The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  ‘No,’ said the pretty woman, standing up, her face clouded with grief.

  It twisted Ladidi inside to cause the woman such pain; she wanted to run to the backyard and cry.

  ‘I was close to your mother.’

  ‘Good,’ was all she said. Her uncle turned, the lines on his face deepening. The air was unbreathable, like it was on those nights when she wanted to get up to pee. She tried to explain, ‘Because my mother is dead.’

  ‘Go to the kitchen, Didi,’ said Uncle. ‘Aunty brought akara for you.’

  She nodded and flew to the kitchen, still dressed in her school uniform. As she washed the plates, the talking from the parlour grew louder. Where did she know this woman from, a dream?

  She knelt to light up the new kerosene stove so that she could warm the okro soup her uncle had made the previous day.

  ‘Why haven’t you—’ she jumped at her uncle’s voice and the kerosene stove belched up flames.

  Ladidi blinked and saw the ceiling. She could hear nothing. Then the woman’s face replaced the ceiling. She felt herself being lifted up and the smell of something familiar and sweet and promised months ago hit her.

  ‘You smell sweet, ma, like soap.’

  ‘I do? Ha!’ The woman was laughing and crying and Uncle was trying to get up from the kitchen floor. She realised she was in the woman’s arms. ‘But you are all right? Let’s go to the bathroom and wash you. Are you in pain?’

  ‘It was the kerosene stove,’ the uncle said, packing the stove up. ‘Not a bomb.’

  ‘Living in these conditions, a young girl; no mother, no mother!’ said the woman, but they were outside now, going to the compound bathroom. Ladidi was ashamed to have this beautiful woman see their bathroom but the woman didn’t care. She undressed her, went to the well, drew up water and brought it to her. The woman was gentle with her. So this was what a mother was like?

  On their way back to the apartment the woman strapped Ladidi’s naked body to her front, like a school bag, wetting her dress, and Ladidi felt like a newborn, unashamed of the stares of the compound neighbours who had come out to watch. She pressed her cheek to the woman’s shoulder and shut her eyes to take it all in, the feel of the woman’s body, the cool air peppering her wet back.

  The beautiful woman dressed her and asked her to be good to her uncle. She told her she would be coming back for her.

  ‘Ma, what is that sweet thing you are smelling of?’

  ‘Me? O, yes, it’s a perfume.’

  ‘Like the sticks Mama Hadiza burns to chase the devil.’

  ‘No-no-no!’ The woman chuckled. ‘This one is strawberry essence.’

  Ladidi’s eyes lit up. ‘Strawberry, the fruit! The red fruit like a tomato but it is like sugar inside!’

  ‘Yes, yes, but I have not seen one before.’

  Ladidi’s face fell.

  ‘But I can be your strawberry if you like,’ the beautiful woman said.

  Ladidi smiled again. It felt good to smile.

  ‘I have to go now or I’ll miss the bus.’ She cupped Ladidi’s chin in her hand and stared into her eyes. ‘I will come back for you.’

  When Ladidi turned fourteen and it was becoming obvious that she was a rare flower, boys began to buzz around her. She had got used to the bizarreness of her new home, the eccentricities of her new parents, the indifference of her elder foster brother, the adoration of the younger one and, with the aid of her new mother whom she never stopped calling ‘Sweet Mother’, the transition into adolescence. She had even tried to suspend her obsession with Max to give life a chance to be good to her. But the vagaries of secondary-school life still eluded her and all the boys wanted to help. ‘Ladidi, let me help you with that volumetric analysis. You know our test is next week.’ ‘Ladidi, you know I am going to be the next head boy; senior Boniface is my school father. You have to stick around with me.’ ‘Ladidi, come let’s study calculus.’

  They were everywhere, these boys. They booked appointments with her during break period and wanted to escort her or give her a ride home after school. One even dared to enter the last house on the left and the world swirled round him the moment he shuffled past the door. ‘My foster parents are artists,’ she explained, holding Nnamdi Ike’s arm to stop him from falling. ‘Are you tired? Do you want me to bring water for you?’ But he couldn’t breathe the raw fragrance of Queen of the Night, and he was struggling to reconcile the outside with this inside, this inside with its painting of an explosion next to a black plank with chicken scratches on a chaste white wall that joined a black one mutilated with chalk scribbles that charted the mental development and physical growth of boys over the years in ascending order, so she went to get water for him anyway. When she returned with the tray of water and a glass (as Sweet Mother had taught her) he was gone.

