by TJ Benson
‘My sistah …’ The waitress smiled to reveal front teeth with a gap as she dug into her waist pouch to give her change. ‘You new here.’
Sweet Pea nodded, forcing the parcel of roasted chicken into her bag.
‘Welcome. Come back Friday. Market day is five-five days.’
‘Thank you,’ she said and walked deeper into the market. There were smaller makeshift sheds of alcohol vendors, most of them young scantily dressed girls at the cusp of puberty. The sun was especially hot, waking up the stench of the market people: their urine, their alcohol and their sweat. She started sweating under her chiffon top. Her braids itched. She considered going back home but discarded the thought almost immediately. She would find him today.
Soon she came to the end of the market, where a lake separated it from the neatly cultivated farmlands that sloped up to vanishing point. This part at least was busy. Fishermen were ambushed by desperate customers once they came down from their canoes with their bounty. She supposed the fish would be more expensive by the time they got to the sellers.
When a man raced past her with half a sack of something, she knew she was getting close to where she was going. A couple of bare-chested teenagers ran after him, yelling in their native tongue. She quickened her steps and wondered if she shouldn’t have got a fresh fish for herself at the riverside. The rows of bamboo stalls ended abruptly in a small stand of tall trees. Mad people abounded in their shelter, running from tree to tree, some climbing, none straying too far from its periphery. This was their home. A few naughty children came close, throwing half-eaten fruits at them, calling them strange names, and the mad people caught the fruits, tussled with one another to do so. It unnerved her when a bare-breasted woman with flowers in her greying hair rammed herself into the man who had stolen the sack of something, ignoring the children’s calls of ‘Delilah, Delilah!’ The man snatched the sack back from her, but not before it ruptured and emptied most of its contents on the muddy ground.
‘My garri o!’ wailed a well-dressed woman who had just arrived at the scene. The boys who had been pursuing the thief consoled her; he had been too fast for them. She threatened to bring the police and one of them laughed to reveal yellowed teeth. It irritated Sweet Pea. She felt this boy belonged with the mad people. She felt sorry for the woman whose sack of garri was lost; she knew, as the boys did, that going to the police station would yield no result. The others joined in the laughter after the woman had stormed off out of sight. She called the boy with the yellow teeth over.
‘Ha! Madam, I no fit o! You wan kill me? No police fit cross this line meet those mad people.’
She dug out a one thousand naira note and pressed it to his chest and he began to smile.
‘Which one you want?’
She pointed to the youngest of the mad people, a little boy with a mangled frame and discoloured skin. He was dancing to the children’s delight.
‘Ok, Mister Teacher na small thing na.’ His mouth stank. ‘But you go add money o!’
She brought out another note that returned the smile to his face. He sent another boy to buy mangoes. They kept the basket of mangoes on one side of the cluster of trees and motioned the others to the mangoes. Mister Teacher, who had been dancing, was the last to notice and when he turned to run to the mangoes the boys crossed the invisible line and grabbed him. Delilah realised too late that Mister Teacher had been taken away. She slapped her chest and yelled out and tore at her hair.
Sweet Pea ignored the mad woman’s screams and walked serenely after the boys with a faint smile. They were taking Mister Teacher to the river to bathe him. Once they had finished bathing him he was calm. She brought out a T-shirt and a pair of navy-blue shorts from her bag for the child to wear. This was not easy, for he thrashed this way and that, threatening to flog them, his eyes on the sun. How could he look at the sun without flinching? He broke free and ran into a fisherman disengaging little fingerlings from his net on the river bank. Before they could get to him Mister Teacher had snatched up a big fish from the man’s basin and bitten into it. He smiled a bloody smile at them, one that was purely childlike in spite of the blood dribbling down the corners of his mouth. The teenagers who had helped catch him were exasperated, but they reminded themselves that they owed the woman. They apologised to the fisherman who insisted they pay him for his fish, and took Mister Teacher back to the river for another bath. The white T-shirt was ruined.
Sweet Pea dug out the piece of roast chicken she’d bought earlier and presented it to him once the boys were done. He started laughing again. It wasn’t the casual, careless guttural cackle of the mindless; it began with slight giggles, increasing in pitch until it was a loud guffaw that had a note of hysteria, a sense of impending doom. His laugh made her feel something for the first time in months, brought tears to her eyes. She saw herself in it.
‘Eat,’ she ordered, forcing out a smile. The child was mad but still human, still alive. ‘It’s delicious.’
The child took the chicken, sniffed it. ‘Go on,’ she nodded. He opened his mouth and started forcing a drum stick in, and then he threw it on the ground and stomped on it, shrieking with laughter. A tear fell from her eye before she turned to the boys. ‘I need you to bring him to my house.’
The yellow-toothed teenager she especially hated told her it would cost her another thousand naira and she obliged. They bound the child’s hands and feet while another boy went to get a wheelbarrow. She almost passed her house, a mini self-contained apartment with extremely cheap monthly rental charges. Everything was cheap in the village.
