When Elijah came downstairs later, she tried to hold his hand, but he twisted away. They ate dinner in near-silence, and Nikki couldn’t stomach more than a few bites. Neither Obi nor Elijah would look her in the eye.
As she washed the dishes, Elijah disappeared out into the garden with his torch to look for bats, and Obi went back to his work. After a while, Obi stood up. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
Nikki leant against the counter and tried not to cry. She folded the drying-up towel and wiped the hob. It was dark outside, now. She peered into the shadows then pushed through the door. ‘Elijah?’ she called. She squinted.
He was crouching by the pond. It was cold and she pulled her cardigan around her as she hurried across the lawn.
‘Elijah?’ She squatted down next to him, but he wouldn’t look at her. She wrapped both arms around him and pulled him close. ‘I’m sorry Dad and I were fighting, Elijah. Dad was upset with me. But it’s OK now.’
She felt his hot tears on her neck.
‘Poor Elijah,’ she whispered. ‘We love you, Elijah. Nothing will change that.’
He leant into her. He was so small. She scooped him up and carried him back to the house. When she tucked him in he clung to her hand, so she sat down on the mattress next to him. He pulled at her so she lay down and he curled against her, squeezed as close as he could, and she buried kisses in his hair. Slowly, he fell asleep and his body relaxed, and Nikki lay stroking his hair as she waited for the sound of Obi.
TWENTY-FOUR
When Elijah woke up, he felt empty, as though there was nothing inside him at all. Over the next few days, Mum watched Elijah like he was a television and Dad started coming home from work on time to play with him, but Elijah couldn’t stop pinching his nostrils to stop the wizard getting out. He could feel it pressing against him from the inside, pushing everything out of its way. The wizard was going to make Elijah do something really bad. At school, he could try not to think about it and concentrate on his lessons. His teachers told him he was learning well, and the wizard was quiet. But at home all he could think of was the wizard. Sometimes, Elijah watched Mum and the wizard whispered in his ear, She doesn’t belong to you. And, even when he told it to be quiet, it still carried on. She’s not your mum. You stole her.
*
At night, he could feel there was something very wrong. Dad was sitting in the living room opposite Mum when he went to find them. They both looked up from the books they were reading, and smiled. Mum was reading a book about gardening, with a picture of a beautiful flower on the cover, wide open and yellow. Dad was reading a book that had no picture on the front and only long words. Dad’s book couldn’t have been a very good one at all because he suddenly threw it down on the sofa.
In the weeks since they had told him about the baby, even though sometimes things were almost normal, it was too quiet and Dad kept his eyes on Elijah the whole time, as if he knew Elijah had some badness inside him.
‘Are you OK, son?’ Dad’s eyes narrowed.
‘I’m fine,’ said Elijah, but everything felt different. The wizard was crawling all the time, creeping around inside him. And, even as he said the words, they didn’t sound real.
‘Go up to bed, Elijah,’ said Mum. ‘I’ll be up in a minute, OK?’
He looked at Dad but Dad’s eyes were not looking at him any more. They were looking at Mum’s growing tummy.
Elijah climbed the stairs and into his empty bed. It seemed bigger somehow. It matched the size of the emptiness he felt inside his chest. Mum came into his room and looked out of the dark window. She pulled the curtains.
‘There’s no story tonight, Elijah,’ said Mum, leaning close to his face. ‘I’m just too tired. Being pregnant makes you very tired …’ She looked down at her middle and smiled. Her face kept changing since Ricardo had come. Sometimes it looked frightened, and sometimes happier than he’d ever seen it.
‘OK,’ he said. But it was the first night she’d not read him a story. He looked at Mum’s face. Then he looked closer. Elijah could only count five freckles. He clenched his fists and knew that the angels were losing. God was losing. The air became dangerous. He looked at her tummy, at the space where something was growing inside her.
‘Goodnight, Elijah,’ Mum whispered. The room was darker than ever and there was a big feeling in his tummy, like he was hungry and was never going to get food again. He heard the Bishop inside him: But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, THOSE WHO PRACTISE MAGIC ARTS, the idolaters and ALL LIARS – their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulphur. This is the second death.