  ‘How do you just leave somebody’s house like that?’ said the father during supper.

  ‘Maybe he was shy,’ said Sweet Mother, coming from the kitchen with an extra chunk of beef on a saucer to comfort Ladidi. ‘Or scared of your bodyguards,’ she added, pointing at the boys with her fork and her eyes.

  ‘They were not around.’

  ‘I was,’ said Max. ‘But I didn’t see him; I was studying.’

  André didn’t speak.

  ‘Don’t worry about that boy,’ consoled Sweet Mother, giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze. ‘Boys come and boys go but when a man comes he will stay. And you have many, many years before then. Do you know I met this man at 27?’

  But that was it for Ladidi. She had followed Sweet Mother’s advice on etiquette by offering a drink, and look how the boy had treated her. Around 10 p.m. that night she was woken by stones thunk-thunking on her window netting. She was surprised when she lifted the curtain and found the boy.

  ‘Ladi, I am so sorry.’ The anguish on his smooth face was heightened by moonlight. ‘It is just that my mother always says I am a coward because I was born premature and—’

  ‘It is okay. I forgive you.’ She genuinely did and she smiled at him a little through the netting. ‘Now go home. It is almost midnight.’

  ‘Ladidi?’

  ‘Yes?’

  He bit his lower lip and let it out. ‘I want to marry you.’

  She stared at him for a moment and when she saw his eyes were sincere she threw her head back and laughed, stumbling backwards from the window, jumping with the upthrust of the cackles bursting free from her chest. He wanted to eat her laughter. He pressed on the window netting, wrestling with the pin-bush thorns pricking him on every side, but he knew he would suffer more for that laugh, a sound nobody in their secondary school could claim to have heard. Or caused. He wanted to spend the rest of his life stoking that laugh. His pleas provoked more laughter and after several minutes she recovered and fell onto her bed. Now it occurred to him that she had been laughing at him, that the rare spectacle of her laughter was not some ritual performed by the most beautiful girls of the world in moonlight. ‘Ladidi, I am serious.’

  She clapped her hands on the bed in the fashion of market women and regarded him, eyes widened in surprise. ‘Me?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are my light, you are my star, you are the only flower in my garden, the only bread in my basket.’

  She fought her giggles. ‘I am just fourteen!’

  ‘I know. But my father, my father.’ He looked down and looked up again and she pitied him.

  ‘Your father.’

  ‘Yes, my father.’ His eyes flashed now. ‘He is rich and we are moving to America and in America you can marry even if you are young and those school boys won’t—’

  She lost concentration. This boy was insane. Of course she liked him, but she was made for Max. Max didn’t know it yet but she knew it the same way Eve had watched Adam asleep and known before he woke up that she would be his wife for all time. ‘Just leave me alone.’

  Her coldness made him desperate, so she threw on her blanket and left him to sket
ch her American future in the cold night alone. She slept as he described parks they would walk in and planned excursions to the White House and Hollywood. She was relieved when she didn’t find him sleeping outside her window the next morning.

  ‘Who were you talking to last night?’ asked Sweet Mother as they ate bread and sipped Lipton tea.

  ‘My father in heaven.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Ladidi was not worried when the boy didn’t come to school the next day or the rest of the week. She was indifferent to the news being passed around the following week that Nnamdi Ike was attacked by dogs and had to have his legs amputated.

  ‘What is amputated?’ André asked her during break time.

  ‘It means to cut a part of somebody’s body off so that an infection won’t spread,’ she explained, clipping his nails with her nail-cutter in the classroom where she was hiding away from the boys.

  ‘Like when they tie somebody’s leg so that snake poison – venom, sorry – won’t reach the thighs,’ he said.

  She tugged his cheeks fondly and he smiled.

