The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  THE MADHOUSE

  ALSO BY TJ BENSON

  We Won’t Fade into Darkness

  Published in 2021 by Penguin Random House South Africa (Pty) Ltd

  Company Reg No 1953/000441/07

  The Estuaries No 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue, Century City, 7441, South Africa

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

  www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za

  © 2021 TJ Benson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  First edition, first printing 2021

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 978-1-4859-0415-1 (Print)

  ISBN 978-1-4859-0469-4 (ePub)

  Cover design by publicide

  Text design by Fahiema Hallam

  Set in Minion Pro

  To Julie and David Benson

  ‘Time will break what doesn’t bend – even time. Even you.’ – KAVEH AKBAR

  Contents

  Blue

  The Five Catechisms of André

  1. Why Did You Lose Your Parents?

  2. Why do souls seek empty spaces?

  3. Am I really alive?

  4. How do you birth a rhythm?

  5. Is there a God?

  5. How does it all end?

  The Kissing Diary

  Strawberry

  Apple

  Coconut

  Mango

  Sweet Pea

  A Happy Home

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgements

  Blue

  When they were young and still shared dreams, the younger brother woke up from a nightmare and whispered to the elder, ‘I saw the future.’ Now the elder wonders if this is what the younger brother saw: three men struggling to follow a dead woman’s vanilla-cake recipe in a small kitchen; three men gravely looking at the big glass bowl of batter as if it holds her body in the dead silence of a Kaduna afternoon.

  He tries to be reasonable again. ‘Sir, she is not coming back.’

  ‘She left the recipe.’ The father’s voice comes out muffled, a sound that has escaped from under water. ‘She wrote it down in her own hand.’

  The younger brother throws his hands in the air. ‘Why don’t we just buy the cake, ehn, Max?’ He side-eyes the elder brother. ‘Why do we have to go through all this stress?’

  ‘Because she wrote it down.’

  Hot afternoon. A fly buzzing in a window, punctuating each period of silence.

  ‘Your mother wrote it so that she wouldn’t forget it when she came back.’ Black-rimmed eyelids looking down.

  Macmillan, the elder brother, whom the younger called Max, can use the steely silence in their father’s pause to gauge the tumult tucked behind it. Fly buzzing still. Max’s eyes on the large hands on the table, straining under the weight of the body of this man who brought him into the world. Sweet Mother always said those were the first hands to carry him.

  Max remembers those hands from childhood, how they had picked him up from the ground and flung him high up to the hungry sky and shot up to snatch him before he got swallowed; hands that never missed. He remembers when he stopped trusting them, that heat time in February two decades ago.

  ‘Okay, sir.’ Rolls up his sleeves. ‘Where did she stop?’ Ignores the raw hurt in his younger brother’s eyes. He is used to it. ‘What next?’

  Their father looks up from the bowl, and the youth of the face, intact from their childhood, startles Max. ‘We put the batter in the oven.’

  ‘But we don’t have baking pans.’ The younger brother still grasping at something, anything.

  Max studies both faces and wonders for the first time if they look alike, but decides not so much: André light-skinned like their pops but his eyes darkened from grief; their father’s eyes dark from tozali. The man had been wearing it on his eyes since they were born, every morning.

  Max pulls back from the kitchen table, relieved that there is a tangible problem to solve. A true task. Freetown Street had finally joined the rest of the Quarters’ development so their house was no longer the last house on the right. There was now a small supermarket down the road. ‘Let me go and buy a pan.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ The father beckoned him back. ‘Let André go.’ Catches his eyes. ‘You will stay and explain why you stopped calling your mother.’

  But Max is already opening the door and stepping outside, his mind drifting to that February heat of ’94.

  Heat. Bringing out the reek of urine and the stench of shit from roadside gutters. Bringing out scorpions and snakes from the forest just past the last house on the right.

  Everyone went crazy when the heat came in February. The alcoholic husband living in the second house on Freetown Street – Mister Sly he was called – got fed up with the remorse that followed his daily beating of his wife, so he hanged himself from his parlour ceiling fan on the night of the twenty-fourth while his family slept. Aresi, the long-suffering wife, quit her job at the bank and abandoned her clothes and the house and was last seen disappearing into the forest just past the last house on the right to look for her dead husband and children, even though she was the one who woke up and untied him.

  Their five children cried in their house from morning till noon, when busybody neighbours came to break down the glass-panel door, yet the Freetown Street children didn’t cease their eternal drama of death: each child took turns to play the deceased, and the child who could hold breath the longest – as his or her corpse was transported on the shoulders of other children – had rights to everyone’s biscuits or one kobo.

  The children made sure Mrs Kufre was not around when they enacted the death play, wailing and falling on each other, overcome with pretend grief as they paraded down the street, stopping to replace the dead child who could no longer hold his or her breath with an eager one. Little fights broke out when this happened and they all fought for turns. Everyone claimed to have been truly dead. Everyone wanted to die and be lifted up.

