by TJ Benson
‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘In your mouth.’ Her face was all curiosity.
‘O, my mouth? I have mouth odour?’ He savagely tore a piece of his uniform and began to scrub his tongue. ‘I haven’t brushed my teeth.’
‘No, no,’ she smiled again and he could not believe he’d tasted those lips. ‘Your mouth is sweet, very sweet.’ He leant on the wall for support. ‘But it is not strawberry. What is it?’
‘O-o, apple. I was eating apples too. I ate plenty apples in Jos.’ His face fell. ‘Should I have brought apples too?’
‘No, no, it’s okay. Please open your mouth so I can taste it again.’
‘How come we do not eat fruit in this house?’ asked the mother during supper after Ladidi had mentioned tasting apples for the first time that day. The father knew that question was for him so he hurried with his meal. André filled in spaces. ‘So is he your boyfriend now?’
‘Yusuf can never be my boyfriend.’
‘They said he trekked to Jos just to pluck strawberries for you.’
‘That one is none of my business.’
‘Who wants to go to Taboo after supper?’ asked the father from behind the newspaper, and everyone except Max shouted ‘Yes!’, so at 8 p.m. they all bundled themselves into Sweet Mother’s Peugeot (by now André could drive, age twelve) and zoomed off to the old Sleep Sweet Hotel in Barnawa. ‘The government fought your mother for this hotel,’ the father had said on a previous visit, ‘but now it is her property.’
‘Why are we poor sometimes if you own Sleep Sweet?’ André had asked as the father had pulled out the key from the ignition.
‘Business is bad sometimes,’ Sweet Mother had said, pulling up the lock on her door and climbing out of the car onto the gravel and staring at the whitewashed walls of the entrance. ‘And we had the small crisis that made the government come and seal it up. But it is our property now. Old things have passed away. We are starting anew. What will we call it?’
‘André and Ladidi are not supposed to be here, Daddy,’ Max had said from inside the car. ‘Hotels are meant for adults. It is a taboo for children to be found in hotels, sir.’
‘Our children have given us a name,’ the father had beamed at Sweet Mother. ‘Taboo.’
‘Taboo,’ Ladidi had echoed from Max’s side.
‘Taboo,’ André had echoed, his face lighting up. ‘I love it, Sweet Mum! Taboo!’
Renovation was in full force when they got inside: people were fixing the lights, hammering at the bar, setting up microphones on the stage. Ladidi found herself among the tall microphones. She decided to tap one, twice. The thuk-thuk made her jump. Something was unfurling in her belly, had been unfurling as long as she knew herself, and now, with the microphone cradled in her hands, it took all her will to let go. Not before she caught the look on the father’s face. He was pale, jaw slack, gawking at her. What was behind her, a snake? A killer? She waited for him to say something, to do something but …
‘Ladidi!’ Sweet Mother called.
‘Ma?’
‘Where did you travel to?’
Everyone stopped working and started laughing. The laughter burnt. She climbed down from the stage and ran out before anyone could catch her crying. ‘Take me home,’ she ordered Max, who followed her outside.
‘What happened?’
‘Just take me home!’
‘What of them?’
‘You will just drop me, then you can come back.’
Max got into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition just as Sweet Mum came out of the hotel, André and Father in tow, but he didn’t stop; he reversed and drove off.
Ladidi was still shaking when they got home so he made her Lipton tea and added a dollop of honey as she eased into her blankets in her bedroom. She was grateful for the tea, for him, so she dropped the cup in the saucer and pulled his head towards her for a kiss, strawberry flavoured or not. Max gently unclenched her hand from his neck and moved his face away. He wasn’t horrified or disgusted, he merely looked at her with pity because she was going crazy. ‘I have to pick up Sweet Mum, Daddy and André,’ he explained in a voice just above a whisper. He stood up and left.
Ladidi fell asleep thinking about how her foster father had looked at her at the hotel, like she was dead. Like she was a woman. Like he was afraid of her. All she had wanted to do was try to sing.