  ‘But you were the last student to see him,’ sobbed Halima, Nnamdi Ike’s seatmate, as the bell at the end of school rang hours later.

  ‘I was not,’ replied Ladidi, dropping her Ababio chemistry textbook into her school bag.

  ‘He drove you to your house from school that day!’

  ‘He didn’t even stay to drink water.’ She slung her bag over her shoulder, talking calmly as if she was telling them what she had for breakfast. ‘Then he went to play Super Mario in Double-O-Seven’s house. Go to Double-O-Seven’s class and ask if you like.’

  Halima, her plump round face glistening with tears, unable to bear Ladidi’s nonchalance, unable to spit out or swallow anything more, walked to Ladidi and surprised her with a ‘dirty slap’, snatching her hand from Ladidi’s stunned face and examining it as if it had malfunctioned. Every eye in the class was on them, waiting to see first-hand what the school would be talking about for the rest of the term. Ladidi languidly took out her strawberry-perfumed handkerchief folded in a neat square, and applied it to her cheek like some soft soap, eyes never wavering from Halima. Halima found she couldn’t run away, for Ladidi’s eyes held her bound until she had folded the handkerchief and returned it to the small purse she kept in her bag.

  ‘Better pray.’ Halima could talk now and she pointed a finger at Ladidi with the same hand, because after slapping her she didn’t know what to do with it; it felt ridiculous hanging at her side. ‘Better pray nothing-nothing happens to him.’ Then she stormed out of the class, the abundant pleats of her skirt billowing about her ample behind.

  But everyone knew it was beyond prayers. Nobody was surprised when their form teacher came to announce that Nnamdi Ike would not be returning since he had been flown to the USA for further care. Ladidi knew she was expected to enact, if not feel, remorse, at least for the gratification of the many who blamed her for what happened to Nnamdi. Even the form teacher glowered at her as she made the announcement. Ladidi tried hard. The boy had wanted to marry her after all. But each time she searched her heart for remorse or grief, all she found was indignation. She had invited him into her house and he had run away, only to come and propose marriage in the night at her window. She had also genuinely forgot to warn him about the vigilante who patrolled from eleven with watch dogs courtesy of Inspector Rilwan when she had gone back to bed. And now Halima, whom he didn’t even look at, could slap her because of him. She decided on her way home that day that no one would ever insult her because of a boy ever again. So when the school got over Nnamdi Ike’s departure and the boys returned, she set a cardinal rule: ‘I will only marry you if you can give me a strawberry.’

  The school was thrown into a great depression by the prerequisite. First the boys, then the girls in the classrooms and dining hall, for depression is a contagious thing. The walls of the classrooms hummed a sad, low, almost imperceptible hum as teachers wrote long notes on the chalkboard and students copied them in antiseptic silence. People moved in precise paths to the lavatory, the snack shop and classes under the still sky and impotent sun. Everything looked and felt like a still life painting, a long milky dream. Even assemblies on Mondays and Fridays were held in immaculate silence, all because Ladidi had requested a strawberry fruit for her hand in marriage.

  Double-O-Seven, Nnamdi’s best friend, was the first one to try. He bought three plastic strawberries from a gift shop in Barnawa where flowers and cards were sold to augment love for Valentine’s Day, to express goodwill on birthdays and spread cheer at Christmas. She laughed. In the corridor outside the classroom, in full view of several students, she instructed him to bite it and give her half. A test. Everyone laughed and jeered at him. A decade later, students would retell the fable of how a reincarnation of Eve had come to this very school and revealed that it was a strawberry and not agbalumo, the African star apple, that she had given Adam to eat at the dawn of time.

  National Youth Service Corps members serving in the school would pound their fists on the wall or their desks in frustration. ‘You think I am a small boy. Do you know how many years I did in polytechnic? Because I want to love you, you think I am a small boy. I am a man!’ But Ladidi didn’t give anyone preferential treatment or lower her standards, not even when the government teacher old enough to have fathered her sent a junior student with mangoes in a polythene bag and a note during break.

  I know you like mangoes eh. Just come and meet me at Johnny’s Lounge at six. I will be waiting. That’s my girl.

