Where Women are Kings

by Christie Watson

He could see everything. In the next bed, a baby was asleep with a tube in his nose, like Elijah’s. He had squiggles on his machine that were the same size every time. His numbers stayed exactly the same. His mama was there, holding his hand, watching the squiggles and waves. The baby was not floating in the air above his bed at all.

  Mama knocked over the tray of drugs by her side and, when the tiny glass bottles crashed on to the floor, she just walked over them, crunching them like they were fresh snow. A nurse lowered her mask, took Mama’s arm and moved her towards the door; she led her out and told her in the corridor that the doctors were doing their best, and they were a good team, but it was important for her to stay calm – out of the way, and calm. The nurse didn’t ask her about what happened, about how they got there. It was only later, after the X-rays had been done, and Elijah had been examined all over, that they began to look at Mama with a stare. He could see everything from above, on the ceiling and through the wide-open curtains in his head.

  He watched the doctors working and the nurses drawing up drugs and attaching plastic tubes and sticking down lines. He hurt all over and the hurt was bigger than the world.

  ‘What appears to be the problem with this chap?’

  The doctors were more interested in what he looked like on the inside than the outside, and spent a long time looking at scan pictures of what they called blood flow and nerve bundles before waving Mama back into the room. He remembered a rash that spread across his body like the sun setting and brought all the doctors running, putting in more drips and wires and tubes, getting medicine that made him float on the waves on the small screens.

  ‘We want you to look in the mirror, so that you can see the hurt, Elijah. But if you don’t feel ready, that’s fine.’ That nurse was called Florence. She had a smiley face drawn on her badge and her breath smelt like coffee. He nodded. She gave him a small plastic mirror and he held it up. Slowly, slowly, Florence unwound the bandage from his head. Underneath, there was a red line that looked like the zip of his Sunday trousers. Around the edges of the zip, bits of Elijah were bright pink. He moved the mirror around and around until he could see outside the room to the corridor where doctors were walking past, and a cleaner. He looked for ages. But, by then, Mama wasn’t there. She was completely gone.

  *

  Elijah opened his eyes. He could hear far away shouting. ‘Elijah! Elijah, son, are you OK?’

  ‘It’s just a faint and nothing to worry about, but we’d better call a doctor, just in case. There’s a first-aider in the office, Nikki; will you go?’

  Elijah heard Mum’s voice loudly. ‘No. No, I’m not leaving. Call an ambulance. Elijah, can you hear me? Elijah! God, what’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with my son?’

  And then suddenly the loudest scream in all the world cut through the voices and Mum’s questions and Ricardo’s rushing around and Dad’s calm. It was his voice.

  Elijah screamed and screamed and screamed. He kicked and punched until his knees and knuckles were bleeding and he had no more energy, so that all he could do was fall flat and simply breathe, fast breathing, like a trapped mouse.

  Mum and Dad held him so tightly for what seemed like hours and hours, Mum’s bump pressed hard against him, but it wasn’t long before Elijah’s voice stopped screaming and he opened his eyes. He looked at Mum and Dad. ‘Mama hurt me, didn’t she? Does Mama love me?’

  *

  Dad came to his room that evening to tuck him in. He smiled, but Elijah didn’t smile back. He couldn’t. ‘Come on, now,’ said Dad, rubbing his hand on top of Elijah’s head. ‘We can get through this.’

  Elijah opened his eyes as widely as they would allow. ‘You don’t believe in wizards,’ he whispered.

  ‘No, Elijah, I don’t. Wizards don’t exist. Wizards are not real and I won’t have any more talk about it.’ Dad’s face changed. Became harder.

  Elijah hugged his knees to his chest.

  ‘I am telling you,’ said Dad, leaning down until his face was directly opposite Elijah’s face, ‘that you’re perfectly safe. There is no such thing as wizards. I am telling you a fact. Your birth mother was mentally ill. One of her persistent delusions was that you were possessed, and she tried to physically force the wizard out of you in the most unforgivable way. But wizards are myth.’

  He pressed his face against Elijah’s cheek, then kissed him, but Elijah tried to pull his head away.

  ‘Wizards are real,’ he said. ‘I can prove it.’