Elijah watched the shadows for a while, then he felt what was happening. The Bishop’s voice couldn’t stop it. The wizard was pushing out of him. He could feel it. It was making itself small and pushing and pushing and squeezing through him until everything went quiet and dark and he couldn’t move any more. All he could do was listen to the wizard’s voice tell him over and over again: Her freckles are nearly gone. I will eat her baby and then eat Nikki. She’s not your mama. Nobody will ever love you. The evil inside you killed your own father and hurt your own mother.
TWENTY-FIVE
They went to the hospital in Nikki’s car, and were all quiet on the way there, looking out of the window at the trees against the sky, the roads almost clear of traffic. She stopped at the lights and looked around at Obi and Elijah, but they were both looking out of their windows. She found herself biting her lip. It had to be OK. It had to be.
They walked through the hospital, a maze of corridors that Nikki knew too well. They were ushered in quickly, past the women in the waiting room who had babies already, or big swollen bellies. Nikki looked down at her stomach, hugged herself. She climbed on to the couch. ‘If you can lower your trousers, please, and pull up your top.’ A woman she hadn’t seen before moved around the room, grabbing bits of equipment and tubes of things, a handful of paper towels.
The room was silent and dark, but it was more than no noise; the only light was coming from a monitor; there was a feeling, a heaviness, contained in the air. She imagined the people who’d been in that room: the babies, the mothers who’d looked on the screen in front of them, waiting for the heartbeat, as they did now, waiting for that one moment when everything changes, when life forks.
And so they watched the screen together, and Elijah couldn’t possibly understand the significance of it all, he couldn’t possibly, and yet Nikki knew that Elijah picked up on clues in the air better than she did. Nikki wanted to reach across and pull him closer to her, but he was out of reach. She looked at Obi. His face was completely unreadable.
She stopped trying to guess what he was thinking and focused on the screen, the picture of the scan: flickering, unidentifiable. Then suddenly something came into focus. And there it was. There she was; Nikki knew in a rush.
‘The points where the lady is marking with the computer is to measure the head circumference,’ said Obi. Elijah’s eyes opened wide. ‘And the long bone there is very important, in terms of scans, too. That’s the femur. If those bones are within normal ranges, it tells us a lot of information about the exact bone age of the baby.’
Nikki tried to tune out Obi’s hard voice and looked straight at the screen.
A flickering. A heart, beating. A life.
And all the worry and pain she felt suddenly melted. She. Her. A heartbeat. She smiled and her own heart flickered and beat inside her chest. She grabbed Obi’s hand and he let her hold it. She reached for Elijah’s hand – he had to shuffle his chair forwards – and then she held that too, and the three of them watched the screen.
‘There’s the heartbeat.’ The woman performing the scan started moving the scanner over and around Nikki’s stomach. ‘Yes, just one healthy heartbeat. All looks normal. All the measurements are good. A healthy baby. And I estimate you’re sixteen weeks plus four already. I’ll get Doctor Seaton to review the scan right now, as requested, and get you back for a routi
ne anomaly scan in a few more weeks. If you can wait, you can see him this morning.’
‘Sixteen weeks,’ Nikki said. ‘Yes, please; we’ll see Doctor Seaton.’ Apart from Ify, all her babies had fallen away earlier, at ten or eleven weeks. ‘Sixteen weeks,’ she said again, to Obi. ‘Healthy.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Obi. ‘Sixteen weeks?’
Obi was studying the angles of the picture, reading the numbers that appeared on the screen, asking the technician questions about the measurements of the head circumference, the femur, the amniotic fluid levels. As he read out the measurements, his frown disappeared and a slow smile appeared on his face. He looked from the screen to Nikki’s stomach then back to the screen. ‘This is real,’ he whispered.
Nikki closed her eyes. They wouldn’t lose anyone. Not this time. ‘Are you OK, Elijah?’ she kept asking him. And, although he was so quiet, he nodded. He looked overwhelmed. They took photos and gave one to Elijah. He folded it up very small, almost the size of a stamp, and kept it inside his clenched fist, before putting it in his pocket. He touched his pocket every so often on the way back, as though checking it was still there. Nikki took this as a sign that he was happy about things.
