Where Women are Kings Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2013 by Christie Watson

  The moral right of Christie Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84916 379 8

  TPB ISBN 978 1 84916 380 4

  EBOOK ISBN 978 0 85738 026 5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Christie Watson

  Tiny Sunbirds Far Away

  For Moyo who swallowed all the goodness of the world, and for Kike, who he loves like the world has never known love.

  ONE

  Elijah, my lovely son,

  I want to tell you your life. Everyone has a story inside them, which begins before they are born, and yours is a bigger story than most will ever know. They say I shouldn’t tell you some things, and that words can hurt little ears, but, son of mine, there are no secrets between a mother and son. A child has seen the insides of its mother’s body, and who can know a secret bigger than that? And they say a lot of things, those English. What they call ‘child abuse’, us Nigerians call ‘training’. So don’t mind them.

  Your story begins in Nigeria, which is a place like Heaven. There is continuous sunshine and everyone smiles and takes care of each other. Nigerian children work hard at school, have perfect manners, look after their parents and respect the elderly. Nigeria is brightness and stars, and earth like the skin on your cheeks: brown-red, soft and warm.

  I am full up with proud memories from Nigeria. Most of all I remember my family. Mummy – your grandmother – was famous for shining cooking pots and shining stories. ‘Long ago,’ she would tell me and my sisters, ‘a woman, so full of empty, sold her body as if it was nothing but meat for sale at the market. She travelled all over Nigeria, that woman, looking for something to fill up her insides, and learnt many languages, searching for words to explain the emptiness. And people liked this empty, clever woman: she was made of starlight; her heart glowed silver. They listened when she spoke her many-language words, telling the places she’d seen: of Jos, where the sky rained diamonds, and the North, where men disappeared inside walls of sand, and the Delta creeks, dancing with river spirits. And so the people made her king. And the land filled her up, and the emptiness was sky. Nigeria is a place where women are kings. Where anything is possible.’

  All my childhood she cleaned her pots while I watched, listening to her stories, to her songs, contented as any woman who ever lived. Mummy’s singing was loud, which was a good thing as my sister, your Aunt Bukky, from whom you inherited that beautiful skin tone, had the kind of voice that reached inside your face. I remember one day her begging Mummy to share secrets. The sun was only half risen, yet we’d been up for hours, listening to Mummy sing and Baba snore.

  ‘Please,’ Bukky whined. ‘Please, Mummy. I won’t tell a soul.’

  ‘I’ll never tell you my secret ingredient.’ Mummy shook her head until her beaded plaits clicked together. She laughed. ‘Never. You can pester me all day and my mouth will be closed tight as Baba’s fist on pay day!’

  ‘Please,’ Bukky said, looking at the cloth with which she was wiping the pots. ‘It could make us rich. Imagine, a formula that cleans pots that well for sale on Express Road!’ Bukky was always looking for ways to make money, and she was foolish. Once, she’d nearly been arrested after a man told her he’d give her one hundred U.S. dollars to carry a bag through airport customs. If Baba hadn’t driven past and seen her out of school and hanging around with a bag that wasn’t hers, she would have been thrown in prison. And if it had been Mummy who’d driven past, then Bukky would be dead, for sure. And who knows if the gates of Heaven would open for such a crime, even if it was born of foolishness? But the things that sit in my heart are not Bukky’s foolishness, or our parents’ exasperation. Rather, the light in the compound, dancing on those cooking pots, making a thousand diamonds in the dust and on Bukky’s pillow cheeks; Mummy’s laughter; Baba’s snoring. The tiny emptiness, where you would grow. A place where women are kings.

  I remember the house, with broken stairs and a leaking roof, was centred around a middle courtyard where Mummy washed rice in one of those pots; I swear our rice was the cleanest in all of Nigeria. My sisters, Miriam, Eunice, Rebekah, Bukky, Esther, Oprah and Priscilla, spent their time looking in Mummy’s other shining cooking pots, examining the thickness of their eyebrows, the distance between their eyes (Bukky always said you could have parked a car between Esther’s eyes), the shape of their lips, the curl of their eyelashes. Baba chuckled with laughter whenever he saw them looking in the pots, and patted me on the head. ‘Lovely Deborah,’ he said. I never looked in a cooking pot. I knew, even from such a young age, that it was sinful to be vain. I was a clever child, Elijah. Gifted. I knew the Bible so well that I could recite Psalms from the age of one year. I’m not sure if it was my not looking in a cooking pot or my willingness to study the Bible that made me Baba’s favourite. But I knew that I was. And every daughter who is her father’s favourite grows up blessed, as I was.

