by TJ Benson
She couldn’t resist saying, ‘No,’ and the father choked, but she went on. ‘In fact, he suggested we went a hundred days without God.’ She rubbed Max’s head fondly.
When they returned for the children months later, André said vehemently, ‘Sweet Mum, I don’t want to do low cut again.’ She didn’t ask him why. She never touched his hair again.
Sweet Pea and Shariff spent the first month away visiting various parts of Indonesia. From Tana Toraja, where the dead were buried in hills and high places so the living could thrive under them, to Rantepao with its beautiful houses that had boat-shaped roofs, to Ubud in Bali, where men flung flaming coconut husks at each other in a ritual dance at night to keep off evil spirits. She soaked up the culture and for some reason the language. By Lake Tempe they stared at the Flores Sea and held hands. Hands reached for bodies and soon they were in the water, gasping for air, grasping their bodies, slowly and forgiving, matching the tempo of the sea. It was dangerous, they could drown, but it had to be done. When the water washed them up on the shore they were returned somehow to those first days in the house when their bodies knew more than them. The night sky was so wide and the air was warm and he held her and fell asleep, the ghost of a smile behind his lips and she thought to herself like this. Like this.
On the Day of the Dead in South Sulawesi they got caught up in a celebration of the deceased where relatives dug up the corpses of loved ones who had departed decades ago to dress them in new clothes and groom them for participation in the annual ancient Ma’nene festival. Intrigued and weighed down with shots of tequila, they followed the parade and rejoiced with the revellers and clapped with them, stopping in shock only when they passed teenagers placing sunshades on the hollowed-out eyes of a corpse, another tightening a belt on its sagging black pencil jeans.
‘They had not been born when their grandfather died,’ explained their father, swinging by with a can of beer. ‘But he wanted them; he even named them before he died, before I found a woman. And,’ he waved at the boys, ‘they love him too.’
Weeks after they returned to Nigeria, reinvigorated from the trip and full of stories, the entire editorial board of the publishing house, including the editors involved in the publication of Dear Sweet Pea, Shariff’s wartime memoir, were arrested for treason. When the soldiers stormed the last house on the right and took him, she was too stunned to react.
The women of Freetown Street took advantage of her husband’s arrest to penetrate the house, bringing praying beads, brooms dipped in holy water to chase away ill luck and palm fronds to evoke the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ.
‘What she should do is go to the police station!’ Miss Rosemary suggested. No one paid much attention to Rosemary because she lived in the house where Mister Sly had fled from his wife by hanging himself and Aresi had fled into the forest, mad with longing for him. They believed Rosemary too had become cursed with the heat of February. Sweet Pea told the women that she was grateful for their affection but the prayer chain was cancelled. They had to leave so she could go and look for her husband.
‘But there is still bondage in this house that needs to be broken.’
‘We can watch your sons for you.’
‘And clean this house. God, the dust!’
‘Haba, madam, and you never show us wedding picture o.’
‘We did not have a wedding.’
‘Are you saying— are you saying you – you have been living in sin?’
‘After all these years? With all these children?’
‘I thought you said you were the pastor’s daughter?’
‘You need cleansing. Go down on your knees!’
‘You are a disgrace to your mother, every woman.’
‘Jesus forgive you.’
‘But forgive this? Fornicating for how many years!’
‘Please leave my house.’
‘Go down on your knees, I say!’
‘Jesus have mercy on your children. It wasn’t their fault that they were born into this.’
‘Stop crying! Shameless woman.’
‘I just want my husband.’
‘Will you shut up! Husband under which marriage?’
‘If you don’ leave my mummy I will chook you this knife.’
They all turned to André. He was dripping red from his mother’s paint, which he’d been playing with in her studio, and pointing a knife at them. Some gasped. Some wondered if it was blood. Only when the door closed behind them did he drop the knife.
She crawled to him on her knees and swallowed his body into her arms, her baby dripping red as the day he was born: her salvation. Then she vowed to bring her children’s father back home.
Kaduna State Prison, Independence Way
Day One
I want to see my husband.
Madam we no want wahala this afternoon. Just carry yourself dey go.
I dey find my husband. Soldier come arrest am for our house this afternoon.
Ahn ahn see me see wahala o! Wetin consign soja man and police?
They tell me say they carry am come here.
If you no commot for hia now you go chop bullet. Commot for hia!
Day Two
I don come o, I wan see my husband.
Oya wetin be him name?
Mister Shariff—
Wait wait! I no sabi any Mister Shariff.
Oga I beg check your register I carry God beg you.
I say I no sabi Shariff.
Oga—
If you no commot for this place!
Day Three
Abeg oga abeg na God I take beg you. I know say you don see my face taya, just kuku help me.
Who you be?
Haba oga you dey see me every morning na oga. Every morning I dey come here find my husband.
You say na your husband?
Yes oga.
Oya go carry your marriage certificate, come.
But oga him name dey your register, just check Mister Sha—
I say go carry your marriage certificate come! Abi you no marry am?