  She forwarded the note and mangoes to the principal’s office and the man’s desk was empty by morning. Careful to reject special favours, especially the ones that required her to be alone with the benefactor, she rejected the private flute tutorials offered by the librarian and music teacher, the beautiful Miss Katharine, who lived alone in the staff quarters, and extra maths tutorials from Mr Gyang, who also lived in the quarters but had his family living in Zaria. All Corps members who tried to get physical with her were reported and immediately redeployed.

  Before that term ended, Ladidi’s fame had spread. Girls in Catholic schools thought of her after completing their novenas. Pentecostal student fellowships upheld her as the paragon of abstinence and preachers throughout Kaduna State were beginning to use her example to preach sexual purity. ‘Just like Joseph in Egypt,’ they cried to their congregations, and there would be a splattering of hallelujahs. ‘Just like the Virgin Mary,’ cheered priests during mass for the students, and the girls would sigh in veneration. Many of them had never seen this Ladidi and it heightened their awe. A feverish rumour spread in her school just before the last term paper: Ladidi was going to become a boarding-school student.

  APPLE

  Just before the veneration of Ladidi, a Senior Secondary 2 boy took sick leave from his house master to hitch a ride with a gongoro-truck driver on a night trip to Jos, where it was rumoured apple trees and even strawberries grew. No staff member believed he was sick, of course; in fact they were surprised he had taken the trouble of asking for permission. They didn’t put it past him to snap into air. For the boy existed like a myth in the school: he was slim and light skinned to the point of pale, smallish, somehow soft and cat-like in gait, slow in talking; he wore several rings on his fingers, a tiny golden cross gleamed on his left ear and he only came out of the hostel at night. He was one of those untouchables at school, those who managed to escape its laws and routine because the staff felt he was better left alone as long as he didn’t hurt anyone. So when he applied for leave, the house master felt respected.

  The boy returned two days later, in time for morning assembly, without having stopped at home for a bath. He looked like a car had run over him. He told those who gathered round him in awe that in fact a car actually had. And that was why he had lost his strawberry. In the midst of the spellbound crowd of students, some of whom were seeing him for the first time in daylight, he looked like a weary magician or a holy pi
lgrim preaching a new religion. Ladidi came and took him by the hand from the circle of boys and led him to the hall so that they could observe assembly together, not letting go of his hand as the national anthem and school anthem were sung, not even when the principal gave a brief talk on morality on school grounds. He mentioned her as a shining example so that all heads craned towards her. She didn’t let go of the boy’s hand, not even then, and he must have died and come back to life at least six times. Her hands were so smooth, so soft, and as she led him out of the hall after assembly with all eyes on them, he thought it was worth it, the tedium of the journey, the accident, all of it was worth this kind of delicious death.

  Ladidi didn’t plan to scare a boy away with the garishness of her home again, so instead she took him to the drama club room right away. ‘You should have seen it,’ he said in his rich, high-pitched voice. ‘It tastes like America.’ His eyes sparkled in the dusty room, not at the memory of the fruit but at the vision of her before him: skin the colour of yolk, fresh red lips like the fruit itself, inky black hair racing from her forehead down to the nape of her neck in neat cornrows. Suddenly there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room.

  ‘O, my hair.’ She looked down and smiled shyly and he died again on the spot. ‘I do simple hairstyles because I don’t have sisters or female friends.’

  He was appalled. ‘No, no, it is beautiful … you don’t … you are beautiful-I-God-you—’

  He couldn’t speak with her tongue in his mouth. The feel of it wrestling his for any trace of strawberry drove him mad. It was as if he had grown a dozen more ears and each of them was being prodded gently with a cotton bud.

  ‘Do you feel better now?’ she asked but he was gasping. ‘Sorry, I haven’t … I haven’t done this before. But I like it. Do you like it?’

  He nodded, and when she brought her lips to his, he drank thirstily from her mouth. Her tongue was soft and firm at the same time and he grasped her whole body for dear life. He decided he would have ten more accidents for this, and yet it was too excruciating, so he wrenched his mouth away, panting for air, for life.