The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  Her new name started appearing on walls all over the school in Gothic letters, the stems of the consonants curved and thickened with care into vines, a tiny star flower forming the dot atop the ‘i’ of ‘Night’, so Halima tried again. She reported to the authorities that Ladidi was the queen of an evil secret cult. Nothing was done but the school was gradually waxing to hatred; they hated how much they depended on Ladidi’s nocturnal appearances for it seemed that pandemonium would break loose the night she didn’t show up. She only had time for André, and he begged her to stop using the strawberry perfume; it was the scent of death but he couldn’t explain how he had come to this conclusion so she ignored him. By the end of the term her textbooks and desk were desecrated with crude doodles of genitalia. Sweet Mother was bewildered by them when she inspected the texts that Christmas holiday, the malevolent attention to detail. Ladidi insisted that she had drawn them. The teacher had complained of the rumours of her promiscuity with boys in SS2. Sweet Mother expected Ladidi to break down and open up but that didn’t happen.

  Ladidi didn’t go mad all of a sudden; there were small rebellions, like refusing to close the door or forgetting to put salt in the yam-and-sweet-potato porridge. She started sneaking to Taboo to sing, but the father was thrilled and made it official, making André play sax or the keyboard. As long as she couldn’t have Max, she returned to the bar to implore the gods, fate, rain and even the government to return him to her every Friday. The same people who venerated her as the Virgin Mary and proclaimed her Jezebel now came to the bar to luxuriate in awe of her. Taboo thrived. Painters and photographers hung their framed work on the walls so that the foreigners and the upper class could see and maybe buy. With a percentage to the bar. Some of Sweet Mother’s old work was put up. Fiery conversations were held in between Ladidi’s performances on the state of the country while the foreign journalists and wanderers observed in silence.

  None of them concerned her, of course. She would just climb onto the stage and the chatter would die and the faces would turn to her. She would imagine the faces were all Max, close her eyes and let the yellow out of her mouth.

  Then she began to take charge of the house, just as her mother had a decade and a half earlier when the entire country was waiting for the end of the military wars. Like her mother, without knowing it, she too attempted altering the seating arrangements in the living room. When she saw the shock on Sweet Mother’s face at her suggestion of repainting all the walls of the house white, she was confused. ‘But our Fine Arts teacher said white makes rooms look bigger. You are an artist; I thought you’d know.’

  She tried to update the house cuisine to the standard meals taught in Food and Nutrition class but failed to align the eating habits of the house’s occupants to the recommended three square meals a day, not because they were too poor to afford it, but because of their madness and because, as Max confided cynically when she confided in him, they were too rich to stick to it.

  ‘Ladidi, thank you for bringing what they taught you from school home today, but if we don’t finish this chicken today it will spoil,’ Sweet Mother scolded, peeling off the cooking timetable Ladidi had pasted on the fridge. ‘There’s no power for the fridge and you know God hates wasters.’ She squeezed it into a ball and threw it into the waste bin. ‘Cooking timetables are for homes in countries that have light.’

  So chicken pepper soup in the morning, fried chicken as a snack at noon, then plain boiled chicken at night. Ladidi’s attempt to balance their diet failed because they all ate according to Sweet Mother’s whim and Sweet Mother ate what she felt like eating when she felt like eating. She would come out of her medieval Sokoto romance novel-in-progress at midnight with a craving for plain boiled rice so she would cook a pot of it and the whole house, Ladidi included, would wake up the next morning and realise it was plain boiled rice without the drama of stew or soup or milk that they had been craving for months.

  Every Nigerian can detect the change in seasons sometime in September by the change in the air. It starts to smell like Christmas. For most people born in this period, it’s when they are the happiest. For Ladidi, they were her most impulsive months, the time she felt most aligned with her core, a force she couldn’t understand but which drove her to start her piercing practice, start her renovations. It was in the ember months that she started to think maybe she could sing, and it was in the ember months of the first year she came to the Madhouse, that she realised Max was the one.

