The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  The reverend sighs and looks up. ‘That man was not your father.’

  And he tells him of the last words the imam had whispered to him, his ear on the man’s mouth, both religious men, both grey and older than the country that November afternoon. Different faiths had met in the fire for the boy’s sake, an exchange, a secret in the flames. ‘The imam who raised you found you by the road. I want you to travel back to your people. Learn your story. Then return to us.’

  ‘Father—’

  ‘My assistant will escort you in the Volvo. He remembers the place. We were to build this parish there. But now I see we only went there to rescue you. God and his marvellous ways.’ He draws the sign of the cross, looking at the ceiling, and lifts his rosary for a kiss. Then he looks Shariff in the eye. ‘You should go this Saturday. Enebeli will assume your duties, don’t worry. Now sleep, my son.’

  ‘I agree with André. That piece could be worth millions if you wait another ten years.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. Sweet Mum never sold it. No matter where we were in the world she looked at it and knew we were fine. Even that time when we were small and Daddy went to Liberia she didn’t sell it. She sold everything else but she kept this one. Now maybe it can remind us of her, how much she—’

  ‘Would you people shut up?! What do you know, ehn? You, how old were you when she made it, can you remember?’

  ‘We were learning how to tell the time with clocks. We gave her the idea.’

  ‘Will you shut up! Before any of you were born she drew it on my chest, the first clock; she drew it here, the hour of her birth. You people know nothing. That is the problem with your generation: you think you are smart and you know everything. You have Twitter and Facebook so you come and give the world your half-baked opinions and—’

  ‘Father—’

  ‘I just want her out of my house, I beg you.’ Sobbing, face in hands now.

  He’d been nothing more than a youthful mistake. A child of lust between step-siblings. The reverend’s assistant insisted on remaining in the car with the driver so that it didn’t get vandalised or stolen.

  At the local primary school a teacher offered to serve as an interpreter but the headmaster realised who Shariff was at once. Years ago, the headmaster’s brother had reported to the elders that he’d seen the abandoned child swimming in the stream behind the village while hunting. He recognised the child by the scar on his chest. No one believed him at first but when other villagers saw the boy too the elders sent spies to buy clothes from the Muslims and these people confirmed it was true: they’d spotted the child with the scar on his chest making traps. It was at this point in the headmaster’s narration that the primary-school teacher started getting uncomfortable. When the headmaster urged him to talk, he confessed that he had been a boy at the time, but had also accompanied the spies. The spies who confirmed the rumours that would lead to the slaughter of the Muslims and arson of the mosque. The primary-school teacher spent the rest of his childhood filled with guilt, disgusted by the customs of his people, so that by the time evangelical Christian missionaries came shortly afterwards, he was ripe for conversion.

  ‘There are still ways of our people that hold meaning for me. I saw a shooting star the night you were left for dead. Our people believe that a shooting star means a great man is being born somewhere. Let me take you to your father. He hasn’t married since the event. Your mother died of grief not long after.’

  Shariff’s father was the mechanic of the village. A friendly man with the kind of hasty geniality that kept the world at bay, that shrouded a profound solitude and loneliness nothing could penetrate. Because he was chatting in broken English about the small strides the village was making to join the rest of the state in development, his eyes sparkling with fondness but heavy with the burden of work he had thrown himself into and the weariness of life, he didn’t notice what was immediately apparent to the headmaster and Shariff – the likeness that was as obvious as the scar on his chest.

  ‘Wetin happen?’ he asked when he saw the way everyone was looking at him.

  ‘I be your pikin. I am your son,’ Shariff said and saw how his words punched his father in the gut. Wrinkles materialised on his face. The man’s eyes glazed over. Then he said in clear Queen’s English, startling everyone, ‘They tied the testicles of a goat to my testicles and I walked round from hut to hut saying, “I reject this child, I reject this child”. I did not want to reject you. You were mine. I wanted to wrap you in the skin of a leopard, so that you could return in the night, wild and dangerous but still alive. Still mine.’

