The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  ‘O, God, I am so—’ He pulled her into the tub and she fought him, laughing, the water splashing on the ground, and soon her slaps became clasps, caresses. Fighting became fondling and the water slapped around them; their moans amplified by the wall tiles were audible across the street.

  ‘What time will they finish school?’ he asked once the water settled and she was nestled in his arms.

  ‘Two ten.’ She turned her head back for a kiss. ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘Please, what is the time now?’

  ‘You know we don’t keep time in this house.’

  She felt his stomach harden under her back and got worried but something told her not to push him since he didn’t ask further questions. She was able to forestall his insane wrath until that afternoon, when she tried to surprise him by sneaking up on him from behind and he drove a knife into her side.

  Years later, towards the end of the military regime, when Ladidi had blossomed into that mysterious flower she was destined to become and she stabbed Sweet Pea in the hand, Sweet Pea would recognise the knife and decide once and for all that Ladidi was really his daughter.

  But she blamed no one, at least tried not to blame Shariff after that night Dele Giwa was shot and he slept with Sarai. As he slipped into alcohol to hide his shame, she decided to be the best version of herself for her son and for the house and for Sarai while Prof was away scheduling plans to escape from the country.

  ‘But how can you still be my friend?’ Sarai had exclaimed in one of the rooms in Prof’s hotel as Sweet Pea helped her pack her bag. She was going to Sokoto to teach in a secondary school for a term as a guise to further deflect suspicion until it was time for her and Prof to flee. ‘You know I slept with your husband but you – you are still here!’

  Sweet Pea had carried on, clicked the Echolac suitcase shut. ‘Better use the train. Your husband said there would be no check points but if you use a bus those people on the road can stop you and recognise you and—’

  ‘Stop it!’ Sarai had cried. ‘Stop being so perfect, stop! Why are you punishing me like this?’

  There had been a silence punctuated by the traffic outside. Some politician was driving in convoy down the road, giving basins of milk to the passers-by. Sweet Pea let go of the suitcase and glanced at her hands. She smoothed some invisible wrinkle on her skirt and looked over her shoulder at herself in the mirror. Then she walked round the bed to where Sarai sat and dragged a stool to sit close to her. She picked up her handkerchief from the bed and dabbed the tears from Sarai’s face. She reached for a compact mirror on the dressing table, handed it to Sarai and started applying blusher to Sarai’s cheeks. ‘Hold still. Remember that if anybody asks you, you used to be a hairdresser in Lagos. You finished the diploma and you are going to teach English language and live with a relative until NYSC post you somewhere. Don’t cry o, you know I have not mastered this make-up thing from you yet. You will just ruin the look. Where do you keep your eye pencil?’

  Sweet Pea stood up and smoothed the invisible wrinkles once more and went to lean against the curtain, her hands behind her waist, waiting for Sarai to stop crying. When Sarai eventually stopped she looked at Sweet Pea. ‘I want you to hate me. Please hate me.’ She went down on her knees and crawled to Sweet Pea to grab her feet. ‘Please blame me. It was my fault, it was my fault.’

  ‘I cannot blame you,’ Sweet Pea finally said, looking down at her. ‘I blame myself. I was not supposed to be born.’

  ‘How can you say such a thing!’

  ‘Shush.’ She leant down to brush Sarai’s cheek. ‘My father wanted a male child – he had three daughters already. It is not your fault. I wasn’t supposed to be born.’ She left Sarai there and walked to the door. ‘Clean your face. Maybe make-up will attract too much attention. Remember to use the train o. Ehen.’ She stepped outside the room, then peeped back in. ‘And don’t worry about the hotel, I will keep an eye on everything. Be safe.’

  Sweet Pea didn’t tell Prof about what happened, and he could barely visit for long enough any more to find out. He didn’t need to know. It was of no good or use to him. He would pick Sweet Pea up from a particular market at a prearranged time and their meeting would be in the car on a drive round the city. And he would ask after Sarai.

  ‘How is my madam?’

  ‘Ah, she’s fine o, she is adapting to Maiduguri well. She even has a letter for you. Sef, I forgot it in my house.’