  Really, we were all blessed. We loved school and attended The Apostle of Christ Coming Senior Department, which was only a fifteen-minute walk away. But we loved coming home from school even more – to eat dinner together and talk through the day, and read the Bible, or the other books that Baba bought for us from t
he store near his work, or books given to us by Mummy, which were so well read that they stayed open, as if their stories were alive and wanted to be heard. We lived on the outskirts of Lagos, in the suburb of Yaba, near the bus stop on University Road towards the cemetery: me, Mummy, Baba, my seven sisters, aunts, grandparents, and my brothers, Othniel and Immanuel – although Othniel was busy training to be a pharmacist, and always out at work or the university library, and Immanuel spent all his time with his girlfriend, who lived on Victoria Island. Immanuel’s girlfriend was even more of a top secret than Mummy’s cooking-pot paste; she had starred in a music video and her parents were separated and never attended church.

  Church was always a big part of our lives. When you live in a place like Heaven, you cannot forget to thank God. And we had another reason to love God: our uncle, Baba’s brother, was born with the voice of God in his heart. Uncle Pastor performed miracles. He could make a dying man live, and turn around a family’s bad luck to make them the most fortunate family in all of Lagos. I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes. I’ve seen many things. One man prayed for the miracle of financial security and returned to church a week later with a winning Lotto ticket, a new Rolex watch and a girlfriend with breasts so large that Baba could not help commenting on them, and Mummy made him put all the naira from his pocket in the offerings bin. How we laughed, Elijah! Our church was a place of happiness and laughter, and your little face led me back to it, back to our parents’ laughter. We’d all watch the way Mummy and Baba teased each other: his pretending to choke on her cooking; her calling him ‘big-belly man’. Their laughter. The way they looked at each other, and at us. It was such a happy home. A family. There is nothing sweeter than that.

  Mummy and Baba had strong foundations to their marriage, so, when the winds blew too hard, nothing fell over. They were friends first, for so many years, and when I became friends with Akpan, I remember Mummy and Baba looking at each other and the smile they shared. They wanted strong foundations for me, too. They were so happy when your baba led me under the palm tree, producing from his trouser pocket a ring that shone like a midnight star and must have cost six months’ salary. They knew something of how marriage can work. They felt happiness, but also relief. Even in a place like Heaven, life is difficult for women. If it hadn’t been for your baba, Akpan, asking for my hand in marriage, I do not know what would have become of me. And, son of mine, that is the situation for women the world over.

  I was lucky. Akpan became my friend. He visited all of the time, and every time he visited I liked him a little more. He had a kind face and he believed in things, and often had a Marks and Spencer carrier bag full of gifts for us: a matching gold-plated jewellery set for my sisters and me, a travel alarm clock for Mummy, though she never travelled further than Ikeja and didn’t have any AAA batteries, anyway.

  Sometimes, when I was a child, I heard God in my ear – heard His voice as clear as the colours of morning. When I told him, Akpan said I had a spiritual gift. He said God had chosen me to whisper secrets to, because I was so beautiful. He called me his angel and my heart swelled so much I struggled to breathe. It was so many long years before we were married, and before Akpan got a visa for himself and a spouse visa for me so that we could leave our home and come to England, to the flat in London where we made you on the first try. The stars were bright that first night, Elijah, as though the Nigerian stars had travelled over to Deptford to light up our lovemaking. You were born from love and Nigerian stars and secrets believed.

  You are loved, little Nigeria, like the world has never known love.

  TWO

  Disgusting dirty horrible evil. Elijah heard the voice of the wizard all of the time. It told him to do bad things. Elijah knew he was bad. A disgusting boy. He wished the wizard would choose another boy, or just use superpowers for only good, like climbing really high or flying. The wizard could do anything. It could use superhuman strength to lift heavy things, and read people’s minds. It could turn into an animal, become invisible and fly through the night sky catching sticks of lightning in his hands. Elijah could use the wizard inside him to think right inside someone’s brain. If Elijah could control the wizard, he could make it only do good things, like superpowers, and then Elijah would not be so afraid of it. Of what it might do next. Of what it might make him do.

  Elijah was staying with Sue and Gary in a house that was filled with signs telling you what to do. He couldn’t read, so he had to ask what each sign said, and Sue and Gary were bored with telling him. That is why it was lucky he could remember everything:

  Keep Calm and Carry On

  If It Isn’t Broken, Don’t Fix It

  A House with Love Is a Home

  They lived in something called a cul-de-sac, which was a place where every house was big and looked the same, and where no black-skinned people went. The neighbours were always washing their cars, or cutting their hedges, or weeding their front gardens whenever Elijah went past. But he knew they were really waiting to get a look at the wizard. Elijah wanted to warn them. He looked at them and opened his mouth to tell them to run from him but, whenever he did so, no words came out. They’d better go inside their houses at night, he thought, and pray to God. Please pray to God, he thought. And he prayed so hard himself that they too would pray. They would have to pray every night to protect themselves. Or the wizard might melt their houses with acid. Or eat them up.