  Shariff’s eyes filled with tears. The shed of palm fronds suddenly became so cool. Then the man looked at Shariff from the corner of his eye and said the last words anyone ever heard him say from that day onwards. ‘The scar on your chest, that should have stopped you from coming back.’

  His father didn’t speak when they offered to take him back to the city. He didn’t speak when they dropped twenty naira on his tool box. Once they left he packed up and retreated into himself, into the place where he hid from his customers, from his people, and shut the doors forever.

  When Shariff returned to the parish he didn’t give the reverend the details of the meeting not as a deliberate omission but because he didn’t dwell on it. Refused to dwell on it. When the reverend probed he said, ‘My father is fine. But because of customs he can’t have anything to do with me.’

  ‘Maybe this is why you were called. Maybe this is why you were saved. To deliver your people.’

  When he got back to the seminary to continue his exams, the words of his father returned to him. What had he meant exactly? The headmaster explained that in ancient times their people wrapped their dead in animal skins, sometimes monkey, sometimes leopard, and these dead beloved returned as animals.

  But why did his father say his chest wound should have stopped him from coming back? Did his father wish him dead? He rolled and rolled on his six-inch mattress until around 4 a.m. when the night heat was about to make way for the chill of the morning. He climbed out of bed, went out of the hostel, certain it was for a pee. He didn’t realise he had been walking for long until he looked back and saw the security light of his hostel, and drew in his breath. He had to return. He had entered the forest without knowing it; he had to return now. Who knew what he would find there or what would find him? He however knew what he would find when he got back: the question of his father’s claim over him. I wish I had wrapped you up in leopard skin. You were mine. Stopped you from coming back. You were mine. Stopped you from coming back. You were—

  The next morning the reverend’s office was informed of Shariff’s disappearance. There was genuine panic among his peers as nothing in his past seemed a precursor to this behaviour. The reverend seemed less troubled. He hosted the morning mass and enjoyed his breakfast. His assistant was itchy with confusion. It wasn’t until noon that the reverend sent for the driver and asked for the car to be refuelled.

  Shariff was startled when he saw the reverend’s car pulling up in the road.

  ‘How did you find me, Father?’

  The reverend chuckled and sat beside him on the ground. ‘The view. Who can resist this view? Look at how the hill slopes down to the village. I can even see where the mosque used to be, the mosque where I found you. What are you doing here? Don’t you have theology class?’

  Shariff had sneaked from the seminary to this place and by muscle memory located a little stream at the end of the village which flowed from a high waterfall.

  When he was four or so, none of the women he called ‘mother’ were patient with him; they had given him their breast milk and that had to be enough; they had their children too. So he escaped and came here, unseen by the villagers, and contemplated the faces of these women. Mother one, mother two, mother three. He thought they were the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. Why didn’t they want him?

  He took off his little jalabiya and plunged into the water, hoping if h
e stayed in it long enough one of them would notice he was missing and come here and see him in the water flapping his hand like this like this and she would scream and jump into the water and carry him and put her head on his head and cry and cry and he would feel sugar inside his belly.

  The stream wasn’t deep; he managed till he got to a small rock and sat there and waited for one of his mothers to come. He waited until the sun started leaving the middle of the sky. So he decided he would sleep there. He would just sleep there and not wake up. He was about to lay his head on the rock when he heard someone calling out to him from a far place. He couldn’t hear the name that was called exactly but he knew it was his. The moment he looked up and found the face, the face of a boy, it vanished and he turned back just in time to see a great wall of water rising, rushing for him. He dived into the water before panic could paralyse him but the water surrounded him, picked him up, pulled him this way and that and he was screaming and screaming his name until he couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything.