‘Madam, the money …’
She apologised for having zoned out and gave them two one thousand naira notes. They couldn’t hide their joy this time; in fact, she was sure they must think her stupid. The thing was, they would come back the next day to look for an excuse to get more and she would need their help.
They helped her bath the boy every morning and night over the following days and got breakfast and dinner in return. Cooking for five teenage boys wasn’t much stress for her; she had actually missed cooking for more than one person. The loneliness that came from cooking for oneself created a hunger no amount or variety of food could satisfy.
She had to lock Mister Teacher in her empty storeroom once he had been bathed every morning because when let loose in the house he was like a hurricane. Even when he was locked in the room there was no peace in the house; he kept on thrashing and yelling and threatening, so much so that she woke up one night sure that she had captured the devil. She tried playing classical music but he didn’t stop shrieking. She had to get used to it, the way she got used to the noise of the traffic passing their house every morning in the city. She had used that noise to wake up in the morning and prepare breakfast for her family.
Communication was one way; he did all the screaming. When she talked back he ignored her. She doubted he understood a word, so she eventually gave up trying and listened. He always woke up with a slow, guttural moan that never failed to wake her up in the morning. The screams were the loudest from after breakfast until noon, when they became low wails. One afternoon she was startled out of a siesta; his cries almost sounded like the sobbing of a little boy. She tiptoed to the kitchen storeroom, her heart in her throat, each step punctuated by the boy’s sobbing. She hesitated at the door, for a perilous minute certain that she had got her miracle, that she would open the door and find a little boy she used to know. The second she opened the door he leapt on her and slashed her right cheek with a shard of glass before running outside, over shelves and chairs where the boys who had heard her scream waited. She couldn’t go to a clinic – they would ask questions she didn’t have answers for – so she looked at her face in her bathroom mirror, cleaned the gash with methylated spirits and applied iodine. When she was done she realised she hadn’t seen her face in months. She had forgotten what she looked like.
‘Leave him alone!’ she yelled through her bathroom window at the boys, a hand pressing cotton w
ool to the wound. They were beating Mister Teacher outside. ‘Let him go!’ she cried as a mother would for her child. They didn’t stop until she ran out.
‘Come here,’ she ordered the boy.
He stopped wrestling with them and looked at the ground.
‘Come.’
This was his most human act, walking straight to her. She stooped and rubbed his head. The ringworm was fading from his scalp, thanks to the ointment she’d been applying since the day he came. ‘Mister Teacher is not a name. What is your name?’
‘Mista Shisha!’ he yelled.
She laughed with the boys. She had to stop almost immediately, because when you had a gash on your cheek, laughing hurts. ‘Your name should be André.’
But she never called him by her son’s name. She sent the boys home and bathed him herself. Then she cut his nails. She cleaned up the shards of glass from the storeroom window he’d broken. The door was a few inches short from the ground so she would pass a plate of food under it three times a day. She collected the plates and cleaned up the faeces when he was taking his evening bath.
From the day he cut her he had become very calm, almost normal. There were no additional nail or tooth marks on the wall, and now he only defecated while he was being bathed. At first she thought he was sick but there was nothing wrong with his temperature or his stools. The screaming had stopped; he had gone almost mute. Was this what happened to mad people who were driven mad?
One cool evening when she took him his food, he pushed her away from the door once she had opened it, throwing her to the ground, and she despaired. She felt she had lost whatever progress she had made with him.
Then she went after him. Over the chairs, on the bed, under the chairs into the kitchen, where he got hold of a long knife and paused to admire it with a smile. Fear, solid and familiar, froze her at the kitchen door. He gave her a long look before marching lopsidedly towards her like a zombie. She was too terrified to run; she just crumpled to the kitchen floor and shut her eyes. She felt him go past her to the storeroom but she didn’t dare open her eyes until she heard the sound of metal striking metal.
‘Mr Teacher, stop!’ But it was too late. He had destroyed the door-knob and fled to the parlour. The parlour door was locked – she had taken the precaution ever since the day he slashed her face. There he was, his eyebrows furrowed in desperation, this terrified devil-child with knife clenched in fist. There was a moment when she hoped he would march back to the storeroom, but he just smashed himself through the window.
Days later she would find a welder to affix burglar bars on her window but that night she spent in fear. She had searched for him with the boys to no avail. He hadn’t even returned to his mad family by the trees. He could have been anywhere on the outskirts of the village, she didn’t know. And it killed her, not knowing. The only thing she knew for certain was that wherever he was, her kitchen knife was still clenched in his hand.
When she woke up the next morning she realised she had managed to sleep. A more intriguing realisation was the smell of flowers. When she sat up in bed a white blossom fell to the ground. Curious, she picked up a mirror to study her face. To her shock her hair had been woven into chunks with bougainvillea and poppies, the same way that the woman who had been called Delilah at the trees of mad people wore her grey hair.
‘Jesus!’ she exclaimed and got out of bed.
There he was, dozing on the ground beneath a wrapper she had been fond of a long time ago. A small circle of wetness indicated that he had urinated in his sleep. As she reached out to pull back the cover she got the same feeling she had had trying to open the storeroom door the first time, the sense of finding what she was looking for, the terrifyingly impossible. How peacefully he slept! Like any normal child. He didn’t want the barrier of a door between them, the cell without a bed and blanket kept him away from her. Children are violent and patient teachers.