She opened her eyes the next morning in the arms of Sweet Mum, who had slept beside her, holding her shoulders. Ladidi shrugged off the limp arm and climbed out of the bed. She didn’t eat breakfast before going to school. During break she took Yusuf to a narrow storeroom in the school library and asked him if he was fine with her pulling off his shirt this time. He didn’t have any objections; she was the kind of death he wanted to die. This kiss was his undoing. He leant into her body for a better angle and it was too much: he jumped from her, out of the storeroom of mouldy newspapers piled high around her, panting. In his delirium he decided his religion, the sacred codes of their school and other pinnacles of order could go to hell if they would keep him from the sweetness that was Ladidi.
The principal, who happened to enter the library a few minutes after them, confronted Yusuf about his attire, as though he hadn’t looked away previous times. Then it occurred to him that he hadn’t – this boy was wearing the green collar of a Senior Secondary 3 student, velvet yes, but green, and he had never met him before, not in the several West African Examinations Council preparatory meetings he had had with SS3 students.
‘Come here. Are you a student of this school?’ he asked, anticipating a potential disciplining session, and Yusuf saw in the man the personification of order. His blood was hot and instead of tucking in his shirt and buttoning it up, he punched the principal in the face and shouted ‘We want free love!’ over and over again. Fist in the air, he looked down at the withered man who couldn’t rise, not so much from the physical blow but the act of the blow itself; the principal simply couldn’t comprehend it. Or maybe he was scared the SS3 boy would strike again. ‘We want free love!’ Yusuf chanted, storming out of the library.
The family doctor blamed the boy’s behaviour on an adrenaline rush and malaria fever in a note attached to the parents’ apology letter the next day. In the second attachment, a pastor blamed it on evil spirits. How else could his three-day disappearance be explained? The disciplinary committee considered both spiritual and medical evaluations and found neither cause satisfactory to justify the mangling of a fifty-eight-year-old principal of a secondary school older than Nigeria itself, who had spent thirty-five years in service, by an eighteen-year-old boy.
Yusuf was expelled and Ladidi was alone again. She spent nights crying and didn’t wake up on time. She managed to talk to no one in the Madhouse for a week. Sweet Mother stepped away from her work and tried to take over the chores but Ladidi would clean the kitchen even if she saw it had been swept, iron the father’s clothes even though she saw them folded. One day Sweet Mother found that elusive taste she had been looking for in Ladidi’s yam porridge.
It was the buxom Halima who found someone’s underwear in the same library storeroom in which Ladidi and the SS3 student were said to have been kissing. A wave of hysteria spread across secondary schools in the state. Rumours of Ladidi’s deflowering was passed from tongue to tongue but it was too hot to swallow. Of course there were different schools of thought but what was Ladidi doing there in the storeroom with that boy in the first place? By the time exams were over the extra-large size of the panties made the evidence invalid but not the wildfire it started. Male teachers whose advances Ladidi had spurned pursued the matter, turning Ladidi into an anathema, but as far as the disciplinary committee was concerned the case held no water. No one had caught Ladidi and Yusuf together in the storeroom. The librarian had admitted seeing her walk in moments before the ‘adrenaline incident’ (that was what students were calling it) but at least four students had rushed in after the Evil Spirit ruckus had started. (That was what t
hey were calling it. Students can still find The Spirit or Evil Spirit scratched into blackboards in classrooms or burnt onto the asbestos ceiling boards of the dining hall decades later.) Those who had joined Yusuf in shouting his mantra ‘We want free love, we want free love’ for the sake of rebellion and youth and bravery and pumping blood and the scandalisation of the beautiful music teacher cum school librarian, had banged the reading tables and pushed over the shelves until they had found her trembling in the storeroom.
Miss Katharine, who understood Yusuf’s words to mean more, as in movements in other parts of the world, suspected Ladidi was innocent. In fact, nobody knew Ladidi would die a virgin.