  When he opened his eyes again, all was silent and black and a half-moon hung in the sky and the stream flowed calmly as if the afternoon had been a dream. He dragged himself through the forest, through the music of trees, a motherless child with a sorrow older than himself. Back at the camp of his Muslim family his father, the imam, was calling for prayers. The children breezed past him to the mosque, which was almost completed. He went to where he slept, rolled out his mat and started sobbing. First the Arabic prayers he had learnt then sobs, mama, mama, mama, mama, until he fell asleep, dreaming of screaming his name and water rising to surround him.

  Now he had come here, as close to the waterfall as he could, to scream his name again, to see if it rang true. After water had been sprinkled on him in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit at his Catholic baptism, he had been given a Catholic name but Father Ebube had told him it could be his middle name. In front of him there was no waterfall, just a wall of jagged rocks and shrubs streaming rivulets. He had screamed his name once. The forest had returned it to him.

  ‘I wanted to think, Father. I am not sure I am fit for the seminary.’

  ‘Then you can’t stay here, my son.’

  He looked at the reverend’s face but it said nothing. So he looked down to his hands. He was startled when the reverend exploded into laughter beside him. ‘Father—’

  But the man kept laughing; his body shook the ground. He kept laughing until Shariff was forced to smile.

  ‘Ah, my son. My son. My son.’

  ‘Father.’

  ‘Do you know I was just like this, almost at your age? My father was a white man. Left for his country once they gave Nigeria independence. I had finished my final exams to become a priest. That was when I went home to tell my mother and she said my father had gone and wouldn’t be coming back.’

  ‘Father, I—’

  ‘If you leave, the army will come for you. My younger brother is in the army. You should visit him.’

  Shariff couldn’t stand the thought of army life again after spending a holiday in his third year in the camps. He could tolerate the ghastly stories of the civil war he had been spared from by growing up in the parish, but he couldn’t take the drills. How did the popular Hausa-accented song on the radio go? ‘Dem beat us talk say na training.’ And nothing in his two religions had prepared him for war. Christianity, his most recent, said be at peace with all men. He was liable to be conscripted if war broke out and there weren’t enough soldiers on the field. With the Bible in his heart he couldn’t raise his hand against a man. He told the reverend that he was having moral conflicts about it all.

  ‘Ah, my son, but you can’t stay here. They will come for you.’ Then, after a pause, ‘There is this house in Sabon Geri. It belonged to our father in the colonial era but he left it behind. You can hide there for some time. Another brother of mine is supposed to be in charge but he is doing his PhD in the UK.’

  ‘But Father, they will question you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, my son. Go and call the driver.’

  In reverence of the house he tried not to tamper with things. He didn’t cut down the barren orange tree or twin palm trees in the front, he didn’t rearrange the parlour or excavate things wrapped and sealed in the storeroom. He hardly used the front door for fear of the soldiers coming for him. The only thing he touched was the sewing machine next to the shelf in the living room, the shelf of books that covered an entire wall. He dusted the machine and oiled it and began to think of where he would set up shop. He already knew how to sew from mending Father Ebube’s torn robes, not standard sewing but still … and he definitely couldn’t use the house for a tailoring business.

  He only went out to survey the Quarters at night, and that was how he found a beer parlour just down the road called ‘Mama Transformer’ because, in spite of the fact that electricity in Sabo was a myth, the drinks in her beer parlour were always cold. She must have had her own transformer, people speculated. She refused to share the secret of her chilled drinks with other competitors disguised as customers and her business prospered because of it.

  On this particular evening the pocket money Father Ebube had given him was dwindling and he walked past the beer parlour and saw a man who had torn his babariga in a fit of drunken rage. The man, dark with red lips, was now sitting on the ground with the countenance of a cool glass of water. There was no way he could stand up without amplifying the laughter of the beer crowd. The next day, when someone ripped his trousers ‘from America’, Shariff was under the mango tree in front of the beer parlour, waiting to solve the man’s problem. He asked for ‘any amount you have’ as payment and soon people began to notice the discipline in his seams and started bringing clothes to sew to avoid the tyranny of their tailors, the delays and hikes in price every season.