  ‘Sad that I can’t write her back or even see her,’ he would sigh in the car, and shake his head. ‘But one day, one day. We are working on it; I can’t tell you everything because the less you know the better for you. How is my friend,’ and he would add a lilt of humour to his voice, ‘your tenant?’

  ‘Ah, he keeps worrying about you.’

  ‘I don’t want to complicate things, eh. Or I would have come to drink whiskey with him.’

  ‘He is starting to like it,’ she would say, looking out of the car window, chuckling for his benefit. ‘You have corrupted my husband.’

  ‘Ah, good then, haha! I miss my friend. But you know he was in the army before – just imagine someone is monitoring us, ehn. Former spy and mistress of a general married to a British Nigerian cavorting with a defected soldier. Too dangerous. Thank God at least he has drink to remember me by.’

  They would then switch to other things. He gave her contacts she could send her illustrations to. She worried about the government officials in suits who kept coming every month requesting to see the manager. Each time she said she was the manager, they would laugh and ask her to make sure the ‘real’ manager called their number. Their persistence tired her. ‘Are you sure they are from the government?’ she would ask Prof. ‘See their cards: no name, no address, nothing.’

  He would laugh and reassure her that they really were from the government. ‘Don’t worry yourself. Take this gift for Max. And please contact those numbers I sent you. At least there should be a reputable textbook publisher that needs your illustrations. And please, I beg you, tell my Sarai how much she means to me. Remind her she is the only cockroach in my cupboard.’

  They would laugh and she would give him the hotel income for the month and he would give her something for the house and drop her off. Sometimes she didn’t see him for two months.

  The last time she saw Sarai she had to travel to Maiduguri herself because Sarai had stopped writing letters and Sweet Pea had not seen her in eight months. Everyone at the school where she was teaching believed Sarai was the laziest staff member, but that the principal wouldn’t fire her because of her condition. Sweet Pea didn’t bother asking what the condition was; she asked where Sarai could be found. They gave Sweet Pea directions to a tree Sarai spent lesson periods sleeping under. When Sweet Pea found her she had to swallow her gasp. Sarai was not only sleeping, she was heavily pregnant.

  ‘Ah, you have found me,’ she said, sitting up on the mat and stretching her hands above her head to yawn. Sweet Pea, in spite of the metallic taste of shock on her tongue, was able to recognise that Sarai was beautiful, would always be, even though she was unkempt, even though she was just waking up, even if she was carrying Shariff’s child.

  ‘Carry me home,’ Sarai said. ‘I want to go home.’

  So Sweet Pea led her to her room in the staff quarters to pack her things so they could return to Kaduna. She couldn’t say a word to Sarai the entire journey; speech had been wrenched from her throat.

  In Kaduna she wanted to confront Shariff after dropping Sarai off at the hotel but he was drunk as usual that night, chanting in Latin, then Arabic. Those were the days she needed him desperately but during the day he was either asleep or missing. She needed him to be a father, to clean the ever-accumulating cobwebs, to scare off those suited men from the government who kept pestering her, and she needed him to tell her whose child Sarai was having.

  She tried to watch over Sarai in her last month. Sarai needed lots of caring for, because she carried on those final weeks in a delirium
that was heartbreaking to watch. This strange woman who believed she was destined to die by the hands of her former lover in a strange town. Days before the birth Sweet Pea wrote to Prof, asking him to come as soon as he could because his cockroach was back and missed him terribly. She turned from the desk where she composed her letters to look at Sarai sleeping on the bed. The bloody cockroach.

  How many disasters can be contained in a night?

  Consider Sweet Pea in the car hurtling to the nearest hospital, House of Mercy it is, because she was the last child in her family and has no practical knowledge about childbirth even though she is a mother; Sarai writhing in the backseat of the 504, screaming out the agony of eight months of pregnancy, screaming out into the night. Think of this sound passing outside your house, a rush of wind, the grumble of a heavy car negotiating bumps, then a long, deep shriek in the night.

  Sweet Pea was about to leave a dreaming Sarai’s room when the screaming began. First the tossing and turning on the bed, then a loud shriek into wakefulness, followed by the declaration, ‘The baby wants to come out!’

