The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  He didn’t move. His eyes moistened over.

  ‘Kill me!’ she screamed.

  But he took her head in his lap and stroked her hair. ‘See Shariff, see Shariff coming far away.’ He sang a made-up melody that made the hair on her forearms rise.

  ‘How do you know his name?’ she cried. ‘I have never used his name before!’

  But he never stopped stroking her hair. ‘Shariff is waiting for you … Shariff is waiting for you.’

  In the night a knocking at the door woke her up. She was on the ground with Mister Teacher sleeping beside her. This boy had touched her in a way only André had, mad as he was. That was all she had gained from her blind trip: a caricature of her missing son. But it was over. It was time to go back home.

  Knock-knock-knock.

  She straightened up, smoothed down her skirt and went to the door. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It is me.’

  Her heart sank. She opened the door and let in the night and insect sounds. She wanted to squeeze her arms around him and strangle him so she clung to the cold door instead. ‘How did you find me?’

  He kicked a stone and placed a hand on his forehead. Every word that had to come out of him required tremendous effort. This mortified her.

  ‘I am your husband, I know you. I went to the Kawo Market and asked for the most beautiful woman to have come there and they said you went to Benue. I kept describing you to bus drivers and transport unions. When I got here I got my answer at the beer parlour.’ His eyes twinkled in amusement, even though they brimmed with tears. ‘You have caused quite a stir in this village.’

  ‘What do you want?’ She looked away from his grin.

  He exhaled. ‘I want you to know that we need you back home.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry you had to come so far.’ She stepped back into the safety of her house. ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Are you with someone there?’ His voice was hoarse and his hands trembled.

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘Today is André’s birthday,’ he said before she shut the door.

  She regretted having opened it in the first place.

  At fifty-nine she had not learnt how to age. She had not grown grey hair, her face hadn’t wrinkled because she had escaped the bitterness of awaiting pension by not working for the government in the first place; she didn’t have bags under her eyes because she had slept through the horrors of the coups and military regime under the influence of her delicious narcotic vegetables. Her thirties and forties she had spent worrying about how to make her characters fall in love in impossible pre-colonial circumstances instead of worrying about Nigeria. The only indicators of age were her skin and her eyes. Her dark skin turned light in the autumn of her life. She had stopped worrying about it when she moved into the Madhouse; coconut oil was all she used. Then her eyes, they grew wider and heavier. Her skin, her eyes and her heart. All the damage and love that had been done to her hid in her heart.

  She had emerged from motherhood unscathed because of her taut, small frame: she had never had a big bosom so her breasts didn’t sag at fifty-nine; she had never had a big backside so she felt like a girl in her own body. Even her laugh felt wrong for her age, girlish and light.

  The only sign of motherhood on her body was the star scar on her right palm where Ladidi had stabbed her almost two decades ago. And she enjoyed this scar in secret, caressed it at night till she fell asleep, for it reminded her that Ladidi had once been alive and belonged to her so fiercely.

  Ladidi had returned to her in the manner of an itch years later on the same date she had inflicted the knife wound. She took it as a sign that Ladidi was still alive. The first time it happened, she scratched the scar in her sleep until she woke up and screamed ‘Ladidi!’, without having had any thoughts about her the previous day or any appearance in her dreams. For years she had secretly resented the malevolent girl for refusing to appear in her dreams.

  ‘It was just a bad dream,’ she told her husband and settled back in his arms.

  Filled with hope, she had snuck away to see a psychiatrist in Abuja who had an interest in the metaphysical the following day, but she was told that she was experiencing muscle memory: ‘Some important incidents we may want to forget, but the body never fails to remember.’

  She knew Max never forgot.

  She saw the power in his eyes when at five he collected André from her, a bloodied and mute baby with eyes wide open, already hungry for the world. She saw his eyes soften as she tried to stand up from the blood and fluid on the terrazzo. She saw the power disappear as adoration clouded his face but she knew it was always going to be there.

  When Shariff had returned her to the house and André had been found, their younger son would only talk to his brother. She caught the look of power in Max’s eyes before he shut the door on her.

  Maybe that was why she was the first to suggest André withhold his news. Maybe she wanted André’s baby to belong to her because she knew the day Max learnt about his baby’s baby, the child would belong to no one else.

  ‘Don’t tell him. You know how proper and moral he is, André. He will be disappointed in you.’

  And André took his son inside the house and shut the door after her.

  When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she was furious. ‘The biggest cliché!’ she vented. ‘Of course, why not breasts? After all, I used them to feed my babies.’ One baby was on the verge of becoming the next big something at NAFDAC, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, while the other was already a father. On her second scan they couldn’t find the lumps; an error, the doctor said. In the spirit of relief and celebration, he offered to scan her entire body and they found cancer in her ovaries. When the doctor, solemn once more, told her, she couldn’t hold back her laughter. ‘Please,’ she said, wiping her eyes with her handkerchief, ‘just tell me when I’m going to die.’