COCONUT
There was common practice among boys who, in the exhilaration of youth, wanted to become feared and respected. It had to do with ear piercings, a final test of manliness that wasn’t usually indulged because of the risk of drawing the attention of policemen, church and mosque leaders to oneself and becoming the scapegoat of the community each time an act of vice or vandalism occurred. The piercing of ears had to be:
1.Performed by a girl
2.Performed by a girl who wasn’t on her period
3.Performed by a girl who was a virgin
Break any rule and the pierce wound would never heal. Break two and the ear lobe would swell gigantically with pus.
Nobody could be exactly sure when Ladidi started her piercing practice because she probably started it long before the testosterone wave hit their school and boys, very unusual boys, did it just because they wanted to be different or remember a woman they used to adore or wanted to know what it was like to be a woman. The boys who pierced their ears in worship of a woman would steal an earring of hers and wear it as a totem on rare occasions, like special night preps, when no member of staff was on duty, hoping somewhere in another town, a woman would touch her ear, the ear with the missing jewellery, and by some magical association think of them. In reality these women were frustrated because it was the era Obasanjo was president, and since the world hadn’t ended in 1999 as predicted the cost of jewellery was skyrocketing again.
The success of Ladidi’s practice, even though many begrudged her motives in the first place, was a testament to her chastity because none of her customers suffered any complications. They praised her for the neatness of her tools (a needle sterilised with fresh coals from the hostel kitchen and her first-aid kit, which she brought from home). Most claimed it didn’t hurt at all and soon even boys with good home training, boys already set on the path to becoming prefects, boys with excellent academic records and good spiritual standing at school and student fellowships, came to be pierced. At the top of the lobe, at least, where the hole could be hidden.
The mysterious Yusuf who wore rings and only came out at night had been one of Ladidi’s first customers. It could be said this early patronage sealed his fate. It could be said that he ‘opened market’ for her because watching him emerge from the abandoned and unlit classroom where everyone knew she did the piercings after school brought quite a few influential students to her.
That she worked in the dark might have been for the sake of security but it also provided a sense of thrill: it heightened the risk of an accident with her coals or needle and made it delicious. She was unaffected by the fanfare, unworried by the fact that her practice could get her expelled, and she would accept whatever you had to offer her as pay. If anyone had asked her, she would have told them the genuine reason she did it was because she wanted to know what being a surgeon was like. But no one asked and she became more mysterious instead.
Ladidi practised until she mastered aiming in the dark at whichever point of the earlobe a client wanted, the way she hoped to one day use a blade to aim for the heart. She rejected those who wanted to be apprentices.
Sometimes she sang strange songs as she pushed the needle through, some of them personal compositions, others the foreign jazz her foster parents listened to, transforming the dark atmosphere into something pulsing with dreams. There were students who returned for a second piercing because of her singing. She used pieces of coconut to support the lobe from beneath and stop the needle. When she was done she made her clients eat the coconut stained with their blood. This way the entire school knew:
1.She was a flesh-and-blood girl
2.Her blood cycle
3.She was not having sex
In fact, many adopted her blood cycle as a second school calendar. They would anticipate the end of her blood flow the way people expected Saturday at the start of the week, the way people anticipated the change in seasons. She was often surprised to be approached and booked as soon as her blood had ceased. She didn’t believe in their superstition but she obeyed it. And it vindicated her when rumours of her promiscuity with The Evil Spirit started circulating. After the underwear was found, two boys dared to test her virginity by soliciting her service. She knew the students would organise a mob to beat her publicly if they emerged from her clinic with so much as a wound but she didn’t mind. Weeks passed and nothing happened.
When André came to the classroom one night after she had finished the head girl’s second piercing and requested his own session, she laughed and motioned him to sit down. He obeyed the vibration of her hand in the dark and sat down. It was a pure silent night and because of the broken windows it felt like an outside inside, like there was no roof over their heads. He watched her fan the hot coals on a tray as she sang a song from one of their father’s records.
