Osagiede Best
RIVER STONE
“I am pregnant,” I told the doctor.
“Your husband knows?”
“No.”
“He is responsible?”
I did not answer.
●●●
On our wedding night, it all began. During sex, there was this unrest on how to position myself. What colour of whore am I? What if he finds he doesn’t like sex with me?
“What?” Kpolor had asked.
“Oh, sorry, I should remove… the bra?” But ‘about how to be a flower, I don’t know’ is what I didn’t say.
“No… huh, I mean… you are not responding.”
“As how?”
“I don’t know… You are… tensed? Stiff.”
I said, “Kpolor… I don’t know how to position myself.”
It was not that I had not done it before; I was afraid he would misunderstand what I meant. But then he went to put on Ben King’s Stand By Me and said it was just like dancing. I never knew a flower could dance—if not a flower, whatever I am.
What is a flower? A flower is a mother in her becoming?
I started seeing a doctor on the issue of my fractures.
“So… as early as a Sunday morning,” the doctor said. “I saw her in the backyard pushing her tongue inside the mouth of the Sunday school teacher’s child from her mother’s church. I had to rescue the kid. I told him, ‘son, if you want to live long, avoid her, she will finish you before you grow your tenth pubic hair.’ She was ten then. I know, sexual curiosity and all that bullshit. But hear me out, Dora is a case. I am literally a psychologist, I can help her but nobody told me children don’t listen to their parents; I must have done my childhood wrong. You know what I mean.”
“I thought you said you were not a psychologist.”
When I first saw the Doctor, he was naked but holding a jug in front of his crotch.
Kpolor tried to cajole me to allow two other doctors to enter wearing clothes, before the doctor came. He saw me sitting on the mattress, he raised his left brow. And then walked to where the window was and sat under it. What is a window?
Through which things we would miss are thrown away?
Then he said, “afa.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what he was told; I wanted him to see that I was normal.
Kpolor had brought me to my grandfather’s house where I grew up. We were on top of a two-story building. It is about fifteen feet high. My room had been cleared of everything except the bare mattress. Spiritual deliverances had failed; Kpolor had started reading about angels and light before he called an expert.
“Nice place you got here,” was the doctor’s first words.
“Nice face, you got there,” I replied.
He laughed. “Nice one… But I meant the spiritual atmosphere you got going here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I never knew I needed a place to be naked too. Without the chaffing of cotton on my skin and the fabric of lies that protect society from truth malaria. Hear me out, we all need a break from sanity. From everyday life. Fuck the hate against exhibitionism.”
“Who said I am insane?”
“Look, kid, everything is not about you. Or… Wait, I hope this is not another feminism thing. No clothes policy, huh? I was told, she has a hysterical reaction to clothes blah blah blah… If it is some revolt against sexism, please stop, we all know women love their clothes.”
“Feminism thing? Oh my God… you are a sexist psychologist. You are supposed to help me? This is a joke.”
“No, I am not a psychologist, I’m a psychiatrist. Jesus. They are different. How many times do I have to tell people this? Lord of God.”
When I saw his daughter, Dora, in court, I felt for her. They both have the same face, except for Dora’s full cheeks. They took Cat from me.
The twist that brought the doctor into my life had its first echo when I was fourteen.
We were coming from her place, Jennifer and I. Two bricklayers were whispering at us and followed us for a while before they turned back. When I got home, I told my grandmother.
“If you like be yanking your legs open for them to scatter your vagina for you; the one I know is that you will not be pregnant in this house, I kill you first before that happens,” was her response.
The night of it, I didn’t add soap to my sponge when I bathed. I scrubbed my skin so hard, I was lying down before I saw the bruises on my arm. I had the male’s whispers on my skin. My body started to ask its questions then. I changed the brand of my bathing soap the next day. The abandoned soap was my first Christ; a sacrificial Lamb of God embodying my total transgressions.
