Where Women are Kings (33 page)

Nikki made her voice light. ‘Shall we have a new book tonight? We’ve finished
Treasure Island
.’

‘That would be really nice. Thank you.’

‘
Treasure Island
is one of the only novels I’ve ever read all the way to the end,’ Obi said. ‘But I prefer non-fiction. When you’re a bit older, I’ll start reading you some of my research papers.’ Obi laughed. ‘You don’t need pirates when you have the
New Law Journal
.’

Nikki noticed that Elijah wasn’t laughing with Obi.

*

As she tucked Elijah in that night, she kissed his cheeks and pressed her hands together underneath his back. ‘Now we’re locked together,’ she said.

He smiled. ‘You can have a cuddle in my bed if you want.’

Nikki climbed in beside him. ‘Of course!’ His body was so warm. She held him close and hummed a few nursery rhymes. His eyes did not close at all. ‘Aren’t you tired?’ she asked.

‘Not tonight,’ he said. He turned his body to face hers and put his hands on top of her stomach. ‘I’m sorry for what I did,’ he whispered. ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘We’re going to be all right,’ said Nikki, kissing his hands and then his head, patting her own stomach. ‘All of us.’

Elijah pulled up her T-shirt. Nikki’s skin was ghostly white in the lamplight, the skin on her stomach stretching and changing shape. Elijah rubbed his hands together and blew inside them. Then he gently put them on Nikki’s stomach and laid his cheek on top. He closed his eyes and Nikki watched the rise and fall of her stomach as she breathed, her son’s face. She couldn’t work out what he was thinking. His eyes looked different from before. Sad, but not frightened any more. Whatever strange thought had entered his head, whatever memory had caused him to attack her, was gone from his eyes. He must have worked it through. It was a sudden explosion of all that had happened to him, and now there was calm to build upon.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered to Nikki’s skin. ‘The baby is safe now, isn’t she?’

Nikki’s eyes shone. ‘She is,’ she whispered.

Then he looked at Nikki very closely.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking at your freckles. You’ve got lots and that’s really lucky.’

Nikki laughed. She closed her eyes and tried to hold the moment deep inside her heart.

Elijah,

Time was passing and I was winning. I smiled and smiled. I planned to get out as quickly as possible and track you down, find you and rescue you. I’d make sure that the wizard had left your body and would never return. I wanted to get a message to Bishop, but there was no way of sending letters without the nurses checking every detail and, in order to play their game, I pretended to be compliant. When they put me in a special nightshirt and had me sign a form, I didn’t really hear the words they spoke: ‘Affecting short-term memory …’ I simply nodded and smiled. They took me to the small room and put stickers on the side of my head. I didn’t really understand what was going on.

The first sticker went over the side of my head and the second went over the very front. The stickers were small and smelt a bit like Flash wipes. They were attached to a small machine that a nurse had covered with a towel. Two doctors were in the room talking over me, as if they couldn’t see me lying there.

A needle pushed into my arm and the doctors stopped talking. They put a mask near my mouth with foul-smelling cold air blowing out of it. A nurse squeezed my hand.

‘First, they’ll put you off to sleep and then give you a
medicine to stop your body moving at all. Then they’ll give the treatment and we’ll wake you up in about ten minutes. OK?’

I closed my eyes, ready. I didn’t care what they did to me, Elijah. I closed my eyes and imagined a deep sleep and no dreams. I imagined your beautiful face with brown eyes and felt the coldness travel up my arm and then there was nothing.

When I woke, my body was too still. I moved my fingers slowly and opened my eyes. The room looked the same, but something was not right. The doctors were still talking and the nurse was still holding my hand, but I could feel something bad in my heart, turning the blood hard. I closed my eyes again to look for your face, but suddenly I realised you were gone. Elijah! I searched inside myself, my mind running over memories like hot stones, and there was nothing. The place in my head which held pictures of you was empty! You were gone! I searched my mind and my thoughts and my head, but you weren’t there. ‘Elijah,’ I whispered. ‘Elijah!’ But you were gone from inside me. For the first time since you had been born, I felt emptiness in my core that was greater than the sky. It was greater than everything. It swallowed me up. I shouted. I cried and cried. They had taken you from me again. Elijah, my son, my little Nigeria. Nothing would be the same any more. I was broken into sections and you were gone. My love, my heart, my centre. Elijah, England took you from me, my little Elijah. My little Nigeria.