  I am nursing a dead body. Applying cream to a body that will soon explode. Where is my lipstick? The red one? My hair started falling out today. But I still ate breakfast. Yam porridge – can you imagine? Ugwu leaves, dry fish and chunks of kpomo. I am feeding a dead body. Why feed it at all? Why sustain a life that is leaving you? Why eat, wake up, shit, bath, fuck sometimes, do your hair, today then tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and ten years or twenty or forty? I am what, fifty-four? Fifty-five? Still menstruating, can you believe it! What have I done with my life? Two boys, one great heartbreak, Shariff, three decades of pain on and off. Feeding this body, sexing this body. The sex is like a conversation: he always has something to say; he still loves my body. Why wouldn’t he, this taut, unwomanly body that wouldn’t loosen up with age and breastfeeding, this body that wouldn’t become motherly: a prostitute’s dream. And all these years I’ve carried this bomb in this unwoman’s body, I carried this bomb with me.

  The cancer disappears one morning three years later after she had gone for chemotherapy at her husband’s insistence. Everything about her body becomes enjoyable, even a hot piss on a cold December morning. It is in a hotel room that she starts returning to those torrid early days of their marriage. He has been kissing her neck, back to the bedroom mirror and she has been swaying with him in the waves of passion and will crash eventually on the bed. Before they climax she opens her eyes. What a view. To watch him fire her up in the mirror gives her an omnipresent power. How his mighty back muscles clench and release as hands run up and down her spine, the way André’s fingers travel the strings of a guitar, leaving fire blazing in their path. It is like seeing the mechanism of how they work. When the pleasure becomes excruciating she can look no more.

  Twenty minutes later, sweating in the chilly dawn, she decides two things on top of him:

  1.She will take a true blind trip for twenty-nine days.

  2.She will bake a vanilla sponge cake when she returns.

  He protests, a weak protest for he is beneath her and she is playing with the few strands of grey hair on eithe
r side of his face. What about her final check-up? Why not a weekend?

  ‘I want to return to my body,’ she explains. ‘I have not belonged to myself these past years, the way I used to when I came here.’ She smooths his sweaty forehead and smiles. ‘And you just reminded me of how it used to be.’

  ‘For twenty-nine days.’

  ‘The years of our marriage; why worry so much?’ She smiles down on him and grazes a tongue over the tip of his nose. ‘What are twenty-nine days compared to the rest of our lives?’ and she feels him harden between her thighs at the prospect so she takes him as she had that first time on the kitchen floor.

  He doesn’t know when he falls asleep but when he wakes up she is gone.

  If she was to pick a defining moment, the moment she knowingly chose to stay, that made her return to him after her time with that mad child, it would be one of those first mornings when they were still trying to be cordial but ended up waking up next to each other. She woke up into his eyes, found them boring down on hers. Those eyes didn’t look away. A month passed and looking at his eyes she realised nothing would ever be temporary again. After now, those eyes said, no more dancing around. They were in this, whatever it was.

  Sometimes panic overwhelmed her, panic born of her father’s strict discipline and distaste for eccentricities and excesses, panic that told her she was making a terrible, terrible mistake as her sisters had before her, an undoable mistake that involved a man, but when she stared into his eyes, the black-blue of rocks at a distance on a hot afternoon, she saw in them the journeys she wanted to take. How much time did a human being have? In Nigeria, sixty years at best. That is, if you didn’t manage to get into an accident or starve or get involved in a coup or receive fake drugs or poor treatment or too many drugs; if you managed not to find yourself embroiled in an incident with the military or find yourself in the wrong place where a riot was breaking out or in the wrong church which could be bombed. Sixty years. She had to live like her three sisters never had. She had to live beyond the dreams of her parents. It was too cruel, giving away your life like that to family in the name of God and respect. This was why she ran.

  Which was why, when she realised that she really was going to make it – after surviving the military regime, the death of her best friend, the betrayal of her Shariff, who never lied to her, who would find meat if he said he would and find their André if he said he would, the poverty of the Nineties, the violence and magic of André’s childhood, the scorn and bitterness of her Max, the return of Ladidi, her death, the Miss World War, the disappearance of André, the phantom cancer, the return of their sexual appetite and the spite of her body – she knew she would have to turn sixty in Japan.

  When she was a girl she had run into a woman in chains being led into the Zaria State Prison from court. This was the first handcuffed person she had ever seen in real life. A handcuffed woman for that matter. When she later told her classmates at the University Primary School, none of them believed her – only men could commit crimes, only men could be armed robbers, only men could kill. Only men could end up in prison. But the police officers were saying in Hausa that court had found her guilty.

  Her mother had just started selling food from a makeshift stand at the time because her father was on suspension for abandoning his duties as a lecturer to chase her elder sister to the end of the country. The handcuffed woman looked nothing like a criminal, wasn’t sad, didn’t struggle with the police, so she had to ask, ‘Ma, why are they taking you away?’

  ‘I killed my husband,’ the woman said, not looking back at who had asked the question. ‘Stabbed him with my tailoring scissors. I warned him.’

  ‘Shut up!’ One of the guards struck her on the face but the woman didn’t stop and she followed them until they entered the block. Stuck on his white woman. He promised me, told me he was going to prepare his family for when I came to visit. I was carrying his white baby. And he went back to that white witch.’