‘If you pray right, heaven belongs to you,’ she sang, placing the long needle on the coals. ‘If you act right, heaven belongs to you.’ She walked to him, dipped a cotton-wool ball in her bottle of spirits, then asked, ‘Which ear?’
‘Left.’
She dabbed, placing a piece of coconut underneath to catch the needle. ‘If you sing right, heaven belongs to you …’
There was a flash of pain followed by the sweetness of her voice. ‘Oh-oh, heaven belongs to you.’
MANGO
Now there had been other mysteries in their grammar school before Ladidi. Take, for instance, the skeleton in their biology lab, said to be that of a former principal. It felt so real to the touch that generations of biology and integrated science students really believed a prior monarch of the establishment had retired from his office to the lab to educate even in death, for all time. He was said to have been a malevolent principal who delighted in sadistic punishments and so six students apprehended him on his way to the school farm one Saturday. In those days secondary-school students could be as old as twenty. They took him deep into the forest and tied him up in the branches of a tree and abandoned him there. The students returned to their lives and soon the police were tired of searching for him. After a year, the students, who were to be expelled by a new principal for some other bad behaviour, went to retrieve his bones, in magnificent condition, and left them on one of the tables in the biology lab as a warning. Of course, nobody knew whose skeleton it was except the lab attendant and the head of the department, whose intuition wouldn’t let them be, so rather than report it to the local police station they made a decision: since biology apparatus had become expensive, well, at least they could glue this one together properly and seat him in a chair. Whatever the students had not learnt from the man’s administration they would learn from his bones.
A new girl had visions of the bones the night Ladidi resumed school, which was two weeks late as was the fashion of students who just crossed into SS3. They (she said the bones spoke as though they belonged to people and not to one man) warned her that Ladidi was to die a gruesome death. Ladidi laughed when someone told someone who told the house mistress who told someone to tell her as she soaked cornflakes in milk the following morning. She laughed as her roommates left for class and, now that the topic of death had come up, wondered about her dead mother. Her uncle had said she looked like her, but there were no pictures. He never talked about what had happened to her, or her father, what lives they had lived.
>
When the bell rang for class she packed her bag and walked out of the hostel to the gate. It was locked. She called for someone to open it but no one came. The hostel compound was serene, patches of grass were dying, and a yellow check dress hanging on a line reminded her of her yellow dress and her singing in the bar. She started singing of September, of how everything was dying into dirty yellow; even the sun didn’t shine as it used to, even her family didn’t worry about her as they used to, but she had her yellow dress, she was going to pull her yellow dress on—
The bell for break time interrupted her. How many hours had she spent rolling in the grass and dancing round the hostel? It didn’t matter. Max wasn’t interested in her. It didn’t matter at all. She went back to her room and kept on singing of yellow. The bell rang and the gates were opened. Students exploded into the hostel compound, and the vast silence that had lasted for hours became a memory. She lay on the bed with her sandals on, staring at the ceiling from shut eyes, reaching desperately for the silence when her roommates came to get plates and cutlery for lunch. They tried not to make a noise and disturb her; she must have had a tough day, first time in boarding house, then those terrible rumours. Well, that was the price of beauty, perhaps. But they would not ruin her siesta. They left her and went for lunch. She didn’t wake up when the bell clanged an hour later or when the whistle screeched for sports. She woke up when she felt the yellow leaving her. Evening was setting in. She sent for jollof rice from the student buka and undressed for a shower.
‘Queen of the Night,’ they called her. No one saw her during the day, not even during lessons, service or assemblies. It was as if she had assumed the persona of The Spirit, the boy who almost won her heart. Soon even her roommates forgot what she looked like outside her corner of their dimly lit room where natural light was never enough. For them it was like living with the memory of her, life in sepia. No one knew how she managed this miracle, what with the class registers and noon prep roll calls, but they all waited till the sun had disappeared behind the staff orchard for Ladidi to emerge from the girls’ hostel for night prep, strawberry perfume scenting her wake.