  Sweet Pea reminded her she was only eight months pregnant, but she saw the bloodshot eyes, the tenacity with which Sarai pulled clumps of the bedsheet for support. So she tore a page from the records book and drafted a letter, very straight to the point, straight enough to cause Prof, who had driven into the city an hour after it was drafted, to leave the men he had come with confounded in the lobby, and to drive into the same night, speeding after the screams of his wife, to his death.

  It was a baby girl. She was as wet as everyone in the labour room: Sarai sweating from pushing and screaming, an army of nurses from shouting orders, and Sweet Pea from yelling encouragement. Because it was 1987, a time when the arrival of female children was beginning to be accepted, at least as a form of consolation, proof that the womb was working, the nurses took turns to dance with the baby and sing Hausa songs of praise. The female child had been sent to prepare the way for the male child; o the wisdom of God! Or maybe they celebrated especially because they had delivered the baby without the help of the doctor.

  In the midst of their celebration, Sarai pulled Sweet Pea to her and whispered ‘Ladidi’. She fell back on her bed and closed her eyes, and Sweet Pea knew she would never open them again. Sweet Pea wrapped her arms round herself and let out a loud screech that rose higher than the singing women, stupefying them. She didn’t stop until she fell to the cold floor, dazed and mad and drunk with grief, not able to separate this grief from the others in her life. The nurses rushed to her, fearing a heart attack, but she pointed to Sarai on the bed. Peaceful, still.

  ‘Pre-eclampsia,’ the doctor diagnosed once he had joined them not too long afterwards. ‘Her body was not well prepared for this; there is nothing you could have done.’

  When she got to the hotel, two strange men dressed in skinny bootcut trousers were waiting in the lobby. Sweet Pea asked the receptionist, Sade, who they were.

  ‘Ah na Oga Prof carry dem come o; Oga read your message you no meet am for hospital?’

  It is hard to lose yourself entirely to grief when there is a house to hold you up. Those long afternoon death-sleeps people sleep when grieving, sleeps that make them forget food, are impossible to indulge in when there is a child you have to feed, a husband to babysit, two dead friends to make disappear and a hotel to look after.

  That night Sweet Pea couldn’t involve the police for fear of exposing Prof, so the two men volunteered to look for him. Towards morning they found him in the Kaduna River that separates the state into north and south: he had driven off the bridge. They suspected foul play with his brakes. ‘He wanted you to have it,’ said one of the men after asking Sweet Pea to drive them to Abuja Road.

  ‘To deal with those government people,’ said the other, giving her a brown envelope.

  ‘We hope you never see us again.’

  She ripped open the envelope. In it were documents declaring her the sole owner of Sleep Sweet Hotel, Barnawa, Kaduna State, and house number 37 on Freetown Street, Old Quarters, Sabon Geri, formerly properties of Professor Odinkalu Tupperton, heir to Sir Francis Tupperton’s estate. Sweet Pea bowed her head on the steering wheel and cried deep and long and ugly. When she checked the rear-view mirror, the men were still there. It took all her energy to turn the key in the ignition and drive. She drove straight to the House of Mercy hospital to see how the baby was doing.

  The nurses, all remorseful for their earlier premature jubilee, took her to the ward where the premature pink wonder was being incubated and told her someone had paid all the bills. He was waiting to see her.

  She stepped out of the ward and when she saw the man she knew from all the stories who he was, standing in the middle of the hallway, his back to the light from outside. She hurried to him as if in fear that he would disappear but when she got to him he was still there, real. He was the tallest human she’d ever seen. She looked up from his chest to ask, to say, ‘You are Sarai’s brother.’

  He swallowed and his eyes welled up with tears. ‘I followed her. I watched her every move. Once I got out I followed her but I knew I couldn’t get too close. I knew they were watching me.’

  ‘She talked about you all the time. All the time she told us about you. She feared for you. She assumed you were dead.’

  ‘I am. As far as this country is concerned, I am dead. We can’t talk here.’