  On the last Christmas Eve she would have in this world, she marched to the bathroom, propelled by her mysterious force, and opened the door. Her foster father stood naked before her, half-bent over the bucket of water, shocked at the familiarity of the moment, shocked at a woman returned to him from sixteen years ago. Sarai. In that same yellow dress. She stared back at him without sexual curiosity but curiosity period, eyes clear and steady, asking him a question he could not, would not answer.

  The roar of Sweet Mother’s Peugeot startled them back to life and he shut the door with fresh shame, avoiding her eyes. She fled to the back of the house where she was about to slaughter four fat pigeons André had caught for Christmas.

  ‘You will not kill me!’ screamed Sweet Mother. The sound reached Ladidi in the kitchen before the mother came in, mirroring lightning that came before thunder, her curls bobbing as her heels clattered on the old terrazzo floor like rain. ‘How dare you, how dare—’ She brought down her right hand to Ladidi’s face but Ladidi shielded herself with the hand holding the knife. The small knife impaled Sweet Mother’s palm. ‘Your daughter will kill me o, your daughter wants to kill me!’ she screamed, bustling back to the bedroom where the father still stood with a towel wrapped around his waist. ‘Your daughter will kill me!’ He made her sit on the bed and with the quick precision he had used to chop off infected hands and remove bullets in the Liberian peacekeeping force, he pulled the blade out of her hand as she yelped in pain.

  He washed the wound with saltwater, applied iodine and covered the perforation on either side with a tuft of cotton wool before wrapping her hand in a bandage. He told her to get up so that they could go to the hospital for a tetanus injection but she collapsed in tears in his arms, deep gut-wrenching tears that came from a storm in her lower belly, and he rocked her to sleep as always. He took off her shoes and lay beside her for a moment, waiting for her to fall deeply before getting Doctor Rufus to come – how he would do it on Christmas Eve he didn’t know. He didn’t know that Ladidi had been watching the whole time. He wasn’t shocked when he turned and found her looking from the door. He stood up, dressed up and told her to watch her mother. She joined her on the bed as soon as he left and promptly fell asleep. At some point in the night she circled her arms around Sweet Mother’s waist.

  Sweet Mother woke up to the sound of Ladidi sobbing in her sleep. She wiped the shut eyes and wondered where her husband had gone. The wall clock said the time was almost midnight. She stood up and went to the kitchen and turned the knob of the lantern that was never put out to inspect the pot of Christmas pigeon stew. She considered painting something to run even further from her thoughts but stopped at the door of her studio where André had slept, waiting for Nepa to bring the light. She jostled him awake and shoved him to the boys’ room, then lowered the flame again. She returned to the room and lay beside Ladidi, beautiful even in tearful sleep, face squeezed in the throes of a nightmare. This girl would kill her but it was her death to die. She smoothed a hand on the girl’s bare silver forearms and the sobbing subsided.

  Ladidi woke up on a windy Christmas morning wrapped up in the bed in sleeping Sweet Mum’s love. The father threw open the door around nine in the morning and bellowed ‘Merry Christmas’, lugging a large sack followed by the doctor. He had found the man in a beer parlour some time before dawn. The doctor set down his wooden box marked with a red cross on the small round table and started to work on Sweet Mother’s hand. When he was done they invited him for a Christmas breakfast of rice and juicy re
d-tomato stew with fried pigeon. When the father blessed the food he prayed for the spirit of forgiveness and for his son Max, who had insisted on spending the holiday at school. When they were done and the doctor had gone they had a small meeting where it was decided that Ladidi wouldn’t return to the boarding house for the second term and that the use of knives would be abolished for a while.

  ‘But what will we eat?’ asked the mother, laughing.

  The father tore open the sack and pawpaws and watermelons rolled out. Sweet Mum started complaining about things so he walked to his room and Sweet Mum followed him, clapping and laughing and taunting, saying something about how he had squandered his last pay cheque from the publishers until their bedroom door shut behind them. He emerged at noon and looked at André, fingers hovering over the keyboard that wouldn’t work because there was no electricity, and Ladidi who hadn’t moved from where she sat; his eyes were glazed with the faraway look of wanderlust so they knew he wouldn’t be back the moment he stepped out.