  Shariff was able to feed himself this way and stopped replying to Father Ebube’s letters. He concentrated on the books caked in dust on the shelf in the parlour of the house. Homer’s Iliad, a collection of British short stories from 1890 to 1960, an anthology of post-colonial literature and so forth. With books he found he didn’t need to go anywhere; in fact, he was beginning to enjoy the solitude of the empty house. On impromptu visits he assured the reverend that he was doing okay, told him of his tailoring business, but that was all. Once he got back he shut the door and didn’t go out. The world inside was bigger than the world outside. And when she would join him years later, Sweet Pea would participate in the solitude, where they were both free from the world, with such fervour that they didn’t question their compatibility. So that when the professor from the UK, the reverend father’s brother, came to visit, not for inspection of the house as Father Ebube had warned but because Father Ebube had died, he would be stunned to find them untouched by the state of affairs in the country.

  ‘We are actually in a military regime!’ said Prof in case they didn’t know during one of his first dinners with them. ‘Coups have been executed and failed, people have died.’ Then he turned to his young wife. ‘How can you not want more chicken? Eat chicken.’

  Over their serendipitous friendship that would unfold over the succeeding months and cast off the gloom of the military regime, Prof talked about his wife by way of talking about himself. He had insisted on schooling in Britain just to humiliate his father and his new family but found that he loved it. He loved reconnecting with Nigerian soldiers and students who flew into the country for weekend holidays and took him on rides in their expensive cars, letting him into their cliques because of his white blood. ‘But it was really nice,’ he told Shariff in a bar one night in Barnawa. ‘We partied and partied and had fun. Some of them even liked me. So we became friends for real.’

  And friends exchanged histories, so everyone in his circle knew that women of all ages, both black and white, came to fall for him at the end of their lives. The men kept him on a rotation of downtown prostitutes for the safety of their womenfolk and quickly paid the prostitutes off
when they started getting soft on him. When a friend of his married a white woman the soldiers among their clique mocked him, saying he was only hiding from the civil war but it was to remain close to his friend, whose marks were so good he got a job at the university library, then eventually at his faculty, and after finishing his master’s his feet were planted in London. By the Seventies Prof had buried three women he had married in spite of his friends’ pleas. His in-laws mourned their daughters, then mourned him in turn. The friend who married the white woman advised him to move back home and he was beginning to see reason in it. The new president seemed interested in infrastructure, and universities back there were in tip-top shape. So when Prof invited his friends to a reunion in their favourite bar close to campus and told them he had the hots for the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Fulani general in his ethics class, they begged him to have mercy.

  ‘At least let her graduate first,’ the watchman in London pleaded. He was almost crying but then he was always weak with liquor. ‘Let her go back home and finish NYSC.’

  He masked his hurt and told them she wasn’t interested in the National Youth Service Corps, she believed it was a poor bandage for the country that had fallen apart after the civil war.

  ‘Unless she won’t return to the country. It is compulsory now. Talk to her. Tell her the stories.’

  ‘She knows the stories.’

  ‘Then at least let her marry her first husband first.’

  ‘And have a child.’

  But he ignored them.

  Her name was Sarai. She had the air of a little girl, skipped over doorways, wore flowery dresses and had her short hair tied tomato style. She would bite her finger and wag it in the air when someone said something unbearably funny. Her eyes could smile and really widen in surprise. Yet with her volatility she was fragile, she was small, too small for the massive halls of Oxford; hugging her or taking her hand was like handling a dream. She said yes to everything. Yes for seven years. Yes, I want you too. Yes, I will marry you. Yes, we will keep trying to have children. Yes, I will return to Nigeria with you and bury your brother. It wasn’t that she didn’t have a mind of her own; in fact he could see secrets on her face when she was lost in reverie and didn’t know he was watching her. Secrets he knew would hurt him. Some of them she shared. He knew asking her to return with him to the country would put her life in danger, but somehow her thoughts and wants were always ultimately enveloped in his. And her eyes never faltered when she looked into his. Yes my darling, yes.