  He walked out and she followed him at a distance. Under a tamarind tree where cars were parked she told him Sarai wanted the baby’s name to be Ladidi. He wanted to take the baby. She was horrified. How could he come back from the dead and want a baby? Yes, he knew about war and survival, but what did he know about babies? He said where he lived he was safe; she could come and visit any time. He even wrote down his address for her. She said he was crazy. They argued for hours and he eventually left promising he would be back the next day.

  And he came back the next day. And the next. She wished desperately for Shariff to leave alcohol for at least a day and fight for her but he was still dwelling on the thing that had happened the night Dele Giwa died.

  One day Sarai’s brother didn’t come. She asked the nurses but they hadn’t seen him either. She thought maybe he would come the next day. Or the day after that. He didn’t. Later she would miss her tussles with him under the tamarind tree. Those were the longest and most intimate conversations she had had with any man apart from Shariff. Sometimes they descended into irony and sarcasm to invalidate each other’s points, and sometimes the two of them would storm off in anger.

  ‘I am not raising my voice for nothing; I just find it disrespectful that you think I am not able to care for my sister’s child just because I am a man. I do not look down on you for being a woman and – why are you laughing? This is serious.’

  ‘No-no, it is you with your head up in the tree and you looking down on me and saying you do not look down on me that is making me laugh.’

  On the day of the discharge she came for the baby, after reorganising the house.

  ‘Ah, madam,’ said one of the nurses, chewing roasted maize. ‘Your friend done carry am go na.’

  The hospital started spinning. She grabbed the desk. ‘Which friend? I do not have any friends. Which friend?’

  ‘Ah, that dogo wey you dey carry go gist for car park every week na. You don’t remember?’

  The doctor told her there was nothing he could do; Sweet Pea herself had confirmed that the visitor was the deceased mother’s brother when asked by the doctor in charge of baby Ladidi.

  ‘He signed our document and said you knew he was coming to take her. Are you all right?’

  ‘I need to lie down here small. Can I lie down here?’

  She hated Shariff. She hated him so much but she still undressed him in his alcoholic state and plugged in his penis. And no matter how many bottles he took he couldn’t resist. She enjoyed the helpless surrender she saw in his eyes beyond the mists of spirits each time she seized his trousers or wra
pper. She knew he knew he could never say no to her. How was that for a cliché? But it was not enough. One night when he reached for her in half-sleep, she pushed him away, and because she didn’t know what reason to give, she asked him to go and look for a job. She sent him to look for a job and he found the nearest war.

  The first time someone remarked that André was handsome she waved it off as the superficial kindness of strangers, but as she pulled his blanket up to his chin that night she realised that it was true: her boy was beautiful in a way that was raw, disconcerting and almost supernatural. It frightened her, his beauty. You couldn’t stay calm once your eyes fell on his thick, wild eyebrows that often met in a unibrow when she forgot to shave him, and his round eyes and small mouth that seemed pinched together round his small nose like an owl. You just had to stare. And people stared, in the market, everywhere. Max’s long readable face they could tolerate but not André’s. Besides, what Nigerian child born in the Eighties answered to the name ‘André’? She had to fight this battle every term with his teachers. ‘Max’ they could forgive but not ‘André’.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ a young teacher with her red-painted lips was saying at an end-of-term party, ‘your son Andrew—’

  ‘André! My son’s name is André!’

  When their fiasco with the military government came and they had to leave the country Sweet Pea didn’t even bother introducing the two boys when they got to her father’s house. She didn’t want to leave her life behind. The thing was, she never felt unsafe in the Madhouse. Even after Shariff had stabbed her. She never thought about leaving.

  The entire family came outside to witness the spectacle of her return, stepping far apart from one another to have enough shock room. Shariff made to come forward and give the man a handshake but she blocked him. ‘This is my husband,’ she said; then, ignoring her mother’s gasp, she went on, ‘I have two sons.’ She turned to the Peugeot. ‘Oya, you people should come out now,’ and they did, in matching green-and-red paisley-print shorts and cream button-up shirts with green suspenders. Her father looked at them, from their feet in matching black pied-piper buckle shoes with long socks that disappeared into their shorts, to their low cuts, and accepted defeat with a grunt. ‘I like their smart haircuts,’ he said, and asked, looking Max in the eye, ‘Does this one love the Lord?’