Oga abeg I no know wetin I go tell my children. Three days now they don dey ask me for their papa. I take God beg you shebi you get wife for house?
I carry God beg you.
I sabi una! Ashawo! Sebi you talk say na your husband? Commot from here God punish you and your toto.
She stood up from the ground where she had been kneeling to plead and tightened Shariff’s favourite wrapper around her waist. It was when she stepped out into the hot afternoon that the tears began to fall.
But they had been married.
His sons had joined their primary school band and were teaching him to drum to a cultural dance piece a few years ago. There were no drums in the house so they improvised by hitting spoons on empty Peak milk tins. ‘Onye ga agba egwu iya, ga agba egwu iya. Onye ga agba egwu iya, ga agba egwu iya!’
The parlour door creaked open and before they could pull off their school uniforms she was standing before them. Even he had paused and bowed his head, waiting for her outrage.
But she dropped her bag and cried off key, ‘Iga agba egwu, iga agba egwu—’
‘Iga agba egwu, ewo!’ they all replied and in the furious rhythm of her children’s drumming she bent low, pushed back her hips and began to dance the length and breadth of the courtyard, darting her face this way and that, thrilling them all.
‘Piiiipipipi-pim!’
And the drums stopped. She jumped up and assumed the dancer’s resting stance, still bent, but one hand on a knee. The children cheered. The husband beamed, eyes sparkling like a child.
‘Mummy,’ asked Max as she straightened up, ‘why are you and Daddy not married?’
She was surprised at the question. She turned to her husband but his eyes twinkled at her, mouth twisted in a half-smile. ‘Because there was no pastor.’
‘You people should marry now.’
‘Who will marry us?’
‘Me!’ Max said.
‘Me too!’ said An
dré.
‘But you are not a pastor or imam,’ she laughed, eyeing their father, but he just sat and chuckled, hands in the air, as if to say ‘I had nothing to do with this.’
‘But Mummy, Sunday-school teacher say we carry the presence of God.’
‘And that children are closer to God than parents.’
She gave Shariff a look. He returned it with a smirk and stood up. ‘So how will you marry your mother and me?’
‘Daddy, I will stay with you here,’ said Max, eyes flashing with excitement, breathless. ‘André will hold Mummy’s hand and bring her from the parlour and you people will kiss—’
‘Mwah!’ André kissed the air to show them and laughed.
‘Like that, and we will pronounce you husband and wife.’
They did as they were told. Max waited with his father while André slow-marched towards them, singing one of those tunes he pulled out of the air. ‘See Shariff, see Shariff coming far away. See Shariff, see Shariff coming far away! Shariff is waiting for you … Shariff is waiting for you …’
And when they met they made her and Shariff kneel before them, then brought out a surprise that made her cry, that made the moment true.
‘I anoint you with the power of red,’ André said, drawing his finger dripping red paint from her forehead down to her nose and doing the same on their father’s face.
Max stepped forward and she closed her eyes as he drew his finger dripping blue from the end of one eyebrow to the start of the other. He did the same for the father and said, ‘I anoint you with the power of blue.’
It was when they stood up, enchanted with the beauty of the evening, that Max remembered an important part. ‘Do you, Sweet Mum, take this man as your lawful wedded husband?’
‘Yes, I do. I do.’
Sometimes she let herself laugh. The light sound would escape her leaden heart and ring out in the Madhouse. Then she would remember her Max wasn’t talking to her and God knows what André was doing and Ladidi was still gone, so she would quickly flatten her face and return into herself, undoing the magic, attempting to recall the happy sound, stuff it back into her mouth, shove it down her throat, down, down, into the black waters of her heart.
Victory came unexpectedly, in November. After months of visiting the state police station, consulting lawyers, abandoning Sleep Sweet Hotel and avoiding the care of the women of Freetown Street, Sweet Pea decided to remain indoors, decided to face her children. André was having difficulty with telling the time in school because in the house the short hand was still on the twelfth hour making it the right time twice a day.
She lifted herself out of despair long enough to watch André replicating the circles from his textbook on the black wall in the living room dedicated to their scrawls and scribbling before calibrating them and she realised that she was losing time. She had spent most of it trying to salvage her relationship from the episode of Sarai, from his alcohol and then from his sojourn into war, and in the process almost left out being present with the children. Yes, she bathed them and fed them, but if she were to die now, would they remember her? Would Max even shed a tear?
She had to slow things down, slow her children down, so she got plywood from the storeroom, burnt the face of it in the backyard and began the work of scratching into the board the times they were born over and over, with the aid of the long hand and short hand, mingling their times together: three o’ clock for André, five o’ clock for her, five minutes to three, then a single dash because Shariff didn’t know the hour of his birth. Or maybe it was to represent the scar his people had inflicted on him as a baby to keep him in the world of the dead. She repeated their times across the board to keep them there, in her life. Auctioners would study the constellations of scratched time after she died and place the value at six figures in dollars. The technique she used to create the whirlpool effect gave the illusion of vibrating, pulling you in. Like this:
She probably would have added more time to the piece in spite of the growing darkness if not for the chanting at the gate. André was already on the chair peeping through the window, watching the women of Freetown Street as they chanted
God of Elijah, send down faya
God of Elijah, send down faya
God of Elijah, send down faya
God of Elijah, send down faya
Hallelujah!
