t locked and this gave him a head start. He sprinted to the end of the living room, dodging broken furniture in his path. He turned into the corridor and found a flight of stairs waiting. The three had entered the living room, and one of the men was pointing at him, yelling things André couldn’t hear. He flew up the first flight of stairs, turned at the landing and flew up again, his ears ringing with the sound of feet clattering after him. He kept running through open doors without registering the use of the rooms till he found himself panting on a dusty balcony overlooking the brown rusted roofs of buildings the tops of mango and palm trees, on and on to the orange horizon where the sun was about to sink.

  The nearest thing to jump onto was a slim wall but he knew he would never be able to balance on it if he jumped. Besides, broken glass jutted out of the top in places to keep robbers away. Would it be easier to run back inside, right between the strangers? Before he could decide, the door burst open behind him. He almost fell from the balcony, which had no balustrade, but a pair of arms encircled his waist with the tautness of tree branches while a smaller hand pinched just under his neck so he couldn’t scream. He kicked at the air and tried to weasel himself out of the grip but the arms dragged him back inside. At the door he was able to shift his body a little and elbow one of the men in the side. When his captor bent over he stamped on the feet of the woman squeezing his throat, wrenched free of their hands and leapt off the balcony.

  He found himself balancing on the top of the wall. Something stung his feet – the head of a charcoal iron. It bounced off the wall and when he looked up he saw the iron itself flying towards his head. He ducked and it crashed into the zinc window frame of the adjacent house. The woman who had strangled him was now hurling things at him from the balcony so he ran, bolstered by the cheering of children in the next close as ceramic dishes and old glass cups crashed to pieces at his feet. Just as he was about to jump down outside the gate, the thought of hailing an okada forming in his mind, he was stunned by an icy explosion: he had stood on the broken glass sticking out of the top of the wall. The next moment he lost his balance and fell into a darkness that pulsated with his own screams.

  3. AM I REALLY ALIVE?

  In a bathtub at age ten André discovered a superpower. His penis could harden and grow if the water was hot enough. He didn’t tell Macmillan because they had stopped sharing dreams by then. He used to squat in the tub, where he could create a small pool in the cavern between his small chest and his thighs while Max banged on the bathroom door.

  ‘André! How many hours in that bathroom? Me I want to bath o!’

  It was always hot water, delicious on the skin. He could never understand why Macmillan never spent much time in the tub enjoying hot water. Was Max’s body too big to drink it up? If that was the case, André decided he didn’t want to be eleven, and when he was eleven and still enjoyed hot water and Max still didn’t he decided he didn’t want to be sixteen. He would feel a general warmth in his lower belly each time he did this, lost in a water world of his invention where his little penis was a sea creature stuck under water. Every morning, as Max thumped on the bathroom door, he filled up the pool and tried to persuade little Augustine (as he had christened his penis) to come out of his hiding place to play, that the world was really beautiful, and his elder brother could teach him music if he wanted, his mom could teach him how to paint, or he could come listen to his father’s stories. Augustine often wouldn’t budge, or would suddenly release urine and mess up the pool and the game would be over.

  One morning Augustine came out to play. Bored with him, André unplugged a wine cork from a hole at the edge of the tub and floated it in his artificial pool. It was a success. The next second his little penis shot out. He would have let out a scream and opened the door for Max if he hadn’t felt the soft but intense roots of pleasure threading beneath his pelvis from where his penis suddenly grew out. He touched his testicles and found them stiff. What was happening? A flash of searing heat shot through Augustine, making André shudder in the tub, and out of the little eye came a thick white fluid. André touched this miracle, found it to be of the same consistency as catarrh, and screamed.

  ‘So because your brother has become a man you wanted to break my door?’ the father said between mouthfuls of Semovita at dinner. André had not touched his food. The same sickening weakness in his belly swirled in Max’s too, but Max forced himself to eat out of duty.

  ‘This is his first time, sah. You-you know how he … you know he is not—’

  The father slammed the table. ‘Why can’t you be composed, ehn?’ Pushed the food away. ‘Who is quarrelling with you?’ He turned to André, still frozen at the table. ‘Am I scolding your brother?’ The little head nodded quickly, avoiding eye contact with anyone. The father’s face relaxed. ‘Do I beat you, Macmillan?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then why are you scared of me? What is the meaning of “sah”? Am I your school principal? Of course I don’t have the money to fix the door now, so you people will have to manage your bathroom like that. But I don’t like your attitude to me at all.’ He was talking in that soft low voice, like the gentle rumble of the fridge when there was electricity, the same way he had talked to Max when he was restless in the womb during those early lethargic afternoons at the Madhouse, and Max could not resist looking at his father’s face. ‘I want to be your friend,’ his father said in that steady rumble of a voice that had soothed him into relaxation in his mother’s amniotic waters. ‘All of you. Do we agree?’

  Max ruined it all by replying reflexively, ‘Yes, sir.’

  Years later in a communal bathroom of unplast
ered walls, Madamthemadam was scrubbing André’s belly and asking him, ‘Am I not your friend?’ It had happened again, the catarrh thing, while he bathed in a large hall full of other teenagers picked off the streets. Madamthemadam, monarch of the Divine Children establishment, had come into the bathing hall and seen them laughing at him.

  ‘Yes, ma.’

  He knew from the stares of the other boys that something was unusual about the woman bathing him, but they were the same as the stares his classmates gave him in maths class and the stare his grandfather had given him when his parents came to collect him years ago, and they washed over him like the water Madamthemadam splashed on him. Yes, Ladidi had explained that he was a special child, that he might find himself understanding things his mates couldn’t, or not understanding things they could, and that this was a good thing because it meant none of them, nobody, was like him in the whole wide world. ‘And if there is somebody already like you …’ she had said during break, continuing a lecture from previous days, ‘what is the use of you being alive?’

  So he didn’t flinch when Madamthemadam washed his testicles each day. Hers was the first face he saw when he opened his eyes; she had personally treated his foot wound and bathed him for two weeks and a few days. She assured him he was safe and far from any attacker, whoever they were. She asked him to call her Madamthemadam. He thought it was a joke and laughed but she waited for him to finish laughing, with clear eyes and an expressionless face, before standing up from his bedside. She fed him and made every child in the dorm walk into his assigned room and welcome him. With forlorn faces they said they were happy to have him. When he joined the band months later he would learn that they had been reciting those lines as they recited most of their conversation within earshot of any staff for Madamthemadam’s benefit. They all knew that any slight misdemeanour and she would send them away. And even though they hungered for the world beyond the high unplastered wall, they were terrified of leaving. No one had cared for them like this before. So they only communicated their resentment of André with their eyes.