The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  It was a divorced woman who had started it. She had been one of the early members; André had visited her in her saloon. She realised one Sunday that their congregation didn’t have a name, so she took it upon herself to go from house to house to collect contributions from willing pockets and got a carpenter to print the exclamation of a white woman, after she had listened to André’s points in the first meeting, on a board. ‘The Catechisms of André’ the sign said – so that people would know where they were going.

  Soon this committee of givers, who met behind André’s back, decided to grade the road that led down to the abattoir so that movement would be easier, especially as everyone in the congregation had a car at that point. The poor, whose circumstances had been miraculously elevated in a short time, weren’t breathtaken at all; they hardly thought of their new jobs and new homes as miracles, and when their colleagues in the slum asked them to recommend their Babalawo, they replied calmly, ‘Master André says the same sun that rises over the dead rises over the living. Do not be shaken by success or loss. Find your centre and watch different seasons go by, learning from each of them. Accept the season at hand and prepare for the next.’

  They didn’t have sermons, they had ‘discussions’, and it was from these discussions that they realised it was necessary not to pray that the dead rest in peace because they were living other lives in other versions of existence. That was why they still visited in dreams, why some very sensitive humans could still catch their presence in a whiff of a scent. So it was important to pray for their welfare. And so a remorseful convict prayed that the girlfriend he murdered would find a better man in this other life. These prayers soon became conversations with the dead, which culminated in peace. People let their loved ones know they had forgiven them. André didn’t join these prayers though. He knew his dead twin was always with him.

  It was André who began the food revolution that Nigerian churches would adopt for their programmes. With suya nights, where everyone shared their stories and thoughts of God, and happy loaf Sundays, the numbers of his congregation grew. When a concerned new member complained about the frequency with which they had bread and wine, he laughed.

  ‘Don’t worry, my brother. It’s our churches that cause all these things. You think having communion every week is abuse of the ritual abi? But what did Jesus say about when we should do this? Did he give a timetable?’

  The crowd yelled, ‘No!’

  ‘Did he say the first Monday of the year?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Or every three months?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘My dear brother, you can even have communion in your house with your lover. I would have communion every day of my life fa! No need to economise Jesus, ehn?’

  ‘But some people,’ the man looked down, ‘some people brought alcoholic wine!’

  André threw his head back and laughed. ‘I am sorry, but which wine did Jesus use?’

  ‘Non-alcoholic.’

  André laughed some more. He wiped his mouth, then he said, ‘Where in the Bible was this specified? Thank God we don’t live in the dark ages where information was hidden. We have Google now.’

  To the ex-convicts fresh from jail who came straight to the place, meeting André was like meeting an old friend; patients with terminal diseases recovered mysteriously and came to meet the only man in the world who wouldn’t neglect them. People tired of changing churches came to catch their breath; agnostic young people at the brink of atheism came to be reassured; atheists came to prove that you didn’t need God to be good and André didn’t disappoint. ‘Everything you need to be is already inside you,’ he declared. ‘It is for you to discover that thing, then become it. How many of us are in the world? How many universal laws of goodness can we humans agree on?’

  André startled those seeking jobs one Sunday. ‘Where are the job seekers?’ he asked.

  The divorced woman, three ex-convicts, a man who had lost his job while in a coma in hospital, and a secondary-school graduate fleeing her abusive madam stepped out. André shook his head sadly. ‘Why are you looking for a job when you have jobs to give?’ On seeing the ex-convicts, he said, ‘You people are lucky that this is not America. It is shameful to be carrying your certificate up and down. MDs would have mocked you in their offices.’

  He exhaled. ‘Anyway, I didn’t call you up to pray for you. You can smile.’

  And the atheists in the front exhaled.

  ‘You.’ He pointed at the first inmate.

  ‘Me? Is it me, pastor?’

  ‘Yes, it is you and I am André, not “pastor”. What did you want to do before you got to, er, prison?’

  ‘Past— I mean brother, I no get wife—’ The congregation’s laughter interrupted him.

  ‘I am not asking what you did that got you in prison; I am asking who you wanted to be before all of this, as a child.’

  The man’s eyes travelled to the ceiling for a while and then he exclaimed, ‘Muzikshan!’

  Everyone smiled.

  ‘As you see me so I like music eh! No be lie. In fact I like music pass my wife. When I bin dey small—’

  ‘Why didn’t you become a musician?’

  The man explained that he had no money for training or instruments. ‘Everything you need is already in you,’ André counselled, looking round the semi-circle of people who stepped forward. ‘All you have to do is be.’

  They chorused amen.

  ‘Return to your music.’

  He turned to the other ex-convict. ‘What did you want to do before you got to prison?’ And so on.

  The musician came to thank God and André the following month because he had been hired as a back-up guitarist for a contemporary fuji band touring Europe. The other ex-convict managed to find an Indian publisher online interested in his thoughts on isolation. Within six weeks his manuscript was polished and his book on its way to become a bestselling memoir in Urdu. When he came to give his testimony after six months, the memoir was being made required reading in Indian prisons and he had signed book contracts in Latin America and Europe.