Elijah opened his eyes and did not blink. In his bedroom he saw the antlers that Granddad had screwed to his wall, making shapes in the darkness like a hundred tiny knives cutting his room to pieces, the world to pieces. It was late. He could hear Dad’s soft snoring and Mum groaned in her sleep every so often, which is something she’d only done since it happened.

Since the wizard tried to hurt her baby.

His baby sister.

They said that the wizard was something Mama had dreamed and, because she was sick in her head, she couldn’t tell the difference. But how could Mama’s dream get inside Elijah’s head? And now they told him that Mama hurt him badly. Every time he closed his eyes, he remembered and he wanted to scratch out the memory, but he couldn’t. It waited there for him like a wolf under a tree. He had to make sense of it. ‘There is a wizard,’ he said aloud. ‘There has to be.’ But he couldn’t feel anything at all. There had to be a wizard. If there was no wizard, then he had hurt Mum. He had hurt his sister. And he would never have hurt Mum, or his sister. It could only have been the wizard. Mama: the wizard was real because Mama loved him. And if there was no wizard then Mama hurt him for no reason.

If there was no wizard then Mama didn’t love him at all.

There were only two things of which he was certain:

Wizards were real.

And Mama loved him.

He felt a pain so sharply in his shoulder that he called out, but nobody came; the snoring noises continued. He watched the magic dust gathering in the air. He knew what he had to do.

Elijah stretched out one foot, then the other. He pulled back the quilt and stepped into the darkness. He walked to the window and opened it, letting the cool air come up to his face. It was a perfect night. The stars were bright enough that he found very quickly the best one where Mama would surely be looking. Their eyes in the same place. He thought of Mama. And Mum and Dad asleep, a baby between them.

A flash opposite caught Elijah’s eye and he realised that Jasmin was up and looking out of her window too. She waved and flashed her torch. He didn’t wave back, but he was glad she would see it. A witness to prove that Mama was right. To prove that she’d loved him all along. He didn’t think much about afterwards, about what might happen. But a fluttering at the back of his heart wondered if it might be possible, if it might just be possible that he could live with Mama again, once they knew the truth. He and Mama could live nearby, or even share a room at Mum and Dad’s house, so that Mum and Dad could help with things like dinners and going to school, and Mama could help with wizards and praying. They would make a very good team.

Jasmin flashed her torch again and again. She was using the special code and she flashed the torch three times quickly then one slow flash. He knew that meant she wanted to knock in the morning and walk to school together. But there wasn’t a code for what he wanted to reply: that wizards were real and
he would prove it. A code to tell her not to worry, and that he knew what to do; that, in the end, it would all be all right. Elijah looked up at the patch of sky. He could see Mama’s face in it, beautiful and soft. He lifted himself up to sit on the window ledge and pushed his feet out, dangling his legs over the edge. He closed his eyes and breathed in the fresh air. It was cold but, inside his body, he was hot. He knew that the wizard would be inside him, even though he couldn’t feel it at all. He felt empty, hollow, like the inside of an old tree. There were knives in his head, and insects crawling. But he didn’t worry. He was certain of two things:

The wizard was real.

Mama loved him.

He opened his eyes and looked over to Jasmin, who was flashing and flashing but it wasn’t a code at all, just flashes. He could see her mouth open wide and she was banging on her window. Her hand was spread out like a starfish and she had her face pressed to the glass. She was saying something. Shouting. He saw Aunty Chanel’s bedroom light turn on and then Jasmin’s bedroom door open and Aunty Chanel rush in. Aunty Chanel ran towards the window. Her hand went up to her mouth and she ran out of the room. Jasmin stayed up against the glass, flashing her torch and shouting. Elijah smiled. Her face was beautiful, even pressed against the glass. His best friend, surrounded by a map of the whole world that she would see. He put his thumb up, to show that he was OK. He caught some moonlight in his hand. He breathed the magic air.

He took a long look at Jasmin. He could see she was crying all the way across the street. She had stopped shouting and was looking. She didn’t put her thumb up at all, but lifted her torch next to her face and flashed it five slow times: I love you.