  Dad sat up and pulled the blanket up around Elijah. ‘Wizards are not real and you are not proving anything. Now, it’s been a long day, Elijah. You’re safe and sound now and I want you to have sweet dreams tonight. Goodnight. Tomorrow we’ll play football.’

  Dad smiled again before leaving the room. Elijah lay looking at the darkness. He dreamt about Mama and heard her voice in his heart. We invented the meaning of love, you and I, little son.

  It was real. It was true.

  *

  That night, Elijah dreamt. Mama was above, looking at him, and her face was flat. He could smell her: burning plantain. Her eyelids had dropped and her cheek skin was hanging from her bones. ‘Give me back my little baby,’ she whispered.

  He reached up and said, ‘It’s me! It’s me!’ but she didn’t hear.

  ‘Little Nigeria,’ she whispered, ‘when you come back to me, I’ll take you home. We’ll save the money and leave this place. An aeroplane ride: in no time at all we will be back with our family, who will help us and save us. Uncle Pastor will protect you there from any other wizards entering you. We will build up your strength with Mummy’s cooking and, before you know, you will be a round and running boy with straight legs and a straight back, and my balance will be returned. I will be restored and the spinning will stop. There will be no more insects crawling around inside my head. Times will be different – better. How I love you, little son of mine.’

  She stopped whispering and leant down. Her words sounded so clear. When she touched Elijah’s back, her hand was soft. He looked at her next to him; she was sitting down. Her other arm was behind her back. She rubbed him and he felt every movement on his spine through the T-shirt he was wearing. He wished she’d lie down next to him and they could both close their eyes and go to sleep together and never wake up. Leave the wizard to do whatever it wanted. It was pushed all the way down inside Elijah now that Mama was near. Mama’s love was so strong, it might be enough. Elijah let her rub his back and he looked at her face. She looked straight back at him. He felt the corners of his mouth turn upwards.

  ‘Mama,’ he whispered. ‘It’s me. Elijah.’

  Suddenly she leant forward and there was hardness in her face. She thought it was the wizard talking.

  ‘Get out of my son!’ she said and she pulled her other hand in front of her. A screwdriver was there, the one she sometimes ran up and down the back of her leg, pressing herself so the hurt on her outside was more than the hurt on her inside. He wondered if she was going to press herself. She looked at his eyes and leant close. Closer than before.

  ‘Mama,’ he whispered. ‘It’s me. Elijah.’ His voice sounded strange coming out – a quiet breath. His throat was still dry from burns a few weeks before. Maybe his throat would always be dry.

  ‘Get out of my son.’ Her hand was pushing his body down into the carpet. ‘Get out of my son!’ she screamed, and he couldn’t see her face at all. All he could see was the screwdriver above his eyes. It came slowly and pressed. The screwdriver hurt was stronger, biting. The pain filled every corner of him. He wanted it. Elijah wanted it to carry on, him and Mama and the pain pushing the hurt out, there on the carpet. Just them. She positioned her body above the screwdriver and began leaning onto it. She was praying. He thought of crying, but with Mama there next to him, there was no reason to. Whatever happened, she was there next to him.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Little one,

  There are places in this world that are stranger than dreams. When I first arrived, I
remembered the Centre for Mentally Ill Destitutes in Lagos, where you could hear the patients screaming from the end of the road. I felt such a sense of panic that it was as though my face belonged to another person. The Greenfields Women’s Psychiatric Hospital was a long set of rooms, each filled with wild-eyed women who had stories to tell but would never tell them. I shared a room with three such women. The first, Nicola, a depressive, had a smile on her lips that appeared to be glued there. Even asleep (I crept out of bed one night and peered over her face), her smile remained, as if she was not real and only the smile was. The second shared a name with my sister, Miriam, and was Yoruba but she’d never been to her own country. Imagine that. She liked to ask me questions all day and got me to teach her the odd words of our language.

  ‘E’karbo,’ she said, as I entered the room. It was getting annoying hearing back the words I’d taught her, in her thick English accent. She sat on my bed. I was having a day when I didn’t feel like talking. They had reduced the tablets they were giving me twice a day: a small plastic cup full of pills that made me think less about you being full with wizard, and imagine you healthy and running after a football. I gobbled them up like sweets. They said I was becoming addicted. But the tablets were the only thing that numbed my stomach until the twisting knife stopped turning and the picture of your face covered in blood became softer.