  ‘I said shut up!’

  She had followed their procession all the way from her mother’s stand to the cell block for women. The woman turned to look at her and she would never forget that look. ‘Have you killed someone before? Have you? Answer me!’

  She shook her head, on the verge of crying.

  ‘Good girl. You will be fine.’

  When the plane began to fall from the sky decades later over South Sulawesi, she didn’t think of her André or her Max. She didn’t even think of Shariff. The memory of the woman, pale black-skinned with reddened eyes, being dragged away in chains returned to her with more clarity than ever. She wasn’t in the plane with the screaming people; she was running after the woman and the woman was asking her, ‘Have you killed someone before? Have you?’

  When the plane crashed and skidded over the shrubs and people wailed for their gods, she was screaming, ‘No, no, I didn’t, I didn’t kill anyone!’ and when it finally stopped she heard, ‘Good girl. You will be fine,’ even though she couldn’t feel her body. She wanted to cry and laugh at the same time but she couldn’t find her body to do so. Of course she would be fine. She hadn’t killed anyone. Now she could think of her life, her children and the man whose life she couldn’t separate from hers, water running into water. She thought of her bad luck and all those times she had believed she was the cause. ‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ she said as the fragrance of salty steel filled her mouth.

  When the men found Sweet Mother’s mauled body they couldn’t believe she was still alive. ‘Take me to the water,’ she choked in their mother tongue. ‘I want to die in the water.’

  They protested. Why not in the mountainous caves where she could be resurrected every three years for adulation? Of what use was sprinkling the necessary palm wine over her sinking body? As they reasoned with her she felt tenderness for these strangers. Three minutes and they were already worrying over her as if she belonged to them, as if she was their dead. It is impossible to see anything alien about a person who speaks your tongue. There is no such thing as a foreigner in this world.

  And they did. They got over their surprise and sang the song of the dead for her. They took her strapped-together pieces into the water and left her when they reached the South Sulawesi sea. The water overwhelmed her as he had that night in the rain, their clashing bodies in the hammock rivalling the clashing of rain on earth, and soon the water was under her, above her and inside her and she became it, became him.

  A Happy Home

  She had come to recover from a man. He would never know who the man was, just that she had spent all her savings on this abandoned pre-colonial house full of books to run from the man and her family. He knew she could not tolerate his presence at first, thought he was a vagrant who walked about the house with an old wrapper knotted around his waist, book in hand, but that was before perceiving the aroma of his egusi soup as she washed her plates one day. She was living in a separate room of course. After they started talking she told him that the man was a man of God who told her parents he had seen her in a dream. She told him how worthless she had felt when she discovered the harem of other Christian sisters the man had used and disposed of. She even told him about the Seven Holy Years. But she never asked him who he was or how he had come to live in the house.

  It took months of living together before she started talking about this man. It happened like this. She came back from wherever she went to in the morning those days in the rain. He understood she wanted to avoid him as much as she could, so he only got out of bed when he heard the front door click in the morning. He waited for her footsteps to pass the corridor to her room before he let himself out in the evening. This was how they divided their days: she went out during the day and he went out at night. She seemed to respect his boundaries but as time passed he began to realise she had nowhere to go, and when he woke up late one morning and saw the Good Morning! Ina Kwana! Ekaaro! Nde wo! Paladin toilet paper sticker on her bedroom door, he realised she had no intention of leaving.

  Sh
e didn’t touch the things he brought from the small farm and he didn’t touch the leftover food she forgot in the food flask beside the kitchen sink, but when night gave way to morning and the kitchen stank, he would empty it into the abundant supply of polythene bags in the storeroom and throw it outside.

  Anyway, he’d fallen asleep reading a book in bed and didn’t know when the rain had started. He jumped out of bed just when the rain was spent, and ran into the living room to make sure he hadn’t left any windows open, and then he saw her standing in the doorway, wet and dark against the curtain, rain pouring in. He realised immediately that he was naked and when she just stared ahead as if he wasn’t there, he knew something was awry. He pulled down the short curtain that separated the living room from the rest of the house and tied it around his waist. Then he hurried to her. ‘What happened? Rain get you?’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘Please step inside; let me close the door.’

  She didn’t move. So he pushed her gently into the nearest chair. He was alarmed at how cold she was but he masked it with a light banter about how he’d have to dry the carpet because the rain had soaked it. Then he asked her if she wanted him to boil water for her so she could have her bath.

  ‘Do you have scissors?’ she asked and lightning flashed, harsh white against her face, and he didn’t like what he saw. He won’t tolerate her in the house if she lost her mind. ‘I need scissors.’

  ‘I do not have scissors,’ he said. ‘Go and rest.’ He left her in the living room. Back in his room he found his tailoring scissors and concealed them under his bed. He untied his wrapper and got back into bed to return to his book. But the moment he cracked its spine, her feet dragged along the corridor. Unable to resist his curiosity, after minutes of deliberating he opened his door just in time to see her turning into the living room with a knife in her hand.