Elijah felt his whole body fill up with warmth. He took a cold breath and closed his eyes, pressed himself down on the window ledge. He heard his own bedroom door open, and Dad shout. He turned his head quickly to see Dad’s strong Nigerian face. Elijah looked straight at him. ‘Dad,’ he whispered, and smiled the biggest smile he could. Then he pushed himself off and up in one movement until he was away from the window and the house and in the sky itself. And then he was flying.

The Children’s Intensive Care Unit buzzed and beeped and alarmed with screeching noises and nurses running to and from bed-spaces. There was a row of children, sicker than Nikki could have ever imagined, children who looked unreal, plastic, with tubes poking from their mouths and noses and arms and necks, surrounded by machinery, bags of blood and fluid, which Obi kept looking at. But Nikki couldn’t stop looking at their eyes, half shut, eyelashes filled with some sort of thick, clear substance, which could have been Vaseline, or it could have been tears so cold they had frozen.

‘Too busy,’ said Daddy, who sat next to Nikki, her hand in his. ‘When will the doctors come to us? This ward round is taking too long.’

Nikki looked at Elijah. His eyes, too, were frozen half shut, suspended somewhere – like the rest of him, like them all – between night and day, or life and death. She wanted so much for him to open his eyes and look at her, and cry warm tears. A tube came out from his nose and connected him to a breathing machine that made sucking noises and then beeped. It was quite therapeutic, the noise of the machine. Especially during last night. She’d spent the night with her head resting on the side of his bed, curled over her bump, despite the nurses’ insistence that she rest.

‘I don’t want to rest,’ she’d said. Nikki didn’t want to do anything else but be next to Elijah. The baby was pressing on her bladder; she had to force herself to go to the toilet, and she ran back, squirting alcohol gel on her hands on the way. She didn’t want to waste time washing her hands in the toilets. What if … The thought was too much to bear. The baby inside her kicked, as if it sensed Nikki’s mood. Impossible, Obi had said. But nothing was impossible, she thought, looking at Elijah. Her beautiful son, with his eyes stuck half shut and three tubes sticking out of his neck carrying his blood in and out, the shape of them making him look like he was a strange exotic flower. My son.

‘Is it that same doctor?’ Daddy squeezed her hand and looked over Nikki’s shoulder at Obi, who alternated between waiting by the bedside and pacing the corridors outside, his face puffed up from crying. ‘He was nice.’

‘They’re all being nice,’ whispered Obi. ‘That’s their job. But I liked the one who was really honest.’ He turned his head away. Nikki had noticed that he couldn’t look at his dad, or her. It was as if he’d gone into a bubble. She reached behind her and took his arm, pulling him round her.

‘I’m sorry,’ Obi whispered. ‘I’m sorry for all of it.’

Nikki looked at him. ‘You can hold his hand if you want,’ she said. ‘He might be able to hear us.’

Instead of Obi pulling away, as Nikki had thought he would, he leant towards her. ‘Do you think he can hear us?’

She turned. Seeing Obi cry was almost the worst part of it. His face had given up already; it was a different face, one that couldn’t fix everything, that got things wrong sometimes. Very wrong.

‘I got the letters from Ricardo, written to Elijah. He told me to read the latest one, if we had the chance.’

Nikki let go of Daddy’s hand. ‘What do you mean? What letters?’

‘The letters from her – from Deborah. She’s been writing to him all this time. Ricardo kept them. The letters,’ said Obi. ‘Oh, Nik, the letters …’

Nikki looked at Elijah and listened for the sucking ventilator noises and she looked at the screen above him with the waves. She looked back at his face, his soft skin, the shape of his ear.

‘I don’t want to see them,’ Nikki whispered.

The door near the bed-space buzzed and Chanel and Jasmin were there. Chanel was wearing, for the first time since they had been adults, a white shirt and pair of jeans – no rips – and trainers. Her face was drawn and grey, the patches underneath her eyes almost hollow. Nikki realised she wasn’t wearing any make-up. Not a scrap.

Jasmin stood beside her, her ponytail perfectly still as she looked at Elijah. ‘Why have they made him into a robot?’ she said. And then she began to cry. Chanel held her.

‘I saw him jump down,’ Jasmin said, ‘and I tried to flash my torch and I told him that he couldn’t really fly, not really, just like I’m not really going to America, not really, but he wouldn’t listen; he just jumped right out the window and I saw him smash.’ She sobbed. ‘Mummy, I saw him. I’m not really going to America, Mummy, am I? I don’t want to go to America, Mummy; I want to stay with you …’