They each held flaming torches and for several minutes Sweet Pea could not understand what was going on. She adjusted Shariff’s wrapper over her breasts and went outside.
‘What has happened again?’
‘You and your household are evil!’
‘You are a witch!’
‘You are a marine spirit.’
‘Seduced that man to use for witchcraft and to bear you a wizard son.’
‘Now you have eaten the man’s destiny ooooooo.’
‘That is why we can’t succeed in this Sabo!’
‘She is the cause of all these clashes. She eats the energy of people when they fight.’
‘Evil woman oooooo.’
‘We must purge this neighbourhood.’
‘We must purge this house.’
‘We must soak it with the blood of Jesus.’
‘We must purge it by fire!’
‘Bring out your demon child, bring him out.’
They had begun to push down the wire-mesh gate when two trucks of soldiers arrived and the air was punctured with gunshots. The women dropped their torches and fled, screaming. Sweet Pea turned and ran back to the house on instinct, shrieking and waving at her child peeping through the window netting. ‘Go and hide, go and hide under the bed!’
When she got to the door, she gave one last look and saw Shariff jump down from the truck, followed by the men jumping out of a decade ago when they helped her find Prof’s body.
‘Sweet Pea?’ he called to her.
The ground soared up to the sky and it was all blank.
When she came to after fainting and saw Shariff had really returned to her, she threw herself into life with purpose. She found a church to start attending. She mustered the confidence to retrieve the address Sarai’s brother had written for her in one of Max’s Nursery One files and travel to Niger state to collect Ladidi. This was the period when she started trying her hand at historical fiction with a typewriter they hadn’t thrown out. She never really had the success in writing that she did in her illustrations for the new wave of English textbooks from the contacts Prof gave her, and from the few exhibitions of her paintings in Abuja, but she enjoyed the worlds she created.
‘Romance novels, haba!’ Shariff would chide ‘How clichéd!’
‘Your two boys are killing themselves for their sister,’ she would fire back from behind the typewriter for good measure. ‘Is that cliché enough for you?’
She of course realised the intensity of André’s obsession with Ladidi but she hoped it was a season, a cloud that would pass. She felt helpless as she watched him grow apart from Max, Max who had taken him from her as a baby, bloodied in his arms, and it filled her with sadness even though their separation was something she had fought for in the past.
She tried to immerse them in the fashion and music of the times, kept out of Max’s way, which worked for him, changed the name of Sleep Sweet Hotel to Taboo to please André, and tried to teach Ladidi all she knew about solitude because she saw in the strange ways of the girl that no one would ever really understand her. She was too rare for this world. It showed when she started singing at Taboo: her voice was something too special, something that had been revealed too early, and there was a general sense in the air that there would be a huge price to pay for it.
So when they lost her in the Miss World War years later, Sweet Pea was surprised at how crazy the loss drove her. As she burnt dinner and took barefoot night strolls up Freetown Street, subconsciously hoping the women and children would jeer at her, she told herself that she should have known. She had known, in fact, from the very day she had held the baby next to
her dying mother. Sarai. The only woman she could call a friend. She should have known. Later she would distract herself by looking for André long after people had stopped looking for their children. Long after empty coffins had been lowered into a mass grave in memory of the deceased Freetown Street children and a heavy rain had washed them up, sending them floating down the street, jostling against one another as their owners once had, into the forest, mothers crying and watching by the windows.
She didn’t stop looking for him. Didn’t stop thinking of Ladidi. And of Prof and Sarai. The world was adjusting after the Miss World War, neighbours were bringing condolences for her as if André was dead, and she couldn’t take it. So one ordinary day, when she was sure Shariff was in his right mind, enough to cook for Max, she left the house. She did not know if she would return, where she would go; she just needed to keep moving. She knew her son was out there in the world. She left a warning on the writing wall, a poem, a song.
If I leave you, it’s not because I’ve grown wings
strong enough to fly; it’s this black water I have inside.
Take heart, break it, faint heart, let it die.
Don’t want to poison you with this black water I have inside.
It was delightful really, waking up in a strange place. When she stretched her limbs on the stiff new mattress they ached with a feeling she had not felt in months: joy. She opened her eyes and smiled. She would find him today.
She had only arrived the day before yet she could easily locate the village market thanks to the driver who had brought her here. It wasn’t market day. The makeshift shops of bamboo and raffia were empty and most of the more permanent ones, of zinc and concrete, were locked. Except for a semi-detached hair salon and a beer parlour. A fat woman with an indeterminable complexion and rollers in her hair came out from the beer parlour with a frown. Did she want to have her hair done or buy beer? She wished that was all she needed. The woman hissed and disappeared back into the beer parlour. Across from the hair salon there was smoke in the air, acrid with nuances of burnt pepper and chicken. She could buy that.