  ‘When I get out of here,’ Miriam sang in her voice like a thick English coat, ‘I’m going to get totally fucked up. My boyfriend will sort me out. You should come with me; I mean, we can get some good shit where I live. Best medicine in the world!’ She put her face next to my ear. ‘Anything you want. Crack, crystal meth: that is some good shit.’

  I closed my eyes. Miriam told me about the place she went to for drugs, but I already knew where it was: the door, a few doors down from ours, with comings and goings and sweet burning smells. I tried not to think of you growing up in a country where Nigerian children could end up like Miriam, on drugs and cursing with every breath. Not my son. Nigeria does not produce such caricatures. Not even for rich oyinbos. Thank God that she’d never made it to Nigeria – she would have been beaten black and blue for such language. The market women would have dragged her weave straight out of her hair. But then, if she’d been in Nigeria, she would never have ended that way, Elijah. Of that I’m certain.

  The third woman was not a woman at all, but a young girl who was quiet and had eyes that moved too suddenly. Her body was so thin I could see her insides and she had a layer of soft hair on her face like down on a newborn chick. Every night, the nurses came in and held her down and put a tube into her nose while her body twisted and turned, trying to get away from it. ‘Come on, now, dear,’ they said. ‘Jody, dear, we need to get this into you and the sooner you lie still, the sooner it will be over. Really, if you didn’t keep pulling out your N.G. tubes, we wouldn’t be in this situation.’

  After she’d writhed around for at least half an hour, her body usually gave up and she lay flat – too flat, like she was made of cardboard. And they’d put the tube down and then hang a bottle of sour-smelling milk above her all night. Instead of sleeping, I watched it drip, imagined you.

  Doctor Phillips was not scared of anything. I could see in his eyes that stared straight at mine that he wasn’t scared of me, not like the nurse who kept one arm behind her back the whole time and the other nurse who looked at the door whenever he came into a room that I was in. It’s a terrible thing for people to be frightened of you, Elijah. It makes everything seem frightening.

  ‘How’s it going, Deborah?’ He had his long legs crossed in front of him and I could tell by his mismatched socks and scuffed-up shoes that he was not married. Either that or his wife was a lazy woman. I thought of Akpan, how his socks always matched. Funny the things you remember.

  I smiled in as normal a way as possible. How could I tell him that I wanted to die? That they had taken you from me?

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’m much better, thank you. Can I see my son, Elijah, now, please?’

  I held my breath, but the doctor’s face told me everything. He uncrossed his legs and sat up in his chair. There was a pile of notes on a small table beside him: my notes. I recognised my name, even though my eyes were blurred from the tablets, my head full of fog. The notes looked too big, bursting out of the folder.

  ‘Deborah, mental illness should be no different from physical illness. Think of it as a bad break in your arm. It will take doctors and medicine and perhaps a long time to treat, but ultimately your arm will function as it did before. You will, in time, hopefully, be able to do all the things you did. But I have to tell you, Deborah …’ He sat forward and put his arm over mine. Was that the broken one? It didn’t feel broken. It felt fine. I moved it suddenly and opened and closed my hand. My hand felt bigger, giant almost, like another person’s hand. It made me smile suddenly, then wonder why I was smiling.

  In Nigeria, it didn’t matter if you were mad with sadness or with evil spirits or with marijuana drug. Mad was mad. I would be in the Centre for Mentally Ill Destitutes, if I was lucky. Or, if not, walking on the intersection of the road with urine covering my legs, one shoe on, one shoe off.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Deborah? You have a serious condition. But not an untreatable one.’

  ‘Am I sick?’ I lifted my arm up and down. My arm was floating away from me.

  ‘Yes, Deborah. You’re very unwell. We think you have a serious condition which causes you to hear the voices. It makes you believe things that are not real.’

  It panicked me, Elijah, that this stranger could think my thoughts. Did he know about the red car? About what was inside it?