  ‘She say make i write am like diary, like that!’ he said and everyone clapped. It was a good morning. The sun was white gold and hot and had a soothing, slightly burnt perfume, like the fragrance of an ironed towel.

  ‘Let’s keep clapping,’ said André. He could hear it now, loud in the in-between of things. The thing he had always suspected since he was a child: All life was part of a strange music, everything. The stomping of soldiers’ feet, the singing of insects, the rustling leaves, even the almost imperceptible buzz of the sun. ‘Don’t stop, continue, continue,’ he ordered, closing his eyes, stamping his feet in time to the clapping as the secret melody revealed itself to him, the river running within a river. A woman started crying at the back. Everyone was on their feet now, possessed with this force, this fire André had started and wouldn’t have stopped if he hadn’t opened his eyes and seen Max watching at the end of the hall.

  ‘Ah no, continue, pastor. Well done.’ Max called out.

  That was it. André walked out and went home. He locked himself in their room the whole day, listening to Max quarrel with their parents for causing all of this, blaming Sweet Mum for her deliverance sessions and moving from church to church.

  André only opened the door when he was sure Max had left. But he knew his ministry was over. On Facebook he reconnected with the former inmates of the asylum. They wanted to know where he was, what he was doing. Shit was crazy, man! Could he remember the amazing music they made in Oakland? They didn’t stop after they left; they kept playing on the streets, outside bars and music festivals until they found a Nigerian manager in Brooklyn who didn’t think they were crazy. Would he want to come over to be their lead singer? The manager had big plans for them, big plans. He even found a Nigerian lead guitarist for them who’d also been in jail – how awesome was that! When was he coming, when was he coming, when would he come?!

  They were thinking o
f calling themselves Guns and Naira – Naira because of him, that first day in the asylum, when he realised he didn’t have any dollars on him. Did he remember?

  5. HOW DOES IT ALL END?

  The year of the unending music tour. Forever running from home. Upside-down falling into a dream. Guns and Naira. Kiss the devil. Come back inside, Ladidi, come in. It’s knives and blood and displacement outside. Some Amsterdam nights are so cold. Where is this place? With houses climbing mountains to the other side. Why did they have to go to the market that day of all days? Sweet Mum had to do weekend shopping. To buy fruits because knives had been banned from the house. Everyone ducked once they heard the first explosion. Sweet Mum told them to remain in the car. That was when André turned and saw the open door and the empty seat. There was chaos outside; why did Ladidi run to it?

  ‘What was Sweet Mum going to do in Japan? You think you are the only one who lost her,’ yells Max, losing his temper for the first time.

  There is going to be a big fight, André can feel it, and the sweet scent of the cake batter makes the whole thing ridiculous. He turns to see their father’s dropped jaw.

  ‘Well, sir, with all due respect, how did you treat her when she was alive? She was the breadwinner of this house and you, what have you really done for us? What? Besides drink beer?’

  ‘I am your father! You will stop raising your voice at me this second,’ growls the father, grabbing both sides of the table, ‘if you want to live long.’

  Max throws his head back and laughs a deep laugh that André recognises as their father’s but doesn’t say anything.

  ‘You think I am scared of death? I spent my life saving this one’s life,’ – he thrusts a hand at André – ‘protecting him from your madness and Mom’s madness. But it’s fine; I won’t live long enough to be as old as you are. Keep your long life.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, sir, can you remember the disease Mom was supposed to have?’ Max smiles a big smile and André’s blood goes cold.

  ‘Yessss, cancer, hahaha! Yes! I have brain cancer. Mother was so pissed off because she felt dying of cancer was a cliché. Do you remember? Well, I can manage the cliché. Way better than a plane crash. What was she going to look for in Japan?’ Max is laughing hysterically now, with tears in his eyes. ‘What was she looking for in Japan?’

  Their father lets go of the table and sinks to the kitchen floor, dazed. André wants to comfort his brother, to mother his fears and assure him that he isn’t going to die, that he had protected him by imagining all the 490 ways it could probably happen and secretly mourning each death to make sure it didn’t occur.

  He had used his preternatural gift for dreaming things that would never come true, which is the main reason why, when he once woke up in his brother’s arms in the rainy pre-dawn, he announced that he had seen the future. Max had soothed him back to sleep without asking what he’d seen. Like the new churches sprouting up all over the town that specialised in prophecy André’s gift wasn’t taken seriously. ‘Repent! Jesus is coming soon!’ the prophets of those churches cried unanimously on Sundays in the last months of the old millennium. ‘Jesus will come on the last day of December 1999.’ Until those prophecies began to fall short in accuracy of detail and timeline.