In some moments in my marriage, a thought would try to raise its head: what is left of me to be given out? I am not white. I am not red. I have known my pollens since early. I started touching my private part when I was eight, started feeling private feelings there when I was eleven. I saw my first flow at thirteen. At fourteen, I was asked what it meant to be a woman to a man; my body has been answering since then.
●●●
The next time I saw the doctor—this time holding a cat in front of his PP—I was scared. I love cats, the same way I love lions, but I don’t want them close to me enough to entertain the thought of eating me. He said its name was Cat—of course, the doctor would name a cat Cat. He was provocative like that.
“Doctor, why is the body so much like a conduit? Why do these effects and thoughts feel like they don’t belong to me? These words, I don’t own them. They pass through me.” I asked him, knowing I know why it was.
He said, “We are not the river alone, we are also the course. And the water that runs this course is a story. A history.”
I told the doctor about my body. I said, “Doctor, my body is a shell. Not a story. If it’s a story, who authors it?”
He replied, “Don’t be stupid. The body is the soul, don’t let them deceive you.”
When I saw my first flow, I went to my grandmother, my first husband. I said, “Mama, I am bleeding.” She was in the kitchen picking leaves for the evening soup.
“Did you cut your fingers? Ordinary slicing of leaves. It is lazi—”
“No, mama, I am bleeding from under here.”
“Under where?”
“From inside me.”
A small silence. A small moment of looking into my eyes. A small nothing.
“Go to the toilet, fold the tissue and put it under… there.”
She came back with a pad after her evangelism that evening. As she thrust it to me, a wafer biscuit was on top. She said, “Eat that.”
I had known what was happening to me but I wanted to become a woman; at least, in the eyes of her. I wanted to let her know, so she can give me the keys to my body. I could swear I saw love in her eyes when she handed me the biscuit. But that night, she said I heard her calling me but I didn’t answer; she added another mark to this rented body.
“Since you have decided to lose your ears when I am calling you, you will see pepper.”
On the wall above the window in that room, a picture of me hangs in silence; my face has grown long since last they framed that becoming of memories. They say I look like my mother. The one that gave birth to me. It is so in the pictures. She died giving birth to me. She is a stakeholder in this body too. I have felt I had to make her parents forget their pains. To be enough to fill their hollowed-out hearts. I have wanted to be her for them. For her. But also for me; they say you never miss what you never had, but sometimes though, what we can really miss is what was never at hand.
“I am nothing but the desire of others,” I told the doctor.
He said, “yes-yes, good. As I was saying, I remember when I started dating my wife; after the first time we had sex, I had to force her have sex with me even—no-no hear me out—even when she wanted to have sex with me. I didn’t know if she knew she wanted to have sex or she was trying to preserve her virtue. We would be talking and then I kiss her on her neck; I put some back into it—”
“Some back into it?”
“Yah, it is an expression. Let me cont–”
“I know. It sounds like hard work though.”
“Jesus, can you let me finish?”
Our eyes locked, we both heard it, and we laughed.
He continues: “I don’t like you… Anyway, getting to her panties, she would cut me off. And when I leave her alone, she would come and sit on my lap and start kissing me, tugging on my belt… She would so frustrate me I would latch out and tell her to leave. Then she starts to cry. Then I apologize for shouting at her. Then we start to kiss again. I go for her panties again; this time I get passive resistance. Not until we are already in it before she would put her mind to it. It was weird until she told me about her rape experience. You were raped and then try to reenact it; it is so unoriginal—the unconscious can be predictive and boring sometimes.”
“What? You told her that?”
“No. What do you think of me? Lucifer? Well, truth be told, I almost said it. Then, I realized it was right in such situations to be empathetic. Then I told her, ‘I tell you that rape is like a pandemic outside and many have been and are still unable to cry out because of shame. You have built a shrine in your body where you come back to worship the moment of emotional overturn.’ It wasn’t romantic. My wife is a Christian, you know how they are.”
“I am a Christian,” I let him know.