  Waves of grief on the tides of another time swept into the house, grief so consuming some hot melancholy afternoons that it startled its occupants, yet they suffered alone, not wanting to infect one another. Ladidi, who was more connected to the origin of the virulent grief without knowing how, suffered monstrous cramps that kept her rolling and wailing in bed. Sweet Mum lovingly explained all over again what her body was doing, applying cold towels to her forehead as a porcupine danced in the girl’s insides.

  ‘But why are we the ones who have to bleed?’ Ladidi cried out and Sweet Mum turned her face away to keep from crying herself. In the face on her lap she saw another. The face of Sarai’s. Sweet Mum wished she could tell her she knew what she was feeling but it would be a lie; she had never known the pangs of menstruation – another failure at womanhood on her part. ‘It’s how the good Lord made us, my daughter,’ she sniffed, rocking her back and forth. ‘It’s how the good Lord made us.’

  They had to abide by the father’s no-knife law because every sharp object in the house disappeared with him. They also withdrew Ladidi from the boarding house, to the school’s consternation. ‘Brothers of the Spirit,’ a group of disgruntled SS3 students, marched to the last house on the left with lanterns, retelling the chronicle of how Ladidi had come to their grammar school in chaos, how every man who had ever come close to her was doomed, from Nnamdi Ike, whose legs had been amputated for the sake of her love, to the teacher who had lost his job for it, and now their ‘Spirit’ couldn’t write external exams. ‘She is a witch,’ they proclaimed at the wire-mesh gate for the benefit of those in the house, ‘and she must be stopped.’

  ‘Mummy, they even have a pastor,’ André told Sweet Mum, bent over the typewriter in her room. She had been in the ancient Benin Kingdom guiding a warrior in the forest as he searched for an antidote for the princess’s snake bite. ‘Mummy, they said they will burn our house if we don’t bring Ladidi back.’

  She stopped typing long enough to say, ‘They won’t be the first to try. Come and close this window for me; their noise is distracting me.’

  André was not satisfied, so he went to play his frustrations on the powerless piano.

  Outside, the pastor confirmed the general suspicion: yes she was a marine spirit, a flesh-and-blood avatar for the Queen of the Coast. The Queen of the Coast had sent Ladidi to steal the souls of men so she had to be destroyed. He prophesied by way of consolation to the parents that they would get another daughter but they had to give up this one; besides, anything that would deny you the Kingdom of Heaven had to be cut off.

  They used their torches to light their Molotov cocktails. Double-O-Seven had got the idea from a Robert Ludlum novel. The boys had scavenged for their bottles in rubbish heaps. The pastor had provided money for fuel from the black market to help execute the purge.

  The first boy lit his bottle and leant back to hurl it at the house, but at that moment, the first and heaviest rain of the year came down, sending them scrambling blindly into the night, shivering with cold and shock. André abandoned his imaginary music to laugh and join Ladidi in shutting all the windows in the house. Sweet Mum stepped out of the sixteenth century Benin Kingdom long enough to smile.

  At midnight the rain hadn’t stopped but it was Ladidi who heard the knocks rapping on the front door. ‘Max, o my God, Max!’ she screamed once she’d opened it and jumped into his arms to take in the night cold, his wet body and mango breath.

  ‘My little sister,’ he laughed as though she had not kissed him. ‘My little sister, get down, see my wet body.’

  ‘Why are you coming to my house at this hour, eh?’ protested Sweet Mother from the darkness. ‘Are you sure you are at the right address?’

  The lantern lit up in the dark and they saw she wasn’t joking.

  ‘You,’ she said to Ladidi. ‘Get down. You think you are still a small child?’ Ladidi slid down off of Max. ‘And you, stop smiling. Why are you here?’

  Max stopped smiling and walked over to her, inspecting her eyes. ‘He left again,’ he said.

  She nodded.

  ‘You have been writing too.’

  ‘You have not answered my question,’ she said.

  Max sank into his father’s armchair and started untying his laces. ‘What happened to your hand?’