  Indeed, André had dreamt of a fire rain that burned trees, houses, people and every other thing that stood upright on the face of the earth. The dream had been so detailed – he could discern the smell of burning wooden shelves from that of burning people – so elaborate and so real that when he woke from his nightmare into the dawn of New Year’s Day in the year 2000, he was shocked to breathe earthly air and see his room, the saxophone on the shelf intact. He sat on his bed for a long time waiting for the fire to come.

  Before twenty he had thought music and dreaming of his father’s death were the only ways he had for dealing with his daily life of abuse at the hands of Madamthemadam, but he’d been protecting him. Yet somehow, in all those morbid fantasies, he had never taken precautions by dreaming ways of dying for his mother. Not once in his imagination had he permitted her the mercy of eating a poisonous leaf or never waking up from a dream. For two and a half decades he had left her vulnerable.

  And now she is dead.

  As silence floods the kitchen, André shuts his eyes and summons the image of his brother once more, as he has hundreds of times before. Max would not die. Not in the real world.

  He would not allow it.

  The Kissing Diary

  STRAWBERRY

  Just at the edge of childhood, never having been a child, Ladidi watched with indifference every afternoon as other girls tried to predict their futures with a skipping rope. Her uncle feared for her reclusiveness – the child would stay indoors all day if left to her – so he forced her out of the house onto the streets where children played predictive games.

  ‘How many husbands will you marry?’ the girls would chant as one of them jumped over and fell under the oscillating rope in time to their counting. ‘One. Two. Three. Four. Five. One …’ until the girl got tired or her leg caught in the rope. The number she stopped at was her fate.

  ‘How many children will you have on your wedding day?’ the breathless girls would sing for another prediction. ‘One. Two. Three. Four. Five. One …’ They always stopped at five before returning to one, for they were merciful.

  ‘How many heads will you have on your wedding day?’

  She kept to herself at school. She sat in class during break time, nibbling her bread and sipping her sachet of zobo, the nearest thing in taste to the exquisite wonder her agricultural science teacher at her former school had brought them the previous term. She couldn’t remember the name of the fruit or the name of the teacher. Nobody at her new school could understand how a tomato fruit could have pores and taste like sour sugar and flowers. They laughed when she tried to describe it. So she didn’t join their skipping or hand-clapping games; she never talked unless being spoken to, and she did her class work without relying on anyone for help. At home she washed the plates her uncle had eaten from, did her homework, formed words on her uncle’s Scrabble board, her favourite thing to do in the world, yet the days were unbearably long and she just couldn’t wait to grow up. The nights were another matter. Falling into sleep was impossible in the new house in the new room on her new bed. The trip to the compound bathroom at night was terrifying; she couldn’t bear to leave her room and go wake her uncle sleeping in the parlour so she lay awake, trapped in the still darkness of her room till morning.

  One Saturday she came out of the tiny storeroom they used as a scullery to wash plates and saw drops of blood on the steps. She panicked. Something told her, seven years old, to pick up a knife and follow the trail of blood. The red sprinkling led past Mama Hadiza’s room to the fence where it turned behind their row of houses. Finally, at the far end she found a goat with her newborn, a small white sack beside it. She knew the goat – she was practically a member of their family, came to sleep in the small corridor that led into their storeroom every night and ate leftover rice and yam peels. It was the most intriguing thing she had ever seen. The following Monday she came back from school and saw a woman in their small parlour talking to Uncle. She was surprised to see Uncle at that time of the day. She didn’t know what work he did exactly but she knew he was going to ‘work’ when he left her to eat the breakfast he prepared in the morning. She was always happy to see Uncle’s yellow pawpaw face with black freckles. When she was younger she used to beg him to carry her so she could taste them with her tongue and he would laugh his wiry microphone-screech laugh, tell her she too would have them if she lived long enough, and then he’d grow serious and make her promise she would live long enough. She would nod solemnly and promise him that she wouldn’t die like her mother, even though he had never told her how her mother had died, or disappear like her father, even though she had never met the man.

  Who was this woman in their parlour? She had her hair
up in a wide-brimmed hat that shielded her from the sun. Her big eyes that seemed unhappy even as she smiled with teeth so white that you thought of coconut.

  ‘Ladidi!’

  Startled, she dropped her lunchbox. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’ She curtseyed. ‘Good afternoon, ma.’

  ‘Go to your room and change,’ commanded Uncle. ‘Oya!’

  The strange beautiful woman had skin the colour of the Choco Milo her uncle made for her every morning. How the beautiful woman’s face had turned to her in genuine shock when her uncle called her name!

  Ladidi dropped her lunchbox on the sink in the kitchen and ran to her room, avoiding the parlour, yet once she had shut the door behind her she pressed her ear to it to gather whatever muffled noises she could. When she heard footsteps clacking to her door she knew they had been talking about her.

  ‘My socks—’

  ‘O, my God.’ The woman was covering her face with both hands. ‘O, God.’ She leant down to touch Ladidi, then looked to the uncle. ‘Is this … is this she?’

  Uncle nodded.

  ‘Are you my mother?’ Ladidi asked the woman, even though her uncle had told her before they moved here that her parents had died when she was born.