“Yah, look how you turned out.”
“I would tell you ‘fuck you’ but home training won’t allow me say that to my elder.”
He briefly mused and then said, “That was good.”
“Yea?”
He laughs.
“I had a roommate in school in my first year, she told me she was almost raped by her father when she was small, but as he was having difficulties, he used his fingers instead. After that day, he didn’t do it again but sent her to a boarding school.”
“It is true, our bodies are historians; when new experiences resonate with old ones, all the emotions and thoughts of the system in our soul come surging high. Call it hysteria, call it historicity, one thing is sure, the body keeps scores.”
●●●
We climbed a hill behind a moat. On the red hill was a little forest of bamboo; we sat under its shade. On top of the hill, the breeze that passed there passed nowhere else in the world. That evening, a white hen came with her chicks and settled on the stubs of fallen bamboo.
He kissed me. I quickly looked around and nobody cared. He kissed me again. I said, stop. He kissed me harder. He didn’t smile, so I didn’t know what it meant to him. But in his eyes, I see he is proud to have me. My hands were on his waist and his on my shoulders. The feeling was right but something in the setting… I took his hand, put it on my waist and placed my hand on his chest.
Soon, he kissed my cousin Rita the same way. Fucked her the same way.
It was not a clean break; it was a gradual decaying and tearing away. After a call I had with him, for two days, I was inside crying in my bed in school—unable to get up or do any chores. Then I fell ill. My neighbour had to call my grandmother. She was in school in no time with food and drugs. She took me home and took care of me. I never told her about Smart.
I had wanted to frame him for my suicide: lied that he raped me. It hurts so bad I promised myself I wouldn’t mess around with love anymore. It is not fun to be the one that aches.
I followed the poet Wing’s Dust on Instagram, and she became the song of my sorrows—a rhythm in the chaos.
In one of her live readings in our school, I met Osakpolor. He had just graduated from our school. He was there to perform his poem about Ladi Kwali: the potter woman on the Twenty Naira note. After the event, I tried to take photos with him. But it was dark and my front camera didn’t have a flash. He brought out his phone and shone his phone-light on us as I took the pictures.
“You like the poem, huh?”
“Yeah… of course.”
“I was so nervous, dear. I was more concerned about getting it over with than how it appealed to my audience. Oh, sorry… You didn’t ask to hear that.”
“No… It’s fine. I get nervous too… I mean… during presentations of group projects in class and all.”
“Oh, okay—”
“So don’t sweat it… I didn’t notice you were nervous though, so hopefully, so nobody else did. So…”
“But… You know now.”
“Yeah… But we are friends.”
“We are friends? I mean, my dear, not that I won’t like us to—”
“We are friends, dear.”
“‘Dear?'”
“Okay, sorry… Sweety-pie.”
“That’s worse… How did you manage to make it worse?”
“What can I say, I am a natural.”
“Ah… Can I get your number? I mean, in case, I hear our little secret in another person’s mouth… I gat to…” He used his thumb to cross his throat. “Krii… you know… It is because I like you, I don’t leave witnesses alive.”
“Thanks for not…,” I used my thumb to cross my throat, “mister hire-killer, well-done. Okay… I hope you share your poems on WhatsApp.” I took the phone and tapped my number on the dial pad.
“Tonight,” he said as he was leaving.
“Tonight what? “
He winks.
“Tonight what? Fucking answer me you, male… of Eden. Tonight what? Please na… I hate suspense.”
A wink. A smile.
●●●
I told the Doctor, “I am an angel. Angels are light.”
He said, “It is unoriginal. If you want to be something, be God. No-no, hear me out. Don’t you see what Jesus did? They tell you people to be like him, be like him na.”
“What… You just sit down and think up outrageous things.” I told him, “I am light trapped inside a body.”
He said, “Me, too.”
“A thousand years ago, the angels discovered that God died.”
He asked what it meant.