Doctor Seaton was a tall, painfully thin man who smelt of turpentine and had one section of hair that he’d combed over the top of his head. ‘At this stage, everything is fine. We’ll keep monitoring your platelets and levels, so continue to take the medications I prescribed, but baby is doing very well and, actually, now we’re treating you, I don’t envisage any problems at all.’
Nikki wanted to lift the piece of hair out of the way and kiss the top of his bald head.
‘Thank you, doctor,’ said Obi. He kept peering at the door. Elijah was outside, within shouting distance, playing a Nintendo. He’d wanted to come in with them, but then a boy in the waiting room took his computer game out and they started playing together. It was good seeing him make friends.
‘I also want to start heparin injections for the remainder of the pregnancy. It’s a tiny injection that you can do at home, once a day, just underneath the skin. Most people do it in the skin on their tummy. It doesn’t hurt and it’s a sort of extra treatment to make sure your blood doesn’t get sticky any more.’ He began to write out a prescription. ‘Take this to the nurses and they’ll get you sorted with the injections.’
Nikki took the prescription. All that was needed was a simple injection to thin her blood. She thought of all the tests she’d had, all the times she’d been told that miscarriages were common and it was just one of those things. And then, after Ify, they’d finally been referred to Doctor Seaton. Referred too late to save their daughter – Nikki put her hands over her stomach – but not too late for this baby.
Obi picked up Nikki’s hand and kissed it. She looked up at him. He didn’t say he was sorry but he didn’t need to. She blocked out all his earlier words. Now he had seen their daughter, and heard himself what the doctor said, he couldn’t be angry any more. They just had to concentrate on making Elijah feel safe and loved.
On the way home, Obi turned around in the car to face Elijah. ‘What a great big brother you’ll be,’ he said.
Nikki watched Obi and Elijah all day, the warmth of the air between them. She felt bubbles inside her, the baby beginning to move. Nikki smiled, let her heart grow. This baby was going to make it. They would be parents of two children. A family.
*
The three of them curled together on the sofa, listening to music chosen by Obi: a Cuban band that Nikki had not heard before. Elijah was tapping his knee with the drums. He seemed so much more relaxed. After his initial reaction to the pregnancy, it crossed Nikki’s mind that he wouldn’t cope at all. But seeing how he calmed down after hearing the news, how he folded the photo, he was nearly back to his usual loving self already and it had only been a couple of weeks since he’d been told. ‘He did react extremely,’ Ricardo had said. ‘But that doesn’t mean he won’t adapt. The news triggered something in him: a rage. It will calm down the more involved he is.’
And Ricardo had been right. After taking Elijah with them to the hospital, he was calmer, and he hadn’t twisted to get away from her touch all afternoon.
‘What’s it like being a big brother?’ he asked.
Obi grinned. He had completely forgotten his anger at Nikki. ‘It’s like having a friend to play with all day long.’
‘Like Jasmin?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Obi. ‘But the baby will be a lot younger, so you will be able to teach him or her things.’
‘But only if your blood doesn’t get sticky,’ said Elijah.
Nikki nodded. ‘That’s right. But, like we told you earlier, I have special medicine for that now. The medicine will stop the sticky blood.’
Obi hooked his arm through Elijah’s. He looked as if he was deciding something. ‘Everything will be fine,’ he said.
Nikki pressed herself towards Obi and kissed him hard on the mouth above Elijah’s head.
‘Jasmin would say that’s gross,’ said Elijah.
‘What about you, Elijah? What do you say? Do you think it’s gross?’ Nikki tickled him, and he smiled and tried to wriggle away.
*
Obi pulled her towards him that night. He rested his hand on her stomach. She exhaled for so long, it was as if she’d been holding her breath for days on end. ‘I’m sorry I kept the pregnancy from you,’ she said. ‘I hated not telling you. I really thought I was doing the right thing.’
Nikki rested her face on his neck. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered again.