  Baba Rotimi was rumoured to recruit people in their sleep for free labour from the hours of three to 5.30 a.m. That February, people in the Quarters were beginning to wonder how he was able to cultivate that vast amount of land deep in the forest. People were wondering because in those days it was getting harder to recover from a long night’s sleep; instead of feeling refreshed in the morning, they woke up with bodies pressed down from exhaustion. Baba Rotimi was accused of hypnotising people with voodoo to do his work. Jungle justice prevailed that February, in spite of his likeability and cries of innocence, because local logic held that even if he was innocent he must have been guilty of a similar secret offence and this was karma. His farm was not destroyed because there were rumours of cannibals in the forest who tempered their appetite with raw crops, but he was beaten in the night by the area boys and advised to get a job.

  The thing was that everyone in Sabon Gari was wary of hypnotists. It was in that same February that some of them, masquerading as a dance troupe, complete with all the steps from all tribes of Nigeria – from the mesmerising snake-like Swange of the Tivs to the vigorous shoulder flexes of the Jukuns – visited Sabon Geri. By the time they were gone, everyone who came out to watch had something missing: old expensive jewellery hidden under the bed, naira notes in the purses and shoes, coins in empty tins, even Mama Kufre’s expensive wig.

  The people of Sabon Gari did not joke with omens. When news got to the Quarters of the new Biro pens with perforated cork-tips that killed students who were greedy enough to write till the last drop of ink, there was considerable panic. Parents and
guardians bought extra pens for their children and reiterated the stern warning.

  Mrs Kufre saw her death when she saw their procession of children performing the notorious death play one day. She had gone to get ingredients to prepare vegetable soup for Mr Kufre, since he had forgiven her for an unmentionable in a telephone call to her office and promised to come back home. Something had rushed in her chest when she had hailed a motorbike taxi at the market but she hadn’t known what it was. When the okada man turned into Freetown Street and she saw the procession of pretend mourners roll down, she recognised the rush she had felt in the market to be a premonition, and it clenched its claws round her heart each time the okada man threw her into and out of a gallop. She shook it off with rage. Her house came into view and the claws clenched.

  ‘Drop me off, o, drop me off!’ She slapped the okada man on the back. ‘Stop, stop!’

  He had been whistling Victor Uwaifo’s ‘If You See Mammy Water’ when she startled him with the slaps, so he lost control of the motorcycle and crashed into Baba Halisu’s enduring Peugeot 504 parked in front of his house. The car had not been moved in a decade and its tyres were long gone, but it probably caused more accidents than any moving vehicle in Sabon Geri. Mrs Kufre’s skull cracked in the gutter she had been flung into, some brain matter splattered on the new concrete work begun by the governor in fulfilment of a promise older than his tenure, and the terrified children who saw everything before their mothers and elders could come and cover their eyes never played the game again.

  Long after light has left the rooms of a house, after sounds of daytime wane and curtains settle for the night, it is possible to find, trapped in a bottle of oil or jar of water, the heat of an afternoon.

  It burns from the inside.

  No occupant of the Quarters could remember what electricity had looked like in their homes, so no electric fans could cool those hot afternoons and no refrigerators could chill water for drinking. The father sawed one of the rubber Geepee tanks in half and filled it with tap water. When the children came back from school he was already immersed in it, stripped down to his white underpants.

  ‘First person to jump in,’ he announced and both boys began to wriggle out of their clothes as fast as they could. With big splashes that made the father cackle, they dunked in, André sulking because Max got in first.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the father. ‘Sweet Mother will be the last person,’ and to that the boys started singing the Prince Nico Mbarga classic ‘Sweet Mother! I no go forget you’, punching the air and beating the water. By the time Sweet Mother walked in from work and kicked off her high heels in the corridor, André and Max had exhausted their day’s activities with their father. When they saw her, they pointed wet fingers at her.

  ‘Mummy, you’re laaaaast! Mummy is laaaaast!’ called André.

  ‘Last at what?’ she asked with a distracted smile, mind still at her day job.

  ‘To get in,’ replied the father, eyes flashing with a private heat.

  She whipped her hand in a circle round her head before snapping her fingers at him to say over my dead body and starting to walk to their bedroom, but he caught her by the arm, ignored her half-chuckle protests and pulled her in, and the children cheered at the big splash. She screamed and laughed and they laughed because they loved it when Daddy and Sweet Mother were like this.

  The father, still carrying her in his arms in the water, kissed her once on the forehead before turning to the kids. ‘How many times should Daddy kiss Sweet Mother?’

  Max began: ‘Five—’

  ‘Eight times!’ André’s voice always prevailed.

  ‘I have to honour their wishes,’ he said, grinning at her in mock apology. He leant down to kiss her long and deep in the mouth to the jubilation of the boys, then he finished the other seven on her forehead, her cheeks, both sides of her jaw, then down, either side of her throat, then the U where collar bones join at the base of the neck. She tried to resist but her laughter weakened her. So she surrendered instead, allowed herself to believe this cold-water massage would make her work tomorrow bearable. She gradually unclenched herself, relaxed her muscles in the water and shut her eyes, the heat of the February sun forgotten, her children and husband splashing water on one another.