“There is no centre anymore. The beginner is now interwoven with the ultimate trajectory. When the body is left without a head, where does it go from there? When angels become atheists, what then is left but to store their essence inside human bodies?” I told the doctor my body was a shell.
“You would make a fortune if that’s a book.”
He gave me a notebook and a pen one time he came on one of his visits. “Since you will not allow me talk about my problems, write yours down.”
I am writing on this book now to say I miss him. A space with him was a space of re-narration. My narration is easily drawn to the fantasy genre when it is drawn taut by terror.
●●●
“I am pregnant,” I told the doctor.
“Your husband knows?”
“No.”
“He is responsible?”
“Yes… I don’t know. I am a mess. I did a test; I had not seen my flow for two months.”
Kpolor is sweet. Very understanding. But sometimes, I felt as if he was not alive. Not enough.
One day, I met Smart again. I didn’t want to be one of those girls but we started chatting. I thought there was no harm in chatting. There would be no harm in visiting: just to see him for the very last time.
I never went anywhere with Kpolor. I told Kpolor, “I am going to a friend’s house; he is travelling to stay abroad, tomorrow.” I didn’t know why I told him, but he looked up from the book he was reading: “Oh, okay… Take care. Love you, dear.” His faith in me made me angry. I am an awful person.
The doctor patted my back. “It is okay.”
“How could I do this to him? He is a good man. You should see his eyes when he looks at me; he loves me.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why? Think.”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know, somehow.”
I looked at the Doctor’s eyes, he looked down. He said, “My wife cheated on me, too.”
I suddenly kissed him.
Then, I didn’t know if something told me first to kiss him before I did or the reverse was the case. We were left, both of us, in a state of confusion.
“Why did you do that?”
I quickly held his face and kissed him again; this time, all me, and with a reason—To understand. Thank God—no spark.
When I raised my head, Kpolor was standing by the door. His face contoured. The doctor got up quickly. Kpolor advanced toward him as he moved toward the window.
“Mister man, it is not what you… Fuck.” The doctor, stretching both arms, signaling Kpolor to stay back.
“You are wearing clothes,” I was telling Kpolor as I moved to a corner and crouched on the ground away from him.
His nostrils flared. Kpolor picked up the Jug the doctor brought with him once, and the doctor was cornered to the window. Kpolor knew he wouldn’t jump; besides, the louvres were locked. He wouldn’t. Kpolor rushed at him. As he tried to move away from the wall, the doctor slipped on Cat’s urine and…
●●●
He was never a psychiatrist; he was a librarian with a wife and two children. Kpolor found out before he saw that awful mistake of mine; he had left his jotter in the library where he read books on psychosis. The doctor had gained admission into a university when he was young, but he could not pay the admission and clearance fee; he had to leave schooling. The doctor’s madness was being for the other a cure he seemed unable to find for himself.
Before I met him, the narration of my body ended in the first draft.
I asked the doctor once why the body doesn’t know that it is too open to the outside, that it is vulnerable. Affected. After he died, my hallucinations worsened. One day, I had a bad stomach pain early in the morning, and soon after I lost my pregnancy. I was rushed to the hospital; when I came back, I was back to my full self. I even wore the itchy hospital gown.
I guess it is an eye for an eye. I lost Kpolor, too; I had lied to him too much, it broke him. I still see him in court, with the doctor’s family.
Outside my window, shadow is settling now where the woman selling moimoi gave up on an escapist cellophane that was aided by the breeze. Each time I sit, I check how I sit. Are my legs open? Is my first husband present? I am still like this? How does a proper woman sit? Under my skin, each time I walk past a guy—under his eyes—shame on how I walk, shame heavy on my shoulders struggling not to hunch. My body has to be offered to have a sense of self. Gentle sacrifice, can any water quench your thirst? My fantasies are still with me but now not all of me.
I am glad, for though the night can be very dark but inside me, a voice still sing ‘heal’ to the ears of old wounds.