  Sue and Gary’s house was very tidy and smelt of cabbage. They had no pets. They let Elijah play football on the grass outside but they didn’t let him go out of the garden on his own. The living room was where they spent most of the time, watching a big television that was hooked on to the wall. He liked to watch Spiderman and Superman and, once, when Sue was at bingo, Harry Potter, which was about a boy wizard who had a matching scar on his head. But Elijah’s scar was not the same shape: instead of being a zigzag it was a straight line, and Harry Potter was a good wizard and Elijah was the evil type. He sat on the sofa, which had cushions with writing on them:

  Grandmas Are Angels in Disguise!

  An Old Rooster and a Young Chick Live Here

  Welcome to the Nuthouse

  Life Is Too Short to Drink Cheap Wine

  Elijah had made Sue read them out to him.

  Everywhere, there were pictures of children, all of them smiling, some with missing teeth. None of them looked like Sue or Gary. Sue and Gary had white skin with brown spots on their hands and hair you could see through. Sue was very short – Elijah came up to her shoulders – and her fingers were swollen and red all the time. Gary had glasses and wore slippers that had Mickey Mouse on them. They gave Elijah baths without oiling his skin afterwards and he felt dry and itchy and scratchy. The children in the pictures had different colours and different eyes and different hair. They must have been very itchy too. Elijah was so powerful he could read their minds, even in photos. They wanted their mamas.

  ‘All those kids we’ve fostered.’ Gary was behind him; Elijah could see him without turning around. ‘So far, twenty-two emergency placements.’ He laughed. ‘And eighteen who stayed for quite a long time: one of them, until he was sixteen. They still come at Christmas, pop in and see Sue, bring their washing sometimes …’

  Elijah wouldn’t be staying for a long time. They wanted him to leave before the wizard killed them, and he couldn’t blame them. He liked living with Sue and Gary but they didn’t like living with a disgusting wizard. Gary kept talking to the air but Elijah blocked him out. All he could hear was the message sent directly from God. God sent messages sometimes. Twenty-two and eighteen. He had been told, and told to remember it well.

  22:18 Exodus. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

  It was night when Sue made Elijah brush his teeth. Even with the minty toothpaste, all he could taste were the boiled vegetables they forced him to eat. He looked at Sue. Since Ricardo had left, she’d been watching him closely. She tried to hug him but Elijah managed to pull away from her arms. She was watching him
now in the mirror but he knew that she couldn’t see him because he didn’t show up in mirrors. Sorcerers had no reflections or shadows. That’s how you could tell if a sorcerer was living inside you. Sue was looking hard but she couldn’t see Elijah at all. He couldn’t believe she forced him to eat a vegetable called swede, which was orange and tasted of spit. Mama would never make him eat vegetables. Mama would never give him food that tasted like spit. Mama had no evil inside her at all. Mama was an angel. She was so kind that if a baddie were dying, she would save them, even if they were a real baddie. She would never give boiled vegetables to anyone, not even the worst baddie in the world.

  ‘That’s right, Elijah. Brush for two whole minutes. You’re doing a great job. You are such a clever boy, and you’re so good at brushing your teeth.’

  Elijah watched Sue looking at the empty mirror and pretending she saw a seven-year-old boy brushing his teeth. He used his laser eyes to steam the mirror up.

  After brushing his teeth, Elijah followed Sue into his bedroom and climbed into bed. Sue pulled a blanket over him. ‘Stop wriggling,’ she said. ‘You’ll never drop off if you wriggle around like that. Maybe you’re feeling a bit frightened today? You know you can always talk to me about anything at all.’ Sue laughed and sighed at the same time. She looked at Elijah and patted his body. ‘Are you feeling a bit unsafe? Because I want you to remember all the things that I told you: you’re completely safe here; nobody will hurt you.’ She lifted her head and pulled the blanket down to see more of Elijah. He wanted to pull it back up. He wondered if Mama had a blanket or if she felt cold.

  Sue rested her head on her hand. ‘I tell you, these social workers don’t tell us half of it. Even Ricardo, as lovely as he is. Probably just as well, I suppose. Anyway, hun, you know you can always talk to me. It might help to talk it out. You know, share your problems.’ Elijah looked at the brown spots on Sue’s hand. The wizard was probably poisoning her.

  Instead of looking at Sue’s hands and thinking about things, he looked around the bedroom. There was a wardrobe with a picture of a bear on it that she said was called Winnie the Pooh. Sue read Elijah lots of stories. On the wall was a shelf with a lot of books, including the book about the bear. The book was Elijah’s second favourite thing in the room.