They fell asleep next to each other and, when she woke, his hand was still on top of her stomach. She looked over his shoulder at the books on the nightstand, which were a mixture of adoption books – Parenting a Challenging Child; When Trauma Affects Behaviour; Underlying Health Issues Caused by Negative Attachments – next to his new pregnancy books: A Normal, Healthy Pregnancy; Attachment Begins Before We Are Born.
TWENTY-SIX
Elijah took the folded-up photo from his trouser pocket and smoothed it out. He looked at the curves and angles, the shapes and shades of the baby. It didn’t look like a baby at all, more like an alien. Mum and Dad and Ricardo kept telling him things that he didn’t want to hear. They told him that the baby Mum had in her tummy might not grow big enough to be born, that it might die. And Elijah didn’t know what to say. There were no words he could think of.
Elijah studied the photograph. He could see the baby’s nose. ‘You have to grow really big,’ he said. And he knew that photos couldn’t hear and even the baby might not have ears yet, but he said it again anyway. ‘You have to grow really big and don’t die.’
And then he curled into a ball on his bed and tried to pretend he was growing in Mama’s tummy. He heard the whooshing, and felt the warm. Then he heard something else and sat up.
The medicine won’t work. When you’re asleep, I sneak into Mum’s body to make Mum sick and hurt her baby. Medicine can’t stop a wizard.
Elijah pressed the photo to his chest and tried to slow his breathing.
*
Dad was hidden behind the biggest bunch of flowers that Elijah had ever seen. Nikki ran to the door, to Dad and the flowers. Elijah was in the kitchen doing a drawing and trying not to think that his wizard could be eating Mum’s baby.
‘They’re gorgeous!’
Dad poked his head above the flowers. ‘Hi, Elijah. Me and Mum are going to have a quick chat, OK? Then I’ll come and we’ll play football before dinner. I’ve booked Chimichanga’s at seven, and Jasmin and Chanel and Granddad are coming.’ Elijah didn’t answer, but Dad didn’t notice. He heard them talking from the other room, even though they closed the door:
‘He’s fine. He’s been fine all day.’
‘I know. I was so scared about how he’d react. I was scared about how he did react. But since then, nothing. No outbursts; no rages.’
‘And Doctor Seaton was so positive.’
‘I have
such a good feeling about it all now, Nik. I’m so sorry about before …’
*
‘I’ll have a margarita please.’ Granddad had studied the menu for ages before choosing.
‘Are you sure, Dad? That has tequila in it …’
‘I’ll have one, too.’ Aunty Chanel didn’t look at the menu once. ‘I always have chicken fajitas,’ she said.
‘I’ll have a margarita, too, please.’ Jasmin had her hair in two pigtails and she’d put five clips on the middle section of her hair.
‘You can’t have a margarita, Miss.’ The waiter looked bored. ‘It has alcohol.’
Jasmin turned to Aunty Chanel. ‘So unfair. All the children in Mexico drink tequila. They have it in their bottles to help them sleep because everyone knows that Mexico is so noisy because of people playing those annoying pan pipes all day.’ She looked at the waiter and narrowed her eyes. ‘Are you even from Mexico?’
‘Jasmin –’ Aunty Chanel stood up – ‘a word, please.’
Jasmin followed Aunty Chanel, tutting.
Granddad shook his head and then chuckled. ‘She’ll have a lemonade, please,’ he said.
As usual when Jasmin was nearby, Elijah didn’t worry too much about the wizard. He looked at Granddad. Granddad was still looking at the menu and reading out all the words, asking the waiter to recommend a dish.
‘I’ll come back with the drinks, sir,’ he said, ‘and give you more time to choose.’
Obi laughed. He had his hand on top of Nikki’s. ‘He always takes ages deciding. He likes to think carefully about everything.’
‘All wise people think carefully about things,’ said Granddad.
Elijah flicked his head to Granddad’s eyes. Granddad was wise. And clever. He knew everything about Nigeria and lots about stars. And then he realised something important:
Granddad must know about wizards.
*
‘Can we go to the park today?’ Elijah asked. He looked out of the window. It was a beautiful spring day; his favourite kind. Mama’s favourite kind.
Where Women are Kings Page 18