  ‘Mummy, I am a fish!’

  ‘Mummy, I am a whale!’

  Later, after everyone had dried and changed into house clothes she would throw open the windows and doors to let in the cool of the evening. As it got darker she would burn orange peels on Peak milk-can lids to deter mosquitoes and scent the house for sweet dreams. ‘Go, leave the plates. I will wash them,’ she’d say, shooing them out the back door. ‘Go and tell your father to spread the mat for you outside.’ And after a little cajoling, the father would emerge from whatever book he had been wading through in the last light of day in his fishnet hammock tied between the two forever-dying palm trees at the front of the house.

  The book was almost always The Man Died by Wole Soyinka.

  He would enter into the house to fetch the straw mat leaning on the wall behind the front door and march out army-style, his children jumping round him and giggling as he stepped. Then he’d pick a spot in the compound and spread the mat out under the moon. On nights when there was no moon they used a lantern whose flame was never quenched, only lowered before they slept.

  The children always suggested they all climb into the fishnet hammock but the father always refused. Why? Well, because according to him it was sacred.

  André once caught the tiny after-smile on the mother’s mouth when the father had turned them down again on the grounds that the net was sacred.

  ‘Moreover, the net is so old it won’t hold all of us.’

  But André knew his mother knew what ‘sacred’ meant. And he promised himself that he would ask her when he grew up. He never remembered to. But he was always fascinated with how their mother kept quiet and how her eyes became so alive when their father started saying things they couldn’t understand.

  After she had arranged the house and prepared breakfast (the orange-peel burning was a half-hearted ruse to chase them out, have the house to herself), she would find herself prised out of the house by his voice – not the story he was telling, but the voice. Almost anyone could tell a good story but not every voice you recognise in the abyss of sleep; not every voice can anchor you, steady as running tap water in good times, in the chaos of your life. When she made it to the mat there would always be space for her, somehow. No matter how big the children got. She would watch him conjure stories from the face of the moon with full eyes, soothed from the aches the water couldn’t cure in the heat of the day.

  ‘… and the boy left the market in glee because he was able to find the dew his mother had sent him to buy, dew that she would use to make water …’

  The father taught them how to invoke rain: On those hot, lethargic afternoons when soft, fresh air was just a memory and their mother was having The Thing, the father would gather them in his arms in the living room and hold a finger against his other palm. ‘Like this,’ he would say, slapping the finger onto the palm, a tap-tap sound. They would repeat after him. ‘Now another finger; make it two fingers, two fingers,’ and they produced ta-ta-ta, hurried drops, splatters. ‘Now clap your hands, faster, faster,’ and the Madhouse would be engulfed in a storm. André always shut his eyes when they did this, as though in prayer. He could almost perceive the petrichor.

  They had already learnt prayer by then.

  To plant is a prayer.

  An act of faith.

  They learnt prayer and faith on the small farm behind their house. Their father believed if they could learn to sow beans and groundnuts and corn in the earth, if they could wait for them to germinate, grow and yield more, then they could learn to sow their hopes and dreams in the future, maybe even believe in God. Then they wouldn’t need God from any institution, Eastern or Western; they would have found God for themselves, in themselves.

 
He made sure they learnt early never to put faith in human beings. ‘Listen to this man.’ He would shove the radio at them and they would press their ears to it but wouldn’t comprehend a single thing. ‘He says he believes he is God. He has taken over the country. Okay, then give us simple electricity – but he can’t give it to us. He promised lights and good road networks and plenty of other things, but common Nepa he can’t give us. Serpents!’

  The children shuddered at the image of human-level sensate snakes ruling the country. They distracted themselves with the unlit bulbs and studied the dead fridge and followed their father to the living room as he ranted, inspecting the dead electrical appliances they had believed were strictly for decoration. Since they were born they had never seen the bulbs in the house light up. They never knew the television could show human beings like them; they had thought it was some sort of crazy mirror that showed the people who once lived in the house in distorted, unfathomable shapes.

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who own this house?’

  ‘Sweet Mother.’

  ‘Before her who own it?’

  ‘Before her there was no one.’

  ‘Tasiu said mad people used to live here.’

  ‘I told you to stop playing with those area touts. Are you not supposed to be doing something with your time?’

  All they did in their free time was paint with their mother when she was in the mood to have them, write on the black wall in the living room assigned to them, and join their father, when he wasn’t reading, to nurture the garden. Music would come later, when André would win a Panasonic keyboard in secondary school and when an older André would join a band.

  The garden prospered: there was everything from vegetables, ginger, tomatoes, peppers, groundnuts and corn planted by the side of the house, to sweet potatoes and the small clusters of yams called the apostoli, a Tiv species named after the apostles. The brothers would have no memory of sucking on their father’s teats when their mother had to go to work.