  ‘Ask her.’ Sweet Mother pointed to Ladidi before setting down the lantern on the small table at the epicentre of the chairs. ‘She stabbed me.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘There was a riot at school, soldiers came to carry off people, everywhere. I escaped, I ran. Ate mango all the way. I didn’t plan to come back till September.’

  ‘A blind trip,’ she said, her lips curved in a little smile at the lantern.

  ‘No.’ His eyes flashed in the dim light and his jaw was set firm. ‘I knew where I was going; I knew I would come home.’

  Ladidi carried Max’s travelling bag to the room because she didn’t want to be there when they talked about what had happened with Sweet Mother’s hand, neither did she want to talk about the banning of knives that had resulted in the nasty fight that had led to their father’s leaving. She had managed to keep it out of her mind, out of her diary. The truth was she hadn’t meant for the knife to touch Sweet Mum. She knew now that she would never be forgiven. Max would never want her.

  She fell asleep by her window, crying to the roaring rain outside, relishing the mango-meaty taste of Max’s mouth. Morning brought fresh air, clear skies and sunshine for the rain had been swallowed up in the night.

  In the calm of this new-born morning Ladidi decided she would leave. There was no drama or madness or desperation about it; leaving was the only step left for her, the only way she could breathe. The ‘where’ was irrelevant. André saw her in her yellow dress, tying on their mother’s high-platform strappy sandals and asked her where she was going, to which she said, ‘Taboo.’

  He dropped his school bag and joined her in the room to beg. He told her he could understand why she wanted to leave but she shook him off. What could he possibly know at how old now, fourteen? He in turn went to Max and threw a tantrum, reminded Max that his presence always made Ladidi upset; well, he had better go and make Ladidi go to school.

  When they got to her room she was gone.

  Sweet Mother caught up with them on the road. ‘Ehn, I am going back home. My new job starts tomorrow – I thought it was today.’

  ‘Sweet Mum has a new job, Max!’

  ‘Ehn, so where are you going?’

  They told her. She said a few things under her breath, reversed the car and told them to get in. ‘André, come and drive. I can’t think. I will kill this girl. Taboo? I thought they were doing their external registration today? I will kill this girl. Come and drive. My high heels!’

  Sweet Mother marched into the club and they walked in after her but it was André who saw her first. Ladidi was on the stage, singing to soldiers and businessmen about the colour
yellow and about how soon Harmattan would come and dry up all the leaves to a dirty-yellow. Dirty-yellow makes everything, people’s hopes and dreams, dirty-yellow. André could see she was crying, even as the audience cheered madly. She stood gripping the microphone in her mother’s yellow dress, standing in Sweet Mother’s platform heels, hair braided back, big eyes scanning the crowd. They fell on Sweet Mother so Ladidi leapt from the stage and rushed to the bar and had her first shot of alcohol before they could get to her. Max reached her first but she had already poured herself a tumbler of mango vodka to invoke the memory of his lips and quell her pain.

  Sweet Pea

  When you are sixty in Japan, you are new-born. Rich or poor, it doesn’t matter. You put on a big red hat and a red vest and celebrate the beginning of a new life. Sweet Mother read it in a newspaper André had brought back from his trip to Seoul. The Chinese sixty-year cycle gives you the chance to start your life again. They call it Kanreki.

  Which other, more perfect way was there to turn sixty than in Japan? Far from her three sisters, far from her church, the choir, the husband, the children … Far from that house with its destiny of incineration by her cigar or a mob or the government looming just over its roof. She knew she would have to be born again in a faraway place before coming back to them. So she started leaving in installments by saving in secret. It was just a wonderful dream then, this rebirth in Japan, but she still saved from her paintings and portrait work for school textbooks and writing until the year that would usher in her sixtieth birthday. By then she had more than enough money, so much that she decided her destination will be reached by blind trip. When Shariff asked her where she was flying to first, she said she didn’t know and it was true. She decided on a departure date and booked the first available flight she could find, to grasp what it was like to have no direction. Wherever the plane landed she would be thankful for and then take another flight to Japan. The first available flight on the random day she chose was going to Bali, so she went to the Indonesian Embassy in Abuja. It was over the Indonesian sea, with Japan and her Kanreki in sight, that her journey would end.