  ‘The voices are real,’ I said. ‘I can hear them very clearly. I am not a lunatic. I am spiritually gifted. My husband told me that a long time ago.’ The fog lifted enough that I saw your face, Elijah, covered with blood, a bedroom full of drawn-on men, and Akpan’s black shoe. I sobbed.

  ‘We never use that word: lunatic. One in three people suffers mental ill-health at some point or other. And I know that in Nigeria things are very different. But here in the U.K. you will have access to proper treatment in this hospital and, when you’re stable, you’ll be able to be cared for in the community. You’ve been suffering a long time, Deborah, and now we know what’s wrong we’ll be able to help you recover. The medicines we use are so effective, we hope it won’t take long at all to stabilise you.’

  I looked around the room. If I was home in Nigeria, they wouldn’t have given me an official diagnosis of anything. I’d have been taken to the Centre for Mentally Ill Destitutes, where my sisters would have come in every day to wash me and refresh my hair. There, in that place, the only people who talked to me was the girl who would not eat and Miriam, who had taken so many drugs her eyes did not look in the same direction. The doctor had his eyebrows raised, waiting for me to speak.

  ‘Thank you, doctor,’ I said. But I did not believe him one little bit. It was not mental ill-health that caused the voices. I had a spiritual gift. It was the voice of evil, and sometimes of God. Akpan had told me himself. I had a gift that they were trying to destroy. I was under spiritual attack.

  I thought of Uncle Pastor and everything we believed. This doctor was insane. But I could play a part, Elijah. I was a clever woman, even with my imbalance. And I knew, in order to get you back next to me, I’d do anything.

  But I suddenly thought of something. If they gave me medicines to stop the voices, how would I protect you? How could I possibly protect my own son when I couldn’t hear the evil wizard talking to me? The wizard would surely kill you – take away my son forever. Had it worked? Had I driven out the wizard with the screwdriver? I would never know unless I heard those voices. The quiet voices, whispering. God’s voice. I suddenly knew what I needed to do.

  I would have to be very careful. I would do everything they said in that prison. Eat the tablets. Talk. Tell Miriam about her own country. Ignore the bird girl being h
eld down flat. I would do anything to save you. Anything at all.

  At night, I could hear the flat bird girl wait until the staff had held her down, and then rip and cough and drip her sour milk on the floor underneath her bed. After that, she pushed her fingers into her mouth and vomited into her pillowcase. She was not a skilled vomiter. The church women would have been able to vomit by merely thinking of it – no fingers required. They could teach her a thing or two. Rebekah would have fallen over with laughter.

  ‘Are you awake?’ Miriam was next to my bed. I could smell her unwashed armpits. I closed my eyes tightly and pretended. I was getting good at pretending. I thought of you every second. ‘Psst! Psst! Sister, are you awake?’

  Suddenly she climbed into bed with me and pressed herself against my body. I sat up and moved away. ‘Get out!’ I whispered. ‘What are you doing?’

  But then I saw that her face was full of tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I just can’t sleep. I can’t. I really need to take my medicine. On the street, I mean; the medicine helps me. This shit here doesn’t help. They’re killing me.’

  I looked at the door. I thought of calling a nurse, but something in Miriam’s face stopped me. I noticed for the first time how young she was. How broken.

  ‘What’s wrong? What do you want me to do about it? Go back to bed, silly girl. Go back.’

  She shook her head so fast. ‘I can’t. They’re killing me. Let me sleep with you. Please. I know I’ll die if I stay alone. I need my medicine.’ She had scratched off lines of her skin and bled tiny droplets on to the white sheets.

  ‘I have enough problems,’ I said. ‘Go back to bed.’ I didn’t tell her about you. I didn’t speak about it to any of the other women. I didn’t want your name in their mouths.

  But something stopped me from pushing Miriam out of the bed, Elijah. Maybe it was the way she looked so frightened. Or maybe it was the way I was so frightened. Either way, she slept in my bed that night and every night after that. When the nurses had done their twelve o’clock checks, she’d sneak across the room and climb in, and I’d move over, allowing in the smell of unwashed armpits and terrible breath. And a few nights after that, the bird girl climbed in bed with us both, lying next to me, so tiny and fragile I didn’t dare move in case I crushed her. We twisted and turned, us three. We were not a soup full of sisters, but still, for a short time, we were not quite so alone.