She told the boys with a smile when they came that morning for their duties that she wouldn’t need their help again. There was something dangerous, threatening in their low whispers as they dragged their feet away from her house. She returned to the room to find the boy cowering in a corner, fright etched in his eyes. She picked him up and he wrapped his arms and legs about her, rested his head on her shoulder, the whole of him trembling, and she wanted to cry. How could she not have known that she was going about this madness thing wrongly? She vowed to him to do things better. He seemed not to understand her; his face held a haunted faraway look. He didn’t have to say anything; she would do better.
She didn’t bath him again, just soaked a towel in soapy water and mopped his body. She gave him his toothbrush to clean his teeth himself but he licked up the toothpaste and laughed at the taste. He offered her some of his half-finished toothpaste and when she declined with laughter, he forced it into her mouth so that she fell to the bathroom floor, still laughing as he saddled her belly as though she was a horse. Then he collapsed on her chest with his unearthly laughter, slapping her face and biting her nipples. She held his head up with a maternal fondness that overwhelmed her. He looked back into her eyes, without fear, mirroring what he saw in hers.
He opened her up to the luxury of disorganisation; she could only find things when he scattered them all over the place. There was a pattern to his madness, so much so that she began to wonder if he was really mad at all. He scattered her heap of dirty clothes in the bathroom, reminding her that they needed washing; he tore open the polythene bags bearing beans to show her the weevils that had so infested them while she was busy with other things, and the one bearing rice whenever he was hungry. Rice was his favourite meal, the one thing he ate with irregularity. She found that his eating could not be tamed; it was much like his defecating and urinating.
She had to grow an acute sense of awareness so that she could duck whenever he was trying to make a point with a knife. Like the one evening when she was mopping up his urine at the door and the knife zinged past her ear and into the wood. Even though she had come to terms with the fact that he would always need his knives if there was to be peace in the house, she turned to him in anger. She rose, her hands clenched in a madness of her own, and marched to where he was cowering in fear. As she raised a hand to strike him, someone knocked on the door.
It was the elders of the village, one of the voices claimed. They had heard that she had captured a mad boy and was using him for ritual purposes. Not opening the door, she told them she didn’t know what they were talking about. When one of the men made to pull open the door, the knife that zinged past him from inside missed his eye by a second. As the lucky man clutched the spot on his forehead the knife had cut, she warned them that if they made further advances she would call the village police station. They lumbered off, emasculated, but promising to be back by morning.
She was now furious with Mister Teacher. Didn’t he know that harming the man would cause trouble for her? She stooped to the ground and held his face in her hands. Didn’t he know the men could take him from her!
When he nicked her arm with another knife she decided she had taken enough. ‘Go to the bedroom and sleep!’ she screamed. ‘Oya! Get up from the ground.’ He acted limp so she had to drag him along the ground to the bedroom door, where he tried to slash her with the knife again. She hit him hard on the head. So hard he paused in surprise before exploding into what she thought were loud cries till they became cackles that reminded her of the times when they had had no understanding. Then he ran to the parlour and tried smashing himself through the window again, but the burglar bars stopped him from falling outside. He jumped up from the carpet, bleeding, before she could get to him, and started running round the small house, laughing as she served the punishment of chasing him. He flung everything at her – ceramic plates, a pot of half-finished egusi soup, her flat-soled shoes, the kerosene lantern she had no use for since electricity was constant, her jar of cream, her Bible, her clothes, her pillows … When he flung another knife at her, she scream
ed as loud as she could. It had to stop. This madness had to stop.
‘Sleep, child!’ she roared at him, a caricature of a human being bleeding blood, soup and raw eggs from her almost naked body. ‘Climb into the bed and sleep!’
He laughed at her, long and loud to match her screaming, overpowering her. How could a child be so strong? She collapsed to the ground beside the bed, weeping silently, begging Mister Teacher to sleep. His laughter grew louder as he jumped from wall to bed, from box to heap of clothes like a demon, aiming her bottle of perfume or a knife at her at various times, but she didn’t flinch. She knew it was over. Now or tomorrow or someday she would have to pack up her things and return to her life in the city or take her own life. Either way, she would have to let him go.
‘How many times have I tried to save you, my child? How many times have I done that day differently in my head? How many times?’
Mister Teacher stopped laughing and dropped the knife.
‘I remembered the day you came out of me. How could something so alive, so tiny come out of me?’ She leant her head back on the bed. ‘You were so helpless I wanted to put you back inside, to hide you in my womb from the dangers of this world. I had always known you would eventually die. So why did I give you life anyway?’
Mister Teacher climbed on the bed and sat beside her face. ‘I shouldn’t have let you out of my sight. I replay that day over and over again but I just can’t …’ She closed her eyes and gnashed her teeth. Her chest was on fire with the words that would only come out of her as tears. She turned to him. ‘Take the knife and kill me now. Oya. Shey that is what you have been trying to do.’